The cheap and easy joke is that if producers want to guarantee an audience for these January 6 hearings they need to put Johnny Depp and his girlfriend on the stand. Or at least get a celebrity masked singer to blast out The Star Spangled Banner.
Whatever the issue — a worldwide pandemic, a military invasion, gun slaughter — Americans insist on being entertained. Not necessarily with a laugh, but with a story that has easily identifiable villains and relatable heroes, spectacle and most of all … pace. The characters and scenery need to change frequently. Things may not drag. If your show is “slow”, you’re dead. “Boring” is the cardinal sin of show biz. Alternate viewing is a half-second away. With a tap of a button your vitally important, democracy-protecting message, and — oops — your long-gestating cri de coeur, has been replaced in America’s family rooms with pizza-spinning super heroes.
So here’s hoping the (mostly all) Democratic committee staging the hearings over the next couple weeks are being honest when they say they’ve applied basic show biz thinking and pacing to the packaging of these 90-minute, primetime events.
The critical question is whether they’ve got enough suspense, revelation and sex appeal to reach beyond the usual Trump-reviling choir. Personally, I’m skeptical I’ll see or hear anything I don’t already know or suspect. And that includes the promised video-taped depositions of Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump.
I have no confusion whatsoever about the “hows” and “whys” of Jan. 6. I understand what drove it, who fomented it and who was meant to benefit from it.
But I understand the central purpose of this capitol hill mini-series. It is, not to put to blunt a point on it, to create enough populist mass to compel Attorney General Merrick Garland to finally, formally indict Trump and his long … long … list of stooges and cronies responsible for everything that went into a plot to overthrow an election/stage a coup. Poor ratings and bad reviews may be taken as a sign there’s insifficient public “will” to prosecute Trump, with all the certain hellfire of backlash from MAGA-land that would ensue.
But … maybe … possibly … with a good, compelling TV show producing a large audience and that dominates a half dozen consecutive news cycles, the Justice Department will accept the risk of a US v. Trump trial and indict a man who has obviously, clearly committed a staggering long list of crimes against … contractors, bankers, insurance companies, individual women and oh yes, the vaunted Constitution.
So yeah, I’ll be watching.
I just suspect “The Masked Singer” will pull bigger ratings.
I suspect that only a relatively small proportion of Minnesotans are aware that DFL legislators want to finish work delivering tax cuts and popular investments to Minnesotans, while GOP legislators have walked off the job and left that important work undone.
But state legislators spend much of their time with well-informed lobbyists and activists. The State Capitol is an insular island. Therefore, many legislators probably incorrectly assume that most Minnesotans already know all of this.
But many don’t know it, or don’t fully understand the damage it’s causing, so DFLers need to proactively and repeatedly tell the story.
The policies that Republicans are effectively blocking by refusing to do more work are extremely popular. Tax cuts. Education and child care investments. Long-term care spending. Police funding. Infrastucture improvements. Moreover, Minnesotans believe in working hard, and not quitting just because the task is difficult. There is a strong case to be made here.
But if DFLers don’t proactively repeat the point about the GOP’s dereliction of duties, and the consequences of it, many voters will never know about it, or won’t remember come November.
To educate voters about what is happening at the State Capitol, and make it stick in their memories, DFL legislators need a series of provocative tactics that play out between now and the election. A few options to consider:
Empty Chairs at Mock Legislative Sessions. DFL legislative leaders should send a letter to all GOP legislators proposing a date and time to return to the Capitol Building for a Special Session. Republicans won’t agree to attend, but all DFL legislators should show up in the House and Senate chambers at the proposed time anyway. They should wait for the missing Republican legislators for 24 hours or so. They should use that time in the half-empty chambers to make it clear that the GOP is refusing to do their jobs, and describe the contents of the legislation effectively being blocked by the Gone Old Party (GOP).
Then they should record video of the speeches, liberally interspersed with shots of the Republican incumbents’ empty chairs and offices. They should share short videos of the speeches and empty chairs via targeted social media.
They also should invite DFL challengers to come to the State Capitol to participate in news conferences about the refusal of the incumbents to do the jobs they were elected to do. Those challengers could record “Looking for Rudy”-style videos to use in their campaigns, humorous videos portraying the DFL challengers searching empty offices for evidence of the GOP incumbent doing their jobs.
Missing Person Flyers. DFL candidates could also make tongue-in-cheek Missing Person-like flyers to be used in online ads and postcards. The “Missing Legislator” flyers would include a photo of the GOP incumbent, with a description of the unfinished business they left behind when they walked off the job they were hired to do.
Poll Documenting Public Frustration. The DFL Party should also commission a poll asking Minnesotans if legislators should return to work to finish the tax cuts and investments. They should also use the poll to document the popularity of each of the major components of the unfinished business – tax cuts, education and child care investments, police spending, infrastructure investments, etc . They should publicize the poll results in news conferences and campaign materials.
Why a poll? The results of a survey would make it clear that this isn’t just an argument between the GOP and DFL. It’s also an argument between the GOP and the overwhelming majority of Minnesotans. That’s an important nuance to stress when framing this issue.
Pink Slips. Closer to the election, DFL candidates could develop termination notice forms (e.g. “pink slips”) to use in advertising and mailing. The pink slips would be filled in with the legislators name and reason for firing – “failure to show up for work when constituents needed tax cuts, education, and anti-crime help the most.”
Whether or not these are the right tactics, the larger point remains: DFLers need to develop an on-going campaign to make the 2022 elections a referendum on whether Republican incumbents should show up for work when struggling Minnesota families need help. DFLers stand a much better chance of winning that referendum than the one’s Republicans are stressing, about whether Democrats are sufficiently committed to fighting crime and cutting taxes. If DFLers allow Republicans to frame the election that way, they’re in trouble.
Mid-term elections are historically awful for the party in power. Beyond that, the post-pandemic economy is unpredictable and unsettling. To be sure, the DFL is facing stiff political headwinds.
For those reasons, this is no time to run a dull, conventional campaign using blah, blah, blah cookie cutter messaging. Desperate times call for desperate measures. DFLers need a provocative campaign that cuts through the message clutter by telling the unvarnished truth about the Gone Old Party and the damage its refusal to work is causing for Minnesota families.
The Hon. Clarence Thomas and other “originalists” among the justices of the United States Supreme Court favor a concept with respect to interpretation of the Constitution that asserts that all statements therein must be interpreted based on the original understanding “at the time it was adopted.”
That’s how they justify opposition to, say, gay marriage. The Founders didn’t mention homosexuality — or women, for that matter — so there.
I’m not happy about this, but if that’s the way it is, they should be consistent. Apply their doctrine to guns as well.
At the time the Constitution was adopted, in June 1788, a personal firearm was a musket. A single-shot, slow-to-load musket.
It’s highly doubtful that even Thomas Jefferson and Ben Franklin — visionaries, inventors, Gyro Gearlooses of their times — envisioned anything beyond a musket. The repeating rifle wasn’t invented until 1847, almost 60 years after the Constitution was ratified. Muskets were still in wide use during the Civil War, and primarily — irony of ironies — by soldiers of the Confederacy, the states of which are now among the most protective of their gun-totin’ rights.
No way could Jefferson, Franklin and any other Founder have foreseen M-16s and AK-47s.
So, let Originalist theory reign. Let’s go musket.
Everybody 21 or older should be able to have a musket — a beautiful, wood-and-metal, work-of-art weapon, like Davy Crockett’s “Betsy” — if he, she or they wants. Our government could even provide them for free, like Covid test kits, and require courses on how to handle, use and care for them. They could be etched with our individual Social Security numbers.
But as part of the same campaign, we would collect every single assault rifle and pistol — every unforgiving, grimly utilitarian weapon of war that was never intended for civilian use.
Congressman Clyde owns the Clyde Armory in Athens, Georgia.
Praise the Lord and pass the powder horn.
Note: Noel Holston is a freelance writer who lives in Athens, Georgia. He regularly shares his insights and wit at Wry Wing Politics. He’s also a contributing essayist to Medium.com, TVWorthWatching.com, and other websites. He previously wrote about television and radio at Newsday (200-2005) and, as a crosstown counterpart to the Pioneer Press’s Brian Lambert, at the Star Tribune (1986-2000). He’s the author of “Life After Deaf: My Misadventures in Hearing Loss and Recovery,” by Skyhorse.
Like everything else, reaction to Beto O’Rourke’s crashing of Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s post Uvalde press conference immediately split into two separate camps. Tribe A was indignant that anyone, much less Abbott’s rival, would “exploit a tragedy” for “political gain”. Tapes of the incident include voices from the stage around Abbott calling O’Rourke a “son of a bitch” and ordering him thrown out of the building.
The other camp, of which I’m a part, applauded O’Rourke for having the chutzpah, the cojones, the level of proportionate moral indignation to get in the face of a cynically self-serving cast of gun-slaughter enablers, right then and there with all cameras rolling. And this was before we learned how much of what Abbott and other “leaders” of Texas’ law enforcement community was saying at that presser was pretty much utter bullshit.
The O’Rourke Incident instantly recalled an interview with Atlantic writer, Anne Applebaum, that I was listening to driving back from up north this past Tuesday, almost simultaneous with the murder of 19 kids and two adults at yet another America school. Applebaum was the guest on New York Times columnist Ezra Klein’s podcast and the topic was her new introduction to the classic book by Hannah Arendt, “The Origins of Totalitarianism.”
Klein is an interviewer with an exemplary talent for drilling down to the most salient issues of whatever topic he’s covering. And soon the discussion was moving into the “why” of people’s response to often crude, authoritarian leaders and their flagrantly obvious perfidies. I encourage you to listen to the entire episode for all that Klein and Applebaum get in to.
But at one point Applebaum used the phrase “muscular bravado” to explain the appeal of characters like Donald Trump.
Rogues like Trump present themselves as unfettered-by-common-rules-of-decorum warriors defending what large masses of people want defended. Or at least as “fighters” antagonizing the same people large masses want antagonized. The responses are not entirely rational. But it often translates to “heroic” in the eyes of people, as Applebaum and Arendt say, isolated by their ignorance and fearful of what they don’t understand.
A salient point here being that in 2022 USA this kind of bravado is entirely in the possession of Trumpist Republicans, and this explains much of the imbalance of energy and enthusiasm between Republicans and Democrats.
The takeaway is that politics/leadership is a profoundly emotional game. Barack Obama swung millions his way in 2008 through charisma and the belief that he had the strength and bravery/star-power to make change happen. More to the point, liberals, Democrats and the millions rightfully repulsed and horrified by the complicity of Republicans in America’s gun slaughter, erosion of Constitutional rights, degradation of our court system, indifference to climate change, wildly out of balance tax system, etc. have no real choice but to accept the power and importance of “muscular bravado” in rallying voters.
Liberals may accept this in theory, but are often embarrassed by it in reality. Bravado of a sort that appeals to largely non-ideological, non-partisan voters strikes the average policy-intense liberal as corny and suspicious, and beneath the dignity of a serious leader.
The dilemma for liberals, is that bravado works, on swing voters if not them. And in our current moment, as we reel from yet another grade school slaughter, genuinely indignant bravado could be a very effective emotional trigger for voters.
O’Rourke isn’t a newby to gun reform. He’s favored a flat-out ban on assault rifles for a while now. So I’m accepting his indignation as genuine. He’s demonstrated he’ll take the political risk that comes with his position on the issue. Just as with his “stunt” at Abbott’s press conference he’s demonstrated he’s prepared to take the blowback for getting right up in the grilles of the ghouls (Ted Cruz was standing behind Abbott) and accuse them for their complicity.
Liberals are notoriously not single-issue voters. Get a Democrat or a Democratic politician going on what needs to be done to set the country right and you invariably get a list longer than a Cheesecake Factory menu.
But 19 more dead fourth-graders presents as unequivocal a single-minded life-or-death issue as any imaginable, and O’Rourke is correctly calculating that no matter how short our attention spans, the outrage over gun-mutilated grade schoolers is something that carries deep, long-lasting moral outrage. Horror-struck outrage of a kind that can — and should — be resurrected repeatedly, with muscular bravado, for months until November and years beyond that until the cynics are driven back under their rocks.
The final point being, Republicans have no good faith response to their role in our gun insanity. With an unabashed siege on their corruption and reckless disregard for … children! … Democrats have an issue that like Joe Pesci in some Marty Scorsese mob movie they can hold Republicans’ faces to the burner with.
You know and I know that despite the emotional pleas of the past 24 hours nothing whatsoever will be done about America’s gun insanity. If Mitch McConnell was able to rally his Senate caucus against the most modest invigoration of gun laws after 26 grade schoolers were murdered at Sandy Hook, he won’t even have to bother after 21 were slaughtered in Uvalde.
While the originalists on the Supreme Court plunge on ahead to take away a right supported by 70% of the public for 50 years, no conservative or red-district liberal is going utter a peep about serious gun control — beginning with universal background checks, red-flag laws and a ban on assault rifles — supported by 60%-plus of their voting age constituents. And we all know why.
Guns are existential for conservatives struggling to maintain authority through the country’s demographic shift. Republicans simply can not win elections without showing support for each and every relaxation of gun laws that gets traction in paranoid America.
You’d like to focus “existential” attention on the victims of our ceaseless gun slaughter. Not just the 21 murdered in Texas yesterday, or the 10 in Buffalo a couple weeks ago, or all those killed in the over 200 mass shootings … in just the first five months of 2022 … (27 in schools) … or those dying from single-victim, gun-homicides/suicides at the rate of … 110 a day, month in and month out. “Existential” has played out for all those people.
But the key to how this truly astonishing level of carnage is sustained lies in the existential threat to the careers of conservative politicians, most but not all of whom are Republicans, should they raise so much as a sympathetic eyebrow at the thought of any … any … kind of controls on the sale and use of guns and ammo. The hard, let’s make that “obscene”, fact is that guns are so deeply and thoroughly hard-wired into the insecure psyches of a deeply threatened minority of Americans they are the very definition of single-issue voters. They may tell pollsters that “immigration” is their biggest concern, but we all know, “immigration” is code for “more brown/black criminals I need to protect myself from.”
In my experience talking “Second Amendment” with “guns rights” supporters, the unmistakable takeaway is that a life without the potency that comes from gun ownership (and display) would be indistinguishable from castration. So good luck getting those remarkably reliable single issue voters to support restrictions on a fundamental life function.
A Pew Study says this:
“White men are especially likely to be gun owners: About half (48%) say they own a gun, compared with about a quarter of white women and nonwhite men (24% each) and 16% of nonwhite women.
“Like the gender gap, the education gap in gun ownership is particularly pronounced among whites. Overall, about three-in-ten adults with a high school diploma or less (31%) and 34% of those with some college education say they own a gun; a quarter of those with a bachelor’s degree or more say the same. Among whites, about four-in-ten of those with a high school diploma or less (40%) or with some college (42%) are gun owners, compared with roughly a quarter of white college graduates (26%).”
FWIW the same survey shows three times as many conservatives own guns as liberals. … if you’re assessing “the fear factor.”
In a country not held captive by an electoral college system that sustains minority rule …
Assault rifles would be banned.
Internet gun and ammo sales would be banned.
Red flag laws would be universal, with heavy penalties for any seller who violated them.
Bullets would be taxed at a 400% rate.
A license, showing certified training and insurance would be mandatory for every gun owned by anyone anywhere. The market would determine premium prices.
Manufacturers of firearms could be sued, just like manufacturers of death-and-injury causing cars, microwaves and fast food.
But we don’t live in same galaxy as that imagined country. Instead we have the latest mass murder — of school children — in a state where the Republican Governor (Greg Abbott) — who, along with Donald Trump and Ted Cruz is scheduled to speak to an NRA convention in Houston this coming week. A state where Abbott and his mostly (but not all) Republican legislature recently relaxed gun laws to the point customers aren’t required to even take training before toting a gun to church.
And a country where instead of acting with conscience conservative politicians routinely release the same anodyne responses to the most vile tragedies.
When you hear the phrase “race to the bottom” that kind of overt pandering to paranoia and cynical contempt for public safety is what they’re talking about.
In your career, imagine that you faced a deadline to deliver on an employers’ assignment — a report, a construction project, a patient treatment, a classroom unit, a research paper, a production goal, a sales pitch. Then imagine that despite your best efforts, due to factors beyond your individual control, you run out of time.
It happens to all of us all the time. Do you double down on effort and finish your assignment, or point fingers, declare defeat, quit your assignment, and refuse to return to it?
If the latter, I’m guessing you probably have been fired at least once, or denied advancement.
Well, the Minnesota Legislature had an assignment from their employers, the constituents they are sworn to serve. The promise each of them made to their bosses on the campaign trail was to make life a little better for them during challenging times. But the legislators encountered challenges that were outside their immediate control–principally disagreement from the opposition party, which is to be fully expected. Because of the challenges, they ran out of time.
So, they walked away from the job, and say they’re not coming back to work until 2023. See ya!
So Close
Quite remarkably, legislators actually appeared to be very close to at least partially delivering on the assignment that their constituents gave them.
Tax deal? Done. It’s not everything that Democrats wanted, and not everything that Republicans wanted. But it was agreed upon and done.
Overall fiscal deal? Done. It outlines how much in tax cuts and supplemental spending would be acceptable to both parties. Again, the compromise agreement was equally satisfying and disappointing to both Democrats and Republicans.
Those two parts of the task are arguably the most difficult that legislators faced. That’s where past Legislatures often have failed. But to their credit, this 2022 Legislature got that difficult work done, along with deals related to unemployment insurance, health reinsurance, farm disaster aid, and other items.
But by the time the legislative clock ran out, this year’s Legislature hadn’t agreed on the specifics for how to divvy up already agreed upon sized budgetary pies for public safety, education, and health and human services. To be sure, those are challenging assignments for two parties with fundamentally different values.
But this Legislature got other difficult tasks done this year, so this final task is imminently doable.
WhyQuitters?
If you try, that is. Democrats are willing to keep trying in a special session. Republicans apparently are not.
For now, Republicans are saying they won’t give one more second of effort to help those who clearly will be hurt by their refusal to come back to work – taxpayers, renters, seniors, children, parents, child care providers, nursing home operators, police officers, and crime victims.
Minnesota Republicans looked at those struggling constituents, shrugged cavalierly, and walked away before the assignment their employers gave them was done.
Why? I’m speculating here, because I’m not a mind reader. But I suspect it’s not because Republicans are lazy or incompetent. They seem industrious and competent bunch, at least when it comes to things they care about, such as campaigning.
I’m also guessing that it’s not a negotiating ploy. I hope I’m wrong, and that they’ll be back. But right now it doesn’t look like that’s what they’re doing.
I hope I’m wrong, but I suspect worse. I suspect they just don’t care about their job assignment. That is, at their core they don’t really think that making their constituents’ lives better as soon as possible is sufficiently important to merit the extra work and headaches associated with a special session.
Sure, these Republican legislators love much of what comes with the job — the title, office, public platform, power, and respect. That’s presumably what keeps them running for reelection year after year. But the work assignment itself? I’m just not convinced.
Worse yet, a few who are disproportionately influential on their caucus actually seem to feel that their work assignment is, in the name of conservative or libertarian ideology, to prevent the government from helping taxpayers, renters, seniors, children, parents, child care providers, nursing home operators, police officers, and crime victims.
That’s not what they tell those groups on the campaign trail, but it’s too often how they govern.
Do Voters Care?
Back to the opening analogy. After failing to complete your task on time, how do you suppose this would go over with your employer? “Yeah, I just don’t really believe in this job assignment, and it got really difficult, and the time clock ran out, so I quit and I’m not going back to the assignment you gave me.”
Yeah. Maybe it’s time Minnesotans reacted the same way.
“This is Democrats’ fault too, because they’re so bad at messaging.” This is the go-to blame-shifting critique I get from self-identified “moderate” friends, well-intentioned folks who dodge conflict, critical thinking, and/or accountability by continually declaring equal disgust for “both sides.”
In the wake of the leak of the forthcoming U.S. Supreme Court decision allowing states to ban abortions, I’m hearing this a lot. It’s hardly the first time. I hear it every time there is another preventable mass shooting, and every time some jaw droppingly stupid piece of legislation passes, such as “don’t say gay” teacher censorship or something that further aggravates climate change.
The moderates’ flippant “this is Democrats’ fault too, because they suck at messaging argument” is patently ridiculous responsibility avoidance.
Let’s start with the “this Democrats’ fault too” part of their claim. To state the obvious, Democrats didn’t appoint the justices overturning Roe. Republicans did. Democrats didn’t vote for the politicians who appointed those abortion-banning justices. Republicans and moderates did. So, where is moderates’ unambiguous criticism of Republicans?
Because these facts are so undeniable and damning, moderates, ever-wary of decisively taking a side on an issue, quickly shift to the “yeah, but Democrats are to blame too because they can’t message” condemnation. This invariably gets the moderate bobbleheads nodding in self-righteous agreement.
I don’t buy that either. As for messaging effort, while conflict averse moderates too often have been silent on the sidelines of the unpleasant abortion debate, Democrats have been leading the fight for reproductive health rights for decades, including in the largest protest in American history.
Democrats have even been fighting for abortion rights in jurisdictions where they know it will hurt them politically. For example, my former boss Tom Daschle lost his reelection bid in no small part because he courageously stood up for reproductive freedom in a state where he knew doing so would hurt him.
Beyond an alleged lack of messaging effort, moderates also criticize Democrats’ messaging skills.
My question back to moderates: “Tell me, have you discovered the magic words that convince your anti-abortion friends to preserve Roe? If so, could you please share them? Has any human being on the planet come up with those magically persuasive words?
Market researchers tell us there are words and arguments that seem to work better than others. But they still don’t change many minds.
If the magic words don’t seem to exist, maybe messaging
skills isn’t the problem here.
Maybe the audience, not the messaging, is the problem. Maybe the audience is unpersuadable on this issue.
This “it’s Democrats’ fault because they suck at messaging” line of blame-shifting is not just irksome, it’s one of the root causes of the coming abortion ban. The moderates’ mindless, self-indulgent “both sides are equally bad” and “why should I support them if they can’t message” viewpoints frees moderates to continue using their election-swinging votes to empower Republicans.
Too many moderates give Republicans their votes, often out of greed, because there is a tax cut promised, or out of shallowness, because of some kind of an irrelevant personality preference. They subsequently express shock and dismay when the Republicans they helped elect do the things they promised they would do on the campaign trail, such as making abortion illegal, censoring teachers, opposing gun background checks, blocking efforts to make health care and child care more affordable, and effectively empowering white supremacists and insurrectionists.
While all of us, including congressional Democrats, could and should get better at messaging on these issues, let’s not kid ourselves. The primary reason abortion is about to be banned in about half of the states isn’t messaging. The primary problem is that there are too many Republican extremists in office. That happens in part because there are too many moderates giving them their votes. That happens because there are too many moderates rationalizing their votes for extremist Republicans with self-delusional “both sides are equally bad” arguments.
So the next time you hear moderates say something bad is happening because Democrats suck at messaging, please stop nodding your heads, and hold them accountable.
Not that there was really any question, you understand. But with this “leak” of the Supreme Court’s imminent abortion ruling we can pretty well dismiss the notion that there is ever a “settled” argument in this great, grand democratic experiment of ours. Given sufficient connivery, bad faith and partisan fervor, nothing is ever truly decided and settled.
Court watchers and other sage heads — like Slate’s Dahlia Lithwick — are at the moment undecided about why and who leaked Sam Alito’s 98-page screed/draft of the court’s upcoming opinion. Was it someone trying to gin up enough public outrage to … dosomething about it? On a court where there’s a locked-in-stone five votes to decide in favor of anything the Federalist Society/evangelical right has on their to-do list?
Or was the leak from someone sympathetic to overturning Roe? An arch-partisan wet dream that has never polled higher than 30% with Americans since 1973? The thinking being that given Americans’ inability to focus on anything longer than two weeks would mean the howling and protesting — from the majority of citizens — will be exhausted by June when the formal decision is expected to be handed down?
Predictably, FoxNews world is already declaring that the “real scandal” here is … the leak … not Alito’s thinking.
Whatever, there’s little doubt that overturning a “settled law” that has maintained 70% support for 50 years will be the signature decision of John Roberts’ court. This vote will be his legacy. And as I’ve followed the news since last night, Roberts has neither said or signalled anything about how he will vote or whether he’s trying to work the team to modulate the greatest example of “legislating from the bench” in modern American history.
The Roberts angle of this is interesting because from everything I know about the guy he is the classic between-the-forty-yard-lines institutional conservative … getting trampled like so many others of his fading ilk by hyper-partisans with a truly hypocritical regard for constitutional integrity. Like so many old-school, country club Republicans, he’s watching the cumulative effect of so many of his status quo/progressive-resistant decisions coming back to wreak havoc on the dignity of the institutions they claim to so revere.
The abortion argument is so treadworn there’s nothing fresh to be said about it. My personal attitude — shared by many in polling over the decades — is that while I could never consent to it in my relationships, and certainly not as “casual” birth control, the idea that The Government has any standing to dictate to a woman what she can and cannot do — even in the case of rape or her health for chrissakes — is about as anti-democratic, anti-libertarian and anti-American experiment as it gets.
What makes the pro-life argument even worse — which is to say even more hypocritical — is that poll after poll and study after study shows that Godly-divined, Christ-sanctioned anti-abortion partisans are nearly as rabidly opposed to social welfare spending — for people like single-mothers — as they are to choice. For them, support for life stops at birth.
Amy Klobuchar popped up on Rachel Maddow’s show last night making brave sounds about how this means liberals and everyone else in favor of Roe as it stands has to, you know, band together and gird for the fight to change Congress before this authoritarian stampede gets any worse.
To which I say, “Well, good luck with that.” As someone pointed out on Twitter this morning, over two million people have signed a petition to cut Johnny Depp’s ex-wife out of the next “Aquaman” movie because she was so so crazy mean to Johnny.
By contrast, the outrageously sordid tale of Clarence Thomas’s wife cavorting with abject nutjobs and insurrectionists — with his full knowledge — trying to subvert the Constitution by overthrowing an election has faded from public interest with no apparent legal consequences.
“According to the American Library Association, conservative activists in several states, including Texas, Montana and Louisiana, have joined forces with like-minded officials to dissolve libraries’ governing bodies, rewrite or delete censorship protections, and remove books outside of official challenge procedures.
“Leaders have taken works as seemingly innocuous as the popular children’s picture book In the Night Kitchen by Maurice Sendak off the shelves (and) closed library board meetings to the public. . . .”
All I can say is, IT’S ABOUT TIME!
Public libraries are a public menace, especially for young, impressionable minds. I am living proof — living, permanently scarred proof.
I grew up in Laurel, Mississippi, now best known as the star of HGTV’s popular house-makeover show Home Town. In the late 1950s and 1960s, when I was in my formative youth, it was better known for its shady mayor, Klan activity and a stinky Masonite plant.
Laurel, however, did have a great public library. I was a regular from an early age, especially in summer, when you got a star on a big poster board for every book you consumed.
As I moved into my tweens, I was still happily reading Hardy Boys mysteries, inspirational, youth-oriented biographies of great men like Admiral Richard Byrd, Thomas Edison and Yogi Berra, and occasionally a mystery by Agatha Christie or Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. I saved my money and even bought books occasionally at Laurel’s Baptist Bible and Book Shop.
At some point, I decided I should read something from the best seller list. I asked at the front desk of the library for recommendations, little knowing there was a subversive librarian just waiting for any easy mark to pounce on.
Miss Eva Mae, a soft-spoken gray-haired lady with a sweet smile, said, in essence, “You know, Noel, there are many better books here than what’s on those best-seller lists.”
“Really?” I said.
“Come with me,” she said with a nod of her head, leading me deep into an adult-section aisle.
She showed me several books. They tended to be slightly worn looking and lacking the fancy, pictorial dust jackets of the newest arrivals.
I passed on David Copperfield and Wuthering Heights. I’d seen the movie versions on TV. I settled on John Steinbeck’s The Grapes ofWrath, the fattest, heaviest book I had ever checked out.
And that’s how I was lost. The story of the Joad family, hardscrabble farmers like my ancestors, told of poverty and bad luck, desperation, mean bosses, heartless bankers, courage, anger.
Just like that, I outgrew Joe and Frank Hardy. Tom Swift, too. I was soon checking out books by James Baldwin, J.D. Salinger, Carson McCullers, William Faulkner.
And so it was that I gradually morphed into a free-thinking, questing liberal. I couldn’t stop myself. I read books like I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, The Women’s Room, Slaughterhouse 5 and The Other America.
When I had kids, two sons, I read In the Night Kitchen to them — many, many times — despite the fact that it included a couple of illustrations of the hero, a boy named Mickey, in his birthday suit. I let them read To Kill a Mockingbird before they reached puberty.
They became even more progressive and free thinking than I.
So, you see, those Texas folks are right. Public libraries are dangerous places, especially for the young.
They might get ideas.
Note: Noel Holston is a freelance writer who lives in Athens, Georgia. He regularly shares his insights and wit at Wry Wing Politics. He’s also a contributing essayist to Medium.com, TVWorthWatching.com, and other websites. He previously wrote about television and radio at Newsday (200-2005) and, as a crosstown counterpart to the Pioneer Press’s Brian Lambert, at the Star Tribune (1986-2000). He’s the author of “Life After Deaf: My Misadventures in Hearing Loss and Recovery,” by Skyhorse.
Personally, I’m just fine with pulling the plug on the public transportation mask mandate. At the risk of sounding like a raging, bug-eyed Trump goober — or Bill Maher — masks, as a universal mandate have served what purpose they could and it’s time to move on into the next phase of COVID protection.
How the mandate has been ended is a whole other story. I am not alone in thinking it bizarre-to-appalling that in a highly-developed society of 320 million people one strategically placed partisan with precious little legal and no medical qualifications can dictate/induce a health policy for everyone. Really folks, WTF? Can we get some half-baked judge somewhere to require every pot hole in the country get fixed today?
(This on the judge from Charlie Pierce: “You see, Judge [Kathryn] Mizelle is one of those folks that the Federalist Society sent up the pneumatic tube that led from its labs to the White House. She clerked for Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, and was rated as “not qualified” by the American Bar Association. She was 33 when she was nominated and confirmed as the 2020 lame-duck session was winding down. She was eight years out of law school and had never tried a case of any kind. Her husband was chosen to be acting general counsel at the Department of Homeland Security through his connection to that noted devotee of the Constitution, Stephen Miller. She had no experience, but she had the golden resume.“)
Have you read her argument on “sanitation”? What for godssake is the woman babbling about?
But the science of masked airplane travel has escaped me for a while. If every environment in which we spend time in close quarters with other humans was as well ventilated and filtered as an airplane I seriously doubt COVID would have spread as far and as deep as it has.
The larger point is that after two years, and after everything we’ve learned about the virus, after the vaccines and boosters and all that is readily knowable about transmission and individual vulnerability, we are truly at the point where it is up to each of us to protect ourselves. Pre-vaccine I wouldn’t have said so. But now I do.
Feel free to tell me how completely wrong I am, but two shots and two boosters later and with no underlying conditions (other than general mule-headedness and irritability) I’m not seeing myself as particularly vulnerable to serious infection from COVID as it exists today, even in its sub-variants. Likewise, based on my understanding, if I’m carrying any level of the virus, (which immunologically may actually help me avoid a more serious infection) my viral load isn’t potent enough to do much if any damage to another similarly vaccinated, otherwise healthy person.
Which gets us obviously to those who are either not vaccinated or afflicted with some other significant health problem.
At this point in the pandemic everybody has had enough time and has access to enough information to have made an adult decision about vaccinations. Not that “adult” means “good”, you undersatand.
For those still avoiding vaccination because of some utterly imbecilic hyper-partisan political reason (which usually covers both “religious” issues and athletes with “body purity” excuses) … well, good luck to you. If your fierce stand for “personal freedom” gets a tube jammed down your throat and an early grave, you can hope that Donald Trump or Ron DeSantis or Kristi Noem or some other sociopathic right-wing grifter will show up and say a few appreciative words at your funeral.
For people with emphysema, diabetes, etc., they absolutely should continue protecting themselves with masks in public settings. More to the point, they should have been doing that before COVID. It unfortunately comes with their territory.
For the rest of us, we’ve followed science, as opposed to cable TV entertainment theory, and have every good reason now to move on. Exercising, mind you, similar basic cautions we use to avoid harm from… well, pick as many as you like … spinal meningitis, hepatitis, diptheria, measles, strolling blind across six lanes of freeway, jumping out of airplanes without a parachute, French kissing Matt Gaetz … (sorry about that last one) … and on and on … and on.
Point being, there’s something out there somewhere for everyone, given the right circumstances and bad luck.
[Updated: With the proper use of “lying.”] With everything going on in the world you can be forgiven if you haven’t paid a lot of attention to … South Dakota. I mean, to most of us it’s just that big flat place “over there”. A place where unless you’re counting pheasants and super spreader motorcycle rallies nothing much ever happens.
But then you get a story like the one where the state’s top law enforcement officer — protecting and serving, y’know — kills a guy with his car — and given the place’s 90% Republican control, gets off with a hand-slap, essentially Scot-free, at least until he doesn’t.
Yesterday the South Dakota legislature finally summoned the courage to impeach Attorney General Jason Ravnsborg for, A: Killing 55 year-old Joe Boever by hitting him as he walked alongside a rural highway, and then B: Flagrantly lying about it, claiming he thought Boever, a guy whose head came through Ravnsborg’s windshield, was a deer.
The story has played here in Minnesota and nationally, but usually without the telling details, some of which were only partly known until the full North Dakota BCI report was released several weeks ago. (The incident took place Sept. 12, 2020.) Having already established that the dead man’s glasses were lying on the passenger seat of Ravnsborg’s car, thereby making it, well, pretty damned unlikely the Attorney General didn’t know he’d hit a human being, the report revealed that far from Boever walking on the road, Ravnsborg — a guy who at at age 46 has already accumulated 25 traffic citations — was completely off the road, as in his entire car, a full-size Ford, was on the other side of the rumble strips and fog lines, practicaly in the ditch, when he hit Boever, who was carrying a flashlight, so hard Boever’s head not only came through the windshield but one of his legs was torn completely off.
And about that flashlight … . A local sheriff rolled out to the scene in response to Ravnsborg calling in a report of hitting a deer, (something you have to do for insurance reasons). Neither of them bothered to check around for the deer. So neither noticed the light from the flashlight lying in the ditch back near the point of impact. (The car – traveling at 68 mph — carried Boever about 100 feet before throwing him off.) When Ravnsborg and other cops returned to the scene the next day and found Boever’s body, the flashlight was still on.
So much for thorough law enforcement work.
So now Ravnsborg will face a Senate trial that like — pick your Trump impeachment — requires a 2/3 vote to convict. How that goes is anyone’s guess. But — and here we get into more wildly dysfunctional, contemporary South Dakota politics — he does not have friends in high places. You see, Ravnsborg is in a death match feud with South Dakota’s “presidential contender” governor, former beauty queen Kristi Noem. She wants him gone real bad, and right now, she carries more water in South Dakota than he does.
Noem needs far less introduction than Ravnsborg. She is best known to anyone with a conscience as the appalling Trumpist politician who so resolutely denied COVID that South Dakota for a time (around when Ravnsborg killed Boever) had the highest death rate per capita of any place in the world.
For her brave stand for “personal freedoms” Noem became a darling of FoxNews and was catapulted into the pantheon of self-serving gargoyles considered suitable successors to the Trump mantle. (Semi-notorious Trump “adviser” Corey Lewandowski has become a, mmm, regular traveling companion as Noem makes the required CPAC/Trump rally circuit of activities having nothing to do with responsibly governing South Dakota.)
I could go on about Noem’s scandal-ette over big-footing her daughter’s real estate license, then pushing out the bureaucrat who denied it, and the $400,000 fence she had put up around the Governor’s residence (with no hint at all of any unique threat to her), or the constant use of state aircraft to get her and Lewandowski to MAGA rallies. But, in the annals of South Dakota today there’s something better … but far more opaque.
With all the news about sanctions on Russian oligarchs, seizing their super yachts and chasing their extremely murky finances all over the planet, it’s worth noting that flat, boring South Dakota is today a rival to Switzerland when it comes to — let’s call it what it is — hiding money.
Back in the ’80s another Republican governor, Bill Janklow, yet another Republican politician with a notorious driving record — 13 citations — and a guy who while speeding killed a Minnesota motorcyclist on a South Dakota highway, opened the doors to the industry of remarkably air-and-light tight trusts. Over the last ten years alone, as every millionaire-billionaire with a reason to hide money has set up such “legitimate financial tools” the amount of cash stashed in South Dakota has risen seven-fold, from $50 billion to $355 billion as of late 2020.
That’s a third of a trillion dollars protected from prying eyes and taxes by … South Dakota.
How much of those billions is utterly nefarious, maybe even from Russian mobsters? No one knows and South Dakota certainly isn’t going to do anything to make it easier for investigators to find out. (Amazingly South Dakota — tough negotiators over there — doesn’t get even the tiniest of a percentage of a taste for hiding all that loot.)
It almost goes without saying that aggressive journalism is a deeply endangered species in full-on, proudly red and merrily Trumpian South Dakota of 2022. But there are a few brave souls doing what they can.
South Dakota’s descent into The Alabama of the Midwest was taking root back when Tom Daschle was a top Democrat. But I can only imagine what George McGovern and James Abourezk think of their once dull, fly-over home state?
As for us here in Minnesota, thank god we’ve got Wisconsin.
So I’m trying to remember when I stopped believing, “Crime doesn’t pay”? As a teenager, I suppose. But the question connects to why I believed it in the first place? Where did that reassuring, fanciful notion come from in the first place?
Mom and Dad? As I recall they were quite clear in their belief that the bastards were always getting away with things. The nuns at St. Joe’s Catholic School? Well, if impure thoughts about cute little Marcia with the pigtails was a crime, I knew for sure I was going to burn in eternal hell. Something in the water in rural Minnesota? Mmm, maybe. It was an awful long ways from the crimes I saw on the evening news.
This all rattled through my alleged mind while watching director Richard Linklater’s latest film, “Apollo 10 1/2” on Netflix the other night. For those unfamiliar with Linklater, I regard him as one of the most acute and compassionate observers of modern American mores working today. He’s most famous for films like, “Dazed and Confused”, the “Before Sunrise/Sunset/Midnight” trilogy with Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy and “Boyhood”, which somehow lost out for Best Picture in 2015. (In 2022 Hollywood it would of course have to be re-titled “Identifies as Non-BinaryHood.”)
Technically, “Apollo” is a re-visit of the rotoscope animation Linklater used in his 2001 film “Waking Life”, which explored American culture via dream states. (Highly recommended.) Thematically though, “Apollo” is one of the most charming and evocative strolls any Boomer can take down through the mediums of an era that formed us far more, says I, than Mom, Dad or any nun or minister.
Set among a big, loving, idiosyncratic family in suburban Houston during the rise of NASA and the race to the moon, it is chock full of references — reminders — of where our arguably naive notions of truth, justice and the American way came from. Which is to say … from television and pop culture, far more than strict, sterile religious authority figures.
The story — built around one of the son’s/narrator’s fantasy of being sent to the moon before Apollo 11 — is basically a hang-out with the family enjoying the innocence of the era. Its like a long, carefree summer full of TV shows — “I Dream of Jeannie”, “Bewitched”, “Bonanza”, “Gunsmoke”. Pop music like “Sugar, Sugar” by The Archies, Herb Alpert’s “Whipped Cream and Other Delights”, Janis Joplin on Dick Cavett. And movies like “The Shakiest Gun in the West” (at the drive-in where half the kids are snuck in under blankets in the back of Dad’s station wagon) and “2001” (with the narrator trying to explain the ending to his glazey-eyed buddy.) And days at space-themed amusement parks like AstroWorld.
It’s a lovely little film, full of bittersweet nostalgia.
Bittersweet, because I wonder what 10 year-old now, much less any 16 year-old still believes “crime doesn’t pay” or that “the bad guys always lose in the end.”?
What sort of sensory deprivation would such a kid have to be living in to not see:
The President of the United States, defeated in a fair election, set off a riot at the Capitol and (to date) face no consequences for it?
Or the same guy on TV, lying to everyone’s face thousands of times a year, killing tens of thousands of his own voters with venality and gross incompetence, not to mention defrauding banks and insurance companies for years and avoiding any kind of day of reckoning?
Or watch greed-crazed bankers and manipulators crash a world economy without a single top executive ever going to jail?
Or a dumb kid practically their age kill a couple people with a rifle in full view of police and be acquitted by a jury of his peers?
Or, hell, a Russian sociopath unleashing genocide on a neighboring country and continuing to enjoy the fruits of two decades of outrageous kleptocracy?
The sweet summery innocence Richard Linklater shows in “Apollo 10 1/2” was of course an illusion even then.
But I can’t help but think that the illusions of Boomer youth were stronger and therefore more real than whatever lessons the kids of 2022 are taking away from what they’re watching today.
You know what
Joe Biden’s biggest problem is? He’s boring.
That ought to be a good thing, because he’s boring in the positive sense of the term, boring like President Dwight D. Eisenhower was boring. Like Ike, Joe gets things done, maintains his composure, doesn’t dance.
Remember how
they called Biden’s Democratic predecessor “no drama Obama”? Comparatively
speaking, Obama is Jim Carrey to Joe’s Gary Cooper.
Some of us
believed that this was what we wanted — and what the nation needed — after four
years of Donald J. Trump’s tweeting, bleating, bragging, lying, bitching and
preening. But whether you worshiped The Donald or recoiled at the sight of him,
he got us all accustomed to having a President who was a noisy, ongoing public
spectacle, a Fast and Furious binge-watch.
Trump only
accelerated a trend, however. Climb aboard the Wayback Machine with me for a
moment.
Barrack Obama
didn’t call himself a rock star or sell himself as such, but once the label was
suggested, he took to the role with ease and enthusiasm. Silver spooner George
W. Bush had has good ol’ boy act and his flight suit. Bill Clinton had his
Arkansas drawl, his sax and his sex appeal. Ronald Reagan was our first
“acting” President.
The trend is
usually traced back to JFK. He was our first made-by-TV President, quick with
the quip, athletic, married to glamour. He probably wouldn’t have beaten
Richard Nixon — a one-man psychodrama to come — if he hadn’t been better
looking.
Biden, then, is
at a distinct disadvantage. He’s just plain Joe, and he’s gotten plainer and
paler and slower moving with age.
Which is not to
say he’s incompetent. Far from it. It’s just that he doesn’t make the applause
meters go haywire. As result, his administration’s real, impressive
accomplishments don’t get the respect they’re due.
He’s been
President 14 months. He got his historic, decades overdue infrastructure bill
passed in 10. The Affordable Health Care Act — Obamacare — took 14.
Dealing with the
pandemic, Biden has acted methodically and scientifically to limit the spread
and slow the Covid death toll despite the efforts of the anti-maskers and
anti-vaxxers that his predecessor had encouraged.
On his greatest
foreign policy challenge, Biden has been caught between Americans who want us
to boot the Russians out of Ukraine militarily and the who’d like a Putin type,
if not Putin himself, to be our President. And that’s just the
Republicans.
Still, Biden has
handled the crisis with resolve and caution, encouraging our NATO allies
without hogging the spotlight. His worst “gaffe,” supposedly, was to intimate
that Vladimir Putin murderous assault cannot be forgiven. I’ll take a President
who feels moral outrage over one who’s morally outrageous any day.
Biden’s great
bungle, supposedly, was our military withdrawal from Afghanistan last year. It
probably could have been handled better, though whatever “better” might have
looked like would have been panned in some quarters anyway.
Just don’t
forget that he bit that bullet, shouldered that responsibility, and foreclosed
a boondoggle that three previous Presidents did not. And in doing so, he
incalculably improved the standing from which we could condemn Russia’s
aggression in Ukraine.
Yes, inflation
is cancelling some of the gains of an otherwise booming economy, and while
economists point out that pent-up pandemic demand and complicated supply chain
snarls would be inflationary factors no matter who was President, Biden is the
one who (really, truly) won the election. Inflation is his problem to deal
with, and he is.
He hasn’t fixed
immigration, reversed income inequality, halted climate change, stopped crime
or cured cancer yet, either, but he has committed to those fights. And he
hasn’t even served half his term yet.
His approval
rating is stuck at a worrisome 41 percent, but I’d wager that if he just
weren’t so unexciting, he’d be 10 or 15 points higher.
Maybe if he dyed
his hair an unnatural color and learned to play the saxophone.
We do love a show.
Note: Noel Holston is a freelance writer who lives in Athens, Georgia. He regularly shares his brilliance and wit at Wry Wing Politics. He’s also a contributing essayist to Medium.com, TVWorthWatching.com, and other websites. He previously wrote about television and radio at Newsday (200-2005) and, as a crosstown counterpart to the Pioneer Press’s Brian Lambert, at the Star Tribune (1986-2000). He’s the author of “Life After Deaf: My Misadventures in Hearing Loss and Recovery,” by Skyhorse.
Among the torrent of stories coming out of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine — military atrocities, blunders, sanctions, seized super-yachts, top-level spies and generals under house arrest and on and on, are regular reports of Russians, captured soldiers but self-exiled Russians in particular, expressing shame. Shame for what their country is doing and for what they didn’t do to prevent it.
You don’t have to be raised Catholic to agree that shame is a powerful human emotion. Few emotions motivate civilized people more. (My Jewish friends and I argue over who was raised in a denser cult of shame. But that’s a topic for another day.)
Simultaneous with these stories, I dropped in my DVD of “Andrei Rublev” , the classic 1966 film that is really more of a biography of 15th century Russia than the legendary painter of Eastern Orthodox icons. I don’t expect many of you to have have seen it, although I encourage you to give it a try. All three and half hours of it. (Shot in 2:35:1 “CinemaScope” black and white by the equally legendary Andrei Tarkovsky. ) Along with its mesmerizing imagery and epic scale, the film is often mentioned as the most vivid depiction of medieval Russian rural life ever put on film.
And, following the life of the ever-conscience stricken monk, Rublev, it simmers in shame.
The question I’ve been asking myself as I follow Putin’s invasion is, “What responsibility do common Russians have for what their leaders are doing in their name … again?” And, is it ever fair (or meaningful) to hold an entire culture responsible, with shaming, for repeated cycles of kleptocracy, despotism and psychopathology in its ruling class?
I ask this because Russia, of the world’s so-called “great powers”, is demonstrating again that it is unique in its inability to prevent regular devolutions into violent autocracy.
“Andrei Rublev” opens in 1400 with the peasant class living in farm animal squallor, periodically raided by rival villages if not Tartars from the Far East and wholly subservient to a regal class defending its status with vicious militaristic policing. Midway the film depicts the 1408 sacking of the city of Vladimir, organized by a Russian prince conspiring with marauding Tartars, in an attempt to kill his twin brother. (Although financed by the Soviet bureaucracy, Leonid Brezhnev’s Kremlin refused to release the film for years and cut it by almost 50%. The Criterion edition runs the original, full 209 minutes.)
And 1400 was already at least five centuries into Russia’s organized despotism, not even halfway through, with the calamitous eras of Ivan the Terrible, Peter the Great, various weaker but no less vicious Czars, Josef Stalin, the grim, grey Soviets and now … Vladimir Putin still to come. In all, a truly remarkable thousand-year cavalcade of sociopaths … accepted, tolerated and often revered.
The informed will argue, “But every culture experiences this!” And the most woke liberals will point out the United States’ genocide of the Indians, racism toward Blacks and innumerable military misadventures. All of which is fair. As is the fact that Russia’s history is pock-marked with invasions from almost every direction.
But I still believe Russia is different. Not only is the violence of Russia’s despots borderline irrational and invariably unapologetic, but the common Russian, even today, in an era of Twitter, TikTok, McDonalds and Boeing jets, remains largely subdued, cowed and mute. For all our failures, the West, meaning the US, Europe, Japan, the Commonwealth and the like, has largely brought what you might call “the despotic impulse” under control. Certainly to the point where one man, a flagrant gangster, is not likely to be able to commandeer a vast army to attack a neighbor. Even repressive China sees that a better, stronger (near-term) future lies in providing cheap manufacturing for Western corporations.
So what is about Russian psychology that keeps its culture in this endlessly repeating, violent, self-destructive trap?
I’m asking. I don’t know.
But the eminent Russian historian Stephen Kotkin, recently interviewed by New Yorker editor and Russian authority in his own right, David Remnick, suggested that in addition to Russians’ historically heavy indoctrination in threats from “others”, they have also been fed a wildly disproportionate belief in their “exceptionalism.” (The FoxNews, American right-wing echo chamber comparison is right there to behold in all its naked ignominy.)
It’s as though having produced Rublev, Rachmaninoff, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Sakharov and Tarkovsky (indisputably one of film world’s all time greats) they believe themselves every bit the cultural, technological and inventive equal of democracies like the United States, Britain, etc.
(Kotkin is a fellow at the Hoover Institute and has been regularly interviewed on all things Russian. Here’s one recent video.)
The problem, says Kotkin, is that they are not. Not even close. Their repeated cycles of repression, kleptocratic corruption and violence pushes them back every time — as with Gorbachev — they showed the possibility of shaking off neo-Czar-ism or whatever you might want to call it. Consequently, because it regularly slides back into medieval tyranny and isolation, Russia simply hasn’t achieved like the “super power” it insists it is.
And today — with the world watching horrified and in real time as Russia bombards maternity hospitals in an obscenely irrational assault on a peaceful-enough neighbor — the shunning and shaming of Russia, all Russians, not just Putin, is going to be worse and more immediately punishing than it has ever been.
So the mostly younger, urban, elite, “modernist” class — the very people a retrograde culture needs to shake off the “despotic impulse” — is fleeing Russia in droves unlikely to ever return. (If you were young and bright how long would you wait abroad before you were convinced Father Russia had fully and permanently exorcised Putinism?)
From Turkey, or Europe or wherever will take them, they’re looking back, rightfully ashamed at their native land for what is doing, again, and for what they didn’t do to stop it from doing … again.
At the risk of sounding like a poor man’s Tom Friedman, I’m watching the truly astonishing turns of events in response to Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine and thinking that this holds potential to be the single most transformative global episode since WWII. And not just militarily.
Just a few things that come to mind:
In automotive terms, the rubber is truly meeting the road in the US of A. I see no one expecting the price of gas to return to pre-invasion levels for months, if ever. In fact, based on my diet of articles and YouTube videos of economists, finance ministers, etc. there isn’t anyone who does not see prices continuing to escalate upwards all summer long. $6 a gallon and higher in Minnesota is not out of the question this year.
The effect on vacation travel — by car or plane — and commuting habits is plain to be imagined . (And this just as businesses, post-COVID, were coaxing employees back into the office.)
Then imagine consumer demand for immediate alternatives to the average family’s 5000-pound SUV and pickup. With the US cutting off the 8% of oil it gets from Russia, and Europeans slapped across the face with the existential dilemma they’ve created buying billions of euros of gas from a homicidal maniac, an even more dramatic/disruptive tightening of the tap is inevitable.
(In a couple months, I expect to see some real bargains for people shopping for a 13 mpg Ford F-150. Computer chip shortage be damned.)
“Transformative” also applies here to the no doubt foul-smelling deals being cooked up with the Saudis, Iranians and Venezuelans to reduce cost-at-the-pump issues here and make up for fuel Europeans will need next winter when — not if — they stop doing business with Vlad the Invader.
So let’s imagine the new-found demand for electric transportation. Mass and personal transportation-wise. It’s been a common understanding for years now that cost is the critical factor in any transition to electric vehicles. Well, a 50%-80% increase in gas prices is pretty much what the good green doctor has always ordered if you want to dramatically increase the US’s 2% electric vehicle fleet substantially and permanently higher. True, there are basic material issues related to the invasion, but I’d bet the longer term viability of electric wins out over ever more impractical internal combustion cars. (It would be nice if we could capture some of that gas price increase for state and national treasuries but … share-holder value, you know.)
When I think of the great, convulsive events that have taken place in my lifetime — the Cold War/Cuban missile crisis, Vietnam, various assassinations, the fall of the Berlin Wall, 9/11, the crash of 2008 — none of them set off the combined shift or reinvigoration of alliances, reexamination of national priorities and changes in day-to-day consumer habits and lifestyle that we can see erupting here from Putin’s hellish blunder.
And this is all based on the situation as it stands today, before a truly desperate Putin — a man for whom “losing” equals death, figuratively and quite possibly literally — escalates this war into something truly catastrophic.
Please feel free to tell me where I’m mistaken about any of this.
For years I’ve been making the joke about Vladimir Putin’s food taster. As in: Who is that guy? How did he get the job? How does he keep the job? What’s his pulse rate when he tries out the caviar? And, if he’s only the latest, how long do Vlad’s Official Tasters last?
Now, with Putin feeling pressure on a number of fronts, I’ve begun wondering Who Tastes Putin’s Food Taster’s Food? I mean, we are talking Russia here, where a long line of kings and czars and leaders of one stripe or another have, um, “succumbed to nefarious retribution” by one time loyalists suddenly in the mood for their blood.
Obviously, I am no Russia expert. But Russia and Russians have occupied a significant space in my alleged mind nearly my entire life. I was 11 years old during the Cuban missile crisis. We actually did the “duck and cover” drills in grade school. The godless Russian Red Menace was a regular feature of my Catholic upbringing as well as the evening news when I toddled home from school.
As a result, over the years, I’ve padded out the usual consumption of news stories and analyses of Russian government behavior with books about the country, films from the old Soviet Union and more lately, YouTube series from Russian vloggers. Eventually, you do get a grasp of something like the “average Russian mind set”. A mentality set in a startlingly shambolic realm where, to quote the title of one of the better recent books I’ve read, “… Nothing Is True and Everything is Possible.“
Consuming the reporting and punditry of the past five days, I note that plenty is being said about the sanctions on Putin and his closest circle of oligarchs — iuncluding very high profile characters like Chelsea football team owner Roman Abramovich, an early “investor” in Russia’s oil and aluminum businesses. Few believe Putin’s fortune, thought to be well protected in Swiss banks and other off-shore accounts, is in any immediate danger, as in next month or next year. But there have been noisy public statements from European countries — Britain in particular, where the capital has been so saturated with Russian mobster money it has been nicknamed “Londongrad” — that they will at long, long last make life difficult for flagrant thieves who own not one, but two 400-foot yachts, their own personal 787 and … a Premier League football team.
A side story of great interest to me is what the notoriously corrupt international soccer agency, FIFA, floating on gobs of Russian mob money, does in response — to the response — to Putin’s invasion? (Imagine the reaction of American chuckleheads of Biden did something that obliterated the NFL?)
(Another not at all far-fetched notion is what a Spanish Civil War-like call for freedom fighters — from all over the world — to come to Ukraine’s aid might do? Do you doubt there are millions who see this as the moment to make a heroic stand against authoritarian criminals?)
One of Abramovich’s yachts
What then does that crowd do to Putin if they are refused access to Western ultra-rich society, have their London, Paris and Miami mansions seized, their children expelled from the toniest British schools and their byzantine financial transactions/money-laundering hobbled by banking restrictions? Is their loyalty to Putin — who made them, despite getting a reported 50% kickback on their lootings — really all enduring? If not, at one point do they in effect, or in reality, gather the Putin family in the basement of a dacha in Yekaterinburg?
The idea of someone — or some cabal — taking out Putin would be preposterous if his invasion of Ukraine didn’t appear so ill-conceived and delusional, so completely divorced from reality. I mean, the guy was on TV the other day ranting — Trump-like — about “drug addicted neo-Nazis”, a reference apparently to Ukraine’s Jewish president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy. (Abramovich is also Jewish.)
If your billions in ill-gotten gains are dependent on a character sounding as histrionic and unhinged as that, how long before you start looking for a food taster who knows his way around a vial of Novichuk?
At this moment in the drama I’m probably in the minority who thinks this will end badly for Vladimir Putin. In these first moments he seems to hold all the best cards. But the consequences for this kind of naked aggression in the 21st century are yet to be felt.
Leading up to yesterday’s invasion of Ukraine there was plenty of discussion of why Putin would risk something like this? The most common answers being that he sees himself as the Grand Restorer of the Russian (i.e. Soviet) empire, and he’s doing it now while he still has the kind of economic leverage over the West that comes with pumping so much gas onto the world markets. It’s a leverage even he must know will dry up once western Europe in particular goes green (or nuclear) and stops sending him — and I do mean him, personally — billions of dollars (and they’re mostly dollars) in exchange.
But Putin’s bigger problem is also largely of his own making. He is administering a shockingly sick country. 20% of Russians don’t have indoor plumbing. The country is ranked 70th in the world standard of living. It has a GDP 20% smaller than Italy. Russian conscripts are paid the equivalent of $28 a month. (One pundit joked that this war would end today if the European Union offered citizenship to every Russian soldier who laid down his rifle and migrated west.)
Under Putin’s 23 year rule, he has orchestrated a partnering with a cadre of mob-like oligarchs to whom he is Vito Corleone. Each of these characters are not just looting Russian resources — gas, aluminum, etc. — for their private fiefdoms but are kicking back so much cash to Putin he is widely regarded as the wealthiest person on the planet as of this morning, far beyond the wildest dreams of Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk.
And every (thinking) Russian knows this.
Whether the sanctions — and other retaliations by the West — cyber attacks and the like, will be enough to incite revolt inside Russia remains to be seen. Russian history is after all a tale of an endless series of semi-god-like strong men tolerated by the woefully abused masses out of fear that Oppresive Leader is their only protection from another invasion — from the Asian east or the imperial/fascist West (Napoleon and Hitler).
But that was before the internet. Before a constantly interconnected liberal intelligentsia could see and hear in real time what was true and what was just the hysterical war-mongering of Putin’s state media.
Here by the way is a sample of what Russian TV (your average Rooskie’s FoxNews) was saying prior to the invasion. (Via the Los Angeles Times:
“To hear Russian media tell it, the government of Ukraine is run by neo-Nazis waging a genocidal campaign against ethnic Russians in the country’s east, where Moscow-backed authorities regularly uncover mass graves full of the corpses of women and children with bound hands and bludgeoned heads even as they face the hell of constant shelling.
“Such false images and narratives have become a daily staple in Russia….The Russian media have gone into overdrive with stories depicting a government in Kyiv so cruel that Moscow has no choice but to swoop in and protect the ethnic Russians in eastern Ukraine’s Donbas region.
“ ‘It’s a war between the Ukrainian government and its own people…. People are dying there every day. Thousands of civilians died there. Thousands of children lost their limbs there, buried in little coffins’,” Margarita Simonyan, head of the state-funded broadcaster RT, said on a talk show on the Russia-1 channel.”
Having successfully undermined international confidence in the United States through his manipulation of social media and fluffing up Donald Trump, and by degrading Great Britain with Brexit, Putin appears to believe he’s succeeded in splitting the West. To the point that the principal forces of NATO are now so polarized and fragmented they are incapable of wreaking any serious economic damage on him personally.
Judging by Trump and Tucker Carlson and Steve Bannon and Mike Pompeo and the other usual suspects aligning themselves more with Putin than the United States and NATO, it’s tempting to think he’s right.
But I think he’s delusional. A creature of his own bubble. I believe NATO in particular, and world markets in general, are tired of the constant corruption-induced chaos they’re suffering at Putin’s hand. To the point that, with something as unquivocally outrageous as this invasion, they’re united enough to want him — Putin — to suffer a resounding defeat.
You’re hearing it from many quarters: Direct, personal sanctions on Putin and his high-flying mob cronies. Freezing of their accounts, confiscation of their property, (much of it likely acquired via money-laundering — hello again, Donald J. Trump), expulsion from Western communities, colleges, etc.
The tough nut on the personal finance front is — as usual — getting international bankers, our good friends the Swiss in particular, to accept that playing cute with the Third Reich wasn’t lesson enough. If you want credibility in the 21st century, you cut ties with indisputable, war-criminal gangsters.
America’s Trumpist media will continue align with Putin, and more loudly as gas prices spike up towards $5 and $6 a gallon. But I don’t see them convincing a majority of Americans – other than the 20% of Republicans who view Putin more favorably than Joe Biden — that this is anyone’s fault other than Putin’s and that things will only get worse if he prevails.
Many years ago I was talking with a veteran local TV political reporter. It was the Newt Gingrich era. You know, “balanced budgets” and “term limits” and all that other transparently cynical “revolutionary” bullshit.
My question was, “Why are you taking this seriously? Why even give it respectful attention?”
His answer was, “At least there are some ideas there”, avoiding any acknowledgment that the Gingrich PR machinery was “the hot issue” at the moment and, in straight pendulum terms it was time for the press to shift balance after a couple years of mostly favorable Bill Clinton coverage.
The overwhelming scent of bad faith politics, of the “loyal opposition” doing nothing other than throwing gravel in the gearworks of government was, you know, a “speculative” judgment. Reacting to manufactured topicality was a better position, journalistically speaking.
This comes to mind with the latest “revolutionary” proposal from Minnesota’s anything-but-loyal opposition. Namely, the transparently cynical proposal by top Republicans, including gubernatorial candidate Paul (Cotton Mather) Gazelka, to require the state’s teachers to “share” curriculum with parents — and should parents object to heretical texts like, oh I don’t know, “To Kill a Mockingbird” — offer “alternatives”, like, who knows? “The Selected Sermons of Jerry Falwell Jr.”
With Tim Walz still in office and Democrats controlling the House, this latest exercise in shameless pandering — dubbed the “Minnesota Parents’ Bill of Rights” — isn’t likely to go anywhere. But, still, there it is.
After two years of throwing up nothing but impediments to combating an international pandemic, and dismissing the impacts of police violence, this naked appeal to Critical Race Theory racists … (there, I said it) … is what Republicans are selling as a fresh idea. Something that truly improves the safety, prosperity and happiness of all concerned.
I have several teachers and ex-teachers among my family and circle of friends and it’s safe to describe them as universally disgusted. On top of Republicans regularly deriding the work of public school teachers for decades, (because as a group they tend to read a lot of books, have a union and vote Democrat they are a threat to Trump-era conservative ambitions), this latest brainstorm would add hours … and hours … of uncompensated time to every teacher’s workload. (Feel free to suspect that this “fresh idea” was handed down to Minnesota’s deep-thinking Republicans by some ALEC-like dark money cabal which is simultaneously sliding cash to their campaign funds.)
My problem, on the beat reporter/editor level, is declining to aggressively confront the naked pandering of this and other even more cynical positions taken up by 2022 conservatives.
Like, for example, the “fraudulent 2020 election” claims pushed by Trumpists and widely-to-unanimously accepted (publicly) by Minnesota Republicans.
Post January 6 there was a brief moment when a truly revolutionary idea kicked around professional journalism circles. Namely, every interview with any politician would begin with the simple question, “Did Joe Biden win the 2020 election fair and square?”
Any answer other than, “Of course he did”, meant the interview was over and the politician, self-revealed to be a pathetic toady for a corrupt reality TV performer, would have to get his free publicity from some other outlet. (Working reporters could hand him business cards for Joe Rogan.)
That moment dissipated an instant later. Which means we have returned to treating cynical nonsense like “sharing curriculum”, (more accurately described as “censoring” or “canceling curriculum”) as though it is a good faith proposal to improve the academic outcomes of Minnesota students.
So I ask again, does this crowd have even one constructive idea?
Purely as a distraction you understand, I’ve taken an interest in Sarah Palin’s defamation trial against The New York Times. A decision may come down today, and betting money says she’ll lose. But losing could likely mean yet another in a series of pop culture paydays for the ex-mayor, ex-governor, ex-vice presidential candidate and ex-Masked Singer.
If you haven’t followed this at all, the very short story is this: Palin is accusing the Times, its editorial department and its editor at the time, James Bennet, of sullying her reputation in 2017 when he referenced an ad her “team” ran in 2011. The ad, fairly typical of other rabble-rousing pro-Second Amendment fund raising appeals, used gunsight imagery — a collection of crosshairs — over 20 Democrat-held congressional districts. You know, “They’re in our sights.”
Truly clever stuff. But invariably effective in ginning up small dollar contributions from the right-wing base.
The issue is that one of the “targeted” districts belonged to Gabby Giffords, who not long after was seriously wounded by a lunatic in a Tucson rampage that killed six people, including a nine year-old girl. (After being shown the ad prior to the attack, Giffords herself said, “We’re on Sarah Palin’s targeted list, but the thing is that the way that she has it depicted has the crosshairs of a gun sight over our district, and when people do that, they’ve got to realize there are consequences to that action’.”
Six years later Bennet added in a reference to the ad as he edited an opinion piece in the wake of the baseball field shooting — by a Bernie Sanders supporter — that seriously wounded Republican congressman Steve Scalise. His intended point, he says, being to draw attention to how violent rhetoric and imagery can lead to truly violent actions by the unstable.
Palin wasn’t having it. She had been sullied! And by god and mama grizzlies she was going to take the Times to court.
The truly ludicrous part of Palin’s claim is that the editorial — which Bennet and the Times corrected within hours — had “damaged” her in some way. Which way, she couldn’t say exactly, as Times’ lawyers pointed out that her standing in her political community and by extension her finances didn’t diminish much at all in the aftermath.
Put in another, less polite manner; being accused of anything by a citadel of godless, anti-freedom, elitist-liberal intolerance like The New York Times is — as everyone knows — like a monsoon of gold from the hillbilly firmament. In other words, mam, “Exactly what damage have you suffered?”
True to form, court room observers have noted that Palin hasn’t lost her touch when it comes to self-parody. At one point she declared that this editorial was just another example of how the Times had “lied” about her. The only problem with that being was that no one, not even her, could come up with that other, um, you know, example. Said Palin when pressed in court, “I don’t have the specific references in front of me.”
Right. Well, we understand you’ve only been preparing for this trial for five years. But you get back to us when you’ve done some more research.
Then you factor in Palin being a very high profile-to-notorious public figure and how difficult it is to make a case abut defaming any famous personality.
So how a jury possibly rules in her favor will be a fascinating thing to see.
But the behavior of Mr. Bennet does expose the Times to a standard criticism of bias, certainly in the eyes of the usual right-wing echo chamber suspects. I mean, he did reach back six years for an example of a conservative politician using violent imagery. That leaves him open to accusations of fixed bias.
However, as Bennet — who was later driven out of the Times by the Times itself after running an incendiary opinion piece by Republican Sen. Tom Cotton demanding troops be sent in to subdue George Floyd protestors — explained in court, he was unable to find even one example of a liberal politician using similar violent imagery. In other words, its kind of a PalinWorld thing, that “targeted”, “get ’em in our gun sights” money raising pitch.
If Palin loses today or tomorrow I do hope someone keeps tabs on the speaking circuit/cheesy singing show/reality TV/FoxNews appearance/fund-raising haul that comes her way in the wake of being treated so cruelly and predictably by … a jury of New Yorkers.
I tell you, there’s gold in being a perpetual victim of elitist liberals.
