Trump Cabinet Possibilities: At Least Meatloaf is Out of the Running

If the question of the day is whether the neocons would capture the Trump presidency, his cabinet suggestions do not yet answer that question. There are indicators that he will indeed become the lapdog of right wing ideologues, John Bolton being considered for Secretary of State being one strong example of an acquiescence to that school of thought. Bolton is one of the great chickenhawks of our time, famously confessing that, “…I had no desire to die in a Southeast Asian rice paddy,” but who was elemental in laying out the WMD bed of lies that served as pretext for the war in Iraq, and who gets visibly moist when speaking of chemical weapons.

Fair enough on the rice paddy situation, but Bolton’s enthusiasm for military solutions to nearly everything over the course of his administrative career can I think fairly be considered through this lens, and whether or not personal hypocrisy factors into assessing Bolton’s possible appointment, if you thought Hillary was a hawk, this guy is a cassowary. Mitt Romney, under “active consideration” for secretary of state, would be the wiser choice. If it turns out to be Bolton though, defense manufacturing stocks would be an excellent investment right now.

Also in the neocon hawk (but not chickenhawk) department is James Woolsey, who is reportedly being consulted heavily for security advice; Woolsey has never met a devastating military incursion he didn’t like. The refreshing aspect of Woolsey’s world view though is that he is a staunch environmentalist, driven in large part by his I think correct disposition that energy is a security issue. Add to that Trump’s hot-off-the-presses appointment of four-star general James Mattis as secretary of defense, and you have to think that Trump is getting ready to kill people and break things. Mattis is not a neocon doctrinaire like Woolsey, and he’s certainly not a chickenhawk like Bolton. He’s a serious choice, but in the chain of envision, strategize and implement, he is the big gun at the end of that process. My guess is he will be blowing things up fairly soon and my guess is also that he will be doing it extremely well.

I do not feel at all good about the other general Trump has on the team. In reading about General Flynn, I am surprised that he was promoted as rapidly as he was. He seems like a fool. Inconsistent in communication style and content, he is famous for leaving great chaos in his wake and a palpable grumbling dissatisfaction among his staff and colleagues, hardly desirable attributes of a leader at that level. In reading General Flynn himself, his writings are undisciplined and beneath standards I would expect of someone in his position in terms of organization and clarity. He doesn’t strike me as smart. When I read accounts of him in a hunt for positive reports, the terms “high-energy,” “workaholic” and “passionate” are what come up frequently. In my opinion, high-energy, workaholism and passion can be detriments rather than virtues if they are aimed in a twisted direction, and with Flynn, they are.

We could go down the line and make predictions, but as far as military spending and doing, “Give War a Chance” seems to be the aborning Trump administration plan, though the appointment of Romney over Bolton would install a governor on proactive militarism as a strategic preference. In any case, I am relieved that Meatloaf is apparently out of the running for any and all cabinet posts.

Maybe We're Best Off Letting Trump Be Trump (Within Reason)

Well, what to say about this whole mess apart from assessing it for what it is: a catastrophe. It’s a catastrophe for the world and it’s a catastrophe for the United States. We have elected tyrants and we have elected fools in this country, but never have we elected a psychopath. Nixon was close, but with Trump, we have installed into the White House a deranged and uniquely unqualified amateur whose capacity for damage is worth worrying about.

The presidency of course has checks and balances, and on issues of consequence a stubborn minority opposition can present dramatic obstacles as we observed throughout the Obama administration. On the other hand as the Iraq War attests, a president can lead the charge into great damage. It is hard to imagine that Trump won’t wish to fiddle with this new thing, the presidency, with much the energy a child might express toward a new toy, and it’s even harder to imagine his caprices succeeding, but it’s easy to imagine them courting disaster. How big a disaster depends on how big the idea is and as we all know, Trump thinks big league.

Trump is not firm in his ideology and has swayed dramatically over the years on key issues, always tilting toward whatever was most expedient financially or for brand enhancement. It is my belief that he doesn’t subscribe personally to a lot of the racial and religious antipathy that buoyed his candidacy. However, he now has to follow through and present some cardboard replica at least of the grander idiocies he promised his base. Not that railcars teeming with weeping families and disrupted international travel over some clumsy implementation of the Muslim ban would incur any cognitive dissonance that would effect a crisis of the presidency on Trump’s part. As I’ve suggested before, his ideology is a moving target, his moral compass a weathervane, his personal ethics a vast wasteland.  

All of this though, makes him a real target for pernicious forces that are not nearly so circumspect about their antipathy toward the rest of the world and elements of American society deemed less worthy. I nudge of course to the neocon crypt that opens up once every four years and looses its ghouls to see if it’s possible to throw more American kids into the meat grinder in devil’s trade for the Halliburton and Bechtel bottom line. The great question as I see it is whether Trump has enough energy left after this bruising campaign to be himself, the obstinate rule breaker, the one who steers his own course against all advice good and bad, or whether he will be captured by the cabal of neocons that have been wringing their hands and salivating, hopeful for another manageable president in the tradition of George W Bush.

It’s anybody’s guess. I am hoping for four years of what we might want to think of as a casino presidency; a kleptocracy where the house always wins and so do a few customers, but where most people more or less have a good time and the bouncers keep the broken noses to a minimum. The other option is for him to fall captive to the neocons, and we’ve already seen what they can do.

Coming Together as a Nation

I am reading a lot of the “we have to come together as a nation” rhetoric from some of the most reasonable of my friends. I am not certain that is so. Don’t forget that Trump ran on the promise of oppressing a variety of American demographics, and he won’t just leave these racial, religious and sexual orientation grievances unaddressed. For me at least, that leaves not much room for coming together. As much as I suspect he would personally love to, he can’t just blithely betray the southerners and Midwesterners who ushered him in.    

My honest impression is that he would rather spend his energies rewriting trade deals, shredding the ACA and unbuttoning business and environmental regulations than he would expressing the racism and bigotry of his constituency. The guy is from New York. He doesn’t personally mind gay people, black people or Hispanics. I think he does sincerely hate Muslims. But their usefulness as an aggregated bogeyman proved useful as an election strategy. He’s a charlatan, but he needs to keep the ruse going. The identification of “the other” as the architect of the white man’s misery is at the heart of what got him elected, and he will not be permitted to pay it mere lip service.  

Trump won’t be able to build the wall. It will stand as a monolith, a hypothesized nothing that will ever stand as a metaphor for the gullibility of his base. Such a project would involve an endless string of eminent domain land seizures, each from someone bearing a strong resemblance to Cliven Bundy, the very ilk who elected him, and that would never happen. The wall will go down as his great unkept promise, his Guantanamo if you will.    

What he will be able to initiate on the immigration front, however, is the mass deportation squad he promised, and that is an ugly thing. In order to slake the peasant bloodlust, it will be a requirement of the coming administration that brown families howling in pain be seen on television with some regularity, otherwise out come the hoes and pitchforks.    

I have nothing in common with these people and I don’t intend to do much coming together with them. A massive schism presented itself this election, and it carved itself along gender lines, age lines, race lines and education lines more perfectly than any election in the modern era. It was my demographic, the working class white male, that saw the dying of its light and desperately clawed it back using the politics of fear. They are a sad, pathetic lot, and what they condone, I revile. What they seek, I seek to dismantle. What they love, I hate. So, as far as “coming together,” I don’t see much of that for me. I recommend dramatic, committed resistance in word and deed.    

And away we go…  

A Review of Don Cheadle's "Miles Ahead"

The jazz cognoscenti have lined up in pretty lock step to slam the Miles Davis movie, “Miles Ahead.” From nit-picking continuity issues including clothing and the microphones used to wholesale rejection of the film’s high concept, disdaining “Miles Ahead” has almost become a litmus test of a critic’s jazz credibility.

Perhaps the weakest knee-jerk reaction on the part of any artist to criticism is, “You just don’t get it, do you?” But in my opinion such a reaction is to some degree warranted on the part of Cheadle’s creative team.

The biopic has always been popular, but it really is the current genre du jour. America’s obsession with celebrity, its propensity to fall prey to cults of personality has birthed what seems to the layman movie-goer an unprecedented interest in thumbnail reductions of larger-than-life lives, as has recently been done to James Brown, Steve Jobs, Walt Disney and others, each to its own varying degree of success. The question I would ask if presented with the daunting task of bringing Miles Davis to life on film, and the question I am pretty confident Don Cheadle asked is, “What would Miles do?” And I think the answer is that he would point his horn opposite the expected direction.

What I infer from Cheadle’s choice to present a sequence that is fictional in terms of events but arguably factual in terms of human disposition is that not only was the entirety of Miles’ life too prodigious to address in a hundred minutes, a just representation of anything purportedly factual would by its very nature be a distortion and a betrayal, antithetical to the entire Miles Davis ethos. Cheadle instead sought to capture some of the complexity and turmoil of the man rather than stand as some kind of self-appointed arbiter of the relative importance of this or that component of Miles’ life and music. Cheadle played the opportunity like Miles would play a solo, with ferocity and daring.

The action flick nature of “Miles Ahead” was entertaining and also served to portray how fiercely protective of their work the great black music giants of the 20^th century had to be. They had a real understanding of its value, and a real understanding of how willing and able the record industry was to acquire it below its value or to steal it outright. It is this spirit that made Ray Charles insist on being paid in one dollar bills so he could count them with certainty. For these great artists, their unprotected intellectual property was all they had, and depending on how they managed it, it was worth anywhere between millions of dollars and not one cent.  

For those craving elements of a biopic, perhaps the steadily used flashback to the love story between Miles and Frances ought to have been enough. For me, it was. And as a modestly accomplished amateur trumpet player, I was very impressed by Cheadle’s approximation of Miles’ Julliard-honed trumpet technique.

From a visual and an auditory perspective, the film is a feast. It is as chaotic as it is ordered, like jazz itself. The greatest solo, the greatest performance, the greatest album, the greatest career in jazz always leaves its listener transformed but not necessarily resolved. It is an art form that is much about questions as it is answers. The irresolute nature of living is how the most moving jazz sits in the ear, and leaves the jazz lover or the life liver with a feeling of melancholy that is at once belied by an overwhelming gratitude for having been so lucky as to have had a passing whiff of it, however illusory, however temporary, however imperfect. Like Miles said, “It’s the notes you don’t play.” I think Cheadle et al heard that suggestion and did something akin to what Miles would do: play something fresh and exciting, leave a lot out and maybe split a few notes along the way.

What Kaepernick Does Next Will Determine His Civic Legacy

The Kaepernick story is the perfect storm of American patriotism colliding directly with the civil rights movement and teasing out the hypocritical and heartfelt extremes of both. As backyard beanbag and barbecue champions across the land now seize this opportunity to use the n-word between their f-words, the shrine of vicarious American violence at last has a lamb to sacrifice at its altar.

Anheuser Busch’s flagship product, Budweiser, has temporarily been renamed America, just in time for drunken halftime Kaepernick hating. The #7 shirts burned in effigy are posted all over YouTube. Kaepernick merchandise boycotts have been called for. The 2016-2017 season is not yet under way and Kaepernick has thrown a can of gasoline onto the raging bonfire of alt-right identity comfort that has recently become enheartened by the Trump campaign. Kaepernick has sixteen full weeks to continue dispatching salt into this gaping wound, and the opportunity for a full NFL season of race-baiting joy is being salivated over by opportunist pundits from the left and right.

My immediate thought was that Kaepernick’s passive-aggressive refusal to stand during the national anthem was an antagonistic, sullen and unhelpful means of expression, and that if he wished to contribute to the national dialog on this topic, which is very much welcoming of high-profile voices right now, he could do so in a way that doesn't throw such conspicuous disrespect on a class of people who absolutely do not deserve it, which is to say, veterans. The anthem means a lot me, but it means even more to veterans, and to accept harm to the hearts of our veterans as reasonable collateral damage for this unoriginal, vague and uncreative means of protest seemed to me at first blush an insensitive and disappointing play.

That said, what are we talking about right now? Oppression in America through the lens of Kaepernick’s protest. So, shut my mouth. He did it. He elevated the volume of the conversation, if not yet its clarity. He did what he wanted to do and he did it successfully. But, and it’s a very big but, the job is not over. He now has an opportunity, and I think an obligation, to offer an articulate howl of protest and to be a mouthpiece through which some of America’s persistent racial injustices can be described and identified for redress.

If he elects not to do that, if he prefers instead to keep making this dull, imprecise and gratuitously cruel gesture every week, for the mere fact alone of it delivering undeserved harm to American veterans, his protest is a loser for me. If, on the other hand, he assumes the mantle of courage and explains his frustration with the pace of civil rights reform, the unacceptability of double standards in policing and other areas of racial inequity, and does so in clear language in an open forum, I’ll applaud as loudly as anyone. In my opinion, he should hop onto this immediately and make a gesture of good faith.

Picture this. Kaepernick lays out the frustrations of minority Americans loud and clear at a press conference, and then accompanies that with language expressing hope. Were he to say, for instance, that the elevated attention to issues of racial imparity in policing makes him optimistic for real change in the near future, so optimistic in fact that he will stand proudly for the anthem throughout the entirety of the regular season, the entire tenor of his gesture would change from cynical to hopeful and from dark to vibrant.

A gesture of that sort would be a masterstroke for Kaepernick, and maybe that’s what he has in mind. He needs to do something, because without putting a finer point on his protest, it is doomed to have an identity rooted only in the problem rather than in the solution.

The Last Time I Left California...

Let me tell you a story. It was February 1989. I was leaving San Francisco, having experienced a pretty devastating sequence of events that had combined to lead me to the conclusion that I wanted to return home to New England after having lived in the Bay area for four years. I was fired for suspicion of theft from the music store where I was working (I didn’t do it), my band had just dissolved, and the woman I was dating had committed suicide. Each of these events merits its own detailed telling, but none of them are the subject of this recounting. I suppose it is relevant that all three of these negative occurrences happened in the same couple of months, and all were in the vicinity of an approaching Christmas. I was devastated. In any case, I packed up and began the 3000-mile drive back to my native New Hampshire.

A vicious blizzard had come roaring across Siberia, through Alaska and Canada and had settled into an airstream pushing its way across northern California. It caught up to me in Reno, Nevada and followed me all the way across the country, shutting down Route 80, Route 70, and Route 40, forcing me to traverse our fair land on Route 10. As I passed through Texas, which was a sheet of ice, and limped into Arkansas, I saw a sign that heralded the proximity of Fort Smith, the small city where my father was born and raised, and I resolved to visit it.

My father died at 42 years old when I was 16. A Yale graduate, he never saw me get accepted into his Alma Mater, nor of course graduate from it, and in truth we never had an adult conversation, so naturally at age 30, I had some unresolved issues with my father. I had been to Fort Smith only once before when I was four or maybe five years old, and I thought it might be a fine opportunity to exorcise some demons.

I pulled into town and had lunch at a drug store counter, asking some of the folks if they knew of him or his family and the answer was repeatedly “no,” so I drove around a little bit and spotted a Catholic church. I parked, got out and walked up to the doors. I gave them a hearty tug, but they were locked. As I pulled on the unrelenting double doors, something inside of me snapped. I collapsed on the walkway leading to the entrance and fell into a fit of uncontrolled sobbing. When I pulled myself together enough to get up, I spotted a statue of the Virgin Mary and knelt before it and prayed.

I looked down at the pedestal and there at Mary’s feet was a beautiful, perfect green pine cone, still moist and pulpy, exuding the fertility of the deep South. I picked it up, still sobbing, and brought it with me. As I drove away, maybe having done myself some modicum of good, this song that I link to at the bottom of this story, The Living Years by Mike and the Mechanics featuring Paul Carrack, came on the radio. I think it was the first time I ever heard this song, and I had to pull over and listen to it, a process that birthed yet another round deep, heaving sobs.

I will remain ever grateful to Paul Carrack for writing this song, and for singing it so beautifully, and also to my higher power for forcing me to drive through Arkansas, for showing me the sign to the place of my father's birth and youth, and lastly for playing DJ that day, and providing me with a piece of music that I needed to hear. I kept that pinecone for several years until it finally crumbled to dust.

http://youtu.be/uGDA0Hecw1k

Nature Abhors a Vacuum, as Does Politics: Enter the Libertarians

Libertarian doctrine varies dramatically within the confines of Libertarianism (part of Libertarianism I guess, being as Libertarian as you care to be), but in its purest form, it is a Utopia of strict objectivism that appeases the prevailing left with a staunch adherence to personal liberty and does the same to the right with a likewise laissez-faire attitude toward business. The ruling elite in a Libertarian paradise cedes all questions of personal behavior to the citizenry, as it should be, but in devil’s trade for that, the personal behavior of commerce becomes likewise unregulated, and that’s a problem. It seems to me to be a bit of a self-assigned hall pass to rapacious mercantilists whose personal appetites veer from churchly ways.

It’s Republicans with bongs. It’s feeling bad about cutting school lunches. The core Libertarian message is that if things get bad enough, the people for whom it is bad will pool resources and correct the problem. The inferred corollary is, “and if they don’t, screw ‘em.” Whatever the attitude toward social safety nets, when it comes to infrastructure and public services, systems are required, and they need to be consistent and maintained to good health, and under the fat-trimming knives of Libertarian leadership, everything from pothole repairs to hospitals to soup kitchens falls under the butcher’s gimlet eye.

There is a strong advocacy of Libertarianism within certain elements of the tech sector, notably the highest echelons of management and ownership, one that suffers from a myopia that relates significantly to Obama’s both celebrated and reviled utterance, “You didn’t build that.” It’s the tech wealthy becoming wealthier, perceived as due reward for their pioneering individualism, conveniently forgetting that the technology their new technology hitchhikes on was developed through government research. The same is true of pharmacology, space exploration and many other fields that have more and more come into the realm of private commercial ventures. After a few decades of Libertarianism, all of that seed research dries up and you’re left with a passel of cutthroat entrepreneurs fighting over the last leftovers from the final sustained periods of pure research.

The first thing Libertarians will tell you is that they are fiscally conservative but socially liberal. Social liberalism requires funding though, and until you square with that, you’re not socially liberal. That’s just the way it is sold in the marketing materials, not as Randian feudalism, but rather ultimate freedom. It’s a second-rate philosophy popularized by a third-rate novelist whose big idea should have died right along with her.

Libertarians are refugees from the Republican Party for whom financial and environmental deregulation was proceeding too slowly. Or maybe in Johnson and Weld’s cases they were sick of being on the B-List and smelled blood in the water so they decided to make some hay while the election was unstable. The driving precept of Libertarianism remains unfettered capitalism, which wouldn’t annoy me quite so much except that it is always sold under a predictive model of spontaneous social cohesion that holds no historical model.

The Libertarian concept of a free market is flawed at its core because we no longer club each other to steal wildebeest meat, which is the beginning and the end of pure free markets. Anything more than that is influenced by structure. The restructuring of these “free” markets according to the whims of Libertarianism as pertains to patents, contracts, property, monopoly and enforcement (and these are the economic pillars that truly matter) are always going to be to the advantage of an elite that knows better, a kind of presumptive benevolent monarchy of the smug. The trick for hardcore Libertarians is to get as close to the clubs and wildebeest model as possible while keeping the lottery mentality afloat in the minds of a trusting public. I prefer an accountable democracy.