Tag Archives: America

White Noise by Don DeLillo

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DeLillo’s novel White Noise won the National Book Award for Fiction in 1985. I read it back then and enjoyed it, but also found it somewhat mysterious. I guess I didn’t know what he was trying to say. Having read it again, and enjoyed it even more, I’d now say he’s commenting on the strangeness and artificiality of modern America lives.

It’s the story of a Professor of Hitler Studies at a small liberal arts college, and the professor’s wife and children, and how they all cope or fail to cope with their confusion and fear. The centerpiece of the novel is an “airborne toxic event” that the family has to escape. But the most important aspect of the story isn’t the plot, or even the characters, but DeLillo’s wonderful language. Real people don’t speak like DeLillo’s characters, but it’s still great to see what they have to say. 

Who Is She Anyway? And What’s She Really Like?

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With that devastating speech Hillary Clinton gave this week, lots of news about the scam formerly known as “Trump University”, and the end of the primary season only a few days away , it feels like a bubble has burst. Clinton will be the next President. Trump will spontaneously combust on live TV. Sanders will go back to being the junior Senator from Vermont (and if he keeps doing the Republicans’ job for them, be relegated to the Senate Subcommittee on Livestock, Dairy, Poultry, Marketing and Agriculture Security – that’s a real thing and someone has to go to their hearings).

Meanwhile, I found two more comments I left somewhere. They were both in response to articles about Hillary Clinton. The first had to do with her “likeability”. It was written by David Brooks, a nincompoop who suggested she tell us more about her hobbies: 

The Guardian published one of those “why women aren’t crazy about Hillary” articles this week. The women interviewed didn’t offer much justification. So I looked at the comments section. The level of vitriol directed at her was amazing. The comments were much more negative than the reasons people gave.

It’s reasonable to conclude that opposition to Hillary Clinton is more visceral than rational. The reasons don’t justify the dislike; the dislike generates a search for reasons. Mr. Brooks can’t explain the phenomenon because he’s only looking at her, not the people who dislike her so much.

The second may have been in response to that very article in The Guardian: 

[Some on the left think she’s much too conservative] and yet the Republicans think she’s a closet socialist who will take away their guns and destroy the economy. It’s so tiresome hearing Clinton depicted as a corporate whore, a pawn of Wall Street, when she’s actually a liberal Democrat who will govern to the left of her husband and probably to the left of Obama.

After all, she’s in favor of more Wall Street regulation, higher taxes on the wealthy, better childcare, abortion rights, fewer people in prison, immigration reform and less student debt. I wish she was less inclined to support military action and more even-handed regarding the Palestinians, but there is no reason at all to think she won’t pursue a liberal agenda when she’s President, even if it’s not as liberal as some of us would hope.

All these insults and talk about not “trusting” Clinton is simply a cheap and easy way to attack her without being specific about anything, while wrongly implying that she’s a Republican in sheep’s clothing (the Republicans certainly don’t think so).

Remember, it was “Slick Willie”. Nobody has ever accused Hillary Clinton of being slick.

“Nobody Ever Accused Her of Being Slick” could have been the title of an article in New York Magazine by Rebecca Traister, a self-styled former “Hillary hater”. The actual title is “Hillary vs. Herself”. If you want to understand who Hillary Clinton is, and what kind of President she’ll try to be, please read it.

Now, if she’ll only be as nice to the reporters who follow her around as she is to other people….

Hillary Makes Her Case and Lambastes Trump

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Hillary Clinton delivered a speech in San Diego today during which she explained her national security priorities and showed Trump no mercy. And she did it while being totally “Presidential”. There should be no doubt in anyone’s mind that she is a serious person who is seriously qualified to be President. Here’s a brief summary of her remarks from The New York Times. It’s accurate enough but leaves out her argument that doing things like reducing income inequality and fostering human rights also contribute to our national security. 

You can see the whole speech courtesy of CSPAN. It’s beyond belief that any rational person could watch it and go away thinking Trump would do a better job protecting us than she would. If you asked them, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, as well as Vladimir Putin, would agree.

We Can Happily Look Forward to More of This

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Here’s part of a brilliant report from MSNBC on Trump’s attempt to explain where the money went:

So where does that leave us? Trump said he’d raised $6 million for veterans, but that wasn’t true. He later claimed he never used the $6 million figure, but that wasn’t true. His campaign insisted Trump had contributed $1 million himself, but that wasn’t true. Trump said he “didn’t want to have credit” for the fundraising efforts, but that wasn’t true. He said he and his team were vetting groups they’d never heard of four months after the fact, but that wasn’t true.

And as of yesterday, all of this, the Republican candidate insisted, is the media’s fault. Indeed, Trump thinks journalists should be “ashamed” of themselves for scrutinizing his claims that turned out to be wrong.

Not to put too fine a point on this, but in a normal year, in a normal party, with a normal candidate, this is the sort of controversy that could end a campaign. Legitimate presidential hopefuls can get away with some dissembling and the occasional whopper, but Trump was caught telling obvious falsehoods about support for veterans’ charities.

If this happened to Hillary Clinton, is there any doubt it would be the #1 issue in the presidential race between now and Election Day? That every pundit in America would use this as Exhibit A in their takes on why Americans just can’t trust the Democrat?

Unfortunately, there’s some truth in that last paragraph, although I think there will be less media criticism of Clinton’s “untrustworthiness” as we head toward November. I mean, even if you want to be “tough” on both sides or you have an ax to grind, how do you criticize Clinton for spilling a glass of milk when Trump makes a habit of firebombing dairies?

Reasons to Smile, Clear Sailing Ahead

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Who wants to read depressing crap every day? Not you! Not me! Hell no!

That’s why I’m planning to devote this blog to good news and encouraging thoughts until after the election.

That means I won’t quote from, comment on or link to disheartening articles like these:

“The Dangerous Acceptance of Donald Trump”, by Adam Gopnik in The New Yorker: It’s excellent:

He’s not Hitler, as his wife recently said? Well, of course he isn’t. But then Hitler wasn’t Hitler—until he was. At each step of the way, the shock was tempered by acceptance. It depended on conservatives pretending he wasn’t so bad, compared with the Communists, while at the same time the militant left decided that their real enemies were the moderate leftists, who were really indistinguishable from the Nazis. The radical progressives decided that there was no difference between the democratic left and the totalitarian right and that an explosion of institutions was exactly the most thrilling thing imaginable.

The American Republic stands threatened by the first overtly anti-democratic leader of a large party in its modern history—an authoritarian with no grasp of history, no impulse control, and no apparent barriers on his will to power. The right thing to do, for everyone who believes in liberal democracy, is to gather around and work to defeat him on Election Day. Instead, we seem to be either engaged in parochial feuding or caught by habits of tribal hatred so ingrained that they have become impossible to escape even at moments of maximum danger….

If Trump came to power, there is a decent chance that the American experiment would be over. This is not a hyperbolic prediction; it is not a hysterical prediction; it is simply a candid reading of what history tells us happens in countries with leaders like Trump. Countries don’t really recover from being taken over by unstable authoritarian nationalists of any political bent, left or right—not by PerĂłns or Castros or Putins or Francos or Lenins or fill in the blanks…. If he can rout the Republican Party in a week by having effectively secured the nomination, ask yourself what Trump could do with the American government if he had a mandate.

Or “Trump Has Taught Me to Fear My Fellow Americans”, by Richard Cohen in The Washington Post. Maybe Mr. Cohen hasn’t been paying close attention in recent years, but now he understands:

Donald Trump has taught me to fear my fellow Americans. I don’t mean the occasional yahoo who turns a Trump rally into a hate fest. I mean the ones who do nothing. Who are silent. Who look the other way. If you had told me a year ago that a hateful brat would be the presidential nominee of a major political party, I would have scoffed….

When I see these Trump supporters on television — the commentators …  — I have to wonder where they would draw the line. The answer seems to be: nowhere. They want to win. They want to beat Hillary Clinton, a calling so imperative that sheer morality must give way. Muslims and Mexicans are merely collateral damage in a war that must be fought. What about blacks or Jews? Not yet.

Maybe the talking heads on TV would draw the line at some mild version of fascism, but would the American people do the same?

And “Trump’s Lies and Authoritarianism Are the Same”, by Jonathan Chait in New York Magazine:

Donald Trump is a wildly promiscuous liar. He also has disturbing authoritarian tendencies. Trump’s many critics have seized upon both traits as his two major disqualifications for the presidency, yet both of them frustratingly defy easy quantification. All politicians lie some, and many of them lie a lot, and most presidents also push the limits of their authority in ways that can frighten their opponents. So what is so uniquely dangerous about Trump? Perhaps the answer is that both of these qualities are, in a sense, the same thing. His contempt for objective truth is the rejection of democratic accountability, an implicit demand that his supporters place undying faith in him. Because the only measure of truth he accepts is what he claims at any given moment, the power his supporters vest in him is unlimited….

Truth and reason are weapons of the powerless against the powerful. There is no external doctrine [Trump] can be measured against, not even conservative dogma, which he embraces or discards at will and with no recognition of having done so. Trump’s version of truth is multiple truths, the only consistent element of which is Trump himself is always, by definition, correct. Trump’s mind is so difficult to grapple with because it is an authoritarian epistemology that lies outside the democratic norms that have shaped all of our collective experiences.

Those are just a few examples of the kind of material I’m going to avoid from now on. After all, our political situation isn’t all bad. Some in the press are waking up to the fact that they can’t cover Trump as if he were a normal candidate. Some Sanders supporters are accepting the fact that Hillary Clinton will be the Democratic nominee (and not because the super-delegates are all corrupt). More stories are appearing about Trump’s nefarious past. The businessman’s campaign is running out of money, while Clinton is sharpening her attack and correctly labeling Trump as a fraud and a con man. On top of all that, we’re only a few days away from the end of the primary election season! What’s there to worry about? Life is good!Â