Foreboding developments
Tonight’s televised debate is an illegitimacy. Jill Stein or Gary Johnson will not be in attendance. If they attempt to enter the theater at New York’s Hofstra University, they will likely be arrested, as Stein was four years ago under similar circumstances. According to USA Today, more than three-quarters of the American people say they want to see Stein and Johnson share the stage with Clinton and Trump. More than 85% say that neither Clinton nor Trump “share their values.” Officially, the Green Party and Libertarian Party presidential candidates are excluded because of the poll numbers, but there are a couple poll results for you, motherfucker.
There is absolutely no legitimate reason for excluding them. No laws, no regulations, no Constitutional prohibitions. In 1988, the League of Women Voters warned that the new Democrat/Republican debate commission would "perpetrate a fraud on the American voter," and they refused to be "an accessory to the hoodwinking of the American public." Contrary to what you’ve been told, Clinton and Trump will not be having their first meeting tonight in a
public forum. This is a
private, corporation-financed forum. Make a note tonight of the event’s sponsors. Each of the contributing Fortune 500 companies will get special recognition. They are the benefactors of the modern political system. People accept this as ritual because it’s been deeply ingrained in us that we must do our best with whatever amount of democracy we’ve been allowed to have. We’re the inmates in line for our medication in
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. But those of us in the Green Party are the Indian.
I refuse to give in and watch a hollow, mind-numbing spectacle that’s poisoning the soul of America. So I’ll be watching football.
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On Saturday night, I went to see Steve Martin and Marty Short touring in their two-man show at Hancher Auditorium in Iowa City, and that’s a great sentence to be able to write. The two showmen are each so tremendously talented that they were on for two hours and never even tapped into Martin’s magic act, other than for a presentation by video of the Great Flydini on Carson's
Tonight Show. It was one laugh line after another all through the evening, but this one sticks out. Martin Short: “I like my champagne the way I like my women-- Compliments of Hancher Auditorium.”
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This is a true story. I have a subscription to Sports Illustrated. Ok, there’s more, but I need to first explain that part. A friend’s daughter was selling magazines last summer so I signed up for a year of SI to peruse during, this, its waning days. Because I did the clearinghouse that courtesy, I get additional magazines each month that I didn’t even subscribe to-- namely, Men’s Health and ESPN the Magazine. The October issue of the latter came to me on Friday. Of course, I never asked for it, and also didn’t want it. It was advertised as their “Chicago Cubs” issue, the first one-sports-team-oriented of any sports magazine I can recall. Yuck. Another failure in micro-marketing by Madison Avenue, a product that proceeded to breed greater resentment in me for the product than I already had. Along those same lines-- in eleven months of SI subscription, I’ve received five issues of the weekly mag that have Cubs players on the cover, and three more with Iowa Hawkeyes football or basketball players. (You’d think one of those teams would have a championship by this time with all of that spilled ink.) It’s just what this Cardinals fan that’s a graduate of Iowa
State University wants to get in the mail. These days, I pray to open up the mailbox after work and only find credit card bills.
Anyway, I get my new Cubs issue, containing six separate features on the team. A general lead story on the season to date, one on Joe Maddon, then Theo Epstein, a couple others I forget, and of course, one featuring a photo shoot with members of their long-suffering fan base, who in ESPN the Mag, I noticed, look much more culturally-diverse than the actual thing. I walk back out the entryway of our building to wait for my ride to dinner, and I haven’t gone two steps when I see
what about 10 yards away on the sidewalk? Yes, a black cat... not unlike the one that sashayed past Ron Santo in the on-deck circle that fateful summer of 1969.
I fiddle with my lunch container, my book of the moment, my mail, and my new cell phone, and I maneuver to get the phone in place to snap a photo for the interwebs of my magazine posing with this ominous cat. The thing doesn’t sprint off, but it is in its evolutionary hyper-alert state, and it walks only a couple feet away into a group of bushes in front of the property. I try to get as close to where I saw it go without causing it to let out a fitful hiss or even leap at me. Soon I’m pushing the leaves away on the bush with my book, and I’m peering under the coiled garden hose, which rests between the bushes and the building. Nothing. There’s no photo happening. The cat has disappeared into thin air.
So what does
that mean?
The debasement of Elizabeth Warren
Autumn is lovely. It’s the beautiful season of falling leaves, important baseball games, and-- because it’s an even-numbered year, pandering Democrats. In 2016, the latter translates into the pushing of Elizabeth Warren into the national spotlight to make rousing anti-Wall Street speeches that carry no weight of action behind them whatsoever, but orchestrated to help drive progressives to the polls. This is that magical time of year when it's important to remind voters just exactly what you pretend to stand for.
Warren says she wants Wells Fargo’s CEO, John Stumpf, to resign from his job. She wants criminal penalties sought against the Wells Fargo agents and executives that created phony accounts to enrich the company's stock portfolios, and she wants golden parachutes returned to corporate coffers. But also, she wants Hillary Clinton to be president. And guess what? If you want the first part, you can’t have the last. Wells Fargo and its executives have given hundreds of thousands of dollars to Secretary Clinton and the Clinton Foundation. In 2011, Bill Clinton received $200,000 alone for giving a solitary speech to Wells Fargo executives and employees. They bought the Clintons. They have to share them with some other large banks, but they own them.
They also own President Obama, these “now much too much bigger to fail” banks.
But Obama wanted to do more after the economic collapse, you plead.
What could he do in the face of a do-nothing Congress? Well, Congress has shit to do with it. The Department of Justice, under the executive branch, has 100% authority to decide which criminal investigations to pursue, and which punishments to hunt in court. When Wall Street arsonists torched the housing and lending markets, one man and one man alone was responsible for letting the perps walk away scot-free-- Barack Obama.
Hillary Clinton stands in now as even more compromised than her predecessor.
This you may label as conjecture, but Hillary Clinton
will be president less than four months from now, and then we will find out exactly how illegitimate this anti-Wall Street and anti-corruption campaign message really is. We will still be well within the statute of limitations to pursue criminal penalties against, not only the low-level criminals at Wells Fargo, but the high-level ones that created and fostered the atmosphere of fraud that we now read about daily in media reports. In fact, nothing stands in the way
right now. DOJ lawyers can step up any time they choose to pursue what Warren has been calling for on her pro-Hillary stump. Still waiting.
As for Senator Warren, she serves an invaluable role for the Democratic Party, a deeply cynical one for the voting public. She epitomizes what the party
claims to believe in and to be working towards. She personifies the path by which Democratic voters internalize that they’re the good guys, and that they have a collective moral compass that Republicans lack, even when there is no difference at all in deed. She feeds an illusion. I don’t doubt her sincerity, but nearly every one of her actions is being manipulated to a cross-purpose. She serves that powerful make-believe progressive movement that works to snuff out the
real one each new electoral season.
We were told by party hacks that she was a finalist to be Hillary’s vice presidential choice, when in reality, her name was floated only to assuage angry (and possibly litigious) Bernie Sanders voters. The actual pick for VP then was very purposefully an
anti-Warren selection. Because
real action must always serve the center-right coalition. This week, with Warren railing against bank corruption during Senate hearings, we have delivered to us specifically-timed think pieces written by Clinton loyalists opining that Warren would be “the second most important person” to the president inside a Clinton White House. There’s no real-world evidence to support this contention whatsoever-- unless we’re referring to the symbolic importance to the party explained above. Warren will be just as short of actual power within a Clinton administration as she is in the Obama one, a solitary, crying voice in the wilderness.
I'm sure that all left-wingers, regardless of party, would agree that the fundamental question at the very heart of Warren’s public service is “are you with
her, or are you with Wall Street and the banks?” This question must ultimately be posed of both her colleagues and her constituents. And we already know who Clinton is with. She took millions upon millions from the group of them to rise to where she is today. There
is no Candidate Clinton without Wells Fargo, without Citigroup, without Goldman Sachs. Elizabeth Warren’s role in the rigged game is to make
you feel better about yourself, superior to the lumbering herd of Trump voters.
Kaepernicks on campus
Slowly but confidently, Colin Kaepernick's NFL colleagues are joining him in his protest of the National Anthem over the national indifference to racism and institutional violence, but sadly, we haven't witnessed the same electrifying visual images we've seen on NFL sidelines performed by pigskin participants at the collegiate level. Yes, there've been a few, but they've been far between and mostly away from the campuses of the high-profile, Division I institutions.
It illustrates how little power these athletes perceive themselves as having upon the
"plantation" that is higher-education athletics in the United States. I don't think they're wrong in their bleak assessment of the situation. Individually, they have almost no power. Without the major financial investments that many NFL players have behind them, they are as expendable as their physical bodies so routinely reveal them to be. Even college basketball players, also exploited, are probably better able to exert power, the great ones in particular, simply due to the fact that their sport allows one or two players to dominate a contest.
The funny truth of it is, though, that,
as a group, the athletes have magnificent social and economic power. We saw this at the University of Missouri last fall when members of the Southeast Conference football team, en mass, refused to suit up until the university president had stepped down because of his insensitivity and inaction in the face of racial intolerance on campus. They were successful in their protest within a week, the president was history, and a highly-lucrative contest between the school and Brigham Young University, which had been threatened, went on as originally scheduled on a brisk November Saturday.
The sad irony of all of it is that the college environment is exactly the right one for protest, for independent thought, and for self-expression. It just doesn't work out that way. In an ongoing absurdity incapable of inviting immediate comparison, University of Iowa head football coach Kirk Ferentz bans the young adults on his team from using Twitter. Preventing college students from expressing themselves in public is a little like keeping elementary school students from participating in extracurricular activities like sports, music, and dance. It's a big reason they're
supposed to be there.
As we saw in Columbia, Missouri a year ago, though, there's a danger posed to the traditional economic structure of an educational institution, and perhaps even to a state, if the students learn to express themselves beyond the simple ability to parrot a humble gratitude for the "rare opportunity" they've supposedly been gifted. To adapt a Kurt Vonnegut idea about education to the collegiate sporting field: If they were no longer using their diplomas as tickets to establishments of the ruling class, they would no longer be obligated to pretend that America is something that it obviously isn't.
The man who built it
The gentleman who wrote
Shoeless Joe died on Friday. W.P. Kinsella was 81. He was from Canada, educated at the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop, and his fiction novels and short stories-- that I was familiar with, anyway-- were all about baseball or they were dramatic tales set in Native American communities in Canada. I met him at a book signing in West Des Moines when I was in college, and he signed my copy of the short story collection that included the short upon which
Shoeless Joe was based,
Shoeless Joe Jackson Comes to Iowa. I asked him to inscribe it "Go the Distance," a reference to the book and the extraordinary film that came later,
Field of Dreams, and he agreed. The next two people in line followed my lead and asked him to inscribe the same. I was so proud.
Bill Kinsella loved the movie Phil Alden Robinson made based on his work. We all do. It's the most important piece of pop culture in our state's history, and I think plays just as well away from home. I grew up on a farm where we had a baseball field built into our backyard too. My father didn't carve out a diamond infield or anything like that, but there was a fenced backstop and the edge of the cornfield marked a home run. Nearly one hundred Moellers gathered for a family reunion at our farm in the summer of 1992, and one of the second cousins from Southern California remarked to her grandmother, "This is just like the Field of Dreams." The movie was only three years old at that time. The grandmother, now 102, appeared by video at this summer's family reunion near Yellowstone National Park, and recalled the anecdote.
My wife and I were gathered with family on Friday, and the topic of
Field of Dreams came up, even though we were all unaware of Kinsella's passing. I told my wife, who immigrated from Kenya eight years, you
have to see this movie. There are people in this world that associate it with your husband.
Upon his death, I'm grateful for what Kinsella did for Iowa, for my circle of friends and family, and also, of course, the new life and the new legacy that he gave the Eight-- Weaver, Cicotte, Risberg, Felsch, Gandil, Williams, McMullin, and Jackson.
9-11 at 15
2016 has seen the complete and utter collapse of the traditional news media in this country, along with much of our sanity. Bizarrely, I think we have Donald Trump, largely, to thank for this, although whistle blowing leakers of courage held a detonator, as did lying politicians who’ve given all of us so much for which to be cynical. Trump’s campaign has been a direct repudiation of the establishment media, exposing it as fraudulent even to those in the nation’s hinterlands that don’t spend their evenings concerning themselves with whether or not Matt Lauer deserves to be revered.
In the cultural arena, Trump's ultimate legacy will be having welcomed white supremacist and nativist groups back into the open, and I, for one, consider that a positive thing. Where there is light, there is no secrecy. It wasn't Trump's noble ambition. His motive was greed. But now we see who you all are, and holy shit, there are
a lot of you.
Hiding behind the flag and mindless patriotism isn't playing anymore, though, as reactionaries watch the activists take to the streets, impervious to danger. The Have Nots have had it. Can you remember a more bizarre September 11th than the one we experienced on Sunday? This one was most notable for the protests against police brutality that took place on professional football fields. The patriotism police must be altogether flummoxed. Their attempts to shame and discredit the agents of social progress have lost all strength. How much authority do you have to scold when your political standard-bearer is running against the Iraq War you defended, against the Washington neo-con establishment that played you for suckers? You're admitting to the world that you were wrong (and meanwhile, here are the Dixie Chicks, still touring). What the hell just happened? Nobody feels like organizing a red, white, and blue parade. The reactionary right can’t attack the left for its purported lack of patriotism when the best presidential candidate they can come up calls Bush the Decider a loser and says that prisoners of war are actually not heroes. It's a dissociative identity disorder. If you couldn't still work out your demons by going onto social media and calling an NFL quarterback "a burrhead asshole," as one of my friend's friends did, you'd have to order up a butterfly net for yourself.
The news media doesn’t know how to handle any of the chaos. The desk anchors didn't pay to get those head shots done only to get so much abuse lumped onto them. They’re getting attacked on all sides-- alternately accused of permitting the lunatic Trump to “mainstream” xenophobia, and then of ignoring the colorful stories behind Hillary Clinton’s compromised candidacy. (Both are true accusations, incidentally.) No doubt American news reporters long for the day when they-- or more accurately, their predecessors-- held the respect of the citizenry, those days when a shiny smile could flaunt his or her journalistic celebrity proudly at dinner parties in Washington and Manhattan. Now, nobody gives a shit. Conservatives hate one media conglomerate, liberals another, and the audience for each has been pared down to a size that essentially qualifies as a cult. Few Americans can name more than one or two members of the United States Supreme Court, but fewer still could tell you which empty suits are currently hosting the CBS, NBC, or ABC evening news. What does their celebrity even mean for them anymore? They’re careerists in a business that gives off such a stink, they might as well be congressional representatives. Directly related, the Trump phenomenon is not a hard one to explain. He’s
deeply unpopular with an enormous cross-section of the American population, but the campaign is built upon his direct confrontation with the nation’s news media, and that institution is even more unpopular than he is.
Today's journos are in a knot of their own tying, helpless to defend themselves against charges that they are protecting Hillary Clinton on behalf of the nation’s ruling Washington/Wall Street cabal. (She has been successfully vetted already, but he's still hustling for the oligarchy's endorsement.) There is a clear video made public this week of a frighteningly-frail Clinton wobbling to the sidewalk in broad daylight in midtown Manhattan, nearly biffing it chin-first into the side door of a limousine van, and-- this is an important element-- the campaign
refuses to release the candidate's medical records to the public, yet reporters are accused of owning a pro-Trump bias if they publish a word about any of it. Worse, and more bizarre than almost anything previously imagine, these reporters are labeled sexist.
It's a silly season to make us forget the previous one, and the one before that. As the War Without End reaches the age that it qualifies for a school driver permit, we see the modern empire in a state of astonishing collapse. The destruction of the Twin Towers, as if in a perfect metaphor, wound up doing a number and a half upon our national psyche. It's exceedingly difficult at this point to claim victory over the terrorists. The USA is a nation that owns a proverbial hammer, a hammer that it enjoys using at any time and at any location upon the globe. But it is hard as hell to exact a violent revenge upon a group of
successful suicide bombers. So we were forced to go another way with it. At a concentration camp in Cuba, we locked up and tortured hundreds of people that we thought sort of
looked like the suicide bombers. The Bush/Cheney Energy Corporation took us into a bloodbath in Iraq under a total fiction. The Bush and Obama administrations both made firm allies of repressive governments like Saudi Arabia's, and apartheid ones like Israel's, whose leaders gave generous contributions to the Clinton Foundation and, together, we executed the invasions of nations whose leaders didn’t think ahead to give contributions to the Clinton Foundation-- Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, Qaddafi’s Libya, and al-Assad’s Syria.
We see the hijackers' ghosts everywhere, suspecting the terrorists are probably right next door. It’s hard for me, personally, to imagine how the United States could have two better neighbors than the ones it has. Canada is like the better version of ourselves that we like to believe we see in the mirror each day, and Mexico, a culturally rich land with a shockingly stable government considering it breathes next door to a country with an insane policy on drugs and an insatiable habit for them. Yet, according to records printed by the Intercept, we spent $1.1 billion on a “virtual fence” of censors along the Mexican border that turned out to be a technological failure. We threw another $230 million at a failed plan to install radiation detectors at our airports. The lost, priceless treasure of our military men and women in immoral Middle Eastern wars is a profanity-- and not to mention, all for naught. The Taliban holds more territory now than at any point since 2001. According to polls, 90% of young people in Iraq consider the United States to be their “enemy.” Retired U.S. General David Petraeus has recently suggested arming our
original enemy in the War on Terror, al Qaeda, in a fight against ISIS. And you wonder why many Americans don’t listen when dicks like him proclaim Donald Trump to be a danger. He
is one, but the point goes missing. They are men and women of power operating without moral authority in a nation that also does not possess it.
So the Fourth Estate is gone, unless you have strength enough to reach under its giant, rotting corpse and find the still-beating heart of its tiny children that are the Intercept and Anonymous. Most will never do that, and so they're on their own to do the sorting of what's actually true and what's a press release. On August 1st, President Obama announced his latest war, a new bombing campaign against ISIS in Libya-- and the news media didn’t even notice. That was a day Trump was publicly feuding with a Gold Star father. I'm not sure if he won or lost. The pundits are still debating.
The silence of the Great White Father
The censored reaction of President Obama, as well as Hillary Clinton, to the issue of the Dakota Access Pipeline is an unconscionable act. Approximately 5,000 members of the Standing Rock Sioux and other Native American tribes have been protesting in strength, staring down guns and attack dogs, in order to protect their water and their ancestral land from an oil company called Energy Transfer Partners that's been empowered to destroy by the United States government. What would the uproar be if this oil firm wanted to pipe through Arlington National?
The same week the president goes to Asia to tell audiences there the people who elected him at home are “lazy” on environmental issues, he continues a stone-cold silence over the pipeline and the fate of Native lands. To Asian business leaders, he vowed to continue pushing for the planet-mugging trade deal, the Trans-Pacific Partnership. A provision in the deal would allow foreign companies to skirt U.S. environmental laws and regulations. Late-term president same as the early-term president.
Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein spent part of her week getting arrested for trespassing in an act of civil disobedience protesting alongside Sioux protestors in North Dakota.
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This is
the latest must-read of the election season-- Greenwald explains the complete surrendering of responsibility on the part of the American mainstream media in appropriately critiquing the Hillary Clinton campaign. Corporate news agencies believe that any criticism of Clinton is a boost to the repugnant Donald Trump campaign. I indict Huffington Post and MSNBC, in particular, as well as a so-called “alternative” media source, Mother Jones (which doesn’t deserve to carry that historically-important name). In each case, and you can find all of this online, it's a ceaseless defense of all-things Clinton that is almost humorous. The unfiltered parroting of the campaign's talking points is most annoying, but the McCarthyite attacks on her opponents, channeling the same anti-Russian sentiment of a half-century ago, get my vote as the ugliest.
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How to explain the fact that hundreds of NFL players, alternately African-American
and white, have
NOT joined Colin Kaepernick in his silent protest of the nation’s anthem?
