The Irredeemable Deplorables: Hate the Sin, not the Sinner

Donald Trump does have the capacity to get to the nub of a problem occasionally: When Brexit got voted through, amid all the elaborate explicating by pundits, he simply shrugged and said, "People want borders."
When Hillary Clinton described (accurately, I think) his supporters as deplorables, he said he didn't know which was worse calling them deplorables or irredeemable. 
And that was the problem, as many saw it for Clinton.
We are taught to hate the sin, not the sinner.

But it is difficult.

Consider two stories from today's New York Times:

Animated by Mr. Trump

1. An Arizona rancher, Tony Fraze, talking about illegal immigrants filtering through his property near the Mexican border said, "We've had too much wishy-washy--people trying to control it, not end it. That's what we should have done years ago with the World Trade Center-flown over there, put it back to nature and have it done. Playin' around just don't get it done."

Topher Sanders

2. Topher Sanders writes about watching his 5 year old son being told by a white girl in a Maplewood, New Jersey playground that he could not hop on the spinning disc because, "Not you, only for white people." 

In the case of the white five year old girl, you might say you could tell her it was not acceptable to say to a Black boy he cannot use the playground because he is Black. And Donald Trump would say we are preaching political correctness, and he'd be right, but we all know, getting that said would not change that girl, her attitudes or her parents from which she got them. Saying she is deplorable might have more of an impact, if enough people who mattered to her and her family said that. 

As for the rancher--where do you begin with that level of ignorance and stupidity? 
Should we ask Mr. Fraze just what he meant by "put it back to nature?" Is that like making the sands glow, as Ted Cruz suggested?  Oh, why didn't we think of that before? Just bomb "them" over "there" in the desert and all our troubles will go away. 

You see, all you have to do is announce we need all the terrorists, any of you who are radical Islamic terrorists, or jihadists or anything like that to report to the designated stations outside Aleppo and Falujah and some other spots so we can bomb you back to nature. Got that? Now why couldn't President Obama have thought of that? Why, it's just like Vietnam: if only "they" had let our boys win, well, we would have cleaned up those Viet Cong in no time. Lands sake, those boys in Washington are just dumb as sticks. 

Really, what this country needs is a good ol' verbal whomping every time one of these moles pops up above ground. Just whack-a-mole them and if we are never done with dealing with them, at least we've had the pleasure of dope slapping them.

What I am really asking is, how do you separate the sin from the sinner in these cases?

Talking to New Hampshire Voters

Trump Heartland

Today I spent walking around Hampton, New Hampshire with a clipboard on which the local Democrats had pasted a list of voters who were either Democrats or Republicans who had voted Democratic in the past or Independents. My guide was a woman who has lived in Hampton for 16 years and she seemed to know not just everyone in every house, but who had built the house, who had lived in that house, what had happened to the children who were raised there and whether or not the house was on well water. 

Most of the people we talked to were Democrats and we were simply encouraging them to vote November 8, but we ran into one man who said he's been a Democrat all his life, was a Teamster, worked for the same company for 22 years and then they closed down, cut off the pension he thought he'd earned and he thought building a wall was a good idea because they're coming in and taking our jobs and he might just vote for Donald Trump.  He then added, "Of course he might start World War III."
My companion went to work on him, in her non confrontational way, and by the time we left he seemed to be nodding in agreement that World War III and thermonuclear holocaust might not be a good plan.

What struck me is this was a solid union man, a guy living in a one level, very modest house, blue collar, who felt alienated from the Democratic Party he had grown up with--he felt betrayed.

Another man said he was not inclined to vote for Maggie Hassan for U.S.Senate because she had made an issue of combating the heroin epidemic and he thought that was throwing good money after bad and we should just let those addicts die. There's no curing them.

No longer Republican

He lived in a McMansion, as did most of the Democrats we visited today. The Democratic Party is no longer the party of the working man, far as I could see today. It is the party of the professional, the college educated.

Trump may like her; feeling not mutual 

We met a slim lady in a fitted leather jacket and tight jeans and chic haircut in front of her stunning home, set in the woods, and she was horrified at the thought of a Trump presidency.  Twenty years ago she would have had Republican written all over her. 

It felt like that New Yorker cartoon of a crowd of well dressed middle aged people in pearls and suits and ties out in a field under the banner, "Woodstock Reunion."  

The resentment among the losers in the economic struggle is driving the Trump wagon.

The question is: How many of them are there?

click on image

Frauke Petry, Donald Trump and the New World Order

Frauke Petry

What is the appeal of slasher movies, of horror movies, of dark dystopian movies? There is something pleasurable , some thrill in imaging a really dark place-in much the same way as the man who pounds his head against the wall and when asked why he says, "Because it feels so good when I stop."

So it is readingThomas Meany's article in the October 3 New Yorker about Frauke Petry, the new leader of the AfD (Alternative fur Deutschland) Party, the German party which advocates closing its borders, banning the wearing of burkas, which proclaims "Islam does not belong in Germany." 

There is much that is familiar here: There is the not so subtle sexual presentation of it's leader.  She divorced her husband, stopped posing with her four children and made tabloid headlines, controlling news cycles with her affair with a fellow party leader.  There is the posture of becoming an authoritarian leader, full of energy, vigor, pulsating heat. 

Her new hot lover

The party has a "dark core" of true believers and another half of members who simply want to protest the alternative--Angela Merkel. 

Frumpy Frau Merkel 

Those events in German cities on New Year's Eve, when Middle Eastern men fondled and groped blonde German women who were out in city squares to celebrate New Years had long reverberations. As Petry remarked: These men do not belong here; "These people coming into Germany are used to being in completely different social circumstances...This is not going to work." 

It was Donald Trump's Mexican rapists argument. Of course, Mr. Trump is having a harder time lately with that argument. He would have been right there with the Turks, groping women in the squares on New Year's eve.

Of course, unlike the fantasy of Mexican rapists, which was simply a convenient invention of hobgoblins, the Turkish and Syrian men in the New Year's squares were not products of an over heated imagination. They seemed to confirm every fear smoldering below the surface of the Aryan brow.

A series of violent attacks by Muslim men in Germany echoed those we saw in America, but in most of these cases, the men were later proved to be simply deranged, or acting in the heat of broken affairs, not politically. 

What the whole story conveyed was that we are seeing in Petry's ascent to power a foreshadowing of what we may soon see here. 

The fear of the immigrant gave us Brexit and the AfD.  Nobody saw those things coming. 

We might see it coming here. 

Donald Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest

Trying to understand the appeal of Donald Trump, it struck me this is a story we've seen before--the appeal of the exuberant over the buttoned down mind, the appeal of the libidinal urge over restraint.  It's Prufrock vs Sweeney. Prufrock measured out his life in teaspoons and coffee cups. Sweeney was erect.


It's Robin Williams rebelling against the straight laced professors and administrators at the uptight prep school, urging his young students to "seize the day."


It's Tom Cruise in "Risky Business" getting into Princeton by dancing in his underpants and throwing wild parties while the grinds resent him.


So Donald plays Jack Nicholson's Randal McMurphy to Hillary's Nurse Ratched.

Randal,( or "Randy" for short,) is the guy who may be a little daffy, but he is so much fun to watch.  (And remember "randy" means "horny" or libidinous.) Guys can be into women, as long as they are funny, at least in show business, (unless they are Bill Cosby.) 
Italy had Carlos Berlosconi and Musolini, who bragged about their sexual exploits, with often unwilling women, but in more Puritanical America, we've always told ourselves we are different.  It depends, of course, on which America you are speaking of, however. In the down home, Here-Comes-Honey-Boo-Boo America, women say, "Oh, you just sock him in the mouth and move on." Boys will be boys.


Of course, as my musician son told me, even the most wild and free sounding musician, a Van Halen or Jimmy Hendrix "practiced with a metronome."  It was a striking image--what could be more disciplined, less uninhibited than a metronome, ticking insistently, side to side?

But music is about beat, rhythm and that means discipline.

We all understand there are areas in life which require people who have great discipline--you don't want a free swinger operating on your brain or sewing new arteries into your heart.

But we do tend to think the Hollywood story of Jack Black and his school of rock which only requires tightly wound little minds releasing all the energy and joy beneath.

Donald does radiate joy, in a perverse, dark sort of way.  That's why his salacious expostulations failed to shock his ardent fans--it was jut more of the joy, more of Donald being the free swinging Donald--"ain't no thing."

I heard a woman defending her support of the Donald by saying that Hillary attacked all those women who were victimized by Bill Clinton and so she was complicit, as guilty as Bill in the violation of those women. So now Jennifer Flowers is Hillary's fault!  She went on to say it was more important to have Donald Trump appointing Supreme Court justices who would reverse Roe v Wade than anything else. So, in the end, she rationalized what she did not like about the Donald by saying Hillary's worse when it comes to protecting women, and anyway, there are more important things.

We'll find out November 8th how many like her are out there.

Mr. Trump and Mr. Warren Buffett

When Donald Trump is confronted with an uncomfortable truth like the fact he has paid no federal income tax for 20 years, his reflex is to lie his way out of it--his first excuse was that if he had paid income tax the federal government would simply have squandered it, so he was simply too smart to pay his share.

When that started to sound like Leona Helmsley saying that only the little people pay taxes, which is to say only fools and weaklings pay taxes, Mr. Trump shifted to saying, well, as a billionaire, I'm only doing what other people in my class do, like Warren Buffett who claims even bigger deductions than I do, who rapes the system even more than I do. 

Turns out, that was untrue, and what makes it a lie is that Mr. Trump either knew it was untrue or was too unconcerned to verify it to take the time, which amounts to the same thing.

Turns out Mr. Buffett has paid over a million dollars in income tax for each of every year over the past decades. It is true, he pays at a rate of only 16%, but he pays.

Mr. Trump blandly waves off his income tax scam by claiming he already pays lots of different taxes already, and shouldn't be burdened with a trifling thing like the income tax.  After all he pays taxes at the gas pump, whenever he goes out to a restaurant, and sales taxes on all those expensive suits and ties.


Of course, we all pay those taxes right along with him; the difference is we also pay our income tax.


A lot of Trump supporters make too little income to actually pay taxes, so it may not bother them he doesn't pay any income tax.


One thing these debates do--they eventually illuminate some part of a man's character. We can not really know these people on stage, but we can know something about them.


What I can see in Trump is out there for anyone to see. If you don't see it, it's because you do not want to.

Dancing with the Devil: The Town Hall Debate

Only saw the last 50 minutes of the town hall debate, but I'd have to say, if there are still any undecided or potentially dissuade-able voters out there, it had to help Donald Trump.  Any time you allow a lunatic or a demagogue look like just another actor on the stage, he has already achieved something important.

Shakespeare knew this--"In speech, there is logic." By which he meant, just saying something makes it sound true, unless it is promptly slapped down. Parading across Shakespeare's stages were villains of every description, who the audience could see were deplorable, wicked, sometimes obviously, sometime subtly evil, and it was his genius to make the most nasty villain human, in some ways understandable, or at least recognizable. Ms. Clinton possesses by no such genius. 

To pick just one of hundreds of examples--when Donald Trump says Hillary wants to kill all the coal miners' jobs because she hates them and by the way, it's unnecessary because there is such a thing as clean coal. She can reply, "I am the coal miners' friend, not their enemy. And I'd love to embrace 'clean coal' if it were only a reality, but then again, I'd love to eat ice cream and cake and never get fat, but nobody has ever, and likely will, never figure out how to do that and we are no closer to clean coal than we are to body friendly calories. This is just another example of pie in the sky from Donald Trump. When he's not selling fantasy solutions he's dreaming up fantasy hobgoblins." 

Or words to that effect. 

And to not have a better response to the "deplorables" question is beyond comprehension? Why not simply say, "When a man says all Muslims hate us, that is deplorable. When a crowd cheers that then every last member of that crowd who cheered is equally deplorable. I still believe that. It's not just the grand dragon of the Ku Klux Klan who is deplorable, it's every other person in a white sheet."

Why Ms. Clinton fails to prepare that sort of answer effectively is an imponderable. If she loses to Mr. Trump, one can only say, well there is only one person to blame.

Fresh Pages for Hillary's Notebooks

Not that Hillary Clinton needs my help disemboweling Donald Joffrey, but at the town hall format, she may need some help with the John Q. Citizens they will dredge up.

So, here's my two cents:

Q: Ms. Clinton: How can you say you will put Main Street before Wall Street when you gave speeches to Goldman Sacks for $250,000 a pop and you still refuse to release the transcripts?

A: There's really two questions here: How could I be venal enough to give speeches for $250,000 a pop and why am I unwilling to release those transcripts?

The answer to the first is I needed the money. When we left the White House, we were broke. The way you cash in on fame is to give high priced speeches.  That doesn't mean you have to get into bed with anyone, but if they want to pay you for showing up so they can get your photo for their brag wall and they want to pay you that much, who among you would not jump at the chance? Does it look like they were paying me for votes or for access? Well, for votes, no. Nobody in all of Mr. Trump's opposition research regiments has ever been able to find a case of me voting for Wall Street and against Main Street, because I never have and never will. Sure, I took their money, if they are that eager to give it.

As far as releasing the transcripts, sure it makes it look like I've got something to hide, and frankly, I'm afraid if you sent Mr. Trump's troops through those speeches they could do a snip and clip job, a sound bite which would sound bad, out of context, just the way Republicans have always done with selective editing.
 When President Obama expressed sympathy for the sorry lot of people in the rust belt who had lost their jobs when American factory owners closed shop and moved overseas, leaving workers unemployed and communities collapsing he said, "What do they have left but their religion and their guns?" And that was made to sound like President Obama held them, their religion and their love of guns in contempt.  But, of course, while he despaired about their love of guns, he was not contemptuous of their religion.  But he was made to sound arrogant and condescending.  

Well, I don't want that happening, in other ways, with my transcripts. Oh, what a feeding frenzy.

Q: Ms. Clinton: What about those emails. Why did you have your people destroy phones and computers with hammers? 
A: Because I wanted those emails destroyed. Not because there was anything incriminating or embarrassing in them but because they had information about the thinking of people I worked with, and my thinking, I did not want to share with Vladimir Putin, among others, and as it turns out, maybe that was not a bad idea, given the Russian state sponsored hackers. 
But let me ask you: What is the worst thing you can imagine might have been contained in those emails? What deep, dark secret could I possibly be trying to hide in those emails? 

Q: You could have revealed state secrets, compromised our national security.
A: Well, that is within the realm of possibility; trouble is, there was no such security breach. The FBI looked for one, but none of those mundane, boring emails had anything juicy or important in them.

Q: Why, after 30 years in public life with you serving as a U.S. Senator and Secretary of State is the country in such a terrible state? Why should we want more of the same?

A:  You should want more progress, is what you should want. You should look at where we were when the Republicans left office in 2009, how we fell off the precipice which trickle down economics and T party politics brought us to, and how we have recovered, slowly, too slowly for sure, but steadily ever since. Crime rates are down. Gas prices are down. Al Qaeda is emasculated. True ISIS has sprung up, but we're on them now. 
The sad truth is, we are never going to get manufacturing jobs back to Kodak, or the steel mills or some of the manufacturing plants. Those jobs were lost, not because of trade deals but because of robots and lots of other forces, including globalization and those particular jobs are never coming back. If you are making film when the world goes digital it's not the fault of government or the Secretary of State that your company goes belly up. 
 There will be new jobs, better jobs for more people.  But we can't just wish this into being. We have to have government helping business. 

The government created the internet, and it can build infrastructure if we give it half a chance. But the truth is no one government official whether she is a US Senator or a Secretary of State can single handedly govern.  A Senator, a Secretary of State, even a President, has to work with other people. She can't just issue orders from on high the way a CEO of a drug company can do.  She can't just haul in the Speaker of the House and say, "You're fired!"

I can't take sole credit for programs insuring kids, or for routing Bin Laden, but I was part of the effort. 
 And I paid my income taxes to the federal government because that, for me, was an act of patriotism.

Patriotism cannot be patriotism with sacrifice and risk. Singing the Star Spangle Banner at the ball game is fine fun, but it's not patriotism. Fighting for your country is patriotism.  Paying your fair share of taxes is patriotism. Patriotism costs you. All the other stuff is just bluster.