I Found Wilson Pickett

I was going to do a post on Wilson Pickett's breakthrough 1965 hit, In The Midnight Hour, co-written with Steve Cropper, guitarist with the Stax house band (aka Booker T and the MGs), at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, the location where Martin Luther King Jr would be assassinated three years later.  When I discovered that Cropper was inspired to come up with the title from the lyric of the 1962 single I Found A Love by The Falcons, with their lead singer Wilson Pickett(!), I decided to go with the lesser-known song.  Here it is:

Nice Getaway

Looking for a quiet, unique, and little known spot for a getaway?  Kate and Greg Barrington are happy to welcome you to Forrest, Australia where they have six lovely cottages ready and waiting for you.  Just go here for info on contacting the caretakers.

A couple of things you should know before making your reservation.  Forrest is in the State of Western Australia near its border with South Australia.  It's in the middle of the Nullarbor Plain, the almost treeless, flat, 77,000  square mile area, containing the world's largest formation of exposed limestone bedrock.  However, it is conveniently located along the line of the Trans-Australian Railroad; in fact it's on the stretch of the railroad which is the longest straight track anywhere in the world - 297 miles!  Unfortunately, the trains no longer regularly stop there.  But don't let that discourage you; if you have a sturdy 4-wheel drive vehicle you can reach it by a 68 mile drive along a dirt road.  And, best of all, there's an airstrip there; used for aircraft having emergencies, but I'm sure they'd let your private plane land there if you're a pilot.

For more on Forrest and the Barrington, watch The Big Wait on Vimeo.

The Lion's Mound

Unlike the WW1 battlefields we visited in September, where the battles lasted for months over areas covering 100 to 500 square miles, Waterloo, which we saw on the last day of our trip, happened on one day, June 18, 1815.  Though it was only one day, it was bloody, with 45-50,000 men killed or wounded, twice the toll of Antietam, the worst single day of America's Civil War.

Today, it is peaceful.  But for the occasional monument and the two fortified farms on the flanks that still exist, Le Haye Sainte (privately owned) and Hougomont (open to the public), it is mostly open farm land (see this panorama from Wikipedia).

The very well done museum is underground and behind the main English/Dutch battle line.  And then there is the Lion's Mound, the artificial hill, located at the center of the British position, constructed at the order of King William I of the Netherlands between 1820 and 1826.  It rises 141 feet above the surrounding surface, with 226 steps to climb to the top.  Unfortunately, its construction caused the topography to be dramatically changed, a change the Duke of Wellington found most distressing when he returned in 1828.

We did make the trek up and down the Lion's Mound.

 

 

 

Ruggles Of Red Gap

On the 162nd anniversary of Lincoln's speech at the dedication of the National Cemetery at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, here's Charles Laughton's recitation of the Address from the 1935 film, Ruggles of Red Gap, a clip I've posted before.  Laughton plays an English butler, Marmaduke Ruggles, won by an American in a poker game, who comes to the States and discovers a new way of life, ultimately deciding to make his way on his own.

Trenches

From our WWI battlefield tour in September.  Three sets of photos of the trenches in which so many soldiers spent months.

The first is at Ypres and are a small section of actual trenches preserved since the war.

The second is a reconstructed section of trench (which includes some materials used during the war) at the WW1 in Ypres.

The third from our visit to the Butte de Vauquois.

Preserved trenches at Ypres

 

Reconstructed trenches at Ypres

 

(The ceiling ribs are from actual trenches.  You can see damage from shell fragments.)

Preserved trenches at Butte de Vauquois  

 

The Wursthaus

Old School Boston has the best photos of Boston from the "old days".  I lived in the Boston area from 1973 through 1992, so I guess that's now the old days.

The Wursthaus - Harvard Square, 1917- 1996. @Historicimage pic.twitter.com/rJIWnHZBCH

— Old School Boston (@OldSchoolBoston) November 16, 2024

 

The Wursthaus was just outside of Harvard Square.  The food was heavy German and not that good but in the 70s it was the only place you could find that offered a large selection of foreign beers and that was enough for us.  It closed in 1996, after almost eighty years at that location.

Less than 100 feet down the street and down some stairs was Jonathan Swift's, a club that featured the best in local New England music acts, including NRBQ, the Pousette-Dart Band, and the Estes Boys' in which one of my roommates played pedal steel (later, for several years, he played pedal steel with Mickey Gilley's Urban Cowboy Band).  It's also where I sat having beers with Red Sox pitcher Bill Lee as he hilariously described the debacle of the 1978 season.  Swift's closed in 1986.

For my memories of one of the great Boston area eateries of the 70s read Rita's Place.

November

Yes, that's about right when it comes to my New England days.

John Atkinson Grimshaw: 'November,' 1879. #Leeds pic.twitter.com/O3En7nYTNU

— Darrell Epp (@DarrellEpp) November 1, 2024

This is last night in Phoenix metro.

Twenty Century Bridges

Video on the construction of Roman bridges, explaining their durability.  Supported by the pressure of stone on stone and anchored in place by their own weight, several still carry traffic twenty centuries later.

Uh . . .

Initial thoughts on Trump's intent to nominate Matt Gaetz as Attorney General:

Many do not appreciate the subtlety and nuance of Donald Trump's thinking on political philosophy and governance.  It was a recent rereading of The Federalist, a copy of which he keeps on his bedstand, that inspired him to devise this test of the political and moral strength of our institutions and of the system of checks and balances developed by our Founders.  It's a test reminiscent of Solomon's in the Old Testament.  Just another example of 4-D chess from The Master.

On second thought:

Nominating Matt Gaetz for AG is a political and moral atrocity.  A disaster should he actually become AG.

There is nothing 4-D about it.  Trump will only appoint as AG a person that he has complete faith will unquestioningly follow his instructions and desires and be his "wingman" just as Bobby Kennedy was for his brother and Eric Holder for Barack Obama.  Expertise in the law or in the day to day issues addressed by the Department of Justice is of a secondary, or even tertiary, concern.

To understand why, we need to go back to January 2017, when the Russia collusion story explodes publicly.  Trump knows the allegations contained in the Steele Dossier are phony, though much of the public, including myself, don't know what to make of it.  

He's appointed Jeff Sessions as Attorney General.  Sessions is not a personal friend, but was the first senator to endorse Trump.  However, he's also an old-fashioned "honorable Republican" statesman and when presented by the Democrats with a phony conflict of interest story about the Russian ambassador he recuses himself from anything to do with the Russia collusion allegations (something Eric Holder would never have done in similar circumstances).  It effectively leaves the Justice Department's actions in that matter in the hands of Trump's political enemies.

By later in the spring, Trump becomes aware James Comey at the FBI is actively conspiring against him and fires the FBI Director, but allows Andrew McCabe to become acting director, not realizing he is also part of the conspiracy to get the president.

In May, Robert Mueller is appointed Special Counsel for the Russia investigation.  By now, Trump has his own lawyers to represent him in that investigation.  Those lawyers are experienced hands, but not previously known to Trump and hired on the recommendation of people around him.  They tell the president that Mueller is a straight shooter with a great reputation and advise him to cooperate fully which they think will quickly put an end to the investigation.

Trump takes that advice, does not invoke Executive Privilege, and turns over more than 1 million White House documents and allows his own White House Counsel to be interviewed about conversations he had with Trump, an unprecedented move by any president in American history.

It is from his counsel's interviews that we know, as reported in the Mueller Report, on at least two occasions, Trump complained that he needed an Attorney General like Bobby Kennedy or Eric Holder to protect him, just like they protected their presidents.

But despite giving the cooperation as advised by his lawyers, Mueller did not go away.  To what extent Mueller was already mentally slowed down, as we saw in 2019, is unknown, but it was no secret he despised Trump and he hired a rabid pack of Democratic partisan lawyers who were never going to stop their investigation, regardless of the facts.

To become the new FBI Director, Trump nominated Christopher Wray, as suggested by Chris Christie.  Wray was not personally familiar to Trump and has turned out to be horrible at the agency.

In February 2019, William Barr became Attorney General.  Barr saved the Trump presidency by finally shutting down the Mueller gang, and provided good advice to help advance several of the president's initiatives.  However, Barr was not a MAGA devotee who would do anything the president demanded, several times disagreeing with Trump.  Things finally cratered between the two of them when, after the 2020 election, Barr reported (correctly) to Trump that he found no evidence the election was stolen.  Now Barr is considered an agent of the Deep State.

The bottom line is Trump will no longer rely on the advice of others to appoint someone he doesn't personally know, with a track record of loyalty, to oversee DOJ and the FBI.  The problem is that the lawyers Trump knows with such a record are second and third-rate, with poor legal skills, and with questionable judgement and character.  There are conservative lawyers who'd love a chance to clear out DOJ and FBI and restore integrity to those agencies but Trump does not know them, they have not proved their loyalty to him so, as it stands now, they will not have the opportunity to effectively do what needs to be done.

As I am writing this, several news outlets are reporting that Trump is going to nominate Robert Kennedy Jr as Secretary of HHS.  This is lunacy.  One of the reasons I did not vote for Trump is I thought his presidency would implode, but this is happening faster than I thought.

[UPDATE Nov. 21 - One down, one to go!  Though I'm less optimistic about getting the second one.]

Chasing Bright Medusas

Now I know that nothing really matters to us but the people we love.  Of course, if we realized that when we are young, and just sat down and loved each other, the beds would not get made and very little of the world's work ever get done.

- Willa Cather (1874-1947) in a 1945 letter to a friend

Just finished reading Benjamin Taylor's new biography of Willa Cather, Chasing Bright Medusas.  It's a literary biography, well-written, and clocks in at less than 200 pages, a relief in an era where door-stopper biographies are more common.

Over the past year I've read two Cather novels, My Antonia, and Death Comes For The Archbishop.  Cather is a wonderful, vivid, yet subtle writer, with powerful descriptive abilities when it comes to settings, landscape, and character.  My Antonia set in the central Nebraska prairie lands in the late 19th century, where Cather grew up, portrays the struggles and everyday lives of a multicultural cast - mostly immigrants from northern, central, and eastern Europe.  Death Comes For The Archbishop is a masterpiece, beautifully written and moving, one of the finest novels I've ever read and one I will return to.  The roughness of mid-19th century New Mexico is the setting for an unusual tale.  Told in episodic vignettes over the years, with settlers, renegades, and native Mexicans and Indians, along with guest appearances by the Navajo elder Eusebio, and Kit Carson, the story centers on the first bishop of the new diocese, Father Latour and his vicar Father Vaillant, both native Frenchmen, who set out to build a cathedral in Santa Fe.

It is a moving portrayal of faith and friendship.  At one point, Latour says to Vaillant,  "One might almost say that an apparition is human vision corrected by divine love.  I do not see you as you really are, Joseph, I see you through my affection for you."

Taylor quotes a Catholic critic writing of the book when it was published in 1927:

Her book is wonderful proof of the power of a true artist to penetrate and understand and to express things not a part of the equipment of the artist as a person.  Miss Cather is not a Catholic, yet certainly no Catholic American writer that I know of has ever written so many pages so steeped in spiritual knowledge and understanding of Catholic motives . . . 

In our modern era when to write of something beyond your personal experience is dangerous and may even lead to the failure to be published, it is refreshing to read this perspective from a century ago.

Cather was a phenomenon even as a child.  She was class valedictorian in 1890 (though, to be sure, it was a class of three!) and can you imagine hearing this from a 16-year old:

There is another book of God than that of scriptural revelation, a book written in chapters of creation upon the pages of the universe bound by mystery.

She would end of spending most of the rest of her life in the East; Pittsburgh, Boston, New York, Maine, and the Maritime Provinces of Canada.  Taylor tells of her two great loves, both women, one of whom she lived with for the last four decades of her life, though he notes that sexuality and sexual matters seemed to play a small role in her life.

According to Taylor, Cather was "a cosmopolitan while she was still a provincial", her "deeper theme: the nation as a gathering of peoples from elsewhere, adding Americanness to some earlier identity".

He goes on:

What sets her apart from her younger contemporaries - Hemingway, Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Dos Passos - is that her idealism about American possibility was unironic.  What makes her the greatest of anti-modernists is that ideals were what were most real to her.

Cather expressed it best in a 1922 address:

There is such a thing in life as nobility, and novels which celebrate it will always be the novels which are finally loved.

Dylan 15

Over 15 months  in 1965 and 1966 Bob Dylan released three albums (one of them a double).  Before March 1965 Bob Dylan was America's top folk singer, beginning to come to wider national attention, but those months transformed him into DYLAN, an iconic figure with major cultural and musical impact.

If the 1964 arrival of The Beatles and the ensuing British Invasion revolutionized pop music and culture, 1965 was the year that revolution deepened and expanded, proving it was not a fad.  The Beatles kept on the move, releasing three consecutive singles, each of which would have been considered unusual before '65 - Ticket To Ride, Help!, and Yesterday, ending the year with the release of Rubber Soul, an album much different from their earlier efforts and clearly influenced by Dylan.

The breadth of the change was also expanding.  At Motown, Berry Gordy had been trying for several years to break into white radio.  He'd had occasional success since 1961, and '64 was a breakthrough with the label having three #1's - Mary Wells' My Guy, and the first two hit singles from The Supremes, Where Did Our Love Go? and Baby Love (essentially the same songs with different lyrics), while Martha & The Vandellas reached #2 with Dancing In The Streets.  

In 1965 Motown greatly expanded its beachhead, becoming a fixture on white AM radio, a position it maintained for the rest of the 60s.  The Supremes continued with their stream of #1's, Come See About Me, Stop! In The Name of Love (their finest song), Back In My Arms Again, and I Hear A Symphony.  The Four Tops (I Can't Help Myself) and The Temptations (My Girl) scored their first #1's, and a slew of other singles became hits including Ain't That Peculiar (Marvin Gaye's first hit), Uptight (Stevie Wonder's return after his voice changed), The Tracks of My Tears (The Miracles), Nowhere to Run (Martha & The Vandellas), and Shotgun (Junior Walker & The All Stars).

In Memphis, Stax, with its rougher sound, also broke through with Wilson Pickett's In The Midnight Hour and 634-5789. 

The three Dylan albums were Bringing It All Back Home (March 22, 1965), Highway 61 Revisited (August 30, 1965), and Blonde on Blonde (June 20, 1966).  Prior to the first of these, Dylan had released four albums, with none of them charting higher than #20.  All three of the new records reached the Top Ten, with Highway 61 reaching #3.  Dylan had never had a hit single, but then came Like A Rolling Stone in 1965.

There were four factors contributing to Dylan's breakthrough:

The first was a decision Dylan made in late 1964.  Though he had achieved huge success and a devoted following as a folk singer he decided to turn his back on that phase of his career and change both the content of his lyrics and the way his music was played.  The latter is the well-known switch from acoustic guitar and harmonica to drums, bass guitar, keyboards, and electric guitar.  It didn't happen completely, one side of Bringing It All Back Home was acoustic but it was dramatic and offended part of his fan base.

Dylan always wrote on a variety of topics, but in his folk days there were a lot of"protest" songs like Masters of War, The Times They Are A-Changin, A Hard Rain's Gonna Fall, and, my favorite of that genre, The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll.  He deliberately stopped writing those types of songs, not wanted to be branded as a protest singer and wanting to chart his own path, independent of the expectations of his audience.  Dylan wrote a song in '64, My Back Pages, about his feelings on political songs. There are no protest songs on the 1965 and 1966 albums.  1965 was the year the American military presence became large in Vietnam, but Dylan never wrote a song about the war nor, to my knowledge, did he every make any public statement about it.

The second was the decision by a new band, The Byrds, to record Mr Tambourine Man and release it as its first single.  The founders of The Byrds, Roger McGuinn and David Crosby were folkies who were inspired by The Beatles to go electric.  They knew Dylan's music and heard a pre-release version of Mr Tambourine Man which would be on Bringing It All Back Home.  Adding twelve string guitar, a memorable bass riff, soaring harmonies, and dropping several verses of the original, their version of Mr Tambourine Man was released in April 1965, just after Bringing It All Back Home hit the record stores.  It was a giant hit, the first Dylan song to chart and it made #1.  For my 14 year old ears it was unique and thrilling, the bass and jangling twelve string sounding great on a car radio, and I got the single as well as the album of the same name when it was released in June and which contained three more Dylan covers.  It brought Dylan into the mainstream. 

The third was the July 20, 1965 release of Like A Rolling Stone as a single, a month in advance of  Highway 61 Revisited.  It became a sensation.  You heard it everywhere in August and September and no one had ever heard lyrics like that before on AM radio.  

Ahh you've gone to the finest schools, alright Miss Lonely
But you know you only used to get juiced in it
Nobody's ever taught you how to live out on the street
And now you're gonna have to get used to it
You say you never compromise
With the mystery tramp, but now you realize
He's not selling any alibis
As you stare into the vacuum of his eyes
And say do you want to make a deal?

 And it wasn't just the lyrics, it was the way Dylan sang them with the band behind him on fire, never letting up.  The single was the same length as the album cut, six minutes, but to conform to current radio practices, most stations just played the first two verses making it three minutes long.  He followed it up with another hit (not included on an album), Positively 4th Street, the most scathing put-down song in pop history.

I wish that for just one time you could stand inside my shoes
And just for that one moment I could be you
Yes, I wish that for just one time you could stand inside my shoes
You'd know what a drag it is to see you

The success of Mr Tambourine Man and Like A Rolling Stone led to the final step.  For about a year it seemed like everyone in pop music was releasing covers of Dylan songs, many of which became big sellers. We had hits like All I Really Want To Do by Cher, It Ain't Me Babe by The Turtles (also recorded by Johnny Cash and June Carter), and Blowin' In The Wind by Stevie Wonder.  Even Elvis Presley got into the act, recording a beautiful version of an early Dylan ballad, Tomorrow Is A Long Time.

Dylan even influenced music that wasn't a cover.  Just after Blonde On Blonde came out in '66, the Four Tops released Reach Out (I'll Be There), my favorite Motown tune and a #1 song, written by the great Motown hitmakers Holland-Dozier-Holland.  While researching the background of the song, I discovered the HDH had been inspired by Like A Rolling Stone.  Dylan's half-singing, half speaking vocal was their model for the melody, which they pitched at the top of singer Levi Stubbs' range causing him to adopt the same singing/speaking approach, almost preaching, just like Dylan.  The pulsating rhythm section was also modeled on the relentless approach of Dylan's backing band.

The quality of the songs from those three albums is also impressive.  Along with those already mentioned here are some other notables:

Bringing It All Back Home

Subterranean Homesick Blues

She Belongs To Me

Maggie's Farm

It's Alright Ma, I'm Only Bleeding ("even the President of the United States sometimes must have to stand naked")

It's All Over Now, Baby Blue

Highway 61 Revisited

Ballad of a Thin Man

Highway 61

Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues

Queen Jane Approximately

Desolation Row ("they're selling postcards of the hanging")

Blonde On Blonde

Visions of Johanna

I Want You

Just Like A Woman

Absolutely Sweet Marie

Most Likely You Go Your Way

Rainy Day Women #12 & 35

Stuck Inside of Mobile With the Memphis Blues Again (if you want to know the inspiration for the lyrics and music of every early Bruce Springsteen song, listen to this one)

After Blonde on Blonde, Dylan decided once again, as he'd done in late '64, that he needed a change.  He wanted to slow down and spend time with his wife and young children in Woodstock, New York.  In the fall of '66 it was announced he'd been injured in a motorcycle accident and would be taking some time off to recover.  He would not release another album until December 1967; John Wesley Harding, a very laid back, mostly acoustic record.  He also began working on other new material with the members of what later became The Band in the basement of the pink house they rented in Woodstock.  The recordings of those sessions, which generated further Dylan classics, would be released years later as The Basement Tapes.

White Bird

An essential song from the end of the hippie era.  From It's A Beautiful Day, composed by Linda and David LaFlamme.  David passed last year, while his ex-wife Linda just passed, which reminded me of the song.  This is a live version from 1970.  Vocals by the LaFlammes, electric violin by David.  The guitar solo is definitely San Francisco style in its tone and attack, along with being overly long and self-indulgent.  This is the studio version.

I saw them as the opening act for The Who at the Fillmore East in May 1969.  Terrific set and still remember their performance of this song.

Praise Be

Gulp.  I am about to praise Donald Trump.  Didn't vote for him and there are many things I dislike about his personality but am moved to write this because of a recent piece by Evan Barker, a young woman from a impoverished background who worked on the campaigns of Barack Obama and Bernie Sanders and voted for Donald Trump this year.  The article, which you can read here, explains her political journey, but it was an anecdote she tells at the end that caught my eye.

Leaving Donald Trump's official election night party at the Palm Beach Convention Center she writes:

As the night in Palm Beach, Florida, melded into Wednesday morning, and dawn neared on a new day in America, I crawled into the backseat of my cab to return to my hotel. My cabbie was a middle-aged black man. I asked him how he felt about the night. Giddily, he exclaimed: “READY to make America great again!”

When I asked him why he didn’t vote for Kamala Harris, he answered: “She just didn’t speak to me. It’s like she was pretending to speak like a black person. It felt fake.”

“Trump,” he concluded, “speaks to all of us the same.” 

Whatever else negative I think about Trump, that last sentence is completely accurate.  Donald Trump does not care if you are black, white, red, or any other color (other than green!).  He will treat you the same.  If you praise him, he'll praise you back in the same way regardless of color.  If you attack him, he'll attack you back in the same way regardless of color.  He will not stop to think, "maybe I should say something different because of this person's color".  In this regard, Trump's actions and reactions are authentic. 

I'm reminded of a study done by the Yale psychiatry department a few years ago.  It looked at the comparative speech patterns of self-identified white liberals, moderates, and conservatives when speaking with whites and blacks.  The study found that moderates and conservatives tended to speak with whites and blacks in the same way, while liberals tended to "simplify" their language when speaking with blacks.

The racist label Democrats have tried to pin on him is just wrong, and ironic considering the Democrats own views on the merits and demerits of different races.  Trump is egalitarian in both his praise and abuse of people.  He's the guy praised by Jessie Jackson and Al Sharpton when he was a Democrat.  While Trump was president I read both his official White House and personal twitter feeds, because I could not trust what was being reported in the media.  On occasion I would stop reading the personal feed when Trump went on one of his bizarre middle of the night rants, but overall I found it interesting how much of both feeds was filled with events featuring black and Hispanic people.  His administration provided record funding to Historically Black Colleges & Universities.

He was subject to some deliberately outrageously inaccurate reporting by the media when it came to race, most notoriously the "very fine people on both sides" remarks regarding Charlottesville in 2017.  As I came to realize when reading the full transcript of his remarks a couple of years later, he twice stated he was not speaking about neo-nazis and white nationalists, going on to call them "bad people".  Yet, this year, Joe Biden and Barack Obama both cited the out of context remark.

I think he crossed the line in 2016 in an incident I wrote about in What Would Otter Do? in which I also noted that if Democrats were correct in their views on race, then Trump was correct in his remarks.  Since I think the D's are wrong I thought Trump was also wrong.

One other thing I remember.  In the 1990s we lived in Palm Beach County, Florida.  Donald Trump purchased Mar-a-Largo in 1985, converting it into a members only club in 1994.  Shortly after, a local magazine published an article about Trump's new venture.  It reported that the snobby, exclusionary, and conservative residents of Palm Beach island didn't like having the club, thought Trump was crude and gauche, and also didn't like the fact that he had opened membership to blacks and Jews.  As I said, the only color Donald Trump really cares about is green.

Embarrassing

 Hey, we're still faster than California!

Arizona Announces They Have Finished Counting And Calvin Coolidge Has Won Their 3 Electoral Votes https://t.co/Krubw5nFPY pic.twitter.com/1DPYMb4pkf

— The Babylon Bee (@TheBabylonBee) November 8, 2024

 

Can someone please ask Florida how they do it and can our legislature just enact it?

We also need less on our ballots.  Mine had 44 races (some where you voted for more than one candidate) and 19 propositions to vote on.

Observations

On Tuesday's event:

1. I've seen some comments about the "mysterious" disappearance of 15 million Biden voters from 2020 this time around, with implications about that election being stolen.  Calm down, there are still over ten million votes to be counted, with two-thirds of them in California.  The final total turnout number will be close to 2020, though probably a couple of million short.  Because most of the remaining ballots are in Democratic states I expect that Trump's margin in the popular vote will be 2-3 million rather than the nearly 5 million as it stands now.  The extreme D lean of California, Oregon, and Washington continues.  As of now, Trump leads in the other 47 states by over seven million votes. 

2. Trump gained nationally and it is remarkable how much individual states moved towards him since 2020.  Here are the Top 10 in percentage moves from 2020 to 2024:

California (12.0%)

New York (11.6)

New Jersey (10.9) 

Maryland (10.4)

Florida (9.7)

Massachusetts (8.8)

Illinois (8.6)

Mississippi (8.4)

Texas (8.2)

Rhode Island (7.3)

This is huge movement, much of it in the bluest states.  In terms of overall margin, Trump came closer to winning New York than Harris did to winning Texas or Florida.

3.  The large Hispanic, and smaller Asian gains, by the GOP indicate that the Democrat strategy of increasing racial divisiveness, and making race essentialism a permanent fixture in our society, is failing.  That is a very good thing for this country.

4.  Saw this X post from Matt Yglesias, a Democrat liberal of the old style.  As to his nine points, I agree with all of them.  Problem is they are much closer to the Trump GOP than today's Democratic Party.

What is far more telling is that the Democratic Party has explicitly branded itself AWAY from all nine of these points over the last decade. https://t.co/UvdiidbftO

— Jeff Blehar is *BOX OFFICE POISON* (@EsotericCD) November 7, 2024

 

 

5.  To the above point, the class of political activists, public employee unions, foundations, NGOs, and billionaires that fund the Democrats will not change course.  They will continue to blame all disagreement on misinformation, racism, and sexism and continue to work hard to suppress opposing viewpoints. They may try to hide their core beliefs more, as Harris did during this campaign, but their authoritarian ideology will not change until such time when they become accountable for their behavior.  Here's an example from Laura Helmuth, editor in chief of Scientific American, which she posted on Bluesky the night of the election:

"I apologize to younger voters that my Gen X is so full of fucking fascists"

"Solidarity to everyone whose meanest, dumbest, most bigoted high school classmates are celebrating early results because fuck them to the moon and back."

"Every four years I remember why I left Indiana (where I grew up) and remember why I respect the people who stayed and are trying to make it less racist and sexist.  The moral arc of the universe is not going to bend itself."

Today she deleted those comments and posted this:

I made a series of inappropriate and offensive posts on my personal bluesky account on election night, and I am sorry.  I respect and value people across the political spectrum.  These posts, which I have deleted, do not reflect my beliefs; they were a mistaken expression of shock and disbelief about the election results.  These posts of course do not reflect the position of Scientific American or my colleagues. I am committed to civil communication and scientific objectivity.

Under Helmuth's stewardship, Scientific American has descended into an advocacy rag, losing its once-vaunted credibility.  In Helmuth's world, civil communication means agreeing with her beliefs and scientific objectivity is that which reinforces her beliefs.  She has all the right credentials; before taking on her current post Helmuth was Science Editor of Smithsonian Magazine, Health & Science Editor of the Washington Post, and President of the National Association of Science Writers.  I think it is pretty clear her real sentiments were expressed on election night.

 

6.  Who is going to work for Trump in the White House and federal agencies?  Personnel is policy.  Does he have the personnel with the right talents?  Will he appoint people who actually understand how to effectively manage a hostile bureaucracy?  Will he appoint nutcases like RFK Jr?  It's particularly important because Trump is not an FDR type president.  FDR was a master manipulator, while Trump gets manipulated by the people around him and isn't interested in details.

 

7.  In retrospect the great strategic mistake made by the Democrats in 2016 was their approach towards the Trump candidacy and presidency.  During the campaign they stoked hysteria about The Donald, creating a demonic figure who would end democracy and let loose the brown shirts to march in the street.  For a couple of days after the election Senator Schumer, who knew Trump better than any other national politician, made conciliatory statements about trying to work with the new administration, just prior to the inauguration warning the president-elect that the intelligence community "have six ways from Sunday at getting back at you", prescient advice considering the conspiracy launched against Trump by that bureaucracy.  Schumer knew that schmoozing and flattering Trump works best to get what you want.  Trump likes to make deals, but he's not that concerned about the substance of the deal, believing he can publicly sell whatever he agrees to.  Over the thirty years before 2016, Trump had been on every side of every issue, except trade, and been a strong supporter of Democrats.  He had no fixed views other than what he would opportunistically seize on.  Moreover, I believe he was surprised as everyone else that he actually won in 2016 and was unprepared to run a presidential administration.  A perfect situation for a savvy negotiator like Schumer.

 

However, word quickly came from the Democratic establishment that it would go the Resistance path, obstructing every administrative action, refusing to normalize his actions, and launching the Russia collusion hoax.  They created a real conspiracy against a gullible and conspiratorial minded president.  The consequences have proved terrible, not just for the Democrats, but for this country.  Hillary Clinton, the Intelligence Community, Adam Schiff, and the New York Times could not have done more damage to the credibility of American institutions if they'd been paid agents of the Kremlin.  Putin must have delighted in seeing America devour itself.

 

8.  It was encouraging to see voters in deep blue California decisively reject the craziness of the Democrat agenda.  They kicked out of office the pro-crime prosecutors in LA and Alameda counties, and a referendum proposition to reinstate harsher criminal penalties won 70% of the vote (a few days before the election Harris was asked about her position on the referendum; she declined to answer).  In 2020, the same voters defeated by double digits a Democrat ballot proposition to delete the anti-discrimination provisions of the California constitution. 

A strange advantage the Democrats have had in recent years was their agenda on issues like race, gender, censorship, immigration, and crime had become so insane and extreme that older liberals, and younger people who paid less attention to policy, would simply disbelieve anyone who described what the D policies actually were because you sounded crazy talking about it.(1) Its very extremism formed a protective shield.  Maybe that is changing.

 

9.  One positive about the Trump victory is avoiding the Trump/Bannon crowd immediately claiming the election was stolen.  They would have done so regardless of whether there was supporting evidence.  Making stuff up is good enough for them.  It's just what they do.  We are fortunate to have avoided the chaos they would have created.

 

In 2020 Trump lost because of the white suburban vote shift nationally, something that also happened here in Maricopa County.  There is no big mystery to what happened if you look at precinct data.  But Trump and his crowd didn't care. 

 

10.  Having won, will Donald Trump eventually drive the bus off the cliff as he did in 2020?  My betting is yes.  He's the same guy, with the same characteristics and behaviors, and he's now 78.  Trump is not changing his ways.  As an example, if there is a recession on his watch he will respond poorly, lashing out at everyone.  

11.  Though I disagree with him on some issues, there is no question that when it comes to smarts, policy knowledge, and the ability to speak in coherent sentences, JD Vance stood head and shoulders above Trump, Harris, and Walz.  He should be a viable contender for the 2028 nomination.  However, Trump's history provides a cautionary note.  Trump always wants to be the center of attention, the unquestioned boss who demands absolute loyalty.  Should he decide that Vance is getting too much attention, too big for his britches, or wavering in that absolute loyalty, Trump will publicly demean Vance and demand JD kowtow to him.  Chances are he will destroy Vance's future career before 2028.  Anyway, he probably wants Donald "Fredo" Trump Jr to succeed him.

 

12.  What happens after Trump's term?  It is his party now but there is no one on the scene with the same combination of weird charisma, attitude, style, and inattention to the details of policy and governance that has led to his success.  Those who, since 2016, have tried to imitate him, like Kari Lake, have failed.  And, if his administration is a failure, he will leave rubble behind.

 

And for that post-2028 world we must also realize that while we know what Trumpism or MAGA is from a rhetorical and attitude perspective, we have no idea what it means from a policy perspective; nor does Trump.  Its substance remains unknown because it is dependent upon Trump's impulses at any particular place and time.  You can't pull his 2024 campaign statements into any coherent overall picture and even if you could, it is no guarantee of what he will actually do come January.  For instance, you can make a good case that on foreign policy Trump was the best president since the end of the Cold War, though that is said less in praise of him than as an indictment of the foreign policy establishment of both parties over the past three decades.  But the thing is that Trump's 2016-20 performance has no relationship to what he might do in 2024-28 because it's all improvisation and impulse.  I have no ability to predict what he might do; nor do you.  It means no GOP candidate in 2028 has any idea what they might inherit.

 

13.  I leave you with two final observations.  

The first from Holman Jenkins, writing in the Wall St Journal in 2019:

Mr Trump is said to upset the norms of our political life, but how exactly?  By lying? By engaging in demagoguery?  By making absurd claims?  His real trick has been to be a one-man satire of our politics.  And so far he has yet to find an opponent or critic - whether Mr Biden, or Hillary Clinton or Mitt Romney - who doesn't prove his point.

To show what a liar he is, his enemies entangle themselves in lies.  Democrats have turned themselves into a party of Adam Schiffs, who, whatever his previous virtues, now is wholly defined by his promotion of the collusion canard.  It's an amazing psychological feat to squander their advantage over Mr Trump in this way.

Ditto the media.  In their eagerness to traffic in falsehoods about Mr Trump, his media critics lend him strength.  We face the weird prospect now of a world-class scandal involving the FBI and the intelligence community being aired even while much of the press is committed to being part of the coverup.

The second from Henry Kissinger in 2018:

I think Trump may be one of those figures in history who appears from time to time to mark the end of an era and to force it to give up its old pretenses.  It doesn't necessarily mean that he knows this, or that he is considering any great alternative. It could just be an accident.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

(1)  Try telling someone that Biden's first order of business was revoking a Trump Executive Order that allowed federal employees to be trained about diversity and the benefits of multiculturalism but forbid training based on racial stereotypes and scapegoating.

Try telling someone that Biden issued an Executive Order requiring any AI used by the Federal government incorporate racial and gender bias and stereotyping.

Try telling someone that Biden issued regulations ending women-only sports and facilitating the transing of elementary school children. 

Try telling someone that the Biden administration advised a pro-trans activist medical organization to drop its draft recommendation that puberty blockers and other dangerous medications not be given to those 14 and under because such a recommendation could be damaging politically.  And the organization, WPATH, followed Biden's advice!

Try telling someone about the efforts by Biden to censor opposing viewpoints on social media and about the FBI monitoring, as potential terrorists, parents who objected to the inclusion of race essentialism in public schools.

Here's Andrew Sullivan, a gay man who did not vote for Trump, on the nuttiness:

It matters when the elites decide to re-educate the masses in Neo-Marxism. Young men are sick of being pathologized, as they should be. Urban residents — from San Francisco to New Jersey — are maddened by Democrats’ seeming indifference to violent crime. And one of Trump’s most effective ads — “it shifted the race 2.7 percentage points in Mr. Trump’s favor,” according to the NYT — was on Harris’ support for public funding for sex reassignments for illegal aliens and prison inmates. It packed a real punch among black and Latino men and suburban women.

The Democrats’ insistence that women have penises and men give birth is perhaps the most insane position any major political party has ever taken in US history. And how exactly do you remain a pro-woman candidate when you favor boys competing against girls in sports and women prisoners being forced to share intimate space with biological men convicted of rape? At some point, as Harris found out, you can’t. But can she and her party extricate themselves from this hole they keep digging ever deeper? I doubt it.

Sounds crazy, doesn't it?

For a while, it was difficult to get people to accept that the Biden administration opened our borders.  It was a brilliant stroke for governors of border states to start shipping illegal immigrants to sanctuary states and cities, finally waking up more people to what was actually going on.

Got No Sand In My Pocket

No, sirree.

Cross-Tie Walker from Creedence Clearwater Revival featuring John Fogerty's rockabilly guitar.

Let's Face The Music And Dance

Yes, we must, unfortunately.

But what better way to do it than with Irving Berlin, Fred Astaire, and Ginger Rogers?

A Different Path Towards Voting

Martin Gurri first came to public attention with his 2014 book, The Revolt of the Public, in which he posited that the new technologies and social media would completely disrupt the ability of elites to control communication.  Much of what he wrote about proved prophetic.   

In a recent issue of The Free Press, Gurri wrote an essay explaining that while he had abstained in the past two presidential elections, he would be voting for Donald Trump this time around.  I agree with much of what Gurri has to say here but differ on my conclusion.  I've already voted and left the presidential line blank on the ballot, the first time I've done so since casting my first ballot in 1972.  I've discussed my reasons for not voting for Trump in posts going back three years including And Then . . . and Unbarred, reasons that remain unchanged.  If elected, Donald Trump will prove a disaster for the things I think most important.  Meanwhile both parties continue to ignore our impending financial crisis which will impact basic services, healthcare, retirement, and our national security.  I refuse to be associated with this nonsense.  No matter who wins or loses, we all lose.

My only hesitation is that while Trump would be a disaster, inspiring even more resistance, and be yet another missed opportunity for the opposition to Democratic insanity just like his first administration, if Harris wins and the Democrats take the Senate we may face an irreversible disaster and the end of a meaningful democracy.  If Trump does win and the Dems don't control the House and/or Senate, don't worry, by 2026 voters will have two years to be reminded how terrible Trump is and the Dems will control Congress.

I'm going to use the format employed in Unbarred by reprinting Gurri's essay and inserting my own comments. 

Kamala Harris or Donald Trump—the empty pantsuit of elitism or the eternal master of disaster? We must pick one or the other on November 5.

For many years, I belonged to the “a plague on both your houses” party. In the last two presidential elections, I abstained: I found both candidates unequal to the task and refused to endorse either with my vote.

But I feel I can’t refrain this time around—and I want to explain why.

There are only two vital forces in American politics today: those who wish to control everything, and those who wish not to be controlled. The antagonists are roughly equal in number but vastly disproportionate in strength. True to its nature, one side controls virtually all the institutions that hedge the life of the voters. Also true to its nature, the other side spends most of the time fighting with itself.

The forces of control own the White House, the Senate, the media, the universities, the mainstream churches, the federal and state bureaucracies, most corporations, most digital platforms, and the entirety of American culture. Homegrown control freaks can also rely on assistance from Control International, the cabal of like-minded elites that runs the United Nations, the European Union, and any number of nation-states from Britain to Brazil.

[THC: In November 2021, Margaret Hoover of PBS interviewed Chinese dissident and exile Ai Weiwei.  Hoover asked if he saw Donald Trump as an authoritarian.  Since Ai had written critically about Trump, Hoover was expecting an answer in the affirmative, so she was surprised at his response (the relevant part starts at about 15:45):

Ai: If you are authoritarian, you have to have a system supporting you.  You cannot just be an authoritarian by yourself.

He goes on to say that in today's conditions you could easily have an authoritarian and that, in many ways, the U.S. is already in that state, pointing to political correctness and its similarities to the Cultural Revolution of Mao.  Hoover asked no follow up questions.

Gurri's point, with which I fully concur, is that the power structures in the United States currently are aligned in support of repression of opposition viewpoints; whether it be the Democratic Party, the federal bureaucracy, tech and social media, entertainment, the press, NGOs, foundation, and academia.  The cultural sea in which we all swim is domination by progressive viewpoints and other perspectives locked out.  The exceptions prove the case - progressives are hysterical that they lost control of one social media outlet (X, the former Twitter) to Elon Musk and he's become public enemy #1, as the Biden administration pursues a "whole of government" approach to making his life difficult with the goal of forcing the sale of X to someone more amenable.  The left authoritarians cannot tolerate any dissent.

During this election campaign both Harris and Walz have been open about their disdain for the First Amendment as have old war horses Hillary Clinton and John Kerry.  The New York Times regularly runs columns from academics debating whether the problem of free speech can be solved with the "right" Supreme Court justices interpreting the Constitution or whether we are better off with a new Constitution more clearly defining the limits of dissent.

In contrast, Trump has no supporting system or structure.  His essence is chaos and improvisation.  That's why it was so easy for the Biden Administration to reverse all of his domestic and foreign policy initiatives from his Presidential term.]

Why the itch to control? Nietzsche would explain it as pure will to power, and that’s a perfectly adequate account. 

The Democratic Party is the party of control. Joe Biden has been a dotty old figurehead stage-managed by Democratic establishment fixers: The chief controller is himself controlled. Harris is a less withered version of the same thing. Intellectually, she’s Biden’s equal—that is to say, a slave to the teleprompter. She has never had a thought, held a real job, or succeeded at anything on her own. She was nominated for the presidency after receiving approximately zero votes in the primaries.

No matter. The fixers are on the case, and they can work wonders. Harris has been kept in a bubble of adoration, to the deafening applause of the media and the rest of the institutional horde that controls the national narrative. 

Threats to the controllers will be smashed without mercy. Trump represents the greatest danger—that makes him a criminal, to be raided by the FBI and prosecuted in Democratic-influenced courthouses.

[THC:  The Democrats current hysteria about Trump prosecuting his enemies, is merely a matter of projection.(1)  It's what the Dems did from 2016-19 during the Russian collusion hoax.  It's what they did with their multi-pronged federal and state assault on Trump.  If you want to know why Trump's supporters complain about double standards, let's take the crazy NY DA case against him.  DA Bragg got 34 felony convictions because of a $250K payoff to Stormy Daniels, which was supposedly misclassified on federal reporting forms because Trump was trying to influence the election.  Under the federal statute that is one misdemeanor but Bragg somehow created a state case on the same facts.  I believe the conviction will be overturned by the state appellate court.  In contrast, in 2016 the Clinton campaign and the DNC paid FusionGPS over $1 million to create the phony Steele Dossier in order to influence the presidential election and misreported the expense in its campaign filing.  The FEC settled the matter for a $135,000 civil penalty.  

After winning in 2016, Donald Trump had the opportunity to go after Hillary Clinton for her criminal violation of federal document security standards.  Instead he asked DOJ to stand down.  In retrospect, a mistake, as his enemies would never have done the same.]

Tulsi Gabbard demolished Harris in the 2020 Democratic primary debates. That makes her a terrorist, to be placed on the travel watch list usually reserved for hardcore jihadis. Others who run for national office against the wish of the controllers are guilty of lèse-majesté and should be arbitrarily removed from the ballot—not just a Republican like Trump but disobedient liberals like Robert Kennedy Jr. and Jill Stein. It’s about domination, not ideology.

The internet allows too many heretical opinions to reach the public. That means a censorship apparatus must be erected on the Chinese model, to smother those pesky anti-control voices. “Disinformation” has become any message the controllers find offensive. “Malinformation” is acknowledged truths the controllers wish to bury. All are protected speech under the First Amendment but Our Democracy demands the silence of the lambs. Despite Mark Zuckerberg’s pseudo-confession of guilt for his own participation, government censorship of the digital sphere continues to this day, including on Facebook. 

Mistakes by the regime must be shielded from view—blunders such as Anthony Fauci’s involvement in gain-of-function research at Wuhan and Hunter Biden’s lost laptop from hell. That means the scientific establishment and intelligence service executives must be dragooned to lie to the public on behalf of their institutional masters, followed by a torrent of ridicule in the media for those who irrationally insist on the truth.

[THC:  In early 2020, I thought that Covid originated from a Wuhan wet market, based on my reading at the time, as well as my experience in China from 2000 to 2011 when I had the opportunity to meet with national and regional health and safety officials.  The evidence that's become available since then has changed my mind.  The burden of proof is now on those who don't think it originated from a leak at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.   And, as we've now learned from the release of internal NIH and NIAID documents, Fauci and others deliberately suppressed information that conflicted with their preferred narrative of a wet market origin.  

The Hunter laptop story is even worse.  We now know that the FBI had the laptop for a year prior to the 2020 election and had verified the authenticity of it as well as its contents.  Yet it carefully laid the groundwork with social media companies for months prior to the New York Post article, priming them to censor the revelations in the weeks leading up to the election.  Moreover, a cadre of former intelligence community officials issued their letter, falsely implying the story was Russia disinformation, in order to further support suppression of the story, an effort in which they were mostly successful.

The Hunter laptop story also supports the systems and structure argument made above.  This all took place when the Trump administration was in power, yet the White House had no control over its own administration.  That simply does not happen with a Democratic administration.]

Every principle espoused by the controlling caste leads inexorably to a tightening of the noose. Climate change? To save the earth they must control away our vehicles, our travel, our gas stoves, our diets, even our plastic straws. Anti-racism? To ensure perfect numerical “equity” they must control every outcome of every transaction, from the test scores of our children to the people we hire for our companies. Gender identity? To allow for the proper fluidity they must control the relationship between parents and children, access to women’s bathrooms and women’s sports, and finally the English language, down to the last pronoun. 

[THC:  The Biden-Harris administration adopted as its primary domestic initiative, pushing through all government institutions, policies based on the conspiracy theory that whites and Jews have deliberately manipulated the structures and very language of our society in order to maintain white supremacy, also known as diversity, equality and inclusion (DEI).  The administration issued two major Executive Orders to make sure DEI is injected into every federal action.  DEI is a repudiation of the principles of the Civil Rights Movement and is actively hostile to free expression, freedom of conscience, equality and due process under the law.  It is why progressives define hate speech as speech that disagrees with progressive, and anti-democracy as disagreeing with progressives.  For more read The Danger Within: Equality or Equity, Which Side Are You On?]

An overarching political theory can be deduced from all this. The American public is axiomatically violent and bigoted. From the best of motives, therefore, the guardians of Our Democracy must radically limit the number of democratic choices available to the public.

So here is the most compelling reason I will be voting against Harris and the Democrats in November. I was born in Cuba. I recognize the stench of hypocrisy emanating from those who conceal lust for power behind a buzz of salvationist jargon.

If the control accumulated by the administration had been used for good—if the world were calm and at peace, say, or the American public brought to unity as was promised—we might have been convinced it has some merit. But there’s a reason Biden is no longer on the ballot. There’s a reason Harris is running away from her administration’s policies. At home and abroad, the last four years have been a rolling disaster—and the voters know it. This crowd understands institutional control and nothing else. Out in the world, failure has been habitual, horrendous, epic in its dimensions.

Where to begin? For motives I am hard put to explain, the Biden-Harris people encouraged millions of illegal aliens to swarm into our urban centers. They mismanaged the response to the Covid-19 pandemic, relying (naturally) on harmful school closures, lockdowns, and mandates, all based on contrived falsehoods, and they utterly botched the persuasion campaign for the vaccines. They inflated, indebted, and overregulated the economy. They spent trillions but were unable to build or achieve much beyond a handful of charging stations: We can guess where the money went. They promoted grotesque stereotypes based on race and sexual preference, a policy that sowed division and reaped distrust.

Internationally, the nightmare began in Afghanistan, where the administration gratuitously turned the country over to the terrorist-friendly Taliban. Thirteen American servicemen died in the rout and many more were abandoned—and shamefully forgotten by the media.

[THC: If Gurri's point is we should not have left Afghanistan I disagree.  I've thought since about 2004 our mission was finished.  Making that country into a functioning tolerant democracy was not something achievable in my view.  Whether we stayed a year or a century, Afghanistan would revert to its historical tribal politics when we left.  I hoped Obama or Trump would withdraw, so I give credit to Biden for finally doing it.  What I do not understand is why we chose the worst possible way to conduct the withdrawal.  We left massive amounts of equipment behind, we closed Bagram Airbase, which we could defend, leaving us only Kabul for evacuation, and instead of withdrawing later in the fall when the Taliban mobility was restricted because of winter, but we had superior ability to operate and could have managed a more orderly evacuation, we did it in summer when the Taliban had full operational mobility.  For that, Biden and the military chiefs need to take the blame.}

Every despot in the world took note: The U.S. was in retreat mode. Putin sent his Russian legions into Ukraine. Hamas invaded Israel, which was also attacked from the north by Hezbollah. The Houthis in Yemen, a third-rate outfit, managed to shut down commercial shipping in the Red Sea. Iran is about to build a nuclear bomb, the logical conclusion of the frustrated Obama-Biden-Harris love affair with the ayatollahs. China is aggressively expanding its military, particularly its navy, even as our own military has atrophied because of antique equipment and low enlistment rates. We can’t even deploy all our warships because we lack the personnel to do so. 

THC: This point I agree with.  It's not just the disaster in Afghanistan.  People forget that prior to Putin's invasion of the Ukraine in February 2020, Biden public message was that if Russia limited itself to taking an additional slice of the Donbas, the U.S. would be just fine with that.  Even before that, Biden reversed Trump policy, dropping U.S. objections to Germany's approval of the Nordstream 2 pipeline, making that country's energy supply more susceptible to Russian diktat.  Senate Democrats even used the Jim Crow filibuster to prevent a resolution being brought to a vote disapproving of the Biden policy.  Biden had also reversed the Trump policy of refusing to renew the Intermediate Nuclear Forces treaty until the Russians stopped cheating.  And, in the immediate aftermath of the Russian invasion. the administration advised Zelensky to flee the Ukraine, promising him sanctuary in the West.  Of course, Trump's reckless rhetoric on Russia allowed the opposite impression to be created with the public.  Trump was tougher on Russia than either Obama or Biden, but both of them sounded tougher than Trump (read Ukraine Blues for more).

We've let the Houthis (and their Iranian and Chinese backers) throttle Red Sea traffic though we have the capabilities to destroy them remotely.  We continue to funnel money to Iran for unfathomable reasons.  And, yes, our fleet is in bad shape.  For all the talk about defending Taiwan, we no longer have the capability to sustain a prolonged conflict in the Western Pacific.]

There are too many leaks in the dike and not enough fingers—not to mention an absolute dearth of strategic thinking to identify where our priorities lie in a dangerous world.

This, then, is my secondary reason for voting against Harris. I’m not sure we can survive four more years of such toxic levels of incompetence.

Against this Everest of power madness and recurrent failure, a single argument is put forward in support of Harris’s candidacy: Donald Trump. Trump, we are told, isn’t just mistaken or bad. He’s a moral abomination—beyond the pale. All decent Americans thus have no choice but to vote the other way.

But the same thing would be said of anyone who opposed Harris. That’s how the forces of control function: “It’s either us or the death of Our Democracy.” Trump isn’t a moral abomination—or at least, no more so than Harris or Biden. He’s an ex-president, a politician with a known track record. If you strip away the moralizing narrative—the endlessly repeated inanities about dictatorship and insurgency—we are left with a flawed but semi-capable person. The world was at peace during his tenure. The economy boomed. I would happily accept the U.S. and the world of 2018 over that of 2024.

A more realistic charge lodged against Trump is that he’s an inveterate liar. This is certainly the case: The man spouts industrial amounts of nonsense. But in politics, everything is relative. The entire public character of the Biden administration rested on a colossal lie, in which Harris was complicit: that the president was a wise, energetic senior, fully engaged in the nation’s business. That massive deception, promulgated for years by an irresponsible media in defiance of the evidence of our own eyes, amounted to state propaganda, many orders of magnitude more destructive of trust than the worst of Trump’s outrages.

Trump is an agent of chaos, much as the Republicans are the party of chaos. At worst, he can do limited damage, since he lacks any purchase on the institutions. At best, he will slash to the ground the malignant harvest of the Biden-Harris years: the digital surveillance and censorship, the human flood at the border, the racial and sexual obsessions, the growing prostration of our military. If, from sheer animal intimidation, he can restore seriousness and discipline to the federal agencies in Washington, that would be a magnificent bonus.

I will vote for him because he’s taken a stand against the forces of control, and has been persecuted and vilified by them—and also because, at the moment, there’s no such thing as an agent or a party of freedom. That, I pray, will come in time.

Whatever happens, our system will endure. The American public, believe it or not, is still fundamentally sound and sensible. I freely acknowledge that we are in the grip of a psychotic episode, a sort of national midlife crisis, but I have faith that we will outgrow and transcend the moment. The hysterical refrain that Our Democracy is dying, recited ad nauseam by the forces of control, is a disgusting and self-serving trope—a gross demonization of fellow Americans who happen to disagree with their views. Those of us who take the side of freedom and the open society should disdain the use of such repulsive rhetoric.

[THC: I am less optimistic than Gurri.  The damage we have already sustained over the past decade is immense.  The damage that will be incurred, deliberately in the case of Harris, and through ineptitude by Trump, will make it substantially harder to "outgrow and transcend the moment".]

If my candidate wins in November, I will be content but not overjoyed. If our current masters retain control, I will be depressed but not suicidal. I am old enough to have acquired a sense of proportion. The United States and its amazingly sturdy Constitution, and the way of life that has flourished therein, will remain long after I have passed from the scene.

[THC: I hope I'm wrong and he is right.]

-------------------------------------------------

(1)  For more on projection and where the danger to democracy comes from read this piece by a former Democrat.

Recent Reading

 Some selected books from recent months:

I learned about The Trigger by Tim Butcher while listening to the Rest is History podcast on the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the spark that ignited the first World War in 1914.  Butcher was a correspondent in Bosnia during the Bosnian War of 1992-5.  In the trigger revisits Bosnia in 2012, going to the isolated village where the assassin Gavrilo Princip was born and raised.  He mostly walks as he retraces Princip's footsteps to Sarajevo, where he went to school, and then on to Belgrade in Serbia and his return journey to the fateful rendezvous with Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo.  Along the way, Butcher discovers some previously unknown documentation on Princip.  But this book is more than about 1914.  Butcher draws the common threads between Princip's motivation for the shooting and what he witnessed in the 1990s, along with reflecting on the scars still visible on the land and in the people when he returned in 2012.  Butcher is a terrific writer, very perceptive and thoughtful.  Highly recommended.

In a August post I referenced TG Otte's July Crisis, also discovered listening to the Rest is History, covering the period from the assassination to the outbreak of the war.  A detailed blow by blow account, a bit drier than Butcher's book but good reading about appalling events in which some duplicitous diplomats deserve blame for the tragic outcome.  My description of those weeks from the earlier post:

The period from the morning of June 28 to July 31 leaves one with the same feeling as watching a "by the numbers" horror movie where find yourself thinking "don't open that door!", "don't go in that room!!", and "splitting up is a really bad strategy!!!", yet the characters proceed to go ahead, nonetheless.

Twilight at Monticello by Allen Pell Crawford covers Thomas Jefferson's 17 year retirement beginning in 1809 when he left the presidency.  Fascinating reading of what seems like a time of much sadness for Jefferson.  A famous figure, deluged by letters and visitors, but seeing Monticello in continuing financial distress, with quarrels breaking out within his family, failing to address slavery at the most personal level (unlike George Washington), and plagued by increasingly poor health.

The First Congress: How James Madison, George Washington, and a Group of Extraordinary Men Invented the Government by Fergus Bordwich is the first book I've read about the inner workings of the House, Senate, and Executive Branch from 1789-91.  As the title says, they were inventing everything, making it up as they went along, guided by the often vague language of the Constitution.  The first problem was how hard it was to get the new representatives and senators to even show up, as it took weeks after the the official start of the government to reach a quorum.  The Supreme Court held its opening session and then disbanded for months because it had no cases to hear.  And Washington felt his way into his new role.  Lots of depth to the research and I learned quite a lot.

Moving ahead to the Second World War, we have The Washington War: FDR's Inner Circle and the Politics of Power That Won World War II by James Lacey.   This was an uneven book; the best parts on the little known White House and sub-cabinet officers who had to mobilize America's industrial base to produce the staggering amount of armaments to win the war and the bureaucratic infighting along the way.  Other parts are a rehash of military and high policy issues that I was already familiar with.  A mixed verdict but worth it for the best parts.

The Peacemaker: Ronald Reagan, The Cold War, and the World on the Brink by William Inboden is a masterpiece.  The book focuses exclusively on Reagan's foreign policy.  Inboden grew up with a generally unfavorable view of Reagan which he revised after doing the research for the book.  Reagan was at his best with his large strategic view and his adherence to it, throughout his administration.  He did win the Cold War with a very different view of it than his predecessors.  His assessment of the Soviet Union's financial stability proved more accurate than that of the intelligence and academic communities.(1) Although portrayed as dunce by the media and Democrats, he actually did read his briefing books (unlike some other presidents), while also horrifying a large number of conservatives when they realized he wanted to abolish nuclear weapons and began making deals with Gorbachev, over whom he'd attained psychological dominance.

The book is not a hagiography, going into the president's failures in Lebanon and in Iran-Contra, and pointing out that while a superb strategist and mobilizer of public opinion through his eloquence, he was a terrible day to day manager which created its own set of problems.  The book also conveys what it was like to make decisions given the enormous pressures and uncertainties faced by those in the administration.  Whether the decisions proved good or bad we understand how they looked to those making them at the time.  A big book but worth the investment of time to understand how the world changed so dramatically in his administration.

I was disappointed in the most recent installments of two of my favorite fiction series; The Waiting by Michael Connelly and Martin Walker's A Grave In The Woods.  I've always enjoyed the setting, Dordogne, and the characters in Walker's series on Bruno, a local police chief and the charming cast of characters revolving around him, but the plots have gotten increasingly outlandish and the writing sloppier.  I will continue to read the books because of my past enjoyment but would only recommend the first ten to new readers.  Connelly is a better writer than Walker and his Harry Bosch and Mickey Haller novels are great reads, well plotted and compellingly written.  But Bosch has gotten older, retired, and only appears as a bit player in his new novel which centers on LAPD's Renee Ballard, who is just not as interesting a character as Bosch or Haller.

Morning After the Revolution: Dispatches from the Wrong Side of History by Nellie Bowles is the tale of a journey.  A journalist of the progressive persuasion, she joined the New York Times.  She eventually left the Times for two reasons.  She started dating Bari Weiss, another progressive working as an editor at the Times.  Because Weiss believed in platforming views that occasionally dissented from progressive thought she came under constant assault from her fellow journalists.  Bowles recounts being out to dinner with her editor and colleagues, when the editor, in all seriousness, questioned why Nellie was dating Bari, saying of her, "She's a Nazi. She's a fucking Nazi.", to which all her colleagues eagerly agreed.

The other reason was what she saw in her reporting.  In her words:

When I started this, I was a little angry.  After I wrote some of these chapters, I quit the paper. . . . I traveled to Portland's late-night Antifa rallies and spent days in the no-cop autonomous zones of Seattle and Minneapolis, looking for utopia.  I looked at the attempts to atone for our collective sins, visiting homeless encampments run by BMW-driving socialists and taking courses led by America's leading anti-racist educators, who happen to be mostly middle=aged white women.  When the revolution made a turn from race to gender, I followed it, exploring why so many children were being born into the wrong bodies, their genders so far from their flesh. 

The book is best suited for readers who don't know already know the truth about the stories Bowles covered.  Since I already did, I found of most interest the earliest sections which recount the inside working of the New York Times, another of our once-great institutions that has self-destructed.

The good news is that after Weiss was expelled as a heretic from the Times, and Bowles resigned, they started a new social media company, The Free Press, which is thriving, both as journalism and financially because it turned out there was a mass audience for journalism not designed to push predetermined narratives.

The Morning After ends with on a cautionary note, writing that the first phase of the revolution was ending as she finished her book:

Black Lives Matter was in disgrace.  All the autonomous zones had shuttered.  The police were re-funded.  The Tavistock pediatric gender clinic in England where children would be assessed and begin their transitions?  That's shutting down.  

But did the quieter streets mean it was done? Hardly.  The ideas became the operating principle of big business, the tech company handbook, the head of HR, the statement you have to write to get a job in a university.(2)  The movement fell apart because of how fully it succeeded.  It didn't need to announce itself so loudly anymore.  We didn't need to notice it anymore.  . . .  There are a thousand tiny changes we've just grown accustomed to.

On my Kindle awaiting reading:

Chasing Bright Medusas, a biography of Willa Cather, of whom I became a fan after recently reading Death Comes for the Archbishop and My Antonia.

Foucault's Pendulum by Umberto Eco.  I anticipate a challenging read.  Hope it is worth the effort.

The Line of Splendor by Salina Baker.  A historical novel about Nathanael Greene, the outstanding and little known Revolutionary War general who saved the South from the British.

The Coming of the Terror in the French Revolution by Timothy Tacket.  How a bunch of mild-mannered reformers ended up chopping off heads, including their own.

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(1) Ah, if only we could have had some brave bureaucratic soul like Alexander Vindman become a whistle blower to Congress, denouncing the President for defying "the consensus" of the foreign policy establishment. 

(2) And these ideas became the top domestic priority of the Biden administration, implemented through two Executive Order, embedding them throughout the federal government and even looking ahead to require that any AI used by the government must embed within the racial and general biases of this ideology.