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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

I Think Perhaps I’ve Taught Too Long

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distruption-copy-copy

 

I think perhaps I’ve taught too long —

None of my pop cultural references register.

 

Allusions to Barney Fife, Ricky Ricardo,

Beaver Cleaver, Hoss Cartwright

Produce stares as blank as if I’d dropped

Anaximenes’s or Parenides’s names

at a Tea Party conclave.

 

Anyone out there have any idea

Who has replaced Eddie Haskell

As the prototype for insincere obsequiousness?

Or Ozzie and Harriet as avatars

Of wholesome vacuity?

 

If you know, please text me.

 

The teenagers I teach have never listened to

Mitch Ryder and the DE-troit wheels

Or Wicked Wilson Pickett,

Have never heard Koko Taylor sing

“Wang Dang Doodle.”

 

When the fish head fills the air

Be snuff juice everywhere

We’re gonna pitch a wang dang doodle all night long

 

All night long . . .

 

What’s an uncomfortable kind of old scarecrow to do?

Bone up on Dr. Dre and Beyonce?

Binge watch Modern Family and The Big Bang Theory?

 

No suh, un-uh, no thank you.

 

I think it’s time to take that proverbial timecard

And check out of this here career,

Transplant my ass to Lisbon’s Bairro Alto

Spend the uneventful

Dwindling days sipping IPAs

In that lovely park overlooking

The lower, less ancient, sections of the city.

the author and his son, the King of Nowhere

the author and his son, the King of Nowhere

 

Springsteen’s Autobiography

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I’m reading Springsteen’s autobiography Born to Run, and as much as I admire the Boss, I have to admit at first I was somewhat put off by his prose, which seemed mannered in that it was a bit too wham bam for my ear – too self-conscious — or as Richard Ford puts it in his Times review, “a tad more rock ’n’ roll highfalutin” than I [Ford]” needed.”

One example: “There, even that great tragedian Roy Orbison, a man who had to sing his way out of an apocalypse waiting around every corner, had his ‘pretty woman’ and a home on ‘Blue Bayou.’”

Not that it’s bad prose– not at all – how inconceivable would it be for the lyricist of “Wild Billy’s Circus Story” to produce lousy prose:

Oh, and a press roll drummer go, ballerina to-and-fro

Cartwheelin’ up on that tightrope

With a cannon blast, lightnin’ flash, movin’ fast through the tent, Mars-bent

He’s gonna miss his fall, oh, God save the human cannonball

And the flyin’ Zambinis watch Margarita do her neck twist

And the ringmaster gets the crowd to count along, ninety-five, ninety-six, ninety-seven

However, 165 pages in, I’ve grown accustomed to his narrative voice and am completely immersed in his story, especially now that Springsteen’s bittersweet childhood has come to an end – though bittersweet might be a bit too cheery a descriptor for what amounts to living in a series of ramshackle rental houses with a father who considered his son “an intruder, a stranger, a competitor [. . .] and a fearful disappointment.”

young Springsteen

young Springsteen

Truth is, the late 60’s weren’t all that conducive for filial felicity given the zeitgeist of revolution, sex, drugs, rock-n-roll, longhair, and lawlessness (not to mention bralessness). Some mothers and fathers throughout the land were slow to concede that their sons and daughters were beyond their command. It took my old man a couple of years to get the picture, and several of Springsteen’s descriptions of his father could very well describe the man for whom I’m named:

At our house, there were no dates, no restaurants or nights out on the town. My father had neither the inclination, the money, nor the health for a normal married social life. I never saw the inside of a restaurant until I was well into my twenties [. . .] My father was a misanthrope who shunned most of humankind.

Springsteen does a spectacular job for depicting the sociological tribalism of Central New Jersey with the rah-rahs (preppies), greasers (northeastern rednecks), blacks, and working class kids, and also, he’s really good at creating tangible settings for the dramas he cinematically recreates. The dramatization of his rise from garage guitarist to regional phenom is especially instructive. We’re talking grit – crashing beneath a boardwalk on the Jersey Shore, shivering in the back of a truck racing through the frigid heartland, living at nineteen on his own in commercial spaces where his “bedroom” consisted of a mattress lying on cold, hard concrete.

What I have discovered about Springsteen himself so far is that from the very beginning he was tremendously ambitious, straight-edged (no booze or drugs ever), meticulous, and obsessive when it came to producing a genre of music he had studied with the profundity of a scholar possessing an encyclopedic historical knowledge of his subject matter.

I’m only a quarter of the way through, but I can assure you that the Springsteen has paid his dues and remained true to the workingman ethos of his background. He doesn’t claim to be a genius – and I agree he’s not a genius the way I consider Tom Waits a genius – but when you get down to the nitty-gritty, I can’t think of any rocker’s body of work that can compete with his in light of Matthew Arnold’s criteria for greatness, i.e., the total number of superb works produced in light of the breadth and significance of those works’ themes.

 

The Balkan Boogie: Somewhere, Macedonia

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My younger son’s prose making his daddy proud.

kingofnowhere's avatarKing of nowhere

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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.

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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.

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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

Folly Porch Fest 2016

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Some of my crew between sets at Porch Fest

Yesterday marked the third anniversary of Folly Beach’s version of Porch Fest, a down-home musical festival where local talent spreads across the island to play in various down-home venues, sometimes literally on someone’s front porch, but more often on a makeshift stage in someone’s backyard.

Yesterday was chilly and windy, hard on the musicians’ fingers.  The wind interfered with some of my recordings, which are, alas, very amateurish.  Nevertheless, here are two of the acts, Jim Crow and Fleming Moore.

Jim hails for Arkansas where he learned his chops.  Among the folks he played with back in the day was Cindy Williams, who goes by “Lucinda” nowadays.  In the tradition of Ry Cooder, Jim is a walking, talking, crooning, finger-picking archivist who brings back to life long forgotten gems.

Fleming, on the other hand, is folk singer who traffics in dark apocalyptic visions but also writes songs that display a sardonic humor in narratives dealing with existence along the frontage road of the Interstate of Life.

Welcome to the Trump years!

And once, again, film making ain’t my forte.

The O.T. Abridged, Illustrated

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eschers-garden-of-eden

Once upon a time, and a very good time it was, God walked in a garden with Adam and Eve in the cool of the day. Eve and Adam were naked, perhaps He was, too.

We have no record about what they discussed. Perhaps the symphony of birdsong, the perfume of the never fading flowers, the always perfectly ripe fruit multi-hued in the golden light?

eden

That was before the fratricide and the subsequent drowning of the puppies and kittens in the sad days when fruit rotted and raptors shrieked and reeking carcasses bloated.
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Begetting, covenants, sacrifices, oracles, famines, plagues, kings, concubines, wars, circumcision, prophecies, etc.

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A good bit later, according to the Hebrew arrangement of scrolls, God spoke his last recorded words an individual.

They were addressed to boil-encrusted Job regarding the awesomeness of whales.

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The End

The Con: You Can Fool a Whole Lot of People a Lot of the Time

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snake-oil

Last Tuesday, lots of low information voters stood in the relatively short lines where white people vote and cast their ballots for Donald Trump because they’re sick of Washington DC and wanted to take a sledge-hammer to the status quo.

These people are unaware that not much got done in Washington under Obama (except for saving the economy and adding 20 million to the ranks of the insured) because the Republican Congress thwarted his every move. Mitch McConnell infamously announced right from the get-go, i.e. right after Obama’s first inauguration, that his goal was to make sure that Obama would be a one-term president.

Well, these low info whites are going to get their way now because things are about to get done in Washington – the Affordable Care Act will be repealed, massive tax cuts signed into law, environmental protections gutted, banks deregulated – sis-boom-bah!

Perhaps because Trump’s gruff plain speech echoed their thoughts and expressed their prejudices, they figured he would give a shit about them and get those factories humming again, but, of course, all Donald Trump cares about is Donald Trump, and certainly his polices aren’t going to help those disaffected Michiganders and Ohioans; indeed, they’ll make their lives even less lavish. No doubt, these pissed off citizens don’t know that Trump literally defecates in gold-plated toilets. They couldn’t see that he’s the great-great grandson of the charlatan who sold their great-great grandfathers that snake oil.

Trey Lott and the lobbyists, on the other hand, will do right well as deficits rise like volcanoes, necessitating drastic cuts in non-military spending in subsequent years. The real irony, though, is that after the election, it’s not Republican Party that is, to quote Matthew Yglesias, “a smoldering heap,” but the Democratic Party instead.

Although Abe Lincoln’s famous statement, “You can fool all the people some of the time and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time,” might very well be true, it’s also true that you can “fool a whole lot of people a lot of the time — over and over again.”

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

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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