Draining the Swamp

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Remarks of Walter M. Shaub, Jr., Director, U.S. Office of Government Ethics, as prepared for delivery at 4:00 p.m. on January 11, 2017, at the Brookings Institution.

I wish circumstances were different and I didn’t feel the need to make public remarks today. You don’t hear about ethics when things are going well. You’ve been hearing a lot about ethics lately.

I need to talk about ethics today because the plan the President-elect has announced doesn’t meet the standards that his nominees are meeting and that every President in the past four decades has met.

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Strategy Memo

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OK, Meryl Streep is a wonderful actress, a very smart and eloquent lady. But I think her Golden Globes statement, while striking and eloquent, was a strategic mistake. And here’s why – because it puts style over substance, and not everybody agrees with putting down Trump’s style.

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Bibliotherapy

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Angry Young Men—today the concept in its simplicity seems quaint, almost charming. Among millennials, there’s an underground subset of young males wrecked amidst the storms of self-creation and signification. The internet is now nearly the exclusive domain of social and cultural life. For many born without memory of life before the web, there burn weird heart-fires of grievance and resentment, imbued with the alien green hue of nocturnal computer monitors. How to forge an identity out of an endless succession of ironic poses?

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Merry Christmas from Kevin Durant and Draymond Green

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The monetary and the military
They get together
Whenever it’s necessary
They’re making the planet into a cemetery.
—Gil Scott-Heron

Christmas Day, and did I need a gift!  Feeling—ever since Elektion Day as if I am living somewhere between under a dark cloud and in a ratcheting-up concentration camp, I thought maybe I could still derive some pleasure—if not solace—from the long-anticipated NBA Finals “re-match” between Cleveland and Golden State.

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Continental Drift 2.0

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Russell Banks responds to questions about the election put to him by a regular interlocutor from Nouvel Observateur.

1. Did anger and hatred against Obama contribute to Trump’s success?

Until now, on the eve of the winter solstice, at the start of a new astronomical year, I’ve put off trying to answer questions about the election of Donald Trump.  I went to Ecuador and climbed in the Andes, cut myself off from radio and TV, the Internet and newspapers.  I remained mostly silent, except to utter quiet moans and groans of despair or the low worried whimpering that follows a sudden fall from a great height after you’ve checked for broken bones and found none, but haven’t yet determined the extent of internal injuries.  Since returning to the US, I’ve read most of the explanations for Trump’s victory by the pundits and commentators of the left, right, and center, and listened mainly in silence to my friends and colleagues as they try to explain how and why this mentally deranged ignoramus became the most powerful human being in the known universe. 

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Boss Tenor

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Out Christmas shopping yesterday, your editor lucked into Gene Ammons’s Boss Tenor for $6. Bet you’ll get gone if you go here and listen to the first track, “Hittin’ the Jug.”  And here’s the rest of the gift: Amiri Baraka’s spontaneously lovely liner notes.

I suppose Gene Ammons is what you could call a real hybrid. His playing is a perfect (albeit weird) assimilation of two widely opposed ideas of playing the tenor saxophone. Gene somehow manages to sound like he comes right out of Coleman Hawkins and Lester Young, the two farthest poles in the business of playing the tenor saxophone.  

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Jug Eyes

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Originally posted at First in 2012.

The Boss is Back! The album was on the Prestige label, the first Gene Ammons made after being released in 1969 from Stateville Penitentiary following a seven-year term for heroin possession. With Junior Mance on piano and Buster Williams on bass. Bernard Purdie on drums, Candido on conga, it’s a hell of a record. Ammons’s tenor holler breaks loose over the hard funk backing, out of the horn something like a contagious fire catching on the fills and slides and the stuttering beats.

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Stubborn Leaves

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On the stairs up the deck,
Or walking through piles of curling leaves
Still waiting for spunky Japanese red maple compadres
To drop and join them in flat bouquets

The racket above is like an old school, non-green,
New York City traffic jam where cabbies blast
exhausted horns and Yiddish-bang their steering wheels—not too hard—
not to get anywhere, just on a Racing Form stage for their passengers’ tips

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Tease

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Molly Klein is working on a piece for First that links Trump’s spectacles to “a war on rationality that began in Baltimore in 1966 with the Johns Hopkins conference on structuralism/post-structuralism, which introduced the mountebanks Lacan and Derrida to US academia.” In the meantime, here’s a taste from her recent demolition of Slavoj Žižek, “The Protocols of the Learned Lacanian of Slovitzie,” published this year in a Belgrade academic journal. Klein’s clarity about “ecstasy of the bullying” makes her a national resource for Americans in our time of the Don. 

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The Interpretation of Dreams

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Friday, January 23rd, 2016

In the few days prior to Trump becoming the President of the United States, even through a flickering awakeness, we know that given the power of the United States however in decline, the whole world is right now being funneled together for the long march into dreamland.

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Post-Election Reflections

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The role of identity politics in Trump’s victory and Clinton’s defeat:  Identity politics, the invention of the multicultural left, has been taken over by Trump and his hard right supporters. 

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Long Weekend

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Excerpts from familial emails.

12/11

BEFORE THE ELECTION

Mid-September, “Obama dispatched [Lisa] Monaco, FBI Director James B. Comey and Homeland Security Director Jeh Johnson to make the pitch for a ‘show of solidarity and bipartisan unity’ against Russian interference in the election.” —WashPost, story then scrubbed for particularities and replaced with blander version (about voting machine worry, discounting intelligence agencies’ consensus about Russian subversion of the Clinton campaign).

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The Manchurian Candidate

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The final item in Greil Marcus’s last Real Life Rock column (originally posted at Pitchfork.com) has taken on a new urgency in the light of Trump’s pick for Secretary of State and the leaked CIA “assessment” confirming “Russia intervened in the 2016 election for the purpose of helping Donald Trump win the presidency.”

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Bad Faith

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Oliver Hall notes this quotation from Sartre’s “Anti-Semite and Jew” which first turned up on twitter in late August is now “stuck in my head like a blues melody.  ‘The anti-Semites have the right to play.’ MSNBC could run it as a permanent crawl…”

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sartre

 

Patriotism of the Scream

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Re: The Torture Report Must Be Saved. (See the New York Times, p. A23, December 10).

Historians will increasingly find much to admire in the Obama presidency, but not the fact that in the years of his first administration he failed openly to review the mendacity and nationally inflicted deludedness of the Bush years. A struggle for the truth was at that moment urgently needed. Wherever that inquiry might have led, it would have been a moment  past that would now calmingly come to the support of the present. For we face the increasingly bewildering question of how to parry the dislocation of mind—a reign of disinformation—that a president-elect with an impinged sense of reality now uses to keep in turmoil and uproar a nation that has itself for decades dodged knowing its own reality. It is sickening to say, but however everyday everyday life continues to seem from a sidewalk view, we are in the midst of a struggle for the truth that is propelling us to the edge of what is felt as impulses for self-preservation where any comprehension of what is actually occurring could be lost for good.

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