A Dark Corner of the American Experiment

When Jay Landsman, the hard bitten Baltimore police detective, delivers the eulogy for a fellow cop at a Baltimore bar, he displays for possibly the only time in the five seasons of "The Wire" real emotion about what doing the work of a policeman means to the fraternity of police.

Jay Landsman, Baltimore PO lice

He says they all live and work in a "dark corner of the American Experiment," and while he acknowledges none of the cops present are always good cops, seldom good husbands, often slobs, frequently cruel, perpetually angry, dangerously explosive, they answer the call to duty and that is all that can be asked of any "PO-lice."

Nobody following the recent trials of the Baltimore police accused of murdering citizens in their custody,  who watched "The Wire," has any real doubt about what happened in those real life instances. We know that world from "The Wire."

What you see of police is men (and women) who enjoy, nay relish the license to beat up people, who see themselves as victims, who go about their work without remorse, without sympathy, but with cold blooded determination.

I'm re-watching "The Wire" to remind me of what at least half of America is really like.
There is not a single character in any of the five seasons of this American masterpiece who would have even considered voting for anyone but Donald Trump, if they bothered to vote at all.
And when you see their world, it all makes sense.
In fact, Trump seems inevitable, when you see the world through the lenses of "The Wire."

Hillary and those who supported her are from "The County" which is the phrase city people in Baltimore  use to mean anyone not living in the city itself, the affluent suburbs of the city, the people who send their kids to Gilman School, who live in what Bubbles once described as "Heaven."
There are even occasional references to places in Maryland where the government is "whistle clean." City people laugh when they say, "What do you think, this is some sort of Bethesda?"
A woman, sitting on the stoop of her row house tells Cutty, who has just been released from prison and is searching for his old girlfriend, the girlfriend now has a job with the city, teaching inner city kids to "talk all Condeleeza" and she has a upscale car, upscale clothes and looks down her "county nose" as "us city niggers."
In a few sentences she crystallizes what the other half thinks of those who have made it.

Clinton Land

Nothing Donald Trump has said in public, not his remarks about Meghan Kelly, not his taunts about Mexican rapists not his references to Muslims, seems even off color in the context of the way people in "The Wire" speak.

When I moved to New Hampshire, I was struck by how rarely people, even men talking among themselves, use profanities. We live in a polite society up here. We get offended by four letter words, references to genitalia. Not so in much of the rest of the country.

Trump's election will be analyzed, studied, explained by people who work in offices in front of computer screens at Harvard, but for me, all this amounts to is a revolt of the underclass. That's what Bernie appealed to, and nobody (enough) in the Democratic party listened to him--Debbie Wasserman Schultz and all her friends regarded him as an eccentric crank. But the hoi polloi, the lumpen proletariat, the unwashed masses, the people from "Making of a Murderer" and "The Wire," they rose up.
It wasn't a dark corner of the American experiment, it was the wet and raw underbelly of the American experience voting for someone who never grew up like them, but who could speak their language.

Trump Land

Which is why it is so anomalous New Hampshire occupies such an outsized place in the Presidential selection process. We are a sort of Hobbit Shire, a place more of the 1950's than the 21st century. For us, Trump "coarsened" public discourse.

For Baltimore and for much of the rest of the country, he did not even offend.

Trump? Who Cares? Jimmy McNulty Instructs

There is a scene in "The Wire" which keeps coming back now in the post election funk.



Jimmy McNulty is finally out to dinner in a swanky restaurant with Theresa D'Agostino. Their relationship until this moment has consisted of  running home, tearing off their clothes and having sex, but this time they decide to actually have dinner together.

D'Agostino grew up in Baltimore, of humble origins, but is now living in Washinton, D.C., leading an upscale life, managing political campaigns and acting as a consultant to Democratic candidates. (She will ultimately manage the successful mayoral campaign of a white candidate.)

Jimmy reveals he didn't vote in the presidential election when Bush ran against what's his name--and Theresa helpful supplies, "Kerry."
She is taken aback. Why did he not vote? For Theresa, voting against Bush was a very important act, a defining action. 

Well, neither Bush nor Kerry would ever matter to Baltimore, Jimmy explains,  and the only way either of them would ever even know West Baltimore, with all its problems, even existed would be if Air Force One crashed into Martin Luther King Boulevard.

You can see the steam coming of of Ms. D'Agostino's ears. She is so angry and turned off she shuts the door behind her when they get home, leaving McNulty baffled, on her door step.

For D'Agostino, McNulty's indifference to the fight she fights every day is outrageous. In her eyes, it makes him a knuckle dragger, indifferent to the important issues which animate her life. How can he think these national politicians and national elections do not matter? 

But of course, what McNulty is saying is he feels the same way, simply in reverse. To her, the local concerns of who gets shot on a corner, who gets put into jail are irrelevant and beneath her notice.  She does not live on the street corner. She thinks she lives in the clouds of Mt. Olympus.

But for McNulty, the strife among the national gods doesn't matter. All that matters in his life is what happens in Baltimore, and in fact in the inner city, where he sees lives destroyed or ruined daily. For the people he deals with every day it is local government, namely the police and the mayor's office,  whose decisions really matter. 
What happens in Washington seems remote and irrelevant.
(Of course, McNulty learns differently eventually, years later, when he finds he needs help from the FBI to help establish wire taps crucial to building his cases to imprison and bring down drug king pins,  but the Republicans in Washington, who will have to authorize and fund the program, don't care about Democratic Baltimore or its Democratic mayor. 
Like Theresa, they have "bigger" concerns.)
"The trouble is," one friendly FBI agent tells McNulty, "If you were chasing down Ahkmed or Abdul with this wire tap, well then they might be more interested. But catching Shakeel or Tyrell or Stringer Bell,  not so much."

This is the scene, I imagine, we have just played out with all us impassioned Democrats out here on the coasts furious and disdainful of all those apathetic Rust Belt yahoos who don't care about policy or principle or Washington, which is not much more than an abstraction to them.  

They just want their jobs back and they want someone who thinks as incoherently as they do.

It doesn't matter to them if the Donald can't do anything, if his idea of policy is grandstanding at an air conditioner plant, or Tweeting about the cost of Air Force One. 

Far as they're concerned, none of the smart people who talk about policy, and global trade ever did anything for them.  What mattered to them is Donald knew where the Carrier air conditioning factory was.  He didn't have to crash Air Force One into Indiana to find them.

Flynn, Bannon, Price: Hey, This Could be Fun!

Lt. General Flynn-Strangelove

According to a story in the New York Times, President Trump's National Security Advisor, Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn during the campaign, ran a Twitter account accusing Hillary Clinton and her "tope aides" of running a pedophile racket.  "You be the judge," the general urged. And you know how that goes: If the lady in the parking lot tells you something, it must be true!
I'm not exactly clear what a National Security Advisor does, outside of what I saw in the "West Wing" TV show, but the woman who played the role looked very serious most of the time, and seemed to be talking a lot about terrorists who liked to lop off heads.

Dark is Good

Steve Bannon, who Saturday Night Live depicts as a dark, skeletal Death figure, has embraced the dark side as a good thing. Might see him wearing one of those black hats with the death's head pin worn by the SS in the Third Reich. They liked that dark side, too.  Others have suggested he might like a Darth Vader helmet. But Black seems to be the operating motif. Bannon has spoken ruefully about that big middle class America has created in Asia by giving away all those wonderful, high paying factory jobs American workers once held, stamping out toy metal cars and fishing line and cheap lawn tools and sending those wonderful jobs off  to China and Vietnam and Cambodia, where the workers could be paid slave wages to make the same stuff and they could then call themselves middle class.

Donald the Joffrey

I loved the story Steve Jobs told about having an epiphany one night, when he realized his Apple phones really needed tempered glass screens rather than plastic screens which could get scratched by the keys everyone kept in the same pockets where they carried their phones. So, he called up his Chinese manufacturer to say all those phones needed to be re done and all the new ones changed to include glass screens. All the Chinese manufacturer had to do was to sound the alarm and pull all his workers out of their bunk beds in their dormitories, and march them across the alley to their machines in the factories where 100,000 screens were replaced overnight and the phones were ready to go the next day.


I could never have done that with US workers, Jobs noted. It might have taken weeks to do that kind of corrective turn around.


Of course, had it taken weeks, Jobs would still have sold the same number of phones, just 3 weeks later, but it would not have been nearly as good a story.

800 jobs safe for Christmas

And then there were those great stories about all the jobs making air conditioners in Indiana--you remember Indiana, where that judge with the Mexican parents was from. Well, Donald drove a tough deal with Carrier. In return for some tax breaks and the continuation of $16 billion dollars in defense contracts, Carrier and its parent company agreed to keep 800 to 1000 of the 2000 jobs slated to go South to Mexico this year. Of course, next year those jobs may be in Tijuana. But it was a great Christmas story--Tiny Tim gets his Christmas goose, God Bless us, one and all.


I could really get into this new administration.


We have Ben Carson, who looks to be in early stages of Alzheimer's, is going to run Housing and Urban Development, which is a department, like the Department of Education and the Environmental Protection Agency, which Trump and his supporters would like to see die a quick and decisive death.  So you appoint Ben Carson and that Department will go up in flames.

If Sarah's not available, how about Maria in the Red Dress?

I would have bet on Sarah Palin for Education. She would have been the obvious choice, but that crack about crony capitalism might have killed her appointment. Oh, well. There's that ex governor of North Carolina who needs a job.  Or maybe, Tim Tebow. He'd be my choice. He's tried football and baseball, so he has a broad background in the NCAA.


The EPA requires some thought. Chris Christie would be the obvious choice, as anyone who has ever driven along the New Jersey turnpike toward the GW Bridge would know--all that ghastly oil refinery dystopia, burning black plumes into the air 24/7/365. But there you go mentioning the GW Bridge again, and that's a problem for Chris.

I want my job back

I would think you'd want that guy who owned that Big Branch coal mine which exploded in West Virginia would be the obvious choice for the EPA or at least for the Occupational Safety Administration, but the thing is, nobody is willing to admit who actually own and ran that mine.


NASA needs Tom Hanks.
Defense, I know, has lots of contenders, but can anyone doubt Stephen Spielberg would be just an inspired choice? Or, if he's not available, George Lucas.

What I'm hoping is the Donald will stay true to form and he'll start a new reality TV show called, "My Cabinet: You're Fired!" and every few weeks, when he starts dropping out of the lead sentences on Fox and CNN he'll haul in some cabinet member and get the cameras and lighting all set and say, "You're fired!"
It'd be better than gladiators in the Coliseum. 


Really, I'd stay up to watch that.

Freeloading in the Heartland

No Senators, No Congressman, Pays more taxes than 29 states

What I have always found particularly appalling about the South, but really about most rural states, like Wyoming, the Dakotas and rural parts of the Midwest is how much hell they raise about their taxes going to support welfare cheats in big cities, when in fact, it is these very white, indignant voters who are getting the welfare from our federal government.  

This Sunday's New York Times carries an article by Steven Johnson in which he details the way densely populated coastal states (New Jersey, Massachusetts, New York, California and Washington in particular) subside those great massive states like Wyoming, Alaska, the Dakotas, Montana and all the Southern states save Florida and North Carolina. 

Those rural white males are the takers, not the givers.  For every dollar a citizen of New Jersey pays the federal government, he gets just 61 cents back; for the same dollar the white nationalist in Wyoming gets back $1.10. 

So who's the welfare queen now, bitch?

What's really sweet for those downstream, aggrieved whites is the voter in Wyoming has three times the voting power of the voter from New Jersey, owing to the two Senators from Wyoming and the electoral college rigging.

I don't know there's any way to correct this rigging, to right the wrong of this imbalance, but for the next four years, folks from the giver states ought to be thinking of ways of taking back America for the folks who really make it run, who drive its economy, who stoke its engines of innovation and productivity.

Let those coal miners in Kentucky and West Virginia stew in their burrows; let those malcontents in Arizona and Idaho pull their own weight for a change. 

It's the populous coastal states who need a Tea Party

There's a great scene in "Hamilton" where Jefferson chides Hamilton because the South is productive, doing the work,  growing things, creating things from seed while all the Northerners do is move money around.  Hamilton replies we all know who's really doing the planting in Jefferson's home state, and the only reason he's doing well is the free ride he's taking on the backs of slaves. 

Well, the white Trump voters are taking and have been taking that free ride for too long. 

We ought to start thinking up here in New Hampshire, how we can stop that free ride, how we can make them squirm in the free loading rural parts of America.

Keep Your Government Hands Off My Medicare

Hey, I like that Donald going and telling those Carrier bosses they can't move those jobs to Mexico. That's what I'm talking about.
Now he can build that wall and keep those Mexicans from coming here to get those jobs. And raping. 
And he can slap a 35% tax on everything they make coming into this country and he can lower the corporate tax rate to 15% so the big shots in the corporations can stay right here in the USA making things.
But the thing is, I don't want to be sitting in front of no keyboard, operating no robots. I want my old job back, running the forklift.

My Mom and Dad are telling me they're losing their Social Security, so they'll have to move in with me. Maybe we can get a mobile home and park it in our driveway for them, just as long as that thing is made right here in the US of A. I'm proud to be an American, which is now great again.
Mom's a little overweight and got diabetes but she lost her doctor when they changed Medicare to a voucher program. 
Dad's voucher covered $50,000 for his heart surgery. Trouble is, the bill was $500,000, which I'm told is ten times the voucher, so we have to find a bankruptcy lawyer now.

Those damn Democrats got us into trouble with Medicare. I wish they'd keep their goddamn government hands off my Medicare. I got it when I was 55 because I hurt my back and was out on disability and now they're saying all I get is a voucher. 

It's all Hillary's fault. Her and Obama. She's so crooked. Is she in jail yet?

The Only News That Matters In The Rust Belt

So here's the news all those Rust Belt Trump voters were waiting for: Vote Trump, keep your jobs.
No regrets (yet) in Indiana, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan or Ohio.

Trump to Announce Carrier Plant Will Keep Jobs in U.S.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/29/business/trump-to-announce-carrier-plant-will-keep-jobs-in-us.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=a-lede-package-region&region=top-news&WT.nav=top-news&_r=0

The 1919 World Series and the 2016 Election: When the Fix Is In

click to enlarge

Still, it really doesn't matter,

After all, who wins the flag.

Good clean sport is what we're after,

And we aim to make our brag

To each near or distant nation

Whereon shines the sporting sun

That of all our games gymnastic

Base ball is the cleanest one!

The team from Chicago should have beat the team from Ohio, but lost.
It was 1919 and the fix, we now know, was in.
"Say it ain't so, Joe," summed it up.
Nobody likes to think something as sacred as baseball could be rigged, fixed.
But if you were going to fix something, then you hide it in plain sight. You start bawling about how you can't trust even the most sacrosanct of things and you get the whole world, most especially the opposition, insisting even bringing up the subject is heresy, and when the outcome is a surprise, well the one thing it cannot be is what you said could happen and they said could not.
It's a classic double ploy, the deeper game.

There's only one thing that could be the fly in the ointment. That one, independent, check which, in the past, kept things honest: The exit polls.  You might be able to catch the final pipelines in four or five key states, hack those, and nobody can tell because nobody knows how people voted on those secret ballots. Except for the exit polls, where every 4th person walking out is asked how they voted. That is not hackable.

But here's the thing, if the pre voting polls are discredited by the voting, then who will believe any polls, even exit polls?

Check mate.