Graveyard Scene

Screen capture from Trump's Tik Tok campaign video shot illegally in Arlington National Cemetery, via. Just for the record, I know you probably know this already, there were 45 combat deaths of US troops during Trump's presidential term, 18 "non-hostile" deaths, and no 18-month period during which there were no deaths at all. I haven't seen it mentioned anywhere, but there actually were about 18 months with no US deaths in Afghanistan after Trump signed the deal with the Taliban in February 2020, but Biden was the president for eight of those months. (This is a key reason why Biden honored the deal, because he knew if he didn't the Taliban would go back to attacking and killing Americans.)

On that story about the shoving match last week at Arlington National Cemetery, where a ceremony meant to honor the last Americans to die in the Afghan War, with presidential candidate Donald Trump as a guest, was marred by the behavior of members of Trump's gang entourage, who insisted on violating the rules (and the law) by filming the event, for what turned out to be a Trump campaign Tik Tok commercial, to the point of using violence against the official who tried to get them to stop (it's not clear exactly how, whether they pushed her to the ground or just punched her—the Trump team apparently has some video, but they don't seem at all eager to let it out)—there's an angle that hasn't been covered directly, which has to do with the mourners, family members of the American dead.

There were 13 Americans, 11 Marines and one man each from the Army and Navy,  killed on August 27 2021, among 180-some deaths altogether in a suicide bombing at the Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul, where desperate crowds were trying to get flights out of the country as the US forces packed up and left under the disorderly arrangements negotiated by the Trump administration the previous February, and the Taliban assumed control. The Americans were there, at least some of them, to help Afghan evacuees process their papers to get out. The attacker detonating the suicide belt was affiliated with the Taliban's enemies from Isis-K (the Islamic State in Khorasan), but it's not ruled out that panicked American troops killed some of the victims as well. It was a terrible mess.

Joe Did What? Post-Trumpatic Stress Disorder

Listen to it twice, if possible—it's not long, and it's mostly in English. Here's a good text for following along, with the few German bits translated.

A little over a month ago, at my day job as a music bibliographer, I was processing an essay by the Italian musicologist Mariano Russo about the12-tone music of Arnold Schoenberg and his students, which argued that it was never as revolutionary as it sounded, and didn't last very long, if at all, as the norm for contemporary music; nevertheless (according to the abstract I wrote),

in the history of 20th-century music it continues to be felt as the decisive parting of the waters after which everything changed. Jacques Lacan's concept of the après-coup (after Freud's term Nachträglichkeit, "afterwardsness"), a "mode of belated understanding or retroactive attribution of sexual or traumatic meaning to earlier events", is drawn on to explain the phenomenon: the arrival of 12-tone music was recognized as a traumatic event only after the event had passed. An illustration is provided by the premiere of Schoenberg's A survivor from Warsaw under the conductor Kurt Frederick in Albuquerque in 1948. After the performance, the audience remained stunned and baffled, without applauding, for a full minute. Then Frederick repeated the whole of the 7- or 8-minute work, and the audience applauded thunderously--it was only in the "afterwardsness" of the re-hearing that they were able to process the traumatic character of the first impression.

Which took hours of research, I may say; I don't have any experience with the later 20th-century psychoanalytic material—somewhere in my library there's a chapter on Lacan in a book surveying the French structuralist movement, but I know I didn't read the chapter with much interest or understanding, and I can't find it at all at the moment. But the après-coup concept really stuck in my mind, where it got connected to something completely different: the political events of the last month and the last eight years, and in particular the strange sensation of "joy" Democrats have been experiencing especially last week over the Chicago festivities.

Not just the joy in itself, but what seems to me like its belated character, of a national celebration we really should have been enjoying four years ago, when we drove Trump out of office. We're out singing and dancing in the public square like the Munchkins after Dorothy's house falls on the witch—"Ding dong, the witch is dead!"—at the wrong time, when the witch has actually come back to life, and seriously threatens to retake power.

Literary Corner: Did Trump Close the Border?

 

Screenshot from Newsweek.

The former president responds to the Democratic candidate's acceptance speech, in a call to Fox News, which the network cut off after ten minutes, claiming they were out of time:

I Didn't Have a Bill

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

Why didn’t she do the things
she’s complaining about?
She didn’t do any of it.
She could have done it
three and a half years ago.
She could do it tonight
by leaving the auditorium
and going to Washington, DC,
and closing the border.
She doesn’t need a bill.
I didn’t have a bill.
I closed the border.

It's almost endearing how he still hasn't found out what vice presidents are supposed to do for a living, even though he had one of his own for four years. 

Or is this something I've been missing? Did Pence use to pop over to the White House and issue executive orders while Trump was in the East Wing watching Fox & Friends? Or does he think Harris is already the president? He's often suggested in recent months that the presidency is a very slippery kind of identity, sometimes suggesting Barack Obama is still in office (and likely to be responsible for a nuclear war, because Putin doesn't respect him), sometimes hinting that he believes he's still president himself. 

Here's the passage from Harris's speech:

Pre-DNC Pep Talk

Trump "Freedom Cities" affordable housing proposal, via Raw Story.

By the way, I still think Biden would have won the election, when it came down to it. I still think there was a majority who would be happy to vote for him but told the polls they didn't want to because they'd heard he was unelectable, and were afraid if Biden was the candidate Trump would win. Fear of Trump won out.  But it certainly wouldn't have been as much fun as this looks likely to be. As Josh Marshall (gift link) is saying, it was going to be a slog, weary work, not happy. And now we're talking joy!

I also still think Biden made that happen, defeating the timid centrist plan to run Some White Dude chosen by some improvised set of reality-TV rules, with his endorsement of Kamala Harris as his successor minutes after he left the race (the centrist plan was specifically meant to exclude her, as too "controversial"). And it was clearly a great decision, as was his naming Harris in the first place, back in 2020. If anybody engineered a "coup" it was Biden himself, ensuring his post-neoliberal "legacy" by naming the candidate most representative of the Biden coalition and most likely to continue along his policy lines. As Harris has confirmed in her own naming of the most Biden-like of VP candidates, Tim Walz, the lovable non-rich white guy, mainline Christian, tell-it-like-it-is orator (Biden could easily have invented the "these guys are weird" line himself), simple but extremely sharp, with a genuine fund of out-of-country experience (in China, where he taught English for a while and used to bring his American high school students on trips every year) and an unshakable commitment to kindness and understanding. 

(I also should add, contra Peter Beinart's "Joe Biden Is Not a Hero", that I still think Biden has been doing everything he believes is possible to stop the killing in Gaza, and continues to work tirelessly at that at this late date. I think he's literally hoping to have the permanent ceasefire announced at the Democratic convention. Biden may well be wrong on the hopefulness of this approach, but I'm certain an arms embargo wouldn't have succeeded any better at stopping the killing, given the mood in Israel and the criminal intransigence of the prime minister and his party, intent on saving his own bacon; it would have left Netanyahu feeling even freer to ignore US entreaties. Meanwhile, as I type, FWIW, Blinken has just announced that Netanyahu and Gallant have accepted his "bridging proposal" for getting from here to there, though the details remain thin.) 

Weaky Leaks. II: Interviews With a Vampire Squid

...Which was the detail emerging from the WikiLeaks dump if you happened to read it instead of screaming about it, on October 16.

I had no idea, but there actually is such a thing as a vampire squid, Vampiroteuthis infernalis. Not because it sucks blood, it doesn't, but because of its red eyes and the webbing on its tentacles, making it look as if it were wearing an opera cape. Threatened by predators, it "inverts its caped arms back over the body, presenting an ostensibly larger form covered in fearsome-looking though harmless spines" in what is known as a "pineapple" or "pumpkin" posture. So it's actually kind of cute! Image via Wikipedia.

Everybody knows Hillary Clinton refused to release the speech transcripts because she didn't want us to see her cozying up to those bankers (and cardiovascular researchers, Canadians, Jewish organizations, Silicon Valley women, and pro-camping lobbyists, among many others, who also paid her upwards of $200,000 a pop to address them in 2013-15, as we know thanks to the fact that she released complete tax returns in July 2015). But it's possible that she was really much more worried about somebody entirely different seeing the transcripts, like Xi Jinping, you know, or King Salman.

Or Silvio Berlusconi, the Italian Donald Trump, who still wields real power in Italy as a news magnate and opposition politician. Speaking of that third Chelsea Manning dump of 250,000 diplomatic cables in late 2010, she told an audience of Goldman Sachs "builders and innovators" three years later,

Weaky Leaks

In the context of Politico, New York Times, and Washington Post being in receipt of what may be an Iran-hacked file of possibly derogatory information about Senator JD Vance and keeping it secret from the public, a lot of folks are finding themselves vaguely remembering the Russian-hacked file of possibly derogatory information on presidential candidate Hillary Clinton stolen from campaign manager John Podesta in 2016, which WikiLeaks published on October 7 2016, shortly (I'm talking about minutes, at most a couple of hours) after the revelation of the Donald Trump Access Hollywood tape in which he revealed his penchant for grabbing pussy and how when you're a star they let you do it.

"What was in those emails?" somebody wondered, unable to come up with anything other than the idea of Podesta sharing a risotto recipe. "Was it really damaging?" I think it was, in fact, but in a very carefully targeted way, at students, through the Trump campaign's Facebook operation (whether or not it was helped out by the Russians, or Cambridge Analytica, or whatever), aimed especially at persuading students of a leftish persuasion in Michigan and Wisconsin not to vote.

Anyhow, I thought I'd re-up my piece, from October 10 2016, on how it went down.

The Lincoln cabinet as pictured by the pro-slavery press in 1864; drawing by John Cameron, via Wikipedia.

When WikiLeaks sends out a new document dump on a Friday evening, also known as the "death slot" because it's where you make a news release when you're hoping nobody will read it, that could be a sign that the organization doesn't have a lot of confidence in the news value of the material.

That seems to be the case with this latest dump released Friday night (shortly after the Access Hollywood pussy-grabbing video, I think), featuring emails presumably hacked by Russian intelligence personnel and associated with John Podesta, chairman of the 2016 Hillary Clinton presidential campaign (and not, contrary to Julian Assange, in "control" of the Podesta Group lobbying firm, which he co-founded with his brother Tony in 1988 but hasn't been involved in for years). There isn't a whole lot of thereness there.

The centerpiece of the thing is a document apparently collated by or under the direction of Tony Carrk, research director of Hillary For America, in 2015 during the Democratic primary campaign, consisting of passages from some of those 2013 paid speeches of which the transcripts have never been released, though the Sanders forces kept demanding it. The excerpts flag moments that might look to the left opposition like evidence that she's in cahoots with the forces of corporate evil: telling the banksters, in particular, what she really thinks while publicly telling all us liberals she's one of us, so it looks as if the campaign gathered them as part of the process, maybe, of deciding whether to release them or not—how damaging would it be? Or maybe of preparing for the storm that would follow after they were released; each passage contains some phrase or clause that could be pulled out of the context to make it seem as if she was revealing some horrible secret plan to her audience, and there's a helpful headline telling the reader how opponents will read it (could be the headlines were supplied by the hackers, though):

Hyperreality 2024: Assassination

I've had the hardest time thinking of a way to cope with the abnormal events of the past month in American politics, not just because of the way they've thrown themselves at us one after another, without giving us a chance to reflect on one before we're fully occupied with another one. My machine is full of false starts abandoned when I thought I had to move on to something different, right away. I also find myself assaulted with a bunch of philosophical, often postmodern thoughts about what's going on. Looking at one of those drafts, I'm thinking, instead of trying to "cover" the situation, maybe I should be trying to look at one thing at a time, before I start trying to pull it together.

 

AP Photo by Gene J. Puskar.

One of the strangest things about the attempt on the life of Donald Trump that started off Crazy Week on July 13, I guess it was, was how weirdly hard it seemed to take it seriously.  I mean, technically it was extremely serious, if you accept the story we've been given, as I have no good reason not to do. It was (apparently) a round from an AR-15, of a kind that instantly killed Corey Comperatore, sitting a couple of rows behind Trump, when a different round hit him in the head during the attack, and if Trump's bullet had hit him less than half an inch further to the left than it did, or (perhaps) if he hadn't woggled his head in that parrot-like side-to-side way he has, at just the right moment, it would have more or less blown his head off. That's pretty serious!  

But I watched that video, or side-eyed it, so many times, as all the TV stations turned into CNN imitators and tried to keep the story going, the way they do with a school shooting or earthquake porn, as the Secret Service agents lift him (it's pretty heavy) from the stage, with the blood dripping from his right ear, photobombing his way from among the agents trying to protect him, and makes that upraised fist with a furiously angry face, mouthing the words, "Fight! Fight! Fight!" (I read his lips as "Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!"). Trump didn't look scared, he looked really angry, And I'd seen video of Trump experiencing physical fear, that time he was threatened by an annoyed eagle, so I had an idea what it would look like,

Too Left or Not Too Left

Photo by Elizabeth Frantz/Reuters, via.

One thing on the selection of Minnesota governor Tim Walz as the Democrats' vice presidential candidate that I think it's up to me to say, because it's about one of my hobbyhorses, in the face of the fatwah issued by ayatollah Jonathan Chait:

Kamala Harris and Tim Walz Need to Pivot to the Center Right Now

Do not pass Go, do not collect $200. (I guess Chait means "the center right! now!" rather than "the center! right now!", but both are problematic.) 

He doesn't bother to specify what exactly they need to do in terms of policy, other than suggesting that Walz needs to back off of "providing free health care to unauthorized immigrants"—because Chait thinks it's politically more advantageous to punish the undocumented than it is to protect the broader public against the spread of a deadly pandemic ("Healthcare exclusions contribute to extreme inequities...Latinx Minnesotans have died of COVID-19 at twice the age-adjusted rate of white Minnesotans and their age-adjusted ICU-admittance rate for COVID-19 is nearly four times higher"). It's "moderate", for Chait, to force a susceptible subgroup of the population to seek care in the emergency room or just die untreated, and what you need right now is that kind of "moderation":

NABJ: The First Six Minutes

Via Threads.

I don't think Trump precisely means to praise the fictional criminal; I think his idea is that Lecter is a typical example of a border-crossing asylum seeker, which is equally nuts. But he can't help showing the appreciation for Lecter's comic stylings.

TRUMP:

First of all, I don't think I have ever been asked a question in such a horrible manner, first question. You don't even say "Hello, how are you."

In fact, Rachel Scott began the Trump interview at the National Association of Black Journalists convention by thanking the former president for showing up.

SCOTT:

Mr. President, we so appreciate you giving us an hour of your time.

Only then did she ask her question (given his long history of racially insensitive remarks—such as telling congresswomen of color to "go back to where you came from", calling Black district attorneys "animal" and "rabbit" and Black journalists "losers" whose questions are "stupid and racist"—"why should Black voters trust you?") That's the first lie in the first six minutes of the transcript. More, big and little, follow.

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