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.

Fuel prices are obviously a factor in the prices of consumer goods that have to be shipped, but the price of bacon is not a special function of the price of energy. It doesn't take more gas to ship a ton of bacon than a ton of pork chops, or mattresses, or gilded sneakers. If the price of bacon went up more than the other stuff in 2022, it was because of some other factor, basically the bacon industry calculating that they could keep raising the price and bacon-mad Millennials would keep buying it. If people really didn't eat bacon any more, the bacon producers would bring the price back down. Which is sort of what actually happened, isn't it, two years ago, but Trump still hasn't heard about it. 

Maybe he should have asked JD Vance, I'm sure he does a lot of food shopping, though not apparently for doughnuts, but bringing home the bacon is one of those manly things.

Wind energy is very cost effective and getting more so, and it doesn't cause blackouts when it stops blowing, because batteries exist, and they're getting better too. Batteries exist, Donald! He used to pull this all the time on solar power, telling you your TV would turn off at sunset (God forbid!). There was a real scientific issue there, and it got attention. The process isn't over, but it's getting where it needs to be.

The suggestion that your kids could come home from school any day with a surgically altered sexual identity, speaking of manly things, does not seem to me like something parents need to worry about. That's not something you can do in the nurse's office. 

And even if it was, it's not Trump's Oval Office. There are rules you have to follow. Your kid cannot be given a Tylenol in a public school, for instance, without a parent's written consent. Project 2025, of course, would reinforce parents' negative power, to demand that their child not be exposed to dangerous literature like the Diary of Anne Frank or The Bluest Eye or, you know, Virginia Woolf's Orlando (which I read myself at a pretty early age—I definitely liked historical fiction—without getting disturbed enough to ask my parents what was going on, though I remember feeling kind of annoyed, as by a bait-and-switch, when the male protagonist unexpectedly turns into a woman); the attack is on parents' positive power, when they want the child to be exposed to Anne Frank or Toni Morrison, or more seriously to deal with the gender dysphoria that can have a child wanting to take their own life, with the red state they live in determined to stop them from treating it. Republican policy is concentrated on stopping parents' freedom.

In the extremely rare case that a minor child undergoes gender-affirming surgery, it's going to be with parents who are on board with the idea, persuaded that it's best for the child's happiness. It was parents, not a school nurse, who successfully sued Alabama in federal court over the state's harsh law making it a felony to "engage in or cause" a child to receive gender-affirming care:

four Alabama families with transgender children, two healthcare providers, and a clergy member....the district court found that the plaintiffs were substantially likely to succeed on their claim that the sections of the law that prohibit puberty blockers and hormone therapy unconstitutionally violate parents’ fundamental right to autonomy under the 14^th Amendment’s due process clause by prohibiting parents from obtaining medical treatment for their children subject to medically accepted standards. The court also fond that the plaintiffs were substantially likely to succeed on their claim that these sections of the law are unconstitutional sex discrimination in violation of the 14^th Amendment’s equal protection clause because the law denies medically necessary services only to transgender minors, while allowing those services for cisgender minors. Additionally, the court found that the plaintiffs were likely to suffer irreparable harm, in the form of “severe physical and/or psychological harm” and “significant deterioration in their familial relationships and educational performance,” if the law was not blocked.

The bothsiderist press is determined to treat the Democrats' emphasis on "freedom" this year as some kind of clever appropriation of a Republican theme, but I'm taking it seriously. The Republicans are more and more openly opposed to freedom, the freedom to read Anne Frank or the freedom to practice a religion that doesn't object to abortion, or the freedom to boycott the Israeli government, or in particular the freedom to vote without the hindrances erected by certain states. It seems to me that freedom is a pretty serious issue in this election.

But at the same time I can't deny that the sheer stupidity needs to be an issue. You can learn about the relationship between the price of fuel and the price of bacon, if you want to do that, but it's not clear how you teach it to others. There are thoughts floating around this campaign that are so dumb they're a serious danger to the public, in their own right.