Friday, October 4, 2024

Literary Corner: Making the Hell's Angels Look Nice

 

Désiré Ntwayingabo, a refugee from the civil war in the Democratic Republic of Congo who settle in Dayton in 2010, and works there now for the city as a community engagement specialist, at a World Refugee Day event he and his team organized in June 2023, via Spectrum News 1 in Columbus.


From a fundraiser with Texas governor Greg Abbott  in Aspen,  Colorado, August 10, $25,000 to $500,000 a couple, of which The Guardian obtained a recording. For money like that, you get to hear the former president say "fuck". The first piece is about a party of 22 Congolese migrants to the United States he claims to have met at some point; the second his encounter with Helen Comperatore, widow of volunteer firefighter Corey Comperatore, who was killed in the first attempt to assassinate Trump on July 13.


Two Songs

By Donald J. Trump, 45th President of the United States of America

 

I. I Hate to Use That Foul Language

We said, ‘Where do you come from?’
They said, ‘Prison’.
‘What did you do?’
‘None of your fucking business what we did.’

You know why? Because they’re murderers.
I hate to use that foul language.
These are the toughest people.
These people are coming in from Africa,
from the Middle East. They’re coming in
from all parts of Asia, the bad parts
the parts where they’re rough,

and the only thing good is
they make our criminals look extremely nice.
They make our Hell’s Angels look
like the nicest people on earth.


II. I'd Much Rather Have My Husband

So they’re going to get millions of dollars
but the woman, the wife, this beautiful woman,
I handed her the check –
we handed her the check–

and she said, ‘This is so nice,
and I appreciate it,
but I’d much rather have my husband.’
Now, I know some of the women
in this room wouldn’t say the same.

I know at least four couples.
There are four couples, Governor,
that I know and you’re not one of them.
At least four couples here
would have been thrilled, actually.


There is obviously no reason to think Trump has ever interacted with a large group of migrants from Congo, let alone that they told him they came to America "from prison", let alone addressed him so rudely. The idea of Congolese must come from the story of the Haitians in Springfield, Ohio, accused of roasting and eating their neighbors' dogs and cats, for which Christopher Rufo found some video evidence, except it turned out that the migrants in question were not Haitian but Congolese, in Dayton rather than Springfield, and the video was an evident fake (sounds like a Radio Yerevan joke!).

All he's retained of the story is that there are Congolese somewhere in the US (there's a big community in Dayton in particular), which must have shocked him a lot, and he's made the rest up out of his congested head, probably mostly from the Mariel Boatlift from Cuba in 1980, the only time as far as I know when a foreign government really did "send them" to the States, and rumors flew that some of the boat people might be prisoners and mental patients, which was probably not true, though many of them were undesirable from President Castro's point of view, gay, ill-educated, political detainees, or Black. That was a time when a relatively young Trump was still capable of learning something—the wrong thing, of course—and the source of many things he thinks he knows now.

On Mrs. Comperatore, I can't find any evidence that he's ever presented her with a check, or met with her personally at all—he did speak with her on the phone at least once, and he may well have contributed to the gofundme, though he's not listed in the report of celebrities (Dana White, Ben Shapiro, Kid Rock) who did. On the joke about how some women would be pleased if their husbands got shot to death at a Trump rally in Pennsylvania, four of whom were at the Aspen dinner, not including Mrs. Abbott, I have no words.

Wednesday, October 2, 2024

Vance in Defense of the Lie

Drawing by Clay Bennett, Chattanooga Times Free Press, 7/17/24.

Anne Applebaum, of all people, created or appropriated a meme, and a good one:

This is another instance of the same shocking openness as when Vance claimed that he was justified in telling lies (on the imaginary pet-eating in Springfield, Ohio) in order to get attention—

The American media totally ignored this stuff until Donald Trump and I started talking about cat memes. If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do, Dana...

—and in this case turning it around on the moderator, making her the offender, and taking advantage of the moment to tell a more difficult-to-expose lie without fear of correction, as you see from the transcript:

Margaret. The rules were that you guys weren't going to fact check, and since you're fact checking me, I think it's important to say what's actually going on. So there's an application called the CBP One app where you can go on as an illegal migrant, apply for asylum or apply for parole and be granted legal status at the wave of a Kamala Harris open border wand. That is not a person coming in, applying for a green card and waiting for ten years.

The CBP1 app, introduced in October 2020, was originally meant for truckers crossing from Mexico into US to schedule cargo inspections, so they could just show up at the border at their appointment time instead of lining up and waiting for hours and days clogging the road. In January 2023, DHS added some new functionality, so that it could also be used by individuals applying for asylum (from all over the place, but chiefly at that time the "Northern Triangle" of Central America) or Temporary Protected Status (at the moment for Haitians, Cubans, Venezuelans, and Nicaraguans) to schedule interviews from the Mexican side of the border instead of having to wait in line for hours and days and months or, in the pattern that had become a serious problem since 2014 or so, crossing the border at an uncontrolled spot and chasing down a border patrol agent to interview them; and that May, the app was made the only way to get a first asylum interview at the Mexican border.

So the app, far from being a "Kamala Harris open border wand", is a piece of cell phone tech for applying the law as it has stood since the 1990 Immigration Act was signed by George H.W. Bush (in which Temporary Protected Status was instituted—the asylum provisions date back well before that), and meant to get rid of the much decried chaos at the border, or rather keep it on the Mexican side. In fact it adds a good deal of harshness to the system (for which it has been rightly called out by organizations like ACLU), as waiting in Mexico is difficult and dangerous, and it can take a really long time. But in terms of what it was intended to do, it's worked exceedingly well, with migration at the border at its lowest level since fall 2020 (when the Covid pandemic had largely shut it down).

And Vance's picture of a Kamala conspiracy to wave people in (presumably to vote illegally and beget "anchor babies" that will dilute America's blood) is as grotesquely false as the cat-eating canard. 

Senator, the question was, will you separate parents from their children, even if their kids are U.S. citizens? You have 1 minute.

JDV: Margaret, my point is that we already have massive child separations thanks to Kamala Harris' open border. And I didn't accuse Kamala Harris of inviting drug mules, I said that she enabled the Mexican drug cartels to operate freely in this country, and we know that they use children as drug mules, and it is a disgrace and it has to stop. Look, I think what Tim said just doesn't pass the smell test. For three years, Kamala Harris went out bragging that she was going to undo Donald Trump's border policy. She did exactly that. We had a record number of illegal crossings. We had a record number of fentanyl coming into our country. And now, now that she's running for President, or a few months before, she says that somehow she got religion and cared a lot about a piece of legislation. The only thing that she did when she became the Vice President, when she became the appointed border czar, was to undo 94 Donald Trump executive actions that opened the border.

Harris wasn't the "appointed border czar"; she was asked in early 2021 to work on combating the "root causes" of the wave of asylum seekers coming through Mexico from the three countries of the Northern Triangle (Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala) by improving cooperation with the four countries on US immigration law and by encouraging investment to relieve the economic stresses of living in Central America, and it may have had some effect—by 2023 just 16% of all CPB encounters were with people from Golden Triangle countries, compared to 52% in 2021 (replaced by Venezuelans and Haitians, who were not part of Harris's mandate).

It's true that some family separations took place up through 2022, of parents accused of gang affiliations, or through the stupid Trump-instituted Title 42 program, but nothing like the systematic destruction of families pushed through by Stephen Miller in his truly czar-like, sadistic and violent, reign.

Fentanyl is not smuggled into the US by undocumented aliens, but by US citizens driving cars at the official crossings. Do the cartels use children as mules? Sure, if they're Americans and can drive:

Sunday, September 29, 2024

State of the Race

I'm on a bit of a very refreshing holiday and finding it hard to focus on the realities, but this seemed especially hilarious: 



Per CBS News

A company called TheBestWatchesonEarth LLC, which is licensing Trump's name for the watches, lists its address as a suite located in a building in Sheridan, Wyoming, the same address as the company selling Trump's $499 sneakers. The suite is near a Wendy's fast-food location and Sherwin-Williams paint store. 

New York's Chas Danner and Matt Stieb have reported of the sneaker operation, however, that the Sheridan company that licensed Trump's name for the sneakers, 45FootwearLLC, as well as the company that did the digital Trump trading cards, is the creation of an "asset-protection consultant" called Andrew Pierce, who specializes in creating LLCs for clients who could like to keep their transactions inside layers of misdirection, apparently quite a big business in Wyoming (see Pandora Papers), in these cases the not-at-all illegal fact that Trump actually owns the businesses himself, and the buyer of these cheap sneakers from a "low-cost Asian country", smelling of glue (that's said to be a bad sign) and marked up something like 900%, who probably thinks he is benefiting the Trump presidential campaign, or the equally dubious Tourbillon watches, is actually giving the money straight to Donald. 

And with those those kinds of markups, he's definitely got the tariffs covered, if the goods are subject to any.

Then there's the way he's restructured the Republican National Committee, taking the management away from that loyal tool Ronna McDaniel and turning it over to his daughter-in-law, the aspiring pop singer Lara Trump, and Michael Whatley, whoever that is (he's a North Carolina lawyer and an election denier). They are pledged not to use the party funds to pay Trump's legal fees, for whatever that's worth, but they've allocated their energies in a sort of weird way, devoting themselves mostly to fighting against the election results before the election takes place, with 120 lawsuits in 26 states, while the party's normal get-out-the-vote activities have been wholly outsourced to outside groups, Charlie Kirk's Turning Point USA, the "America First Works" run not by political operatives but by theoretically sane celebrity veterans of Trump's old cabinet (Linda MacMahon and Larry Kudlow), and most splendidly a superPAC aligned with former genius Elon Musk, AmericaPAC, which is said to be doing most of the work but adopting a somewhat peculiar strategy, aimed at a relatively small number of unlikely voters:

Friday, September 27, 2024

Seems Tired

  

Photo by Getty Images via Forbes, April 2024.

From Fox News:

At the end of the interview, Attkisson asked Trump if he was not successful in his bid for president in November, could he see himself running again in four years? 

"No, I don’t. No, I don’t. I think that that will be, that will be it. I don’t see that at all," the former president answered. "I think that hopefully we’re gonna be successful."

It's been reported all over the place (I heard it on NPR), but I haven't seen anybody hearing what I hear, a huge change in the discourse, as I'll explain; especially coming, as it does, on top of his remarks suggesting Jewish voters might be responsible for bringing him down.

That's in the American Israeli Council "Fighting Anti-Semitism in America" event in Washington, where he appeared with huge donor and Presidential Medal of Freedom recipient Miriam Adelson, expressing his disappointment that he got only 24% of the Jewish vote in 2016 and 29% in 2020, after all he accomplished for the Jewish people, and still four years after that is scoring only 40% of the Jewish vote (in fact it's 25%):
I'll put it to you very simply and as gently as I can, I wasn't treated properly by the voters who happen to be Jewish. I don't know. Do they know what the hell is happening if I don't win this election? And the Jewish people would really have a lot to do with that if that happens because at 40% that means 60% of the people are voting for the enemy. Israel, in my opinion, will cease to exist within two years, and I believe I'm 100% right. You know, there's a hat that comes out, Trump was right about everything and I believe I'm right and that's a hell of a thing to say. But I believe I'm right. If I do win, Israel will be safe and secure, we will stop the toxic poison of antisemitism from spreading here all over America. It's spreading, it's spreading like it's never spread before. I've never seen anything like it. I really believe it would be obliteration and it'll happen quickly, too. It's very close to happening. (Retyped from C-Span)

Note that point where he's trying (and failing) to work his way back into the teleprompter text, with the obvious Stephen Miller phrase "toxic poison" (Miller never allows himself to refrain from using an adjective just because it means the same thing as the noun), but can't manage until he gets to "obliteration".

Everybody's talking about one thing in this passage, the ratification of antisemitic conspiracy theories, which is understandable; Trump can't be talking here about the math of the Jewish vote, which couldn't make that kind of difference at maybe 2.4% of the electorate and much less in the swing states (except Pennsylvania, which could well be the crucial state, with 2.3%)—he must be talking about Jew magic, the Elders and their incantations, making all the plain folks vote for the communists.

I myself think Trump's mathematical understanding is really that weak and he may well think the Jews could defeat him on the sheer numbers, though that doesn't mean he's not an antisemite—he plainly is. Unforgettable how he told the American Israeli Council 2019:

A lot of you are in the real estate business, because I know you very well. You’re brutal killers, not nice people at all,” he said. “But you have to vote for me—you have no choice. You’re not gonna vote for Pocahontas, I can tell you that. You’re not gonna vote for the wealth tax. Yeah, let’s take 100% of your wealth away!”

But it's their intrinsically treacherous character he's thinking about there, not their occult powers.

What's interesting about the current phase is the note of discouragement in the antisemitism speech and the Atkisson interview, the recognition of the possibility that Trump and Vance might not be winning at all, the acknowledgment that he might get beaten, without cheating, just by voters, even if he thinks it could be mainly the Jewish voters.

I mean, just in these instances, not in every speech, and perhaps he was just tired and out of sorts for these occasions, but I'm pretty sure it's a first in his political career, or indeed his career all round, which has always run on his never admitting defeat or the possibility of defeat. 

This seems huge to me, if true.


Thursday, September 12, 2024

What She Needed to Do

Portrait of the candidates as baffled uncle and skeptical niece. Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty

When Vice President Harris opened up in her first debate response—to the fairly stupid but utterly predictable question whether Americans are "better off than they were four years ago", I was somewhat dismayed by the way she completely ignored it, choosing to answer a completely different question instead, with a peculiar mix of autobiographical detail and Clintonian numbers:
So, I was raised as a middle-class kid. And I am actually the only person on this stage who has a plan that is about lifting up the middle class and working people of America. I believe in the ambition, the aspirations, the dreams of the American people. And that is why I imagine and have actually a plan to build what I call an opportunity economy. Because here's the thing. We know that we have a shortage of homes and housing, and the cost of housing is too expensive for far too many people. We know that young families need support to raise their children. And I intend on extending a tax cut for those families of $6,000, which is the largest child tax credit that we have given in a long time. So that those young families can afford to buy a crib, buy a car seat, buy clothes for their children. My passion, one of them, is small businesses. I was actually -- my mother raised my sister and me but there was a woman who helped raise us. We call her our second mother. She was a small business owner. I love our small businesses. My plan is to give a $50,000 tax deduction to start-up small businesses, knowing they are part of the backbone of America's economy. My opponent, on the other hand, his plan is to do what he has done before, which is to provide a tax cut for billionaires and big corporations, which will result in $5 trillion to America's deficit. My opponent has a plan that I call the Trump sales tax, which would be a 20% tax on everyday goods that you rely on to get through the month. Economists have said that Trump's sales tax would actually result for middle-class families in about $4,000 more a year because of his policies and his ideas about what should be the backs of middle-class people paying for tax cuts for billionaires.

But it's astonishing, looking back at it, how many necessary things she accomplished with that, in the first two minutes: 

  • sketching out her character, as an ordinary American raised by a single mother with the help of a day care provider (loved, and also properly paid for her work), which has given her a feeling for what ordinary Americans need and a motivation to help them get it, for the benefit of those in the audience that had barely heard of her before July and still doesn't know much of anything about her; 
  • establishing her readiness to talk about policy with details, numbers and all, for the benefit of the moderators whose preparation has led them to believe that she's going to keep it vague and airy, and precisely the kind of wonky detail they hate at the politics desk, because they find it so boring;
  • establishing the contrast with her opponent, who is focused on helping his fellow billionaires and their giant companies, as he has shown in the past and as he plans in the future; and
  • spooking the opponent personally with a description of his tariff proposals that he may not even be able to recognize—it's import duties, paid by the American importers of foreign goods—effectively a sales tax, since the importers normally pass the cost on to their customers, but not literally a sales tax, while Trump keeps implying idiotically that it's paid by the governments of the exporting countries, which he should understand better considering all the import businesses he theoretically ran in his TV star days (Israeli vodka, Slovene cocktail glasses, Turkish furniture, Chinese neckties and eyeglass frames, etc.—of course he was just a licensee pretending to run the businesses for the show, and they were all failures), a description that immediately goads him into opening with a ridiculously ignorant lie:

First of all, I have no sales tax. That's an incorrect statement. She knows that. We're doing tariffs on other countries. Other countries are going to finally, after 75 years, pay us back for all that we've done for the world. And the tariff will be substantial in some cases. I took in billions and billions of dollars, as you know, from China. In fact, they never took the tariff off because it was so much money, they can't. It would totally destroy everything that they've set out to do. They've taken in billions of dollars from China and other places. They've left the tariffs on.....

No, "other countries" don't pay a dime. And while the money paid by US import businesses is real, it's hardly important: it's up from about 1% of annual federal revenue from 1946 to 2017 to 2% (compared to 49% for income tax), and that's not the reason the Biden administration has held on to them. Tariffs haven't been a significant source of revenue since the income tax was introduced by a Progressive movement a bit over a century ago (it's imaginable that Trump learned from his rightwing father that income tax is an attack on the wealthy, and that's the reason he's convinced tariffs are the solution to every problem).

The only reason for imposing tariffs nowadays is as the (post-neoliberal) Biden administration uses it, for the encouragement of domestic industry, but combined, unlike the Trump tariffs, with an effective industrial policy of the kind Republicans regard as an abomination and which Trump and his minions wouldn't know how to begin in any case (Trump's own tariffs on imports from the EU as well as China are best known for China's retaliation against US agriculture—92% of the "billions and billions of dollars" they brought in went to compensating US farmers for the losses Trump policy had caused them).

Via.

FWIW.

Moreover, Harris did have an answer to the "are we better off" question, which she got to in response to Trump's freakout Gish gallop, which ran in a matter of seconds from tariffs to inflation to a rant on "millions of people pouring into our country from prisons and jails, from mental institutions and insane asylums" before he remembered he was supposed to be talking about the economy. 

"I'd love to" talk about the economy, Harris replied:

Let's talk about what Donald Trump left us. Donald Trump left us the worst unemployment since the Great Depression. Donald Trump left us the worst public health epidemic in a century. Donald Trump left us the worst attack on our democracy since the Civil War. And what we have done is clean up Donald Trump's mess. 

So you can't complain that she didn't answer—she just chose to do it in her own time, after getting Trump to define his own character, as ignorant, delusional, and vicious, and did it with a list of charges that placed him as the defendant in what would amount to a trial, and took control of the occasion. 

Really, as Rebecca Traister suggested, she took control of it the minute she came on stage and marched over to Trump's podium introducing herself as if she were the host ("Kamala Harris. Let's have a good debate") and forcing him to shake hands.

It was a stunning performance. It was by far the most entertaining presidential debate I've ever seen, and by far the most useful (both at the same time: the faces she made for the camera when Trump was speaking were funny, but they were also instructive, assisting with the fact checking; leading the audience to distinguish Trump the liar from Trump the fool, libelous Trump from psycho Trump, the sneaky one from the one who was just tired and lost). (It's only fair to mention that the moderators did an unusually good job of keeping the candidates on the subject and checking the facts themselves.)

It didn't, as many of the pundits complain, provide a very clear sense of how Harris's presidency will differ policy-wise from Biden's, but I don't understand why it should; she's not running against Biden, she's running against Trump. Josh Marshall likes to say she's making Trump the "incumbent", the representative of the discredited establishment, in order to present herself as the change agent, and some think that's a little too paradoxical, but I think it meets the psychology of the moment, in terms of the Lacanian picture I sketched out a couple of weeks ago. Economically, Biden (or "Biden-Harris") rescued the nation from the calamity of 2020; psychologically, Biden's term is the afterwardsness in which we began to realize how traumatized we've been, and we may irrationally blame him, in the form of the psychoanalytic transference, but it's Trump we're suffering from—it's Trump who abused us, and he really is the incumbent in that sense.

As to whether the debate worked or not for the Harris campaign, whether she "did what she needed to do" as the horserace pundits always put it, I don't know, but I think there are reasons for being hopeful, and I don't mean the current picture in the polls, or for that matter the parade of Bush-era endorsements for Harris, most recently from that old reprobate Alberto Gonzales, or last week's statements from Liz Cheney and her father the abominable former vice; not that there's anything wrong with those in and of themselves, it's the responsible thing to do, given Trump's known incompetence and criminality, and Trump opposes some things in national security and foreign policy where the "bipartisan consensus" is so fundamental that at some level I agree with Dick Cheney (like "the US should have multilateral economic and security alliances"); but I can't quite bring myself to see it outside the context of Liz Cheney's broader project of rehabilitating the Republican Party by pretending Trump isn't really one of them, that he's some kind of horrific invasive species from somewhere entirely different. I may get back to that a little later.

The Liz Cheney endorsement that startled me was the one for Texas Democratic Senate candidate Colin Allred, because it's a direct attack on the party as it is, in the rebarbative person of Senator Cruz: she wrote,

There are numbers of candidates around the country who have embraced election denialism [the C-SPAN transcript says "elections and nihilism" first, but never mind that]—denialism. It is important that we beat them too. I think one of the most important things we need to do as a country as we begin to rebuild our politics is we need to elect serious people. Often, when you go in to vote you don't have the choice. I want to say specifically here in Texas, you guys do have a tremendous serious candidate running for the United States Senate. [Applause.] It's not Ted Cruz. [Laughter.] [Applause.]....You might not agree on every policy position, but we need people who are going to serve in good faith. In this race, that is Colin Allred.

And because she gives a nod to the idea that Allred might conceivably win, pinned in Cheney's explanation to Trump's and Vance's (and by implication Cruz's) misogyny, and its connection to the reproductive rights issue: "Women around this country, we've had enough," she said. It seems like a more conventional endorsement, in which she'd not only like him to win, but personally hopes to help.

The things that are giving me the most hope at the moment have to do with how bad the Trump Republican party is, in every sense of the work, incompetent, corrupt, and unresponsive to voters, especially on the abortion issue. 

There's the  arrogance of Donald Trump saying he doesn't have to prepare for a debate being matched by his vice presidential candidate:

A reporter asked Vance how he was getting ready for the [October 1 debate with Walz] at a campaign rally in Erie, Pennsylvania, on Wednesday.

He answered: "The way I'm doing debate prep is by spending time with these fine people—this is how I do debate prep."

That didn't work out so well for Donald, JD, you might want to rethink it.

There's the awful quality of so many of the GOP downballot candidates, especially for the Senate, to the despair of the National Review, with only two seats likely to flip to the Republicans, West Virginia and Montana (but Montana is looking iffier for them, with the Republican, ex–Navy SEAL Tim Sheehy falling from multiple lying scandals to financial scandal to racism scandal).  

There's the turnover of the national committee from Ronna McDaniel (a horrible person, but a professional) to Trump's daughter-in-law focusing on her imaginary music career and outsourcing the party's entire GOTV program to pikers with no experience like Charlie Kirk and his Turning Point USA. I'm personally convinced Trump is continuing to milk the party to pay his own and his henchmen's legal fees. It's as if they're so confident in their voter suppression efforts in Pennsylvania and North Carolina that they don't need GOTV:

The Republican National Committee (RNC) once envisioned an extensive field operation for the 2024 election, including having about 90 staffers in the must-win state of Pennsylvania.

But the Trump campaign scrapped those plans when it took over the RNC in March, redirecting the focus on field operations to combating supposed voter fraud and pursuing a twin voter turnout strategy of relying on several political action committees and ardent Trump volunteers.

The result has been that the Trump campaign has put fewer resources into its ground game in battleground states, according to people familiar with the matter – and Republican officials have derisively said the Trump operation is more comparable in size to a midterm cycle than a presidential.

They're so bad at everything else, maybe they're not really good at voter suppression either.

Meanwhile, since the coming of Kamala Harris, there's an explosion of new voter registrations, especially among the 18-to-34s and among those particularly among women:

Voter registration surged 700% after President Joe Biden announced he would not seek reelection, according to the CEO of a nonpartisan voter engagement organization....Hailey noted significant registration increases in key swing states, including Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan and Wisconsin. By the end of the week following Biden’s announcement, Vote.org had recorded more than 142,000 new registrations nationwide....

(who don't show up in the likely voter polls because they'll be voting for the first time). 

This phenomenon is plainly connected to the issue of abortion, which is also the subject of ballot measures in 10 states, including some with important Senate races with repellent Republicans: Montana (Tester vs. Sheehy), Arizona (Gallego vs. Lake), Missouri (Kunze vs. Hawley), and Florida (Mucarsel-Powell vs. Scott). Plus Ohio (Sherrod Brown vs. the unspeakable Bernie Moreno), which had its referendum in 2023, which that state's vile legislature has decided to ignore, and the voters really ought to punish them for it

I'm convinced there could be a Blue blowout in November that polls couldn't have predicted—not that there will be, because it's unpredictable, but that it's really possible, between the joy of the Democrats, the worthlessness of the Republicans, and Harris's emerging pro-freedom campaign.


Sunday, September 8, 2024

Literary Corner: Essay on Criticism

Drawing by JaysonZHahn/Medium.

 

Trump finally explained the Hannibal Lecter bit, and it's worse than you think.

[image or embed]

— Comfortably Numb (@numb.comfortab.ly) Sep 7, 2024 at 6:10 PM

The Poet Defends Himself Against His Critics

by Donald J. Trump, 45th President of the United States of America

AND THEN THE PRESS WHEN I SAY DR HANNIBAL LECTER.
THE PRESS SAYS, OH, WHY DID HE MENTION THAT?
THEY ARE WISE GUYS BACK THERE? JUST WISE GUYS. THEY SAY
HE RAMBLED AND STARTED TALKING ABOUT
HANNIBAL LECTER. WHAT DOES THAT HAVE TO DO?

THAT'S A REPRESENTATIVE OF PEOPLE THAT ARE
COMING INTO OUR COUNTRY. DR HANNIBAL LECTER,
HE WILL HAVE YOU FOR DINNER. YOU KNOW THAT
HE WILL HAVE YOU FOR DINNER. NO, BUT THIS
IS WHAT'S HAPPENED. THIS IS WHAT'S HAPPENING AT LEVELS
THAT NOBODY CAN EVEN IMAGINE. MILLIONS AND MILLIONS.

I love how the critics speak mostly in an easy dactylic pentameter in the first five lines, before Trump responds in his own choppily unmetered voice.

Dr. Lecter is just what your fancy-ass literature professors refer to as a metaphor. That is, not a "representative" like your congressman but a symbolic representation, of the millions and millions of Latin American lunatics, mental patients like Dr. Lecter, driven by their governments from the asylums of their own benighted countries and pushed to cross from Mexico into the USA to find asylums here. The liberals even admit this!

Not that they're really cannibals, exactly, that's a metaphor too, though they really are criminals. It means their rapacious consumption of all the generous benefits we give them is eating our lunch.* 

And finally, like Dr. Lecter, they don't exist, just like the benefits we don't give them. Their existence isn't the point! This is literature, people! The point is the emotions they give us! 

"True! — nervous — very, very dreadfully nervous I had been and am; but why will you say that I am mad? The disease had sharpened my senses — not destroyed — not dulled them. Above all was the sense of hearing acute. I heard all things in the heaven and in the earth. I heard many things in hell. How, then, am I mad? Hearken! and observe how healthily — how calmly I can tell you the whole story."

He's not rambling at all! He's weaving! As the fancy-ass literature professors in his own circle have told him.


*I think Hannibal's joke, the play on the ambiguity of "have for dinner", may be the first and even only piece of purely verbal humor Trump has ever understood, his first or only experience of what it's like to "get" it. That's surely why he's compelled to keep repeating it, in every speech.

Wednesday, September 4, 2024

Literary Corner: Oh Freedom

 

Music historian Linda Russell, via RecordOnLine, on campaign songs.


Two Songs

By Donald J. Trump, 45th President of the United States of America

I. Take a Look at Bacon

You take a look at bacon
and some of these products –
and some people don’t eat bacon any more.
We are going to get the energy prices down.

When we get energy down, you know …
this was caused by their horrible energy – wind.
They want wind all over the place.
But when it doesn’t blow,
we have a little problem.

II. The Transgender Thing

But the transgender thing is incredible.
Think of it. Your kid goes to school
and comes home a few days later
with an operation. The school decides
what’s going to happen with your child

and you know many of these childs
fifteen years later say, what the hell happened?
Who did this to me? They say, who did this to me?
It’s incredible.

The price of bacon in 2023 was down 9% from its all-time high in 2022, year over year, and it's lower now than it was then. Brad DeLong, who I really, really trust, claims the price of bacon is at a historic low, matched only by the price in one weird interval 30 years ago:

The price of bacon relative to personal income per capita has only been noticeably lower than it is today for about a year in 1994-1995.