Dan Riley's Blog, page 23

Shock it to me

I don’t think it’s an overstatement to say that I’ve been walking around in a state of shock since November 9, 2016. As such, I recently got to wondering what is it that makes an event truly shocking…and consequently what have been the most shocking events of my lifetime.The first and most obvious criterion for an event to be shocking is that it has to be unexpected…the more unexpected the greater the shock. 
Second is that it has to reverberate long after it first occurs, often it’s a reverberation that deadens down to an ever-present haunting.
Third, it has to be powerful enough to force a reassessment of life, either on a personal or national level…the more universal the impact the greater the shock.
Finally, the shock should be negative. When I first started compiling this list, it contained a number of what for me were positive shocks, such as the ending the most recent Super Bowl. Then I realized on reflection that such an unexpectedly happy ending soon settles into a warm memory, like a surprisingly fine meal or good sex. There’s no haunting involved…no moment that you want back for a do-over…no sense that you’ve dropped the egg of creation, never to put it back together again. I understand if Super Bowl LI is on The Big List of Shocks for every Atlanta Falcons fan…or that of every sworn hater of the New England Patriots…but this is my list: JFK’s assassination . More than a half-century later and I can still remember sitting next to Tom Quinlan in Mr. Fowler’s math class when the Principal came over the intercom with news that the President had been shot in Dallas. Haunting? I just read another “think” piece about how Boomer selfishness, shortsightedness, and self-centeredness are responsible for the sorry state of our politics (a case admittedly harder to argue against given the Boomer who epitomizes all of that now at the top of our politics). I still maintain that if you could actually lay a generation out on a psychoanalyst’s couch, you might find that having a childhood of ducking and covering out for fear of nuclear annihilation topped off by having your glamorous young President’s head blown off in public is going to leave a scar that just might lead to some anxiety about life if not exactly sociopathic behavior.  9-11 : Did it change everything, as they claim? At the very least it reinforced the message of the JFK killing that life can be brutally cut short in a minute on a grand scale and that the world could be turned upside down. Air travel, military commitments, government surveillance, spending, and dysfunction…all changed profoundly by 9/11.  I’m not sure how anyone who even had an inkling that it might happen and didn’t do anything about it lives with himself (looking at you, George W. Bush). Nixon’s Downfall : Not just the resignation…the entire unraveling from the Watergate break-in to Agnew’s resignation to the Saturday Night Massacre coming after such a resounding electoral landslide. It was one long, slow train wreck of historic proportions. The reverberation…the haunting…has come in the form of the Nixon loyalists and acolytes (Roger Ailes, Newt Gingrich, Rush Limbaugh, Dick Cheney, etc.) who over the decades have sought revenge against the liberalism they hold responsible and see embodied in the media and the Democratic Party. In their dirty, relentless war against to exact their vengeance they have turned the American political process into a turf war for gangsters. The Jonestown Massacre : More than 900 killed in what was termed "revolutionary suicide"…though the inclusion of some 300 children among the dead probably means it was more like revolutionary murder/suicide. It began as a populist uprising against a corrupt and ineffectual system led by an egomaniac with a deep and abiding affection both for Russia and his own flimflam abilities. As the walls started closing in him on him, his madness became more manifest in word and deed until it seemed that blowing his whole phony empire up became the only resolution of his narcissistic vision.    The Trump Election A closing note: Today I watched The Walk, Robert Zemeckis’s feature film version of Phillipe Petit’s 1974 wire walk between the Twin Towers and I realized that Petit’s stunt actually occupies a rather extraordinary place on my shock list. It’s rather bizarre for a number of reasons. For one, I never heard about this highest of high wire acts until more than 30 years after it happened when I watched the Academy Award winning documentary made about it called Man on Wire. My shock--more like my delayed shock—rippled multi directional. There was the shock that it took me so long to hear of this amazing, if reckless, feat. When I learned that it happened on August 6, 1974, I understood why. That was at the height of the deathwatch on the Nixon Presidency, and it’s most likely that all other news was blocked out for me by its expanding darkness. Then there was the shock of seeing the Twin Towers in all their Olympian glory just a few years after they had been so brutally brought down.
So Petit’s walk, even decades after the fact, was a sharp, painful connection to two of the five events on my list of shocks. But the act itself was also shocking for the sheer audacity of it. Watching the movie had me wondering about myself, as I believe shocking events must do to truly be shocking. I wondered how Petit and I could be of the same species…similar heart, lungs, brains, limbs…and still so profoundly alien from each other because I could never imagine attempting…or even wanting or imagining…to do such a thing as walk on a wire a quarter mile up in the air…with or without a net. 
And then I thought of Osama bin Laden, also of similar biology. Like Petit, obsessed with the Twin Towers but whereas Petit’s illegal act in fact glorified them, bin Laden’s destroyed them. And I am shocked all over again to realize that if you make a triptych of Petit, bin Laden, and me you have the three faces of mankind—creator, killer, observer.


The 5 seconds when Richard Nixon shocked the nation into thinking he was fit to be President. 

Life Imitates Cartoon

I’m here to report that filling my new life up watching Turner Classic Movies and an endless string of old Simpsons' episodes in lieu of my old habit of consuming cable news and online editions of daily newspapers has only had one shameful moment. One day an adult female friend of Lorna’s walked into the house, and I had to explain why I was watching a cartoon in the middle of the afternoon. Other than that, not only have I found the combo of TCM and The Simpsons intellectually stimulating, but they’ve proven far more reliable in explaining the society we’re living in than the never-ending parade of TV pundits who have so tramped over the meaning of journalism that it is indistinguishable from elephant droppings.
The Simpsons has been especially sharp in its perceptions. In an episode from 2000, called Bart to the Future, it even predicted a Trump presidency. Given the Fake News Era we live in, that wasn’t enough of an animated moment for some who then proceeded to try and gild the lily by manufacturing more Trump prophecy moments from The Simpsons. Those efforts compelled Buzzfeed and Snopes to research and debunk the phony moments, which in turn cast doubt on whether The Simpsons ever actually predicted a Trump presidency...and down goes the rabbit hole. As I wrote last week, this nonstop retrofitting, reimagining, and reincarnation of fact as fancy was beyond George Orwell’s scope in 1984.
The Internet meme makers will have a more difficult time playing mischief with a 2007 Simpsons episode that I just watched that far surpasses Bart to the Future in terms of cultural perceptivity. It’s not just a shot in the semi-dark, since any comedy writer in 2000 might have found the idea of a Trump presidency funny. This 2007 episode, titled E. Pluribus Wiggum, provides a comprehensive rundown of our current civic dysfunction. In just over six minutes this excerpt from E. Pluribus Wiggum checks all these key boxes:Americans’ basic contempt for politicians: CheckMedia obsession with the horserace aspect of politics: CheckMedia as part of the elite: CheckAllure of authoritarianism over democracy: CheckVoting as a moral issue: CheckConfusion of celebrities with parts they play*: CheckThe temptation to blow the whole thing up: CheckThe persistent marginalization of progressive candidates: CheckThe persistent feebleness progressive candidates: CheckRole of brand name pundits in legitimizing candidates: CheckAmericans' contempt for both political parties: Check Premium placed on candidate’s recognizability rather than ability: CheckCraziest, laziest citizens' knack for dictating news content: CheckTV’s weakness for turning political process into armed conflict: CheckTV pundit’s weakness for glibness: CheckTV pundit’s weakness for speaking for the entire country: CheckTV pundit’s weakness for interpreting wackiness for freshness: CheckDominance of "sound bites": CheckNational ignorance about finance: CheckPundits' need for labeling: CheckPundits' portrayal of Republicans as masculine and Dems as feminine: CheckOutraged reaction of most intelligent citizens to the political process: CheckAttempt by average citizen to avoid politics: CheckExpression of enduring faith in the average voter: CheckInevitable crushing of that faith by average voter: CheckLack of understanding of fundamentals of the US Constitution: CheckUnderestimating demands and complexity of the Presidency: CheckTrivializing government intrusion on individual rights and freedoms: CheckControl of Republican Party by billionaires, talk radio hosts, and Satan: CheckRepublican Party voter suppression: CheckDemocratic Party enthrallment to elitism, identity politics, and diversity: CheckDemocratic Party capacity for seizing defeat from the jaws of victory: Check Propensity of news media to take dumbest thing out of a candidate’s mouth and turn it into something it’s not: CheckAmericans’ propensity for mangling their own history to reach wrong conclusions: CheckDemocratic Party mania for celebrity endorsements: CheckMake America Great Again (Yes…really…2007!): CheckCandidate’s belief that words alone can make change and progress: CheckAd makers blending of inspiring words to emotional pictures to sell false image of candidate: CheckCandidate’s failure to understand own message: CheckVoters’ weakness for candidates whose personalities make them feel good in spite of evidence to the contrary: CheckDemocratic leaders’ propensity for selling out their own: CheckA totally juvenile view of elective office: CheckAmerica as the world's laughing stock: Check


How do they do it? How do creative people manage to get to the truth about a culture before the sober-minded academics, scholars, and journalists do? How can a roomful of class clowns sitting around writing a cartoon show 10 years ago demonstrate more of a grasp of our politics today than any of CNN’s ridiculous cast of thousands political roundtables…more than miles of political Twitter feeds…more than legions of angry, obsessive political bloggers? How?  
Because experience fuels their imagination; it doesn’t calcify it. Because their allegiance is to the creative process; not any partisan agenda. Because they seek to engage and amuse rather than impress or oppress. Because art conceals their intent and strengthens their purpose, they are not easily dismissed or intimidated as "enemies of the people". Because from the first cave drawings they’ve been telling the human story and will be doing so long after the current plague of philistines, propagandists and pundits passes. Until then...we are left to live a life that imitates a cartoon...D'oh!

* A Trump voter recently expressed his faith in Trump by saying that he always believed that the country needed a John Wayne in the White House. Yikes! A phony makes his way into the White House by invoking the image of another phony.)

It's Not 1984

2017...a book in search of an author


As I’ve written before, George Orwell’s 1984 is one of the most significant books in my life. So let me stipulate here at the beginning that this post is not intended as a Nobby Works take down of Orwell, à la Hitchens in Heavens (Hitchens’ admiration of Orwell was the one small piece of common ground we shared in fact). This post is more a rebuttal to the current fashion for viewing 1984 as an uncannily apt commentary on our dark times. I’m happy to see sales of the book dramatically increase in the age of Trump, but I think if anyone takes 1984 as a guide for coping with the age of Trump…well, I’m afraid one might just as well use AOL dial-up to surf the Internet.
The nightmare vision Orwell foresaw in 1984 was borne of the time he lived in…a time when totalitarian states--first Germany and then the Soviet Union--were on the rise and threatening to crush human individual freedom under a monolithic order where even personal relations, communications, and dreams were under state control. It’s not that Orwell was wrong. He was right for his time, but there was no way he could foresee how technology and innovation would turn his nightmare vision on its head…how such seemingly benign advances in society like cable TV, the Internet, social media, and smart phones would make an unimagined dystopia where it’s not ignorance that’s strength, but alternate truth.
Because of my long-time admiration of 1984, I realized how un-predictive it was of our current situation long before Trump’s ascension...excerpt from The Nob four years ago: 

Kahneman’s book is full of empirically proven evidence that we live in a state of unreality dominated by a myriad of unseen forces--or more accurately inconspicuous forces. In his book these forces are identified variously as "priming," "the illusion of understanding," "the illusion of validity," "the halo effect," "the endowment effect," "the anchoring effect." These and many others are subtle beyond Orwell’s imaginings, but have an impact on our thinking and behavior as insidious as anything designed under the ever-watchful eye of Big Brother.

As anyone who engages in political discussion as I have over the years can attest, you find yourself increasingly arguing with people who are not at all ignorant in the common sense of that word. They are people who are "informed" in a manner of speaking, but are constantly subject to those unseen forces Daniel Kahneman writes about and have intellectually embraced and assimilated counterfactual information. A number of these conversations instantly spring to mind as I write this. There was my debate with the man who had FOX News on all day long, yet had no idea that Barack Obama (who he dismissed as a typical tax and spend Democrat) had offered Republicans “a grand bargain” in which they would agree to lower the national debt by cutting $10 in entitlements for every $1 in new taxes. It was a proposition that cost Obama dearly among his base, but this 24-7 Fox watcher had never heard of it. Then there was my healthcare confrontation with someone who argued against his own man Romney’s healthcare plan by insisting that Romneycare was driving Massachusetts into bankruptcy because he had read it somewhere. And it’s not only Republicans who choose to soak in their own reality…just this morning I had a "Bernie or Bust" boy repeat once again the certifiably false charge that the Democratic National Committee had rigged the primaries for Hillary Clinton.
These are all arguments made from the comfort of one’s own sources, certitude, and sectarianism. They’re arguments that defy deliberation because deliberation itself is seen as a weakness. Moreover…and more to the point…they’re not arguments that need a Big Brother to impose them…they are imposed from below…by a thousand little brothers and sisters posting and sharing made-up information that gains currency not because it is tested, debated and analyzed but simply because it exists. In 2017, the most ominous message is not “Big Brother is watching you”; it’s “I saw it on the Internet.”
Only if you're standing in his mirrorOr in the case of the most mentally unbalanced and intellectually incurious president in American history, “I saw it on Fox News”…which was what he said after falsely citing a terrorist attack in Sweden. Think of it: a person with access to all the secrets and intelligence in the world making a public ass of himself by referring to a bogus TV story? (Big Brother, if he had existed, would, be turning in his grave with Hitler and Stalin). This is why comparisons of Trump to Big Brother are so wildly off target. This man is not watching you; he’s too busy watching himself. Focusing on the authoritarian, we miss the far more dangerous and unstable narcissist in charge.
We are not suffering the suffocating, gray totalitarian state of 1984; we are lost in A Night on Bald Mountain, where every bat is freed from its belfry, where undead resentments against sharing rights and equality with others rise up from the grave, where peace is always at war with itself, and where freedom is slavery to the con artist. And if we needed any further evidence of how this is not a totalitarian nightmare but quite the opposite, just look at the reaction to it from the so-called Deep State. If this were the culmination of our paranoid fantasies, our keepers of the secrets, soldiers in the shadows, thought police would be rushing to reinforce and solidify the power of the fraud at the top. Instead, FBI, CIA, NSA, along with corporate media are rushing to undo him through non-stop leaks and devastating leak-based reporting. Their very reliance on order and stability is what drives them to undermine this new reign of disorder and instability…misrule by Tweet, Reality TV, personal pique, and unchecked juvenile ego.

Orwell for all his intelligence and cleverness could not have imagined this world we now inhabit. We do our gross, present harm further insult to think that he did.  

Worst Birthday Ever

The Worst Birthday Ever music video...with apologies to Frank Sinatra and his many fans

This is quite remarkable really...I can with full confidence name this one my worst birthday ever. 

Over the years, Lorna and I have often played the "Name Your Favorite" game--favorite birthday, Christmas, vacation, what have you. We never played a "Name Your Worst", and as I reviewed past celebrations in light of writing this blog post, I could only think of two which came remotely close to "worst." There was the Thanksgiving when we were prevented from riding the VW Bug to grandmother's house by a snowstorm, and ended up huddled in our apartment in West Lebanon, New Hampshire, eating humble "Chinese pudding" (the possibly now racist name our family gave what the Brits call "sheperd's pie" because...well, you know...it was made upside down with the meat on the bottom). And then there was the New Year's Eve when we returned from Christmas vacation to home in Canaan, NH, only to find our furnace blown out. Our poor, overworked local oilman spent the evening down in our dirt cellar trying to get the damn thing running and almost blew his head off in process. So, two "worsts" in New Hampshire, which may have something to do with all the time we now spend in California and any place else that's warmed by the sun on a regular basis. 

All and all, it's been a very sweet life, which makes my designation of this birthday as the worst rather astounding. After all, I have relative health and wealth, the love of family and long-time friends, and freedom enough to maintain this blog without worrying about time or thought police knocking on my door. So, what's my problem? 

I love America...am attached to it as one often is to the land of one's birth, which means warts and all. I've been persistently and publicly critical of it over the span of my life, but I have always realized that the right to criticize is one of the things I most love about the US. I was hooked on American history from my earliest school days...I can still vividly recall kindergarten teacher Miss Sullivan reading to our "bluebird" reading group about George Washington, his father's cherry tree and how George never told a lie. I've referred back to that story often in my adult life because it's a classic American myth, and I cherish myths for what they reveal about the cultures that give birth to them. 

That myth told us that Americans idealize themselves as honest (and here's to you, Honest Abe, a nation turns its mournful eyes to you...lie..la...lie). Whatever the actual historical record against that belief, we have valued honesty at least as a goal, if not a reality. Until now. Now we've passed from the reality that all politicians sometimes lie (indeed, all people sometimes lie) to elevating a certified liar * as President of the United States. We have turned the George Washington myth of never telling a lie into the Donald Trump myth that lies always trump truth...he lies about everything, everywhere, to everyone and gets away with it. The fate of the nation is now in the tiny, idle hands of a fraud and a scoundrel, and that truth should not make for happy birthdays for anyone who's not in on his con. 

My birthday wish? That Trump gets blown out of public life suddenly and soon.  
* This is only one of countless articles from numerous sources certifying (often mathematically) Trump's chronic lying, all one has to do is Google search "Trump lies." 

E Pluribus Unum

Gisele Bündchen gets with the zeitgeist and embraces diversity
On Super Bowl Sunday the football team I’ve been following for most of my life was getting very badly trounced, but I was in an unusual state of equanimity about it. That was partly due to the distance I had put between the team and myself over our political differences. But it was also because many of the Super Bowl ads were so damn compelling. Those who swear they only watch the Super Bowl for the ads are the intellectual heirs of those who used to say they only read Playboy for the articles. I’ve never been part of either charade.
I watched through the ads this time because of the controversy that broke out over a Budweiser ad before it even aired and I didn’t want to miss it when it did. The ad traced the immigrant journey of Bud founder Adolphus Busch to the US from Germany and his meeting with another immigrant, Eberhard Anheuser, to form Anheuser-Busch, the largest brewery in the world. The mere premise of the ad aroused the ire of those who have rightly been called deplorables who threatened to boycott Bud because they viewed the ad as leftist propaganda. There may be no better--rather sadder--measure of how far off its axis the nation is than to have one of our essential myths--the immigrant success story--dismissed as leftist propaganda.
Many of the other ads for the game highlighted diversity and multiculturalism—from 84 Lumber’s taboo take on the Trump wall to A10’s freaky take on the Trump hair to Airb&b and Coke reviving the romantic idealism of Coke’s classic “We’d like to teach the world to sing.”  Ironically, hard  leftists didn’t see the ads as propaganda for their view of the world at all, but rather as further evidence of capitalism's ability to co-opt everything and anything to suit its insatiable appetite for dominance…even diversity and multiculturalism. Hard leftist critics attacked the ads for “commodifying dissent” –for jumping on the anti-Trump zeitgeist as exemplified in recent mass street protests in order to sell the masses more beer, surgared water, hair products and consumerism in general. These criticisms echoed the teachings of Herbert Marcuse who inspired the left of my student radical days with oberservations of capitalist society like this, "The people recognize themselves in their commodities; they find their soul in their automobile, hi-fi set, split-level home, kitchen equipment.” In other words, according to Marcuse, if you shed a tear over Airb&b’s “We Accept” ad (and many said they did), featuring close-ups of an array of racially mixed faces, that “soulful” experience was all capitalism needed to excuse itself and continue exploiting racial divisiveness for its own profit. It made you feel good so it could continue taking advantage of you. It’s a harsh, cynical view, which attributes to capitalism a monolithic willfulness which actually flies in the face of competitive reality and corporate incompetence. Moreover, it ignores the historic evidence that the aspiration for human acceptance of others and building community predates our current state of greed and mass manipulation by eons.
In one of the most important and relevant passages of the entire Bible, Jesus says:

“When the Son of Man comes in his glory, and all the angels with him, then he will sit on his glorious throne. Before him will be gathered all the nations, and he will separate people one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats. And he will place the sheep on his right, but the goats on the left. Then the King will say to those on his right, ‘Come, you who are blessed by my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world. For I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you clothed me, I was sick and you visited me, I was in prison and you came to me.’ Then the righteous will answer him, saying, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you drink? And when did we see you a stranger and welcome you, or naked and clothe you? And when did we see you sick or in prison and visit you?’ And the King will answer them, ‘Truly, I say to you, as you did it to one of the least of these my brothers, you did it to me.’“Then he will say to those on his left, ‘Depart from me, you cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels. For I was hungry and you gave me no food, I was thirsty and you gave me no drink, I was a stranger and you did not welcome me, naked and you did not clothe me, sick and in prison and you did not visit me.’ Then they also will answer, saying, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or naked or sick or in prison, and did not minister to you?’ Then he will answer them, saying, ‘Truly, I say to you, as you did not do it to one of the least of these, you did not do it to me.’ And these will go away into eternal punishment, but the righteous into eternal life.”

Centuries later, the Statue of Liberty arrives on our shores as gift from the French, and we adorn it with words that echo Christ’s message and articulate our best vision of ourselves:

"Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries sheWith silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor,Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"
As stated numerous times in past posts, the Nobby Works eschews the pejorative meaning of myth as a lie to the traditional one that myth is the story a society tells itself about its idealized image of itself. As I’ve written previously, I’m not only filling my new “No Cable News” days with episodes of The Simpsons, but with lots of Turner Classic Movies. It is quite remarkable how powerful and persistent this myth of an all embracing, all welcoming America is in the films of the 30s, 40s, and 50s. Much is due to the fact that so many of those films were made by recent immigrants to this land, who were indeed deemed the refuse of the world in the eyes of Hitler and his ilk. The films, like the myth they embody, stand foursquare against notions of racial superiority and exclusivity. The clip below is from The Big Sky, a Howard Hawks Western from 1952, starring Kirk Douglas with Arthur Hunnicutt in a gem of a co-starring role. Like so many of these American classics, it speaks with prophetic clarity about the current, un-American state of our union. 

(Oh, yeah, it was a helluva game and all politics aside, the better team won...)
  

Them!

Last week I had an unsettling email exchange with a stranger. A mutual friend had sent out an assessment of the Trump voter based on a lengthy exchange he had with one of his students who was a Trump supporter. I “replied to all” when I sent my response and soon received a follow-up from someone on the mailing list I didn’t know (and will refer to as MS here).  MS wrote: “I have highlighted your response below. Not as a direct critique, but to point out how even unintentional language takes on a divisive intent.” Here is my original response with his comments highlighted in red:

"Excellent…does a great job of trying to understand the Trump mentality (reference to "them") with as much charity as possible (indicates that they are beyond comprehension). In the end, however--and I hear this over and over again from my own encounters with these people--is this longing they have for the wrecking ball. How they got to this longing…what drove them to it is another question, but I think ultimately they reached a point where they just decided there was nothing to lose by blowing the whole thing up. And now, with the rest of us, they will pay the price for their civic tantrum." 

I have been writing for public consumption for a very long time, so I’m well attuned to the criticism that goes with the territory. But what made this critique particularly unsettling is that it echoed a frequent exchange that I’ve had with beloved daughter Gillian, especially over our past Christmas together. Gillian lives in Savannah and is surrounded by a goodly number of Trump voters. Whenever our discussions came around to politics, I invariably referred to such voters as “those people.” Then Gillian--like MS--would point how divisive that language was.
I’m not above self-examination, especially when there’s a convergence of criticism from someone who knows me as well as Gillian does and someone who doesn’t know me at all like MS. So I’ve reflected mightily on my use of the third person plural pronoun them/they, and a few observations emerge.
First, Gillian and MS are both educators and, I believe, about the same age…or at least they’re not of my age, so there could be both a professional and generational factor at play here. Educators today have probably been made far more sensitive to the harmful effects of language than we were when I was a practicing teacher. This sensitivity is often called political correctness, and I think I’ve been quite politically incorrect in expressing my disdain for political correctness at various times in The Nobby Works, such as here, here, and here. Not to beat on that poor dead horse again, but the winner of the past election--whatever his many damnable faults--at least understood how political correctness rubs many Americans the wrong way and running against it is a slam-dunk way to separate yourself from the weaselly-mouthed establishment types  in the ears of the voters.
Coincidently, the very day I received that chastising email about my use of the third person plural, my daily ration of The Simpsons served up a timely and delicious episode called "The Girl’s Code". In it Comic Book Guy is the token male on Lisa’s app development team, but he’s not allowed to sit with the female coders, because--as he explains-- “Everything I say offends them.” To which one of the female coders responds, “Who are you calling them?”
I admit that this theming of those we don’t like or don’t agree with…or don’t understand…adds a real strain to the prospect of eventual reconciliation. Moreover, it runs contrary to the entire ethos of The Nobby Works which, based on Norman O. Brown’s theory of Love’s Body, holds that we all once were part of a grand whole and what causes us so much earthly trouble and grief is our struggle to regain that wholeness while not losing our individuality. And so here I am in the that predicament myself. I really do believe in the ultimate commonality of human beings, but like most of us, I often find it convenient and preferable to put some distance between those who seem different…or deplorable…and myself…and thus I resort to “those people.”
As a writer I find it an almost necessary rhetorical device. First, from the standpoint of language clarity and style, calling, say, Trump supporters “those people” is both easier and more emotionally satisfying. It’s not only less cumbersome to call them "those people", but more accurate. After all, if I want to describe the awful outcome of the last election, it would be inaccurate to say, “We elected the worst person in the land as our leader”, because we did not--certainly not the we whose politics I share. Nor would it be accurate to say that, “America elected the worst person in the land as its leader”, because a sizable majority of Americans did not vote that way. Accuracy demands that there be a distinction drawn between those responsible for the action (them) and those not (us), otherwise analysis of an election—or any human activity—becomes impossible.

In the months to come, The Nobby Works will be drawing a lot from the book Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason and The Gap Between Us and Them, which discusses the differences between them and us in terms of different peoples’ moral dispositions. The cheap, inflammatory partisan rhetoric of the day about those who say, are “takers”  and those, say, who are “job creators” obscures real tribal differences…what the author Joshua Greene calls moral biases. It is not that “they” are immoral and we are “moral”, it is that their moral sense is different than ours. It’s deep and complex and necessary for us to understand this if we are ever to pull out of this death spiral we’re in to permanent division. Declaring that “them” should now be “the T-word” shoves those essential, inescapable differences under a rug and prevents us from getting to that understanding.

The Trump Presidency: Vatican Style

A bedroom fit for a Pope? A French King? A President of the United States of America? 
Roll over, Abe Lincoln, give Liberace the news...
One of the fundamental beliefs of The Nobby Works is that art is uber alles. To paraphrase a popular phrase, Art trumps Trump. To fully appreciate the excerpts from HBO's The Young Pope in the video clip below, you have to realize that in order to be first televised this January, it had to have been conceived, pitched, funded, and produced quite a while ago...at least long enough before the preposterous Presidential Election of 2016 to be independent of it. And yet again art is not only able to anticipate reality, but to leave reality standing breathless in the dust in its own heavy boots. 
To further your viewing enjoyment, allow me to provide this helpful guide to the cast of characters:Pope Lenny Belardo is Donald J. TrumpCardinal Michael Spenser is the defeated Democratic candidate for President in dragCardinal Angelo Voiello is FBI Director James ComeyThe Congregation of Bishops is the US CongressThe suppliant bald priest and bearded priest are the gullible true believers

Kumbaya My Ass

Although I try to block it out, I can still hear an aggravating chorus rising up from throughout the land, singing, “All we are saying is give Trump a chance.” Even Barack Obama--classy sometimes to a fault--stepped up for a solo, saying that as a country we need Trump to succeed, because if he fails we all fail.
What makes it so aggravating is that so many of those chiding the left for not being willing to give Trump a chance were cheerleading for Obama’s failure from day 1 of his presidency. Rush Limbaugh called for it on his radio program broadcast to 20 million and Mitch McConnell announced it to his Republican caucus their goal for bringing Obama down in one term of office.
Thing is, the election of Trump was a national failure in and of itself. It was a failure of a culture with a decades’ long addiction to celebrity and reality TV that allowed a certified scam artist and demagogue to dominate and manipulate a lazy and inept media for more than a year. It was a failure of legislative, law enforcement and national security institutions that allowed a teapot scandal over an email server to obscure an intrusion of a hostile foreign power into our democratic process. And it was a failure of our beloved Constitution with its provision for an Electoral College that was never intended as anything other than a check for elites on democracy, and is right up there with calling blacks 3/5th human as a Founding Fathers’ fuck-up. Wishing for Trump to succeed is wishing for this mass failure to be compounded. It is wishing for rampant, reckless deregulation; unbridled conflict of interest and in your face corruption; unstable and incoherent international policy; incompetence and indifference in high places; and nonstop stupid tweeting from a man with the vanity of a drunken peacock and the intellectual heft of a pea.
I will proudly be joining millions of others in marching against such “success” this weekend in what I hope and believe will be a momentous prelude to a resistance movement that will last until Trump-brand American fascism is defeated. An immensely helpful sign in this regard is this document a friend forwarded to me created by a progressive group and titled Indivisible: A Practical Guide for Resisting the Trump Agenda. It’s considerably more civil and politically savvy than the agenda I unveiled in last week’s post, which was less than half in jest (there's nothing humorous about the current state of the nation). It’s pages full of useful, field-tested citizen actions. In addition it contained the following proviso, which I found particularly encouraging: Members of your group who enjoy more privilege should think carefully about how they can ensure that they are using their privilege to support other members of the group. The writers of the guide wisely resisted defining that privilege as white privilege, a phrasing that is both counterproductive and racist itself. This could be a healthy indication that some progressives may already be applying hard lessons from recent electoral failings.
And in that regard, another friend sent me an interview with George Lakoff, who long has been warning liberals, progressives, Democrats (whatever label makes them least uncomfortable) about their tone-deaf framing of issues. Lakoff says,

A lot of conservatives see their in-group as their local community or their neighbors, and then they will do all sorts of things. If there’s a flood they’ll be out there swinging the sandbags, if there’s a fire they’ll be out there on the lines with the hoses to protect their neighbors’ homes. That is the powerful community version of in-group nurturance, and that is real nurturance, it’s real care. That can be appealed to, and we need to find ways of talking about that in terms of regulation and protection.

So No Kumbaya does not mean no cooperation, no compromise, no communication with those who really do care about making this country good and whole. It means no more rolling over, no giving in to a toxic agenda, no surrender to American fascism. There’s a big difference between the two. As liberals practiced in and proud of our art of the nuance, we should be able to tell the difference and make it work for us at the same time that we’re being forthright in advancing our patriotic vision.

And a Child Shall Lead Them...

Bart-Dan

Friend Michael Schaffer beat my quarantine against “the news” by getting a column in front of my eyes written by the always-civil Charles Blow in the excessively civil New York Times. It was advice on what a concerned citizenry should do under the dark shadow of the Trump Ascension. It was just the advice you would expect: write letters to your congressional representative, donate to causes and candidates that oppose the insanity (or inanity as the case may be), stay informed by reading newspapers (D’oh!)…all the good stuff that I learned about as a conscientious young American in 8th grade civics class. Blow’s most radical suggestion was a call for non-violent protest marches (here’s betting that the NYT editorial board wrestled long and hard with that one before assuring itself that it was not an invitation to civic unrest).
I’m really on the outside looking in these days. It’s not that I don’t hold a warm place in my heart for such displays of participatory democracy…I’m especially heartened by the many friends I’ve heard from who will be participating in various anti-Trump marches throughout the country on January 21. Mass marching strikes me as the necessary albeit minimal starting point for citizen response to this rise of American fascism. But in the months since our (ho-ho) informed citizenry elected this transparent fraud and demagogue as leader, I’ve spent far more time watching The Simpsons than reading The New York Times. As such, I now find myself less inclined toward a Henry David Thoreau approach to civil disobedience than to Bart Simpson style uncivil disobedience. I imagine that if Bart were an op-ed columnist for The Old Grey Lady, he’d be making her hair fall out with a list of suggestions that would go something like this:
First, he’d probably take my suggestion from my last post more seriously than I did that The Resistance unleash a bed bug attack on Trump Tower. Bart being Bart, unrestrained by my personal sense of decorum, might take it further…perhaps calling upon anti-Trump guerillas to check into Trump hotels worldwide with champagne bottles full of cat urine. They pour it all over the mattresses, and then immediately check out...but not without leaving a complaint about the smell in the room and a demand for refund. (In lieu of cat urine, horse piss will do.)
Similarly, it would not be beyond Bart’s imagination to suggest that legions of The Resistance throughout the land embark in an airborn assault by sending packages of wet garbage, old meat, and dog poop to 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. The onslaught should be so shocking and awesome that only Trump’s most desperate sycophants (I’m looking at you, Kellyanne) would be willing to open the packages. And even then the call would go out for undocumented Mexican immigrants to do the dirty work. To which a mighty chorus of Dreamers would raise their voices as one and roar, “We don’t need your stinkin’ packages!” 
The T-ButchSpeaking of Mexicans, I can see Bart driving the xenophobia point home by calling on The Resistance to smear their tax returns with Trinidad Scorpion T-Butch chili pepper before sending them in. (Other hot peppers can substitute, but the T-Butch is best because it looks like Trump). In case the message is too subtle for our overworked IRS, Bart would advise including a Post-it that says, “Build your damn wall with this!”
Bart would never suggest this himself…he’s only a kid after all…but any number of adults in Bart’s world—Mayor Quimby, Sideshow Bob, Krusty the Clown—would probably be OK with uncivil disobedience that called for grabbing Melania or Ivanka by their pussies.
Which brings to mind a number of other protest activities directly inspired by Trump himself, so these acts are far beyond Bart mischief:
Start a university. Let’s have more phony universities than Starbuck's on every street corner in America. Promise anything and deliver nothing. And if they want their money back, tell them to sue you.
Stiff contractors. Get that new bedroom addition you always wanted, remodel the kitchen, build the world-class Olympic swimming pool of your dreams…goldplate your frickin’ front door and your name on your roof, and then refuse to pay for any of it.
And phony charities too! Go on Facebook or Kickstarter and announce you have a deformed child…a child cursed with puke orange hair, a self-satisfied smirk, and a walk like he’s always high on the smell of his own farts. Then take the money and spend it on whatever feeds your hopelessly starved ego…giant self-portraits, floor-to-ceiling mirrors, castrated Nubian throne bearers. 
Tweet…day and night…about every little insult, insipid insight, or petulant impulse that crosses your addled mind.
Open fire on people walking down Fifth Avenue. (If you’re non-violent, use a paint gun.)
Fly the Russian flag on the Fourth of July.
And lie…Do Not Forget to Lie…about everything to anyone at anytime. And then deny it, even if you’re caught on camera.
Oh, I’m sorry. Is that all a bit too juvenile? Too irresponsible? A tad too Marxist in the Groucho sense of the word?
How about if Bart added a suggestion about putting Indian war paint on, busting into Whole Foods in the dead of night, and dumping all the very expensive gourmet tea down the toilet?
Fact is, the only thing that separates mere vandalism from political protest is political purpose. So here’s the purpose, The Resistance engages in all this crude behavior until Donald J. Trump releases his tax returns for the past 10 years. That’s it. Doesn’t have to resign. Doesn’t have to make a confession. Doesn’t have to appoint Hillary to the Supreme Court. Just do what every other modern president has done—show us yours since we ALL have to show you ours.
So many shocking political things have happened in my lifetime: The Cuban Missile Crisis, JFK’s assassination; Nixon’s resignation, 9/11; Trump. Not in a league with any of those, but still pretty unbelievable and impactful from my point of view is how the Republican Party has become the philosophical heirs of the neo-anarchist Yippies of the 1960s. The Yippies’ disdain for American institutions, law, and order freed them to engage or threaten to engage in any activity no matter how outrageous that would bring the whole edifice down. Born in the anti-Vietnam War protests, one would’ve thought that it would have been the American left that would’ve been the keeper of the Yippie legacy, but it is the American right with its appetite for shutting down government, ignoring institutional traditions, wild conspiracy theories and outright confrontation with the Federal government (Cliven Bundy is Abbie Hoffman with a six-shooter). The craziest thing is how well it’s all worked out for them. The anarchists have taken control of almost the entire governing apparatus of the US by systematically breaking it down. The more dysfunctional it is, the better they like it because the bottom line is they hate government and have everything to gain and nothing to lose when it fails.
This is a reality for The Resistance to consider as it moves forward. We’re not facing an opposition moved by calls for civic responsibility or patriotism or any of the other earnest virtues we’ve long valued. These are now con artists, vandals and scofflaws in charge. The sometimes too-adult-for-his-own-good Barack Obama once unfortunately quoted this famous line from The Untouchables: "They pull a knife, you pull a gun." Everybody knew Mr. Obama would never bring a gun to a knife fight…beer maybe. Same goes for most of The Resistance. The guns and the will to use them are clearly on the other side. But it’s not a gunfight anyway. It’s more like a food fight, and you have to be willing to make dirty to win it.

The Impotence of Being Earnest

This is Ernest--
unburied from the ruins of Pompeii
Since the fateful presidential election of 2016, I’ve been extremely discriminating in what words I let pass before my eyes or into my ears. I have totally given up televised news…even satirical TV news, including such long time favorites as Stephen Colbert and John Oliver. I have totally abandoned my morning routine of perusing Slate, the NYT, Boston Globe, HuffPo (for the zeitgeist rather than substance). My reasons for the blackout are twofold. First, all that former news consumption not only failed to prepare me for the election results, but turned me into a fool in the process. On the very day of the election I watched MSNBC interview a Trump supporter in Michigan who was asked how in the face of all available evidence he still believed his candidate would win. The voter answered that on election day Trump supporters would surprise everyone by showing up in unexpected numbers just like the anti-EU Brexit voters did in England. From deep in my own certainty, stripped of my usual skepticism, I laughed at the fool and loudly announced to Lorna that these people are totally delusional.
My second reason for no news is no Trump. Not just the policies, not just the manifest unfitness for high office…as many have pointed out, the nation endured the conniving, paranoid Nixon and the grossly incompetent George W. Bush (though just barely in both cases). Trump takes loathing to a whole other level...and I felt this way long ago when his totally amoral, shifty politics were more in alignment with mine. I just have no appetite for confronting his transparent fraudulence, unbound narcissism, and simple nauseating physical presence every day for the next four years as “the news”…nor do I want to spend a whole lot of time trying to fashion coherent paragraphs like this one to communicate my deep and abiding hatred of him, disgust with his supporters, and embarrassment at living in a nation that would have him as its leader.       
What to do then? My hubris about the election’s outcome led me to vow that if he won, I would give up my precious Nobby Works. I was off to a good start in keeping that vow…having not written a post since Election Day. But words have wings and some have managed to fly under my radar. Two lines in particular have scored a direct hit at my core. The first was from Facebook friend Charlotte Canelli who, about a month ago, left this comment on my timeline: “Ugh. Can't stand our impotence.” That word impotence, paradoxically, packs a real punch, especially for those of us of a certain gender. I never planned on being what, during the rise of German fascism, was called “a good German.” I was not going to hide out in personal comfort and weak excuses while this fascism takes over my country. But I do admit to dithering about what to do about it. I’ve been positively Hamlet-like in my melancholy ambivalence:
To be, or not to be: that is the question:Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,And by opposing end them?  
There’s a reason that speech has lasted more than four centuries (and let's not take for granted its chances for survival if fascism prevails). I’ve actually wrestled with whether to take up arms against this rising fascism, even though I am most definitely not a gun guy. Like the troubled Danish prince, madness has led me to contemplate a range of actions…from the civil disobedience of a Thoreauvian tax strike to the unvarnished vandalism of unleashing a bed bug attack on Trump Tower. Some action, any action, seems in order, beyond mere earnest words, which often appear impotent. After all, this is an action culture. We extol action verbs, cleansing action, action pictures, action figures, and men and women of action. In fact, I would argue that for every bit that racism, misogyny and simple ignorance contributed to Trump’s win, America’s mythic elevation of the emotionally unbalanced billionaire from Marvel comics to presumptive savior was just as big a factor. Trump as Bruce Wayne…Trump as Tony Stark…the culture’s been gorging itself on the fantasies of 14-year olds for about 40 years now, is it any wonder that when given a chance a significant mass would succumb to the fantasy?   
It wasn’t always so. One of my refuges from “the news” has been Turner Classic Movies. One of the things you learn about this culture…or for those old enough, reminded about this culture…is that words were once more heroic than weapons. Last night I watched The Moon is Down, a Hollywood B picture based on a John Steinbeck novel about the Nazi take-over of a Norwegian town. Over its full running time, all the most sympathetic characters are relentlessly killed one after another, with no clever ruse, no hidden techno gimmick, no caped crusader coming to their rescue. But just about every killing is punctuated by a speech about courage, hope, mutual responsibility, Democracy. It’s a civics lesson, not a thrill ride. Even in old John Wayne shoot ‘em ups, violent action is couched in words of reason, contemplation, reflection so as not to exist for its own sake. In recent days my friend Susan Gray has reminded me of two of the most iconic moments in movie history…the singing of La Marseillaise from Casablanca and the “I am Spartacus” scene from Spartacus. In Hamlet, too, words do trump impotency in that it’s “the play’s the thing wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the King.”     
For better or worse, words have been my weapons of choice most all my life. Without them I feel far more impotent than I ever did with them.  But my vow was an earnest one…and like most liberals, earnestness is often my worst enemy. Will earnestness continue to be our tribe’s undoing? I, for one, do not intend to let that be the case, and I don’t mind playing all the angles necessary to assure that American fascism is the ultimate loser. With that in mind I’ve gone back to review the vow I made to quit The Nob and found a lovely little loophole. I wrote:

I believe that the majority of my fellow citizens are too smart to turn the reins of power over to the very worst person among us. If I am wrong on this, I will retire The Nobby Works--my bliss & my passion--on November 9 because, truly, a new dark ages will be upon us.

By updating myself on “the news,” I realize that a majority of my fellow citizens were indeed too smart to turn the reins of power over to the very worst person among us. In fact, nearly 3 million more of those citizens voted for Hillary Clinton than the Fraud-Elect.* (And just a word here on HRC…gunshy as I am about making predictions these days, I feel fairly certain that when historians look back from a distance on the treatment she received from the right, the left, the media and the comedians, they will accurately place it among the Salem witch trials and the Hollywood Blacklist in the shameful annals of American injustice). 
Now, as to how I will exercise my regained potency while ignoring Trump-made “news” as much as possible is still unclear to me. But aside from Charlotte Canelli’s line, the other one that struck me so hard in the past few months was (surprise!) from Dylan when I watched Patti’s Smith’s remarkable revival of his classic A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall at the Nobel ceremony: “I’ll know my song well before I start singin’.” 

And so I will...no matter how hard the rain falls. 


* And please, Academia, spare us any more scholarly treatises on the hidden wisdom of the Electoral College...that third nipple on the body politic has now managed to deliver the presidency in two of the last five elections (3 if we count '04) to two truly awful candidates. It is now as big a threat to American democracy as the Citizens United decision.