Author Archives: Brian Lambert

It Comes Down to Whose “Angry Mob” is Bigger

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It’s been a dispiriting few days for everyone who believes (knows) Brett Kavanaugh lied under oath during his confirmation hearings. But anyone aware of the raw, animal power of grievance knew it was going to be tough-to-impossible to win both Kavanaugh and the November election. It was always one or the other. Never both.

Partisans of every persuasion are motivated by grievance  — the outrage over being cheated out of something — and can be counted on to dependably rally to the next opportunity to stick it to their offenders. Had Kavanaugh been defeated the right-wing fever bubble — talk radio, FoxNews, Breitbart — would be on fire from now until November 6 with howls of indignation and demands for vengeance.

Oh, but look! The howling and lust for vengeance is going on anyway.

While liberals and professional Democrats generally prefer to project reasonableness and fact-based arguments, conservatives and professional Republicans simply want to win, and win by whatever means possible. Facts and fairness don’t muddle their strategic planning.

And those qualities are appropriate given each side’s base. Republicans of the Trump era are deeply, profoundly invested in a self-defeating nihilism that is indifferent to whether the candidates it supports — Trump, Kavanaugh — ever do anything to improve their lives. A primary objective, possibly even the primary objective, is simply “sticking it to the libs”, the class forever in the bullseye of their roiling animosities and grievances — racial, economic, whatever. (The amount of time and energy that crowd puts into monitoring “lib” reaction to their lunacies is truly bizarre.)

So now, Trump and Republicans are ranting about “Democrat mob rule”, (all those angry women taunting Republican senators in office hallways). The calculation being that this will sustain the current spike in right-wing grievance enough to neutralize the swelling grievance and the left, mainly within the #MeToo movement.

But like modern news cycles, the life-span of most grievance spikes gets shorter every month. It’s tough sustaining committed anger. Grievance is a beast that requires regular infusions of novelty reaccelerate rage, preferably as close to election day as possible. Even the 11-days prior Comey Letter is now too far out to be a reliable anger-driver. It was so 2016.

Mitch McConnell may be one of modern history’s most cynical and reprehensible actors, but McConnell isn’t stupid. He knows that his new base — the Trumpists who went to the ballot box for the first time in 2016 — will need a fresh grievance probably within 72 hours of election day. And — my prediction — Mitch, coordinating with FoxNews, talk radio, Breitbart, et al (still after 30 years a messaging ecosystem liberals can only dream of) — will deliver something.

Motivated women, grievance-stoked liberals and everyone appalled at the racism and corruption of Trump must be prepared for that inevitability.

More to the point of mob anger, liberals need to perform a gut check at this moment and dispense with the hand-wringing over their Kavanaugh tactics. What else would have been “reasonable” or “appropriate”? I saw the author Walter Isaacson on TV this morning tut-tutting about liberal over-reach and the way it had riled-up the Trump base  … as though there was another, better way to respond to Kavanaugh, even without the sexual assault allegations. And why should we think “riling up” the Trumpists is the thing we need to avoid most?

Here’s the real thing: raging grievance is as natural to the Trump base as breathing. Liberals may be embarrassed about it, and wish we could all just enjoy a feisty rose together. But for 30 years the Republican media eco-system has reduced politics to team sport. Them/us, good guys/bad guys, saints/sinners. No nuance is required or needed. In fact, nuance is counter-effective.

Keep it real simple: Sound the alarm. Play the fight songs. Return to battle.

Liberals have to stop worrying about how their indisputably righteous anger over Trump and Trumpist degradation of America’s reputation for moral leadership “fires up the Trump base.” You’re embarrassed by the all the yelling and name-calling. Duly noted. Now get over it. Suck it up and play the game to win.

This is a (for the moment) non-violent form of civil war. Mob anger comes with the game, as the game has been designed by conservatives and is being played today. Self-recrimination is dispiriting.

Trump is a disgrace bordering on tragedy. Kavanaugh would not have been on The Federalist Society’s list of prospects if he wasn’t first and foremost a reliable partisan conservative warrior, as he proved during the Ken Starr “investigation” and the Florida recount. Trumpists are a revolting stew of easily manipulated ignorance, authoritarian phobias and irrational group-think. Those are realities.

What comes next is committing anger to action and driving more of our mob to the polls in November.

 

 

 

 

 

Let’s Move to The Avenatti Model

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As promised and on schedule Michael Avenatti has dropped another bomb on Brett Kavanaugh’s crater-filled road to the Supreme Court. Regularly tut-tutted over and dismissed as an ambulance-chaser non pareil Avenatti’s latest client — who is not anonymous — is prepared to tell the most lurid story yet of the young and entitled Mr. Kavanaugh’s sexual misadventures, in this case gang rape.

Avenatti popped up on Rachel Maddow’s show a couple of nights ago hinting at what was to come and vowing he would deliver “within 48 hours”, which he did. Again.

Mainstream, Big “J” journalism’s aversion to Avenatti is understandable, in normal times. Who hasn’t rolled their eyes and endured the righteous (righteous, I tell you!) indignation and oozing self-promotion of well-paid lawyers … performing in front of a TV camera? But at some point the bona fides of even the worst self-aggrandizer build up to the point where guys like Avenatti have to be taken seriously.

When you’re right, you’re right.

I mean, come on. TV in particular is clogged with regular players who either A: Have nothing new or significant to say, or B: Parrot whatever the network in question wants to hear, (so they’ll be asked back), or C: Are so far past their expiration date they’re like a straight-to-video sequel to “Weekend at Bernie’s”, (eg: Newt Gingrich, Rick Santorum).

So someone — Avenatti — who is demonstrably in on the action and accurately forecasting what’s coming next should have much higher standing, credibility-wise, than “the usual suspects.” And he does, if you just count CNN and MSNBC, where it seems he has a cot in the corner for easier access to the pundit desk.

But, Big “J” journalism? Not quite so much. Avenatti’s Monday night vow on Maddow’s didn’t create much more than a rustle in big city newspapers, caution toward self-aggrandizers being a primary default for “serious journalists” and anxious politicians, normally for good reason. But after a good year on the scene and a batting average Ted Williams could only dream of, it seems Avenatti is still on a “wait and see” with the self-proclaimed adults in the room.

I think of Avenatti every time I hear someone ask (in solemn theological tones) what Democrats should do if they regain power in DC?

Should they go full payback on Republicans, pulling every foul and miserable trick Mitch McConnell, Devin Nunes, Chuck Grassley and on and on and on have been pulling for the last 20 years? Or, should they hew to the proper course of, you know, “regular order” and follow time-honored (and now regularly violated) standards of civility toward the opposition while seeking to “reach across the aisle?” (Personally, I’ve reached the point that whenever I hear or read someone urging any liberal to “reach across the aisle” I stop listening or reading … right after I gag.)

Implicit in the question is that there is only a binary choice. Democrats can either adapt all the ham-fisted, nefarious, nakedly bullshit tactics McConnell, Nunes and crew have resorted to, or they can be the same earnest chumps they’ve been played for since  Republicans decided winning is “the only thing” and dialed nefarious to 11.

That’s dim thinking.

The Avenatti Model, if we dare call it that, is not nefarious, illegal or unconstitutional. But it is shamelessly aggressive. You isolate a key weakness (illegality) in the opposition and you zero in on it with full prosecutorial energy and zeal. You make the opposition pay a very high public price for nefarious activity. You use every tool at your disposal, which means exploiting Big “J” journalism, punditry and the entertainment industry. And you keep at it until the offense the opposition has committed becomes a permanent stain on their brand. In other words, you make them own their deviousness and bullshit.

(If the concern is you could over-play your hand — like McConnell et al — you’ll hear about it fast enough from the liberal base.)

No matter what happens during Thursday’s hearings, The Avenatti Model would move Christine Blasey Ford and every other woman prepared to speak out against Kavanaugh up to the next level of the court of public opinion. Namely, a coordinated series of TV interviews with — oh I don’t know, Oprah, “60 Minutes” or any of the gal hosts of the morning chat shows — and let the public get a full sense of who these women are and the credibility of their stories.

The effect would be to set the stain on Kavanaugh and his Republican handlers so deep it won’t how Lisa Murkowski and Susan Collins eventually vote.

Oh! Not polite and collegial?

Screw polite.

 

 

 

 

Discuss: Why Would She Lie?

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Since we’re all adults here, let’s have a common sense discussion. The topic? “Why do people lie?”

Books have been written on the subject, a topic with which every human has direct experience. But without going into deeper-than-necessary psychology, let’s agree that people generally lie to make things easier if not better for themselves. To protect themselves. We lie to avoid conflict, shame and punishment. Not getting spanked as a child or jailed as an adult is a better option than a whupping from dad or bunking in a 10 x 10 cell with Dirty Louie. People lie to get what they want. Money, sex, status. We’ve seen it thousands of times. It’s been a staple of popular fiction since the first storytellers gathered around a cave fire.

But who lies knowing things will only get worse for themselves?

Even people who lie as a strategic tactic — in society, business or politics —  usually do it in a way that protects them from exposure and possible consequences. Self-preservation is as basic an animal instinct as breathing. You avoid situations that might lead to injury or death.

Which obviously brings us to Brett Kavanaugh v. Christine Ford. One of them is lying.

If Kavanaugh is lying it it’s easy to understand why. Everything about his reputation and status and ambition for authority/power is on the line. So, accused of sexual assault as a drunken teenager, he categorically denies it (lies) … as an adult. His life will be immeasurably better if the lie holds up. He will get what he wants. He will ascend to a level of influence held by only a handful of other humans and remain there until he dies.

That’s not hard to understand.

But Christine Ford? How does lying — as she’s being accused by the worst of Kavanaugh’s defenders — make her life better? More to the point, how would she ever see it it being better by making the accusation in the first place?  An accusation, by the way, we know she made weeks before Kavanaugh was revealed as Trump’s choice for the Court?

If she was too naive to know, with near absolute certainty, how her accusation would affect her, the first lawyer she contacted and, guessing here, the first staffer in Diane Feinstein’s office would have walked her through the grueling horror of the absolutely inevitable out-of-control hyper-partisan reaction. She would be vilified and threatened. Her professional career would be imperiled, if not terminated. She would need expensive legal advice and protection for a long time to come. She might not even being able to return to her own home. (She is now in hiding.)

So why would she lie — or even say anything at all, even if “mistaken”, as Orrin Hatch says — if she understood any of that? Nothing about her life was going to get better. Everything was going to get worse, certainly in the short-to-intermediate term. (If her accusation derails Kavanaugh she’ll earn “atta girl” points in liberal history books.)

Common sense, the experience of any rational adult, tells us that Ford only wades into that level of horror, that level of epic, negative disruption of her life, if she is telling the truth. Or at least believes she’s telling the truth.

And as for Kavanaugh’s categorical denial: as many of have noted, you can’t walk back something that emphatic. Once you say, “This never happened.” You can’t then undo a lie by conceding that you were, A: a stupid kid, B: blind drunk, and then C: issue a (very) belated apology.

If Kavanaugh has lied about this attack, he hasn’t destroyed his reputation as a drunken teenager, he’s destroyed it as a sober adult.

If Ford has lied, she could be clinically diagnosed as “recklessly unstable”, which of course is already happening … by no one with a clinical degree.

 

 

Next Up for Must-See TV, Kavanaugh v. Ford

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The so-called “Golden Age of Television” will get another turbo-charging next Monday if both Brett Kavanaugh and his accuser, Prof. Christine Ford show for their close-ups. Along with all the seismic shift changes since Clarence Thomas v. Anita Hill in 1991, the fact the media universe has quintupled, septupled … whatever … since then means this will be an instant, blockbuster TV classic.

The one unequivocally sane and rational suggestion for this latest battle of The Culture War is that there should be, you know, an actual investigation. Not another variation of the archaic farce these confirmation hearings always are. An actual investigation. With professional investigators. People not controlled by the Judiciary Committee’s fossilized Republican membership. Something other than — Orrin [bleeping] Hatch, or Chuck [for bleep sake] Grassley and Ted [are you bleeping kidding me?] Cruz — parceling out data for the aid and comfort of Mr. Kavanaugh.

Likewise, some independent entity like, uh, the FBI, would relieve the Committee’s Democrats/presidential aspirants of the need for splashy, empty theatrics. (Here’s looking at you Spartacus Booker.)

Personally though, I’m not inclined to expect anything rational to happen in D.C. ever again. But that’s just me.

Until Prof. Ford put her name on the accusation against Kavanaugh I was of the mind that CBS honcho Les Moonves was #MeToo’s biggest scalp to date. A vaguely recognized background character to most of the country, Moonves was a bona fide, no doubt about it titan of industry, as thoroughly protected by vast, thick layers of money and legal talent as any executive in the country. But #MeToo took him down.

Now though, if #MeToo, embodied by Prof. Ford, can chop block Brett Kavanaugh it will have a far, far more significant scalp. And we all will know for certain that this revolution not only has legs, but granite-like pillars. And if that happens — and the likelihood becomes more possible with each passing day — it will be a very good thing.

At this moment Kavanaugh v. Ford  is quintessential “he said, she said” with both camps of supporters deeply, emotionally invested in their player, pretty much regardless of any verifiable facts.

But here are the point(s) of separation for me.

Based on her reluctance to go on record until this past weekend, Prof. Ford seems to be fully aware of the shitstorm about to land on her … forever. Stepping up like she already has, much less after everything accelerates next Monday, her life has taken at least a 90 degree turn, never to return to its previous, peaceful, anonymous course.

Who does that if they’re lying?

A tatted-up, gum snapping, meth-head, maybe. But a 50-something career college professor? If she were as whacked and deluded as she would have to be to fake something like this I kinda think she’d have struggled (badly) in the notoriously pissy, petty world of academic politics.

But then there’s Kavanaugh. I very much agree with former Wisconsin Sen. Russ Feingold’s view in this morning’s Huffington Post. Sirens and flares went off in my head with the first words Kavanaugh said accepting the nomination at the White House — with Trump looming inches away.

Said Kavanaugh, “No president has ever consulted more widely, or talked with more people from more backgrounds, to seek input about a Supreme Court nomination.”

And to be clear, that is Donald “Can’t read a bleeping book, much less a bleeping daily intelligence briefing and is uniformly regarded as a bleeping moron by everyone with a bleeping post-grad degree” Trump he’s talking about.

I mean, really. You’re expecting the country to take you seriously as an avatar of supreme (quality) judgment and that’s the first impression you decide to make? To publicly engage in a kind of verbal fellatio? WT[bleeping]F?

Feingold goes on to remind anyone who cares — not Grassley, Cruz, Hatch or John Cornyn — that Kavanaugh has pretty obviously already lied twice, (we call it perjury in this courty thingy job he’s up for) during this round of hearings,. Lying being something we’ve come to shrug off from politicians we can vote out of office, but plays juuuuust a bit different when a guy is getting a mega-powerful, lifetime gig.

As must-see TV, I’m loving the thought of Ted Cruz, formerly the most repugnant personality in D.C., interrogating Prof. Ford at this moment atop the still rising wave of #MeToo and while he’s facing a truly serious challenge from a progressive Democrat back in Texas. Likewise, I can’t wait for the line of questioning from Orrin Hatch, long one of the most walled-off from reality dinosaurs of Jurassic-style conservatism.

Talk about turbo-charging the “enthusiasm” of educated, suburban women.

Again, I don’t know if Prof. Ford’s story is true. But nothing about it is implausible given the nature of privileged, (i.e. entitled) teenaged boys partying hard at elite prep schools. (And that truly weird list he produced in a nano-second of 65 women he didn’t try to rape? Again, WTF?) In fact, after reading the stories of Les Moonves literally jumping his (bleeping) doctor as well as prominent actresses and producers in private meetings (because he couldn’t control himself, you see — but also because he felt entitled, and was insulated by layers of lawyers), my thought was, “Jesus, dude. I’ve seen drunken frat boys with smoother moves and more impulse control than that.”

And now one of those boys it seems is poised to join legendary deep-thinker, Clarence Thomas, on the Supreme Court.

 

Full-On Crazy Time Has Arrived

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Among the very few things we don’t have to worry about — as we move toward the inevitable total meltdown of The Trump Farce — is whether the anonymous author of the instantly legendary essay about calculated insubordination in the White House really is a “senior administration official.”

Bank on it. He/she is.

Unlike Trump, The New York Times is not in the habit of doing things in half-assed, reckless ways. The Times has been at the game of vetting information a lot longer than Trump or any of his fever-addled swamp critters. Publishing an anonymous column lie that is, in straight-laced Big “J’ journalism terms, waaaay out there. And knowing full well that the author’s identity will be ferreted out sooner rather than later, the Times would not consent to the “senior official” business if he/she were anything less than someone with regular, direct access to and interaction with our paranoid, buffoon in chief.

The paper’s credibility would take a brutal hit if the author was revealed to be some relatively non-descript third-tier bureaucrat at, for example, the National Council on Agriculture. Also, as was pointed out by one pundit last night — actually Natasha Bertrand of The Atlantic, who is one of the reporters regularly reaffirming her credibility during this fiasco — the Times Op-Ed policy requires proving that a writer making claims to have access to meetings such as are described in the anonymous essay actually had such access. Also, (and I think this was Rachel Maddow), whoever “anonymous” quotes in the essay has to have a pretty damn good idea of who he/she said that to.

(“There is literally no telling whether he might change his mind from one minute to the next,” a top official complained to me recently … .)

That withstanding I take a small amount of pride in my prediction that the full meltdown and a new epoch of craziness was fast approaching. (Here from February and here from June.) I said “late spring to early summer” and I’m pretty confident that the Trump-Putin summit in Helsinki in early July was the breaking point for a large number of D.C./White House regulars, an appalling demonstration of servitude that was quickly followed by both Trump attorney Michael Cohen and long-time tabloid crony David Pecker flipping on him and promising new fathomless tales of corruption, debauchery and incompetence.

So yeah, I’m a goddam seer. (New prediction: The Vikings will royally screw up a vital game and not win the Super Bowl.)

Also worth noting, a conversation on “Morning Joe” this morning, with ex-CIA director John Brennan, retired Admiral James Stavridis and old State Department hand Richard Haas — (i.e. not three twits on “Fox & Friends”) — was all about the very real possibility of Trump attempting some kind drunken-Nixon “wag the dog” action, distracting the public and rallying the goober base behind some absurd military action — and whether the military is now as insubordinate as “anonymous” claims the White House staff is to a guy who is so indisputably out of his depth.

So yes, “crazy time” has fully arrived, only to get crazier and possibly scarier in the weeks to come.

Hey! But how ’bout those Vikings?

Ellison, Ellison and More Ellison

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Clearly, Minnesota Republicans believe they’ve struck gold with Keith Ellison. As Dave Orrick of the Pioneer Press put it in a Labor Day story,

“Keith Ellison, Keith Ellison, Keith Ellison. It’s all about Keith Ellison, at least according a Republican narrative as part of the first wave of what promises to be a tide of political attack ads coming to Minnesota’s 2018 election season. Even in races where Ellison isn’t running, from the U.S. Senate high on the ballot down to state House races, he’s under attack.”

Not that this should come as a big surprise, the game of politics being what it is. To reiterate: in the midst of the #MeToo moment, arguably the largest and most significant cultural revolution going this decade, and minutes before last month’s primary election, Ellison was accused by the son of a woman — his live-in lady friend — of bad behavior, specifically of raging at her and dragging her off a bed during a domestic dispute.

That kind of thing never sounds good, even though no one outside of the two, uh, combatants has any real idea of what else was going on at the time that incident supposedly happened. (The son was not present during the alleged altercation.)

It is of course that “supposed” business where things got funky. Namely, there’s the fact the woman/victim (A:) claims it happened and (B:) she has video of it, but (C:) refuses to let anyone see it on the grounds that, (D:) as a self-proclaimed victim the public should simply believe her, fully accept her accusation and punish Ellison accordingly.

With apologies to Al Franken, #MeToo is morally weakened when we get to a point where women are under no obligation to prove their accusations.

For his part, Ellison has been startlingly emphatic. He says what she says not only never happened, but that no such video exists, two remarkably definitive statements that mean instant career death and permanent reputational ignominy if either are ever proven false. If he’s lying, it’s a gamble of mortal proportions.

(If the video does exist, the woman could quite easily strike a deal with journalists of her choosing to allow them to view it and verify it without posting it for public consumption.)

I’ve only met Ellison a couple of times, once for a fairly long interview prior to him being elected to Congress. My takeaway impression was that of an engaging, bright, cocky guy with plenty sufficient ego to endure a career in politics, where every adversary’s first order of business is to convince the public you’re come kind a cross between a liar, a pervert and a thief.

So, yeah. This latest thing is politics as usual.

But an interesting facet of this episode is the way standard issue Republicans, not Trumpist goobers, have so avidly seized on it as a talking point. While domestic abuse is always a potent political weapon, in this case once you’ve finished smirking at the outrage coming from the lips of folks never exactly in the vanguard of the women’s rights movement, you’re also reminded of their intense desire for anything … anything … that distracts the conversation from their complicity in the presence of Donald Trump in the White House.

I’ve been noting with some amusement how adamant traditional Republicans — and by that I mean familiar, neighborly, civic-minded old-school conservative types —  are to urge focus on local matters. To my ears, their passion for city and state issues has never been more committed.

And not that that is ever a bad thing. If there is a “Pink Wave” this November, with hundreds/thousands of female candidates swarming into elected office, that movement is swelling from the neighborhoods up and I’m entirely comfortable saying that the overall system will be stabilized we’ll all be much better off thanks to that kind of street level passion.

My point is really only how embarrassment and discomfort with Trump, and traditional Republicans’ essential role in failing to respond to his flagrant bigotry, misogyny and lack of qualifications in 2016 is manifesting itself two years later. As I say, these are people deservedly proud of the level of responsibility and good judgment they’ve shown throughout their adult lives.

But IMHO, there is a palpable sense of their mortification over how badly their judgment failed them — and all of us — in 2016. And, as I say, you feel this in their desire to ignore the Trump trickle-down effect in their 2018 local issues and candidates and keep polite conversations confined to zones more traditional and comfortable for them.

 

What I Was Too Dim to See in “Crazy Rich Asians”

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Being a sensitive guy in deep touch with my inner feminist I suggested to my bride the other day that I’d go with her to see “Crazy Rich Asians” the glitzy rom-com now cleaning up at the box office. This was an alternative to staying home with the lights off and curtains drawn watching Ingmar Bergman’s “Cries and Whispers” for the umpteenth time.

As a general rule I avoid rom-coms like an injection of hoof and mouth disease. Not so much that I’m opposed to either romance or comedy, but because every one is the same damned movie just re-set in different locations with different actors. Which means I sit in the theater checking off all the absolutely obligatory turns of plot and counting down to when I can unlock the wrist cuffs and go home.

But I was interested in “Crazy Rich Asians” because I had read so many reviews and “thinky” pieces — usually by writers with Asian names — celebrating the movie as not just a big breakthrough for Hollywood, namely an all-Asian cast up on thousands of screens across the country at the same moment, but a movie with a rich feel for unique nuances of Asian culture.

Really?

Not so much, say I, as a very white guy from rural Minnesota who does however have an appetite for well-stuffed dumplings. (You get hungry watching the movie.)

I grant you that the nuances of Asian culture may have been far too nuanced, too subtle or too fleeting for me to grasp. And that likewise, being clueless about mahjong I had no idea what kind of symbolism was at play when the strong and resourceful female lead sat down to confront her nemesis, the willful and powerful Tiger Mother of the impossibly flawless leading man. The male lead, son of the Tiger Mother, is played by a guy — actor/model Henry Golding — with a precise Oxford British accent and, it seemed to me, only the barest minimum of Asian physical characteristics.

As I’ve read, within the movie’s female characters — the American girl friend, the Tiger Mother and Tiger Mom’s imposing Empress Mother — is a valuable look at the unique Asian maternal culture too little understood by Western movie audiences.

So I’m dim. But the “commoner girlfriend” being denied full respect by the domineering mother of the leading man just didn’t strike me as anything close to “uniquely Asian”, much less any kind of nuanced. I mean, I’ve seen this exact story in dozens of movies featuring Jewish mothers, Hispanic mothers, British mothers, Lutheran Protestant mothers and hyper Catholic Italian mothers. I mean, it’s practically Basic Storyline #12.

“Crazy Rich Asians” is a formulaic rom-com, this time in Singapore. The two strong-willed women butt heads before — huge spoiler alert here — recognizing the strength and resolve of the other and patching things up to make way for the big heart-warming finale, which as usual involves lots of glamorous close-ups, hugging and kissing.

What “Crazy Rich Asians” seemed most like is a re-orientation of your standard Bollywood flick, where, as I say, impossibly flawless heroes and heroines, meet, separate and inevitably smooch for the grand finale, sending everyone home pleased to have forgotten about their root canal appointment (or Donald Trump) on Monday for a whole 90 minutes.

If there was something uniquely Asian about anything else going on — besides that mahjong game — that was way over my head, too.

I strongly suspect that if the movie had been titled just, “Crazy Asians”, it would only be playing on the second half of a double bill at the Film Society and wouldn’t already be teed up for two sequels. Why? Because the luxury-porn factor of that “Rich” thing strikes me as the true, singular driver of its appeal.

With the exception of the #MeToo era-smart and strong heroine everyone else is ridiculously, over-the-top, jade-and-pearl dripping rich. Scene after scene has the cast — all of whom look good in bikinis and swim trunks — racing around in Ferraris, personal helicopters, partying on private ocean-going cargo ships and waggling bags from every Coach and Chanel shop in high-end Singapore.

So if anyone was saying anything about either traditional or modern Asian culture other than they are as glitzed-out and consumer-crazed as any other culture given a few million renminbi of daddy’s money to play with, I missed that, too.

I get the desire of any Asian here in the West to promote the movie and encourage non-Asian Americans to get out and get a taste of something other than Aryan super heroes (with an occasional black guy) mopping the floor with cartoon villains. We should all check out how the other three billion live.

But, as a movie fan, and before I shut out the light and resume my private Bergman festival, I gotta tell you, if Jennifer Aniston and Ryan Reynolds had replaced the perfect, pimple-free stars of “Crazy Rich Asians” my and your understanding of Asian culture would not have changed one iota.

You want a feel for the lingering traditional mores of modern Asians? Check out anything by the great Wong Kar-wai .

And start with “In the Mood for Love.”*

*Spoiler alert #2. There are no Ferraris, private choppers or Chanel bags.

Can We Now, Finally, Talk About An Illegitimate Election?

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With yesterday’s one-two haymakers — personal attorney Michel Cohen going full “rat” and campaign manager (and career-long DC sleazeball) Paul Manafort getting nailed with eight felony convictions — only the most deluded Trumpist goober can still pretend our man in the Oval Office isn’t a criminal. More to the point, if you have been paying attention since way back when he was just a sleazy tabloid caricature, you know Donald “Drain the Swamp” Trump was a criminal before, during and after getting elected President of ‘Murica, USA.

In fact, as is now being confirmed in the starkest terms for those reluctant to believe, Trump’s criminality is directly related to him “winning” the presidency. Period. The guy’s naked illegality — first with paying off Bunnies and porn stars a fortnight before the election he won on the basis of 78,000 votes in three states — and second with whatever he actually did with the Rooskies in terms of illegal hacking, trading stolen e-mails and scamming Facebook cannot be separated from his ascension to the White House.

So, can we now have a serious, non-hysterical, fact-based and rational conversation about the legitimacy of the 2016 presidential election?

What does The Constitution have to say about a candidate engaging in A: Criminal pay-offs and B: Conspiracy with a hostile foreign power to achieve election?

From what I’ve read, not a lot in terms of invalidating his election in the first place.

The fact there is no clear legal mechanism much less any precedent for this situation has led most people to dismiss even the discussion. I mean, that isn’t how we play the game in this most exceptional of republics.

No matter how they win — whether Joe “The Prohibition Liquor Baron” Kennedy cooking a deal with Chicago mobsters to get out the dead vote in Cook County, or George W* being waved into 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue on a straight 5-4 partisan vote of the Supreme Court, we ‘Muricans are always admonished to accept the results with equanimity. Because … well, because that’s just how things are done here in the world’s greatest democracy.

Except that we’ve never had a situation where a candidate actively conspired with our foremost foreign adversary to get where he got. Bimbos? Sure. Rooskies? Not so much.

If you’re saying, “Whoa, Nelly! We haven’t got to that whole ‘collusion’ thing, yet,” I will only point out the fact that Trump and his bejeweled urchins have lived off the proceeds from business with Russian gangsters at least since he went belly up in Atlantic City and that that much has been laying out in plain sight for years. After that you can start factoring in the notorious meet up with the Rooskies in Trump Tower to talk, you know, “adoptions.”

Then for a special Super Duper Bonus Package you can imagine for maybe a half-second how much more vivid detail Team Mueller has on all this not even remotely sophisticated sleaze.

So what is the solution? There is no language or precedent for voiding Donald Trump’s election certificate on the basis of criminal fraud and conspiracy against the United States, and certainly none that would hand that certificate and the remainder of his term over to the candidate who actually won the popular vote by a large and convincing margin.

But if this lunatic farce continues to spiral out of control as it most certainly will with what Cohen will now tell Mueller, what Michael Flynn has already revealed to prosecutors and all the hammers that are going to drop on gormless little Donny Jr., Jared the human cipher and Ivanka the Princess of Entitlement, are we really going to sit still and accept the Trump kleptocracy being handed off to Mike Pence?

If Trump achieved the Presidency through criminal (and treasonous) means, those are the same means that put Pence there. (Never mind for the moment his own legal exposure over what he damn well had to have known about Mike Flynn and the Russians.)

With all the talk about a looming Supreme Court fight over whether Mueller can subpoena Trump, or whether a sitting President can be indicted, I think there’s an even more relevant conversation to be had about “suitable remedies” for an election decided on the basis of tawdry criminality and outright conspiracy against the Constitution.

A Basket of Quotes, Just a Hint of Which I’d Like to Hear from Tina Smith

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From life-long Republican Steve Schmidt, better known as the man who advised John McCain to select Sarah Palin as his running mate:

The two parties for a long time were not homogeneous ideologically. There were plenty of conservatives in the Democratic Party, and there were no small number of liberals in the Republican Party. Now, culturally, we’re in thrall to theocratic crackpots like Mike Huckabee and Franklin Graham and Jerry Falwell, where you’re able to justify the candidacy of a Roy Moore because you want to keep the Senate seat. The theocracy and crackpot sewer conservatism has taken over.

That’s not to mention the baby internment camps, the indecency, the cruelty, the meanness, the lying, the complicit nature of this Republican majority with an attack on the country that’s launched by the Russian Federation. So the Republican party of Teddy Roosevelt and John McCain and Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush is dead. It’s over. It doesn’t exist . It has been taken over, lock, stock, and barrel. For there to be any redemption of a right of center conservative party in the United States of America means the party of Trump must be destroyed politically.

It’s like a fire. Fires are a part of the ecosystem, part of the natural progress. And when the forest burns, it’s purified. There can be new growth. For there to be new growth of a conservative movement, of a right center party, the one that I joined in 1988, it needs to burn to the ground.”

From conservative columnist Michael Gerson in The Washington Post:

“In November, many Republican leaners and independents will face a difficult decision. The national Democratic Party under Nancy Pelosi and Charles E. Schumer doesn’t share their views or values. But President Trump is a rolling disaster of mendacity, corruption and prejudice. What should they do?

They should vote Democratic in their House race, no matter who the Democrats put forward. And they should vote Republican in Senate races with mainstream candidates (unlike, say, Corey Stewart in Virginia).

Why vote strategically in this case? Because American politics is in the midst of an emergency.

If Democrats gain control of the House but not the Senate, they will be a check on the president without becoming a threat to his best policies (from a Republican perspective) or able to enact their worst policies. The tax cut will stand. The Senate will still approve conservative judges. But the House will conduct real oversight hearings and expose both Russian influence and administration corruption. Under Republican control, important committees — such as Chairman Devin Nunes’s House Intelligence Committee — have become scraping, sniveling, panting and pathetic tools of the executive branch. Only Democratic control can drain this particular swamp.

Alternatively: If Republicans retain control of the House in November, Trump will (correctly) claim victory and vindication. He will have beaten the political performances of Bill Clinton and Barack Obama in their first midterms. He will have proved the electoral value of racial and ethnic stereotyping. He will have demonstrated the effectiveness of circuslike distraction. He will have shown the political power of bold, constant, uncorrected lies. And he will gain many more enablers and imitators.

Perhaps worst of all, a victorious Trump will complete his takeover of the Republican Party (which is already far along). Even murmured dissent will be silenced. The GOP will be fully committed to a 2020 presidential campaign conducted in the spirit of George C. Wallace — a campaign of racial division, of rural/urban division, of religious division, of party division that metastasizes into mutual contempt.

But this does not change the political and ethical reality. The only way to save the GOP is to defeat it in the House. In this case, a Republican vote for a Democratic representative will be an act of conscience.”

From conservative icon George Will, also in The Washington Post:

Donald Trump, with his feral cunning, knew. The oleaginous Mike Pence, with his talent for toadyism and appetite for obsequiousness, could, Trump knew, become America’s most repulsive public figure. And Pence, who has reached this pinnacle by dethroning his benefactor, is augmenting the public stock of useful knowledge. Because his is the authentic voice of today’s lickspittle Republican Party, he clarifies this year’s elections: Vote Republican to ratify groveling as governing.

Noting that [Joe] Arpaio was in his Tempe audience, Pence, oozing unctuousness from every pore, called Arpaio “another favorite,” professed himself “honored” by Arpaio’s presence, and praised him as “a tireless champion of . . . the rule of law.” Arpaio, a grandstanding, camera-chasing bully and darling of the thuggish right, is also a criminal, convicted of contempt of court for ignoring a federal judge’s order to desist from certain illegal law enforcement practices. Pence’s performance occurred eight miles from the home of Sen. John McCain, who could teach Pence — or perhaps not — something about honor. …

It is said that one cannot blame people who applaud Arpaio and support his rehabilitators (Trump, Pence, et al.), because, well, globalization or health-care costs or something. Actually, one must either blame them or condescend to them as lacking moral agency. Republicans silent about Pence have no such excuse.

There will be negligible legislating by the next Congress, so ballots cast this November will be most important as validations or repudiations of the harmonizing voices of Trump, Pence, Arpaio and the like. Trump is what he is, a floundering, inarticulate jumble of gnawing insecurities and not-at-all compensating vanities, which is pathetic. Pence is what he has chosen to be, which is horrifying.”

 

And finally (for now) from liberal blogger Kevin Drum at Mother Jones:

“Today, the Republican Party exists for one and only one purpose: to pass tax cuts for the rich and regulatory rollbacks for corporations. They accomplish this using one and only method: unapologetically racist and bigoted appeals to win the votes of the heartland riff-raff they otherwise treat as mere money machines for their endless mail-order cons. Like it or not, this is the modern Republican Party. It no longer serves any legitimate purpose. It needs to be crushed and the earth salted behind it, while a new conservative party rises to take its place. This new party should be conservative; brash; ruthless when it needs to be; as simpleminded as any major party usually is; and absolutely dedicated to making Democrats look like idiots. There should be no holds barred except for one: no appeals to racism. None. Not loud ones, not subtle ones. Whatever else it is, it should be a conservative party genuinely open to any person of any color.

… I’d like to make clear just how long this has been brewing. I know this is hardly news to anyone who reads this blog, but as I approach my 60th birthday I can say that half my life has now been marked by Rush Limbaugh, the Drudge Report, Newt Gingrich, the Vince Foster suicide, Whitewater, the Rose law firm, Filegate, the Christmas card list scandal, Fox News, Monica Lewinsky, impeachment, the Florida recount, Swift boating, the GOP’s partywide effort to suppress black votes via photo ID laws, birtherism, the unanimous Republican rejection of the 2009 stimulus, Benghazi, Emailgate, Merrick Garland, and now the endless haze of racism, bigotry, and corruption surrounding Donald Trump.

This is very much a non-exhaustive list. But every one of these things is either a baseless ‘scandal’, an example of ethical rot, or part of a deliberate media effort to lie and mislead. These are the highlights of the Republican Party over the past three decades. No political party with a rap sheet like this deserves to be walking around free.”

 

And When I Looked Up, MPR Had Disappeared

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So I see “Magnum P.I.” is the latest geezer hit to get the re-boot treatment. Fans of TV as it once was already have a new “Hawaii 5-0” up and running, have seen “Roseanne” rise from the dead … die … and be born again (as “The Connors”, without the queen crazy) are awaiting the restoration of  “Murphy Brown.”

Since I never had any interest in any of these shows when I was (much) younger, I’m a bad judge of who they’re meant to entertain in 2018. But my wild guess is that none of the host networks in any rare moment of candor expects these shows to connect with your Gen X-ers, hipster Millennials or really anyone without an AARP card. That’s because what’s on sale here is — like Classic Rock on the radio — nostalgia for the aged, the now creaky folks eager to recall the time when their knees and hips and cataracts weren’t artificial.

Anyone younger than that has something in the range of 450-500 scripted TV series sprawling across dozens of cable channels and streaming apps providing comedy or drama far … far … more sophisticated, complex and involving than a reboot of color-by-numbers formulas anchored in an era 30 years out of date.

Somehow this nostalgia business — which will make a few bucks for the major networks — reminded me of how my own media consumption has shifted even over the past year. I mean, I don’t call watching a network series anytime in the past 10 years. “The Good Wife”? Never saw it. Oh wait. I did follow “Lost”. But when that ended (badly), so did my relationship with the ABCs, CBSs, NBCs and Foxs of the world, except of course for sports.

The main reason? The profound lack of imagination and audacity in storytelling. Think of it as an evolutionary standstill. Point being, times have changed network TV hasn’t. What worked in 1985 works today only with people with an impractical fixation with lost youth.

Other than a few gay characters it’s been years since there’s been anything in broadcast programming that offered any real sense of cultural change, suspense or comedic surprise. Why? Because everything, as they say in football, is being played between the 40 yard-lines. Right in the safe, dull, bland, familiar middle. It’s a safe, friction-less zone of perfect predictability, where everything is designed to reassure viewers that a kind of rule-abiding Eisenhower-era fantasy world still exists. Any viewer looking for a representation of life with the complexity of what they see around them every day has no choice but tune out and look elsewhere … and they’ve found it in abundance in shows like “The Sopranos”, “The Wire”, “Breaking Bad”, “Game of Thrones”, “Mad Men”, “Billions”, “The Terror”  and (a current favorite) HBO’s “Succession.”

In that vein, it occurred to me, while driving up to the cabin recently, that it has been at least four or five months since I’ve listened to anything on MPR, once the last go-to broadcast news source of any value in the Twin Cities. But MPR (and NPR) have now been entirely, and I do mean entirely, replaced by podcasts, all of which offer a far greater depth of reporting and analysis on a wider range of topics, from politics to science to entertainment than anything public radio can (or will) do within its self-determined parameters.

And yeah, this is Trump’s fault, too.

Anyone following the sprawling Trump story is vividly aware of characters and facets and the interplay between cast members that gets only passing “headline” mention on broadcast TV and only slightly more from public radio. (Honest analysis of the story puts hyper-cautious non-profit news outlets into the “bias” zone, y’know.) As with all complex fictional dramas, part of the appeal of the Trump story is figuring out who got to who and what made what happen, as well as building a notion of how it all ends. But most of that — way too much of it if you’re following closely and are, as I say, already familiar with the timelines and characters — is missing from public radio, and the network news.

Where it exists for me today are on podcasts like:

The Ezra Klein Show   (Check out the hour-long Aug. 2 conversation with Adam Davidson of The New Yorker. Note the part where they both express fear of what follows Trump, namely “competent Trump”. Just as corrupt, but not nearly the fool. Klein’s earlier conversation with author Michael Pollan, on his new book, “How to Change Your Mind” is maybe the most fascinating thing I’ve listened to in years.)

The Josh Marshall podcast.  (Linked is a recent one with Marcy Wheeler, a startling savant on dates and interrelations of characters in the Trump-Russia drama.)

The 538 Politics Podcast (The episode linked has Nate Silver and his crew playing with various theories of the Trump case. The key character IMHO is Clare Malone, the gal in the boys club with a very sharp and clever wit.)

Pod Save America. (Kind of the monster hit of political podcasts, starring ex-Obama speechwriter Jon Favreau and cronies.)

“Why is This Happening?”, with Chris Hayes. (This one, starring the MSNBC host, is newer and bit wonkier. But this particular conversation with Amy Chua, author of “The Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother” was a thoroughly satisfying discussion of tribalism in American culture.)

The Lawfare Podcast. (At 334 episodes and counting, it’s kind of a granddaddy of the species. This particular episode, hosted by the conservative Heritage Institute is a fascinating and scary look at what’s coming next in fake news, namely “deep fake” video. Probably in time for this November’s elections. (Also, for a change of pace, here’s another talking with scientists about whether we should communicate with aliens — of the outer space variety.)

“I Have to Ask” with Isaac Chotiner of Slate. (Linked is his conversation with Davidson of The New Yorker.)

Brain Science, with Ginger Campbell MD. (Invariably interesting discussions with scientists on brain research and phenomena. The linked episode is with neuropsychologist Elkhonon Goldberg, (I had never heard of him), discussing creativity and — very relevant to the appeal of fake news — how in some humans novelty overwhelms the right hemisphere’s critical function.)

Celebration Rock. Hosted by Steven Hyden of 93X here in the Twin Cities. (Linked his Hyden talking, with customary intelligence, with Don DeLuca of the Philadelphia Inquirer about my favorite band of the moment, The War on Drugs.)

With all that and thousands more like them, the appeal of a new dude with less of a porn ‘stash and a newer Ferrari is lost on me.

 

I’ll Take Richard Painter in the Primary

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Prior to busting out of town for some desert road trip nirvana, I dropped by a “Pint With (Richard) Painter” event at Lake Monster Brewing in St. Paul. Besides responding favorably to the (former Republican’s) indignation over the gushing Trump sewer, I was curious to see what kind of crowd he was drawing in his long-shot fight to defeat appointed incumbent Tina Smith.

Expecting the usual sad collection of white-haired ideologues and sweated-up activists, I was pleasantly surprised to find myself among 150-200 people representative of a fairly broad age and gender spectrum — although no black folks that I could see.

The brewery venue was noisy and Painter — George W. Bush’s ex-ethics attorney — was ill-served by a cheesy sound system. Restlessness set in fast as he opened with a detailed explanation of the PolyMet land swap up north and Smith’s carefully calibrated position on that issue. Catching only every third word, those of us on the fringes sipped our beverages and waited for the good stuff.

The crowd got what it very clearly wanted to hear when Painter segued to Trump and the appropriate response to the most corrupt and disgraceful administration of our lifetime. A roar went up when he said, “we’ve got to get aggressive with this”. Another, even louder roar went up when he mentioned “Al Franken” and what the ex-Senator would probably have been saying and doing in the summer of 2018. In fact the applause for Franken was prolonged.

I met Painter last spring when we were both part of symposium up at Itasca Community College. (Painter was the keynote speaker. I was a presenter on “Fake News.”) Our rooms were on the same floor of a local hotel and I cornered him on the elevator. I asked him what he thought of my scenario that the key to driving Trump from office is not the “pee tape”, but rather an indisputable mortal threat to his money, the essence of his “brand” and ego, and if he could imagine a situation where Rod Rosenstein, armed with Mueller’s report, came to Trump with the message that he and his entire family of grifters could either be prosecuted down to the last nickel of their looted treasuries or he could resign. His choice.

Painter laughed. “I’d be okay with that.”

Combined with what he’s said as a talking head on cable news and the speech he gave in Grand Rapids — which was indignant and cathartically “unmodulated” by the standards of your average professional liberal — that’s everything I know about Painter. And it’s enough for me to vote for him over Smith in the August 14 primary.

Like many in the crowd at Lake Monster Brewing (nice joint BTW) “the Al Franken thing” will never sit well with me. The voters of Minnesota were Franken’s employers. We were the ones to decide whether his transgressions in the #MeToo moment required removing him from office, not a cabal of naked opportunists like New York Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand. (And thank you Amy Klobuchar for your courageous collegial resistance to that purge.)

Tina Smith personally had no role that I know of in pushing Franken out the door. But Smith is without question a poster child for the, as I say, professional liberal class that did. These are a strata of bureaucratized, corporatized characters whose success in public life is directly related to their ability to take a belt sander to any word, phrase or facial expression that betrays honest human emotion. Emotion, like for example, visceral outrage and indignation at unprecedented corruption and god knows what else. (See Trump-Putin private meeting Helsinki).

The irony for me is that I argued to my Republican neighbors here in Edina that their best reason to vote for Hillary Clinton was “competent management.”  (I.e. “She’ll protect your portfolio”). Smith, the former Planned Parenthood exec and insider’s insider policy wonk would be perfectly fine in normal times. As in: be your numbingly bland self lady, just vote my issues.

But we aren’t there right now, and won’t be until everything Trump is bio-washed and detoxified from the gears of government. And that requires (constant) heat and pressure from high-level elected officials.

Do you see Tina Smith possessing any ability to apply those qualities?

While out cruising the empty highways of west Texas I heard of the flap between the DFL and Painter, and laughed out loud at the charge that because Painter would not profess fealty to the party sigil he must be treated as a toxic antigen.

Talk about professional liberal protocol.

I strongly suspect that the “fealty to party” thing is another endangered virtue in this unprecedented era. I don’t know about you, but in this moment I’ll vote for anyone committed to terminating this Trump “crap” (as Painter often calls it) sooner rather than later.

Smith has piled up something like 15 times the money Painter is running on, and has demonstrated no willingness whatsoever to face him in a one-on-one debate. (If Ms. Smith is too worried to lock up with Richard Painter, a well-educated lawyer and experienced bureaucrat, why would anyone think she’s up to the task of gutting right-wing nut-jobbery here or in D.C.?)

The betting line says Smith wins the primary easily. But she’ll do it without my vote.

 

” … by a government that had no pride.”

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Chrissie Hynde and the (mostly new) Pretenders were in good form last night at The State. Chrissie’s voice is still crisp and her two young guitar players have a remarkable feel for her material, while the only other surviving original, drummer Martin Chambers, looked to be having as much fun wailing on the tom-toms as the first time I saw them 40 years ago. It was a good upbeat night for geezer rock after a thoroughly disgusting day.

I didn’t take a poll, but my guess would be that more than a few of the crowd happily exchanging tales of bad rock ‘n roll behavior of yore had seen or by the cocktail hour heard of The Debacle in Helsinki. It was a truly depressing sight. The President of the United States … using phrases like “very strong and powerful” to flatter Vladimir [bleepin’] Putin, while demeaning his own military and intelligence services, the Justice Department and every adult with a high school degree who can spell “Make America Great Again” without eating their Crayons.

By now people like me, you know, characters way … waaaay … over on the fantastical fringe, have been gobsmacked by Donald Trump’s flagrant stupidity and fraudulence so many times that we can’t imagine him ever saying or doing anything that has the same effect on his Goober base.

(And yes, I know how the Tina Smiths of the world wring their hands and urge restraint at such intemperate language — for fear, you know, they might get really upset and do something, you know, bad. But screw it. If Trump’s crowd was merely ignorant, that’d be one thing, and I might give them a pass. But by now there is no question that they are mainly just seething with plain old George Wallace-style racial resentment. So, yeah. [Bleep] it. “Goobers.”)

A word gaining currency in the past couple weeks is “maximalist”. This in the context of imagining how bad this Trump crap really is, and how much worse it is going to get before he feels the weight of justice. Jonathan Chait at New York magazine wrote a long piece last week that got a lot of attention for going where our “responsible” press has generally avoided, to date.

Based largely on what is already on the record, what is known to anyone following the available facts of story and is certainly only the very tippiest of tips of the big, hulking spray-tanned iceberg in the eyes of Robert Mueller, we know Donald Trump’s business “empire” (the true size of which he keeps secret) has floated on Russian oligarch/gangster money for well over 20 years. From there common logic requires you to imagine what Trump will do to protect that empire — the essence of him — and what Vladimir Putin will continue to extract from him in exchange.

And forget “the pee tape”. At this point that would be just another … gobsmacker … that would have no effect on GooberNation. (“Fake video!”). You and I and every late night comic would turn cartwheels of delight. But it wouldn’t change a thing. Just as impeachment won’t change anything as long as more than 33 Republican senators see a poll of their voters showing ferocious approval of Trump holding above 50%.

At the risk of repeating myself, reprehensible as he is, Trump is smart enough to know his legal goose is cooked. His new attorney, Emmett Flood, would be engaging in malpractice if he hasn’t by now examined the situation — the money-laundering, the obstruction of justice vis-a-vis James Comey, etc. — and advised his client of the dire precariousness of the situation. Whether he has already used the phrase, “You are [bleeped], dude”, I can’t say. But it’d be accurate if he has, and explain Trump’s even more naked embrace lately of the only people who can save him.

They would be: Putin and The Goobers.

In their two hour-plus secret/no notes/no recordings meeting I have no problem taking the “maximalist” view that Putin assured Trump that techniques his people used to swing the 2016 election have been refined even further, thanks of course to no coordinated pushback from Trump’s government. And that all the algorithms capable of feeding individual Goobers precisely the bullshit insanity they gobble like soggy corn nuts is teed up and ready to roll on this next election. It will be, the promise goes, enough to keep the House in Republican hands and guarantee Trump a full four-year term.

And what does Putin get? Well, he’s already getting it. Trump’s senile-bull-in-the-china-shop act has Europeans thinking out loud about how to go about their business without the United States. NATO is reeling. The Brits are still trying to figure out what to do with the crowbar Putin’s hackers jammed into their Brexit vote. Mini-trumps are in power in Poland, Hungary at Italy, largely because of the refugee (immigrants!) crisis set off by Putin in Syria and North Africa.

And sure, while our Senate can vote for tougher sanctions on Putin and his mob boss money-laundering buddies, Trump’s crew has myriad ways to prevent anything of the sort from really happening.

So yeah. If I’m Trump, and I know that I’m toast every way you can spin it legally, what I do — the only thing I can do — is keep toggling back and forth between keeping the guy who got me there happy, with whatever he wants, and making sure my message to GooberNation — “Where are Hillary’s servers!” — is in tight synch with what Putin’s hackers and social media bots have greased and ready to go in November.

That’s what you call “maximalist” thinking, kids.

 

So I had a fleeting moment of encouragement last night as Chrissie (the pride of Akron, Ohio) and crew chugged through her classic hit, “My City Was Gone”.

Everyone in the place new the lyrics …

“Well I went back to Ohio
But my family was gone
I stood on the back porch
There was nobody home
I was stunned and amazed
My childhood memories
Slowly swirled past
Like the wind through the trees
A, o, oh way to go Ohio

I went back to Ohio
But my pretty countryside
Had been paved down the middle
By a government that had no pride … “

 

At that line, a roar went up among the faithful.

I can’t say how many Goobers are Pretenders fans. But if any were in The State last night they were probably even more mystified and befuddled than usual.

 

One Just for Us Kubrick Geeks

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As the lights went up for intermission I turned to get a good look at my people. People with whom I clearly share a bona fide kinship. Modern, connected America being all about sub-sets of sub-sets of smaller and tighter cults of like-thinkers, “these people”, I thought, “must be mine.” Who else would tuck into a theater on the hottest afternoon of summer to see a 50 year-old movie most likely for the umpteenth time.

Heading toward the lobby I found myself following a very tall, very large blonde woman. Open-toed pumps with two-inch heels, a light summery white dress with dainty floral patterned trim, a small white hand bag held delicately by the handle and a tight, prim page-boy hair cut.  But tall. And large. Easily 6′ 2″ and, um, not obese, but definitely large-boned.

As I considered going over and asking her how many times she’d seen “2001: A Space Odyssey”, or if this was a first, since it was in town (at the Emagine Willow Creek, now held over a second week) in 90% of its original splendor — 70 mm film, with immaculately preserved color and definition, but not in Cinerama — she turned toward me. And despite the carefully applied lipstick and eye shadow, revealed just the barest hint of a 3 o’clock shadow. That and an Adam’s apple.

A fellow Stanley Kubrick geek, of the prim, put together and seasonally appropriate trans variety. You know, my people.

I’m a little sheepish about saying out loud how many times I’ve seen “2001”. But, what the hell, in theaters alone we’re closing in on 60. That’s um, let’s see … carry the three … roughly 150 hours of my life or nearly an entire week.

While there was once a phase of just going, usually in a moderately-to-highly enhanced state, to be pulled along on “the ultimate trip”, the constant overriding appeal has always been the admiration — the pleasurable sensation — of the film’s beauty, which is directly connected to an appreciation of the craft that made it.. It’s beautiful because it is so well made, and being so beautifully composed makes it beautiful.

“2001`” was consciously designed as a thing of beauty, with Kubrick describing it in terms of a symphony of cinema. (You can argue a great symphony elicits emotion and intellectual response with the command of only one sense, sound. While film, “2001” in particular, interweaves sound with image and all the photo-chemical balances available to the medium.)

And far from diminishing, the beauty of the movie — its concept, imagination, technical invention and audacity (three and a half years in production with $10.5 million of a publicly-traded studio’s money — $80 million today) — is as vivid as when it was released (to scathing reviews) in 1968. What’s more, “2001” remains today genuinely unparalleled, without valid comparison, certainly by any other mere “sci-fi” movie.

Not that I didn’t watch it — okay, twice last week — and imagine what The Maestro might do with it today if he had a chance to apply digital fixes to the few things beyond his control in the mid-Sixties.

Kubrick’s stated goal was a completely realistic sense of being in space, as best anyone could imagine it years before any human left low-earth orbit. The cliche movie word today is “immersive”, which I assume Kubrick would have accepted, considering his decision to shoot it for projection on gigantic curving Cinerama screens. (RIP Cooper Theater.)

The print being shown at Willow Creek is nearly perfect in terms of original color balance. Beautiful subtleties of color — ambers, ochres and muted yellows — in the African landscape in “The Dawn of Man” sequence are again visible after decades of being lost in washed-out, scratched-up 35 mm prints.

Tiny figures moving about the space station as the PanAm shuttle lines up for docking, and in the moon base Clavius as the bulbous Aries transporter is lowered, like a head on a platter, into the vast underground hangar are now clearly articulated.

 

Everywhere the nearly pristine quality of the print restores the remarkable depth Kubrick always sought with his use of wide-angle, deep-focus lenses, especially in interior scenes.

As it is, the effect is very close to 3-D, which I strongly suspect would have been an option had the technology been (a lot) better than the cheesy junk it was in 1965-68.

At this point, Kubrick and “2001” are held in pretty much the same regard as Van Gogh and “The Starry Night”. Imitations are rampant but no one would ever consider “touching up” the original canvas itself.

But … if someone, like Christopher “Inception” Nolan or James “Avatar” Cameron were to take on a digital-reconstruction of “2001”, as, you know, a student’s homage to the master, an “unauthorized enhancement” of “2001” as Stanley Kubrick himself very, very likely would have preferred, based on everything we know about what he was going for, it would be a service to cinematic posterity.

For example, Kubrick would certainly be open to color-correcting for the “Dawn of Man” sequences where it is too obvious that the foreground action is taking place on a sound stage. The stage was lit as though in shadow from surrounding rocks, with the Namibian landscapes behind projected through the actors in their ape costumes. There’s a digital fix for that.

More glaring, in both the opening “Blue Danube” sequence and at the end when the Star Child floats back from his transmogrification, is the indiscernible white-ish blue blob that is meant to be planet Earth.

Actual film footage of the planet at that distance — maybe 20,000 miles out — wasn’t available in the mid-Sixties. But compare Earth as we see it in “2001” to what director Alfonso Cuaron and cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki did in “Gravity”, with the resource of countless hours of HiDef imagery available to them. Instead of an indistinguishable over-exposed celestial object, “Gravity’s” audience can easily see the shape of specific land masses, the lights of cities and coastlines. Apply the impact of that realism — especially as the Star Child contemplates what to do with his beautiful home and it’s ill-evolved inhabitants — and it’s unimaginable that Kubrick wouldn’t say, “[Bleep] yeah, that’s the shot I want!”

A digital fix could be applied there quite easily.

The biggest fix, certainly in terms of “immersiveness” and realism would be a big up-date in the soundtrack. The print at Willow Creek (supervised by Nolan), booms with the crispness of old, but there’s still only so much separation you can get with the limited digitizing they did off the celluloid film’s sound track.

Somehow there’s a way to toy with that, enhancing for example the threatening growl of the leopard in “The Dawn of Man” sequences, terrifying the man-apes huddled in their dried river bed, by pushing the roar out of speakers in the far reaches of the theater, a la Dolby Atmos. Likewise, “immersiveness” would be well served with more sound separation in the interior scenes, especially in the space vehicles with their subtle symphony of beeps and bleeps and burps.

Other than that, amazingly, there’s very little else the film more “contemporary”.

I was entertaining some of this as I returned to my seat after intermission. I lost track of the large, prim, trans blonde. But my attention was drawn to another of my people, a ringer for Jeff Dowd, the inspiration for Jeff Bridges’ “Dude” in “The Big Lebowski”. Maybe 60, wearing a loud Hawaiian shirt with long frazzled hair, the poor guy had obviously lost track of where he had been sitting. Wandering back and forth, finally some friend spotted him and yelled out.

The guy’s head snapped up. He raised a fist.

 

 

 

“Stanley!” he shouted. “The man!.”

 

 

 

 

 

Face It, We May Have to “Go Low” to Stop Kennedy’s Replacement

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The past few nights I’ve been binge-watching “Billions”, the Showtime series starring Paul Giamatti as the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York obsessed with taking down a hedge fund billionaire, played by Damian Lewis. There’s a lot to like about the show, (and it gets much better in the second season), but close to the heart of the drama is Giamatti’s character struggling to stay within the lines of propriety in pursuit of a criminal who is every bit his tactical equal and far, far better financed.

Some times, if there’s only person playing the game “the right way”, the rules are a serious impediment to winning. And not winning means truly nefarious activity prospers even more than it already is, exerting an even deeper and more insidious effect on hundreds of thousands if not millions of innocent people.

You can see where this is going.

With Donald Trump being handed the opportunity to appoint a second Supreme Court justice in only 17 months, liberals/progressives/Democrats, whatever you want to call anyone who isn’t an evangelical Trumpist, are staring at a moment of moral reckoning attached to a seismic event.

One more Trump justice, very likely someone relatively young with a good chance at a 20-30 year run on the top bench, means the Court’s balance will shift well out of balance for the foreseeable future. That kind of keel-turning puts not just Roe v. Wade, but any control of dark money in politics, environmental protection, gun control, gay rights … and on and on … in serious, stark jeopardy.

So yeah, elections matter. (And with that thought in mind, let’s pause here and revisit the fact that the 78,000 votes in three states that handed the election to Trump were dwarfed by the numbers of the high-minded and naive who voted for Jill Stein having bought and sold the argument that Hillary Clinton was the second coming of the Gambino crime family.)

As most of us know, a variation of that Purity Of Essence mentality afflicts the entire Democratic establishment. Certainly to the extent of a willingness to resort to the kind of utterly shameless but effective tactics Mitch McConnell used in denying a vote on Merrick Garland in 2016.

That sort of thing is, you know, “low”. And “we” always “go high.”

But this heart attack serious. Particularly vulnerable are protections for all sorts of chronically at-risk constituents liberals/progressives/Democrats claim — claim — to be so concerned for and devoted to. Failing to stick a knife, even a nakedly low-minded knife, into this Court choice means, quite literally, capitulating (again) to powerful regressive forces ideologically opposed to the interests in those particular citizens.

By last night the usual Democrats were making the usual noises about “holding” McConnell to the same standard he applied to Garland, and denying him a vote until after the next Senate is seated in January. The usual verbiage of “appealing” to Republican colleagues, “reaching across the aisle”, “hoping” that Republican senators “will do the right thing” was making the rounds of cable chat shows and churning up a sickening knot in my stomach.

“Reaching across” and “hoping” is the same as accepting defeat.

Yes, a firestorm of public protest — from the usual cultural liberals — will crank up a lot of emotion over this. But I have no confidence that anyone in the current Democratic establishment has either the reptilian guile or the raw Darwinian instinct to stick one of their manicured hands deep into the septic system of politics and stop this next deployment of a weapon of bona fide mass destruction.

I’d use the example of Lyndon Johnson, a classic ratf**ker. Johnson would resort to anything. But Johnson usually had the benefit of a majority somewhere.

Which means your Chuck Schumers and Chris Murphys and Diane Feinsteins are going to have to reach down even deeper for a game-changer, for something ordinarily so obnoxious few parents would be proud to tell their children it is the “fair” and “honest” thing to do. (As though real-world everyday politics always are.)

In “Billions” Giamatti’s US Attorney believes in the law, despises the parasitic power elite kiting money back and forth for their own fabulous gain and to the detriment of all the common chumps too honest/lazy to get in the game of stone cold killers. (Giamatti’s guy also has some basic male issues with his wife and her affiliations, but I’ll let that go for the moment.)

The point is: from time to time Giamatti wrestles with the entirely rational logic that you don’t stop a mob boss and his lethal capos with a noble assertion of the Boy Scout Oath.

The Pot is Reaching Boil Phase

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My prediction that it’d be about now we’d begin to see the Berlusconi-antics of the Trump kleptocracy reach full boil is holding up pretty well. Maybe not exactly as I was thinking four months ago, but well enough to note the high rate of agitation.

The emotional power of this obscene family separation crisis down on the border — the latest in a long list of crises entirely self-created by Team Trump, especially his low-key Goebbels-like “advisor” Stephen Miller — has the dual effect of, A: Re-reassuring “the base”, a.k.a. The Goobers, that Trump is still everything they and their parents before them have dreamed of in a strong white leader, and B: Deflecting attention from the Robert Mueller “witch hunt.”

And it’s working.

Trump’s polling numbers — deeply valued by a ratings-obsessed ego maniac — are rising. The Base and a smattering of traditional, tribal Republicans are firming up around his ankles, encouraged, as usual, by a guy who “keeps the promises he made”, which in this case is to keep out everybody who isn’t known by name at a Lake Charles, Louisiana Waffle House.

Naturally Trump is invigorated by this rise and solidifying of his numbers. Which explains his even more aggressive disregard for truth and decency.

I had calculated — and still do — that the indictment of Michael Cohen (or even more delicious, Jared Kushner) would be the trip wire that set off the full Trump IED. At that point he’d spiral into unfettered neo-Mussolini demagoguery and “hereby” order The Base to take up arms against, well, I don’t know who for sure, but any minority or liberal will do.

Cohen’s indictment remains inevitable and imminent, and there is zero doubt that Trump’s real lawyers, (not Rudy Giuliani), have warned him that both Mueller and the Southern District of New York have all the ingredients necessary or a slam dunk case of long-term fraud and corruption against both Cohen and him. Moreover, his flagrant and comically unsophisticated money laundering scams with Russian gangsters is more cheap grease for Mueller’s collusion probe.

Point being, Trump has no viable legal strategy. He never has. All he has is obstruction and politics. He can do whatever he can to delay and divert investigations and indictments. That’s it, lawyer-wise. But in the end he knows that everything will come down to how fervently (and perhaps even violently) The Base will support him in the face of all the revelations to come.

Because, as we see every day, even with this “children ripped from their mothers’ arms” episode, because The Base loves this there simply aren’t enough Republicans in Congress, or at the state level, brave enough to peep a word of disagreement. One step out of cadence with their Dear Orange Leader and they’ll be on the receiving end of a tweet telling Goober Nation they are a “stooge” and to “hereby” vote for the other guy.

You have to laugh at poor Ted Cruz, aka the Single Most Loathed Creature on The Hill, who has been forced by a credible opponent (Texas Democrat Beto O’Rourke) to garp up a lip-service bill reversing Trump/Miller’s “not a policy” policy. Once this moment passes it’ll be fascinating, in a nauseating sort of way, to listen to Cruz back pedal and explain this gross disloyalty to the Goober Borg as an aberration. You know, some kind of Walter White-like fugue state.

But while 90% of self-proclaimed Republican voters, (i.e. 40% or less of the actual electorate), are still all in for Trump, the temperature of antipathy of voters outside The Goober Bubble for Trump (and Miller and Scott Pruitt and Kellyanne Conway and Sarah Sanders and all the other White House gargoyles) is rising quickly.

It may be Trump’s improving poll numbers as much as this family separation story, but my sense is that garden variety “Trump haters” have lately moved beyond dismissal and disgust to actual hate. Put in vulgar terms that everyone can understand, the attitude today is, “This shit has gone on too long and far enough. These bastards not only have to be stopped, they have to be crushed.”

As an aside, it’ll be interesting to see how low-key, standard-issue, machine-bred Democrats like Tina Smith respond to this temperature spike among likely voters. The bet is Smith in particular is so genetically programmed for Mondale-era politesse she’ll leave the exploitation of visceral disgust/hate of Trumpism to Richard Painter.

Would you give that away?

As for a resolution to this latest immigration crisis, I can imagine Homeland Security Kirstjen Nielsen resigning, having thoroughly disgraced herself in front of everyone who doesn’t think of Mountain Dew and Coors Light as a formal cocktail. But I don’t see Trump accepting defeat on this issue in any shape or form, no matter how it plays out.

He doesn’t have to.

I suspect Miller is telling him The Base will accept any theory of the case he offers. Ever.

Even if the “zero tolerance” separation is reversed, if Trump wants to say his strategy worked, the Democrats caved, the wall has been built, illegal immigration (hell, all immigration) has stopped and all those vicious MS-13 toddlers have been sent off to some SuperMax lockdown, that fantasy will be accepted within The Goober Bubble. In there, Laura Ingraham, Sean Hannity, Tucker Carlson and Alex Jones will be reading from the same script, “revealing” how videos of kids in cages (or kids being returned to their parents) are in fact “crisis actors” in “doctored videos.”

I still have roughly a month left in my “late spring to mid-summer” window for a Pinatubo-like eruption of next-level craziness.

But the trend lines are looking good. I mean, “bad.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Nick I Knew

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I don’t want to belabor the similarities between Tom Wolfe and Nick Coleman, but since they’ve both passed within the same moment there are a couple qualities worth offering up for inspection.

There’s no question Wolfe and Coleman shared a distaste often bordering on contempt for meek and restrained conventional journalism. The world was more vibrant and nuanced and, hell, theatrical than what your average daily broad sheet was describing to you.

They also shared a level of self-confidence that egged them on to conflicts with peers and cultural figures they regarded as too immune to fair comment. A good, righteous battle required an adversary of substance.

Nick was a friend I met back in the early Eighties when he was still the TV critic for the Tribune. I had been reading him faithfully for sometime before our mutual friend David Carr got us together, most likely for drinks, most likely at Moby Dick’s or some other unsanitized dungeon Carr was patronizing at the time.

 

 

Unlike every other TV critic I read as I kicked around the country, Coleman was scabrously funny. He didn’t see his role as a stenographic PR desk for the “stars”, be they Hollywood sitcom starlets or local TV anchors. His job description said “critic” and he flashed that license with relish.

I know it earned him a red circle around his name with the Hollywood PR machine. Nick Coleman: Not a reliable asset, if you know what I mean. (Long after he left the beat former colleagues around the country were telling hilarious stories of Coleman, in big ballroom interview sessions, commandeering the mic and gleefully vivisecting some pompous network executive or creative wunderkind du jour.)

He and I grew closer in the two years Carr, Eric Eskola and I produced a weekly half hour media talk show, “The Facts As We Know Them”, on cable access. Coleman was a regular guest, and as you’d expect from a guy whose father was a prominent politician, the most dangerous place in the studio was between Nick and the camera.

But we kept asking him back because, A: Preening for the camera was what we were all doing, B: Coleman could tell a damn good story and therefore hold the room, and C: His factuality was way better than average, even allowing for plenty of righteous hyperbole.

Like Wolfe, Nick was genetically coded for center stage. That fact of character may well have been to key to his undoing as time passed and newspaper managers became steadily less comfortable with big, in-your-face personalities with lots of thoughts on every imaginable topic.

The guy had a very unique career path. As dyed-in-the-green Kerry wool a son-of-St. Paul as you’ll ever find, Nick leveraged his popularity (among readers, if not editors and disapproving, convention-bound newsroom colleagues) over to the Pioneer Press and then back to the Strib yeas later.

While at the Pioneer Press, we shared, with cronies like Katherine Lanpher and Rick Shefchik, long lunches that were basically competitions to see who could say what that would make the others blow coffee out their noses. (Nick, as his closest, dearest friends will tell you, not only kept the most astonishingly cluttered desk, a teetering slum of paper, tchotchkes and long dead paper cups, but was also the world’s messiest diner. His corner of the table at the end of lunch looked like it had been hit by an ISIS mortar attack. A 40% tip couldn’t begin to compensate whoever had to clean up after him.)

As Nick saw it, a metro columnist’s license was like a diploma from the Mike Royko/Jimmy Breslin school of full contact journalism. Far from getting a pass because of their social standing, and the high likelihood they would soon be making cocktail circuit chatter with newspaper bosses, the plump and entitled of the city were irresistible targets for attack, or even a classic Irish feud, as Coleman’s brawls with Garrison Keillor proved.

Moreover, righteous liberal politics were baked into the gig. The fat cats could hire platoons of flacks to spin their saintliness. But the people they were constantly screwing over needed someone with a big public pulpit to argue their case. Nick saw himself as that guy.

Unfortunately as he found out, the game was shifting. The well-fed, glory days of newspapering – where indignant, bull moose-like columnists could lay regular siege to the thin humanitarian veneer of community leaders — were being replaced with an ever more corporatized editorial culture.

Never exactly a hot bed of provocateurs, (other than the sports department), as the internet squeezed their parent companies (i.e. private equity bandits) regional papers like the Star Tribune and Pioneer Press subtly but steadily migrated toward an institutional voice that was less personal and less confrontational and more committed to what we’ll euphemistically call “consensus building”.

Stoking partisan anger with columns attacking the slick cynicism of sitting governors – Coleman v. Pawlenty for example – was, uh, discomfiting to managers charged with sustaining circulation and ad revenue in conservative, outer ring suburbs and maintaining good relations with major, usually Republican business owners.

The key admonition to writers inclined to batter the revenue class was to avoid being “needlessly provocative”. What writers like Nick Coleman weren’t supposed to say out loud to their editors’ faces was that they were such pathetic wimps a “needless provocation” could be as little as saying “shit” when you stepped in it.

Nick knew the old newspaper mule of his youth had gone terminally lame when the Star Tribune, with conservative columnist Katherine Kersten and him exchanging (heavily read) volleys over the 2008 presidential election, issued instructions to both to avoid any further comment on the election until it was over. Because you know, that’s when readers want to argue over politics.

Based entirely on Nick’s telling of the, uh, conversations he had with Star Tribune management over that one, it was clear his Obsequious/Deference Deficiency Disorder had gotten him in hotter water than ever before.

No one doubts Nick could be annoying as all hell, and that’s coming from people like me who didn’t have to supervise him. As far as employee-to-employer subservience went, Nick’s basic message to any editor telling him what to do was: “Look, all you need to know is that I’m damned good at what I do, and thousands of people read this paper because of me. So go find someone else to fuck with.”

Classic old school bosses might have yelled back at him and made perfunctory threats, before in the end conceding (to themselves) that he was right and that passionate characters like “that asshole Coleman” were vital to any relevant, healthy newspaper. But the newer crowd, fresh from six months of the corporate management academy, had a much lower threshold for blowback. A big, blustering bear like Nick was seen as a direct threat to their authority.

He had to be controlled.

Nick and I bonded anew in the mid-aughts as the Star Tribune began dropping the hammer on him.

Just as every crisis is an opportunity, the paper’s financial distress presented managers ideal cover to finally deal with “problem” employees. Officially, nothing could be further from the truth. For the record, it It was all about “right-sizing.” But in reality, any news reporter who failed to see what was happening for what it was was too credulous by half and really needed to find a different line of work.

As the Star Tribune tightened the screws, Nick would call two, sometimes three times a day, reporting on the latest ultimatum, squirrely management-speak verbiage and outright insults … at least as he saw them.

It was painful just to hear it. As I say, Nick was a fiercely proud, intensely competitive guy. Moreover he had substantial bottom line proof, in terms of readership, that his talents and distinctive voice were driving eyeballs to the paper. But as he told it, the paper wanted him to either confine himself to a far more modulated tone, you know, emphasizing “the good things that bind us together” instead of, to quote Nick, “the fucking scumbags looting the public coffers”, or give up the columnist gig completely and move over to some straight reporting beat.

The lame mule would also have had to have been blind not to see what they really wanted. Every option would be a public humiliation for such a proud, high-profile writer. The unspoken message to him was: just to go away.

And so he did.

Frankly, based on all the conversations as the shit was coming down, I was worried for him, and I told him so. The biggest difference between the two of us, besides reporting talent, was Nick’s investment in being a public figure. Loved or hated, it didn’t matter to him. He was in the game. He was a player. But removed from the action entirely? I didn’t like the potent.

He was of course a lot tougher and had a deeper pool of resources than I gave him credit for. (Some of my expressions of concern were a way of signaling that people – especially his enemies — would be watching to see how he handled it all, and not to feed the bastards’ lust for schadenfreude.)

In the months after he left the paper we met several times to kick around ideas that might approximate a return to the public stage.

He had tried a radio gig with ultra-lefty AM 950. It quickly went south when the not exactly progressive owner-operator, who was barely paying him gas money, melted down and handed him a list of edicts designed to muzzle The Full Coleman fury of his act.

The only thing missing from her list was a traumatic castration.

(Nick the proud, unrepentant liberal was so reviled by some commercial broadcasters he was literally forced out of the studio when I had him on as a guest on my show at right-wing KTLK.)

When I got the call telling me about his stroke and imminent death I felt a rush of remorse. I hadn’t had any contact with him in five years. Heading out on a camping trip, I crossed paths with his family and him at a sporting goods store in Grand Marais. The formality of the interaction accentuated an underlying tension. What exactly it was, I’m still not exactly sure.

I recall being annoyed when he showed no enthusiasm for a dual-headed media/politics blog, a kind dual exhaust rant fest. I thought it could be fun. It might even attract some attention and some walking round cash. We both agreed that other than celebrity foo-foo and collegial, transactional reporting, media coverage was a gaping hole in the Twin Cities news menu.

I took his disinterest as a reluctance to co-brand with me. Such are my insecurities. What he really thought, I never knew. But suddenly years had gone by and now he’s dead.

Over the years I was often struck when people who knew I knew Nick would ask, “Why do you like that guy?” (My wife adored him BTW. It was all that pained-poetic Irish crap, I’m certain.)

What I couldn’t understand was what they weren’t seeing in what he wrote, and if they bothered to get to know him, the gracious and informal way he treated most people.

The guy plainly had a big heart and a soul. He cared, truly and deeply about the people and causes he wrote about. The obvious converse of caring is that is he saw no good reason to coddle the other crowd, the goddam soulless stooges and jackals making life more difficult for the decent folks.

Yeah, beers with Nick meant listening to a lot of Nick. It’s true what they say about the Irish, “You can tell ‘em, but you can’t tell ‘em much.” But as a dominating force Nick had the immense benefit of being well-informed, damned funny and sincere about the people and things he cared about.

If the trade-off was learning not to wait for him to ask, “So, what’s up with you?” The whole package, the whole experience all put together was well worth your time.

There’s no shortage of boorish egos polluting the landscape. (Lord, if Nick had a column and free rein in the era of Trump!)  But there are far too few of the big ego people who thicken and season the (Irish) stew with talent, conscience and, you gotta love it, the theatrical flourish of genuine righteous anger.

Rest easy, Nick. You’ve served your fellow man well.

 

Mueller and Trump: The Contrast Doesn’t Get Any Starker

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Being both obsessive and nerdy I often find myself wondering, “What does a guy like Robert Mueller think of this?” Maybe you wonder that, too? If so, you have my pity.

But today, as we digest the latest gobsmacker — the one where a Russian oligarch dropped a half million bucks into Michael Cohen’s sketchy bimbo slush fund LLC and attended the Trump inauguration — straighter-than-straight-laced Princeton grad/ex-Marine/Vietnam vet/ex-FBI chief Mueller is “in my thoughts” again, as we so often say about those enduring tragedy.

Now obviously Mueller already knows about the (latest) Russian oligarch (a.k.a. organized crime boss) and plenty more about the rank skeeviness of Cohen and Donald Trump. He probably passed the point of being surprised and disgusted by Trump months ago. But as he watches the target (excuse me, a subject, wink wink) of his investigation continue to abuse every norm and tradition associated with respectable behavior, and create chaos with every rollback of anything Barack Obama touched, I wonder how it affects his thinking in terms of how to play all the information in his possession.

Conventional wisdom says Mueller, being a by-the-book kind of guy with an almost genetic respect for institutions, traditions and legal precedents, will never go so far as indict a sitting president. Not even if he has branded-in-the-cowhide proof that, for just one example, Cohen funneled oligarch cash through his funky LLC and into Trump’s pocket. Sober thinking says that no matter how egregious, Mueller will abide by the standard that says he only issues a report and leaves it up to, oh [bleep] Congress!, to decide what to do next.

My question though — what I regularly wonder about as Mueller amasses ever more evidence of Trump’s utterly disreputable career — is how he will eventually phrase the report he hands down.

In a more normal investigation, a guy like Mueller would, you think, stick to a Joe Friday approach. You know, “Just the facts, mam.” But I have to believe that Trump inspires a much higher level of disgust and contempt in a guy like Mueller, someone who takes such obvious pride in conducting his life with honor and integrity.

Look at it this way. From the perspective of a guy like Mueller, Donald Trump can only be seen as an astonishingly obnoxious, reprehensible fraud.

Through the eyes of an ex-Marine, Vietnam vet, Donald Trump is a man who has never, in any facet of his personal or public life, conducted himself with honor — not to his wives, not to all of his children, not to his business associates, his contractors, his lenders or the Constitution he vowed to serve and protect. In Donald Trump Mueller has to see the worst stain imaginable on the respectability and integrity of the institutions Mueller has devoted his life to honoring, not the least of which is the presidency itself.

Trump’s essential sleaziness, compounded by the unsophisticated, cheesy shamelessness of his frauds and constant lies, has to have a guy like Mueller thinking, “Why should I go out of my way to apply traditionally respected standards to a man who holds everything I respect in such contempt?”

Practically speaking, Mueller is almost certainly armed with a mountain of evidence on Trump’s decades-worth of money laundering for Russian crime bosses. His “Dream Team” of prosecutors have seen scams like Trump’s and Cohen’s hundreds of times before. The only thing remarkable about this set of frauds is that one of the perps is President of the United States.

Simultaneously Mueller sees what is — again — an overflowing septic system of tacky, tawdry cons and tissue-thin deceptions. And all this is in addition to obstruction of justice and, oh yeah, conspiring with a foreign adversary to subvert a presidential election.

I can’t imagine that the scent of all things Trump doesn’t disgust him on the deep, personal level he is duty bound to keep under control.

Given all that, why would Mueller pull up short of, at the very least, indicting Donald Trump Jr., Jared Kushner, Steve Bannon (and please, please Robert and Rebekah Mercer) and handing Rod Rosenstein a vividly-detailed, novel-sized “report” on what Trump has been and is?

A report so voluminous and detailed Trump’s for-profit defenders in the FoxNews/Limbaugh/Breitbart nexus howling “DEEP STATE COUP D’ETAT!!!!!!!” will be floundering  against a mountain of irrefutable evidence.

 

I’m Still Giving Garrison Keillor the Benefit of the Doubt

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Lord knows I don’t want to discourage Minnesota Public Radio (MPR) from any future exercise in transparency. But after reading Laura Yuen and Euan Kerr’s (long and  commendably comprehensive) historical explanation for how and why their employer dealt with Garrison Keillor the way they did, I’m still giving Keillor the benefit of the doubt.

My reasons for this are connected to three statements Yuen and Kerr make in their piece (which I have to assume was combed through, massaged and finessed like a federal indictment) and what I recall from moments with Keillor.

The statements, in the order they appear are:

“MPR News has had to rely to an unusual degree on anonymous sources in covering the Keillor story. Staff members — even former staff members — are reluctant to discuss their experiences at the company … .”

“[Bill] Kling and [Tom] Kigin are now retired and declined to comment for this story.”

“MPR said its outside investigation into the claims of inappropriate behavior, conducted by the law firm Briggs and Morgan, has been ‘substantially complete’ for months. [Jon] McTaggart has no plans to disclose more information about its findings, saying he needs to respect the privacy of the woman involved.”

The story notes the high possibility that MPR’s summary execution of Keillor after years of tolerating his, shall we say, on-the-job romantic adventures, was due to the #MeToo moment. Ignoring a supervisor with a habit of hitting on women subordinates and writing them racy mash notes just doesn’t cut it any more. So there’s that, and the fact that at 75 Keillor’s prime revenue-producing days are behind him.

But another movement MPR fails to acknowledge is the more nascent evolution in journalism thinking that says “transparency is the new objectivity.”

Translated for lay-folk understanding it means this: In this day of fake news and wall-to-wall PR blather bona fide journalism organizations should consent to displaying and discussing the work they’ve done to reach important conclusions.

In that context, and this Keillor business is as high-profile as anything MPR may ever fall into. So if MPR wants its view of the Keillor episode to carry the day it should release all the information its “independent” lawyers, (who presumably were paid by MPR and therefore regard MPR as a client), amassed on Keillor and then, after the public has had time to digest it, present CEO McTaggart in some sort of “independently” moderated forum to take on all questions.

The name of the key woman in the story — a woman in her 50s remember, not a naive grad student — can be protected via redaction, etc.

Since both MPR and Keillor have agreed not to sue each other as part of the settlement over his archived material, full disclosure (i.e. transparency) of the indicting evidence would make for a fascinating, healthy debate on all sorts of facets of the #MeToo moment, especially since Keillor seems unabashed in defending himself.

But then “transparency” is not a word much in favor at MPR or many other news organizations in 2018. Yuen and Kerr’s piece quotes former media writer David Brauer echoing everything I’ve said about MPR for almost 30 years. Namely, MPR has always operated with extraordinarily tight corporate control over its image and message. This is understandable once you understand the strategic structuring of MPR’s financial base, with its close, fraternal associations with prominent area companies for both underwriting and board service. Bill Kling (MPR’s founder) had no intention of running another rag-tag, semi-hippie “public radio” station. He was an empire builder and successful empires run by a far different set of rules, where openness and transparency are not necessarily virtues.

Very much like any large corporation, MPR consented to media inquiries if they believed favorable publicity (i.e. a PR boost) was in the offing, and either resisted or flat-out ignored anything that came with a hint of a negative vibe. This created what always struck me as an eery, “Body Snatcher”-like quality in even casual conversations with MPR employees, both current and former. It’s not an exaggeration to say trepidation bordering on fear was a palpable affect. Saying anything was so fraught it was better to avoid it entirely.

I don’t know how you live like that.

So I’m not surprised to read Yuen and Kerr had to rely on a lot of anonymous quotes from their own colleagues. They’re lucky they got that.

Likewise, it is no surprise to anyone that neither Kling or Kigin, the two executives most responsible for monetizing Keillor’s popularity, offered any comment … to their own newsroom. That too is classic MPR.

As for Keillor, he was a primary character on my media beat for 15 years. (I was once told by an editor, “We’re going to own that guy”, meaning, “cover him like he’s our property”). As such Keillor and I got along OK, until we didn’t.

He was an established celebrity — of, thank god almighty, actual literary and intellectual depth — when I began interacting with him in the late ’80s. (I did follow him out to Hawaii for a show in the mid-’80s.)  And while clearly a talented, ambitious guy with a skeptic’s radar for fools, he was hardly anyone’s idea of Stepford-grey corporate soldier. Moreover, by the mid-Nineties it was obvious to everyone how valuable a commodity he was to Kling’s empire building. Put another way, he had leverage over Kling and Kling knew that.

This is meant to explain that while Kling and Kigin neither say or admit to anything, they were obviously in the very familiar business of straighter-than-straight businessmen tolerating the louche behavior of “talent” in the long-term interest of the bottom line.

Keillor’s mercurial romantic moods were an open secret, certainly for anyone who cared to notice. Most didn’t. And if he was routinely falling in and out of infatuations with women he met or performed with, so what, really? He was an artist. And a very good one. He is one of the rare people unmoored from the Victorian/protestant bonds controlling us “ordinary folk.”

Obviously, times have changed, and for the better. Certainly for women badgered and oppressed by workplace clods. Yuen and Kerr present a picture of Keillor as a — that word again — mercurial boss. Shouting and saying demeaning things to his staff. That’s unfortunate, but hardly unique. But if the #MeToo movement is going to expand its focus to include bosses who should not be bosses, supervisors who are simply abusive, irrational, duplicitous or whatever, instead of just horny creeps squeezing butts, there’ll be even more management job openings coming along real soon.

In facile terms, I see nothing anywhere that suggests Garrison Keillor was in the same league as Harvey Weinstein, Matt Lauer or Charlie Rose. In fact, if we care to adjust our lens a bit, Keillor’s seductive style seems to be more in step with the courtly tradition of attention, flattery and … racy mash notes, most with amusing phrasing and proper punctuation.

I remember having lunch with Keillor in Miami back in Prairie Home’s heyday. The Bill Clinton-Monica Lewinsky scandal was on everyone’s tongue. I forget what specific element of the story was trending that day, but Keillor got into a riff about not just “things guys say to get laid” but the way both sexes distort the truth to get what they want out of a romantic relationship. Some of it is as innocent as creating a pleasurable fantasy. Some of it is anxiety that saying what you really think will kill your chances. Either way, “honesty” in matters of seduction was often in short supply, and us humans kind of like it that way.

At the very least Keillor was not applying harsh Calvinist judgment to Bill Clinton’s randy exploits. And if you ever watched him interact with his fan base after a show, like the one in Miami Beach that weekend, you understand why.

The ballroom-like space was pretty well packed, with the upscale, mostly middle-aged (white and well-tanned) South Florida crowd milling about sipping wine and maneuvering for a moment to meet … the star attraction. For a “shy guy” Keillor was actually pretty good at the schmooze thing. He was gracious for the duration and had a quip for pretty much everyone who approached him.

But even your dullest corporate drone couldn’t help but notice the women. As I say, respectable, upscale ladies, impeccably manicured and accessorized, women long past their silly, star struck schoolgirl phase. But there they were, ever so noticeably tossing and fussing with their hair, pursing their lips, making longer-than-necessary eye contact while regularly caressing his forearm, elbows and not exactly hard iron biceps. All while balancing their stemware. The braver among them finagled hugs.

Keillor lived in a realm where the opportunities for the kind of consensual romance that the average man and woman moon over were constantly, readily available. And not skeezy rock star-groupie one-offs, but relationships with women of quality and often talent.

That’s a reality that no doubt horrifies legalistic corporate bureaucrats. The impropriety! The potential financial consequences! But it is an essence of life. Can we admit that?

The fact such “opportunities” is also asking for trouble in the workplace is indisputable. Hence our current moment. But there is so much range and variation to “sexual harrassment” I’m not content with a hired-up, sealed-off judgment like MPR is presenting as a full and final statement on the matter.

For his part, I truly hope Keillor takes his act back on the road and uses his microphone to explore why men and women do what they do and think what they think.

That’d be healthy for everyone involved.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Science, Spirituality and “2001: A Space Odyssey”

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There’s a new book out titled, “Space Odyssey:  Stanley Kubrick, Arthur C. Clarke and the Making of a Masterpiece.” I pre-ordered it a couple of months ago and when I opened it I came immediately to this quote:

“Politics and religion are obsolete. The time has come for science and spirituality.”

The story goes that that second sentence was underlined by Kubrick when the quote, from Indian social reformer Vinoba Bhave, was shown to him by Clarke. As a near lifelong (OK, “obsessive”) fan of Kubrick’s work, his emphasis on that line about science enhancing spirituality strikes me as spot on.

It’s been gratifying to see the remarkable outpouring of observance, celebration and reflection on the 50th anniversary of “2001’s” release, April 3, 1968 in Washington D.C. Its gala premiere came amid a historic week. Four days earlier Lyndon Johnson, undone by his prosecution of the war in Vietnam, announced he would not run for reelection. A day later Martin Luther King was assassinated in Memphis.

Very few movies, a generally disposable “art” form, get the attention and respect “2001” is getting these days. Fifty years from now I doubt there’ll be much commotion over the half century anniversary of “The Shape of Water” or even “Black Panther.” That’s because only a handful of large-scale, mass-marketed Hollywood productions qualify as anything close to actual art, with even fewer as willing and determined as “2001” to defy conventional expectations and leave audiences searching their own imagination for resolution.

 

I was 17 when I saw “2001” for the first time, in late June 1968 at the Cooper Cinerama theater in St. Louis Park. I had been following what I could about Kubrick since being riveted by “Paths of Glory” on TV when I was 14 and “Dr. Strangelove” in a theater a few months later. (“Lolita” required parental permission I did not get.) Here was someone making movies unlike anything else I was seeing in far-off rural Minnesota, a resolutely conventional Mayberry RFD existence where “art” for the most part was something hung on dentists’ office walls.

It took me a few years to accept how profound an effect that first viewing of “2001” had on me. I had driven in to the Cities with my high school English teacher and a couple other pals, and like everyone else in the theater was asking “WTF?” by the time Dave Bowman left his glowing bedroom and floated back to earth as a giant fetus. I remember my English teacher, a fan of “Gone With the Wind”, shaking his head as we filed out and saying, “That was just silly.”

 

I didn’t know exactly what to say, but the word “silly” was not among anything ricocheting around my squirrely teenage head. All I could process was that anyone who could put that kind of craft and imagery up on a giant movie screen clearly knew what he was doing and more to the point, what he intended to do.

By the time the homicidal, riotous summer of ’68 was over “2001” had separated into distinct partisan camps. Old guard traditionalists remained bored, harrumphing and snorting about “pretentiousness”, as though the only explanation for a movie that didn’t push the normal buttons of escapist entertainment was that it was pretending it was smarter, and on to something they couldn’t grasp.

On the other side, the new guard was reacting like something had just jolted them out of a stupor. Yeah, a lot of the “mind-blowing” was abetted by significant amounts of pot and acid. I must have seen the movie another half-dozen times before ’68 was over, and you knew the repeat viewers by the way they filled the first couple rows of any theater you went to, with some sprawled out on the carpet in front of the front row. (There was the time a pal re-wired the speakers at a drive-in so a dozen of us could, you know, like, commune with the stars while we watched.)

It goes without saying it was that latter crowd — not all on acid — that drove “2001” to legendary status. In it, without always consciously verbalizing it, they were experiencing art. Not just art-ful camera work, or an art-ful musical score, but the art of the overall concept. That being a step up from mere masterly filmmaking craft work to something that invites and requires viewers to allow their imaginations to fire up, reboot and realign as though solving a puzzle.

A constant of Kubrick’s world view, seen most vividly in “2001”, but in some form in all of his films, is that we are not a particularly evolved set of creatures. We live fitfully and irrationally, in a way that is not all that improved from desperately hungry proto-humans clubbing tapirs for food in Africa a couple million years ago. We are still far, far too easily controlled by basic animal impulses and instincts — fear of the other, greed and an emotional subservience to higher authorities — like the corrupt generals in “Paths of Glory”, the sociopathic fools of “Dr. Strangelove”,  the police, politicians and scientists in “A Clockwork Orange”, the vain, powdered elites of “Barry Lyndon” and so on.

Politics and religion are obsolete as honest vehicles for delivering us to … something better than this … because the success of each relies on exploiting the most basic and worst of our unevolved emotions and impulses. You only have to acknowledge how much both politics and religion rely on a kind of sanctimonious demonizing of others to see Kubrick’s point.

As Bhave’s quote asserts, the reaction then of rational man to the astonishing revelations and still unfolding mysteries of science — or to explorations of human psychology, biology and the incomprehensible vastness of the universe  — is genuinely spiritual. It is a transcendant experience in how it separates us, if only for a few moments, from the chaos and fraudulence of life. Science presents a spirituality qualitatively different from what so many billions still hear from their pulpits, in that it doesn’t rely symbolic fables, highly suspect history and accepting faith as fact. It is transcendence through reality.

As I say, when all that is introduced to your intellectual life stream — via a movie — it is safe to say you’ve been exposed to something truly unique and remarkable.

(Stanley Kubrick, in blue jacket, directing “2001”).

(P.S. Christopher Nolan, director of “Dunkirk”, “Inception” and the Batman trilogy, makes no apologies for his indebtedness to Stanley Kubrick for re-orienting his notion of what film — the craft and sequencing of image and sound — can do. He has called “2001” “pure cinema”. He will introduce an “unrestored” 70mm print of “2001” at the Cannes Film Festival next month, simultaneous with a re-release of “2001” around the country in May.)

I’ll be in the front row.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Paul Ryan Cashes In

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Raise your hand if you’re surprised Paul Ryan wants to spend more time with his family.

As a “small government conservative” Ryan has spent essentially all of his adult life cashing government checks, (with those sweet, sweet government health care benefits). His ascension to national influence is due primarily to his deft cooperation with and service to Wisconsin’s and then the country’s wealthiest citizen benefactors. His promise to them has forever been two-fold. A: Repeated rounds of tax relief followed by, B: a dramatic gutting of social services, otherwise known as social spending “reform”.

Having delivered the former, in a package that guarantees a return to trillion-dollar deficits, he has in effect accomplished both, and can now dump the daily aggravation of his political gig in favor of a Tim Pawlenty/Norm Coleman style pay-off in the private sector, or put another way, by going to work directly for the .1%-ers who have kept him in DC for 20-plus years.

(Ryan achieves a fresh gutting of social services to poorer Americans by driving deficits up so high conservatives have fresh horrifying numbers to rage and rail that “spending is out of control” … once Democrats are back in power and red ink matters again.)

As loathsome as Freedom Caucus torch-carriers like Mark Meadows and Jim Jordan are, they are at least naked about their subservience to Robert Mercer-scale political “investors”. What’s always disgusted me about Ryan is his snake oil image of a serious, concerned public servant all the while he consents to the same noxious policies promoted by the truly shameless wing nuts of the modern conservative movement.

Very much like Newt Gingrich before him, Ryan is “what dumb people think a smart guy sounds like.”

Besides seizing the cash-out phase of his career, Ryan, being another character who is all about self-serving political calculus, knows that campaigning as a Republican this year is not going to be any fun. Not with Donald Trump looking ever more like a delusional third-tier mob boss and anger at DC descending from swamp to sewer more intense than it has been in a century. Even as Speaker of the House, Ryan was not going to have a pleasant time out in public in his own district. Like Erik Paulsen and Jason Lewis here in Minnesota, he knew public appearances with an actual cross-section of voters was going to be an extraordinarily perilous experience.

I’m still not convinced that a giant “blue wave” is going to sweep across the land this November. There are hundreds of millions in dark money available to spread any hysteria imaginable to prevent that from happening.

But clearly Ryan, the calculator, (aka “the zombie-eyed granny starver”  TM Charlie Pierce), has read smoke signals on the horizon and decided that moving now to profiteer off his “public service” is a far better option than being screamed at and vilified across southern Wisconsin.