Billy Preston - Will It Go Round In Circles (1973)

Ain't this us? You think? Let the bad guy win once in a while? Let it go round in circles? Just let it all fly? And when it all lands, well, fuck all. It'll all work out, won't it? I guess we can all hope so.

Tight Rope / Leon Russell

I have always loved Leon. He's one of my collection of "non-singers." You know, like Brian Eno, or Chet Baker, guys that are definitely not technically accomplished singers, but who can sell a song so fucking hard that they can make you cry. I just had a cry myself. A friend of mine died last night, kind of in her sleep. She was only sixty years old or something, no lifestyle issues. Shit happens, you know? Wife/mother/friend/beloved teacher. RIP, Khun Pikun.

Mose Allison,,,Your Mind Is on Vacation

I couldn't justify calling myself a big fan of Mose Allison, but I've always been an admirer. I had a Best of album, and I played it sometimes. He has died, and mostly I feel like hoping that his life was good and that he died easy like. RIP, Mose.

buffalo daughter - "new rock"

Okay. Let's see what this looks like on the blog.

Looks fine. It was text-only in the dialog box on YT.

Are The Democrats Serious About Winning The Presidency?

I have blogged about this before in other contexts, but this post is an attempt to set out the evidence. I’m not convinced that the Democratic Party has been serious about wanting to win the presidency since the 1960s.

Below you will find the rough details of the Democratic nominating process for the last twelve presidential elections. Take a look, if you will, and see for yourself.

But first, some venting.

Question Number One: How many of these Democratic nominees would you say were obviously the result of a serious process designed to find the strongest possible candidate and mount the strongest possible campaign?

Question Number Two: How many of them appear in retrospect to have been throw-away candidates, predestined to lose?

The only Democrats to win election since 1964 have been Jimmy Carter (once); and Bill Clinton and Barak Obama (twice each). Now be honest, do any of those three seem like obvious, strong choices? If you’re old enough to recall Jimmy Carter or Bill Clinton, did any of them make you think, oh yeah, the Democrats have this one in the bank? All three seemed like dubious propositions to me.

I’m giving George McGovern a pass. He was much more likeable than Nixon (who wouldn’t be?), and they might have thought that public sentiment against the war would carry him in.

Even of the winners, all three must be seen to have been weak candidates. The peanut farmer? The draft-dodging hippie redneck from Arkansas? The (gasp!) black African guy? I’m willing to bet that a lot of Democrats were bloody surprised when they won. After President Obama was elected, the Democrats in congress didn’t seem to know how to react themselves, and they never seemed to be strongly supporting his efforts as president.

Of the remainder, does anyone actually think that either Walter Mondale or Michael Dukakis had a snowball’s chance in hell of even coming close? I don’t think so, and I don’t think that anyone thought so at the time either.

Al Gore had a leg-up after eight years as Vice-President, and, to be fair, he actually did win the popular vote, and probably the Electoral College vote as well. If it weren’t for that (redacted; seven words) Ralph Nader, Al Gore would have had a sufficient margin to beat even those cheaters who stole it from him. Absent that stint as Vice-President, though, he’d have been an unforgivably weak candidate himself.

Well, that leaves us with Hillary. On balance, I like Hillary, but not many people agree with me. Even I have my reservations. Choosing her over her Republican opponent seemed to me to be a no-brainer. At least you could be sure that Hillary would not crash the entire world; she would continue Obama’s success with reducing the deficit and addressing that climate thing. She might even have done some good in the areas of taxation and regulation. At least you could never seriously propose that Hillary was an existential threat to the United States. No, but she is less than likeable, and only a decent public speaker, and she does seem to make a lot of people just plum angry. So yeah, the thinking obviously went, we hate Hillary, so let’s all vote for the real existential threat. Let’s roll the dice!

Hillary lost to Donald J. Trump. Let that sink in a minute.

Wouldn’t it have been advisable to wait for a woman candidate who wasn’t widely disrespected, disliked, and disapproved of? You think? Give it a shot in another four or eight years? No, let’s go with Hillary. How did that work out for you Democrats-in-charge?

I’m not convinced that Bernie Sanders could have won many of the states that went to Trump, but had he been embraced and presented correctly he would probably have done as well as Hillary did. And that’s a seventy-four-year-old Jewish socialist from Brooklyn that we’re talking about! Where were the strong, electable candidates?

Do the Democrats even care about winning?  

The Primaries:

Democratic primaries beginning with 1972 (because 1968 was just too horrible to think about):

1. 1972

Potential Nominees: George McGovern; Hubert Humphrey; George Wallace; Edmund Muskie; Henry Jackson.

Nominee: George McGovern.

McGovern was a true war hero; he was a much decorated bomber pilot who completed his tour of missions over Europe in World War II. He was also a Senator, with previous service in the House of Representatives. He was a quiet man who didn’t like to brag about his battle experience, so it was, and still is, a well-kept secret. He was seen as weak due to his reluctance to continue the Vietnam War and his willingness to entertain amnesty for draft-dodgers.

Result: lost to Richard Nixon

2. 1976

Potential Nominees: Jimmy Carter (2,200 delegates); Mo Udall (330); Jerry Brown (301).

Nominee: Jimmy Carter.

Jimmy Carter was the unknown governor of a southern state. He had an excellent and honorable service record, having been the executive officer and engineering officer of a nuclear submarine for many years. He was also seen as weak, due to his general modesty.

Result: Won over Gerald Ford, who had served out the previous term as President after being appointed Vice-President after the disastrous resignations of Richard Nixon and Spiro Agnew.

3. 1980

Potential Nominees: Jimmy Carter (10,043,000 popular votes); Ted Kennedy (7,381,000).

Nominee: Jimmy Carter, the sitting President.

Jimmy Carter was tough minded and brilliant, but he was seen as weak and unsure of himself in particular, and the country in general.

Result:  Lost to Ronald Reagan, due in some part to Reagan’s illegal conspiracy with Iran to delay the release of American hostages in exchange for weapons sales.

4. 1984

Potential Nominees: Walter Mondale (1,600 delegates); and Gary Hart (1,100).

Nominee: Walter Mondale.

Walter Mondale was Jimmy Carter’s Vice-President and a former Senator. He had zero charisma and little to recommend him for the job of leading the country in the midst of a persistent recession and high inflation. Mondale was way behind in the polls from the beginning, so as a desperate Hail-Mary play he chose Geraldine Ferraro as his running mate. 

Result: Lost to sitting President Ronald Reagan.

5. 1988

Potential Nominees: Michael Dukakis (1,792 delegates); Jesse Jackson (1,023 delegates[!!!]); Al Gore (374).

Nominee: Michael Dukakis.

Michael Dukakis, another man with zero charisma, was the unknown governor of Massachusetts. He appeared way out of his depth on the national stage.

Result: Lost to sitting Vice-President George H.W. Bush.

6. 1992

Potential Nominees: William Jefferson Clinton (3,372 delegates); Jerry Brown (596); Paul Tsongas (289); also in the race, Tom Harkin and Bob Kerrey.

Nominee: Bill Clinton.

Bill Clinton was the unknown governor of a small state. He was a decent public speaker, a former Rhodes Scholar, and a graduate of Yale Law School. He was also an obvious redneck Bubba. He did, though, have charisma.

Result: Won over sitting President George H.W. Bush.

7. 1996

Potential Nominees: Bill Clinton; Lyndon LaRouche (who won no state primaries).

Nominee: Bill Clinton.

Result: Won over Republican nominee, Senator Bob Dole.

8. 2000

Potential Nominees: Al Gore (3,000 delegates); Bill Bradley (522).

Nominee: Al Gore.

Al Gore was the sitting Vice-President. He was seen as a nerd and he was a poor public speaker. Little or no charisma.

Result: Lost to George W. Bush. (This result should have an asterisk.)

9. 2004

Potential Nominees: John Kerry (2,500 delegates); John Edwards (559); Howard Dean (167).

Nominee: John Kerry

John Kerry was a Senator with a good record of service in the Vietnam War. He was also a plodding, pompous public speaker who was completely unlikeable. He was easily attacked for his post-service history as a high-visibility anti-war protestor. He was seen as a dilatant and JFK wannabe. 

  

Result: Lost to George W. Bush.

10. 2008

Potential Nominees: Barak Hussein Obama (2,270 delegates; 17,584,692 popular votes); Hillary Clinton (1,978; 17,857,501).

Nominee: Barak Hussein Obama.

Barak Obama was a first term Senator from Illinois. His national exposure had consisted mostly of delivering the keynote speech at the 2004 Democratic Convention. He was, and remains, a wonderful public speaker with considerable personal charisma. He also was, and remains, a youthful black American with an African name.

Result: Won over Senator John McCain.

11. 2012

Potential Nominees: Barak Obama.

Nominee: Barak Obama.

President Obama had immediately been greeted with a 100% stonewalling agenda by the Republican Party. There was zero cooperation with the President from day one. The obvious strategy was to prevent Obama from accomplishing anything at all and beat him with a stronger candidate in 2012.

Result: Won over Willard Romney (aka, “Mitt”).

12. 2016

Potential Nominees: Hillary Clinton (2,842 delegates); Bernie Sanders (1,865).

Nominee: Hillary Clinton.

After serving as First Lady during her husband’s two terms in the Whitehouse, Hillary Clinton went on to serve as Senator from New York and Secretary of State. She is a fair public speaker. Her charisma is subject to review by individual observers. She came to the election with high negatives and she was subjected to ruthless, vicious campaigning by her opponent and others that was generally based on false information. She is usually viewed as unlikeable and a mediocre campaigner.

Result: Lost to Donald J. Trump. 

It's The Jubilee Year Of The Dada Movement

Dada came into existence in Zurich, Switzerland in 1916. (With a nod to the earlier anti-art movement in New York.) A small number of like-minded young people with artistic temperaments found each other in the safe haven of Zurich and it became the Cabaret Voltaire. They came from numerous countries and they were running away from, and reacting to, the horrors of World War I. You can look around for the details; it’s all very interesting.

They were anti-war and anti-bourgeois. They reacted to the insanity of the world with art that was wild, simple, often nonsensical and generally non-reflective. They were, among many others: Hugo Ball; Emmy Hemmings; Hans Arp; Francis Picabia; and Max Ernst. They were writers, poets and artists.

Here’s an example of a “Dada sentence,” by Max Ernst:

“Thanks to an ancient, closely guarded monastic secret, even the aged can learn to play the piano with no trouble at all.”

Because everything sounds better in German, here is the sentence in the original:

“Nach uraltem, aengstlich behuetetem Klostergeheimnis lernen selbst Greise Muehelos Klavier spielen.” (I can’t get the umlauts together, sorry.)

How perfect is it that in this jubilee year we have elected Donald Trump president! That was a piece of elegant nonsense right there. 

What Donald Trump Knew

November 13, 2016

President DJT saw one thing that most of us are still missing. There is a huge demographic in America that consists of more-or-less rural, kind of uneducated, predominantly white people, out in the stix somewhere, who correctly feel that no one gives a shit about them. Their jobs have been gone for a while; their social safety net has been shrinking; their education was insufficient (and the education being offered to their children IS insufficient); their towns are shrinking; their police have become predatory; their medical care is inadequate; and their politicians mostly ignore them. At the Federal level, both Republican and Democratic politicians have been ignoring them for decades. In many of the towns in states that went with Donald Trump, the biggest businesses are McDonald’s and the thrift store that sells used clothes. If that was your family in that situation, imagine how you would feel. That’s right, be honest. You’d be seeing red, red, red.

Those people are angry, and their anger is righteous. Their anger, predictably, has spread far and wide in the absence of a clear target. That was way in advance of the entry of Donald Trump into the political arena. I don’t want to list some of the groups that they have subjected to undeserved obloquy (they know who they are, and you do too), but the anger of this forgotten demographic has been simmering just below a boil for some time now.

Mr. President Donald J. Trump, most exalted ruler (please don’t fucking sue me), saw this anger and did the math. For a man whose usual manner of speaking marks him for an uneducated Rube himself, he did a wonderful job of analyzing the situation. And then, on a shoe-string, and almost alone, he set himself the task of getting elected president of the United States. And then, poof! Like in a Harry Potter movie, there he was. Unless somebody now figures out that the Russians hacked the voting machines, he will be our president on January 21, 2017.

Of all of the candidates in this election, and there were two dozen, only Trump looked this demographic in the eye and said: no one gives a shit about you except me! I’m listening! I’ll change all of this! I’ll give you your country (i.e., your lives) back! And his math was correct: there were enough of them to give him the win in enough low-electoral-vote states to win the whole prize.

Most of we coastals view the Trump voters as a bunch of overweight Walmart shoppers who spend a lot of time either tweeking or nodding out on Oxy. A bunch of cartoon hillbillies that wouldn’t move out of the Bible-tornado-alley-belt even if they could afford to. In the heat of my own anger at Trump’s election, I myself formulated the term, “The Honey Boo Boo vote.” My head is cooler now, and I apologize for that awful characterization. It is completely unfair to describe them all as low-functioning (that’s the politically correct term!). If they had to get Donald Trump elected president to make their voices heard, well, it worked. We have heard them. What we clearly need to do now is get their lives squared away so that they can rejoin the society that has for so long rejected them so that they will stop voting for any opportunistic propagandist that panders to their base instincts.

The terrible truth is that Trump said a lot of terrible things along the way to endear himself to the voters that he was courting. It wasn’t even the more usual “dog whistle politics.” That kind of statement is when you don’t really say something at all, but people hear it anyway. No, Trump came right out and said things. And many things that he has done were widely publicized, things that would prevent me from even getting some little job somewhere. Nothing seemed to hurt him, though. He spoke directly to his target voters and they heard him, and they desperately wanted to believe him because they desperately needed the help.

It’s worth noting that not all Trump voters are racist xenophobes who hate that laundry list of people that are often referred to as “the other.” Not all of them are uneducated. Although by now it’s obvious that the KKK, various neo-Nazi elements, hysterically anti-homosexual and anti-abortion religious fanatics, the Russians, and yes, the Goddamned FBI, seem to all be firmly in Trump’s corner, many of his voters were of a more reasonable type. I know many of them; many of them were teenage friends of mine. I know them to be otherwise reasonable people of above average intelligence. No, they're not all racist xenophobes, although they do all seem to tolerate that stuff very well. 

Somehow, though, they all had a sense that something had gone terribly wrong with America, and that only Donald Trump could set it right. It may have been a sense of being ignored; or a sense that something had been taken from them; or it may have been the appearance of a world that they no longer recognized. Maybe things are changing too fast for people to keep up with it all. DJT is certainly a reactionary figure; maybe Trump voters just wanted to take a Mulligan on the last fifty or seventy years.

The sad thing is that many Trump voters genuinely believe that he will do what he was talking about, at least to the extent that we could understand the vague sentences that he uttered. They seem to believe that he’s going to help them. “Thank God for President Donald Trump!” they comment on Facebook. Of course he will not help them. We know what his program will be. The Paul Ryans and the Mitch McConnels of the world make no secret of their program for the United States, and Trump has repeatedly expressed the same sentiments. It has been the same program since that prick Reagan was elected. The “drown the Federal Government in a bathtub” program. As Yogi Berra said so eloquently, “it’s déjà vu all over again.” The same old voo-doo economics, and the same old "small government/states' rights" bullshit. It didn’t work for Reagan/H.W. Bush, and it didn’t work for W. Bush, and it’s not going to work now. Watch out for those 401k’s people! Heads-up, world economy! We’ll be lucky if this crowd doesn’t wreck the dollar while they’re at it.

And when it happens, again, the Republicans, the new Trump-Republican-Axis-Of-Evil, will exploit the fact that their voters are very, very easy to fool. They will blame their failures on President Obama, or those ineffectual semi-idiotic Democrats in Congress, or “Libtards,” or the “mainstream media,” or God knows what all. And there is a disturbing probability that this year’s Trump voters are such a credulous bunch that they will believe whatever spew the Republicans and Trump throw at them, and vote for them again.

These Trump voters (I almost said, “these yokels”) will be the gift that keeps on giving. Mark my words. Our only hope is to bring them back into the fold and return them to some kind of secure prosperity so that they calm the fuck down. Is that going to happen? Why no, it’s not! And I’m afraid that many more Americans will be dragged down into Honey-Boo-Boo-Land before this is over.