What Bill Burr Knows the Democrats Don't

 

"You only see the President twice a week. I don't understand why everybody's so upset. Like: What's going to happen? If you liked Obama: Did he call you in the last eight years?"

--Bill Burr, On Donald Trump's election in 2016

George Carlin famously advised people to not vote. It doesn't make any difference. He shared Burr's belief that you have only a meaningless choice between greedy old men. 

I think Carlin and Burr, two of my favorite public intellectuals, are wrong on this point, but there is wisdom in this argument. Most people--not all by any means, but a preponderance--do not care about anything that does not affect them personally. Freedom of speech? Hey, if I can say what I want in the bar to my buddies, I'm fine. I don't care if I can't go on CBS and crack wise about Donald Trump.

Winslow Homer, Herring Net

Turning away from coal and oil to wind and solar power? Hey, as long as my home tank gets filled and it's affordable, I'm fine. Climate change? Maybe, maybe not, but what're you gonna do about it? Like the man says, "Everybody talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it."

Burr's appeal is Archie Bunker's appeal. You laugh, even if you're thinking, on some level, "Well, hey, that's not right."

But enough of what he says is right, you get carried along:

1. "The speaker on Oprah says being a mom is the most difficult job on the planet. I question whether that's true, comparing it to dangerous professions like Ice Road Trucking, where people died. Jobs like catching lobster traps seem harder than looking after children, who can be put to bed at any time. Any job done in pajamas is not difficult."

Imagine guys sitting in a bar in Boston, or Damariscotta, Maine, who go out on lobster boats, or fishing boats hearing somebody say being a mom is the most difficult job on the planet. Of course, motherhood is ladened with difficulty, but comparing being a trad wife to being a lobsterman, a fisherman, an astronaut, a surgeon, an electric high wire power man, an airplane pilot--well, we know there's a wink in the eye--and the point is, people don't realize how hard being a mother is and so this is hyperbole--but when you are talking about what people do for a living, and guys who really work hard hear that someone else is working harder, at home, driving to the grocery store, and doing all the things mothers have to do, it establishes in their minds that the speaker does not appreciate how hard their own lives are.

2. "I got a dog recently. I went down to the pound and got one of those free dogs. Yeah, that's how I say it. I don't say I rescued a dog. I hate when people say that. It's a complete exaggeration. Did you pull her out of a burning building? Did you jump in a river with your clothes still on?"

What he is getting at is that beyond annoying tendency of people who live soft lives trying to dramatize and make heroic what is not, which really makes people who really do dangerous or demanding work snort and snarl. A fireman rescues people. Surgeons rescue people. Sometimes even police rescue people. And they all do that at risk to themselves, under pressure and they sometimes fail, but when they succeed they know the true satisfaction of putting yourself on the line for someone else. 

Obadiah Youngblood

3. "The way I was brought up is like, you can make it to heaven, but some of your family members possibly couldn't, or some of your friends. Doesn't make sense. Like, how am I supposed to enjoy heaven if that's the deal? Just sitting here waiting for my friends to show up: 'Jesus Christ, where the hell are they? It's been 150 years!...Then one day, it settles in that they didn't make it. Then what? Jesus comes walking over: 'Hey, how is it going? Isn't this great' 'Yeah, dude, it'd be even better if all my family and friends weren't burning for fucking ever. Kind of hard to enjoy heaven when you just keep thinking of that there.'"

For some reason, as soon as Burr said this, an image of Stacey Affleck in "Manchester by the Sea," flashed through my mind. Not because that movie is the saddest, truest, most wrenching movie I've ever seen--which it is--but because you see in that movie, almost as a parenthesis, the centrality of friends and family to the workaday stiffs who populate this film are. They don't have college friends, or tennis friends, or friends from the kids' PTA. They have guys they grew up playing baseball on sandlots (or nowadays in little league), playing hockey on the pond with, who have lived in the same town their whole lives.

One summer, an electrician who came by to fix the refrigerator in the house we had rented on Kezar Lake, Maine, noticed the baseball gloves belonging to me and my kids and he asked if I played and when I said yes, he invited me to a game that afternoon at a nearby field. It didn't take long for me to realize everyone on that diamond had played in these games for their entire lives. They laughed at all the jokes two sentences before the punch lines, because they knew them all. These were thirty, forty something men who had grown up together and none of them had ever moved away. 

It made me think of what that must mean--to be frozen in time and place like that.

Where I grew up, everyone knew that at age 18 we were all gone--every one of my friends would leave our suburban town outside Washington, D.C. and likely we'd never move back. We'd go to college--the most prestigious, expensive colleges we could manage--pursue careers in glamor cities and likely, we'd never move back, unless we got elected to Congress. Some kids knew each other from age zero to 18, but most of us had moved in and out of WDC as our fathers got different jobs which brought them to and fro. My best friends, I had known from age 9 to 18, which is a significant part of life, but I did not expect to know them my entire life. 

For these guys, their friends were part of their souls. They knew each other, suffered slings and arrows together. The longest they spent away from town was maybe two years in the military, and most of them had not done that. 

They would have seen small town friendships depicted in "The Deer Hunter" and understood exactly why Robert DeNiro had to return to Viet Nam and rescue Christopher Walken, because that's what lifelong friends do.

So, how does a national politician, even one as real and tested as Obama appeal to these guys? 

They see politicians as rich greedy guys, a class apart, people driven by ambition not friendship, loyalty or love.

Wyeth

4. "You know what I'm afraid of? Robots. I saw one get interviewed on 60 Minutes and he's sitting there, not nervous at all, just rattling off all the fucking answers. Not smoking, not leaking oil or whatever you would do as a nervous robot. And the reporter's asking him questions. In the end, he goes, 'So, tell us, what are your goals?' I'm alone in a hotel room, and I literally lean toward the TV. I'm like, "Do these fucking things have goals?' But the reporter just blows by it. He's like, 'Okay, and what's your favorite color?' Meanwhile, I'm standing on my bed, yelling at the TV, like, 'Dude, unplug that fucking thing! Take the batteries out! How many sci-fi movies do you have to see before you realize where this is going?"

So, the brilliance here is that he's talking about what constitutes sentient life. This is what David Brooks and all the public intellectuals will spend hours discussing in The New Yorker, the Atlantic and on PBS. But for Burr, all you need to do is watch "Battle Star Galactica" and you know all you need to know about cyborgs and machines achieving sentience. This is what the guys at the diner or in the bar talk about. 

And they don't need no friggin' college boys to tell them about it. 

They are right out of "Good Will Hunting," and they know it.

The problem is, the folks at the Democratic National Committee and the New Hampshire state Democratic Party do not.

Fight Night At 1600 Pennsylvania Ave: This America, Man!

 

 “I just can’t believe that we’re at the White House, watching U.F.C. fights. Dude, I’m so filled with, like, testosterone, I want to kick someone in the chest, it’s crazy.”

--Daniel Cormier, UFC commentator, former champion

NB: The White Guy is pounding the Black Guy

Mad Dog has to admit, he has not (yet) seen the entire event on Youtube, but from the scraps he has savored from the New York Times and elsewhere, he just knows he'll love Fight Night at the White House.

This is just what Trump is all about: You've got your Kennedy Center and elitist high culture and I've got the hearts of White Trash (see Nancy Isenberg) and I'm going to rub your face in it.

This America, man.

Really, it is. It is berserk, bloody, testosterone gone wild America.

Inside the White House, we got gold drapes, gold everywhere. 

Outside, we got Mad Dogs fighting.

You may prefer Baryshnikov, or Rachmaninoff or even Leonard Bernstein, but none of that candy ass stuff makes the cut with Mr. Trump. He knows what gets a rise out of his core, his base.

Nobody's putting on airs hereabouts.

We ARE the nitty gritty.

God Bless America.

Girls were girls and men were men.
Mister, we could use a man like Herbert Hoover again.
People seemed to be content.
Fifty dollars paid the rent.
Freaks were in a circus tent.
Those were the days
Take a little Sunday spin,
Go to watch the Dodgers win.
Have yourself a dandy day
That cost you under a fin.
Hair was short and skirts were long.
Kate Smith really sold a song.
I don't know just what went wrong
Those Were the Days

--"Those Were the Days"  sung by Archie and Edith Bunker, Queens, NY

Freaks Were in the Circus Tent

 

Everybody seemed content

Fifty bucks paid the rent

Freaks were in the circus tent

Those were the days!

--Archie Bunker, "Those Were the Days"

One of the lawn signs that appeared around Hampton during the last Presidential elections was "No More Creepy Weirdos" and it got quickly disappeared from roadways and even private property, presumably because it hit a nerve.

The fact is, the Trump mob really does look and act like something out of a Batman comic book, from the supremely smarmy Scott Bessent, whose smile remains pasted on even under withering ridicule from Democrats during Congressional hearings--having been asked how he justifies Trump gambit making billions by buying low after he announces another bombing to continue the Iran war only to sell high when he announces another ceasefire--"Well, before you ask that, you should get your own house in order," Bessent ripostes , and then sits up arching his back as if he's just won the National Spelling Bee.

There's something so utterly creepy about a man who listens to someone call him an unscrupulous liar and scoundrel and all the while maintains a totally incongruent smile, just like those Southern women with their ladled on pancake makeup, who listen to someone vilify them, but they remain smiling beatifically and respond, "Why, Bless your heart! I can see I'm going to have to educate you about this."

And there's J.D. Vance, the now bearded boy who made his mark by writing "Hillbilly Elegy" about his Appalachian upbringing, from which the only escape was joining the U.S. Marines (as in Dylan's famous line, "Join the Army If you Fail") and this is the same man who savages others for relying on the government and joining the ranks of the terminally lazy dependent on the government dole--as if the Marines have nothing to do with the government.

Vance tells a story about returning on leave from the Marines with his pay in his pocket and he was able to take the family out to Chili's for lunch and the sense of pride and accomplishment he felt for the first time, as his broken "family" had never been able to collect enough cash for something like that. It's a truly affecting scene, one infused with humanity and pathos--but a few chapters later, there's Vance denouncing all things government as unvarnished evil, never acknowledging that his own success depended on a government program--the Marines.

For so many Trumpies, this is the case. After all, they "earned" their way by serving in the army. They enlisted out of economic desperation, and they got paid for their efforts, but now they are heroes for having climbed out of poverty by being noble warriors, mercenaries really, just as so many armies over history have been filled with economic failures who, when armed, served the purposes of the rich.

But the most creepy moment of all for Mr. Vance occurred when he looked into the camera and told us he knew, for sure, based on creditable sources that Haitian immigrants in Ohio were eating their neighbors' cats and dogs --and, who knows?, maybe their hamsters and rabbits-- and that's no lie because we know that darkies did that back in Mr. Vance's hardscrabble boyhood neighborhoods! 

Then there is the endless parade of Trumpish  women wearing crosses: Pam Bondi, Kristi Noem, Telsi Gabbard, Karoline Leavitt, Laura Loomer, each more bizarre than the next.

Among the males, Trump's new Jeffrey is Elon Musk, who is ripped right from the pages of Marvel comics, with his Dr. Strangelove accent, his Nazi salute and his apartheid South African origins and, really, look at that face! Right from Central Super Villains casting! And  now his ultimate scam of becoming a new master of the universe by selling the New York Stock Exchange on the ultimate scam: We Will Colonize Mars! We are the Masters of the Universe!

And, in this America, where government is the problem, and private enterprise the King and free markets must reign, the maker of Tesla is protected from the BYD Chinese electric cars, who everyone from Canada to Mexico is buying because they cost only $10,000 and they are way better cars than Tesla or any American EV. Oh, those tariffs surely do ensure a free market economy! Amen.

But nobody can quite match the sheer super villain appeal of Bobby Kennedy, Jr. his own self, with that voice, (yes, Mad Dog knows it's impolite to point to a physical deformity and try to voice shame, but really, how can you not?) and his tic of dropping to the floor to do push ups, and his endless quoting of "medical literature," which shows that more people were killed and injured by the polio vaccine than were ever helped by it. And don't get him started on measles. Well, he will get us started back on the path to measles, which will make our country stronger by killing all those too weak to survive it. 

The MAGA mob has taken Hitler's admonishment from "Mein Kampf" to tell the Big Lie and eschew the small lies, because people will believe the Big Lie but question the small ones. So, we look at the things which society acting as a community has done to improve life for everyone--public health, infrastructure, the internet, reversing air pollution and water contamination--and we say, NO! Those things are actually horrible depredations of our white Christian nation. Bad vaccines! Bad clean air! (Good clean coal). Bad clean water! Good crypto currency! Bad national healthcare! Good Middle East wars.

Whew!

Joe Rogan, who Mad Dog has never actually tuned into, apparently is now in charge of truth.  

Fortunately, there is also Youtube, which has Ricard Feymann and Neil Degrasse Tyson to fact check: There are no aliens flying around Earth because of, well, the speed of light and distances, and we will never be able to colonize even Mars, despite the movie, which Mad Dog loved, because  Matt Damon is fun when he grows potatoes in his own poop, but, actually, Mars is  just too far. We did manage to build a transcontinental railroad, and lots of Robber Barons got rich in the process, but at least that did do what it was designed to do and, Indians, mountains and tornadoes notwithstanding, it succeeded.

And those images of the Cabinet meetings, with the line up of Marvel Comic cabinet officers all expostulating in turn how wonderful things are now under the benign dictatorship of President Trump! The first time Mad Dog tuned into those, he thought it was the cold open of Saturday Night Live, but then he realized: THESE ARE ACTUAL REAL PEOPLE!

Now, tell me: "Where Is Her Gold Cross?"

Even Trump is real. He doesn't look it. He looks like a comic book character: with the hair, such as it is hair, the painted skin, the bright ties, the stained hands, the billowing feet. 

These guys are about as real as the memories of which Archie sings.

The Complicity of Susan Collins

 I'm the last person to ask for advice about people. Especially women...If she was here I'd probably be just as crazy now as I was then in about 5 minutes. Ain't that ridiculous?... Naw, it ain't really. 'Cause being crazy about a woman like her is always the right thing to do. Being an old decrepit bag of bones, that's what's ridiculous. 

--Sam the Lion, "The Last Picture Show."

Imagine this life changing event: After years of rejection and being ignored, your book has finally been accepted for publication by a storied New York publisher and you are invited to the American Booksellers Convention at the Convention Center in Washington, D.C.

You have written about the most important subject of your life, but 19 publishers returned the manuscript, either unopened or with a letter, "Thank you for your submission, but we find your book does not meet the needs for our current list."  One woman, an editor fresh out of Princeton, liked it, but passed on it. At least she wrote an actual rejection note.

Then, just after you hauled 19 manuscripts (400 pages each) out to the dumpster, you realize you cannot account for the 20th, and you check your list and you realize it was that one you dropped off with some ninety-nine year old woman at the Beacon Street, Boston office of a New York publisher, and you are not sure he ever even got it. That secretary may have died before he got back from lunch. So you phone his office, and he answers--the secretary  probably did die--and he says, "Oh, right. Well, don't get your hopes up, but I gave it to my editor and he said he thought it had some merit, and I'll send along his comments."

The "editor," it turns out, is a twenty-something college drop out named Brendan, who works in a Cambridge bookstore and lives in his parents' basement in Charlestown, but whenever this publisher stops by the bookstore, he chats about books with this guy, and the publisher is impressed by his insights into literature. In fact, this publisher had published Katherine Anne Porter, and he was astonished that this twenty-something even knew who she was, never mind  that Brendan could say exactly why "Ship of Fools" and "Old Mortality" were such fine works of art. 

So, the publisher started dropping off manuscripts with Brendan, and Brendan didn't find much in any of them, until he read your book. "Needs some cropping and direction, but some scenes of considerable power and some very good sentences."

And the rest is, as they say, unlikely history. The book is sold to the Literary Guild as its main selection for the month of March. Rejected by 19 publishers and at least one Ivy League editor, seen by a blue collar reader in a Boston bookstore. 

 And you get invited to a few star studded parties in New York City, where you meet famous people, who turn out to be disappointing, and less than meets the eye.

And, finally, the book is officially published and presented to the world at the American Booksellers' Convention in the nation's capital.

And you arrive, and here is the part I've been leading up to: you find the Convention Center, which is a city block large, and you take the elevator up to the exhibition hall, and you get off and look around and there is a sea of stalls, filled with books, which makes the Library of Congress look like your corner Mom and Pop bookstore: Fifty thousand titles that year. (In 2026, it would be 650,000, and that does not include the large self publishing list.)

And you look around, and you can only by asking at various information booths, find your publisher's kiosk area, and there, nestled among scores of celebrity author books, books by authors with audiences, books by authors who write novels about jockeys and some who write about suburban infidelity or sexual repression, books about cats and self help books, is a copy of your book.

And so you have been published.

And you think about the visits you made with various literary agents because someone told you you needed an agent, but you couldn't understand why, since you had already sold your book to the publisher, but the agents smile demurely and say, "Well, but you need someone to champion your cause."  

But now you think: Yikes! 

How does anyone ever get heard in this ocean of voice?

So that's what this post is about: Who gets to offer advice? How are they chosen from among that vast ocean roar of voices and sounds? Who gets the microphone? And why. And How? 

Somehow, some people do get heard; they do occupy the spot light and some get into that spot light regularly. And people listen to them, for advice.

Garry Trudeau's latest Doonesbury has the president of Walden University saying to the graduates at the commencement ceremony, "Graduates, I'm sorry to report we were unable to find a speaker for today. With AI transforming every aspect of life at warp speed, it seems non one felt up to offering advice to this year's class. So, instead, I'd like each of you to take out your phones and spend a few moments consuming wisdom from your preferred online influencer."

And so, there we are.

Advice.

Opinion.

Which brings me to David Brooks. 

David Brooks commands big bucks from speakers bureaus. He lectures a Yale, at the University of Chicago. He gives commencement speeches. He has stopped writing his newspaper columns, but he continues to appear each week on the PBS Newshour in a segment with Jonathan Capehart, called "Brooks and Capehart."

Last Friday, he was asked his opinion of the Democratic candidate for U.S. Senate in Maine, Graham Platner, and Brooks, with admirable concision, said, "He's a moral degenerate." Brooks went on to say why: Platner has a tattoo which may be a Nazi meme; he has abused  and intimidated women and he has written nasty Reddit posts in the past. 

There are 330 million Americans and 100 U.S. Senators, Brooks notes, and we can't do better than Platner? Never mind the fact there are only 1.4 million Mainers, less than 100,000 voters actually vote, a quarter of those are over 65, so, not to quibble, but the willing and able to become the next U.S. Senator do not number in the millions.

But, really, what was Brooks saying? 

He does not like Platner because Platner does such declasse` things as getting a tattoo, getting drunk, sex-texting women. Which is to say, Platner acts like a blue collar, pick-up truck driving bar hound. 

But maybe we need somebody to represent the whoring, hard drinking men of the world. 

In "Charlie Wison's War" Tom Hanks, as Charlie Wilson, is astonished to learn that a puritanical, Bible thumping committee chairman has appointed him to the committee Charlie thought he had no shot at. "I'm a booze hound and a  womanizer," Charlie reflects, "Maybe he thought guys like me needed more representation."

If David Brooks had been that committee chairman Charlie would have had no shot at membership.

Brooks is very insistent about how much he tries to be out on the hustings, listening to ordinary people. He, of course, is not himself "ordinary." He is rich, for one thing. And he makes his living by talking and writing and he would doubtless say, by "thinking." He's a thinker.

But maybe Brooks ought to consider thinking about this:

Who is the moral degenerate: A man who is unfaithful to his wife or a woman who is unfaithful to her country?

While she smiles beatifically, and wears her Ann Taylor suits, Susan Collins has voted to confirm 95% of Trump's judges, who have in turn given Trump a get out of jail free card; she voted for "border protection" to launch ICE agents attacks on American (Democratic) cities and the concentration camps they call "detention centers;" She supported firing FBI director James Comey and installing Cash Patel in his place; she could not bring herself to condemn the shootings of Renee Good or Alex Pretti, saying only that she hoped ICE would improve its training and use of body cameras. She voted against the Trump impeachments. 

Silence Implies Consent 

And while she says she hopes democratic Ukraine can prevail against autocratic Russian rape, the most she can manage to say about Trump's attempt to humiliate and repudiate Ukraine's democratically elected President Zelensky is that the White House scene where President Trump lectured Zelensky about not holding any cards, where VP Vance scolded Zelensky for not being sufficiently grateful for American support and where the boyfriend of MGT shouted out a question about why Zelensky was not wearing a suitably respectful suit--in the face of all of that her best response was that it was "unfortunate."

Which is like the mother of a school shooter saying she wished her son had been better behaved.

If Graham Platner is guilty of having dirty hands, then we have to admit the choice is now between a low grade misogynist, a randy bro, and a sweet looking grandmother with blood on her hands.

Susan Collins is the moral equivalent of the wife and mother of those Mississippi good ol' boys who murdered the freedom riders and ensconced them under a bridge, the loyal wife and mother who remained silent and complicit and smiled sweetly for the cameras. 

The Purity Test

 

"The Characteristics that ruin a man in one class make him eminent in another."

--George Bernard Shaw

For MAGAs, i.e. for Republicans, the only requirement is you love Donald Trump, or at least obey him and nod yes to every wackadoodle action he takes.

She Gives Him What He Wants

For Democrats, it's not enough to be for vaccines, to believe people of all races enrich our nation, to think that before making war on a culture we do not understand, in a part of the world we have never comprehended is stupid, to believe we can afford a well designed national healthcare system and to agree if that health care system extends to caring for people who don't look like us or sound like us that's okay, to believe that the government ought to stay out of the bedroom, that contraception is just fine and to believe that abortion, while regrettable should not be denied--all of that is not enough.

Didn't Go to Yale

For Democrats, a man who leers at women at a bar, a man who gets drunk and disorderly who bullies or brags is disqualified from holding public office. For Democrats, every candidate must be virtuous, having learned morals at the feet of approved philosophers. He must choose his pronouns carefully.

To question whether people who went through puberty as boys ought to be able to play on a field hockey team against girls who went through puberty as girls, or to be able to swim on women's swimming team--that is a litmus test for the truly deserving, the sincerely moral. 

Only paragons of virtue need apply.

What the scandalized, sanctimonious cannot abide is the Jimmy McNulty's of the world. (Mad Dog understands that most people have not watched "The Wire," and so they do not get that allusion,) but what the reaction to Graham Platner's rough edges is all about is not morals, nor character but it is all about class.

David Brooks looks at Platner and sees a tattoo, a brute, a guy who drinks at the bar, not in a corner booth.

Not Reality

So David Brooks calls Platner a "moral degenerate." 

But, fact is, there is are vast herds of Platners out there who look at Brooks and see an example of a  privileged snotty class of would be aristocrats. The lobstermen, truck drivers, HVAC guys will never vote Democratic because they know their class is no longer welcomed in the Democratic Party. They know they are seen as moral degenerates.

And the women, oh, the women! Who could vote for a man who would twist the wrist of a woman, or who would get so angry he would lock her in a room until they both calm down? So much better to vote for a Woman who looks so sweet in her Ann Taylor suits, who wears lapel pins with the American flag (and sometimes with an added Ukrainian flag)  while she quietly votes for a man who betrays an actual hero in his fight against a real autocrat trying to rape Ukraine.

Collins Betrays Her

  Remember, it was the women who were so taken with Der Furher, who voted for him.

Better to have that nice grandmother voting to install Robert F. Kennedy Jr into office so he can cancel vaccines and unleash epidemics, better to choose a woman who votes for Kristie Noem and her storm trooper brigades and better to vote for a woman who reacts to the murders of Alex Pretti and Renee Good by suggesting perhaps next time we can ask ICE agents to wear body cameras. Or perhaps counseling and better training for the goons.

So Sweet

The fact is, the choice is not between voting for a nice old lady and a moral degenerate, who, out of a population of 1.4 million Mainers is the best the Democratic Party can offer. We are not being asked to scold the Democratic Party for its temerity in running a tattooed soldier who snarls at his lovers. Our choice is between a guy with dirty hands and a woman who has blood on her hands.

This is the woman who would wash and iron her husband's Ku Klu Klan robe and hang it in the closet for him and then hold a tea for the wives and daughters of their murderous husbands and fathers.

Susan Collins' middle name is, officially, Margaret.

Susan Collins's middle name in truth is "Complicity."