Donkey School

Like our Middle Eastern friends Jasmine & Aladdin say, it’s a whole new world: 85000 newly signed-up volunteers. $80 million in small donations, 62% of them from first-time donors. Nepo-Baby Huey Elon Musk scared away from Donny Littlehands by the power of Harris.

The last time I posted, it was Yom Kippur for the Republic: The world hung in delicate balance as the Biden camp was judged for its sins, and would our President do the right thing and make teshuvah — not mere repentence but genuine action to repair?

And should he, would the Party Ambitious take his retirement as blood in the water, chicken-fighting to advance their careers, or would they do the sensible thing and unite around the one other Federal elected, who also happened to be the biological, cultural, moral, and political antithesis of Littlehands?

It’s hard to believe, but folks have pretty uniformly done good. Even Cranky Joe Manchin backed off. I can’t remember three days of such consistently uplifting domestic political news as this week. The cavalry’s here, and to paraphrase Bernie Sanders: It isn’t her. It’s us.

So, what about her?

You can’t turn on MSNBidenC or open Facebook without hearing late-phase handwringers kvetch that our new presumptive flagbearer is “untested.” “Not vetted.” “We should’ve had a fight.” “Are the Democrats delusional?” Blah blah blah.

I won’t invoke the nightmare of 1968 nor a Kennedy’s irresponsible candidacy in 1980: the debacles that brought us Nixon and Ronald Reagan. Best to be a good winner and not rub salt in the wounds of the ex-Clinton and -Obama strategists whom Kamala Harris out-strategized. (Here’s yer vetting, pal!)

On the other hand, I won’t repeat the litany of accomplishments with which others have already squashed “untested,” nor make excuses for that godawful 2020 not-quite-primary run. Because, you know what? None of that matters. Not now.

We’re living in July, almost August, 2024. Our opponents are Littlehands and Bedbug. Sure, somewhere in America (probably Burlington, Vermont) there may be a perfect next POTUS, but our nation can’t afford that dream right now. Right now we need the best nominee for right now.

Maybe that nominee had a mixed record as a prosecutor. Perhaps she changed her mind once or twice (or three or four times) campaigning in 2019. She may lack Joe Biden’s foreign policy chops, Bernie Sanders’s truth-to-power anger, and (thank goodness) Pete Buttigieg’s McKinsey technocratic good-government instincts. But she also never married Kimberly Guilfoyle, unlike the lubricious Gavin Newsom. (In fact, she’s Kimberly Guilfoyle’s worst nightmare, but that’s another story.) More to the point, Harris is the Democrat most likely to wake the sleepy (i.e., brain-dead) undecided, to zap the dullwitted to attention, to bring sisterhood, inclusion, and intersectionality to bear. She already has.

Doing short time in the Senate, Harris proved herself a force of nature grilling bad guys like Bill Barr, Jeff Sessions and alleged teen sex-offender, beer-loving  Brett Kavanaugh. She’s not afraid to say “fuck.”  And she displays one oft-overlooked feature that turns voters in America on — a move conspicuously unplayed by her opponent. Kamala Harris has an absofuckinglutely killer smile.

She smiles to express confidence, to take credit for a quip, to forge bonds with her listeners. She claps; she winks; she waves; my god, she laughs. Her face lights up when she scores a deep cut or alludes to some outrage she knows her audience already, painfully, knows, and that she’d put a stop to. She’s sassy. She takes a podium with verve. She takes being Kamala lightly; it’s us, she conveys, she takes seriously.

So let’s get back to Ronald Reagan. Tall, handsome, honeytongued, optimistic, happy Ronald Reagan, the man in the white cowboy hat on the horse, the man who saw the shining city on the hill, Mr. Morning in America. No genius when it came to policy (David Stockman invented “Reaganomics” and the USSR was crumbling under its own weight), but the picture of American glory from, as Littlehands loves to put it, central casting. Unlike Littlehands, he helped voters feel good about themselves and their future, not bitter and thwarted. Unlike Littlehands, he won both the popular and electoral votes, and bigly, and twice.

Now watch Kamala Harris. Watch her reintroduce herself to the ex-Biden now-Harris campaign team. That clip revs up almost as much civic gemütlichkeit as Bernie’s America ad from 2016. She’s sunny, where Littlehands is nightshade. She’s perky, where Littlehands is punitive. She radiates gratitude; Littlehands radiates grievance. Kamala makes us feel it can be Morning Again in Progressive America.

She’s a bit undefined and unknown policy-wise -— but just a bit, just enough to surprise with a gesture that might reframe the national discourse. Take Israel/Palestine. This morning, she refused (or at least declined) to preside over Netanyahu’s shameless show on Capitol Hill. At the same time she frustrated the inevitable blowback by proposing (but not scheduling!) a low-fi private meeting. That’s deft politics.

Harris is our captain now. With her and phone calls and postcards and doorknocks and texts and four face-to-face canvassing contacts per persuadable, we can scrape out the few thousand votes here and there, in Wisconsin, in Michigan, Minnesota, Pennsylvania, in Arizona, that it’ll take to turn a popular-vote majority into victory in the Electoral College. Harris secures our shot at preserving democracy. If she picks, say, a border-state/swing-state/gun-control-advocating hulky male astronaut as VP, she may run the map — from the Midwest straight down through the Sunbelt, and of course from California to the New York island. If she heeds Bernie Sanders and runs as an unabashed, pro-working-people progressive, the first woman, second Black, first South Asian U.S. President may win by a landslide.

Harris may not be the one we expected. She may not be the doyen voters dreamed of when they dreamed beyond Joe Biden. But she’s the one who sparked this whole new world. She’s the woman for this very particular moment, these final fifteen (dear Lord!) Trump-inumbrated weeks. And if we — and she — are diligent, and if we — and she — don’t get cocky (so to speak), and if we are very, very, very, very lucky, Kamala Harris might prove to be our own Ronald Reagan.

My pal Larry Yudelson is a glass-half-full guy. Rather than letting Trump v. United States freak him out, he reads Presidential immunity as a battlecry for real patriots.

Check out his proposal for a Freedom 250 Agenda — a Presidential program based on the observation that the radical MAGA justices “placed the loaded gun on the table before their hero arrived for the third act.”

Our hero still has a shot at saving the republic: Joe Biden, pick the damn thing up and shoot.  Then just slam it on the teleprompter so you needn’t speak ex temp: The Supremes made me do it.

Say goodbye, Don. It’s Independence Day (with apologies to the Boss.)

I’m sick and tired of intelligent people discussing November as if it were a national election, as if national polling or historical precedent meant a thing. This election, like the last two, will take place in a few states on the backdrop of about 45 others, involving a very few voters who are too dumb or stubborn or lazy to commit themselves in advance, at least in public. And like the last two elections, it is the Democrats’ to lose. In 2020, they chose adequately and won. In 2016, they chose poorly, took a flyer on Arizona of all places, took the Midwest for granted, and lost. So the matter has almost nothing to do with any issue standard punditry can pull out of its boilerplate. It’s all and exclusively GOTV in a very narrow context, and that — not Democratic bloodlust — is why the Ds need to “give ’em hell”, to offer a powerful spokesperson for reproductive rights with an optimistic mien–and that’s why a good, accomplished man who can’t speak ex temp anymore may turn Project 2025 into national policy (whether one accepts the term “fascism” or not).

Have a glorious 4th!

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.