News Blog

Ravel and Chamayou

Bertrand Chamayou - Ravel Fragments

Every now and then, an artist comes along with such originality and flair that you can’t help but take notice.  Such is the case with Bertrand Chamayou, the French pianist currently basking in international acclaim for his latest effort, a virtuosic performance of an eccentric collection of pieces by or about Maurice Ravel.  Ravel Fragments, as the new album is called, was created to coincide with Ravel’s 150th anniversary this year.  

When someone gets to be 150, it becomes hard to know what to get them.  Chamayou chooses well with unexpected pieces such as his own transcriptions of orchestral works (Daphnis and Chloe, La Valse) as well as works by contemporary composers whose work has a Ravelian touch.  Together they add up to something almost akin to a surprise birthday party, full of reveling friends and fans, and even the man himself.  This is not easy to do when you’re just one guy sitting at the piano, but Bertrand manages to pull it off.

Ravel Fragments follows a string of off-beat recordings by Chamayou starting with the anthology Good Night in 2020.  This singular release was followed by a pair of albums inspired by American composer John Cage and Cage’s sometime muse, Erik Satie.  The Cage/Satie program, Letter(s) to Erik Satie, and its successor, Cage2, were carefully researched, thought out, planned, and recorded.  This attention to detail paid off — Chamayou won several awards for Letter(s) to Erik Satie and honorable mentions from discerning listeners for taking the time and effort to interpret Cage’s works for prepared piano, not a simple undertaking.

Chamayou writes well about music, especially his approaches and processes.  It seems there’s no aspect of the production of his albums and live concerts that he hasn’t thought through. And yet his performances are so sensitive, so in tune with the emotional qualities and demands of the work, that it almost stops the clock.  For someone who lavishes attention and detail to his work, who seems to see it as a vocation as much as a form of expression, Chamayou consciously leaves the door open for the unplanned, the last minute innovation or happy accident.  This may account for the freshness with which his later work especially is invested.

So much of the output of concert soloists goes into performing well trodden repertoire.  This is a wonderful thing, because we need new interpretations of older works.  Chamayou has certainly done his share of repertoire, including superb recordings of the Saint-Saëns piano concertos and Ravel’s complete works for solo piano, among others.  But one thing that makes his new releases so compelling is his willingness to break rules and go where the concert pianist does not ordinarily go. 

Ravel Fragments is a wonderful recording and it will take many listens to mine its manifold pleasures.  Certainly it’s a tribute worthy of its honoree.

Traversing The Towers of Trebizond

Trabzon - Kalesi

The Towers of Trebizond is a novel by mid-century British author Rose Macaulay in which Ms. Macaulay takes on many of her favorite subjects — travel, ancient lands, British social customs, the role of women, and the like. She also drops hints along the way about the writing biz, religion, and the geopolitical climate in the Near East in the mid 1950s.

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When you first begin to read Rose Macaulay’s The Towers of Trebizond, you are beset with questions. What sort of book is this? Is it a travelogue? A romance? A critique of religion? A send up of British travelers, of the British generally, of global politics in the post-War era? As the saying goes, if you have to ask…

Moreover, Macaulay is so careless of her format that she eventually takes her plot out of plausibility altogether and wanders off into metafiction. Is it a novel, a memoir, a meta-memoir…? And if the answer is ‘all of the above,’ how does one go about evaluating it? It’s a story that resists being summarized. So while there’s much to be said about it, the only way to get at all that richness of thought and experience (and sarcasm and ennui) is to read the book. But though you’re reading this review, that doesn’t mean you’re going to read the book. This article may be the closest you ever get to The Towers of Trebizond. So I will endeavor to give you enough of its flavor to make you feel as though you might have read it, which is probably good enough…

Rose, I mean Laurel, for that is her name in the book, is traveling with her Aunt Dot, an inveterate world traveler on other people’s dimes, along with a very high Anglican priest by the name of Father Chantry-Pigg, and a camel, upon which Aunt Dot and sometimes Father Chantry-Pigg ride in their circumlocutions around the Black Sea after having left Istanbul, formerly Constantinople. It matters what Istanbul used to be called because all the members of this party are very interested in ancient ruins. They’re more likely to know what something was called in the time of Christ than in 1955 when these travels took place. This of course causes some confusion on the part of locals who don’t regard their villages as ancient ruins.

The other preoccupation of this band of travelers is converting Muslims, especially Muslim women, to Anglicanism. This angle is very much exploited for its rich comic potential, as each Sunday, Father Chantry-Pigg sets up his altar in the village square and says high mass to a small cluster of skeptical villagers while everyone else scurries off to their various abodes to avoid the contagion of the infidel. Or something along those lines. I won’t be giving too much away if I divulge that these efforts are not even remotely successful.

Laurel helps out with the proselytizing from time to time, handing out religious pamphlets if it looks as though it will help a given situation. Otherwise, she seems very much along for the ride, and not only on the camel. Normally, she lives in London, the beneficiary of her fabulously wealthy mother’s casual largesse. She is also having an affair with a married man who goes by the sexy, foreign-sounding name of Vere. But Laurel is oddly religious despite being a modern, and Vere, for his part, is not showing signs of impending divorce. Laurel feels guilty but can’t bring herself to leave him, so she runs away to hide, which is what she’s doing when we catch up to her in Turkey with her aunt. And she does it pretty well, this hiding out, because the famous Vere doesn’t show up until the very end of the book and what an end it is. But for obvious reasons, we won’t get into that.

In between, there are various meditations on history, colonialism, empires, the ends of empires, magic, food, language, friendship, intellectual theft, and more. But obviously you can’t build a plot around random meditations, so three quarters of the way through the novel, Aunt Dot and Father Chantry-Pigg sneak into Russia where they are lost to civilization for many weeks to the consternation of their friends.

Truly, it is that kind of novel, if in fact there is another of “that kind” to compare it to.

One side-effect of reading The Towers of Trebizond is that you get an inkling of what educated Britishers were thinking about the Middle East, Central Asia, and Russia at the time. If there is one word that sums it up, it would be distrust. On both sides. As for Laurel, she would rather be in Trebizond in the days of the Patriarchs of the Byzantine Empire. It is there that she does her deepest musing. But her visit to Israel brings out a still deeper note:

“Jerusalem is a cruel, haunted city, “ she writes, “like all ancient cities; it stands out because it crucified Christ; and because it was Christ we remember it with horror, but it also crucified thousands of other people, or wherever Rome (or indeed any one else) rules, these ghastly deaths and torturings were enjoyed by all, that is, by all except the victims and those who loved them, and it is these, the crucifixions and the flayings and the burnings and the tearing to pieces and the flogging and the blindings and the throwing to the wild beasts, all the horrors of great pain that people thought out and enjoyed which make history a dark pit full of serpents and terror, and out of this pit we were all dug, our roots deep in it, and still it goes on, though all the time gradually less. And out of this ghastliness of cruelty and pain in Jerusalem on what we call Good Friday there sprang this Church that we have [Christianity], and it inherited all that cruelty, which went on fighting against the love and goodness which it inherited too, and they are still fighting, but sometimes it seems a losing battle for the love and goodness, though they never quite go under and never can.”

Macaulay tends toward long sentences as a rule but the ones here approach Proustian proportions. Yet it is this seemingly unending litany of pain and cruelty that slams home her point, that these ancient lands with their historic ruins and deep roots are not special really — they just have more pain in their much longer histories, more blood in their soil, than other less antiquated locales. Meanwhile, the cruelty that people inherited in the course of history was not a function of their predecessors but of human nature itself. This is a dark realization to have at the end of a light, amusing travelogue featuring a dotty maiden aunt and an increasingly deranged camel.

The Towers of Trebizond is not a story with a happy ending. Laurel pays dearly for her crime, although it isn’t adultery that gets her, but herself and her all too human nature. Meanwhile, everything else is now ruined, or so we’re told, “spoilt,” from England to the Adriatic and all points in between. Which is how, it turns out, we came to be in Trebizond in the first place.

The Game of Government

Harpers weekly 1865-Chess Game

Just for fun, let’s regard the government as a game.

It is, in a way. There are rules, roles, and regalia, a bank, an army, real estate. You could construct any number of exciting board games from this apparatus. In order to play the game of government, you are presented with a rulebook that you are required to follow. You are not allowed to tear up the rule book and make your own rules that you then insist are binding to all other players.

As is true of every game there is from checkers to baseball, if you persist in breaking the rules of the game, you are disqualified from playing. You are out of the game. You are not allowed back in the game. You must go away and let the players who are following the rules continue the game.

This is also true of actual government. If a person working within the government breaks the rules, they are stopped and corrected. If they continue to willfully break the rules, they are removed from their position. This is true regardless of what role they may be playing from humble functionary to head of state.

In the case of more sensitive positions in our government, persons are even required to take an oath swearing to faithfully uphold and protect the Constitution and laws of this country, i.e., the rules of the game. But — interesting tidbit — the current president did not place his hand on the Bible when he took the oath of office at his inauguration. Perhaps he doesn’t think the rules apply to him?

If so, he is wrong. The rules apply to everyone playing the game. He has disqualified himself already by his flagrant violation of the rules of our government — all that remains is for the other players to expel him from the game.

 

The Musk Technate, or, Why Trump Wants Greenland

Technocracy with Map

A lot of us were surprised when Trump made moves to take over Panama, Canada, and Greenland, because we thought that America is not the kind of country that would blatantly violate its neighbors’ sovereignty like that, no matter how many ‘rare earths’ they have. Turns out we were wrong, and because we didn’t think Trump would do that (threaten and behave belligerently toward neighboring states), it didn’t occur to us that there might be a perfectly logical explanation for such a seemingly crazy policy.

There is, and it’s called The Technate, the brainchild of a group of Canadian malcontents calling themselves Technocracy, Inc. back in the 1930s. These avowed radicals wanted to replace capitalism and democracy with government by scientists and engineers.  The American Technate — a superstate run by America — was to be the first and finest example.

And wouldn’t you know it? Elon Musk’s paternal grandfather was an active proponent, even doing a bit of jail time when the group was banned for basically unCanadian activities during World War II.

But first, the map.  Note the sections colored in red.

» Link to 1940 map depicting The American Technate, from Cornell University Library, with historical commentary

From Cornell University’s description:
“This map illustrates ‘The American Technate,’ a radical geopolitical proposal by a radical organization based on pseudo-scientific economics and authoritarian, nationalist politics.”

As you can see from the map, The Technate is a colossal piece of real estate, stretching from Venezuela to Alaska and including Greenland, Canada, and of course Panama.  Suddenly Trump’s bizarre plan to consolidate North America (along with a few extras like Greenland and Venezuela) makes more sense.  Where did he get the idea?  Why from Elon Musk, no doubt.

Musk was only three when his grandfather died, but he clearly knew about his grandfather’s views. His own father claims that the Haldemans were Nazi sympathizers, “and all that.” Let’s assume Musk fancied the idea of actually creating “The American Technate”  — Musk pitches the plan to Trump, and next thing you know, we’re trying to annex Canada.

Whether or not the Trump/Musk regime manages to achieve this goal remains to be seen, but if the technocracy theory is true, then what we’re witnessing is the acquisition and installation of The Technate by a presidency of two: Trump as the strong man, Musk as the strong man’s brain.

Note: This story is all over the place right now, in many major and independent outlets. I just heard it myself this week.

The Bedside Table Collection

Today’s task, because I had that rarest of commodities, time, was clearing off the bedside table and putting away the barely contained pile of stuff that had accumulated there. I began on a sudden whim, and less than an hour later, the entire junk-filled surface was completely decluttered and the remaining necessaries stowed in several small trays placed there for that purpose.

What remained unstowed were the various notes-to-self written on whatever was at hand, forming a motley assortment of papers and ideas from the last few months.

1. On a three-inch square piece of blue memo paper:

Thrill of fear

of hope

Solemnities

Solemnize

—

At the time I wrote this, I must have had a scare which led me to ruminate on the feeling that one experiences with a sudden flash of fear. It runs through your body like an electrical vibration causing every cell to quiver with unpleasant excitement. The same could be true when you think you’re doomed and then something happens to give you hope — the feeling of relief flows through you like a current.

As for ‘solemnities’ and ‘solemnize,’ it would seem these notes might be related to the Inauguration of Donald Trump, which Trump failed to solemnize when he repeated the oath of office without putting hand on the Bible, in a manner reminiscent of Napoleon Bonaparte who famously took the crown from the Pope’s hands and placed it on his own head. There is an element of the sacred to the idea of solemnities. Weddings are said to be solemnized.

2. “The subconscious is the locked room—like the IT departments at some banks to which no one but staff have access. It has windows and sometimes you can see in but you can never see anything going on. Maybe it’s uninhabited? But no, because sometimes your subconscious sends you messages—through your dreams or in synchronicities and omens (and random inspired thoughts) during waking life. Someone is in there but who?

I’m determined to figure out the answer to life, the universe, and everything. Also human beings. What? Why?”

—

Indeed, questions of a lifetime.

3. “Knowledge is power”

—

My question at the time was: if knowledge is power, why do humans so often avoid having any? We trust machines with everything, including human knowledge, as if someone else could “know” something for you.

4. “Saying that an AI bot ‘writes’ music misses the point of music. Generic ‘music’ for commercial reasons is one thing and AI can generate that all day long. But, music as art is completely different and can only be composed by a living person. AI has no living tissue, hence no emotions…”

—

Ah, the constant urge to rebut AI. Pointless–because it’s going to happen anyway—but satisfying, because I’m right. 😉

 

5. “AI isn’t going to be better than us. It’s going to be us on steroids.”

(AI moment)

—

See 4 above.

 

6. A full page document entitled “Current Schedule.” The document begins “Is it light out? Wake up.”

—

This schedule felt kind of aspirational when I first wrote it down but I actually follow it, more or less, although I’m not usually up at dawn, nor have I been successful at limiting my news reading to a “glance” in the morning.

7. “Whenever you start to feel worried or anxious, ask yourself: ‘When is it a good time to worry?’ Then answer yourself: ‘Never!’ and relax.

—

This has been a very helpful adage ever since I made it up.

Reading through this latest harvest of urgent, self-generated paper memes (“meme to self”), I find that my primary concern is with life’s eternal questions, and especially with human nature — who and what are we? Why do we aspire to be better than we seem wired to be? Another theme is all the reasons AI is horrible. And finally there’s a smattering of philosophical, psychological, and linguistic questions, with politics lurking underneath.

Having written these down, I feel I have done my duty in preserving whatever it was I thought was so important when I first recorded these notes. But when you’re trying to find the answer to life, the universe, and everything, anything could be a clue. It doesn’t pay to take chances.

A Vocabulary of Fascism

Photo Protesting Minister Chadwick

Extremely anti-social views and behavior, coupled with a lack of conscience, are evidence that a person is suffering from sociopathy.  It’s hard to tell if someone actually lacks a conscience, but anti-social behavior is easy to spot.  People who habitually flout the laws and mores of their society, and who are, in fact, against those laws and mores, are behaving anti-socially. This may even be accompanied by misanthropy, which is the hatred of other people.

But just because you hate other people doesn’t mean you can’t love yourself. Narcissism is just that — excessive vanity and admiration of self.  And of course, egotism follows, for surely such a fabulous person as oneself will be completely selfish and self-absorbed. It’s the mindset of the spoiled rich kid — I want it, give it to me now!

Egotism leads to autocracy — the expectation of absolute power over other people, because after all — you’re great!  Not only do you deserve absolute power, you are the best and only person for the job.  And look how the people love you.  It’s proof that you deserve to run the world.

Every now and then, an autocrat emerges who takes it a step further — to the right, that is.  Suddenly, it’s all about the autocrat and his great nation which is his.  Everyone and everything must be put to the service of the great nation and its aims, which are the autocrat’s aims, which are never wrong and always right.

And now you have fascism, a totalitarian, rabidly nationalistic, far right system of government and society run by what we usually refer to as a “fascist dictator.”  Looking back into the not-so-distant past, we see that you don’t even have to be fully sane to do it.

If this is a problem for society, it will be solved. It’s only a matter of time.

 

Photo credit: Vrb7, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

Kids Say The Darnedest Things

Ever since Elon Musk started strutting around the White House like a third world dictator, people have been saying President Musk.  This was meant to get under Trump’s skin, but he hardly seemed to notice.  Musk did his standard derisive denial, and we were all supposed to forget about him, except when he calls press conferences in the Oval Office.  It was at just such a press conference, just days ago on the 11th of February, that none other than Musk’s son dropped a bombshell.  The adorable four year old turned to President Trump and said — near as anyone can tell — “You’re not the president — you need to leave.”

This would be Musk’s son “X,” who was named, tediously enough, for his father’s PR service Twitter, which he renamed X for reasons of his own.   The child was also heard to say, again to the President, “Shut your fucking mouth.”  Nice!

See: Did Elon Musk’s Son Say “You’re Not the President”? What He Said

Little X is one of at least 12 publicly acknowledged offspring Musk has brought into the world.  Why so many? No way to know since Musk’s reply seems typically disingenuous (he says he believes ‘intelligent people’ should produce offspring). Assuming none of the children are actual clones a la The Boys From Brazil, these are still seriously engineered children.  You could almost call them GMO kids. 

To begin with, all but the first of Musk’s children were conceived via In Vitro Fertilization.  According to Musk’s biography, Musk believes IVF is a more efficient way of having children because it allows parents to control the process. According to one blog, taking Musk’s bio as its source,  Musk used IVF with his twins by Shivon Zilis to ensure that the children would have his “genetic makeup.⁠1” We are left to ponder what that means.  There is also a tweet making the rounds, purportedly by yet another mother, Ashley St. Clair, which claims Musk used CRISPR and other genetic modification tools to create their 5 month old child, but the veracity of this post is in question.

According to Forbes⁠2, two of his first ten children were born male (an older child now named Vivian changed her sex).  The genders of his most recent offspring have not been revealed.  Who knows why Musk would want so many sons, although given what we know of his personality, it’s easy to guess.  Think of it, 13 little Elons running around, exercising their egos and using their vast fortunes to run the world.

Adding to the weirdness, People magazine told us last year⁠3 that Musk and Grimes (mother of Baby X and two others) were planning to build a compound somewhere on the west coast where Musk could live in peace and harmony with all the mothers and children, presumably while Musk indoctrinates them with his magnificent masculine aura…. Then again, this plan may be off now that Musk is running the world himself.

Ooh la la.  Is Musk building a dynasty?  If so, we could be dealing with “President Musk” for a very long time.

anImage_2.tiff

1 According to a story in How We Became A Family.

2 As reported by Forbes

3 All About Elon Musk’s 13 Children: All About the Tesla CEO’s Sons and Daughters (and the 4 Women He Shares Them With) 

Let’s Try To Save Democracy

Elon Musk-March 28 2024

Every day of the Trump dictatorship is a new revelation. Today, we learned that Trump’s people are intimidating citizens using law enforcement, the justice system, and local civil servants as their storm troopers.  They are planning to criminalize all forms of dissent.  So they say.  No doubt some people will be made examples of.  It’s terrifying, when you get right down to it.  But is it true?  Can Trump and Musk really shut down all dissent, just like that? Doubtful, but all the same, the pro-democracy, anti-fascist side seems shockingly inactive.  Social media tells us that there are a lot of people who want to fight back and stop the illegal, unconstitutional actions of Trump and his power-mad regime. So why aren’t we out there proving it?  Why this tepid, ho-hum response.   I’m going to attribute it to a lack of imagination about possible actions we can take.

To begin with, let’s talk short term goals — things we have to do right away to save ourselves from fascism.  At the top of that list is getting get rid of Elon Musk who is South African by birth and fascist by nature.  We’ll never get our democracy back as long as he’s around.  Next, we have to challenge the constitutionality of Trump’s massive barrage of presidential decrees.  This is an abuse of privilege if ever there was one.  We don’t govern the way in America — Trump’s executive orders need to be rolled back. 

What to do?  Here are some potential actions to add to the legal challenges currently underway.  

Since the White House is the seat of operations, a huge permanent rally needs to be there every day until Musk and Trump are gone.  If the police push back, the citizens push forward.  It may seem a bit like the myth of Sisyphus, but it’s vitally important that Musk and Trump feel physical pressure every day.  And that pressure has to be loud too.  The size of the rallies must grow and evolve until finally the Trump regime falls.  That’s one thing.  

Furthermore, these loud protests have to be localized in a thousand uncooperative ways, from saying no to some things to demanding others.  We and our elected representatives can do that.

For instance, states rights — demand them. That’ll give us a layer of protection from insane executive decrees.  Insist on state prerogative in every place it applies.  Treat federal money like the tainted apple it is and refuse to take any that has right-wing strings attached.  Don’t comply with Trumpian federal programs just to get money. 

While we’re being loud, we could also be contacting our Congresspeople and anyone else who’s got the power to help, just to keep them thinking and working on this problem, which is massive, an emergency if ever there was one. It’s not an “oh well, I guess we’re doing fascism now” kind of thing. This is all-hands-on-deck.    Seriously.  

So that’s where are are — the time of mourning is over, and we have got to get up off the sofa and do something.  Complete loss of freedom isn’t fun.  Having fascist overlords who use armed thugs to enforce their will is a new level of terrible.  If we don’t act now, we’re going to lose everything we care about, starting with the right to a decent life. Even though doing the right thing is hard, it’s better than suffering the eternal regret that comes with doing nothing.

Let’s try.  I will if you will…

 

Wcamp9, CC BY 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

There’s A New Doge In Town — And His Name Is Elon Musk

Berlin, Lustgarten, Kundgebung der HJ

I’ve been reading a detective novel set in Venice, which, without mentioning the word itself, reminded me of the the Italian noun ‘doge.’ Why is it, I wondered, that it has such a fascist ring to it? For some reason, I get an Il Duce vibe every time I hear it, and I’ve been hearing it a lot lately. This is because Elon Musk, the South African multibillionaire who bought Trump the presidency, has declared himself Doge of the federal government.  I know, he’s not the actual Doge and that DOGE is just his cute name for his new fiefdom, but bear with me.  

For those out of the loop on Medieval titles, a doge is the absolute ruler of an Italian city-state such as Venice or Genoa.  In the day, the Doge was an elected office, but the term was life; the Doge’s job was to represent the local oligarchy.  Definitely a supreme leader type, to which Italy is prone. So this is what Musk is modeling himself after, and don’t think he doesn’t know it.  He even pronounces it the same.

It always seemed like such a typically European thing, these fascist leaders.  Not something we Americans would ever have to worry about.  After all, wasn’t it Sinclair Lewis who wrote It Can’t Happen Here?  And yet, here we are battling fascism in America — America, a beacon of democracy the world over.  I confess, I was surprised.  Lewis, however, would probably NOT be surprised to see America “go fascist.”  Unlike the rest of us, he knew it could happen here, and now, let’s face it, it has.

As for this Doge nonsense, Musk is all over it. Not only is it the name of this uber department which he’s created for himself, it’s also the name of his favorite cryptocurrency.  Using the government as the means to your own private jokes at the expense of the governed is sociopathic.  Using it to advertise a pet investment product, well, what can we say?  Dignity is not a virtue that Musk and Trump possess, if in fact they have any virtues at all. 

Elon Musk in his new role as Terminator of the American way of life now gets to put his patchy efficiency skills to the test in a complete, multi-billion dollar slash and burn on the federal government.  In the process, he will fire tens of thousands of federal employees and eliminate whole swathes of congressionally approved programs, without an iota of oversight or constitutional authority.  You know how tech bros love to disrupt.  Musk is here to disrupt the federal government, so that he and Trump can install a new bureaucracy with which to crush the American people into submission.  They’re thinking long term, you see.

It’s worth remembering that in every case of tech bro disruption, real people have suffered and lost their jobs, whole industries world-wide have been destroyed, whole communities as well, as the oligarchs gobble up our housing stock in the ongoing corporatization of real estate.  Future You will own nothing once they’re through.  The oligarchs will own it all and if we’re lucky, they’ll rent it back to us for a nominal fee, right down to the air we breathe.  

I don’t think it can be stressed enough that quality of life for all but the very wealthy is being destroyed, and the rich, especially the rich young disrupters of the tech industry, truly don’t care.  Why should they?  They’re getting what they want, which is everything and then some.

 But compared to other American oligarchs, Musk is in a league of his own.  Sure, he’s the richest guy in the galaxy but it goes way beyond that.  For starters, he makes no effort to hide his fascist views or his basic hatefulness.  Moreover, it’s hard not to think that he’s been having a laugh at the public’s expense, made all the more rich because so many of us still aren’t in on the joke.  The punch line, of course, is that he’s a fascist and he’s totally open about it, and people still think he’s great.  He can call new agency DOGE, he can sig heil at a Trump rally — twice! — and make Nazi jokes on X, and still people don’t call him on it.  If you’re him, it must be pretty hilarious.  

There’s an old flick called A Face In The Crowd which stars, of all people, Andy Griffith as a somewhat sociopathic populist hero who gets caught on a live mic making fun of his audience.  In the film, the duped American audience was not amused and they dropped him like a hot potato.  This was 1957, when people apparently still had values and some pride.  But today, Trump and his freak show cabinet are wide open about all their mean-spirited, undemocratic views, and still Trump’s supporters support them.  Congress approves or fails to condemn.  The media maintains Trump-friendly neutrality.  

In the end, you have to ask yourself, what would it take for Musk to fail?  Or Trump for that matter?  As The Last Poets said, in a song worth remembering in these dark and dangerous times, “Better get busy before we all are through….”

Photo Credit: Bundesarchiv, Bild 147-0510 / CC-BY-SA 3.0

The Perils of Political Ambivalence

Storm at Sea

America reels after Trump’s shocking election. What does it mean and what will the future bring?, people ask.

Half the people say: “It’s the end of the world! This will be Hell on Earth!”

And the other half say: “This is a glorious beginning. Soon we’ll have Heaven on Earth.”

I don’t believe either one. What to do?

Out here in the tiny bark of my ambivalent political opinions, I have been greatly buffeted by the much stronger and more forceful energies of those on either side. I am blasted from the left, frozen from the right, and rejected as wanting by both. Some think the path lies one way, some another; some think there’s no path at all.

First off, this last is false. There is always a path, even if you’ve been busted down to electrons. And since choosing between extremes, right or left, A or B, is impossible (because it leaves the entirety of the other side out), we need another way to choose.

Here’s an idea: imagine the American electorate as a Venn diagram. Now imagine that the best path lies between the extremes of A and B at the point where the two intersect.

In our competitive, winner-take-all society, politics is regarded as a battle, and the goal of government is to “push through” policy changes, regardless of how many or how few people actually want them. But perhaps this isn’t the role of a democratic government after all. For instance, what would happen if instead of enacting policies that half the country despises, we were to legislate only that on which we can agree? Would that be wrong? We’ll likely never know.

Meanwhile, pity the poor non-partisan, for truly they have nowhere to lay their head where it won’t get bashed by one of their politically-aligned fellows!

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