non-fiction

3 Contrasting Visions of the Trump Presidency

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trum-piss

Boy, I really didn’t realize how dark Trump’s vision the US is until I read his inaugural address:

Mothers and children trapped in poverty in our inner cities, rusted-out factories, scattered like tombstones across the landscape of our nation, an education system flush with cash but which leaves our young and beautiful students deprived of all knowledge . . .

I first thought Trump may have actually written this himself. I couldn’t think of a professional speechwriter who would come up with a simile so imagistically clunky as “rusted-out factories scattered like tombstones across the landscape of our nation.”  But it turns out Miller and Bannon are to blame.

Anyway, are you visualizing the image?

Florida National Cemetery, Headstones, war heroes

tombstones

rusted-out factory

rusted-out factory

 

scattered

scattered

Perhaps there are more than a few rusted-out factories in Michigan, but down here in South Carolina where I live I couldn’t locate one to save my life. I asked my son who drove up from Orlando yesterday how many rusted-out factories he’d seen during the seven hour trip, and he said that the only factory he saw had smoke coming out of the smokestacks.

Also – and I’ll move on – the children in South Carolina suffering from poverty aren’t huddled in inner cities but eking out their existence without Medicaid expansion in shacks that litter the landscape like, um, shacks.

Okay, now that I got that off my chest, I’d like to offer brief synopses of how three thoughtful pundits perceive the Trump presidency, and I’ll go from darkest to brightest for sanity’s sake.

Sarah Kendzior

skSarah Kendzior, the author of The View from Flyover Country, is an anthropologist who specializes in authoritarian states and writes for various newspapers. She considers the accession of Trump as nothing less than catastrophic. She foresees a coming kleptocracy as a fragile democracy succumbs to fascistic institution-gutting by Trump and his mob-like nationalistic white-supremacist cronies.

In 2014 she served as an expert witness for an Uzbek refugee. Here is her account:

My job was to tell the judge about Uzbekistan: a country ruled by a dictator who abuses executive power to obtain personal wealth, threatens independent media and protesters, spies on real and perceived enemies, packs his administration with lackeys and relatives, refuses to disclose his financial holdings, molds public opinion through media domination, persecutes innocent Muslims under the pretext of fighting terrorism, and distracts the citizenry with pageants and spectacle, often proclaiming that he is making Uzbekistan great again.

She goes on to note

American authoritarianism will not be a carbon copy of other states. Mr. Trump’s authoritarianism will exploit pre-existing vulnerabilities – corporate corruption, institutional rot, systemic racism, a weakened economy, a struggling media, celebrity worship – and exacerbate them until our nation is no longer recognizable.

Should this occur, it may look like home, but it will not feel like home. What may be wrenched from us is a fundamental sense of security and sovereignty. When cable outlets are not promoting white supremacists or debating the humanity of Jews – yes, this is what our media airs now – they occasionally document Mr. Trump’s kleptocratic behaviour.

It’s almost dark enough to drive me to the nearest burnt-out strip mall to see if I can score some smack; however, Dr. Kendzior preaches resistance, not submission, and yesterday’s massive protests offer some hope that we’ll not take Trump lying down.

But we are still here, we the people, the inconvenient background players in Donald Trump’s self-serving shakedown of the American dream. We the people have been calling our representatives, demanding to know what is going on. We the people never did form that more perfect union, but we are not about to trade in the red, white and blue for the gold-plated facade of a tyrant tycoon.

We the people look out for each other – even when no one looks out for us.

David Brooks

brooksChances are you’re familiar with David Brooks, the affable guy-next-door conservative columnist for the NY Times and frequent contributor to the soon-to-be privatized PBS.

Brooks is considerably more upbeat about the survival of our democracy:

Some on the left worry that we are seeing the rise of fascism, a new authoritarian age. That gets things exactly backward. The real fear in the Trump era should be that everything will become disorganized, chaotic, degenerate, clownish and incompetent.

He sees hope in the possibility that the polarization Republicans and Democrats will end as the two join forces to quell the megalomaniacal maelstrom that will be Trump’s governing style:

We’ve wondered if there is some opponent out there that could force us to unite and work together. Well, that opponent is being inaugurated, not in the form of Trump the man, but in the form of the chaos and incompetence that will likely radiate from him, month after month.

Brooks ends his most recent column with this Panglossian hope:

With Trump it’s not the ideology, it’s the disorder. Containing that could be the patriotic cause that brings us together.

Peter Leyden

d6qgkbh_400x400According to his by-line, Peter Leyden “is the founder and CEO of Reinvent, a media company.” He sees Trump’s inauguration not as “the beginning of an era – but the end.”

He posits that Trump’s atavistic wish to flip the calendar back to the USA’s manufacturing heyday is doomed because of the evolution of technology into an ever-increasing interconnectedness of digital technologies, which “will be totally global and operate on a planetary scale.”

Whereas Brooks sees Trump uniting the Right and Left, Leyden foresees him being the “vehicle that will finally take down right-wing conservative politics for a generation or two” by “completely and irrevocably alienat[ing] all the growing political constituencies of the 21st century: the Millennial Generation, people of color, educated professionals, women.”

He goes on to say suggest that it’s actually ultimately fortunate that Hillary lost because she “would not have been able to finally bring down the conservative movement and its archaic ideology.”

Wesley Moore

meWesley Moore is a very confused and woebegone blogger. He has no earthly idea what’s going to happen. You can find him at any number of Folly Beach drinking establishments or loitering in the parking lots of burnt-out strip malls.

 

Cruel and Unusual Punishments

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[H]owever unlimited the power of the court may seem, it is far from being wholly arbitrary; but its discretion is regulated by law. For the bill of rights has particularly declared, that excessive fines ought not to be imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted . . .

from the Eighth Amendment of the US Constitution

I have always loved the sound of the phrase “cruel and unusual punishment.” Sonically, you get all four of the basic metrical feet in four words, a trochee, an anapest, an iamb, and a dactyl, in that order. Plus the delicious elongation of the long U sounds of cruel and unusual, not mention the internal rhyme of “un” and “pun.”

Mr. Tom Waits, would you please indulge us with a recitation?

 

Something so horrid shouldn’t sound so enticing.

chair

To me, it’s amazing that some state approved punishments aren’t considered cruel and unusual. Take death by the electric chair, for example.

 

For execution by the electric chair, the person is usually shaved and strapped to a chair with belts that cross his chest, groin, legs, and arms. A metal skullcap-shaped electrode is attached to the scalp and forehead over a sponge moistened with saline. The sponge must not be too wet or the saline short-circuits the electric current, and not too dry, as it would then have a very high resistance. An additional electrode is moistened with conductive jelly (Electro-Creme) and attached to a portion of the prisoner’s leg that has been shaved to reduce resistance to electricity. The prisoner is then blindfolded. (Hillman, 1992 and Weisberg, 1991) After the execution team has withdrawn to the observation room, the warden signals the executioner, who pulls a handle to connect the power supply. A jolt of between 500 and 2000 volts, which lasts for about 30 seconds, is given. The current surges and is then turned off, at which time the body is seen to relax. The doctors wait a few seconds for the body to cool down and then check to see if the inmate’s heart is still beating. If it is, another jolt is applied. This process continues until the prisoner is dead.  (Wikipedia).

Here’s a link to a more thorough explanation via video.

Although only 9 of the 45 executed in the US in the last 15 years have gone to the electric chair, it is still used, and, therefore, not all that “unusual.” The rest of the state-sponsored offings were rendered via lethal injection, but now that drug companies are balking at providing lethal drugs, the good ol’ electric chair might make a comeback.

To me a truly cruel and unusual punishment would be something like this, not lethal, more like an “enhanced timeout.”

Let’s say some miscreant has mocked someone with a physical disability.

You strap him into an electric chair, inject him with an amphetamine, and force him to watch ten consecutive episodes of Little House on the Prairie.

I guarantee you he’ll never do it again. In fact, he might prefer the actual electric chair and its 2000 volts.

living-room-modern-brown-living-room-theater-wall-unit-with-tv-entertainment-center-set-in-modern-living-room-entertainment-centers

 

A Year Most of Us Would Like to Forget

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Gebhard Fuge: An den Wassern Babylons

Gebhard Fuge: An den Wassern Babylons

A couple of posts ago, I stated that I wasn’t going to do my annual review because I lacked the courage; however, I’ve changed my mind hoping that the exercise might provide some catharsis, serve as a purgative to wash away pity and terror, as I rent my sackcloth and tear out my few remaining  strands of hair.

January

Prophetically setting the tone for horror over the horizon, my very first post this year was a New Year’s Day comparison of Hank Williams and Townes Van Zandt, two doomed cool rocking daddies who both died on New Year’s Day 44 years apart.  Click Here.

hank and townes

Of course, David Bowie would die later that month while those undelightful Bundry Boys, who later would be acquitted, occupied federal property in Montana.  Instead of going there, I’ve linked the cautionary tale of my first acquaintance with alcohol.  Read it and weep. Click Here.

Folly Beach Tales of Intoxication

February

In February my Aunt Virginia died, which led to musing on mortality as my siblings and I scattered her remains to the Folly River.  Click Here.

ashes to ashes

Here’s also a review of Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp a Butterfly, which I listened to driving to a funeral home after a stranger in a bar the previous evening showed me photographs of her husband’s severed finger stumps, which he had acquired a couple of hours earlier. Click here.

March

patPat Conroy, the father of a close friend, died.  She and her sister stayed with us during his hospitalization. Click here.

In addition, March brought us the news of the return of Judy Birdsong’s T-Cell Lymphoma, which, of course, was profoundly disheartening.

This post was created on Good Friday right after finding out the news.  Click here.

April

Teaching Keats while in despair proved quite difficult but do-able.  Click here.

And, of course, Prince, whom I dubbed “the Lord Byron of Pop, died.  Click here.

screen-shot-2015-12-08-at-7-58-05-am

 

May

Yet another death, this time a student’s.  Click here.

And I review Don DeLillo’s just released not-exactly-upbeat novel, Zero K.

 

Edward Hopper: "Morning Sun"

Edward Hopper: “Morning Sun”

June

dylan-ali-2-300x201June brought us a mass shooting in an Orlando Nightclub.  Click here.

Ali, a sort of boyhood hero died, which took me back to the early 60’s when my father tried to teach me how to box.  Click here.

So I decided to cheer myself up by reading the Brothers Karamazov.  Click here.

the author fleeing from an ant attack

the author fleeing from an ant attack

July

Trump + Putin = Love. Click here.

Also, there was that festival of bad taste known as the Republican convention. Click here.

Adelson's luxury suite

Adelson’s luxury suite

August

Okay, how about a little sunshine.  I donned my anthropological pith helmet and crashed a bachelor’s party at Chico Feo (click here) and talked a colleague into letting me publish a brilliant letter she wrote to her students (click here).

September

Snazell, Sarah; Doppelganger; Brecknock Museum and Art Gallery; http://www.artuk.org/artworks/doppelganger-178168

Snazell, Sarah; Doppelganger; Brecknock Museum and Art Gallery; http://www.artuk.org/artworks/doppelganger-178168

In September we travelled to Houston for treatment, and my Judy Birdsong met the other Judy Birdsong, a bright light in a year of darkness (click here).

October

Before Leonard Cohen died, I published this piece after reading David Remick’s splendid New Yorker article.  Click here.

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Blow Hurricane Matthew, break your checks, rage blow. Click here.

November 

Oh my God NO! Click here.

melania-libertyDecember

So here we are.  On the edge.  Waiting.  But, hey, thanks to all for reading, especially my regular crew.  Happy New Year!
.

 

How Democritus and Heraclites Might Have Reacted to the Trump Election

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four-elements

 

This evening after a series of minor vexations – son sick, Gamecocks clobbered, eye invaded by wayward particle – I got to thinking about Horace Walpole’s observation that “[l]ife is a tragedy for those who feel, and a comedy for those who think.” I quote Walpole when I’m teaching tragedy and ask students to offer an interpretation.

It’s a hard question, hard to put the answer into words.

Of course, to address the question, you need context.   For example, let’s examine the thinking/ feeling/comedy/tragedy conundrum from the perspective of Trump’s election.

(I know some of you may have supported Trump, perhaps because you feel immigrants are overrunning the country or that massive tax cuts will defy history and fuel an economic boom or that you consider Hillary Clinton/Barack Obama Satanic spawn or some/all of the above).

However, the [tautology alert] a priori premise in this thought experiment is that Trump is a vulgarian with authoritarian tendencies whose boorish pronouncements during the campaign have eroded codes of civility and whose total lack of a sense-of-history and intellectual curiosity make his election as leader of the free world very, very unfortunate.

Not to mention his pathological avariciousness.

Democritus

Democritus

Okay, let’s bring in the cynical pre-Socratic philosopher Democritus, aka “the laughing philosopher.”

Seneca claimed that Democritus, whom he called “the Mocker,” laughingly held human beings in disdain, modeling a detached amusement at the foibles of the masses. In temperament think Bill Maier as opposed to Louis Black.

If human folly is laughable, this election might very well provoke Democritus to guffawing at this turn of events:

A swindler and pathological liar who pleads guilty to fraud a week after the election and who referred to his opponent as “Crooked Hillary” with the help of Fox News and Russian hackers (not to mention the New York Times) convinces a majority populace that he’s “more trustworthy” than she.

[cue laugh track]

Coal miners in Kentucky counties who have decreased their uninsured rate by almost twenty percent vote 93% to 6% for a man who wants to abolish the estate tax.

[cue laugh track]

Thinkers like Democritus take the long view.   Human folly is essentially history’s major motif. Thinkers are familiar with not only Huck Finn’s the “Duke and the Dolphin” but have read Swift and Shakespeare and perhaps Horace and Juvenal.

In their view, only incredibly naïve pollyannas would expect their generation to be less prone to foolishness than their forebears. Most of humankind is purblind, always have been, always will be.

After all, anyone reading this will be literally dead in 80 years. So what if the American Experiment fails? So what if Arizona once again boasts a view of the Pacific? Letting the little people decide was a very, very bad idea.

Just desserts.

By the way, should I add that this view might be considered elitist?

Heraclitus

Heraclitus

Heraclitus, on the other hand, aka the “weeping philosopher,” was a feeler, invested in the here and now. So what if Swift’s view of Yahoos was essentially correct? Those yahoos who voted for Trump in Kentucky lives will not get any better but actually worse: they will lose that recently acquired insurance, babies will die, and those promised coal mining jobs ain’t coming back ever.  Once again, they’ve been lied to.

How horrible, Heraclitus laments, that such chicanery is so rewarded. A spoiled, 70-year-old adolescent tweets preposterous lies and pays no apparent price for his dishonesty and in the mean time transforms the Founding Fathers’ republican democracy into an authoritarian kleptocracy!

People are real, not abstractions to be mocked. Pain is real.

In fact, sorry. My eye is killing me. I got to sign off.

 

fallout1

 

 

Thank God It’s Monday (or Tuesday)

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shapeimage_2

Ah, get born, keep warm

Short pants, romance, learn to dance

Get dressed, get blessed

Try to be a success

Please her, please him, buy gifts

Don’t steal, don’t lift

Twenty years of schoolin’

And they put you on the day shift.

Bob Dylan, “Subterranean Homesick Blues”

Another Thanksgiving has come and gone, and for some reason, even though it’s only Friday morning, already a Sunday evening sadness has descended, which is essentially the consequence of wrong-thinking.

I’ve committed a common error, perceiving life as linear, a journey. A pilgrimage. But there’s a real problem in perceiving our existence in this manner, because the payoff of a journey or pilgrimage is reaching the final destination – Emerald City or Canterbury Cathedral – and, of course, when we reach the end of our life’s journey/pilgrimage, we’re no longer we but something to be disposed of, to be burned or buried.

detail from All Our Yesterdays, Michael Bilotta

detail from All Our Yesterdays, Michael Bilotta

Alan Watts:

And then you wake up one day, about 40 years old and you say “My God! I’ve arrived.” ”I’m there.” And you don’t feel very different from what you always felt And there is a slight letdown because you feel is a hoax And there was a hoax. A dreadful hoax They made you miss everything. We thought of life by analogy with a journey, with a pilgrimage, which had a serious purpose at the end and the thing was to get to that end. Success or whatever it is, maybe heaven, after you’re dead. But we missed the point the whole way along. It was a musical thing and you were supposed to sing, or to dance, while the music was being played.

Ulysses to Achilles in Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida:

Time hath, my lord, a wallet at his back,

Wherein he puts alms for oblivion

Yet, I keep wishing away the present, for the workday to end, for the workweek to end, for football season to begin or the holidays to arrive, or for retirement.

Cindy Streit Mazzaferro: Sometimes Broadway, Sometimes the Catskills

Cindy Streit Mazzaferro: Sometimes Broadway, Sometimes the Catskills

But who are they – the they Watts accuses of making us “miss everything?”

Well, as Porfiry Petrovich  famously said to Rodion Romanovich Raskolnikov when the latter asked him who had killed the old pawnbroker and her sister:

“What do you mean, who killed?” he asked as if he couldn’t believe his own ears.  “Why, Rodion Romanovich, you killed!  You committed the murders, yes.”

The they are we.  We possess free will, BF Skinner be damned.  How many sages have walked upon the earth extolling us to consider the lilies of the fields or that it is better to travel well than arrive?

Those sages say we must murder that conception-of-self psychologists call the ego, abandon the self-delusion that a homunculus somewhere inside our brain is the sum total of who we are, to realize that we and the lilies of the fields and the clouds in the sky and the birdcall are one.

Easier said than done.  Droughts can decimate fields, and although form is emptiness, the swirling subatomic particles of an axe can do real damage.  Food and shelter demand, unless you’re a Trump or Kennedy, labor, and most of us labor under the supervision of someone more powerful, whether it be a foreman or the always-right customer.  And, in truth, a very few people own and control almost everything, but we do ostensibly have autonomy over our lives (at least for the time being here in the good ol’ US of A).

 

Joseph Pennel: End of Work Day, Gatun Lock

Joseph Pennel:
End of Work Day, Gatun Lock

Ultimately, I think, it’s crucial to find employment that we love and to train our minds to concentrate on the bits and pieces of that employment, whether it be whisking an egg, laying a brick, or constructing a math test, in other words, to enjoy the music of the moment rather than racing forward in our minds to the final cymbal crash of the coda.

It’s hard to do, especially with all of the distractions, the mechanical slicing of time into periods, shifts, breaks, etc. – but we certainly don’t want to end up like John Marcher in Henry James’s “The Beast in the Jungle”:

He had justified his fear and achieved his fate; he had failed, with the last exactitude, of all he was to fail of; and a moan now rose to his lips as he remembered she had prayed he mightn’t know. This horror of waking–THIS was knowledge, knowledge under the breath of which the very tears in his eyes seemed to freeze. Through them, none the less, he tried to fix it and hold it; he kept it there before him so that he might feel the pain. That at least, belated and bitter, had something of the taste of life. But the bitterness suddenly sickened him, and it was as if, horribly, he saw, in the truth, in the cruelty of his image, what had been appointed and done. He saw the Jungle of his life and saw the lurking Beast; then, while he looked, perceived it, as by a stir of the air, rise, huge and hideous, for the leap that was to settle him. His eyes darkened–it was close; and, instinctively turning, in his hallucination, to avoid it, he flung himself, face down, on the tomb.

So, ladies and gents, let’s don our dancing shoes before it’s too late.

51bdc1c3985c09d44e20898262ffaf02

 

 

Trump’s First Year: Predictions

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cole_empire_0

 

Inauguration Day

A la Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar and Macbeth, natural phenomena go haywire. The earth becomes feverous and shakes; lions are seen strolling up K Street. By clock it is day, but night has strangled the sun, casting darkness about the capital. When Trump places his hand upon the Bible, his palm and fingers are seared. Franklin Graham blames all of these unnatural events on the LBGTQ community.

Kid Rock recites an Inaugural poem.

O-Da-Lin in the USA

Yo,Yo,Yo, Yo Da Lin in the USA

A delicious break from socialists.

Yo Da Laheeeeoooooooo

Here we go, Prez; take it away!

Cash bars are set up at all of the Inaugural Balls. Trump pockets the profits.

The Rest of January

Led by Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell, Congress scraps Medicare and replaces it with vouchers and tax credits entitling bearers deep discounts in burial/cremation services.

dscn1788

February

Lorne Michaels goes missing.

Trump signs an executive order making Moscow Washington’s “Sister City.”

President Trump nominates Roy Moore for the Supreme Court.

March 

Attorney General Jeff Sessions charges Hillary Clinton with treason.

President Trump signs an executive order replacing Arabic numerals with Roman Numerals.

NBC cancels SNL.

hillary-perp

April

April is the cruelest month, breeding

Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing

Memory and desire, stirring

Dull roots with spring rain.

May 

Jared Kushner successfully accomplishes a hostile takeover of the New York Times. The New York Times buys the New York Post. The New York Post buys the Washington Post. The Washington Post buys The Village Voice.

Celebrations break out in trailer parks across America as Congress abolishes the Estate Tax.

June

President Trump celebrates his LXXI birthday at the Eastern Whitehouse in St. Petersburg, Russia. He and Putin announce a new joint Trump/Putin resort in the Crimea.

July

Hillary Clinton begins a hunger strike.

August

Trump takes a month off. Congress recesses.

Card carrying communists Santa and Mrs. Claus drown in Arctic Ocean.

SNL replaced by comedy show starring Andrew Dice Clay.

santa-and-nrs

 

September

Trump awards Howard Stern a Presidential Medal of Freedom Award.

The Statue of Liberty takes her own life, and Trump replaces her with a statue of Melania.

melania-liberty

October

Evangelicals lobby Trump to ban Trick or Treating as a satanic communistic ritual that encourages the redistribution of candy among the masses.

Trump refuses in what the NY Times editorial board calls “the greatest act of personal heroics since Sir Thomas More was beheaded for his convictions.”

November   

Congress repeals the ACA and replaces it with free first aid kits to all uninsured families (while supplies last).

December

Hillary Clinton dies in captivity.

America is finally great again.

The Balkan Boogie: Somewhere, Macedonia

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My younger son’s prose making his daddy proud.

kingofnowhere's avatarKing of nowhere

225384_10100203806277507_6082778_n

It was four thirty in the morning, and we were walking down the road, no telling how far we were from Skopje—or anything. I just wanted to sleep. The bus had dropped everyone off in the middle of nowhere instead of Skopje’s bus station. The driver had called his friend, a cab driver, to take us the rest of the way. It was par for the course for there to be some unexpected “tax,” some unexpected scam; it was too late for these things to be surprising.

Still, the scam pissed off Josh. We didn’t really have a choice, but somehow Josh chose anyway. He refused to be pushed into paying for a taxi, keeping his honor and money intact. But there was no telling how far we were from the city, how far away from the hostel, how far away we were from sleep. It had been a ten hour ride…

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Harlan County, Here I Come

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It’s been a week since the surreal realization came to me that Donald Trump would become the 45th President of the United States, an outcome that seemed about as likely as Harlan County, Kentucky, being named by Condé Nast Traveler as one of the top resort destinations in the world.

harlan-county-usa

By the way, I don’t personally believe in the 5 stages of grief.  Although Trump’s victory surprised me, there was no denying it (step 1).  Not only did the headlines scream it, but the faces of my colleagues at work wore a degree of despondency I hadn’t seen since I walked the streets of Leningrad in ’89.

2008-36-49_000

Nope, there was no denying it, nor, for that matter, any relief in getting pissed off (step 2).  I’ve read To Kill a Mockingbird.  I can “crawl” into Trump supporters’ skin and see things from their perspective (fear of the Big Bad Other), even if I can’t figure out why lower middle class service employees want to end the estate tax or why rust belt denizens believe Trump has their backs when he’s admitted he’d grab their daughters’ “pussies” if he found them attractive.  Bargaining (step 3)?  With whom?  Satan?  No thanks.  I’ve seen Faustus (Richard Burton) dragged off to hell in that ‘60s movie, and it’s not a pretty sight.

No, I’ve skipped those first three steps and have settled into the 4th stage, Depression with a capital D.

To combat the existential-horrorshow-country-going-to-be-run-by-an-incompetent- megalomaniac-too-slothful-to-even-bother-getting-a-transition-team-going blues, I’m boycotting political media, drowning my sorrows in high gravity IPAs, and assuming fetal position every night at 9:00 pm in hopes of attaining at least a fitful version of sleep.

Sleep that knits up the ravell’d sleeve of care

The death of each day’s life, sore labor’s bath,

Balm of hurt minds, great nature’s second course,

Chief nourisher in life’s feast.

Come to think of it, a vacation to Harlan County might not be such a bad idea after all. It suits my state of mind.

owsley

Who’s It Gonna Be, America: Ted Nugent or Bruce Springsteen?

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** FILE ** In this Nov. 5, 2008 file photo, Bruce Springsteen plays his guitar in New York. On Wednesday, Feb. 4 , 2009 Springsteen said he was furious with Ticketmaster calling its selling practices a “conflict of interest” after complaints that the vendor was redirecting fans to a more expensive ticket seller owned by the company. (AP Photo/Stuart Ramson, file) NY128

As I write this at 8:07 EST on Election Day of 2016, I feel obligated to throw out a couple of clichés, for we couldn’t really exist without clichés.  Without clichés, we’d have to be always original, which would exhaust us, and I’m pretty much always exhausted anyway.

Cliché #1: “This is the most important election in our lifetime.”

You hear this cliché every election, even during the 2012 presidential election, which featured two very rational Christians with opposing economic views, who, by the way, had both ushered through a program to provide healthcare to their constituencies.

This election, on the other hand, pits two very different people against one another, one, a rationalist, the other, a megalomaniacal Exposed Nerve of Spasmodic Resentment.

So this time around, the cliché is valid: this is the most important election in our lifetimes.

For whatever reason, many people tend to despise Hillary Clinton.  Part of this antipathy, I think, is the product of a long history of [cliché alert] hatchet jobs perpetrated by the Far Right, which dredged up the White Water non-scandal, accused her of murdering Vince Foster, and now of being funded by the same people who bankroll ISIS. If you keep hearing over and over accusations of misconduct, you eventually come to believe that a person accused of so many misdeeds must be dishonest.

Plus, her being an uppity woman doesn’t help

Of course, it’s not as if Clinton doesn’t possess flaws.  She’s calculating (viz. the Iran war vote) and can pay fast and loose with the facts, as we’ve seen with the private email server; however, when it comes to mendacity, ain’t no politician I’ve ever encountered can [cliché alert] hold a candle to Donald J Trump.  Here’s a handy link in case you doubt it.

What terrifies me most about Trump is his disdain for democratic institutions.  According to the New York Times, he’s contemplating creating a Super Pac to fund entities dedicated to avenge people who opposed him during this election. In other words, he’s assembling an enemies’ list. If he were to be in charge of the executive branch, and Republicans controlled both houses of Congress, he would be in position to actually make his radical ideas reality by building a wall, deporting millions, establishing a religious test for immigrants.  I can see him embracing rogue agents of the FBI and colluding with Putin, emulating him by ruling our Republic as if he were a mafia don, in other words, turning the US into a thugrocacy.

Cliché #2:  Today’s election is the only poll that matters/turnout will determine the outcome.

Well, duh.

So here are the choices.

  1. Stay home reading the collected poems of Ezra Pound.
  1. Embrace self-sanctity and vote for Jill Stein. As you watch the Dow plummet with Trump’s election and your retirement savings [cliché alert] go up in smoke, at least you can go to sleep at night knowing you were true to your ideology.
  1. Vote for Gary Johnson. Ditto the Dow and your retirement savings.  So what if he thinks Aleppo is subgenre of Jamaican ska,  wants to abolish the fed, favors banning student loans and allowing people on no-fly lists to keep their assault weapons!
  1. Emulate Ted Nugent and vote for Donald J Trump.
  1. Emulate Bruce Springsteen and vote for Hillary R Clinton.
  1. Emigrate to Costa Rica, Ireland, Portugal, etc.

One last cliché:  The choice, fellow Americans, is yours.

In Addition to a Wall, He’ll Also Build Gulags

/ wlm3 / 2 Comments

 

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I’ve resigned myself to a Trump victory and the subsequent dismantling of our democracy, have been relentlessly seeking a corrupt apothecary willing to sell me some suicide pills to swallow after the conclusion of my show trial and subsequent sentencing.

After the inauguration, I suspect that one of Trump’s first acts will be an executive order calling for the construction of hundreds of gulags, and he’ll award the contracts to Trump Inc. (creating thousands of jobs!).

Lefty bloggers like I-and-I will be forced to don baggy gray prisoner garb and compelled to spend our days performing backbreaking manual labor. We’re talking deep dystopia, fellow doomsters, a shitshow world that will make Orwell’s Eurasia look like a Club Med resort in Capri.

So while the getting’s still good, I thought I’d take advantage of my First Amendment right of freedom of speech and for one last time mock Trump and his minions.

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[cue Pete Seeger] Where Has All the Irony Gone?

In the Age of Irony, how is it possible for Trump to have triumphed?  In a land where every late night host is as sardonic as Jonathan Swift, the nation has turned to a despot whose sense of irony robust as Lenin’s corpse.

It’s mind boggling.

Dig this: Just yesterday, in her thick immigrant accent [cough, cough], mechanically looking back and forth from teleprompter to teleprompter as if she were watching a ping pong match in super slo-mo, Melania Trump spoke out against cyber bullying – CYBER BULLYING!

https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/240462265680289792?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw

And also yesterday, the Emperor of Orange announced

“I think I have the best temperament or certainly one of the best temperaments of anybody that’s ever run for the office of president. Ever. Because I have a winning temperament. I know how to win.”

And here’s Kellyanne Faustina Conway, who swapped her soul for book royalties.  Certainly, if she were to write a truthful account of the inner workings of the Trump campaign, she would find herself alongside Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell in one of those above-mentioned gulags.

No sense of irony here:

And then the Trump supporters themselves, impervious to irony:  Hillary’s dishonest; you can’t trust her.

Ladies and gentlemen, Mr. Seth Meyers.

 

Hey, Seth.  I know this corrupt apothecary you might want to contact

trump4cur55