Tag Archives: Bernie

You’re Mad as Hell. I’m Happy for You.

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NEW BLOG PHOTO_edited- 3Every family has its classic stories. Legendary face plants and screw ups. Moments of never-to-be-lived down buffoonery. Hell, recalling such things is practically what families are for. Everyone has leverage on everyone else. It isn’t possible for anyone to stay all high and mighty for longer than it takes a spouse, a sibling or a child to “remember that time when you … .”

So … .

Quick story: A few years ago, after a hiking trip, I’m checking in for a flight at the Phoenix airport. Eyeing my backpack the ticket agent asks, “Do you have any gas canisters in there? Anything flammable?”  No, I tell her, thinking to myself, “How much of a rube do I look like? Gas canisters. Right.  Let’s go, Toots. Chop, chop. I’ve got better things to do than stand here answering your official list of stupid questions.”

“Anything that has been used with gas?”

“What? What do you mean, ‘used with gas’?”

“Like a stove, a camping stove.”

“Well, yeah. But there’s no gas.”

“You’ll have to take it out. It can’t be in checked luggage.”

“There’s no gas. It’s just a piece of metal you screw into canisters. But there are no gas canisters.”

“It doesn’t matter. You’ll have to remove it.”

With that my demeanor, uh, deteriorated … rapidly. “Removing” the screw-in “stove” meant unpacking the entire backpack right there on the floor in front of the counter, clogging the aisle and slowing down the 20-30 people behind me. Pretty soon there are empty water bottles, metal cook kits, spoons, dirty socks and underwear heaped on the terminal floor as I drilled down to the stove.

Finally I come up with the thing. A piece of inert metal the size of a manual can opener. I hand it to her, and with as much snot as I could lay on a line say, “Here you go. No gas. No canister. No nothing. It’s a piece of metal.”

She holds it to her nose and announces, “I can smell gas. This can’t fly. You’ll either have to forfeit it or mail it back to yourself. [For $25].”

Without belaboring a lot of other not exactly mature details, pretty soon — because I know my rights, dammit! — I’m demanding her name, her superior’s name, the airport commissioner’s name and stopping juuuuuust short of dropping a few highly politically incorrect stupid/corporate drone epithets on her.

She doesn’t budge. But she does however press the button for security, which shows up in the form of three burly guys on bikes, who tell — not ask — me to gathering my belongings and step out of line.

Off to one side the oldest of three, a muscular ex-military guy looks me in the eye and says, “I’m going to need you to calm down.”

Truth be told, he alone could have taken me. But with the two younger dudes, a physical defense of my precious Constitutional liberties — it’s in there somewhere: “Thou shalt not be jacked around by [bleeping] dimwits” – was not an option.

But I do whip out the gas-less, canister-less piece of metal and waggle it in his face.

“You know what this is?”

“Yeah, it’s a camping stove. One of those screw-in things.”

“Right. And there’s no gas here is there?”

“No.”

“So what in the [bleep] is the logic of this?”

He pauses, looks at the two younger dudes, then over his shoulder at Nurse Diesel behind the counter, leans in to me and says, ‘There is no logic to this. But that doesn’t mean this could not end up being a very bad day for you if you don’t settle down’.”

This is just a very long set-up to an observation (okay, a complaint) about our popular culture of outrage. Specifically, what a misplaced, counter-productive, self-pitying waste of energy it is, especially for middle-class Americans who by any measure have things pretty damned good these days.

A lot of Donald Trump’s appeal is believed to be rooted in the “rage” and “anger” felt by white Americans who feel marginalized by government, the media and the super rich (other than Donald Trump, of course.) But on closer inspection most of these people are getting along fine or at least well enough that they shouldn’t be nearly as whipped up and pissed off as they say they are. Not many of them are homeless, or getting stopped and gunned down by the cops for broken tail lights. But being “mad as hell” is a great act. It feels cathartic. It attracts attention and pity for their plight, which as all sorts of surveys are showing, is really rooted in crudely filtered resentments of … people in far worse predicaments than they are.

It’s nuts. But in a cultural moment when “outrage” is a standard commodity for sale on reality TV shows, political pundit panels and talk radio, getting in on the act in your own personal way seems like a serious and (very ironically) sophisticated thing to do. “Hey! Look at me! Look at how pissed I am! You should take me seriously! Hell, I should be on TV!”

These are the people I’ll charitably describe as the knuckleheads. The Trumpists, feeling their moment in the raging sun. But theatrical rage is also evident, and arguably even more misplaced among today’s liberals and progressives.

I’ve long had a pet theory built around the notion of “Stress as status”. People, usually in a business environment, who exaggerate and wrap themselves in the stress and tension of their job as a way to A: Extract pity from others, and B: Legitimize their emotional responses to routine workplace disagreements. The more stress you demonstrate, the more serious a person you are.

Liberals at this moment have good reason to be concerned about Donald Trump and his swelling “movement idiocracy”. It is phenomenal. But for the time being it is contained within a Republican party that has been pandering to racial and class resentments since 1968 and is now getting it’s face blow-torched off by the inmates. (It really does remind me of a prison riot.)

By the starkest contrast, the Hillary-Bernie “fight” has been as civil and responsible and mature as anything you’d want to teach the kids in a high school government class. Trump may very well win the nomination. But who can imagine Team Clinton being as feckless and clueless about demolishing Trump as Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio? And the reaction of blacks, Hispanics, women and other rational adults to seven months of Trump’s act? Please.

Point being, there is only suspect status in rage. Mainly, people just adjust and keep their distance from you. In a glutted market for anger, rage is actually kind of boring. It’s a tired cliche. Composure is a more salable long-term product.

And I say that as the guy who would have been a lot better off giving the Phoenix ticket agent one of my patented long, silent, dismissive stares and handing over the camp stove, than throwing an indignant scene.

So as the man said, “I’m going to need you to calm down.”

BTW: The punch line to the Phoenix story comes after I walk across the terminal to some office and lay out $25 to mail the $25 gizmo to Minnesota. As the clerk rings up the charge I ask, “Just out of curiosity, how is this thing getting back to me?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, does it go on some super secure flight or something, you know like in a lead box?”

“No man, it just goes with the regular mail on the plane.”

“You mean like the same plane I’m going on?”

“Yeah, probably. That’s what they do.”

P.S.  Yeah, it’s a new mug shot. December in Furnace Creek.

Whoa! An actual debate.

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Brian_LambertWell, that was actually interesting. And not because it was a night filled with hysteria and off-the-leash narcissism.

In case we’ve forgotten what a “substantive debate” sounds like, Bernie v. Hillary Thursday night in New Hampshire was a refreshing reminder. Two people arguing stuff that matters … most … right now … and not trying to out hyper-ventilate the other guy in imagining bloodthirsty, color-other-than-white terrorists gunning us down in our pickups on our way to Wednesday night prayer service.

Predictably, the morning after pundits are seizing on Hillary’s “artful smear” line against Bernie, by which she was plainly trying to coax him into saying directly that she’s taken bribes from Wall St. The line didn’t play well. Sanders is simply too honorable and too defiant (some might say “courageous”) in his attack on the country’s most dominant minority (the super-super wealthy) for a shot like that to land with the feel of validity and with any sticking power, especially from Hillary Clinton. I seriously doubt she’ll go there again.

And not because her kissing-cousins relationship with Goldman, Sachs and the rest of the .1% mob will go away … ever. But because Clinton, as she demonstrated again last night, both adapts well to the combat of politics and has plenty of fight in her. And I say that as two good things. The Clintons are unrivaled in their facility with the machinery of the political game, which is one reason Bubba not only swatted back the Gingrich Revolution in ’94-’95, but survived impeachment and left office with an approval rating higher than dottering St. Ronnie.

I keep imagining what the first Clinton years might have been like if they knew as much about neutralizing Republican cynicism as they do now and had no interest in compliant interns.

Someone was saying this morning that the Sanders phenomena is much more about the message than Bernie himself, and that sounds right. You could swap Bernie out with anyone saying the same thing and be in pretty much the same level of contention. But it helps that Ol’ Bern comes off simultaneously as fair-minded and mightily pissed-off.

Certainly until the general election, Hillary will be on serious defensive for her “establishment” (i.e. there’s no way in hell you can call this “progressive”) pas de deux with our 21st-century robber barons. (And this new crew gives guys like Andrew Carnegie and J.D. Rockefeller a bad name). That’s her punishment. The hope has to be that she is aware of how much she has to prove she has not been bought off, as so many suspect.

I thought Chuck Todd and Rachel Maddow, who did a very good job with both the line and quality of questions and their willingness to play back and let Bernie and Hillary have at it, missed at least one juicy follow-up.

After Bernie reiterated his familiar charge that Wall St. today — still paying off billions in fines for fraudulent behavior — is really, let’s call it what it is, a massive on-going systematic fraud, Todd and Maddow should have turned to Hillary and asked, “Madam Secretary do you agree that Wall St. as it functions today is a systematic fraud?”

Personally, I would have gone a step further and asked, “Madam Secretary, do you believe JP Morgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon should be indicted for fraud?” But that’s just me.

Todd, and certainly Maddow, might have also pursued a line of questioning along these lines: “Senator Sanders, your essential message, talking of a revolution, has demonstrated substantial appeal. But you seem to gloss over the steadfast opposition the current Republican majority has to literally everything a Democratic president proposes, and that includes minor policy shifts they themselves have previously championed. Aren’t you showing a rather blithe disregard for the size and virulence of the opposition to the enormous and fundamental changes you’re proposing, to the banking and health insurance industry in particular? Your reluctance to lay out how, with minorities in both houses, your plans could survive such a torrent of opposition leaves many people deeply concerned you have not fully accepted the probability of that scenario.”

I’m still waiting for a convincing answer from Bernie on that one.

Still, by way of stark contrast, the debate’s focus on financial corruption and that disease’s impact on middle-class Americans was like sucking in a chestful of pure oxygen after the relentless freak-outs and idiocy of the Republican brawls. Everyone’s sense of real-time security will improve immeasurably when we get a license-to-indict grip on our supremely entitled class.

Bernie’s limitations vis a vis Hillary though were dramatically apparent when the topic turned to foreign policy, a range of issues pretty much on the periphery of his appeal. There was no comparison. There’s simply no one in this race or in any race since Bush 41 who rivals Clinton on first-hand understanding of who’s who in the world and how to handle the best and worst players. The question of course remains, facing the next international crisis, does she go with the option that is best or Halliburton et al, or follow Barack Obama’s much less trigger happy strategies?

(The crowd selling Clinton as an inveterate war-monger, primarily for her Iraq invasion vote, is engaging in its own brand of hysteria.)

Not being a believer in perfect candidates, Thursday’s debate was a satisfying confrontation of two sets of valuable virtues and vices, aspirational and idealistic vs. pragmatic and battlefield savvy.