Books

Books, Libraries

Zealots are Coming for Your Rights …

Posted on by mjohnson

The venerable New York Public Library – you probably have seen a photo of the library with its two massive marble lions guarding the entrance – hosted an event recently to show support for Salman Rushdie, the British-American writer who narrowly survived an assassination attempt two weeks ago.  

Rushdie became a political target after the publication of his 1988 novel The Satanic Verses, a work of fiction that features a dream sequence involving the Prophet Muhammad that the supreme leader of Iran at the time declared blasphemous.

New York Public Library support for Salman Rushdie

Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the Iranian leader who engineered that nation’s revolution in the late 1970s, never read Rushdie’s book, the journalist Robin Wright confirms. Nevertheless, for largely political reasons, the Ayatollah ordered death for a writer. For years thereafter Rushdie lived a life of isolation, surrounded by bodyguards. Years later he assumed a more public life, and nearly died as a result. 

Wright, who has covered the Middle East for years, recently wrote that “Khomeini often capitalized on issues that distracted public attention from the Revolution’s fissures and failures. He had done the same thing after students took over the U.S. Embassy in 1979. In the months after the Shah was ousted, the revolutionaries split over Iran’s political future, a new constitution, and the powers of the clergy. (They also started killing one another.) The Embassy takeover provided a useful diversion.”

So, too Rushdie’s book. It was all political.

The attack on a writer by a knife wielding assailant is a good a reminder of what political and religious zealots determined to destroy fundamental personal freedoms are capable of. Rushdie nearly died after ten stab wounds that will likely cause him to lose an eye, severed nerves in his arm and damaged his liver.

The attack is an extreme example of the kind of anti-intellectual craziness and free speech denialism that is now running wild in the United States. Threats to personal freedoms, like the freedom to check out a particular book at your local library, a right we once took for granted, are under broad assault.

Librarians, as a class, the nicest, most caring and interesting people in every community, are under attack. School boards are facing down angry, and wildly misguided parents who demand that books be banned.

Some political candidates, ironically the Republican Senate candidate in Ohio, J.D. Vance, a best-selling author, are applying ridiculous restrictions on reporters covering their public events.

Before J.D. Vance became a very Trumpy Senate candidate he was a best selling author … now he campaigns with the book banning governor of Florida, Ron DeSantis

Vance held a rally recently with Florida’s book banning governor, Ron DeSantis. Reporters were told they could cover the event only if they agreed to a list of conditions, including not interviewing anyone in attendance.

The editor of the Cleveland Plain Dealer called b.s.: “Think about what they were doing here. They were staging an event to rally people to vote for Vance while instituting the kinds of policies you’d see in a fascist regime. A wannabe U.S. Senator, and maybe a wannabe president.” Appropriately Vance and DeSantis got the bad publicity they deserve.

The GOP lieutenant governor of North Carolina wants to go farther. Mark Robinson, a likely candidate for governor in two years, says he’d abolish the state board of education and eliminate science and history education in elementary schools. “In those grades, we don’t need to be teaching social studies,” Robinson writes. “We don’t need to be teaching science. We surely don’t need to be talking about equity and social justice.”

The religious zealot and free speech deniers are literally everywhere. “For months,” NBC News reports, “a group of conservative Christians have inundated the staff and board of a public library in Bonners Ferry, Idaho, with complaints about books they didn’t want to see on the shelves.

“Their list of more than 400 titles predominantly focuses on young adult books with LGBTQ characters, scenes describing sexual activity or invoking the occult.”

Ayatollahs are alive and well in Boundary County, Idaho. None of the 400 books are even in the library. These zealots want to pre-emptively ban books, which you can be certain, like the Ayatollah, they haven’t taken the trouble to read. If they don’t like “young adult books with LGBTQ characters,” they shouldn’t read them. But the zealot’s real aim is to restrict your choice, your freedom of action, to think for you.

And, of course, they seek to intimidate and frighten. The Boundary County librarian, Kimber Glidden, resigned saying, “Nothing in my background could have prepared me for the political atmosphere of extremism, militant Christian fundamentalism, intimidation tactics, and threatening behavior currently being employed in the community.”

At the Keller Independent School District near Fort Worth, Texas, more than 40 books were ordered off the library shelves, including the Bible and an illustrated book based on Anne Frank’s diary, because someone complained.

Seriously? The Bible? Anne Frank?

One Texas parent got to the heart of the matter. Laney Hawes, parent to four children, said she understood that some parents might not approve of some materials for their children, and perhaps for very good reason, but why ban books that another parent might deem appropriate for their child?

“I don’t think that certain materials that you don’t feel like are appropriate for your children should be withheld from my children, too,” she said. Exactly. 

Andrew Solomon, a free-speech activist who spoke at the New York library rally supporting Salman Rushdie, put a fine point on the threats to personal freedom the book banners and free speech tramplers engage in. “We are living at a time when the right of free speech has been under constant assault from both the left and the right,” Solomon said, “when there have been closures of libraries, books removed from schools, when everything that used to be tokens of America’s freedom of speech is under threat.”

Like Khomeini’s death order against Salman Rushdie, the American book banners and thought police are acting on a zealous religious and political agenda. They want to shape how you think, what you read, what you say and what you believe. They don’t trust you to make decisions for yourself.

This is real. Act on these threats, as more than 200 people did recently in Meridian, Idaho when they showed up to support their local library after zealots demanded book bans.

Act. Show up. Pay attention. Don’t let them censor and ban. You won’t know what you’ve lost until its gone.

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Suggestions for further reading:

Trump “Will Be Indicted”

“As the former president faces legal investigations, the author and white-collar-crime scholar Jennifer Taub identifies the probe that’s furthest along, what January 6 Committee graphic was key, and why you can’t get a toupee in federal prison.”

Informed speculation here from Washington Monthly:

The Red-State Governor Who’s Not Afraid to Be ‘Woke’

I found this TIME magazine piece on Utah Governor Spencer Cox to be fascinating.

Utah’s GOP governor is very conservative, but he’s much more

“In April 2021, just a few months into his governorship, Cox held a virtual town hall with students across the state. Midway through, a senior from Utah’s rural southwest corner asked what he planned to do about the high rates of suicide and mental illness affecting LGBT youth. The girl identified herself as bisexual and gave her pronouns as ‘she/her/hers.’ In response, Cox said, ‘My preferred pronouns are he/him/his, so thank you for sharing yours.’ Cox had previously chaired a teen-suicide task force and championed hate-crime and nondiscrimination legislation, and he responded to the question by talking about the importance of increasing both mental-health services and societal acceptance. ‘You do belong, you do matter, no matter what you might be feeling,’ he said.”

Read the piece by Molly Ball here:

How Britain Built an Empire of Fraud

How the Brits built a financial haven for oligarchs.

“There is no clearer indication that Britain has lost its way, politically, economically, strategically, and ethically, than the outgoing occupant of 10 Downing Street. We have had good prime ministers and bad prime ministers, but never before a totally unprincipled opportunist and self-seeking mountebank, and it’s fair to say that, until recently, a man of Boris Johnson’s character and conduct could not possibly have become prime minister.”

Geoffrey Wheatcroft reviews a new book and also takes the hide off the British ruling class.

The century of climate migration: why we need to plan for the great upheaval

Sorry. This won’t improve your outlook for the weekend. A great upheaval is coming.

“The world already sees twice as many days where temperatures exceed 50C than 30 years ago – this level of heat is deadly for humans, and also hugely problematic for buildings, roads and power stations. It makes an area unliveable. This explosive planetary drama demands a dynamic human response. We need to help people to move from danger and poverty to safety and comfort – to build a more resilient global society for everyone’s benefit.”

A long read from The Guardian. You’ve been warned.

On that happy note – that’s all I got. Be well. Read books. Protect librarians.

Books, Education

The Greatest Threat to America is Not a Book …

Posted on by mjohnson

We have reached the book banning stage of democratic collapse. The end can’t possibly be far away.

In states from Tennessee to Idaho ultra-rightwing lawmakers are enjoying spring by roughing up librarians, cutting their budgets, banning books and intimidating teachers. It’s a coordinated effort that echoes through the alt right determination to wage endless culture war. After all, how better to demonstrate your commitment to “freedom” than by banning a book?

A photo from the New York Times

“It’s definitely getting worse,” Suzanne Nossel, the CEO of the free-speech organization PEN America, told The Guardian recently. “We used to hear about a book challenge or ban a few times a year. Now it’s every week or every day. We also see proposed legislative bans, as opposed to just school districts taking action. It is part of a concerted effort to try to hold back the consequences of demographic and social change by controlling the narratives available to young people.”

As National Public Radio reported earlier this month: “More than 330 unique books were challenged from September through November last year, according to the American Library Association’s Office for Intellectual Freedom. That’s twice as many as the entire year before.”

Not surprisingly, most if not all the book banning has featured works that consider already marginalized individuals or groups, while dealing with what are apparently frightening concepts like sexuality, gender identity or race. It’s apparently not enough for some Americans to be openly antagonistic to the LGBTQ community or to people of color, they demand that no one read about their stories.

If book bans were merely a manifestation of old fashioned, small-bore bigotry that would be in keeping with American history. In the 1830’s, after all, the U.S. House of Representatives forbid members from even discussing slavery, let alone legislating about the peculiar American institution. Harriett Beecher Stowe’s novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin, published in 1852 in the run up to the Civil War, was banned in the South for fear it’s anti-slavery message would stir dangerous ideas. Lots of books over a long period have been banned for being too sexy or too graphic, however you define those terms.

But the current battlefield in the alt right’s culture war is more calculating and more strategic than simply old-style American bigotry, and therefore more dangerous to the ideas of free expression and anti-censorship. Moreover, the book ban mania has not grown organically, but rather has emerged in harness with intense new attacks on public schools and educators, animated by misinformation and fear about how American history is taught.

This fight is all about ideology and surely represents a concerted effort to limit what Americans, particularly young Americans can read, absorb, debate and decide about.

“You’re seeing really powerful movements under way to constrain expression,” says Jeffrey Sachs, an academic who specialized in free speech issues. “It’s not about discussing ideas objectively. It’s about not discussing them at all,” Sachs told the news website Vox.

The agenda here is being advanced on two fronts. One involves the systematic demonization of public education. The farthest fringe elements of the conservative moment – the Idaho Freedom Foundation, for example, or former Trump Education Secretary Betsy DeVos – are hardly subtle in advocating an end to public schools. This movement is lavishly funded, and there is a vast amount of money to be made by those hyping charter schools and other forms of privatization.

Tennessee Governor Bill Lee, a very Trumpy Republican, recently used his State of State speech to tout a charter school plan for his state that would channel public dollars to a small, private, Christian school in Michigan – Hillsdale College – that has been an incubator for school privatization efforts. Lee reportedly wants as many as 50 Hillsdale-supported charter schools in Tennessee. They will teach a sanitized, false version of civics and history.  

Betsy DeVos, the Trump Education Secretary and public school privatizer

Hillsdale’s president chaired the laughably incompetent, yet ideologically frightening history commission Trump established near the end of his term. And it’s no coincidence that DeVos used a speech at Hillsdale last fall to help stoke the alt right’s anti-public school crusade. DeVos and others in this movement talk a lot about “freedom,” but they really advocate control. They want to dismantle the long-established system that many states require – a uniform system of public schools. A good entry point is through the library.  

Banning books or destroying public education are wildly unpopular ideas, so it becomes necessary to clothe the efforts to ban and destroy in the guise of protecting you from something sinister and dangerous. Success in this anti-democratic effort requires standing the truth on its head, because controlling thought, banning books and diminishing valuable institutions like local schools and long-established colleges and universities are not the tactics of freedom loving people. They are, however, tools in the service of authoritarianism.

The absolutely unprecedented attacks on libraries and librarians during the recent Idaho legislative session, actions that included threats to jail librarians, were straight up authoritarian. I doubt most of the political geniuses behind the Idaho library wars actually visit libraries or read books, but if they did, they might know that a mediocre Austrian painter once used this very playbook.

Idaho legislators, as the Spokesman-Review’s Shawn Vestal noted recently, eventually “agreed to form a legislative committee to investigate library materials statewide, a McCarthyite tribunal that promises to be every bit as intelligent and productive as last year’s task force investigating indoctrination in schools.”

This is a red-light flashing moment.

It is time for all Americans to defend with new vigor and new commitment the American institutions that the alt right plans to destroy, and openly speaks of doing so. Institutions, as the Yale historian Timothy Snyder has often pointed out, cannot defend themselves. People defend institutions. And people destroy them, too.

Visit the local library. Praise a teacher. Support good people who believe in genuine American values like intellectual freedom, dissent, inquiry and who aren’t so insecure and filled with grievance that they see threats between the covers of a book.

Institutions, Timothy Snyder has written, “fall one after the other unless each is defined from the beginning.” We are well past the beginning in the assault on educational institutions in America. Time is of the essence to defend them from evil, misguided people who would in the name of freedom destroy freedom.

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Additional Reading:

A few other items that may be of interest …

Banning The Grapes of Wrath in 1939 California

Steinbeck and his controversial book

As noted above, book banning is an old tactic in the United States, even as I think it’s important to note that the current wave is something particularly unseemly and destructive. Kern County, California banned Jon Steinbeck in 1939.

“Officials there actually got the idea from a newspaper story reporting that the Kansas City Board of Education had removed it from public libraries there.”

Read the story.

Will Smith Did a Bad, Bad Thing

You probably have read all you need to read about the “slap seen round the world,” but perhaps you haven’t read Kareem.

“Worse than the slap was Smith’s tearful, self-serving acceptance speech in which he rambled on about all the women in the movie King Richard that he’s protected. Those who protect don’t brag about it in front of 15 million people. They just do it and shut up. You don’t do it as a movie promotion claiming how you’re like the character you just won an award portraying. By using these women to virtue signal, he was in fact exploiting them to benefit himself. But, of course, the speech was about justifying his violence.”

The guy could play so hoop, too. Read his essay.

The Dramatist

This a really terrific piece about the historian Barbara Tuchman.

Author of The Guns of August, among many other books

“In addition to acknowledging that she had help, a frequently taboo subject for successful women, Tuchman was forthcoming over the years about how being a woman with children influenced the development of her career. In 1978, she told the New York Times: ‘My obligation was primarily toward my three children. . . . When the children came home from school or had the measles, I had to drop everything. If a man is a writer, everybody tiptoes around past the locked door of the breadwinner. But if you’re an ordinary female housewife, people say, ‘This is just something Barbara wanted to do; it’s not professional.’ For a woman, it’s very difficult to work behind a closed door.'”

Meredith Hindley is a senior writer for Humanities. Read her piece here.

LBJ Announced He Wouldn’t Run Again. Political Chaos Ensued

I remember watching the speech – 54 years ago this week in .

“LBJ’s announcement was so dramatic partly because it was so unexpected. When LBJ sat down to deliver the speech, even he wasn’t certain that he would utter the words his aides had written for him. LBJ had acquired a reputation, rooted in decades of service in Senate leadership and then in the White House, as a brilliant legislative operator, a masterful manipulator of men and laws, a politician who wished both to advance his own self-interest and outdo FDR as the greatest reform president of the 20th century.”

Good piece of political history as told by Matthew Dallek.

Be careful out there. Keep reading. And thanks.

Books, Politics

Don’t Ban Books…

Posted on by mjohnson

I own a lot of books.

Some might say an excessive number of volumes. I’m a collector, but also a book advocate. I like books. I live in many ways to be surrounded by books and the ideas, insights, controversies and confusion contained between their covers.

I own books I love and some I hate. I grew up with books. My dad subscribed to the old Readers Digest condensed book program that sent several times a year a hard cover volume of five or so “condensed” books to our living room. My dad would devour those stories and patiently wait for the next volume to arrive. It rubbed off.

Growing up I loved books by Clair Bee, a hugely influential basketball coach at Long Island University from the 1930’s to the 1950’s. Coach Bee invented the one-third-one zone defense, which can still be effective if you have a quick team that can shift, cover and defend.

Most of all, from my perspective, Clair Bee wrote books – the Chip Hilton series, 23 books in all about a humble kid who starred in football, basketball and baseball. These books for would be sports stars had titles like “Buzzer Basket” and “Touchdown Pass.”

A Chip Hilton book…

I eventually moved on to history and biography and finally discovered novels. My love for books led me to serve on two library boards in two different states. I collect books on presidents and U.S. senators and have books on ones I admire and loath. I have critical books about Winston Churchill and Ronald Reagan and books that place both of them among them the greatest political leaders of the 20th Century.

Books are like that. Complicated. Full of controversial ideas. Some are well done. Some aren’t. Some endure, many don’t.

I have a book that was written in 1937, a critical, first-hand account of Franklin Roosevelt’s scheme to “pack” the U.S. Supreme Court that same year. Two well-placed journalists wrote it. It reads like a novel and has stood the test of time as a source on the near Constitutional crisis FDR created. Is that book the total story of that controversial part of the Roosevelt presidency? Of course not, but it is a piece of the story. Dozens of other books have been written about the same subject and I expect many more will be written. They should be written and read.

I have a dozen books, at least, on Thomas Jefferson. Not one of them is the complete Jefferson. Individual books point the way to begin to understand a subject, and no book is the only “truth” about any subject. That is why I have a dozen books about the third American president. He is a complicated story.

All this by way of saying be wary, be very wary when anyone says they want to ban or remove books. Sadly – and this happens periodically, which is also sad – a bunch of folks across the country right now think banning books is a good idea. But in fact, it is a horrible, dangerous idea.

Search “book banning” and you’ll find some shocking stuff right now. Two school board members in Virginia actually said recently that some books in the school library ought to be burned. They clearly haven’t read any history.

A school board member in Florida actually filed a police report suggesting it was crime to feature one particular book in a high school library. A Texas lawmaker has suggested more than 800 books that he believes ought to be prohibited in the state’s schools, books dealing with race, sex, human rights and a volume that would be laughably ironic on such a list if it wasn’t so sad, a book entitled The Year They Burned the Books.

“We’re seeing an unprecedented volume of challenges,” Deborah Caldwell-Stone, Executive Director of the American Library Association’s Office for Intellectual Freedom told Time. “I’ve worked for ALA for 20 years, and I can’t recall a time when we had multiple challenges coming in on a daily basis.”

Here’s something you can learn from reading books. One of the first things that happened in Germany in 1933 after Adolf Hitler came to power was the destruction of thousands of books. This is widely documented, including at the U.S. Holocaust Museum, but also by historian Richarad L. Evans in his brilliant three volume study of The Third Reich.

A book burning in Germany under the Nazis

On a single day – May 10, 1933 – organized and well attended demonstrations took place in 19 different German university towns, as Evans wrote, where “huge numbers of books by Jewish and left-wing authors were piled up and set alight.” But in Germany, of course, more than books were banned. Jewish and leftist professors were pushed out of universities and artists and museum directors were sacked, with many fleeing the country.

It wasn’t just the ideas espoused by these people or the concepts in their books, paintings or films that Hitler and his henchmen sought to eliminate. “What the Nazis were trying to achieve,” Evans says, “was a cultural revolution, in which alien cultural influences – notably Jews but also modernist culture more generally – were eliminated and the German spirit reborn.”

It was a kind of Make Germany Great Again moment.

The cultural war that is flaming on the political right in America has, of course, the same basic aim. The “alien cultural influences” that are under assault today are members of the LGBTQ community, anyone who believes the study of American history must reckon with race and slavery, “elites” of every flavor, university professors, school board members, and always Jews and people of color.

And some conservatives, seeing this cultural war as a means to sow division and frankly scare people, are weaponizing books for political means. A conservative just won the governor’s office in Virginia by these means, and governors from Texas to Idaho will happily fan these flames of resentment and anti-intellectualism if it means placating the fringe actors who want to cancel any culture at odds with their own beliefs.

Put me down as a radical believer in free expression. I favor books and ideas, even especially ones I disagree with. Banning books is abhorrent. Allowing this to happen, or heaven forbid normalizing it, is a big step down a very slippery slope.

We should know better.

We must know better.

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Additional Reading:

Some other items I found of interest and hope you do…

Who Poisoned Joe Gilliam…Twice?

A remarkable story from Willamette Week’s outstanding Nigel Jaquiss.

“Two criminal investigations are pending into Joe Gilliam’s attempted murder, one in Lake Oswego and another in Arizona. Police in both jurisdictions declined to comment.

“Both agencies believe, however, that someone close to Gilliam tried to kill him last year with a toxic metal called thallium. And they did so not once, but twice.

“His guardian and the judge overseeing his custody are concerned enough that someone will try again that they will not reveal his exact location.”

A fascinating and disturbing true crime read.

Inside the Red-State Plot to Take Down a Top Trump Ally

I always read the work of McKay Coppins in The Atlantic and this piece about Utah Senator Mike Lee is great.

“First elected in the Tea Party wave of 2010, Lee has long rankled the local establishment in Utah, where he is viewed by many as a showboating obstructionist whose penchant for provocation routinely embarrasses his home state and its predominant religion. Lee’s MAGA makeover during the Trump presidency served only to exacerbate that perception. Now, as he prepares to run for reelection next year, Lee is bracing for a concerted, multifront campaign to unseat him. He seems to know that a third term isn’t guaranteed.”

Good political reporting. Here’s the link:

Sam Huff, Fearsome Hall of Fame Giants Linebacker, Dies at 87

Sam Huff: Football great

“Playing for the Giants in their glory years of the late 1950s and early ’60s, Huff came out of the West Virginia coal country to anchor a defense that gained the kind of renown that had previously been reserved for strong-armed quarterbacks and elusive runners.”

A great obit of the Hall of Famer in the Times.

And while I was reading about Huff’s remarkable career, I came across this – a CBS documentary about Sam Huff, narrated by, who else, Walter Cronkite. Great stuff.

Trains, Planes and Automobiles

And…an early Thanksgiving wish for all of you. This review of my favorite Thanksgiving themed movie with the greatly missed John Candy and the vastly talented Steve Martin.

Anyone need any shower curtain rings.

Be safe. Keeping reading books. Thanks. Happy Thanksgiving.

2020 Election, Biden, Books

Joe and Jill…

Posted on by mjohnson

From this morning’s Politico Playbook:

“Today marks the beginning of the post-Trump era in American politics. To the extent that he still has political currency, it dwindles every day as Jan. 20, 2021 draws closer. Members of his own party are already suggesting his time is up. His staff is looking for new jobs. Markets are looking up, and analysts say it’s because of the expected calm in U.S. politics. In the U.K., government officials are now saying the Trump era was not good for them, and they vow to forge a good relationship with Joe Biden.”

“Around the world and at home, Trump has been written off.”

Many political consultants, journalists, students of how campaigns win and lose – political junkies in other words – consider the late Richard Ben Cramer’s book What It Takes: The Way to the White House to be the very best single book about the meat grinder we put people through who aspire to the highest office in the land. 

Richard Ben Cramer published his classic in 1992

Cramer’s celebrated volume – I’ve written about it before – is a doorstop of a book, ringing in at 1,047 pages even without an index and footnotes. It’s a classic of what was once called “the new journalism,” the kind of reporting that gets to the granular detail of candidates and campaigns. The book still inspires writers of political history.

Cramer’s focus was on six men who ran for president in 1988: two Republicans, Bob Dole and George H.W. Bush and four Democrats, Richard Gephardt, Gary Hart, Michael Dukakis and, yes, Joe Biden. 

I took down my well-thumbed copy of What It Takes on Saturday night shortly after Biden made the speech he’s been hoping to make since at least 1988. I wanted to revisit Cramer’s insights into Biden, and particularly a concise little section of the book that deals with the Biden marriage. It seemed especially relevant given what Biden said in his “victory” speech about his wife Jill. 

 “Folks, as I said many times before, I’m Jill’s husband,” Biden said to the raucous crowd assembled in Wilmington, Delaware on November 7. “And I would not be here without the love and tireless support of Jill and my son Hunter and Ashley, my daughter, and all our grandchildren and their spouses and all our family. They’re my heart. Jill’s a mom, a military mom, an educator.

“And she has dedicated her life to education, but teaching isn’t just what she does. It’s who she is. For American educators, this is a great day for y’all. You’re gonna have one of your own in the White House. And Jill’s gonna make a great first lady. I’m so proud of her.”

Most everyone who has been paying attention knows that just before Christmas 1972 Biden’s first wife, Neilia, died in an automobile accident along with the couple’s daughter, Naomi. The two Biden sons were seriously injured but survived. Biden had just been elected to the United States Senate and, not surprisingly, the tragedy, as he would say years later, altered his world forever. 

Whatever your politics, I defy you to read the chapter in Richard Ben Cramer’s book – he titled it simply “Jill” – and not get a little misty. It starts on page 712 and ends on 714. The punctuation is unusual, signaling pauses and reflection, more like someone speaking than writing, which is perhaps why Cramer’s descriptions ring so true. 

Jill and Joe Biden

“It was a couple of years after Neilia died,” Cramer wrote, “before Joe ever got himself back. Not that he was a basket case. Thirty-two years old, a Senator, rising star in the Party…that was fine.” But, as Cramer put it, there was “a hole in his life.” 

People encouraged him to go out, meet other people, but Biden insisted on being a father first…and last. Being a politician was just his day job. 

“He tried to go out, tentatively…it was hard. In Washington, he felt…well he had to go home. In Delaware, it was almost too close. Everybody knew, or thought they knew. Not to mention, all those eager …well, Mrs. Johnson thought her daughter would make a perfect match for a Senator…”

Meeting Jill Jacobs – she was 24 years old teacher – was a serendipitous thing. Joe saw a photo of her – “she was blond, young, smiling…she was gorgeous.” Biden’s brother “knew someone who knew her” and got Joe her number. He called her. She broke a date to see him for dinner. Biden showed up in a suit, bought dinner and afterward escorted her to the door and they shook hands. 

“She hadn’t gone out with a guy in a suit for – probably since high school.” And Jill told her Mom: “My God, I think I finally met a gentleman.” 

After the second date, “he called and told her he didn’t think they should date anyone else…after two dates! Then he wanted to bring the boys. Then he wanted to take her out with the family, the brothers, Val [Biden’s sister], his folks…that’s where Jill held back. She didn’t want to get involved with the family, to feel she was under inspection. Only later she figured out: Joe didn’t want an inspection. It wasn’t any special trip for here to meet the family. The family was how ‘we Bidens’ lived.” 

Cramer’s description of Jill Biden: “She could talk with anyone. Not that she believed everyone. No, she believed what she believed. She had backbone. She was private – Joe liked that, her cool way of hiding the girl inside, and the old hurts…he could see that. She had that way of looking at you, to make sure you meant what she thought was so funny…and then that quick shy smile, half-doubting – she could sniff out bullshit. She’d tell him, too – especially when it was his bullshit – she’d tell him straight. Very soft of manner was Jill, but smart: she knew who she liked.” 

Cramer goes on: “She could do it…he could see it…and when that started, well, he could see things falling into place. If he could put that back together, if he knew they’d have their home, their family…then he could reach outward again. It wasn’t just the schedule – he could travel, he could speak. It was more like the center was in place…so he could lift his eyes. That’s how Joe talked about it – his words. 

“What Jill did…she was the one who let me dream again.”

——

A lot of ink will be spilled over the next weeks and months analyzing why Joe Biden won and Donald Trump lost the presidential election of 2020. Clearly, the president of the United States tried to employ the same fundamental strategy he used against his Republican opponents in 2016 and then against Hillary Clinton. 

It wasn’t subtle. He sought to demonize Joe Biden. But it didn’t work. And the election, as it should have been, became largely a referendum on Donald Trump’s chaotic, shambolic, demagogic four years in office. 

I think the demonizing strategy didn’t work because Joe Biden, even with his penchant for verbal gaffes, his occasional odd turn of phrase, his 47 years in public life, is fundamentally what you see: a very decent guy who loves his wife, adores his family and really cares about the country. Is he perfect? Of course not. We don’t get perfect in politics or anything for that matter, but we can choose character and experience. And we did. 

It’s odd to me, as the political scientist Larry Sabato says, that politics in the only place in our society where we disparage experience. If we ever have needed someone who displays fundamental competence, we need it now. If we ever need someone who can summon our better angels and who can comfortably quote scripture because he actually believes it, we need it now. 

Are there big challenges ahead? Of course. Biden will assume the most impossible job in the world saddled with the most difficult problems encountered by any American president since at least 1932. But, you know, America is a lucky place. We usually get what we deserve. 

The United States took a wild and dangerous four-year swing in an anti-democratic direction, embracing a man almost wholly lacking in character, self-reflection, decency and competence. We self-corrected. In the process we may well have gotten the one person who has a chance to lead us to better days. 

Jill Biden made the right call all those years ago. Millions of Americans affirmed her decision on November 3rd. 

—–0—–

American Presidents, Books, Trump

Democracy Dies In Broad Daylight . . .

Posted on by mjohnson

“I love Jeff Bezos for what he’s done for the Washington Post, but their headline on top of the paper, the motto, ‘democracy dies in darkness’ — no, democracy dies in broad daylight. Again and again, it’s the lesson in history. You retain the appearance of democracy without having it. I think that’s where this country is right now.”

Journalist/historian Tom Ricks

—————

The journalist and biographer Jon Meacham has a new book – The Soul of America – that makes the case that as bad as things now seem for American democracy that things have actually been much worse at points in our checkered past.

 “Let’s learn the lessons of the past,” Meacham says. “Resist tribalism, deploy reason and remember that fair play for others is the best way to ensure fair play for you. If we can do that, then we’ll rise above the corrosive tweets, the presidential bullying and the narcissism of our reality-TV president,” he says. “It feels dark and insuperable, but it’s felt that way before.”

Agreed. We did have a Civil War. That was pretty awful. Before that war human bondage as a political issue ripped the country apart and even when slavery ended after the slaughter of more than 700,000 Americans it took another hundred years to legislatively guarantee voting rights for citizens of color. (Of course, the Supreme Court threw out the most important parts of the Voting Rights Act a while back, but keep the faith we’re still working the problem, sort of.)

The McCarthy Era was bad news. A demagogue paralyzed the United State Senate, gained a legion of followers and destroyed countless lives. Joe McCarthy eventually drank himself to death eliminating the need for his ultimate repudiation at the ballot box and the Senate did censure him, but not before he poisoned American politics for generations.

Vietnam. Bloody battles over Civil Rights. The Klan. Assassinations. An ever-expanding interpretation of the Second Amendment. (Where do you sign up to be part of that “well-regulated militia,” by the way?) Endless war in places we don’t understand and couldn’t impact if we did.

American strife and division, particularly the poisonous variety, as Jon Meacham says, “are in some ways the rule in American life rather than the exception.”

Fair enough, but, but … we have never before had a Donald J. Trump.

Richard Nixon . . .

Richard Nixon was mean, vindictive and despite his statement to the contrary a crook, it least in the political sense. Harding surrounded himself with a loathsome collection of grifters and political hacks. Bill Clinton did have sex with that woman and history has not been kind to a clueless James Buchanan or a bumbling Franklin Pierce. Yet, none have done what Trump, the ignorant, arrogant, self-obsessed, serial lying, three-times married, hush money porno star paying faux billionaire has done.

The Trump coup d’etat . . . 

As Rebecca Solnit wrote recently – read her stuff in Harper’s and elsewhere – Trump has effectively staged a coup: “It happened on November 8, 2016, when an unqualified candidate won a minority victory in a corrupted election thanks in part to foreign intervention … The evidence that the candidate and his goons were aided by and enthusiastically collaborating with a foreign power was pretty clear before that election, and at this point, they are so entangled there isn’t really a reason to regard the born-again alt-right Republican Party and the Putin Regime as separate entities.”

Consider just a few bits of news from the past few days.

The president of the United States has done publicly what Nixon only did in the privacy of the Oval Office, namely attempt to discredit a legitimate investigation into his own conduct. Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein may have temporarily defused the crisis  by referring the matter to the department’s Inspector General. Still make no mistake this is a very, very, very big departure from previous presidential behavior. Trump’s coup has now made such unprecedented action – certainly unprecedented post-Nixon – standard operating procedure in the White House.

As Jonathan Bernstein wrote in Bloomberg: “Once upon a time, President Richard Nixon turned the Department of Justice into his personal flunkies in various different conspiracies to break the law. Before it was over, his first two attorneys general wound up in legal trouble. A third attorney general and his deputy resigned rather than carry out the further demands of the president.” We may still be in the early days of Trump’s attempts to manipulate and rig his own Justice Department and rip to shreds the notion of “the rule of law,” but it is increasingly clear we are in very deep and unchartered waters.

And then there is Trump’s attempt to pressure the Post Office to retaliate against Amazon and its billionaire owner Jeff Bezos. Bezos, of course, also owns the Washington Post, one of the news organizations attempting to keep alive the flame of presidential accountability.

“[Postmaster General Megan] Brennan [a career official who worked her way up from letter carrier to boss] has so far resisted Trump’s demand, explaining in multiple conversations occurring this year and last that these arrangements are bound by contracts and must be reviewed by a regulatory commission,” the Post reported recently. “She has told the president that the Amazon relationship is beneficial for the Postal Service and gave him a set of slides that showed the variety of companies, in addition to Amazon, that also partner for deliveries.”

Other presidents have certainly attempted to intimidate various businesses for various reasons, but Trump’s action is in a new category. His behavior is the conduct of a man who relentlessly seeks to punish his perceived political enemies and he’s proving he will pull whatever handy levers he stumbles on to inflict the punishment. This is not politics or ideology, but rather rank authoritarianism on an American scale.

It’s the corruption – stupid . . . 

Or consider this lede on a recent New York Times (non-fake) story: “HONG KONG — The Trump Organization’s partner in a lavish Indonesian development project boasting a six-star hotel and golf course with President Trump’s name has brought on a new ally: a Chinese state-owned company.

“The Indonesian partner, the MNC Group, said Tuesday that it had struck a deal with an arm of Metallurgical Corporation of China, a state-owned construction company, to build a theme park next door to the planned Trump properties.”

The Times concluded, “The timing is awkward.” We should hope to shout it is awkward.

After promising a trade war with China and after the Indonesian hotel deal, Trump suddenly abandoned sanctions against Chinese telecommunications firm ZTE, an organization American intelligence officials says is in the middle of Chinese efforts to evade Iranian and North Korean sanctions. Additionally the director of the FBI told the Senate Intelligence Agency as recently as February that he was “deeply concerned about the risks of allowing any company or entity that is beholden to foreign governments that don’t share our values to gain positions of power inside our telecommunications networks.” Top intelligence officials have bluntly told Americans not to use ZTE phones and devices because they constitute an espionage threat.

Perhaps there is a rational explanation for all this, but it would seem the best that could be said for a president making money off a foreign business deal financed by a Chinese company while engaged in trade negotiations with China is, well, “awkward.”

There are new and credible allegations of additional pro-Trump election meddling. The latest involves deep-pocketed Persian Gulf operatives in a second campaign season Trump Tower meeting involving the president’s son Don, Jr. and various foreign agents, one of whom apparently has lied to Congress about his involvement in the campaign. It is worth remembering that it is against the law for foreign citizens, agents, and companies to in any way involve themselves in a U.S. election or to spend money to support or defeat a candidate. Democracy dies in plain sight.

And there is always more with this crowd.

Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner’s family real estate business has apparently entertained offers for a troubled New York building – 666 Fifth Avenue – from an investment group backed by money from Qatar. The Kushner deal, and of course he’s a top White House advisor, somehow is also caught up in an ongoing diplomatic Middle Eastern brouhaha that Vanity Fair described this way:

Jared Kushner – son-in-law, White House aide, real estate investor, problem

“Led by Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, a group of Middle Eastern countries, with Kushner’s backing, led a diplomatic assault that culminated in a blockade of Qatar. Kushner, according to reports at the time, subsequently undermined efforts by Secretary of State Rex Tillerson to bring an end to the standoff.”

I know it’s complicated keeping the conflicts of interest and the world-class grifting all straight, but this is way beyond “awkward” and into the territory of bribery and shakedown. I’ll put it the way special counsel Robert Mueller likely would: Did Kushner pressure Qatar for money for his New York building in exchange for backing off on the blockade?

Or as Slate succinctly put it: “Bribery, corruption, and real estate have always gone hand in hand. If I give you a suitcase containing $500,000 in cash, that’s extremely suspicious. But if I buy a property from you for $1.6 million, it’s almost impossible to determine that the ‘real’ value was only $1.1 million and that therefore $500,000 of the payment was somehow nefarious.”

That we are even considering this kind of thing in relation to the president and his “staff” is an astounding moment in American history.

Whenever there is a choice . . . 

Back in 2008 the writer Thomas Frank produced a splendid little book entitled The Wrecking Crew. His basic assertion was that the modern conservative-liberal political debate can now best be explained by the fact that liberals actually continue to believe in government as a force for good and a route to improvement in the human condition, while conservatives are essentially cynics about government. Conservatives not only don’t want much government they want to privatize what little they tolerate. In the process they elevate “bullies and gangsters and CEOs over other humans” – sound familiar – while telling us to get smart and stop expecting anything good from Washington.

“Whenever there is a choice to be made,” Frank wrote back in those pre-Donald Trump days, “between markets and free people – between money and the common good – the conservatives chose money.”

The modern Republican Party, now completely the party of Trump, is daily proving the essential truth of Thomas Frank’s little book.

“I worry that we no longer live in a democracy,” the journalist and historian Tom Ricks said recently. “We live in what the ancient Greeks called an oligarchy — government of the rich, for the rich, by the rich. Money now is much more important in America than people’s votes.”

Scandals 100th the size those that swirl daily around the White House would have in years past set off a mad race to investigate and hold accountable the wrong-doers. What we have instead is an incredibly tepid response from Republican politicians afraid that raising legitimate questions about the president’s conduct will induce blowback from residents of the Fox News fueled fever swamp that is the Republican “base.”

Republican candidates for an open Congressional seat in Idaho all dodged a debate question about whether there was anything Trump has done that caused them heartburn. The joker who won the primary and likely will go to Congress said he hadn’t been following the special counsel investigation deeming it a “distraction.” Democracy dies in broad daylight.

Conservative never-Trumper Max Boot ended a recent column by saying, “Republicans approve of, or pretend not to notice, his flagrant misconduct, while Democrats are inured to it. The sheer number of outrages makes it hard to give each one the attention it deserves. But we must never – ever! – accept the unacceptable.”

Yet, so much damage has been done amid so little pushback from the conservatives who certainly know Trump is a disaster, but cannot bring themselves to speak of the destruction he has created. And the damage is huge and will be long lasting.

The whole world is watching . . .

“The West as we once knew it no longer exists,” the German magazine Der Spiegel said recently in an remarkable editorial. “Our relationship to the United States cannot currently be called a friendship and can hardly be referred to as a partnership. President Trump has adopted a tone that ignores 70 years of trust. He wants punitive tariffs and demands obedience. It is no longer a question as to whether Germany and Europe will take part in foreign military interventions in Afghanistan or Iraq. It is now about whether trans-Atlantic cooperation on economic, foreign and security policy even exists anymore. The answer: No. It is impossible to overstate what Trump has dismantled in the last 16 months.”

With due respect to Jon Meacham and the “we’ve had it worse” argument, the Republican Party embrace of Trump is not like anything we have ever seen. The embrace of his incompetence and corruption when coupled with a near complete political unwillingness to restrain his attacks on institutions, the law, old alliances and fundamental decency is absolutely frightening.

We retain the appearance of democracy without having it. You have to wonder if we can ever get it back.

Books, Trump

The End of the Beginning …

Posted on by mjohnson

      We don’t know the precise path the next few months will take. There will be resistance and denial and counterattacks. But it seems likely that, when we look back on this week, we will see it as a turning point. We are now in the end stages of the Trump Presidency.

Adam Davidson writing in The New Yorker.

—————-

There are now four types of people in the United States.

One type, slightly over 50 percent of white adults according to an ABC News poll, support the president of the United States. Older white folks are the Trump base. But it is still an astounding number and speaks at some level to the fundamental racial divide in the country since it is more and more clear that Donald Trump’s core appeal has always been racial, the oldest, most toxic play in American politics. Yet, it is also clear as Trump has said that he could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue, and well, you know do anything and not endanger support from “his base.” The true believers are one type.

A second type of American, perhaps best exemplified by current House Speaker Paul Ryan, enables the president while ignoring him in order to accomplish a handful of highly partisan or personal goals – a giant tax cut for corporate America and the wealthiest among us, a much more conservative judiciary for a generation or victory in a Republican primary where fidelity to Trump is the only issue. The morality of this group is on display if not their patriotism. They see. They might even cringe. But they persist. He is an idiot after all, but a useful one.

A third type of American, a handful of elected Republicans among them, seem to believe that Trump’s ethical and legal misdeeds, his trashing of long-established norms of political behavior, his insult filled rants, and his delusional foreign and economic policy will eventually fade away. We must just let all this run its course. It will all work out they say. Common sense and the American Republic will soon enough return, these optimists hold. One hopes they are right, while suspecting they are not.

And the fourth type is, well, folks like me. People who believe Trump represents an existential threat to our politics and our culture. Indeed his daily shredding of truth and decency, his attacks on a free press, the courts and the rule of law are destroying, as Financial Times columnist Edward Luce has written, the very idea of classic western liberalism.

“Western liberal democracy is not yet dead,” Luce writes in his brilliant and frightening book The Retreat of Western Liberalism, “but it is far closer to collapse than we may wish to believe. It is facing its gravest challenge since the Second World War. This time, however, we have conjured up the enemy from within. At home and abroad, America’s best liberal traditions are under assault from its own president. We have put arsonists in charge of the fire brigade.”

Luce’s 2017 book chillingly describes the retreat of western liberalism in places like Poland and Hungary and he correctly places Trump and America in this context. Trump has shown us at least one thing, which in my lifetime has not been as crystal clear as it now is: our system of checks and balances, the conventions of acceptable political and ethical behavior are really very, very fragile. It has actually been quite easy for a would-be autocrat to drive us to the edge of chaos and political breakdown. All it has taken is a reality show personality, a capacity to lie with abandon, an appeal to racial divide and a Twitter account.

And now after months of constant disruption and the kind of behavior that would have doomed any previous president we have arrived at the point of reckoning of sorts. The president of the United States is increasingly cornered, frightened, more erratic and unfocused than normal. He is at war with his own Justice Department and the FBI. Michael Cohen, his long-time personal lawyer – a wise guy character right out of Goodfellas or A Bronx Tale– is almost certainly going to be indicted, likely for a host of misdeeds directly and indirectly bearing on Trump.

Trump lawyer Michael Cohen

Trump’s legal team has shrunk to Cohen and an in-house White House lawyer whose signature accomplishment has been to restore the handlebar mustache to prominence. On the other hand Special Counsel Robert Mueller, working quietly with the passion of a straight arrow Boy Scout and backed by an A-Team of criminal prosecutors, accumulates documents, interviews, tapes and who knows what related to elections, Russians, assorted shady con men, bank loans and porn star payoffs.

When it all becomes public the Trump story – at its core the story of a profoundly flawed, deeply troubled man who has no business visiting the Oval Office let alone working there – will make Nixon’s Watergate or Harding’s Teapot Dome look like a small time embezzlement job at a church bake sale.

We are about to see with the Trump fiasco, as Churchill said after the long twilight of the first three years of World War II and after a victory at El Alamein, “not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.”

The end of the beginning. And Trump knows it is coming. His Twitter account screams acknowledgement. He may be able to compartmentalize his dishonesty and selectively forget what is inconvenient to remember, but he knows his decade’s long haphazardly constructed house of cards – what an appropriate analogy – is going to crumble.

Soon-to-be former Speaker Paul Ryan

Paul Ryan, at age 49, heading for Janesville, Wisconsin to spend more time with his family, knows it is coming. Mitch McConnell will try to create a few more federal judges in the interval remaining, but he knows it is coming. The scores of Republicans declining to seek re-election to Congress know it is coming. The Fox News nitwits, even they (we hope) know its coming.

Vladimir Putin, yes even he knows it is coming, Yet, unlike the rest of us Putin is a winner no matter what becomes of Trump because his whole game has been to show how abjectly corrupt American democracy can become. The mess Trump has made – his own corruption and dishonesty, the lying, the Scott Pruitt’s, The Mooches, the Newt Gingrich’s and Rudy Giuliani’s, the degrading of decency, the wholesale cashiering of a once-proud political party – none of that will be automatically fixed when Trump is gone. It will take years to correct this mess, if it is even possible.

Putin’s aim was to destroy American leadership around the world, fray the NATO alliance and pit the U.S. against China. He wanted to walk back what until just a few years ago seemed to be the relentless history of democratic expansion around the world. Now, as Ed Luce points out, there are 25 fewer democracies in the world today than there were just 18 years ago.

Putin’s dream has worked better than any KGB plotter could possibly have envisioned. Meanwhile, the thug from St. Petersburg emerges as a new Middle East power broker, the new most interesting man in the world, the man who will keep pointing out that America is broken and corrupt and leaderless.

Checking signals

The only question left is whether Trump burns down what is left of the structure of American law and norms or whether enough righteousness remains in the hollow souls of the president’s GOP enablers to stop him short of political Armageddon.

The Lawfare blog’s Benjamin Wittes wrote recently that we have known for months the ultimate blow up was looming, but it “has ripened slowly and, while in plain view, in a fashion that has permitted people to avert their gaze. Those who wanted to deny that the confrontation was coming at all could convince themselves that perhaps Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation would peter out; perhaps it would reveal only misconduct by expendable hangers-on in the president’s entourage; perhaps it would reveal only politically embarrassing conduct rather than conduct that required elements within the executive branch to lock horns over whether the special counsel would be meaningfully permitted to accuse the president.”

The raid on Michael Cohen’s law office, home and hotel room ended all ability to avert our gaze. This is what a Constitutional crisis looks like. If we survive it historians will be studying this moment for years, books will be written and everyone will claim to have seen it coming even though it is often difficult to see things happening in plain sight.

The end of the beginning of the Trump unraveling comes – as Putin and his Kremlin pals must be celebrating – while eight of the top ten jobs at the U.S. State Department sit vacant and while the CIA’s top leader is leaving for State and both he and his announced replacement, an architect of torture policy, face bruising confirmation fights. The unraveling comes while American troops flail away without strategy or leadership in Syria and Afghanistan and while the White House chief of staff has lost all ability to manage the daily drama in the West Wing.

None of this is sustainable. Oh, the 50 percent of white Americans who would cheer Trump if he did something criminal on Fifth Avenue will stay with him to the bitter, bitter end. They are a political lost cause. The GOP base. These white folks will rage on against the dying of the darkness, while their hero fumes on social media. They have made up their minds. They embrace the chaos. Porn stars, Russian meddling, the deepest ethical swamp in modern memory – piffle. He isn’t Hillary. He isn’t Obama. Good enough.

But the rest of us, the Paul Ryan’s, the hopeful Republicans and the worried Democrats, the midnight worriers, must hope the end comes quickly and with minimal collateral damage. But does anyone really think Donald J. Trump will suddenly find reason and common sense and go quietly or reasonably as the circle closes around him? Of course not.

The Boston Globe’s Michael A. Cohen, not to be confused with the Trump Tower wise guy, wrote last week: “we have a president who will do anything to save his own skin. He cares not one whit about the law, ethics, norms, or the good of the country. As has always been the case, Trump’s only concern is Trump.”

Trump will go down. The events of the last week make that all the more certain. How much farther down Trump takes our country is what keeps some of us awake at night. Trump is an existential threat to the long American experiment. And that is no hyperbole and it is certainly no joke.

Books, Politics, Trump

Amusing Ourselves to Death…

Posted on by mjohnson

     “Great is truth, but still greater, from a practical point of view, is silence about truth.”

― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

————

I have rarely – as in never before – thought of the televised Emmy award show and at the very same moment also reflected on Aldous Huxley’s 85-year old novel Brave New World.

Sean Spicer, yes that Sean Spicer, provided the connecting tissue between the glitz, phony seriousness and absurdity of the Emmy’s and the stunning relevance of a book written when Herbert Hoover was in the White House.

Spicer, the truth challenged former White House press secretary who shamed himself with six month’s worth of daily prevarications from behind the White House podium before finally resigning when The Donald brought The Mooch into the White House, was the talk of this year’s Emmy show.

How far, how very far, we have fallen.

Spicer, as everyone on the planet no doubt has seen by now, made a surprise appearance at the top of the award show pushing his podium on stage. It was all part of an elaborate inside joke, the kind that both Washington, D.C. insiders and celebrity A-listers find so irresistible. (Politics is show business for ugly people, as they say.)

Spicy at the Emmy Awards

Spicy was, it was pointed out, poking fun at himself from behind the same kind of moveable podium that Melissa McCarthy and Saturday Night Live used to make him, a political hack in service to a political disaster, into a national celebrity. By delivering a slight variation on his lie about the size of Trump’s inaugural day crowd and applying it to the Emmy broadcast, Spicer was apparently hoping that poking fun at his lying would remove the stink of his White House tenure. It was as if he were hoping that joking about being a lying joker would be as good as a confession before Saturday Mass.

Melissa McCarthy does Spicer

As Mark Leibovich wrote in the Times, Spicer “for all his professional sins, achieved something far more pertinent to the current environment: In the space of barely half a year, he became the most famous White House press secretary in history, hands down. After a while, the celebrity itself becomes the thing. Spicer’s embattled narrative became its own subplot in the greater Trump reality show. How long could he last? How much could he take? How low would he go? People tuned in to watch his briefings in record numbers.”

Yet, now a small time political operator who made White House “alternative facts” the new normal has a visiting fellow gig at Harvard and a seat next to Jimmy Kimmel on late night television. And he’s a “star” posing for photos with complete strangers and lining up speaking engagements like someone who might have something important to say. He doesn’t.

Spicer is alive and well on national TV and on the lecture circuit even if he is not yet quite settled into a well padded sinecure on cable TV. None of this is because he has done anything significant or great and not because he’s a thoughtful fellow (who just happened to lie and bluff his way to the top of the Trump heap), but simply because he’s now considered amusing.

Spicy is our living proof that Neil Postman’s seminal 1985 book – Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business – has become the handbook for our times.

Postman, who died in 2003, was a professor at New York University and perhaps our most authoritative analyst of the intersection where modern communication collides with culture and politics. Our great national reality show has prompted a wide revisiting of Postman’s prescient work, to read Amusing Ourselves to Death in the Age of Trump is to come face-to-face with the perilous nature of our times.

Neil Postman

Postman’s great subject thirty years ago was television and its role in shaping and diminishing American life. His 1985 dissection and critique of the vast wasteland of the blinking tube amazingly applies perhaps even more to our present Facebook/Internet-centric age. Television remains a huge force in modern lives, but the new sinister force that daily wads up truth and sends it to the trash lurks not in the corner of our living rooms, but on our laptops, smart phones and tablets. Spicer and his former boss remind us daily – hell, minute by minute – that distraction, diversion and decidedly fake news are always just a click away.

”When a population becomes distracted by trivia,” Postman wrote in the 1980s, “when cultural life is redefined as a perpetual round of entertainments, when serious public conversation becomes a form of baby-talk, when, in short, a people become an audience and their public business a vaudeville act, then a nation finds itself at risk; culture-death is a clear possibility.” This is where we are, my friends, starring down the national vaudeville act that threatens everything from the rule of law to the law of common sense.

Neil Postman didn’t really predict that America in the second decade of the 21st Century would place a faux billionaire whose real claim to fame was hosting a reality television show in the most important job in the world, but he would not have been surprised. He predicted the enthusiastic embrace of ignorance that inserted Donald Trump into a role that he is demonstrably unfit to manage let alone master.

Postman, predicting our appetite for stupid over substance, would not have been surprised that Trump actually declined to fire Sean Spicer earlier this year because the guy “gets great ratings.” Postman would not have been shocked that the president of the United States began his Tuesday by delivering a juvenile and disjointed rant before the United Nations – praised by his “base,” of course – then ended Tuesday with a tweet bemoaning the poor ratings for the aforementioned Emmy awards show.

My pal Roger Plothow, a newspaper publisher who is actually trying to do something about our appalling lack of media literacy – he visits schools and talks about real news to anyone who will listen – is as worried as I am about the sewer we are swimming in.

“The fundamental inability of people to differentiate fact from fiction has always been a critical problem,” Plothow wrote recently. “The percentage of any population with highly developed critical thinking skills has probably always been low. When technology allows the spread of ‘alternative facts,’ and altered or invented ‘photographs,’ and it makes possible the viral proliferation of sources that intentionally spread fiction, the stakes are magnified beyond even Postman’s imagining. It creates a circumstance in which a man can be so convinced that a presidential candidate is operating a child sex ring in the basement of a pizzeria that he appears at the restaurant armed and ready to act. Amusements are so readily available that families sitting at a restaurant table may be more engaged with their smart phones than with each other. Taken separately, these are troubling. In aggregate, Postman would consider these circumstances a grave danger to our very survival.”

Trump’s great triumph was not his improbable and unprecedented winning of the White House (while losing the popular vote) it is rather the success he has had in destroying objective truth among a significant number of Americans. And, of course, the president has succeeded in replacing facts and most all political norms with chants of “lock her up” and “Make America Great Again.” He can call for terminating the internationally supported Iranian nuclear agreement without ever really grappling with the substance of the deal or what might replace it. He lobs Twitter barbs at North Korea’s “rocket man” with no apparent attention to the real world dangers that bombastic miscalculation might have on literally millions of people.

Sean Spicer, a small man with a small brain always so obviously on display is just one of a thousand exhibits in Trump Museum of Mendacity. The president of the United States lies about everything and trivializes all things. The Toronto Star’s Daniel Dale has been keeping track and records 588 lies (and counting) of varying seriousness since January. Meanwhile the Trump “base” and Republicans in Congress, most of whom really do know better, just keep smiling, amusing themselves en-route to the mid-terms.

Trump Tweets a short, fake video where he appears to drive a golf ball into Hillary Clinton’s back. He brags that the economy has never been stronger. He boasts that he has had the most productive start of any president, ever – period. The Russian election interference is “fake news” and, oh yes, his opponent last year is the “crooked” one.

It is all a show, a roiling, distracting, disgusting show of trivia and piffle, a show that Neil Postman, God rest his soul, forecast a generation ago. These smiling idiots, Postman warned, will destroy the very nature of democratic culture, which brings me back to Huxley.

Postman’s book is in some ways an analysis of the two great 20th Century dystopian novels that dealt with our communication culture – George Orwell’s 1984 and Huxley’s Brave New World, published in 1932. Postman correctly concluded that while Orwell’s book was supremely interesting Huxley’s was spot on correct.

“What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one,” Postman wrote. “Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture.”

Andrew Postman, the professor’s son, wrote recently in The Guardian about the  renewed interest in his father’s thinking about our willingness to replace relevant reality with phony amusement. “While fake news has been with us as long as there have been agendas, and from both sides of the political aisle, we’re now witnessing – thanks to Breitbart News, Infowars and perpetuation of myths like the one questioning Barack Obama’s origins – a sort of distillation, a fine-tuning,” Andrew Postman wrote.

Postman continues: “’An Orwellian world is much easier to recognize, and to oppose, than a Huxleyan,’” my father wrote. ‘Everything in our background has prepared us to know and resist a prison when the gates begin to close around us … [but] who is prepared to take arms against a sea of amusements?

“I wish I could tell you that, for all his prescience, my father also supplied a solution. He did not. He saw his job as identifying a serious, under-addressed problem, then asking a set of important questions about the problem. He knew it would be hard to find an easy answer to the damages wrought by ‘technopoly.’ It was a systemic problem, one baked as much into our individual psyches as into our culture.”

There is no easy solution to a political culture rotting in real time. Obviously, as my publisher friend Roger Plothow has shown, we must begin to foster a more media literate citizenry. This starts early with education and must include a genuine recommitment to education in the humanities, particularly courses in basic civics and American history. We all need to burst out of our bubbles and be willing to confront information – and facts – that we find uncomfortable and at odds with our own well-baked views. And we must engage, all of us, in citizenship. Put the country first. Think and behave with inclusion in mind rather than tribalism. In other words, act like a citizen who deserves a place in a society that was created around the ideal that all are created equal.

And here is another idea. Read. Read Huxley and Orwell and Postman and read Timothy Snyder’s marvelous and chilling little book On Tyranny, a call to arms for our age where the unimportant has trumped the vital.

Snyder, a Yale historian who specializes in European history, reminds us in his tiny and profound book that 20th Century history holds great lessons for our time. “Believe in truth,” Snyder writes. “To abandon facts is to abandon freedom. If nothing is true, then no one can criticize power, because there is no basis upon which to do so. If nothing is true, then it is all spectacle. The biggest wallet pays for the most blinding lights.”

Failure of the world’s most important and enduring experiment in democracy is not a laughing matter, yet we confront the very real possibility that we are permitting the essential fact-based, serious work of citizenship to be perverted simply because we don’t care enough to keep from being amused to death.

Sean Spicer doesn’t matter. He really doesn’t. What he represents matters a very great deal.

Books

Read…It’s Good for You…

Posted on by mjohnson

      “About a quarter of American adults (26%) say they haven’t read a book in whole or in part in the past year, whether in print, electronic or audio form.”

Report of the Pew Research Center

———-

Who doesn’t read books? Doesn’t everyone read books? Everyday? Who doesn’t use a library? Who can get along without books? Or libraries?

I can scarcely imagine going a day without picking up something to read – the latest non-fiction title that is making me think differently about the legacies of The Great War, or the Jim Harrison novel resting on my bedside table, or the slim volume of William F. Buckley’s essays that has been just about the perfect companion to fill a pleasant and informative ten minutes.

Who doesn’t read book? Or frequent libraries? Turns out about a quarter of the American population did not crack a book in the last twelve months. A Pew Research Center survey, not surprisingly perhaps, says less educated, more financially insecure Americans don’t read books and the same group fails to take advantage of the wonders at the local library.

Here’s a paragraph from the Pew report: “Given the share that hasn’t read a book in the past year [26 percent according to the survey] it’s not surprising that 19% of U.S. adults also say they have not visited a library or a bookmobile in the past year. The same demographic traits that characterize non-book readers also often apply to those who have never been to a library. For example, men, Hispanics, older adults, those living in households earning less than $30,000 and those who have no more than a high school diploma or did not graduate from high school are the most likely to report they have never been to a public library.”

I’m tempted to make some sweeping social comment about the non-readers and the fate of the country – Donald J. Trump, a kind of rich guy with time to burn never reads books, either – but I’ll resist the social commentary and merely observe that I can’t imagine a life without books. Those who don’t read – or visit the library for that matter – are simply missing out on one of life’s most rewarding and pleasant experiences – getting lost in a book. It is simply part of what makes life worth living.

So…eleven – why stop at ten – of the best books, in no particular order, that I read in 2016:

Between the World and Me – Ta-Nehisi Coates. A defining book on the still defining American issue – race. Coates’ book is a must read for those of us in the dominant culture who want to begin to understand what it’s like to live as a person of color in a deeply divided American society.

Custer’s Trials – T.J. Stiles. I thought I had read everything there was to read or that I needed to read about the ill-fated George Armstrong Custer, but Stiles, who won the Pulitzer for this book, showed me plenty of new material. He puts Custer in his times in a way no other book on Custer has and he doesn’t even write about the Little Big Horn.

All the Truth is Out – Matt Bai. This book came out in 2014 and received a lot of attention (that is clearly deserved), but I only got to it last year. Bai, a superb reporter and writer now with Yahoo News, tells the old story of Senator Gary Hart’s fall from the next president to a laugh line. You might think you know the Hart story, but I guarantee you won’t until you read this book. It also tells us so much about why politics and the media have become what they have become.

Spain in Our Hearts – Adam Hochshield. Another great reporter and writer tells the story of Americans enmeshed in the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s. It is a compelling and often tragic story.

The Amazing Adventures of Kavilier and Clay – Michael Chabon. Comic books, Nazis, Gotham and a rip snorting good read. I could not put it down.

The Noise of Time – Julian Barnes. The talented Mr. Barnes imagines the life of the great Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich who produced great music while constantly wondering when the KGB would come knocking at his door. The book is in part a meditation on how people behave in an authoritarian society under the constant threat of violence. Somehow Shostakovich lived in such a world – making many tradeoffs – and wrote his Fifth Symphony, one of the great symphonic works of all time.

The Immortal Irishman – Timothy Egan. Read anything the intrepid Tim Egan produces, including his weekly column in The New York Times. This wonderfully told story resurrects the legacy of Thomas Francis Meagher, Irish rebel, Civil War hero and Montana legend and in the process tells us much about the Irish diaspora and why we are all Irish, or want to be.

Prisoners of Hope – Randall B. Woods. We’ll see how much of Lyndon Johnson’s world remains after a new president and GOP Congress get down to business, but since 1964 we have all been living in a world LBJ made. Woods tells this powerful story with color and skill. Johnson emerges as a political genius and a deeply flawed personality and therefore is fascinating.

Bobby Kennedy – Larry Tye. Another fascinating and very complicated politician is treated both critically and with affection.

Finale – Thomas Mallon. This book offers another of Thomas Mallon’s deeply researched fictional takes on American politics and the book puts us right in the middle of the Reagan presidency. You’ll never think of Ron and Nancy quite the same way after reading this.

Dark Money – Jane Mayer. This book may be the best thing ever written about the deeply corrosive effect of vast money on our politics. Deeply researched and objectively presented it is difficult to read Jane Mayer’s awarding winning book and not be worried about our political future.

Go pick up a book and happy reading in 2017.

Books

Life is Sentimental…

Posted on by christian

     

      “Life is sentimental. Why should I be cold and hard about it? That’s the main content. The biggest thing in people’s lives is their loves and dreams and visions, you know.”

Jim Harrison, 1937-2016

——–

I can’t say I really knew him, the great novelist/poet/gourmand/fisherman/hunter who died last Saturday in the high desert south of Tucson, but I did have my fifteen minutes with Jim Harrison and hearing of his death this weekend burned a hole in my heart.

Jim Harrison in a typical pose
Jim Harrison in a typical pose

What a talent. What a huge talent. And what a life, what a quotable life.

Harrison, the Michigan-born writer of all manner of stories; violent, sweet, sexy, make you cry in the dark stories came to Idaho some years ago and it was both my pleasant and completely intimidating duty to interview him in front of an audience. Interviewing Jim Harrison was a little like reading Faulkner – a lot was going on there.

He didn’t know me from a bale and had no reason to care. No doubt he’d been through the “famous author answers questions from some rube in the sticks” routine ten thousand times. But he was kind, generous and did a reasonable approximation of Jim Harrison being interviewed; interviewed by someone – me – who wanted to sound “literary,” but mostly had to fake it. He might have embarrassed me. He didn’t.

      “The simple act of opening a bottle of wine has brought more happiness to the human race than all the collective governments in the history of earth.”

We still laugh about that interview in the auditorium of the high school in Hailey, Idaho. After the author of “Legends of the Fall” and “Dalva” and a dozen other shining, wonderful books answered the last question he need a cigarette break. Returning from the smoking interlude outside he positioned himself at a small table in the auditorium in order to sign his name in the books fans clutched as they waited in line for a moment of his time. My very much better half, hoping to be helpful, inquired if he might need anything, thinking glass of water, cup of coffee, etc.

“A glass of red wine would be nice,” was the reply. You got the impression that might have been an appropriate response to almost any conceivable question asked of Jim Harrison.

Of all the books and all the poems, I like “Dalva” the best, perhaps because the story is set in the rough and starkly beautiful country of northwestern Nebraska where I have my own roots. The book centers on a rough, starkly beautiful 40-something half-Sioux woman who is on the quest we all are on – to find ourselves.

The Guardian noted in a 2012 story about Harrison that the book is an “overlooked classic,” but not in France where Harrison has long enjoyed a major following. He has said that it was not uncommon for him to encounter French women named “Dalva.” If you haven’t read it – read it.

      “What’s the meaning of it all? “Seems to me nobody’s got a clue. Quote Jim Harrison on that: Nobody’s got a clue.”

Jim Fergus, interviewing Harrison for The Paris Review in 1986, said: “Harrison is a man of prodigious memory and free-wheeling brilliance and erudition, as well as great spirit and generosity, lightness and humor; so the reader should imagine wild giggles and laughter throughout, and supply them even when they seem inappropriate—especially when they seem inappropriate.”

His close friend Tom McGuane, another very fine writer, said much the same when he wrote a short “postscript” about Harrison in The New Yorker: “Few American writers of recent times have had his erudition and phenomenal memory. To the end, Jim was a country boy who’d been touched.”

He touched his readers, too.

Air Travel, Basketball, Books, Civil Rights, Native Americans, Television

Strong Inside

Posted on by christian

I love college basketball and of course the love affair is in full blossom this time of year. My romance began in 1966 when a bunch of unknown upstarts from a Podunk school in El Paso – who ever heard of Texas Western College? – won the NCAA championship over the vaunted Coach Adolph Rupp and the University of Kentucky Wildcats.

TWCThere have been a thousand (or more) great college basketball games since 1966, but for my money none was better or more important than Texas Western’s 72-65 win over the big dogs from Kentucky and the segregated Southeastern Conference (SEC). The Texas Western Miners started five black players in that 1966 game. Kentucky didn’t have a black player until 1969. Adolph Rupp, the Baron of the Bluegrass, a Hall of Fame coach who won 82 percent of his games, went to his grave remembered for that championship loss by his all-white team to a talented and determined all-black team. It is stunning to remember that Rupp refused to shake hands with the Texas Western players after the game. And it should be just a little embarrassing to Kentucky fans today that the still vaunted Wildcats play their home games in Rupp Arena.

As Kentucky steams toward another national title, let’s just say that I’m for anyone but Kentucky. Call it a grudge and label it unreasonable, since the Wildcats now depend on spectacularly talented African-American players to maintain an unbeaten season, but I have a long memory.

Maybe its just Kentucky. I’ve long remembered a great line uttered by the supremely talented Civil War historian Gary Gallagher who once joked that Kentucky stayed loyal to the Union during the rebellion and “only joined the Confederacy after the war.” Adolph Rupp and his basketball team were still fighting that war more than a hundred years later.

Strong Inside…

All this old basketball and racial history came rushing back to me recently with the publication of a fine and important new book on basketball and race in the SEC, the pioneering courage of an African-American player at Vanderbilt who was the first to play in that storied league and how far we have come – and still need to go.

The book is Strong Inside, the gutsy story of Perry Wallace and his trials and triumphs in the SEC in the late 1960’s. The author Strong Insideis Andrew Maraniss (son of Washington Post associate editor David Maraniss, author of acclaimed books on Roberto Clemente, Bill Clinton and Vince Lombardi, among others).

In many ways the centerpiece of Wallace’s story is the account of a game he played in 1968 in Oxford, Mississippi. Remember the context. The Ole Miss campus was finally integrated in 1962, but not before a full-scale riot, a death and many injuries marked the school with scars that are still visible. The racist governor of Mississippi, Ross Barnett, played to local politics and his own ambition when he defied federal courts and President John Kennedy when James Meredith wanted to register for classes at Ole Miss.

In 1963, NAACP organizer Medgar Evers, an Army veteran of World War II, was assassinated in the driveway of his home in Jackson, Mississippi. Three young civil rights workers were murdered in Philadelphia, Mississippi in 1964. Bloody Sunday took place in Selma in neighboring Alabama in 1965. It was into that environment of hate, fear and racism and that a courageous Perry Wallace stepped when he set foot on the basketball court in Oxford for the first game in Mississippi featuring a black player.

Shortly before halftime a white elbow was thrown at Wallace, a blow “so fast that no one knows who threw the elbow,” Perry Wallace Senior YearMaraniss says. The blood flowed from Wallace’s wound, the crowd cheered and no referee blew a whistle. “When halftime ended,” the Washington Post noted in a recent review, “Wallace was left alone in the locker room with a bag of ice and a swollen eye. He was ‘shaken not just by the physical blow but by the relentless taunting. . . . He could hear the Ole Miss crowd react when his teammates returned to the court without him: ‘Did the nigger go home? Where’s the nigger? Did he quit?’”

Wallace didn’t quit. He helped Vanderbilt win that game, but had to make the long walk back to the basketball court all by himself. None of his white teammates made the simple gesture of walking with him. In other SEC basketball venues Wallace “was spit on and pelted with Cokes, ice and coins. At LSU, some Vanderbilt players claimed, a dagger was thrown on the court in Wallace’s direction. . . . In Knoxville, teammates remember, fans dangled a noose near the Vanderbilt bench.”

Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of Wallace’s story is the grace and dignity with which he dealt with such unspeakable abuse and overcame it all. Today Wallace is a widely respected law professor at American University in Washington, D.C. and a man humble in talking about his pioneering role in SEC basketball. Perry Wallace 1Vanderbilt officials, originally peeved when Wallace talked candidly at the end of his playing days about his experiences, finally made peace with him and retired his jersey in 2004. Perry Wallace deserves to be more widely remembered and Andrew Maraniss’s book is a wonderful start.

Banning the Dunk Shot…

Wallace stood just 6’5”, which, even considering the standards of his day, made him a rather small frontline player, but the guy could jump and Maraniss writes, “the ‘stuff shot’ was Wallace’s most reliable offensive move.”

The long-prevailing basketball wisdom holds that the “dunk shot” was banned to neutralize the inside play of the great UCLA post man Lew Alcindor – Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. But, Maraniss makes a compelling case that Wallace and his role as the first black player in the SEC also had much to do with banning the dunk. In that 1966 NCAA championship game Texas Western’s unforgettable big man, David Lattin, “embarrassed Rupp’s Wildcats with a powerful dunk over Pat Riley,” later a great NBA player and coach. “The next season,” Maraniss writes, “Lattin’s protégé, Wallace, embarrassed Rupp’s freshman team with his slam over Dan Issel,” also later an NBA star.

Shortly thereafter the NCAA rules committee, long dominated by Adolph Rupp, changed the rules to ban the dunk, a decision Ruppthat it is hard not to conclude was racially motivated. Rupp’s Wildcats never scheduled Lew Alcindor’s UCLA Bruins, but they played Perry Wallace’s Vanderbilt team twice every season. “While the [dunk] ban wasn’t directed at Wallace,” Maraniss says, “it was more than just a coincidence that the rules of the game changed just as the first black player – a prolific dunker – was about to enter the league that Adolph Rupp had dominated for decades.”

Sports at the college and professional level along with the United States military have been more successful than virtually any other segment of our culture in advancing the cause of racial equality. Both have their problems to be sure, but both have also shown what America might be if we finally come to grips with our haunted racial past and commit to a better future. Perry Wallace’s largely forgotten story is a testament to what one man can do to make ours a more perfect union and proof that heroes are found in many places, including above the rim.

Perry Wallace and Andrew Maraniss were recently featured on the NPR program Only a Game when they were interviewed by Bill Littlefield. NPR’s All Things Considered also recently featured a story on the book.

The Maraniss book was published by Vanderbilt University Press. Order it up. If you’re a basketball fan you’ll enjoy it. If you enjoy an uplifting and great American story you’ll love it.