Donkey School

I have been meaning to post all week. I was meaning to post all last nervewracking week. I have been meaning to post since Saturday when everyone was dancing in the streets except my neighbor at Trump Corners (corner of County Road 28 and County Road 28B if you happen to be in Niverville and care to see the sights) who has instead dry-cleaned and rehung his “No More Bullshit” flag.

Then came the pasteboard denial of craven elected Republicans. Then came redbaiting by Democratic moderates; then progressives’ logical, logistical, statistical rebuttal (in short: seven moderates lost, while every swing-district progressive won); then moderates’ ad feminem retorts; and meanwhile the low hum of scraping and groveling for a seat in the Federal cabinet we’re told will be named by Thanksgiving. Thanksgiving, only two weeks away: when each of us will sit in sanitary, socially distanced gratitude for turkey with all the trimmings and none of the respiratory threat. Well, perhaps not socially distanced at Trump Corners, unless reality miraculously sets in. One must keep hope alive.

Meant to post, as I say, so why not? Dread. Dread of 73 million disillusioned acolytes, pickups beflagged choking highways coast to coast, necks dangling little gold N95 masks to recall their defrauded hoaxed rigged undead messiah, keeping hope alive. Dread that all the effort and sacrifice and wretched compromise in the interest of protecting the slimmest chance of a more perfect union sometime in the future would waste away in futile talk of unity, virulence biological and cognitive, and the ingrained habits of the once senior Senator from MBNA (they sell credit cards), our President-elect. He’s already named Ron Klain as chief of staff, much of whose household income derives from his wife’s service to the Waltons of Arkansas: not an encouraging sign.

It is so, so, so likely to get worse before it gets better, and for years, even should re-enfranchised Georgians send a Jew and a Black preacher to the Senate and force Yertle to tug that globby head back under his minority shell. As Bruce Springsteen prophesied in Philly (of all places!) on Election Eve 2016, it’s gonna be a long walk home.

There’s the virus, where I suspect Biden will make slow painful progress. Then there’s everything else. Paychecks. Crumbling bridges. Private prisons. Huddled masses yearning to be free, and not only foreign-born, but fellow citizens. And sickness, sickness unto death.

Which brings me to the current byword, “healing”, and back to the house at Trump Corners.

I’ve never seen those folks, who I’m sure would be friendly enough (until they saw the magnets on my car: One still says “Bernie”). But me, I wish them well. I wish them health, a decent income, a planet with reasonable weather, low oceans, air they can breathe, and all the liberty they want that doesn’t impede or deny anyone else’s or cause anyone else to die, whether of COVID or a cheap Walmart bullet. I wish them happiness and peace of mind enough that they’ll nevermore let themselves be had.

That would be healing. It won’t come from one more read of Hillbilly Elegy (or an hour with the new Netflix movie). It won’t come from fretting over polarization. And, to my brothers on the left, it won’t come from pretending that Trump—-with his rallies; his cult of personality; his dog-whistled, AK-47-toting thugs; his diversion of government power to personal ends, to crush personal (not political, like Nixon) enemies; his privatization of Justice and the GSA; his exile of the Bureau of Land Management and contempt for that least impeachable of agencies, the National Weather Service; his hacking at national parks, plunder of national forests; his coddling of tiki-torch Nazis; his intercontinental shakedowns (in both directions: Burisma, Erdogan); his rhetorical division of us all into “Democrat” (evil, incompetent, radical) and Republican (law abiding, patriotic) clans; and beyond all, his systematic corrosion of the influence, the possibility, the very notion of empirically grounded fact—-is no worse than Bush 2, Dick Cheney or Barack the Deporter.

It will come from justice. It will come from the kind of justice that reaches the heirs of Rodney King, shitkicked by cops so long ago there weren’t yet cellphones (it so happens the Handycam which caught that primal scene went on auction last July, six weeks after Rayshard Brooks was murdered at a Wendy’s in Atlanta, three weeks before Jacob Blake, the floor price set at $225,000. No one bid.), and then reaches beyond. Justice reaching folks who don’t think they need it, like they think they don’t need unions, like they don’t get how global economics and their own longed-for standards of living will keep that factory from ever coming back, like they don’t know they’ve been conned by a real-estate sharpie from Queens. Justice for BIPOC and LGBTQ+ and guys selling loosies and overeducated logorrheic Jews, justice flowing like a mighty river right to the banks of Trump Corners. Justice that doesn’t merely augment privilege with guilt, but erases it.

That’s not moderate. That’s Medicare for All and a Green New Deal and protecting the vote and reforming campaign finance and strengthening public education and defunding our bloated, militarized, demonstrably challenged-to-maintain-the-peace police.

Such justice is not blind, but all-seeing and compassionate. It’s not ideological, not partisan, not wrapped up in identity; least of all is it pie in the sky bye and bye. It’s legislatable. Can believing in Q or in heaven some day beat three meals, healthy kids and a fair shot?

The flag at Trump Corners is right: No more bullshit. No more triangulation, no more secret deals, no more ginned-up fear, no more status-quo-ante “moderation.” If 78 million of us could breathe deep and agree on Joe Biden, we can insist he follow one deeply immoderate northstar, and it’s not “healing.” It is justice, justice that wipes away dread, justice so powerful, so beneficent, so small-d democratic that the other 73 million can see why.

So I woke up this morning pissed at the failingNewYorkTimes because the bastards scooped me, I thought. All week I’m getting ready to write this post (the one you’re reading), and then last night those fakenewsies across from the Port Authority come up with some titbit about the FBI starting an investigation into the possibility that SHMOTUS works for the Russians. Starting? So what happened after they started the investigation?

Turns out Old Grey didn’t bury the lede, because starting was all that there was. Robert Mueller showed up after a couple of days and the G-Men passed the files along, and zzzzip, now we may never know.

But now I’m pissed because someone named KM or Kayem or Kayyem does seem to have scooped me, asking CNN Tonight “How WOULD a president compromised by the Russians behave? Give me any moment in the last two years where Trump has behaved differently.” (I can’t find the clip online, but I trust Brian Stelter‘s Reliable Sources newsletter & so should you.)

This Kayyem seems to be an Arianna-Huffington type up in Boston (entrepreneur/ex-Federal functionary/expert in national security and ride-sharing), but don’t hold that against her, because she’s right. And why isn’t everyone asking this?

Asking.

This.

Right.

Now.

Step 1: Destroy confidence in the courts.
Step 2: Destroy confidence in the press.
Step 3: Destroy confidence in law enforcement.
Step 4: Destroy the separation of powers.
Step 5: oh what the hell, just shut the damn thing down. Indefinitely.

I don’t feel scooped anymore, or worse, vindicated: I’m scared. And with due respect to the Times and WaPo and the networks for their well reported tales of Federal workers’ mortgage payments and stolen Joshua trees: There’s a forest here, fellas.

And there may be a bear in the forest, and what if his name isn’t Vladimir, but Trumpy? (Go on, click it…you’ll see the clue that’s all over Fox News)

Meanwhile here’s Blimpman screaming “national emergency,” and we’re all like Amy Winehouse, no, no, no.  Only what if it’s yes, yes, yes?  What if we’re midway through some 1960s movie brought to life by Mark Burnett?

I know. Paranoia. I’m paranoid. It’s crazy talk. Because we all know Donald Trump could never be elected.

Like most people on the planet, you were probably busy yesterday, and maybe today the last thing your hangover needs is a newspaper. So maybe you didn’t notice that Elizabeth Warren formally began her campaign to become President of the United States, not in the face of human voters, but with an New Years Eve morning show funky as Final Cut Pro. Guess what: She grew up middle class and became successful, and that’s really hard today, and Warren wants to fix it . . . somehow. Also, like Bill Clinton, she thinks you should just have to “work hard and play b’the rules.” Also, like Bernie Sanders, she doesn’t like billionaires.

The video washes every idea, contradiction, capitulation and trope of outrage floated in the Democratic Party over the last 20 years into a bowl of, I know I should resist but, Indian pudding.

When I commented upon this on The Facebook, well-meaning friends counseled that we need to be positive and unified. Sure: 18 months from now. Now, right now, we need fierce debate, from the DNC on down. We need songs of ice and fire that will forge an unmistakable, weasel-free vision for the next 50 years — and reveal a flagbearer who can pronounce that vision with authority and conviction, from a foundation of achievement, surfing over the cheap barbs and insults to come.

Presidential politics isn’t horseshoes (close don’t count), tiddlywinks or a fashion show. And it’s too important to leave in the hands of the fundraisers and “professionals” who live for their share of the video production budgets. We the people need to get acting like we the people, and fast. Warren heads to Iowa next weekend: Here’s hoping the Hawkeyes light some ethanol under her feet.

The other guy isn’t moving past his 38%. That makes 2020 ours to lose. And that makes 2019 no time for focus-grouped gruel.

(Now click on the post title to have your say. Really, do it!)

Oy. Today’s Forward is asking us to compare Paul Simon and Bob Dylan.

My cred here: Have followed Paul Simon live and recorded since 1972, jesus, 39 years! (and S&G on LP before that). Straight through Songs from the Capeman, every new Paul Simon album dropped into my world like a letter from an old friend. Me and the girlfriend (the no-longer girlfriend; tale worthy of a Paul Simon song or, knowing Paul Simon, several) saw The Capeman on Broadway twice; we were rewarded with a last-minute invitation to the cast party closing night because Eddie Simon, whom we chatted up in the aisle, was thrilled to be recognized, not mistaken yet again for his big brother.

We also, the girlfriend and me, suffered a night in a crap Freeport, Long Island, motel so we could hear three evenings straight of Paul & Bob/Bob & Paul at Madison Square Garden and Jones Beach. That weekend proved Paul Simon should be honored by the comparison alone. Dylan was different every night: kaleidoscopic, charismatic, alluring and impenetrable. Paul and the hundred-fifty Africo-Brazilians behind him were note for note, gesture for gesture, fabulous, make no mistake. They sure didn’t. The act was outrageous, James Brown tight, and identical night after night, like watching a video.

Paul Simon still has the songwriting juice, his last two albums of glib, random ramblings about old age & new babies notwithstanding. But, as he once told The New Yorker’s David Remnick, kvetching about the challenge of duets with Bob Dylan, it’s “the words, the words.” His own words have ever veered from undervalued gems like “You’re the One” (available today for 1 cent at Amazon) to flaccid wise-assery like “Pigs, Sheep and Wolves” (on the same 1 cent CD). As tearful as “Sounds of Silence” or “Homeward Bound” may make tri-generational stadium crowds, they forget “We’ve Got a Groovy Thing Goin’ Baby.” (Simon, of course, is silently glad of this: It ain’t “A Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall.” I, meanwhile, admit I often sing “Groovy Thing” to myself, moving too fast down Morningside Avenue.)

Paul Simon concocts endless, seemingly effortless, wry incidents and accidents, not only in song but, though rarely acknowledged, in screenplay. He’s virtuously fearless of self-parody too: “Soft Parachutes” disrespects Simon & Garfunkel as deftly as “A Simple Desultory Philippic” did Bob Dylan. But his incidents rarely come to as sharp a point as, say, Dylan’s “Black Diamond Bay.” Why do God and son come to Earth in “Love and Hard Times” anyhow, only to split and make simultaneously self-aggrandizing and -effacing room for “an old songwriting cliché”?

Since Rhythm of the Saints, Simon’s serious lines have been obscure as Dylan’s, if usually to some cringingly obvious end: Consider “The Teacher,” “Beautiful,” or (department of boundless vocabulary) “So Beautiful or So What.” On the other hand, hook-hooky “boy in the bubble and the baby with the baboon heart” wants to say something about modern times but, as the bard himself might moan, “What? What?”

With respect to Simon’s self-promoted sincerity (see the recent interview in Rolling Stone), those who accuse Dylan of exploiting 1960s folk music generally ignore the fact that a lyrically sensitive Simon emerged only after Bob built a market for folk-pop. His eye always on “the marketplace, the marketplace” (Simon, again, to Remnick of The New Yorker), mid-60s Paul (“Jerry”) shlepped Artie (“Tom”) from doowop to full-frontally Queens-Jewish acoustic folk. As Bleecker Street displaced the Brill Building, so Everly ooh-baby danceables gave way to off-the-shelf angstunes like “I Am A Rock.” He’s nothing if not a professional.

Sigh. I love Paul Simon. I can watch One Trick Pony again and again; I hear “Hearts and Bones” coursing through “Graceland.” But while Simon fruitfully, brilliantly borrowed from obscure third-world, Zydeco and gospel artists, Bob Dylan, seeming to pay those musicians no heed, changed their music and their lives. Dylan didn’t lift tracks from Nashville; he became Nashville, and gospel, and Aaron Copland and Blind Willie McTell. I cherish my old packets of letters from Paul, and lord knows aspergersy Bob never talked to anyone but himself. Still, you don’t need a weatherman to know your windows are shaking, your walls rattling, and the words of the prophet have long faded therefrom. It’s sad as a lonely little wrinkled balloon, but Paul Simon–like pop paragons as varied and fine as Harold Arlen, Joni Mitchell and Paul McCartney–may be history. Dylan, incontrovertibly, still makes it.

There’s this scene of longing in Portnoy’s Complaint. I’m not going to fact-check, because the recollection’s what counts: Young Alex Portnoy has gone down to the neighborhood park on a snowy day; there he sees a single perfect pardon-the-expression shiksa skating gracefully across a pond, dubs her Thereal McCoy, goes home to make use of her memory.

It’s one of those pages where Philip Roth captures the precise in/outness, possession/rejection and, pardon the double meaning, self-love of being a non-Orthodox American Jew/Jewish American. It popped to mind last night within a note or two of my first listen to what I soon knew was the most important American pop album since “The Rising”: Bob Dylan’s “Christmas in the Heart.”

Is this record sincere and in ghastly taste? Might be, but so are its models–the Great American Pop Star Holiday Albums. Is it a spot-on incarnation of a particular, half-century-dead, school of American recorded music? Roger. Is it a, pardon this expression too, post-modern commentary on same? Of course. Is it awesomely (in the pre-21st-century sense) specific in its musicality? Oh yes.

And does “Christmas in the Heart” embody, parody, celebrate, embrace, gaze upon dumbstruck as at a slow-motion pile-up, the gaiety and religiosity to which America pretends each December? Uh, duh. But does it at the same time convey the whole-bodied sense of ownership, the whole-souled sense of not-having-been-invited-to-the-party-and-secretly-glad-of-that, together with the slightly shameful ridiculous feeling when you show up anyhow (singing “Oh Come All Ye Faithful” in the 5th-grade choir) that is the rootless-cosmopolitan secular American Jewish condition at Holiday Time? Mm-hmm. And does it, even so, with wisdom unavailable to the early Roth, capture the complement: our great and good nation’s heartfelt, yet suspicious, yet nonetheless dutiful welcome of the Other?

Oh, mama.

But wait, there’s more. Listen to Dylan’s final “t”‘s. Listen to the precision in his phrasings, rhythmic, melodic, and in intonation: Bob Dylan rising to the level of a Sinatra, a Fitzgerald, a Holiday in blazing his own trail through stands of chestnuts, roasting, open-fired, songs we can sing in our sleep, the tunes to which visions of sugarplums dance. Listen to the interplay of classically synthetic pop-choral/orchestral sounds-of-the-season with his own certified-organic vocal instrument. And recall that “Jack Frost,” the nominal producer–i.e., the man who made every musical choice you’re hearing–is Bob Dylan himself, once famous for his one-take intolerance of the studio.

I used to wonder why Dylan, already pseudonymed, chose that seasonal second-degree nom de travail. “Christmas” may be the answer. It may even be the album he’s waited all his life to make, its formalism, its jaunty, maudlin material, and the wintry ravage to his vocal cords achieving the effect “Self Portrait” could not. After 48 years writing killer songs and singing them live every which way, Bob breaks out here at last as master of that peculiarly American art form: studio-recorded performance of standards.

But the brilliance of this record is not merely formal. Dylan knows something is happening, and he knows just what it is. It’s Portnoy’s pristine skater; it’s us, watching from the shore. Every note and every beat of “Christmas in the Heart” prove Thereal McCoy knows what America needs, but Bob Dylan knows what we want.

A pretty long while ago, I spent too little time working on a screenplay. I was the third writer on the project, not counting my pal T. and his partners, whose idea it had been in the first place and who’d figured why not give the reporter a chance. They were fine with whatever explosions, glass-shattering, air- or waterborne biological agents or massacred troops I might want to adjust, but the name of the picture wasn’t changing: Memorial Day.

It’s a little embarrassing, but it’s also one of the two most important causes facing the USA today, so I’ve written to President Obama again (an undertaking that has become uncannily like writing a letter to God).  Not sparkling prose, so take this message, rewrite it your way and tell your representatives to get on the stick…