The Hollow Men: This Is The Way We End, Not With A Bang But with a Whimper

 It is not the intransigence and boldness of our adversaries we will remember, but the irresolute cowardice of our friends.

--Mad Dog

The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy.

--Martin Luther King

Cowardice asks the question: Is it safe?

--Martin Luther King

A ship is safe in harbor, but that's not what ships are built for.

--W.G.Thayer Shedd

Even a dead fish can go with the flow

--Jim Hightower

The tyranny of some is possible only through the cowardice of others

--Jose Rizal

The unkindest cut of all

--Shakespeare, Julius Caesar

This is the way the world ends

Not with a bang

But with a Whimper

--T.S. Eliot, "The Hollow Men"

The Ignominious Eight

The hardest part is not seeing our own two U.S. Senators bend the knee--Maggie Hassan and Jeanne Shaheen both voted to confirm Kristi Noem and they both voted to kill Dodd-Frank so that banks could profit over the common man. We have always accepted these two as useful but unreliable politicians.

John Fetterman has been a lost soul even before his stroke.

But Mad Dog expected better of Dick Durbin, Angus King and Thomas Kaine. These were men who attacked Trump boldly.

And now they vote to surrender.

Sometimes surrender is the right thing to do: The fanatics in the Japanese government, the die hards who wanted their fellow Japanese to fight on even after Japanese cities had been fired bombed and atomic bombed, even though the Japanese Navy was on the ocean bottom and the air force self destructing--those men were putting their own delusions ahead of their own people. (See "Embracing Defeat," John Dower.)

But our government shutdown was not Japan after the bomb.

It was beginning to hurt. It was beginning to become inconvenient. 

That's where you need courage.

There were two salient arguments for caving in to Trump and Thune and Michael Johnson:

1/ The people the shutdown hurt are mostly Democrats or people Democrats would like to keep in their fold: government workers, the poor, the hungry. Republicans do not consider these folks their constituents and are perfectly happy to see them suffer.

2/ The Democrats had no endgame: If the Republicans say, "Fine, we don't need no frigging guvment and we'll get paid for being Senators and Congressmen anyway and we can go home until the 2026 elections," then what do the Democrats have?

The answer to #1 is that we always hurt the ones we love, but we have to do that sometimes. Churchill did not say we'll fight them on the beaches thinking none of his constituents would be shot, and he did not inspect the bombed out London apartment buildings thinking his decisions had no part in that destruction. But he persevered because he knew what he was fighting for.

The answer to #2 is that neither side had an endgame, but the Republicans said, "We are willing to have no government," and the Democrats have to have the courage to say, "Fine, let's see how that plays out for you. We are willing to bet more Americans  will come to realize they need and even want a government than to not have one."

But what we did not know until these eight Democrats turned coward was whether we have strong enough leadership to justify having a Democratic party. 

And now we know.

CODA:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=40kN6-yAbdA

Best Way to Fight ICE: Get Out Your Camera

J.B. Pritzker, Governor of Illinois knows what Donald Trump is trying to provoke: Another Kent State, a Border Patrol agent shot, an excuse to send in the troops. 

So far, in L.A., in Portland, Oregon, Trump has found his shock troops disarmed by giant green frogs and yellow ducks.

But the Border Patrol and ICE agents and Texas National Guard units sent to Chicago are ratcheting up the vice grip and trying hard to start something nasty. 

Governor Pritzker says the best counter punch is for citizens to take out their cameras and start filming every time ICE shows up.

Without that nauseating video, nobody would have ever heard of George Floyd, and Derek Chauvin would still be killing people in Minneapolis.

Without that famous photo of a napalmed naked Vietnamese girl running in horror from her bombed village, Americans would not have given Napalm a second thought. It smelled like victory, the man said, but with that image it looked like evil.

Without the images of My Lai, nobody would have paid much attention to what U.S. Marines were doing in Vietnam. Officials could claim they were only reacting to horrific behavior on the other side, to snipers or hidden threats. But those bodies of babies and their mothers exposed what was really happening.

The images of the Southern police beating protesters on the Pettus bridge in Selma turned stomachs even among some Southern women.

Martin Luther King being shoved to the ground by his neck meant more after you had heard him speak. But the photo played it's role.

The dog against protester photo was worth 10,000 headlines. Authorities could blame him. They could say he broke some law, that he put the officers at risk. But you can see what you can see.

So, let's get them on video. Let the world see what arresting the worst of the worst really means. Let us see the lie; don't tell us about it. 

An image can be powerful in ways words and even actions unrecorded cannot be.

CODA:

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hjCDDe-oh78&t=72s

Gerrymandering: A Primer

 

Listening to the media, print, social and TV, one might think an electoral map can be drawn up to assure that certain outcomes will obtain for a given party. 

So when the Texas governor assigns five new seats to the Republican party for the U.S. House of Representatives, it's a done deal.

And when Louisiana has 11 U.S. House seats and none of the elected Congressmen are Black, and yet 1/3 of the Louisiana population is Black, some have concluded district maps have been drawn to exclude Blacks from representation.

But how can you do that? Do Blacks not live side by side with Whites in Louisiana?

Apparently not.

The idea of manipulating maps, which reflect two dimensional geography to achieve an outcome in the composition of a Congressional delegation goes way back, to 1813 at least.

But how does that work now? 

Well, many states are "Pittsburgh and Philadelphia and Alabama in between," and for large stretches of land, the people living on that land have predictable opinions and political preferences.

So look at the state of Virginia's Red/Blue election map from the governor's election this week. Virginia gets 11 seats in the House. If you said, we'll divide up those Blue counties (Northern Virgina, Richmond, Delmarva, Albermarle, Montgomery) into different 10 Congressional districts and we'll make all those rural red counties one seat, then Virginia would send 10 Democratic Representatives to Congress and the Republicans would get only one. Currently, Virginia sends 6 Democrats and 5 Republicans to Congress. So the Republicans could lose 4 seats with the right redistricting. And repeat that in other similarly divided states and control of Congress depends on how you draw the lines, not on actual representation of opinion.

That's the big problem for a Republic. 

CODA:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kVlpDV3D0DM

What Do We Call It?

 

Times have changed,
And we've often rewound the clock,
Since the Puritans got a shock,
When they landed on Plymouth Rock.
If today,
Any shock they should try to stem,
'Stead of landing on Plymouth Rock,
Plymouth Rock would land on them.

--Cole Porter

What do you call it when one side decides to play a different game entirely and you've shown up with your football helmet and shoulder pads?

Just Normal Tourists on January 6th

"Game changer," hardly covers the situation.

"Moving the goal posts?" Inadequate, as the idea of a touchdown or field goal no longer applies.

In olden days a glimpse of stocking
Was looked on as something shocking,
But now, God knows,
Anything Goes.

Good authors too who once knew better words,
Now only use four letter words
Writing prose, Anything Goes.

So, when Hitler decided that the new game was not to define borders differently, or to talk about international law or to pay attention to judges and lawyers about what was constitutional or legal, he did not waste time on details.

The world has gone mad today
And good's bad today,
And black's white today,
And day's night today,
When most guys today
That women prize today
Are just silly gigolos
And though I'm not a great romancer
I know that you're bound to answer
When I propose,
Anything goes

His game was all about racial consciousness, racial purity and making the state the guardian of race and using the state to enter the mind of the population under his control to make them function to enhance "racial health."

.

When mothers pack and leave poor father
Because they decide they'd rather be tennis pros,
Anything Goes.

If driving fast cars you like,
If low bars you like,
If old hymns you like,
If bare limbs you like,
If Mae West you like
Or me undressed you like,
Why, nobody will oppose!
When every night,
The set that's smart
Is intruding in nudist parties in studios,
Anything Goes.

So, in the Third Reich, young healthy men were told there duty was not to themselves as individuals, but to their race and the German race,  so they were to marry and produce as many children as possible. The Reich saw the fecundity of Black Africans and Jews as a threat to racial dominance. Fertile German males were advised, in a booklet distributed widely through schools and clubs, to look at women not as playmates but as potential mothers of their children, and to investigate the lineage of their mates to be sure they were not Jews or anything other than of German origin or of "Nordic" origin--so Scandinavians were allowable.

White Mothers Welcoming the White Messiah

The world has gone mad today
And good's bad today,
And black's white today,
And day's night today,
When most guys today
That women prize today
Are just silly gigolos
And though I'm not a great romancer
I know that you're bound to answer
When I propose,
Anything goes

Anything which advanced the cause of expanding the race was morally and legally good. Anything which helped reduce the population of competing inferior races was good: So dragging children off the trains at concentration camps and marching them, along with their fertile mothers, into gas chambers was not murder, but racial hygiene, a necessary cleansing and controlling of populations. 

For Hitler's willing accomplices, marching a village of Jewish women and children into a church and burning them alive was a joyous thing, something they did with the sense of excitement you might see on youtube watching hyped up men hunting wild pigs in Texas, shooting them from helicopters, or trucks, or rounding them up in pens and shooting them through the bars.  People were regarded much as the wild pigs are seen now, as destructive, threatening pests, big vermin, a joy to kill, and a good community project.

So what the Third Reich did was to change the whole game entirely.  It wasn't about defeating an army any more, or drawing a new border or extracting wealth and resources (although that followed on the heels of the invasions) but it was about cleansing and purifying.

If saying your prayers you like,
If green pears you like
If old chairs you like,
If back stairs you like,
If love affairs you like
With young bears you like,

Why nobody will oppose!

At first, some British diplomats did not really get this, when they confronted Hitler's demands for a new chunk of territory, pushing back borders. They thought they were still playing the Treaty of Versailles border and nation state game.

The Reich said quite baldly, there was no such thing as universal human values that all societies,  no matter how different, embraced as part of being human or civilized. So killing people, killing woman and children was not necessarily a bad thing if it was racial cleansing. 

The Reich rejected participation in any international court. It rejected the idea that all men are created equal. White people are not equal but superior. Germany withdrew from the League of Nations because it no longer shared any values with that group.

And we are facing the same sort of phenomenon now with Trump. People are still saying, "It's unprecedented. It's never happened before in American history. It's unconstitutional. It's illegal. It's lawless."

Well, duh. Of course it is. It's a new game entirely.

There are no longer three branches of government. The judiciary has been decapitated, although some lower courts are still running around like chickens with their heads cut off. No matter: when the case gets to the Court of Last Resort, it will rule for Trump.

There is no longer an independent legislature as a check on the President's power. Congress does not really develop spending programs--Trump only spends what he wants to spend and anything Congress sends him he doesn't like, like money for medical research or vaccines or food stamps or healthcare, he just redirects to himself or to his billionaire clients.

When the fourth estate, the free press, challenges him about demanding $230 million from the Treasury because he's been offended by the cases brought against him by the DOJ, he tells the reporter she is a terrible person and directs her to leave the room.

New game.

New rules.

Anything Goes

His minions get it. They ape him: Karoline Leavitt tells reporters the Democratic Party is made up of terrorists, criminals and illegal aliens, she gets it. When Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. recommends unpasteurized milk and there are outbreaks of Listeria, salmonella and bovine tuberculosis, there is nobody to gainsay him in the government. When he attacks vaccines and measles resurges and kills children and adults, well they were just defective people with weak immune systems and it's probably better they are gone and that means the nation is made of tougher stock now.

Modern Day Anne Franks 

So we are now no longer on a hundred yard field with boundary markers and goal posts. Nor do we play on a baseball diamond with bases and umpires who call balls and strikes. There is a new strike zone for each player, depending on how much Trump likes him.

We are not in a Brave New World. 

And though I'm not a great romancer
And though I'm not a great romancer
I know that you're bound to answer
When I propose,
Anything goes...
Anything goes!

--Cole Porter, "Anything Goes"

We are in an Orwellian dystopia, where there is no truth, only Truth Social.

CODA:

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/RW8Gzln_L2k

Dunce Confederacy Does the White House

 

Tom Nichols assembles a platter of remarks from Trump's Merry Mopes of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, in his recent article in "The Atlantic."

What You See Is What You Get

Mad Dog had not seen assembled such a collection of piffle before, but in the aggregate, they gel into a pretty clear picture:

1/ Karoline Leavitt (Press Secretary)

When asked by a reporter who planned a meeting between Trump and Putin, a rather mundane, but staple question asked routinely, Ms. Leavitt replied, "Your Mom did." The reporter might have replied, "Uh, please? And thank you," but we'll never know.

Ms. Leavitt is clearly no C.J. Craig. 

She did not know the answer, or she knew the answer and knew it would be embarrassing, so she simply dug deep into that repertoire from the elementary school playground, which is about where her intellectual development stalled.

I'm Ready To Speak for Trump

2/ Pete Hegseth

Follow Me!

Announcing the end of "DEI" practices Hegseth said, "We're done with that shit."

That, of course, would have sufficed at Joe's Bar, but we were all hoping for something more quotable, something along the lines of, "Diversity has been distorted into an excuse for incompetence, replacing real merit with group think, as if being a particular race is a qualification or virtue." Or something. Some actual argument, you know?

But no. We get, "We're done with that shit." Did he lock and load and fire off a round after saying that, or just throw an axe at some poor drummer?

3/ Vice President Vance, asked whether destroying boats in the Caribbean, killing all on board, without first stopping and searching them, to establish guilt or innocence might be considered a "war crime," replied, "I don't give a shit what you call it."

And he's right to not care whether it's a war crime or not, as recent events, and distant events have demonstrated--you can do all sorts of war crimes for years from Ukraine to Gazza and there will be no calling to account. 

4/ President Trump responded to the No Kings rallies with an AI cartoon showing him joyfully dumping feces on the protesters.

Your President; I Kid You Not

At least Nixon tried to respond to war protesters by calling them "bums." Didn't work. But, you know. He tried.

One might ask:

1/ Do these players think profanity, scatological cartoons are edgy? Do they think if they respond to questions, which is a part of their official duties, with hostility, taunts or by passing gas, they are South Park funny?

2/ Or, could it be, they each realize they have no capacity to formulate a reasonable response, so they just resort to jibes and what they think are ribald jokes, believing themselves to be witty and/or commanding?

There's a wonderful scene in Roxane, the Steve Martin movie which updates the Cyrano De Bergerac play where a knuckle dragger in a bar calls him "Big nose," and Martin challenges him to come up with a better insult, which, of course this Hegseth like buffoon cannot do, and then Martin launches into twenty really funny insults to his own nose, each funnier than the next, which unmasks the goon as a simpleton and thoroughly humiliates him, while at the same time generating considerable sympathy for Cyrano, who has clearly had to live with insults about his nose his whole life.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=urdf4g-LXk4

But neither Hegseth nor the bar dweeb are capable of any real wit.

Nichols calls this "post-ironic glib dismissal." 

They delight in the crass and the lewd, rude, crude and foul.

They think it makes them more accessible, less like the polished,  Hillary Clinton model, with her crafted sentences, designed to allow for plausible denial which came off as sounding to formulaic, dodgy and legalistic.

They delight the Hulk Hogan, Joe Rogan, FOXNEWS mob.

"Just tell it like it is!" the MAGA mob smirks. 

This is the segment of the population which consists of people who get drawn into an argument about tariffs or ICE kidnappings or January 6th, or shutting down the government and once they see, after a few sentences of exchange, that they are failing to persuade, pervade or punish, they expostulate, "Fuck you! You radical leftist effete snob!"

Noem skull

And then they turn their backs and strut away thinking they've just driven their opponent into a dot of humiliation. They have got attention and they think they've intimidated.

Trump is the patron saint  of the third stringer, Nichols suggests, and the only way to respond to them may be to say, "Feel better now? Well, good, Now answer the question. Who arranged the meeting? What is the difference between murder and blowing up a boat with human beings on board without warning--especially when there are other effective options?"

Many have observed you cannot argue with the MAGA mob, because they do not understand how to argue and they simply degenerate into name calling and insults, the way Trump does whenever a reporter asks him an embarrassing question: "You are a very bad person? Did you know that?"

But it's somehow a comfort to see it laid out: These are simple not people worth worrying about. They have been plucked out of obscurity and given their moment in the spotlight, but they cannot sing, dance or even be funny.

They can delight some folks with their insouciance and crudity and vulgarity, but that too grows old pretty quickly. We are only 9 months in this time. It's already stale.

All we can do now is persist and tune into Colbert, Kimmel, Adam Schiff, Paul Krugman, Paul Offit and Bernie Sanders.

And maybe now, Zohran Mamdani. 

Like most newcomers to the political scene, we really don't know much about him. He may be another Obama, or he may crash and burn. But, at least, his vocabulary includes words with more than four letters.

Every Journey Begins With A First Step

 

It's not the beginning of the end. It is not even the end of the beginning. But it might be, if we are lucky, perhaps the beginning of the beginning.

California passed Proposition 50 to allow the state to try to balance the cynical wild west tactic of Texas to pack the Congress with loyal MAGAts. 

And, in New Jersey and even in Virginia, the Democrats won governorships, so Trump cannot simply pick up the phone to the governors in those states to demand they Gerrymander their states to safeguard him from impeachment by a hostile Congress bent on bringing a lawless despot to justice. 

Trump is not impeached.

Trump cannot be impeached unless the Congress changes hands, both House and Senate, in 2026. 

We are a very long and improbable way from that.

And Trump and his MAGA mob are not stupid when it comes to political power. That's why Trump implored Texas to find him 5 more Congressional seats, just as he insisted the Secretary of State of Georgia manufacture 11,000 votes for him in 2020.

The mantra has been that would-be authoritarians always overplay their hands, and Trump's dictate to wimpy Texas Governor Greg Abbott to find him more Congressional seats did cause a reaction in California. Trump is out there stumping on the Gerrymander circuit to extract more Congressional seats for a reason, and that reason is not because he has a grand legislative program he wants to pass--although Project 2025 would be that plan if his acolytes could get him to read,  and he might embrace Project 2025 it if they can package it into small video pieces presented by blond women showing lots of leg on white leather couches.  

No, what Trump fears is a Democratic House which would certainly impeach him, and if the U.S. Senate turned 2/3 Democrat, they might just possibly work up the spine to convict him. 

The math, of course, is in his favor, even if redistricting delivered the House to the Democrats. There is no reasonable calculus for a Democratic Senate any time soon. We have six Senators from the Dakotas and Alaska who represent fewer people than live in Chicago, which has no U.S. Senators. 

The United States Senate is by design, anti-democratic, anti-Republic, a design meant to insure that the will of people is thwarted by wealth and aristocracy, a concession to fears that democracy would mean mob rule and trustworthy men of wealth and property had to be given a stranglehold on the processes of government, to insure "stability" and "reason."

A single Senator from Montana represents roughly a million people, where a Senator from California represents 39 million.

So we have the senators from tumbleweed ruling the Senate, and they have to be persuaded before the representatives of the people, in "the people's house" can do anything which might threaten the interests of the wealthy who have always controlled the country.

Of course, if you add up all  those Red states which look so big on those election maps--North Dakota, South Dakota, Idaho, Wyoming, Montana, Alaska you have fewer people living in all those states, represented by 12 United States Senators than you have people living in New York City, which has no U.S. Senators.

So, the founders were not clairvoyant. And they knew at the time their experiment was imperfect and would have to be adjusted to meet the needs of the future. But, of course, no adjustments have been made fixed the structural  problems of representation, beyond changing that rule that slaves count as 3/5 of a person.

But, for now at least, we've got a new mayor of New York City, who represents and will lead a jurisdiction with more people in it than those six red states combined. 

And the man was born in Uganda. A naturalized citizen. 

No doubt Trump will send ICE after him. 

Trump has already said he'll cut all federal funds from reaching New York City, if Mamdani won, which he's been itching to do ever since a NYC jury found him guilty of 39 felony counts and he got kicked out of the city, sent on his way to the sanctuary state of Florida and his Gatsby house, Mar-a-Lago.

Mad Dog has no idea what Mamdani's win says about New York or the USA, but he is pretty sure Mamdani did not win because he is a Muslim who was born in Uganda.

Maybe it had something to do with Mamdani's willingness to address actual problems faced by citizens who hoped or maybe even expected that government might actually solve problems rather than become the problem. 

Making buses free is one thing but providing affordable housing is not something governments have had much success doing--"the projects" became festering wounds in every city they were tried, except for some projects in NYC, where they worked well some of the time. In Baltimore they became such a center of crime and decay they simply had to demolish them.

So affordable housing and even more so, homelessness, may be complex problems beyond simple government solutions. 

But, at least, New York has voted for hope rather than cynical dismissiveness.

Meanwhile, in Mar-a-log the party goes on, and we've got the woman in the cocktail glass, the perfect symbol for the Trump/MAGA concept of the good life. 

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/e8pBQsDOa1E

The roaring twenties.

Just off Mar-a-Lago

And we know how that ended.

Boats Against The Current: Borne Ceaselessly Back Into the Past

 

Hard as it is to believe Donald Trump has ever read "The Great Gatsby," it is absolutely believable he seized upon the Gatsby theme when it was presented to him, likely with a clip of the Leonardo Di Caprio movie, the very best adaptation ever done.

It's got that Jeffrey Epstein vibe, after all.

Or maybe it's more Tony Soprano who owned a pole dancer bar.

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/e8pBQsDOa1E

And it's all of piece with the new marble in the bathroom off the Lincoln bedroom. And wait 'til you see the new ballroom. That'll make Gatsby turn green with envy!

Nearly naked women in cocktail glasses, women in flapper outfits, which is to say, very short skirts, flashing lots of thigh at rich men in tuxedos. 

It's so very Trump.

And his MAGA boys lap it up. 

I'm sure Joe Rogan, FOXNEWS will run with it.

After all, isn't that what FOXNEWS has been selling for lo these many years?

And as for those folks who rely on SNAP benefits, let them eat cake. They don't deserve any handouts, anyway, and it's all the Democrats' fault.

All of it.

What is the Democrats' fault? You may ask.

Well, just everything. All of it.