Hillary Clinton Playing It As it Lays

Ms. Didion

"What makes Iago evil? Some people ask...You might ask that. I never would, not any more."
--Joan Didion, "Play It As It Lays." 

"The Countess Margit Batthyany, nee Thyssen-Bornemisza, threw a lavish black tie good-bye party fo the SS officers in residence at her castle near the Hungarian border, where she had been reportedly cuckholding her husband with a Gestapo officer. At some point during the evening, the SS men reportedly marched out some Jewish slave laborers. They invited guests to shoot them for a while, then returned to the dance." 
--Ann Marie O'Connor, "The Lady in Gold"

"You could put half of Trump's supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right? The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic--you name it. And unfortunately, there are people like that. And he has lifted them up...He tweets and retweets their offensive, hateful, mean-spirited rhetoric."
--Hillary Clinton



Evil may be an out dated word, but it does have the virtue of clarity. 
But what is evil? If evil has clarity, we should be able to define it pretty easily.

Of course, evil  is in the eye of the beholder.  For Countess Batthyany, those Jews who were shot for sport at her dinner party must have been evil. Shooting them for sport was like shooting rats. Or like shooting that deer like thing at her feet.  Although, one might ask, how much fun is shooting rats or deer in black tie?  (The fact is, having seen rats on city streets, they are not my favorite mammals, but shooting them would not fill me with joy.)
Evil is what we find repellent, although the beggar covered with sores, reaching up pathetically from the street is repellent, he is not evil. You need more than that.

Evil demands a quality of lack of sympathy, often it is wrapped up in aggressiveness, and relishing the misfortune of others. As they say in "Avenue Q" when explaining the word "Schadenfreude" --happiness at the misfortune of others, "Oh, that IS German." 

The Countess with her Trophy

But simply taking pleasure in seeing the demise of someone we do not like is not necessarily evil. If Donald Trump were to lose this election, and all his backers gather in a room to weep and wail, relishing that moment (looking, now increasingly unlikely) would not be evil, but a sign of relief and joy at the ascendancy of virtue.

Hey, let's get this party going: Shoot some Jews

Evil has to do with a willingness to hurt others, perhaps to enjoy the hurting, as a sadist, who is, by definition, evil, would do. Although, one might say the sadist is not so much evil as diseased, but that would be drawing too fine a line. Psychopaths who torture other people may be mentally deranged but they are still evil. 

So evil may involve, but does not always necessarily involve a willingness to harm.
Think of the wives of the commandants of concentrations camps, who raised their children within earshot of the camps, who could smell and see what was happening there,  but ignored what they knew was happening, as they served their children schnitzel on fine china at their carved tables:  They were evil, even though they may not have enjoyed the pain of their fellow human beings. They were willing to support those who did the evil and they were, in their passivity, evil.

The child who throws a kitten into a pond and watches it drown is evil. But what about the adult who watches a child stumble into a river and simply watches rather than attempting to rescue it?  You could say, like Woody Allen, "Well, I don't know how to swim." But not reacting is a form of evil.

The sum total of what Donald John Trump has spewed out over the course of the campaign is evil, for all the reasons Ms. Clinton enumerated. And those who respond to it are just as evil. 

The real problem for Ms. Clinton, and for the rest of us, is that the next day she said she regretted having called  some of his  supporters deplorable. 

If you read more than the sound bite, she went on to remark, "They don't buy everything he says, but he seems to hold out some hope that their lives will be different. They won't wake up and see their jobs disappear, lose a kid to heroin, feel like they're in a dead-end. Those are the people we have to understand and empathize with as well."

The problem with this, Hillary, is the same problem you run into with the Austrians, post war. The Austrians fashioned themselves as "Hitler's first victims," the first country he invaded. Never mind, Hitler was received ecstatically, and as the German troops retreated at the end of the war, Austrians jeered Jews and cheered as Jews were mowed down by crowds of Austrians.  

No, you cannot have it both ways.  When it comes to despots, you are either with them or you are against  them. You may have your reasons, but if you support evil, if you raise that arm in salute, you are just as evil as the guy you are saluting. 

Epipen's Omar Little Moment ( Courtesy of Gretchen Morgenson)

The Wire's Omar Little 

There is a wonderful moment in "The Wire" when Omar Little, a street thug who robs low level drug dealers for a living confronts the lawyer for a man Omar has identified as the murderer who the lawyer is defending. Trying to discredit Omar's testimony before the jury the lawyer strikes an incredulous tone: "You have just admitted you are a thief. You rob people for a living, at gun point. Why should this jury believe a word you have said?"

Omar smiles and shrugs. "Just like you," Omar remarks, unperturbed. 
The lawyer, who has turned his back to Omar, to face the jury, whirls around, "What?" he asks.
"I do it with a shotgun. You do it with that briefcase," Omar says, pointing to the lawyer's attache case, open on his desk. 
The lawyer looks to the judge and spreads his hands, palms up, in mute protest, tacitly raising the objection, but the judge, (who we know well by now) simply smiles and shrugs and he doesn't even have to say, "You asked the question. He gave you his answer. It's up to the jury who to believe."
It's all over in a flash, but it's a moment which comes back to haunt us as we hear Bernie Sanders talk about a "rigged system." 
Of course, Omar's thefts amount to hundreds of dollars, thousands on a big day. The lawyer deals in exponential amounts of that.

But even the slimeball lawyer is a piker compared to the members of corporate boards and leadership in this country. 

Gretchen Morgenson

As Gretchen Morgenson depicts in her September 4th piece on Heather Bresch, the C.E.O. of Mylan, the company that makes Epipen, the reason Mylan has raised the price of Epipen from $50 in 2004 to $600 in 2013 is to fatten Ms. Bresch's paycheck by a minimum of  $13.2 million on top of her annual salary of $32 million. She is not the only officer or board member of the company to reap these profits, but she is the most visible. Her spokeswoman answered Ms. Morgenson's questions by saying Mylan sells more than 2,700 products in 165 contries and more than 600 products in the US alone, so raising the price of Epipen could hardly enhance Ms. Bresch's personal fortune much. But Morgenson then unravels the byzantine structures within this $9.4 billion dollar company (of which $1 billion comes from Epipen) and the explanation makes it clear, even if you cannot follow all the math and all the accounting tricks Morgenson elaborates, that there was more than enough incentive for Ms. Bresch to hike the price to school kids, if Ms. Bresch still cared about adding $13-20 million to her annual $32 million and, personally, I can believe she does care about that because, well, she wants to make $32 million dollars and anyone who wants to make that much money probably wants to make $52 million.

Heather Bresch needs no shotgun

And that person doesn't give a damn about some poor family trying to buy an Epipen for their kid when the family makes $17,000 a year.

Morgenson writes the New York Times financial column and I often start reading her articles which often expose unfathomable avarice on Wall Street but then I get lost in the complexities of these deliberately complicated financial schemes and give up. When she explains Epipen, however, the complexities fall from the bone and you can see the underlying structure.  

You are left with an Omar moment:  Ms. Bresch and all those who sail with her are thieves, not in the legal sense, but in every other important sense.  And they don't carry shotguns. They keep their hands clean.  They steal big.

The sad thing is that enough (mostly Republican) Congressmen are complicit. Our Tea Party Congress shackles the SEC and every other regulatory agency our government can bring to bear. When an Elizabeth Warren tries to scream bloody murder about all this, they refuse to confirm her, so she has to run for the Senate, where she is still in the minority. The pigs are in cahoots with the people who run things, as George Orwell noted, and you can look from pig to person to pig and not be able to tell one from the other. 

Colin Kaepernick and Phony Patriotism

I loathe the Pledge of Allegiance and singing the Star Spangled Banner before ball games is not far behind on my list of phony patriotic gestures.

So when Colin Kaepernick refused to stand for the national anthem, I thought, "Good for him."  

But thinking more about it, it's not so clear this particular act of protest, at this particular moment, is well chosen.

Public acts of attestation of loyalty have not always been meaningless, phony and anti democratic.  During times when loyalties were clearly divided, like during the American Revolution, when at least half the country remained loyal to the British Crown, standing up in public and being counted as "I am with the Revolution," was not without risk and it was  important to say. During the Civil War, saying publicly, you were for Union and not the Confederacy, was worth doing.

But, in recent times, since Vietnam really, when wars have been fought against insurgencies in distant lands, puffing up your chest before a football game is low risk and the coward's version of patriotism. Easy patriotism, is almost by definition, not real patriotism.

On the other hand, after 9/11 and after all the recent stories of attacks by terrorists, it may be worth saying, publicly, we are one country after all, and having Black men and White Men and Hispanics all singing the same tune is a fairly inoffensive feel good moment of bonding, cheesey as it may be. 

It is hard to forget how such expressions of public enthrallment with a flag have played out in the past, with the Nuremberg rallies, and all those flags and all that staging and orchestration of emotion. This sort of thing is easily twisted into nasty belief.

When the two Black Americans stood on the winners' platform at the 1968 Olympics and raised a Black Power salute, as cities burned and people were dying in the South trying to register voters and men were dying in Vietnam in a corrupt war, that protest made sense. 

But today, the national government and its flag is mostly under benign guidance. It's the state and local police who are racists with badges, terrified bullies with guns.

There is no state anthem for Colin Kaepernick to turn his back against--the San Francisco Forty Niners do not play in Kentucky where they play "My Old Kentucky Home,"  and vote in Mitch McConnell every time. 

The problem of white police murdering Black men is mostly a local one--just as local police murdered Civil Rights workers and it was the federal government which investigated and prosecuted these murders. The flag, the star spangled banner is about the country, and is the wrong target if you are festering over Black Lives Matter.

Governor LePage on the Enemy: Color Coded

"A bad guy is a bad guy. I don’t care what color he is. When you go to war, if you know the enemy, the enemy dresses in red and you dress in blue, you shoot at red. … You shoot at the enemy. You try to identify the enemy. And the enemy right now, the overwhelming majority of people coming in are people of color or people of Hispanic origin."
--Paul LePage, Republican Governor of Maine


So, what I'm asking myself is when was the last time you were dressed in a blue uniform and the enemy was wearing a red uniform? Was that the Revolutionary War?
Governor LePage, who was duly elected by the citizens of Maine is saying that most crime in Maine is committed by colored people.  Actually, Maine has one of the lowest rates of crime in the country, and one of the lowest incarceration rates,  at 350 people per 100,000. But, it is true Blacks are imprisoned at 1,553/ 100,000, Indians at 747/100.000, HIspanics 407/100,000 and whites at 259/100,000.  How that math works out, I'm not sure.
There are 15,707 Blacks living in Maine, out of a population of 1,300,000 people. The Internet is a wonderful thing.  If Blacks are imprisoned at a rate of 1,553/100,000, one might calculate all 15,000 are in jail, given the fact that there are 1.3 million Mainers, which seems to be a hard and verifiable number.  
Does this number refer to the number of Blacks in jail per 100,000 Maine citizens of all colors?  Or does this mean 1,553 Blacks of every 100,000 Blacks in Maine are in jail? Somewhere, somebody will know these things.  I'll ask Gov. LePage. He might consult his notebooks with the mug shots. 
Somehow, I think I must have got my arithmetic wrong. Or Gov. LePage has his arithmetic wrong. Or maybe his sampling methodology leaves something to be desired. Or someone does. 

 Presumably, these numbers refer to the number of Blacks per 100,000 of all Mainers who are in jail.  Since Blacks are a tiny percentage of the Maine population, that means a fairly high proportion of the small number of Black Mainers are in jail. Why  the Governor did not include Indians, who appear to wind up in jail more often than Hispanics, is another question.

Wait,! A Hispanic in blue? 

Presumably, none of those 259 white men wore red uniforms. Then again, there are no photos.

Was Governor LePage saying all those Black drug dealers were wearing red uniforms?  Had he just seen "Hamilton?" There were Blacks wearing red uniforms in "Hamilton." But the, Gov. LePage would have had to have traveled to New York City, which seems highly unlikely. Gov. LePage listening to Hip Hop for two hours? Seems unlikely. Unless it was "opposition research." Remains to be seen.

The governor has expressed concern about all those out of state colored men who come to Maine, sell drugs and then impregnate a white girl before leaving.  He has a loose leaf binder with all the cases. What the governor does not tell us is how many colored girls get impregnated by those out of state drug sellers of color. Do these men prefer to impregnate white women? 

It is an interesting question.

Donald the Artful Draft Doger: Why They Love Him

Here's the link to Nancy Isenberg and the White Trash explanation:

https://www.c-span.org/video/?413277-1/qa-nancy-isenberg



Watching Nancy Isenberg, the historian who wrote "White Trash"  on C Span this morning, I finally understood the people who love Donald Trump. Not that Professor Isenberg set out to explain the Donald, but once you read "White Trash" or see the interview, understanding gradually coalesces out of the miasma.

My brother, who lives in North Carolina, who served in Vietnam, is flabbergasted by his neighbors, all of whom seem to be Trump supporters. 

He cannot understand why they do not see him as a draft dodger and a coward.

Trump speaks their language, I tell  my brother.  

But why doesn't every Democrat castigate him for claiming to be the Vet's best friend,  when he bought his way out of the war? He could have been a Vet himself, but he paid some doctor to write the Draft Board a letter.  

Because, I tell him, Bill Clinton, Bernie Sanders, none of them served either. 

Doesn't matter, my brother says,  just keep calling Trump a draft dodging coward, and it'll eventually sink in. His White Trash throngs will eventually see him for what he is, see the emperor naked.

But, no. The fact is, the folks who love the Donald will forgive that.  They are "white trash."  He talks like them.

As Professor Isenberg notes, we do not have or want a Democracy in America; we are not comfortable with income and social equality. What we want is a democracy of manners, in which the rich and powerful sound like the mudsills, sound like the White Trash, even as they go home to their penthouses and McMansions. 

Trump has that riff down. His supporters love him on a visceral level. 

Just watch the tape.

Trump down to her underwear

Mr. Trump and Clean Coal

Want to feel a chill flash down your spine?  Just watch the speech Donald Trump gave yesterday in Virginia.

He began by boldly stating Virginia exports more coal than any other state and that Hillary Clinton is waging war on coal, means to shut down every coal mine and to throw all those admirable coal miners out of work, men who want nothing more than to earn a living, support their families doing the honest day's work of mining CLEAN COAL which will not cause global warming, which is a myth anyway.

He then ticked through his usual list of complaints:
1. Hillary wants to tax you to death, even those of you who make only $17,000 a year and she especially wants to destroy American farmers with her death tax.
2. The Army has been reduced in size and the Navy even worse, leaving us exposed to who knows what disaster.
3. Hillary wants to throw open the Mexican border and to grant amnesty to rapist immigrants.
4. African Americans have got the shaft from the Democrats who have fooled them every time and look at what they got in return: 58% unemployment, slums to live in, unsafe neighborhoods.
5. Hillary cares more about the rights of murderers than about police. All the police endorse Donald Trump because he has their backs.
6. Hillary has used her emails and her private server and her foundation to amass a $10 million dollar a year income and she doesn't care about the struggling middle class, not like the Donald, who gives the middle class good jobs (building golf courses and casinos.)
7. Trade deals with foreign countries have sent American jobs overseas.
8. Mr. Trump will bring back those lost jobs in manufacturing, steel, coal and the production of hoola hoops and Corvettes.
9. You all are losers, but elect Mr. Trump and you will be winners again.
10. Mr. Trump will make America safe again. Mr. Trump will make America wealthy again. Mr. Trump will make America GREAT again.

And listen to the crowd chanting, booing Hillary, shouting "USA, USA" and you can almost hear the echo of "Zeig!" and "Heil!"  

Donald Trump don't need no frigging advertising budget, no campaign advisers, no TV ads, no Sunday morning talk shows. He's getting his message out to those who are aching to hear it.

I don't care what the freaking polls say. I'm seeing a man who is cruising toward victory.  

Perils of the Liberal Persuasion

One of my two sons went to a very liberal school for high school, the Sidwell Friends School, in Washington, D.C. The place is a Friends school, as the name says, Quaker, and so open minded that the day after the 9/11 attacks, they called a meeting of all students and families and the Headmaster and others from the upper echelons  called upon the flock to turn the other check and forgive and to not react in anger. 

Listening in the audience, I could barely contain my rage, and were it not for my wife who pushed me out the door, I would likely have gotten my son expelled. 

Our "champagne son" had a wonderful career there, but, unbeknownst to his parents, he chafed under the excesses of liberal thinking, to the point where he decided to go to college in the South, at Vanderbilt, where he knew he would at least hear a different point of view. 

Our other son, our communist son, in whose heart beat the passions of his ardently union grandfather,  early on rejected the excesses of wealth he saw mushrooming around him in the affluence of suburban Washington, D.C., where even his classmates, not just their parents, drove BMW's, Mercedes and Lexus cars. He refused to go to private school, and never accepted invitations from friends to hang out at country clubs and he attended the public high school.  Of course, the public school reflected its politically liberal neighborhood, but there was more balance and there were no calls for turning the other cheek there. 

Through his college career and even afterwards, our champagne son stirred some concern by sounding pretty conservative. He particularly alarmed us when he fumed about the unions at the hospital which made his job as a surgical resident more difficult and which he claimed undermined the financial health of the hospital. Actually, he had a point:  By refusing to clean operating rooms in 30 minutes rather than the 45 minutes in their contract, the union house keepers reduced the total number of surgeries the surgical staff could do by 30 surgeries a day and that likely did hurt the bottom line. The fact is, he noted, cleaning the OR's took 20 minutes tops, and the "workers" then went out for a smoke or a Coke.

But, as the communist son pointed out, you cannot expect the union to argue management's side. There has to be some give and take.

On the other hand, I would argue: I am all for the workers. But these are not workers.

When I was a medical student, I too felt the pull away from liberal instincts.  I worked, one summer, in a project run by the notorious Office for Economic Opportunity, which was designed to increase the use of a new clinic which had been built in Bedford Styuvesant, which was then a burnt out, crime ridden part of Brooklyn. The whole effort struck me as a boondoggle, a colossal waste of money, thrown at people who would use it to buy drugs and guns. 

Later, with the perspective of age, I came to appreciate the economic theory that the government could throw bundles of money down a deep mine shaft and simply tell drilling companies where it was and that would stimulate the economy as the drilling companies hired people to go after it. 

The problem with any pole of political thought, is it attracts a whole constellation of opinion--at the center you may have a set of ideas which attracts you--the idea that society is best when it provides good things for all its members and does not simply give up on the idea of trying to raise up those at the bottom, when it attempts to provide the greatest good for the greatest number. But, as we learned in the 60's, around that star swirl all sorts of putrid ideas about life being simply about self actualization, pleasure seeking for self without regard to the effects on others, protecting indolence and self indulgence without demanding effort in return. That is when you start to ask yourself: Do I really want to wear the same logo as these "liberals?"

In today's world, the liberal cause has been more defined by Bernie Sanders than Hillary, so universal health care, free public education through college, an end to endless wars mindlessly pursued are all just fine. But ruthlessly rejecting international trade just because it is international, embracing transgender medicine as a cause, advocating for racial quotas in institutions of higher education also orbit that liberal star. 

Donald Trump's son in law, one of his trusted inner circle, makes a good point when he points at the "speech police" who accuse anyone who refers to an "Asian American" as an "Oriental" as "racist." If that one verbal choice makes you a racist, then what is the man who really does loathe the "dark races" who believes Whites superior to Blacks and Asians?  By cheapening language, we do harm to the real distinctions in life. So Trump's attacks on the idea of John McCain as a "hero" is a serious effort to draw important distinctions. In the world of the liberal, all children receive a trophy, and no child should be at risk for feeling humiliated by losing.

Wearing a polo shirt with an alligator logo for Lacoste, was said to be "classist" and college friends actually cut off the brand symbols from their clothes, for fear of being seen as "elitist"--this all happened at Brown University and Wesleyan University, where students whose parents were spending half the income of a typical middle class family every year just to put their kids in a private school which the parents knew, was a sort of assertion of having arrived at upper class status.

At Brown, where a drunken co-ed stripped off all her clothes and climbed into a fraternity boy's bed, where he duly accommodated her by having sex with her,  the boy found himself vilified as a "sexist" and expelled from the college for the offense of having drunken sex.  Never mind, the girl had placed herself in that bed. She was the victim. 

Later, at the same school, transgenders insisted on having their own dormitory and Black students wanted a "safe space" where they could re segregate themselves, having won the right to be admitted to the school, they now won the right to wall themselves off. 

At Harvard and Yale, students were granted "safe spaces" where they could flee from the horrid experience of hearing offensive thoughts, which ranged from racial diatribes to debates about global warming. 

And oh, the horror, suppose you might oppose the idea of paying "reparations" to the African American population of the United States for those 300 years of unpaid slavery!  Get thee to a safe space, so you don't have to hear the disturbing arguments against this, which begin with Lincoln's masterful Second Inaugural Address, in which he observed that every drop of blood drawn by the lash had been paid by blood drawn by the sword--you know, a little incident called THE CIVIL WAR, where white men died for four years trying to undo slavery, and where more Americans lost their lives than in all the other wars combined America has every fought since.

A professor of African American studies at Harvard, who decided publishing papers in "learned" journals was way less fun than trying to release Rap songs was hauled onto the carpet of the university president who told him there was a difference between academic inquiry and musical celebrity, whereupon the professor decamped to Princeton.  This president, Larry Summers, was so hopelessly politically incorrect, he was later thrown out for having the temerity and poor judgment to suggest that there may be a reason there were so few women majoring in math and science at Harvard, implying there may be a genetic difference.  This suggestion was considered so inflammatory and unacceptable, that rather than refuting it, or presenting evidence or argument against the question raised, the Harvard faculty simply voted to throw Summers out. No confidence in this toad.

Of course, Summers is an officious, insecure bully, who never quite got over his own rejection from Harvard when he applied as an undergraduate, and has spent the rest of his life trying to prove he's the smartest guy in the room, but all this episode at Harvard proved is that, at the Harvard faculty club,  the rest of the room is filled with people who are not all that smart, so having that title in that crowd may not be such a crown.

On the other side, however, you have a true black star, the Donald Star, around which orbit unfettered gun rights, advocacy of violence against Muslims, Mexican immigrants, gays, disparaging the handicapped--can eugenic killing be far behind?--advocating for evangelical movements to introduce God into the classroom, the workplace and the bedroom, outlawing abortion, and likely outlawing many of the best forms of contraception, calling for a return of America to being white and Christian, outlawing homosexuality, attempting to return to the Ozzie and Harriet days when American men went off to the factory with their lunch pails packed by their stay at home wives.

Somewhere, there must be a happy center between those two central stars.