Everyone has an Uncle Frank in his life--that guy you might love, sort of, who is a Trump fan and can't wait to vote for Trump for President.
You might want to send that person this clip, just as you might send someone you love a favorite song, a moving download you know they'll love.
This one's from Jimmy Kimmel.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oy0zq8YzY9w&t=832s
Enjoy.
Knocking on the doors of Hampton villagers, we urged a seventy something lady to vote. She stood behind a glass storm door in an upscale house on Great Boar's Head peninsula.
My trusty sidekick dealt with her guard dog, who managed to wriggle through the half open door, a five pound, 16 year old lap dog of some indeterminant breed no bigger than a New York City subway rat.
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| Great Boar's Head |
"I already voted," she told us. She was maybe 90 pounds, soaking wet and looked at us through watery blue eyes warily, a faint smile.
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| She's working hard |
"Okay," I said, turning to go, but for some reason I turned back and I asked her what the big issue for her was in this year's election.
"The border," she said.
"Which one?" I asked.
"The Mexican one."
"Oh."
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| They worked hard |
"And the economy," she added when I looked like I did not quite understand why that border should concern her.
And then she added the reveal:
"I worked hard for what I got," she said.
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| They Worked Hard |
There it was. I worked hard, and you want to give all my money to welfare queens, illegal darkies who sneak across the border, and are now living in plush hotels on taxpayer money, raping people, eating cats and pet dogs like mine, and I've had a hard life.
The thing is: she hadn't.
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| Hard times |
Those women Dorothea Lange captured on her photographs during the Great Depression, those ladies had a hard life. But they would vote for Franklin Roosevelt, not for Trump.
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| Not Hard Working |
Early voting in Arizona, Nevada and Pennsylvania shows massive turnout in Red counties, which means Trump is likely to win those states and with them, the election.
Of course, there is no such thing as one man/one vote in America: The votes of largely rural states like the Dakotas, Montana, Arizona count way more than the votes of inner city folk in New York City or Baltimore.
So the will of "the people" will not get us our next President. A thumb on the scales, obsolescent, special interest anti-democratic scheme will make Trump, once again, a minority President, just as it did the last time he got "elected." Hitler never got a majority of votes. But he got enough.
It's only four years.
But it will be an aggravating, stupid, mean spirited, nasty four years.
And for those of us who may have, at best 10 years left, it's a crummy swing of the pendulum.
We have always been the home of the free, land of the brave, but we have also been the land of lynchings, and eradication of the buffalo and subjugation of the Indians and our boys died fighting Hitler's hordes, in racially segregated army units, and we massacred Vietnamese in their villages rather than allow them to become communists (destroying villages to save them) and we shot down students at Kent State with the townsfolk saying they had it coming to them, just after a summer of peace and love event at Woodstock, and we loved our gangsters like Al Capone, and Bonnie and Clyde, and we have had our assassins who got Lincoln and Martin Luther King, but we elected Obama twice and we have been all those things.
So now we'll have Donald Trump. Again.
This America, man.
As a medical student, I was confronted with patients who had a form of dementia which deceived the unsuspecting--you could ask a man what he ate for breakfast this morning, and he would confidently tell you, "Ham and eggs, two slices of toast with blueberry marmalade, orange juice and coffee, black, two sugars."
Meanwhile, his daughter, standing behind him with her arms crossed, was rolling her eyes, shaking her head and she would pull you aside and say, "He had oatmeal. Nothing else."
That was called, "confabulation." People who cannot recall, who have big lacunae (holes) in their memory and brain will often just run out a convincing sounding string of details which have nothing to do with real memory, or with reality at all.
There are a variety of ways dementia may reveal itself, but details, the inability to recall details, connects many of them. Dementia may hide behind cliche` and common expressions, "Well, he's someone you can trust. He's a man of principle."
This morning, making our rounds in Hampton, N.H., my stalwart partner, Ms. McM, and I walked up a driveway looking for a Marie O'B, who was on our computer list as a Democrat who had voted in the last primary, and who we were trying to remind to vote in the election less than 3 weeks from now. There was a sign for a Democratic candidate on the front lawn, so we thought we were at the right address, but in the window above the garage door was a large Trump sign.
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| Obadiah Youngblood |
Standing over a lawn mower below the sign, in his driveway, a white bearded man wearing a beat up black leather cowboy hat and overalls looked up from abusing the starter cord of his machine, and watched us approach, fingering the starter cord as if he wished it was a trigger on a shotgun. He did not know who we were, or what we wanted. Ms. McM was wearing a KAMALA 2024 baseball hat. It was not clear if he noticed the hat, or if he would be able to read it, if he had.
"We're looking for Marie," Ms. McM told him.
"Yeah, well, she's in the house," he said, eyeing us warily.
"I'm confused," I told the man, trying to sound friendly. "You've got a Democratic lawn sign, Mike Edgar for state legislature, but you've got a Trump sign, too."
"Oh, well, that's Mike," he said. "Mike and me go way back. His wife did my physical therapy, back in the day."
"So, we can't count on you to vote for any other Democrat?"
"Naw. I'm for Trump. All the rest is liars and lies."
"So, when Trump was President, did you like what he did?"
"Yeah."
"What, in particular, did you like?"
"Oh, well, just all of it. He was just so much better. No bullshit. Just did what he said he'd do. I didn't like the other guys, going way back, even before that. You know them. Just liars."
"But Trump did what you wanted?"
"Yeah."
"Which was what?"
"All of it."
We walked over to the front door, leaving the old man who knew his own mind, but who could not actually come up with any details, to work on his lawnmower.
"Oh, that's my father," Marie told us. "An obstreperous bastard."
We asked her what the issues she cared most about might be. "Childcare," she said. "And getting Trump out."
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| Hampton Academy |
She is a pretty woman, still in full bloom, dark hair, peachy skin and dark lashes, and she told us she had gone to Hampton schools, from pre school through high school, now a single mother with two kids below school age, and she had to live with her father because there is no affordable housing in town and she said she makes a solid six figure salary. But daycare alone makes owning a home unfeasible. Her parents do not want to do day care for little kids. She has a daughter and she is incensed Trump has made abortion illegal. "He's taken away freedom."
My partner said, "You ought to come to our Democratic Party Committee meetings, first Tuesday of every month, 6 PM. Lot of kindred spirits there for you."
"Oh, well, if you could make it kid friendly, I'd come. But no way I can do anything after work, except tend to the kids."
We walked off down her driveway. Her father was now limping along behind his lawnmower, carving wobbly lines in the lawn, still trying, no doubt, to remember exactly what it was President Trump had done for him.
The New Yorker put Alexis Navalny's image on its cover this week and I thought: Donald Trump is about to take over the government in three weeks--there's an election going on: Why would you be thinking about a Russian dissident, even if he was murdered by Vladimir Putin?
This man who died 8 months ago, in Russia. He's not of the current moment.
Right now, we've got our own problems, right here in the U.S. of A.
I resisted reading it.
But after I got done with Adam Gopnik's typically trenchant analysis of the Trump problem--"No matter how deranged his behavior is, though, it does not seem to alter his good fortune."--I slid by the article on whether birds can talk to each other, and another on Kamala Harris's chances, and there was "Prison Diaries," and I said, "Okay, I'll read just the first entry, and then move on to the Cartoon Caption Contest."
But, after the first entry, I was hooked.
Nalvany's voice, even in English, is clear and beguiling--it's like reading Dostoevsky as read by Andrei Codrescu, droll, chatty, absurdist, intoxicating.
"The first is frequently to be found in self-help books: Imagine the worst thing that can happen, and accept it. This works, even if it's a masochistic exercise. I can imagine that it's not suitable for people suffering from clinical depression. They might do it so successfully that they end up hanging themselves."
Nalvany is in prison, and not one of those white collar prisons for rich aristocrats who fudged their book keeping and wound up scamming banks for a few tens of millions of dollars, a Russian prison where you sit on a wood bench under a portrait of Putin for hours so you can engage in "disciplinary activity."
But he is not one to feel sorry for himself. He says he made his choices and accepts the consequences, unlike the Ukrainian parents who were "Just living their lives. They had jobs. They were family breadwinners. Then, one fine evening, a vengeful runt on television, the President of a neighboring country, announces that you are all 'Nazis' and have to die because Ukraine was invented by Lenin." So, "Right now, dead civilians are lying in the streets in Mariupol, their bodies gnawed at by dogs."
As he sits in prison, more and more charges are brought against him, as the opaque Russian state moves against him, which is to say, Putin moves against him.
"Some people collect stamps. Some collect coins. And I have a growing collection of amazing court trials."
Finally, Navalny realizes how much Putin and his cadre really fear him: they move him to a gulag in the far north, the Artic Circle. It's not enough to have him deep inside a stone prison 300 miles from Moscow; he has to be really far away for Putin to feel safe, where the temperatures outside are -26 degrees F.
"Today I went for a walk, got frozen and thought of Leonardo DiCaprio and his character's dead horse trick in 'The Revenant.' I don't think it would work here. A dead horse would freeze in about fifteen minutes."
I have never seen that movie, but I am sure I know exactly what that trick was.
"Here you need an elephant. A hot or even a roasted elephant. If you cut open the belly of a freshly roasted elephant and crawl inside, you can keep warm for a while. But where am I going to get a hot roasted elephant in Yamal?"
Navalny died almost exactly 3 years after he returned to Russia and was arrested as soon as he landed.
His fate was sealed the moment he stepped off that plane.
Vladimir Putin was never going to allow him to live, much less to speak to the Russian people.
One wonders why Putin bothered to prolong the agony, but as you read Navalny, you understand. Drawing out the process plays into the narrative.
Putin is not a ruthless king, nor a Stalin who simply shoots people in the head. In Putin's Russia, they pretend there are laws and processes and they even have lawyers. But all that is just for show.
I know what you are going to say--how different are we here in the USA? After all, Jeffrey Epstein died in prison and nobody asked any questions. Donald Trump was President.
Someone asked Donald Trump about what he was willing to do as President: Was he willing to order to have people killed? "Oh?" Trump said, "You don't think American Presidents kill people?"
Of course, President Obama had ordered the killing of Osama Bin Laden and celebratory crowds gathered outside the White House to congratulate him.
Donald Trump does not ask about the law. He asks about the judge.
Putin, of course, is the law. But Trump can, in fact, exert his will through others now. He has a Supreme Court which no longer even pretends to care about the law, about precedent, which has made separation of church and state unconstitutional, which declared billions spent to support candidates as simply free speech, which embraces the idea we have the best government money can buy, which, in his second term, has said it will reverse gay marriage and is open to considering allowing state laws to forbid inter racial marriage. (The last oddity is especially odd since it was floated by a Black justice who is married to a White woman who seemed to embrace this idea; odd, of course, unless he is looking for a way out of his marriage short of divorce. Having your marriage set aside without the cost of divorce lawyers may have some appeal. Or maybe this was simply a sly appeal to Black men who Trump has been courting.)
When Hitler invaded Poland, he claimed he was defending Germans living within its borders, and the same for Czechoslovakia. Autocrats are always rescuing some down trodden group, sometimes on horseback, riding shirtless. Putin is rescuing Ukraine from Nazis, although nobody has yet claimed he has crossed the border on horseback, shirtless. Trump is the father of in vitro fertilization and the protector of women. And like most strong man wannabes, he is, well, strong, or at least he talks as if he were strong, and, well, a man.
But there will always be Trumps, Putin's, Hitler's, Orban's, Mussolini's, and, for that matter, Jim Jones's around.
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| Tough Guy |
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| Not Such a Tough Guy: Sic Semper Tyranis |
The only real question is whether there are enough true believers to drink their Kool Aide.
At what point then is the approach of danger to be expected? I answer, if it ever reach us, it must spring up amongst us. It cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide.
--Abraham Lincoln
Ne timeas populares auditum; timent rugitum!
--Fear not the demagogue; fear his roaring crowd
Trump is a distinctively vile human being and a spectacularly malignant political actor...[He] nonetheless [has] considerable charm and the ability to attract a cult following...To grasp his charisma, historicize his ascent, sympathize with his admirers--the sinister truth asserts itself...One outrage succeeds another until we become exhausted and have to work hard to even remember the outrages of a few weeks past...No matter how deranged his behavior is, though, it does not seem to alter his good fortune...Our self-soothing habit of imagining that what has not yet happened cannot happen is the space in which Trump lives."
--Adam Gopnik, The New Yorker Oct. 21,2024
We are slouching toward Bethlehem now, the election just a few weeks away. Things fall apart; the center cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, as William Butler Yeats observed.
We will find out if there are more of them or more of us.
They, of course, do not care about that question; they are determined to prevail whether they are the majority or not because, as Mr. Trump has asserted, in his world losing the election is simply not possible, no matter how the votes are counted. He has already declared himself the winner no matter what anyone or what millions may say. He cannot possibly lose because he writes his own reality and his masses have drunk that Kool Aide.
In my office, day after day, I daily interview the vampires, the body/mind snatched, who are indistinguishable from normal, ordinary citizens. It's not the MAGA hatted man who chills your soul; it's the guy who looks normal, until he opens his mouth and answers your question about the most important issue to him with, "Oh, the border."
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| Stockholm Syndrome |
And this guy lives in New Hampshire! So what border is he worried about? There's the border to the north, only about 3 hours drive, and then there's that border down in Texas, 2400 miles and 36 hours drive away.
There's the woman who may laugh about Haitians eating cats in Ohio--but that was just a joke. We take him seriously, not literally.
As the bard has noted, the executioner's face is always well hidden.
There are many possible scenarios which may play out on or about November 5th.
Several of them would put Donald Trump back in the White House.
Fewer would put Kamala Harris there.
Gods Taking Sides
There have been times in history when concerted dark forces amalgamated to sweep everything before them. Once, Germany chose to follow a man who found a simple solution to the bewildering array of problems with unemployment, currency collapse, hyperinflation by discovering the Jews were behind it all, along with the Communists, who were mostly Jewish anyway, and he was able to ally himself with Italy to protect his Southern front, a pastiche of neighbors--parts of Czechoslovakia, and Romania and Hungary and if he had only been able to seduce more Americans, his plan would never have failed.
To be sure, there were many reasons to believe the Americans would favor Germany over Britain and its allies: Americans were every bit as racist as Germany--they just chose a different group to vilify. But Henry Ford, Father Coughlin and a host of others including the American Bund, who held huge rallies at Madison Square Garden were all Hitler fans.
As it turned out, though, more Americans drifted toward democracy than dictatorship/monarchy and ultimately the forces of darkness succumbed to the forces of light and progress, which is to say, science and the all men are created equal thing.
Now, we have the guy who cunningly chose a less definable scapegoat, a "they" who he sees sweeping across our Southern border from "shithole countries," rapists, insane asylum escapees, drug cartel gang members, Haitians who will eat your pet, dark skinned men who want to rape your wife and daughter, if your wife and daughter are White.
And his party is also against people who insist on telling you their pronouns, who want to not just choose a different sex for themselves, but who want to seize your children at school and change their sex, or make them gay--you decide which is worse--and they control the weather, and start fires with space lasers, and none of that seems at all outlandish, because, you know, you heard it on TV.
And so, if there are more people who want to believe all that than there are who do not want to go back to the days when women could not have credit cards unless their husbands allowed it, to the days when restaurants, hotels and swimming pools were racially segregated, to the good ol' days, when anti lynching laws could not be passed in Congress, well then, we'll go where the American people, in their wisdom want to go.
Oh, We'll Be Back
