The non-negotiable
Bernie Sanders, the only Democratic Socialist in either the United States Senate or House of Representatives and the most popular politician in the country, is hearing it from the Hillary-bots, who are not slinking away quietly or ashamedly, as the future demands. Sanders' concerted effort to bring economic justice back to the forefront of interest for one of the two corporate national parties has now been extended to include his support for… gasp… an
anti-choice mayoral candidate in Nebraska.
For Hillary’s most loyal supporters, this outrage informs us that the goal posts have been moved considerably-- and in less than a year’s time. The endorsement creates an opportunity to further defame the motives of Sanders, a politician actually so pure in spirit and in public record, and so fundamentally different than the slimy Clintons that her long-time supporters seem to find it impossible to trust him in the slightest. Omaha’s Democratic mayoral candidate, Heath Mello, for whom Sanders and new DNC chair Tom Perez both campaigned this week, has said that he personally opposes abortion, and, as a Nebraska state senator, supported a 20-week ban on aborted pregnancies, but has said he would not work to limit the right of access to abortion as mayor. This is almost precisely the same position on the abortion topic staked out by Virginia’s U.S. Senator Tim Kaine when he was tabbed as Clinton’s running mate last summer. Clinton’s supporters at that time promised us though that Kaine had been painstakingly vetted and could be trusted on abortion rights despite his clearly-expressed anti-abortion religious beliefs and his voting record in limiting access to the procedure.
As Bernie Sanders has staked out a most popular, but politically-uncommon position against economic inequality, an issue Clinton cares not at all about, that clean contrast presents an opportunity for David Brock and the hatchet men on Clinton’s team to exact their knifing skills-- honed on Anita Hill-- upon Mr. Sanders. Because the Vermont Senator is so committed to this one particular issue, they argue, he
must be willing to sacrifice any other socio-political cause that you might possibly care about, whether that be LGBTQ legal protections, gun control initiatives, or abortion rights. Again, that public record of Sanders sets the lie to all such attacks. He championed gay rights decades before Clinton came around on them. Her conversion on gay marriage didn’t take place until the exact same week that it took place on-air for television’s Bill O’Reilly. He strongly opposed the Defense of Marriage Act when Bill Clinton signed it into law in 1996. Bernie’s NRA voting record is less than 5%, and he has never been daunted in his full-throated vocal and voting support for women’s autonomy over their own bodies.
The “Bernie Bro” political invention-- that is, the supposed backlash last year by angry white men
on the left against Secretary Clinton-- is actually diametrically opposed from reality. Sanders’
highest approval ratings, among his sky-high approvals, are with women, millennials, African-Americans, and Hispanics. He fares lowest in surveys with white men.
These attacks from the protected self-interest of others continue to be a by-product of Bernie’s selfless, yet daunting and presumably-exhausting efforts to reform a political party that I have argued repeatedly could be more easily replaced than reformed. The apologists, like
Salon’s Anna March, continue to argue that the Democratic Party platform is a progressive one, forgetting that neither the platforms of the Democratic Party nor the Republican Party actually mean anything. It’s only the votes that are cast, the actions upon those platforms, that matter. Indeed, Sanders
is a divisive force in the party. If he wasn’t, he wouldn’t be worth shit in the role. He’s attacking a cancer. Aggressiveness is required. Egos get bruised. The Clintons and President Obama were apparently
not divisive to the Democratic Party, except so far as they hemorrhaged legislative seats at both the federal and state levels to such an extent that the party has been left an empty shell. But hey, they kept the party together. The party leadership apparatus, anyway. It’s true that that has never been challenged before now.
You still read it all over the comment sections of these news articles.
Clinton got legitimately more votes than Sanders. He only won caucus states. Okay, let’s grant those. Hillary was more popular with Democrats. That wasn’t-- and still isn’t-- the point. The point is that he was more popular with
Americans, and would have performed better in a head-to-head race against Donald Trump, the one-on-one conflict that the Clinton team claimed was too important to be entrusted to a Socialist with unkempt hair. Most Americans sit out the caucuses and primaries-- most of us precisely because they are electoral events sponsored by the two deeply unpopular major political parties. On election day, though, the independents come out, and of course, they looked at Hillary in 2016-- a personality they never particularly liked anyway, and then saw being chosen via coronation by her party-- and they went running in the opposite direction. They were denied a Bernie Revolution so they defaulted to a Trump one.
Then and now, Hillary’s supporters-- the once-proud center-right triangulators who now tar their opponents with that same insult (when they’re not busy calling them sexists, racists, or traitors) accuse Bernie of owning the unmitigated gall to define all by himself what is a progressive and what is not. In their next breath, they declare, as March does directly, that you cannot be a progressive if you are not pro-choice. It's a controvertible sentiment anyway, but one that misrepresents Bernie’s message in any case as he makes the wholehearted and unappreciated effort to go state by state, city by city, town by town, and save the Democratic Party from itself. March argues that this is no time for the Democrats to “(take) us girls for granted,” but who exactly is doing that? It's a faulty premise. African-Americans are taken for granted by the Democrats, if anybody is. They vote for Democrats at a clip of better than 90%. Meanwhile, a majority of white women (53%) voted for
Trump. If they’re being taken for granted by Democrats, the phenomenon didn’t start with Bernie Sanders, and they've already left.
Reproductive rights are non-negotiable, they say, yet they let slide countless other social and economic issues that negatively and disproportionately impact women-- notably, yes, income disparity. Abortion rights absolutely is an economic issue. The only proven cure in the world for poverty is a woman's control over her own body, but do the second wave feminists still standing behind Hillary, who are clearly gassed at this point, even care about these other economic issues? They do seem to care about the pay scale difference between men and women, but not the one between rich and poor. If they did, they wouldn’t cozy up anywhere near the Clintons, who blew up the vital line of demarcation between traditional banks and investment banks while championing NAFTA into law and driving down wages in a “free trade” race to the bottom. They may claim to care about any other women’s rights issue that's out there, but support for abortion access, as this dustup confirms, is still the only one used as a litmus test for the Democratic Party.
Transforming this pending cosmic elegy into a creative psalm of peace
Good news! Bipartisanship is returning to the capital! The national news media can stand down. After almost three long months, the military state (along with the Kushners, we're told) is pulling Donald Trump back into the folds of the Washington political consensus.
Tomahawk missiles were launched against Syria early Friday and Senators McCain and Graham, Schumer and Pelosi, the Clintons, and nearly the entirety of the Fourth Estate approve of Trump's handling of the imminent global threat that is Bashar al Assad, one of the few secularist leaders in the Middle East, a man who’s fighting, with the aid of the Russians, against the Islamic State and other rebel groups backed by Saudi Arabia, but a man who never once made a financial contribution to the Clinton Foundation. Trump, the man we were told was a mental incompetent, is now showing that he’s worthy of respect, don’t you understand, as NBC’s Brian Williams marvels at how
"beautiful" is America’s firepower. Fareed Zakaria declared on CNN over the weekend, regarding the military strikes, “I think Donald Trump became President of the United States” (last night). Bombing translates to maturity in Washington circles. The grown-ups inside the shadow government are back in charge.
Don't lament, though, liberals. Your representatives inside the Beltway are still committed to bringing down the president. Don’t go limp on them now. They just have to switch tactics to continue the crusade. They don’t have the moral authority to criticize the violation of international law that’s he has committed because it’s well-known that their man,
our man, former President Obama, wanted to do the same thing-- that is, target the Syrian government with his attack. The Obama War Department had already dropped a number of bombs on Syrian innocents, but the Democratic president was rejected by the Senate in his bid to target Assad installations. Assad is the target now by stated purpose, and unlike the terrifying missiles seeking blood and death that Trump now deploys, the 26,171 bombs that President Obama dropped on Muslims just during the calendar year of 2016 alone were filled with candy hearts and gum drops.
The agreed-upon justification is that Assad gassed his own people-- you know, those same people we now care deeply enough to defend militarily but that can’t be accepted within our borders as refugees. (The old “bomb-and-ban” from the post-9-11 playbook.) This alleged crime by Assad came less than two months after Obama's National Security Advisor Susan Rice boasted to National Public Radio that the U.S. had succeeded in getting the Syrian leader to surrender his stockpile of chemical weapons. I guess the investigation is complete as of Friday.
The Democrats have been played for fools again as Trump executes his politically-motivated hit upon the Syrian government and the host of innocents. They can’t criticize the attack because their militaristic posturing since 2001-- including Hillary Clinton’s repeated criticisms of Obama for failing to target Assad-- preclude it, yet Trump only stands to gain in the polls at home by starting a war. That one never fails to fly here. As Trump targets Vladimir Putin’s top ally in the Middle East, the bombing also does damage to the Democrats’ claim that Trump is Putin’s puppet. Because the Democrats can’t shake themselves of their “Putin controls the White House” narrative, they’re left to grasping at conspiracies with new angles, that Trump
warned Russia about the Syrian strike before it was carried out. Ooh. I guess they don’t consider that “heads-up” an act of diplomacy, though Russia is-- applicably noted in this context-- not a country we’ve declared war against.
Especially confusing in these topsy-turvy political times is how Democrats transformed themselves in just one day last week from proponents of the argument that Trump is a dangerous sociopath to getting behind the greatest example to date of the supposed mad man’s violent aggression. All along the campaign trail, the man
said he would bomb the hell of 'em, and that he is doing. He
said he would target
the families of terrorists, and I’ll be damned if he didn’t do that exactly with his targeted strikes in Yemen back in February. And now he’s the Commander-in-Chief for
all of the people. Presidential.
He unleashed the missiles and unzipped the missile from his pants.
Democrats and Republicans continue to have everything in common in respect to military and foreign policy. Neither party has a plan for peace other than to continue the bombing and killing of innocents. They murder to posture. It took Trump fewer than 100 days to break his campaign promise and rally behind the U.S. tradition of forcing "regime change" upon other sovereign nations, less than three months to involve us in another war that does not impact our national security in the slightest, except as it serves to create more terrorists. This particular attack is historically notable in that it commenced exactly 50 years and three days after Martin Luther King delivered
his speech at Riverside Church and his historic declaration that the United States “was the greatest purveyor of violence in the world.”
Chuck Berry's funeral
Fateful circumstances-- that is, a Cardinals game and a Chris Rock concert-- led me to St. Louis this past weekend and to the public viewing tribute to Chuck Berry as he lied in state at the Pageant Theater on Sunday. The Father of Rock and Roll died on March 18th, and his family opened up the doors of this theater to the general public for a viewing of the body five hours before the private funeral service on Sunday afternoon.
It was an interesting mix of people in line around my brother and me. It seemed to be largely local people. We were the outliers as visitors from out of town and out of state. Directly behind us in the line, which wrapped about two city blocks early in the morning, were the proprietors of the city’s most iconic music store, Vintage Vinyl, which is located down the street from the Pageant and directly across from Berry's star on the city's Walk of Fame and a statute of Berry. Next to them happened to be the mother of a college football coach that just signed on as a graduate assistant with my alma mater, Iowa State University, for the 2017 season. You find out that it's a small world when you talk to people.
A team of limousines were lined up on a closed off block of Delmar Boulevard even six hours before the funeral.
Inside the venue, Berry was laid out in a casket just below the theater’s stage. He was to be buried in his signature Captain’s hat and with his red Gibson ES-335 guitar. I must say that the body looked magnificent. The casket was flanked on either side by a pair of well-dressed guards in white gloves.
Imposing is the wrong word for their appearance,
impressive is the right one. We were encouraged to sign a guest book, which we did, and a program was handed out. During our time passing by the body, “Maybellene” played overhead. That was Berry's first hit record in 1955. Near the casket, a large floral arrangement in the shape of an upright guitar was a gift from the Rolling Stones.
The first 300 members of the public in an auxiliary line at 11 am were given entry passes for the private service, but we were destined to be on the road by that time. Had we waited, we would have easily made the cut. Among the luminaries that would be on hand for that event were the frequent Berry collaborator Johnny Rivers, KISS’s Gene Simmons, and TV’s Paul Shaffer.
Chuck Berry was committed to the earth late in the day on Sunday. He already belonged to the ages.
Don Rickles upon his death
I saw Don Rickles perform on stage twice. After a show at the casino in Osceola, he stood atop a balcony inside the hotel and blessed all of us below as if he was the Pope. He anointed us with bottled water and called us dummies. He was so offensive that he wasn't offensive at all. Not only was he the funniest comic, in my book, but I would argue that he may have been the most important because of the purity of his style and what he represented about the power of laughter to disarm every human exchange. For decades, no performer could follow Don on stage. He punctured everything that came close to him. Though he was 90 years old, he had more to give us, and that adds to the tragedy of his death. He walked the highest tightrope of all the comics with what Bob Newhart called "that act of his," but Don made the balance look easy because he did it so well for so long. He's gone and we don't have another one.
The more-or-less fast-approaching defeat of Trumpism
Jonathan Chait and Ed Kilgore at New York Magazine are still all in for the corporate wing of the Democratic Party. From the cold, dead hands of the agents of the party's defeat, I guess.
Nobody on the Eastern Seaboard was a bigger cheerleader for Hillary Clinton last year than was Chait. He
opposed Bernie Sanders' call for a $15 federal minimum wage, and
called Sanders' campaign against free trade "more ignorant than Donald Trump's." My favorite among his criticisms of Sanders that were, in retrospect, an unintentional indictment of the
Clinton campaign instead is that last year's Democrats
"risk losing the presidency" by nominating a candidate who has been "shelter(ed).. from necessary internal criticism."
For his part, Kilgore, during that period of the campaign just before WikiLeaks exposed to voters the anti-Sanders machinations inside the DNC,
argued that Clinton should "offer Team Sanders the fool's gold of platform concessions and maybe the promise of a look at primary laws and procedure" rather than
actual concessions and, it would seem then, the basic courtesy of respect and consideration. Kilgore also
opined last May, more than half a year ahead of the Rust Belt Revolt, that "the actual working-class voters Sanders claims to represent view Clinton as the devil isn't borne out by the numbers."
So when these two cats lean in to tell you that Donald Trump's political death is imminent, grab a pen and a college-ruled, spiral-bound notepad and form a Lotus-position at their feet because they're most certainly hooked to something big.
Chait's editor has chosen for
his latest cheer routine the headline "Republicans Are Going to Wish Hillary Clinton Won." This is New York Magazine politics at its finest. Give the people the reality they
want. Reinforce their most strongly-held beliefs about the purity of their own motives and the wisdom of the electoral choices that they make. Though there are some odd comic elements to the article, Chait seems legitimately convinced that Republican Party is (again) on the verge of collapse. In fact, I could have put that phrase "verge of collapse" in quotes. He writes that exactly-- even as he then follows that immediately with an acknowledgement that the nation's dominant party is about to add a Supreme Court justice, "a host of federal judges, and a wide array of deregulation."
Kilgore's
April 5th offering is titled "Trump will Help Dems Solve Their 'Midterm Falloff' Problem." He's already predicting big gains for the Dems in the 2018 mid-terms, something that-- if it happens as he suggests-- would be a historical rarity indeed as Democratic turnout is typically horrendous in off-presidential years.
Where can all of this optimism be coming from unless they're still unmoored from reality? Few other details are offered by either man. Where are the
candidates of opposition? What will they look like? What will their message be? They've got
a live one out in Montana, but they're ignoring him. There's no evidence that anything has changed at all in the mindset of the leadership of this party that is now relegated to minor status-- controlling neither the White House, nor the Senate, nor the Congress. Only 16 of 50 state governors are Democrats. The party was obliterated at the local level during the Obama presidency, experiencing a net loss of 1,000 seats in state legislatures during the last eight years.
Have they changed their message? Are they reaching out to the disaffected working-class voters in Rust Belt states that handed Clinton her defeat and helped send an overwhelming majority of Republicans to Washington for 2017? You tell me. Do you hear any of them, or their surrogates, talking about jobs? About trade? About a living wage? We might claim different news sources, but all
I hear from them is xenophobic shit about Russia. Their only apparent strategy for combating what Chait refers to as Trump's "power of ethnonationalism" is a little ethnonationalism of their own. If only they aped his rhetoric of economic populism instead.
What we're getting instead from Chait and Kilgore, and from Democrats in general, is a doubling-down on a strategy that has already face-planted-- a rigid focus on their hopeful perceptions of a "Trump hate" existing among the populace, and still refusing to develop a populist message of their own despite the gaping vacuum Trump has created for a version of the real thing. Trump has indeed exuded an extraordinary incompetence during his first two-and-a-half months on the job, but the Democrats are still gifting him with the same antidote for his defeat.
The ungrateful refugee
What a writer
this woman is-- Dina Nayeri. I'm going to be quoting from this article for the foreseeable future.
"(I)sn’t glorifying the refugees who thrive according to western standards just another way to endorse this same gratitude politics? Isn’t it akin to holding up the most acquiescent as examples of what a refugee should be, instead of offering each person the same options that are granted to the native-born citizen? Is the life of the happy mediocrity a privilege reserved for those who never stray from home?
..."Despite a lifetime spent striving to fulfill my own potential, of trying to prove that the west is better for having known me, I cannot accept this way of thinking, this separation of the worthy exile from the unworthy. Civilised people don’t ask for resumes when answering calls from the edge of a grave. It shouldn’t matter what I did after I cleaned myself off and threw away the last of my asylum-seeking clothes. My accomplishments should belong only to me. There should be no question of earning my place, of showing that I was a good bet. My family and I were once humans in danger, and we knocked on the doors of every embassy we came across: the UK, America, Australia, Italy. America answered and so, decades later, I still feel a need to bow down to airport immigration officers simply for saying 'Welcome home.' But what America did was a basic human obligation. It is the obligation of every person born in a safer room to open the door when someone in danger knocks. It is your duty to answer us, even if we don’t give you sugary success stories.
..."The refugee has to be less capable than the native, needier; he must stay in his place. That’s the only way gratitude will be accepted. Once he escapes control, he confirms his identity as the devil. All day I wondered, has this been true in my own experience? If so, then why all the reverence for the refugees who succeed against the odds, the heartwarming success stories? And that’s precisely it – one can go around in this circle forever, because it contains no internal logic. You’re not enough until you’re too much. You’re lazy until you’re a greedy interloper.
..."A person’s life is never a bad investment, and so there are no creditors at the door, no debt to repay."
The Father of Rock-n-Roll
A week from tomorrow, Chuck Berry will be laid to rest. He was a musical icon, a St. Louis icon, and an American icon. Props to Robert Zemeckis' 1985 film
Back to the Future for perpetuating the reality that Berry invented rock and roll. Thanks in part to that popular Michael J. Fox vehicle, I hope that it was generally understood by the public, upon Berry's death week before last, that Berry was, indeed, the man most responsible for what rock and roll would eventually become and how we would come to understand it, even as we acknowledge that each of these popular art forms are very fluid in their origination story and possess many parents. If not its inventor, however, Berry was certainly the music's designer and engineer.
Berry's guitar licks gave the genre its power and its electricity. They are on display in such timeless recordings from the mid-1950's to early '60s as "Johnny B. Goode," "No Particular Place to Go," "Maybellene," "Roll Over Beethoven," "School Days," and "You Never Can Tell," and it has been cited as
the predominant influence on the work of everybody after that is considered to be under the rock and roll umbrella. He also sold the music hard, providing the swagger that became the music's foremost characteristic, and it was a signature of his art as well up until the end. He is "the Father of Rock-n-Roll." In 1977, Berry's recording of "Johnny B. Goode" was chosen for inclusion on the Voyager Golden Record, a collection of vinyl grooves snuggled firmly aboard the Voyager 1 probe and launched into space with the intent of communicating to extraterrestrials the story of humans on planet Earth.
Also "time capsuled" on the Voyager are interpretations of the work of Mozart, Beethoven, and Stravinsky, and a recording by at least one other American, the gospel blues singer Blind Willie Johnson. During a
Saturday Night Live comedy sketch in 1978, a character portrayed by Steve Martin psychically intuited that the aliens had responded to the gift by returning a four-word message "Send more Chuck Berry." According to prominent and respected internet sources, the Voyager Golden Record passed the orbit of Pluto in 1990, and left the solar system in 2004. In 2012, the probe was reported by NASA to be 17.9 billion km from the sun, and in 2013-- still capable of sending back data transmissions-- it had left the heliosheath and entered interstellar space. In only about 40,000 years, Voyager 1 will come within about 1.8 light-years of the star Gliese 445 in the constellation Camelopardalis. That's a long bus ride from The Ville neighborhood in North St. Louis, where Berry was born in 1926. Due to housing covenants and other legal restrictions, African-Americans in St. Louis were-- and have been-- concentrated in this 0.42 square-mile area for decades, though its borders could not contain the talent and the drive within. Other native sons and daughters of The Ville include Arthur Ashe, Grace Bumbry, Dick Gregory, Sonny Liston, and Josephine Baker.
Until 2014, Chuck Berry still performed one Tuesday night each month in the Duck Room of the Blueberry Hill club on Delmar Boulevard in St. Louis. I will be in St. Louis on Sunday. His funeral will be a private event that day for friends and family, but the Berrys have scheduled a public viewing for us at the Pageant theater on Delmar from 8 am to noon. Berry also recently completed a record of new music that will be released posthumously.
