Joe Biden & Kamala Harris Have Won

President-Elect Joe Biden Jr.
& Vice President-Elect Kamala Harris

This has been a nightmarish year on so many levels, from the deadly Covid-19 pandemic, to the Ahmed Arbery, George Floyd, and Breonna Taylor murders, as well as many others, at the hands of police and extrajudicial forces, to the current economic crisis (the second major one in less than two decades, yet again under an inept Republican administration) and ballooning wealth and resource inequality, to the devastating effects of climate change (hurricanes and tropical storms, wildfires, etc.), and on and on, but if I can identify one possible ray of light, troubled though it may be, it would be the Joe Biden's and Kamala Harris's historical and groundbreaking defeat of Donald Trump and Mike Pence in the recent presidential election. Four years of malign incompetence, brazen criminality, incoherent domestic and external policies all keyed to and driven by the narcissistically warped vision thankfully met with a major NO MORE from US voters, and now Biden and Harris are the President-Elect and Vice President-Elect of the US, and will, attempted coups by Trump and the GOP notwithstanding, assume office on January 20, 2021.

They defeated Trump despite the Covid-19 pandemic (or, more likely, as a result of his catastrophically horrendous response to it), which meant markedly reduced in person campaigning and canvassing by Democrats; evident and relentless voter suppression across the US; threats of continued Russian interference; Trump's seeming attempts to destroy the United States Post Office by appointing as Postmaster General his supporter Louis DeJoy, who gutted branches all over the US by removing sorting machines and reducing hours; and a steady drumbeat of disinformation, misinformation, and anti-voting rhetoric from the President, his supporters, various other agents of disruption, and at times the legacy media, which amplified--rather than countering--Trump's message of a "rigged election" and "voter fraud." (We very well may look back and find that in fact he was, as usual, projecting about his own attempts to steal the election this year.)

In the end, Biden and Harris received more than 80+ million total votes, the most ever, 7 million more than Trump and Pence's 73+ million, and 306 electoral votes, the exact total Trump received in 2016, when, despite losing the popular vote to Hillary Clinton and Tim Kaine, he labeled his victory a "landslide." The Biden-Harris combo won back three states-Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania--that Barack Obama had won in 2008 and 2012, but which Clinton lost in 2016 by slender margins, while also winning two more, Arizona and Georgia, that a Democratic presidential candidate had not won since Bill Clinton in the 1990s. They make history with Harris becoming the first woman Vice President, first Black woman VP, and the first Asian American VP.  She also is the first graduate of an Historically Black College or University (HBCU) to serve as VP, and the first member of a Black sorority to hold that office as well. She will be the second VP not to be White (Charles Curtis was the first) and the second in an interracial marriage. Biden will be the oldest man elected to the presidency, and the second Roman Catholic president, and a decidedly devout one, after JFK. 

The next President and Vice President
of the United States of America

Ideologically Biden has tended to be a conservative to moderate Democrat, with a problematic legislative history, especially during his Senate tenure, of support for racist, pro-corporate policies, while Harris, at least in the US Senate, is considered one of the most liberal US Senators based on her voting record, though her records while California's and San Francisco's Attorneys General were more mixed, sometimes quite progressive and at other times conservative (pro-police). (I should note that in the Democratic Presidential primary I again voted for Bernie Sanders, but have contributed the campaigns of both Harris and Biden.) Both have expressed support for and voted for neoliberal economic and social policies in the past, and during the primary campaign, neither would consistently commit to programs that progressive and Democratic Socialist branches of the party endorsed, like Medicare for All or Single Payer health insurance, or the comprehensive Green New Deal. That does not mean, however, that they cannot be pushed towards more comprehensive, popular, paradigm-shifting policies, but their political backgrounds, especially Biden's suggest moderate rather than radical changes. But I am going into the next four years with clear eyes, and have set my expectations low. The first tests of this will be how they deal with this pandemic, which has worsened as Trump's malignant time in office winds toward its close.

Whatever they do achieve will depend in significant part on which party controls the US Senate, whose fate hangs in the balance as Georgia's two Senate seats head to runoffs, but also will hinge on the Democrats' ability to retain their control of the House, where their margins for error plummeted as Republicans regained a number of the seats they lost in the 2018 midtarms. How Biden will govern given the challenges, which mount daily, facing the country and his administration, remains to be seen, but if he can take any lessons from Trump's four years, and the eight Biden served as VP under Obama, they might include grasping the nature of the contemporary zombie Republican Party and its overriding goal of nihilistically holding power; the appeal of economically populist policies and politics and the effect of government largess for the 99% (remember 2012?) vs. the abject failure of neoliberal capitalist orthodoxy and libertarianism, especially amidst a pandemic and its aftermath; the importance of transparency, openness and regular communication with the nation; liberal interventionism in foreign policy should be a dead letter from now on; and the absolutely fundamental concept of not forgetting and ignoring your base voters, as Obama frequently seemed to and Trump never did, which, in Biden's case, comprises Black and other BIPOC voters, especially Black women, young people (Gen Z and millennials), seniors, urbanites and many suburbanites, educated middle class voters, and working-class and poor voters, even if and as he works to expand his coalition. 

It is one thing to clean house when it comes to Trump's lawlessness, recklessness and incompetence, but replicating the worst aspects of the Obama years will imperil not only Biden's tenure and doom Democrats but the nation and the globe. I cannot predict how the next four years will turn out, but it will be refreshing to have Trump out of the White House, whatever damage he attempts as a private citizen, and, as when Obama was president, we will have to press Biden and Harris, as FDR said, to do what is needed; in fact, echoing FDR, we will need to make him (them) do the right things, for all of our sakes.

New Comics (Comey + The Summit)

Some doodles to pass the time.

First, Comey commentary:

James Comey on George
Stephanopoulos's show

And second, since the "Summit" between North Korea and the corrupt chaotic gang running the US will supposedly take place at some point soon (June? never), here's a prediction (if they pull off a real peace deal, they'll earn my thanks):

The Summit

A Few Comics

From time to time to amuse myself I draw comics, I guess you could call them. They're really visual gags. I've posted a few in the past, and here are three new ones. My apologies if any of the text isn't clear, but my usual handwriting can veer between post-calligraphy and hieroglyphics.

Please click on the image to see a larger version, and enjoy!

Hail the Combover

The Mustache Reigns

Cheshire Tillerson

All copyright © John Keene, 2018.

The Parkland Massacre & The Pressing Need for Gun Control

16 of the 17 fatal victims of the
Parkland school shooting
(From NBC News)

Another day, and extremely saddening and confounding to have to say, another school shooting, this one at Marjory Stoneman Douglas School in Parkland, Florida. Yesterday, on Valentine's Day, a 19-year-old expelled student, Nikolas Cruz, arrived on the school campus at 2:19 pm and, according to reports, began his terroristic assault  using a AR-15 assault rifle, ultimately killing 17 students and teachers, several of whom sacrificed their own lives to save others, and wounding over a dozen more. Cruz managed to escape with the fleeing students, walking to a nearby Walmart and then a Subway, but was later apprehended by police at 3:41 pm that same day as he strolled down a nearby residential street.

Reports suggest that despite Cruz's deeply troubled history at home and in school, the young man was able to purchase the AR-15 legally, in February of last year. Orphaned after the death of his adopted father, Roger Cruz, roughly ten years ago and his adoptive mother, Lynda, of pneumonia last November, he had been living at the home of a former schoolmate, whose parents apparently knew about the assault rifle and other weaponry he possessed. Cruz also had been working at a local dollar store at the time of the attack.

In addition to his expulsion, Cruz apparently was known for virulently racist and anti-Semitic postings online. Cruz has been pictured wearing a pro-Trump red cap, and a white supremacist leader also came forward to say that Cruz was linked to his group and had trained with them, though that assertion remains under scrutiny. One neighbor had videotaped Cruz firing off a BB pistol, and classmates stated that, before the murderous assault, they were concerned that Cruz might commit such an attack. Indeed, one teacher came forward to say that the school had been warned not to let Cruz bring a backpack onto campus. The FBI had received a warning about one of Cruz's disturbing social media posts on YouTube, in which he supposedly wrote that he wanted to "be a professional school shooter," but their followup produced no leads. The Bureau has since expressed regret for not being able to do more.

New York Times reporters Julie Turkiewicz, Patricia Mazzei and Audra D. S. Burch note in their roundup of news about the Parkland incident that "with this shooting, three of the 10 deadliest mass shootings in modern U.S. history have come within the last three months." Since Adam Lanza's 2012 mass murder of children and teachers at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, 438 people--children, adults--have been wounded in over 200 school shootings, and 138 have died. Moreover, there have been eight school shootings through the first seven weeks of the new year; to put it another way, as the Guardian points out, "guns have been fired on school property in the US at least 18 times so far this year."

School shootings since Sandy Hook, in 2012
Gunshot victims in school shootings:
Red dots = killed; pink dots = injured
(from New York Times)

Under any measure, this is a horrifying and unacceptable situation, though the persistence of such attacks, going back decades (remember Columbine?), and the continued inaction of the US Congress in tightening a range of gun laws--or even severely restricting access to firearms--underlines why these mass tragedies have become almost routine. Indeed, Congress and many stage legislatures, in thrall to the National Rifle Association and similar groups, have moved in the opposite direction, to loosen gun laws, allowing concealed carry provisions, guns in college classrooms, and so on.

At the time of the time of the Newtown massacre, then President Barack Obama vowed to address the crisis with legislation, and received support from many Democrats in Congress. But Republican leaders and legislators in the House and Senate refuse to enact new strictures, or even reauthorize lapsed ones, like the assault weapons ban. Early last year, Donald Trump even signed away the gun check regulation President Obama had put in place to make it harder for mentally ill people to acquire firearms. I should note that while violent crimes have plummeted in the US since the 1990s, other forms of violence, ranging from police killings of suspects to these mass murder events have not slowed. The US remains more armed than some entire foreign militaries, and guns, especially ones than can kill large numbers of people, are too easy to sell and purchase.  One parallel I noted on Twitter was the US's barely discussed but extensive wars across the globe, which continue under Trump's watch as they did under Obama, who inherited a number of them from George W. Bush; these external, almost shadow wars mirror the ones occurring inside our borders, where certain kinds of violence and, as we witnessed yesterday, slaughter have essentially become normalized.

One difference this time may be the outspokenness of the young survivors, who have not been silence since this incident. From outraged parents to students calling out Congress, Florida's governor and legislators, and Trump and the GOP-controlled Congress, the outcry looks like it may have some effect. The key word, of course, is "may"; again and again after these unspeakable tragedies, which do not occur anywhere else in the world outside of wartime conditions with the frequency they do here, we have heard calls for regulation gun access, but the NRA and Republicans--and even some Democrats--stall meaningful legislation. Let's hope that this time is different, and that those slain and injured in Parkland receive at least one tribute they merit, which is to spur those in positions of power to do something, beginning with reinstituting sane gun laws and eventually going much further, to make it as difficult as possible for anyone to acquire a human-killing machine, in order to prevent any more massacres of this kind.

The Postmodern Dystopic: One Year/Year One of the Trump Presidency

President Donald J. Trump & former FBI
Director James Comey, January 22, 2017
(Photo © NBC News)

On January 20, 2017, Donald J. Trump became the 45th President of the United States of America. His presidency really began, however, on the night of the national election last fall on November 8, 2016, when he defeated Hillary Rodham Clinton, by a 77 vote margin in the Electoral College and despite a loss of nearly 2,868,691 popular votes. Or, one might even argue, it began before he was formally elected, while Barack Obama was still the legal president, when Trump's rise signaled a shift, long underway, in our election process and public discourse that his victory only confirmed. In saying this I am not referring to the now steadily amassing body of evidence that suggests that Russia involved itself extensively in the 2016 election, and had numerous ties of various sorts to the Trump campaign. What I am suggesting is that Trump's ascent, from his declaration of his candidacy in the summer of 2015 forward, marked him out as the emblem not only of the contemporary Republican Party, for which he is the standard bearer, but underlined where our politics and society had begun to head during latter years of Bill Clinton's and all of George W. Bush's presidency, and which has found its true tribune in him.

Before I say anything more, let me note that I have found these last 12 months so exasperating, depressing, maddening, and absurd to the point of outright laughter by turns--though I have also been trying to convey in personal conversations that in some ways they still do not approach the insanities of 2001-2008, a period this country has still not recovered from, which in part has made Trump's rise possible--that I have not registered here, as I once might have, every significant outrage committed by this president or his allies and defenders. First, there are too many and they come in such steady and heavy flurries that they would make a snow-cloud jealous. Second, it really would require someone with the patience of Job--or an army of fact-checkers--to keep up with the daily tide of lies, misstatements, half-truths, and misinformation, let alone the innumerable questionable and potentially actionable violations of rules and laws that this administration seems to engage in. We currently have one major political party, the Republicans, who hold all the reins of federal power, utterly in his thrall, and a second, the opposition Democrats, who still have not reckoned with the opponent they face nor with the shifts in the broader social and public discourse that demand that the the Democrats change how they function in order not just to remain a viable party for the future, but a potential backstop against the complete dismantling of our society.

On October 2016, as I watched the election unfold, I wrote a post entitled "Our Postmodern Election(s)." (Jeet Heer later wrote an article in New Republic that expounded on some of these themes while exploring other ones in relation to this president.) It had its limitations, and on the key point of Trump's electability, I was wrong. One of my dear colleagues recently decried the idea that Republicans, let alone this president, have taken up postmodernism and run with it, though I think it is a foregone conclusion that they have, and as I tried to assert in that earlier blogpost, the postmodern condition (and, in many ways, an essentially neoliberal framework) underpins our entire society, including our politics, so it is not merely the GOP that has adopted and warped a postmodern worldview, but, more broadly, it defines this society itself to an estimable degree. I won't restate that post, but I think it's fair to say that "truth" has no fundamental relationship to how Donald Trump operates, unless one takes the Platonic (in the sense of his The Republic) and, perhaps more correctly, Nietzschean views that truth is what the ruler--or Übermensch--or similar corporate entities declare it to be.

In fact, as Trump has made clear for decades and especially over the last few years, especially with his championing of the Birther conspiracy, verifiable factualness, material evidence, reasoned argumentation, and science-based statistics have no bearing whatsoever on what he believes, let alone how he acts and moves through the world. Yet it is not Trump, but large numbers of Americans who reject verifiable facts, appeals to any authority but that of their feelings and those who agree with them, even what we might call objective reality itself. Additionally, both the mainstream media, by manufacturing consent (as Noam Chomsky brilliant argued years ago) and "normalizing" Trump's actions, and numerous parallel organs of reportage and pseudo-reportage, have served to make a muddle, at least for a sizable number of people, of what "truth" might look like. Figures like Steve Bannon and Mike Cernovich are quite aware of the tenets of postmodernism, as the latter pointed out in a New Yorker profile earlier this year, and have made great use of them. This is a feature, not a bug, of how they and the Right have come to operate.

Housing and Urban Development Secretary
Dr. Ben Carson, at his confirmation hearings
(Copyright © NBC News)

In that earlier post, I did not believe that American voters would elect Trump. Or rather, that enough white voters would not be so appalled by his campaign and behavior that they would vote against him. (My predictions about the Senate were closer to how things actually turned out.) As I say above, I was wrong. Despite admitting that he had forcibly kissed women and groped their private parts without their permission, while also pursuing married women "like a bitch," he received 52% of white women's votes. Since taking office, he has lurched from crisis to crisis, now so numerous it's hard to keep track of them. In this regard, he has made Obama's first year, which included addressing inherited national and global financial crises and multiple wars, while also trying to pass a stimulus bill, a comprehensive health insurance bill, and a bill to rein in Wall Street's excesses, look like paint drying. Trump's first year has also transformed the slow-rolling catastrophe of Bush's inaugural year into a series of surprising but nevertheless dull anecdotes, 9/11 notwithstanding. In January I thought about regularly posting on the Trump administrations scandals, which seemed to be accruing as soon as he entered the Oval Office, and then again, after his first 100 days, which seemed to mark yet another low-point in his tenure. But one could pick any point over the last 11 months, or before, to find evidence of the debacle this presidency is turning out to be, and so it might perhaps be best to say that like the classic figure of synecdoche, any point is representative of the whole, and metonymically, the Trump administration is synonymous with corruption, disruption, and a sense of foreboding and rolling disaster.

If, as Aristotle once pointed out in the Nichomachean Ethics that "Man is the rational animal," while also arguing that there also was an irrational component to human existence, Trump has exemplified that this country's most powerful man is the dominating and dominant "emotional animal" whose main goal is to satisfy his own psychological needs and energize those of his core supporters. This would be worrying in any leader, but it should be especially concerning to have such a person at the head of the most powerful government and military on earth. One effect has been to keep not just his government, but the entire national and globe in a state of disquiet, dis-ease, since the demands and effects of his emotional needs and outbursts cannot be contained within the walls of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Trump campaigned like a right-wing racist nationalist and has seeded his government and presided like an ultraconservative white supremacist authoritarian. He appointments to his Cabinet, save one or two, are to the right of the kinds of people George W. Bush placed in office, and his Supreme Court appointee, Neil Gorsuch, has positioned himself so far to the right that  Antonin Scalia, the justice he replaced, would be envious. Significantly and in Orwellian fashion, many of the people Trump has placed in positions of power actively and openly seek to undermine or destroy the very organizations they are running, and ensure, as his formally dismissed but still potent advisor Bannon championed, the "deconstruction of the administrative state," or rather, the federal government as we have come to know it.

Several Cabinet departments, among them the most important like State, appear to be in disarray and withering on the vine, at a time when world affairs, made so precarious in part through prior US attempts at creating a "New World Order" and "nation building," are approaching a precipice. To take one example, the chief means by which the United States has kept North Korea's nuclear ambitions and aggression in check has been through diplomacy and partnership with allies and, in some cases, hostile countries that have a vested in interest in containing the North Korean government. Under Trump, however, we keep inching nearer and nearer to outright war with the North Korean government, a turn of events that would most certainly lead to cataclysm, including the deaths of hundreds of thousands, potentially millions, of people in South and North Korea, China, Russia, Japan, the United States, and countless other countries if nuclear weapons were involved. Yet Trump at times appears to be undermining his Secretary of State, former oilman Rex Tillerson, who, for his own part, appears to undermining the State Department itself, through a bungled reorganization that has led to numerous empty bureaus and widespread understaffing. One major lever of power the US yields, through its wealth and influence, for good or bad, is soft power via diplomacy, yet even in a crisis zone like Korea, under Trump and Tillerson, we lack an ambassador to South Korea since Trump, in one of may steps against precedent, summarily canned all of Obama's ambassadors shortly after taking office.

Rather than detailing the numerous crises, scandals, failures, and so forth that have occurred under Trump's watch, though a number of sites do have lists, cheat sheets and more notating the Trump administration's mis-actions through this month. It should suffice to note that beyond appointing Gorsuch to the court; striking down many of Obama's executive actions; succeeding in most of his appointments to his administration; and presiding over the growing economy bequeathed by his predecessor, Trump had no major successes in the legislative arena until the recent monstrous tax cutting bill, a massive giveaway to billionaires and corporations, which still requires reconciliation between the House and Senate and could yet end up another of his failures. In his account, by contrast, he has been the most successful president since Abraham Lincoln, though unlike each of the various men to hold the office before him, he is the least popular president at this point in his term, with a majority, upwards of 50% in many polls, disapproving of his governance.

United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley
(Copyright © CBS News)

Among the low lights thus far of Trump's tenure, and this is hardly an exhaustive list, once could mention:

• his constant attacks, deflections and projections on and mis-representations of the free press, his opponents, his former campaign opponent Hillary Clinton, his predecessor Barack Obama, the US intelligence services (including the CIA and FBI), and even fellow members of his party;
• the repeatedly attempted Muslim ban (which, after revision, was finally allowed to take effect); 
• firing the FBI director, James Comey, initially for one set of reasons proposed by his Attorney General and Deputy Attorney General, only to contradict them on television and later to the Russian Foreign Minister and Ambassador, in the Oval Office (more about this below);
• his dismissal of Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates, who had warned him about General Flynn;
• the resignation of his now convicted National Security Advisor, Michael Flynn, after 24 days, for allegedly lying to the Vice President about his contacts with Russia (more about this below); 
• the repeated failure in his attempts to legislatively repeal the Affordable Care Act/Obamacare (though he continues to shred it by other means); 
• his equivocation on the white supremacist Unite the Right tiki-torchlight march and subsequent murder of Heather Heyer in Charlottesville;
• his failed response to Hurricane Maria's battering of Puerto Rico, which remains in dire condition;
• his flipflops on the DACA policy, leaving countless young undocumented Americans in legal jeopardy, and his rescission of the refugee policies for Haitians and Salvadorans;
• his illiberal pardoning of Arizona prison chief and avowed racist Joe Arpaio, who had been convicted on a misdemeanor charge for contempt of court, because he was disobeying a judge's order to stop racial profiling.

Also:

• his attacks on Black football players and other athletes protesting state and police violence on and racism against African Americans and other people of color;
• his establishment of a Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity, admirably bi-partisan, but headed by a man, Kris Kobach, known for racist views and who has actively worked against expanding democracy and voting rights;
• abandoning the Paris Climate Accords, leaving the US only one of 2 nations not to sign on;
• losing two Communications Directors, Sean Spicer and Anthony Scaramucci, within the span of six months, while also forcing out his chief of staff, former RNC head Reince Priebus;
• his advocacy for the Dakota Access pipeline and the Keystone XL pipeline (which actually burst not long ago, leaking 210,000 gallons of oil);
• his appointment of new commissioners who are vowing to repeal net neutrality;
• his use of a slur against Native Americans during a ceremony to honor Native American military heroes, the famous "Code Talkers," while standing before a portrait of President Andrew Jackson, whose record of extensive anti-indigenous policy and violence is well-documented;
• his promotion of anti-Muslim videos, including one considered to be fake, posted by a fringe, extremist white nationalist British political group;
• his constant tweeting, through which he has advanced conspiracy theories, false information, and unilateral policy without alerting his administration (such as banning transgender troops in the military without first discussing this or consulting with his Joint Chiefs of Staff)

To conclude the list, Trump is now campaigning for and recording robocalls for a man, Roy Moore, who has been credibly accused of molesting a 14-year-old girl and assaulting another teenager, was twice removed from the bench, and whose ideas are so far out of any mainstream that he repeatedly lost out in prior attempts at runs for statewide positions in a state dominated by his party. And the above list does not even touch upon the administration's possible violations of the Emoluments Clause of the US Constitution; the Hatch Act; the Logan Act; and other ethical or legal landmines. Nor does it include the debacle of the Al Hathla Raid in Yemen, which faces a humanitarian crisis in part because of US-supported actions by the Saudi Arabian military, or the Tongo Tongo ambush, in Niger, which still remains unexplained to the wider public.

Amidst all of this, as a backdrop, Congressional panels in the House and Senate, as well as a Special Counsel, lifelong Republican and former FBI Director Robert Mueller, continue to investigate the Trump administration for obstruction of justice in the firing of James Comey and its ties to Russia before and after the 2016 election. The investigation includes the various revelations in MI5 agent Christopher Steele's "dossier"; alleged Russian hacking of the Democratic National Committee's server and the accounts of other DNC and Democratic officials, as well attempts on state and local voting systems; the Trump campaign's ties to various Russian officials, oligarchs, and emissaries, as well as Russian, Russian-allied and foreign banks and institutions; the Trump campaign's links to Wikileaks; other alleged Russian forms of and attempts at meddling in the US election process; and the Trump campaign and administration officials' financial ties to other foreign entities like Turkey, Ukraine, and so on. (And there may be even more that I have not listed under investigation.) The bizarre scene earlier in the year, involving the Russian Ambassador and Foreign Minister, in which the US press were effectively barred, is just one of many strange moments in this administration's shadowplay with Russian.

(Chris Detrick | The Salt Lake Tribune) Gov. Gary R. Herbert
swears in Jon M. Huntsman, Jr. as U.S. Ambassador
to Russia during an Ambassadorial Swearing-in
Ceremony at the Utah Capitol Saturday, October 7, 2017.
Mary Kaye Huntsman is in the middle.

Among Mueller's actions so far have been to indict former Trump campaign head Paul Manafort and his adjutant Rick Gates on felony charges; to secure a felony guilty plea from former Trump advisor George Papadopoulos; and to gain a felony guilty plea for lying to the FBI from Michael Flynn. Attorney General Sessions, special advisor and Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner, Trump's son Donald Trump Jr., and many other Trump campaign and administration officials, including the President himself, may find themselves caught up in the FBI's net as well, as a fundamental line propagated by Trump from the very beginning of his campaign, that he had no ties to Russia, now looks increasingly like a falsehood, and the President's actions since taking office have not advanced the perception that he views Russia as a hostile foreign power, as his predecessors and most of the US's allies, all have.

But--and this is a major point, beside this backdrop, as I have labeled it, Trump's power to disrupt remains. To give but one very contentious example, he could fire Mueller, it seems, creating a constitutional crisis if the GOP were unwilling to stand up to him, and whereas even some very conservative Senators expressed faith in the investigation months ago, they now appear to be wavering. The conservative head of one Congressional committee, California Republican Devin Nunes (temporarily?) recused himself after troubling contacts with the White House. Although several Democrats, led by Congressman Al Green of Texas, have introduced Articles of Impeachment, nothing can happen unless either the Republican majority decides to act upon them, which is not assured even if the Congressional committees and Mueller identify possible material evidence of collusion, coordination, and financial crimes, or the Democrats win an airtight House majority and a significant enough one in the Senate in 2018. The former is not inconceivable; the latter is much more of a stretch.

In our postmodern political and social climate, there is no guarantee that even in the face of proof of obvious crimes the GOP in Congress, let alone Republicans across the US, would sanction impeachment of Trump, nor agree with attempts by Bob Mueller to indict him or his family members, if it came to that. Nor is it a lock that the Congressional Democrats, unlike those of the 1970s or 1980s, would have to have the will and fearlessness to take Trump and his administration on either. Thus far they have done a mostly lackluster job challenging him publicly or creating a compelling counternarrative to energize voters to oust the GOP. For the Republicans' part, they very well might argue, as some seem to be doing and, as one, a "anonymous source linked to the Bush administration" told journalist Ron Suskind in the October 17, 2004 issue of The New York Times Magazine:

"We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors…and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do."

That empire under Bush was a putative failure, but Trump's has quickly taken shape and continues to emerge. Truth may have an implicit "liberal bias," as some wags like to say, but nearly one year of Trump has shown us that the liberal imagination, and liberal, democratic and republican structures remain imperiled when a leader decides, with the support of millions, to create and enact his own reality. At the rate things have occurred this year, we should all, whatever our perspective, be very concerned about what will await us at this point one year from now. 

Trump's Inauguration

Philadelphia-based artist Theodore "Teddy" Harris expresses my thoughts on this tragic farce more succinctly than I ever could in one image: "Vetoed Dreams," a 1999 photo collage print of his I picked up over a decade and a half ago.

To put it simply: Lord help us, and resistance is crucial!

Theodore Harris, "Vetoed Dreams," 1999. Original signed print.

A Brief Note On the Election

The results of yesterday's election, in which Republicans Donald J. Trump and Michael Pence defeated Democrats Hillary Clinton and Tim Kaine by winning a majority of Electoral College votes (about 290 so far) versus 230 and despite losing the popular vote, was a difficult day for so many of us. Making it even worse, the obstructionist GOP caucus also retained control of the US Senate and House, and will now have the power to give President Trump whatever he asks for--or they can convince him wants, including a far-right jurist to fill the seat of the late Antonin Scalia. As I told a friend and colleague, we've lived through times as tough as these and worse, and we'll get through it if we stick together, though we'll suffer along the way.

 The first step, though, is acknowledge that Trump's victory occurred, recognizing the many people and things that made it possible, and then not throwing up our hands in sorrow, anger and apathy, and allowing him to steamroll over everyone and everything.

This election reminds me a lot of 2000, only torqued up a few hundred notches. That one also included a Democratic duo winning the popular vote yet losing to the Republican ticket, after over a year of grotesque media malpractice, and lots of liberal handwringing about how the successor of a popular president could lose. Republicans and the media salivated over having an allegedly "compassionate conservative" "businessman" take over the reins of government, promising us reform and a new path. Most voters then, as now, and particularly African American and Latinx voters, rejected it. The true outcome, however, would become clear shortly thereafter when the US suffered through rolling blackouts, the beginnings of warantless wiretapping, a major trading firm (Enron) collapse, and finally, in spite of warnings and red flags, the worst terrorist attacks on US soil on September 11, 2001. I hope and pray that horrors of this magnitude do not befall us under Trump and Pence, though after the experience of that earlier election, I am trying to steel myself for whatever may unfold, and remind myself, organization, coalition-building, dialogue, and resistance, in every way are key.

There were some bright spots in yesterday's election, however: The US Senate will now have the most women of color in its history, with the election of Kamala Harris (CA), Tammy Duckworth (IL), and Catherine Cortez Masto (NV) joining Mazie Hirono (HI), all of whom are progressive Democrats. Also, the Democrat Maggie Hassan eked out a win for the New Hampshire Senate seat, so the Democrats will have 48 votes (46 + Bernie Sanders and Angus King), meaning they'll be able to provide some semblance of a check on Trump, McConnell and Ryan. I'm holding on to this, and to the knowledge that we won't give up, because we cannot, and will keep fighting for a better future for all of us. That's what my ancestors did, what my parents did, and that's what we must do.

Our Postmodern Election(s)

Donald J. Trump and Hillary Clinton at the second presidential debate

at Washington University in St. Louis.

Credit Doug Mills/The New York Times        

The Presidential election is less than a month away, and as J's Theater readers are probably aware, unlike the 2008 election or even the 2012 edition, I have hardly written anything about it. I could chalk it up to the farce that I've found the entire campaign season to be since early 2015, and to exhaustion after the last eight years of political paralysis and crisis in Washington (I did and continue to support President Barack Obama, though I have many criticisms of his policies), but more than anything, I wanted to move away from writing about electoral politics, which I had done quite a bit during the final, horrible years of the George W. Bush administration, as well as before and during the 2008 and 2012 elections. It's hard, however, not to write something about the debacle underway, so here are a few non-systematic thoughts. I should begin by saying that I supported Bernie Sanders in the Democratic primary, and will vote for Hillary Rodham Clinton in November.

The Postmodern Election
Postmodernism is dead, long live postmodernism. During the 2004 election, journalist Ron Suskind famously reported in the October 17, 2004 issue of  The New York Times Magazine on the chasm between what an anonymous source linked to the Bush termed the "fact-based community" and the faith based, epistemically closed world of turn of the 21st century conservatives around the sitting president:

The aide said that guys like me were "in what we call the reality-based community," which he defined as people who "believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality." ... "That's not the way the world really works anymore," he continued. "We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors…and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do."

One way of reading this statement is an assertion of raw Nietzschean reshaping of the truth to the dictates of power. It would not be out of place in any dictatorship, or, to be less strident, any real political power center anywhere.

Another way to look at it is as postmodernism in its contemporary and diffuse, political form. We now live in a society in which multiple, conflicting "truths," which is to say subjective or discursively shaped impressions of reality, do not and cannot cancel each other out. Instead, much like postmodern stylistic antecedents of the late 1970s and early 1980s onwards, they sit side by side, often awkwardly and, unlike their literary and artistic predecessors, often antagonistically, rendering any possibility of a unifying, ideologically coherent master understanding or reading of reality not impossible, but difficult and often futile. Our politics now consist of contrasting regimes of truth, some as manufactured as any work of fiction on a library bookshelf, which hold sway and constitute "reality," or the kinds of "new realities" that Suskind's interlocutor was talking about, thereby allow agents of that reality--Congress, corporations, what have you--to reshape reality as they see fit.

While it's easy to point the finger at Fox News as the main progenitor of this situation, critic Bob Somerby has shown on his Daily Howler site how, since the 1990s in particular, the legacy--supposedly "liberal"--media have been repeatedly at fault, nearly sinking Bill Clinton's presidency with the fake "Whitewater" and "Travelgate"s scandals, their embrace of "truthiness" and creating false equivalencies between candidates such as George W. Bush and Al Gore, while also penning damaging, untrue stories or inflating created narratives (those Gore "sighs") about the latter candidate, thereby helping to ruin his chances of victory in 2000; and vitally aiding in the push to send US troops into the debacle that we now know as a the Iraq War. These are only a few of the many examples from the last 20 years, but the process has been underway for quite some time.

I hate to say because it represents real cynicism, but I think this situation is only going to get worse no matter who wins, and it will require a deep and thorough reckoning from people on all sides to think through how ideologically requisite critiques of the status quo and the political, social and economic spheres, which is to say, attempts to understand and challenge the dominant discourse and the systems that constitute it, can function without a complete dismissal of any baseline of factuality or, to put another way, any recourse to a foundation of empirical and coherent truths. As far as this election goes, it seems, it's a wash.

Bernie Sanders
Bernie Sanders was the candidate the Occupy Movement made possible; he was, to some extent, the one who, in political and economic, if not symbolic and social terms, they--or we--had been waiting for.  Given the deep vein of frustration about the slow and unequal recovery, wage stagnation for most workers and student loan debt for millennials, and the steadily widening post-Great Recession wealth gap, Sanders spoke to an enthusiastic constituency on the left. Indeed he went further than nearly any major candidate I've seen in recent years in offering a vision and proposing policies that would fundamentally reform and transform our economic system for the better. It was, to paraphrase, Noam Chomsky, a kind of New Deal 2.0., and badly needed. At the same time, however, Sanders sometimes came off as a one-note herald--important though that one-note was!--who did not seem to grasp how important and necessary it was to take a more intersectional approach to the country's pressing issues and challenges.

His relentless pursuit of addressing economic inequality, the rigged tax system, corporate power, and Wall Street's manipulation of Congress, was and remains invigorating, but he also has seemed blind at times to our longer and more problematic history, including the basic fact that Black Americans in particular have never started out or been on the same economic, political or social footing as White Americans, despite all attempts by the the GOP, Libertarians, some Democrats, and others, to dehistoricize our past. (He did attempt to respond to and incorporate some of the important critiques put forward by the Black Lives Matter movement.) To put it another way, he critiqued the structural depredations of late US and global capitalism, but did not always appear able to articulate how structural racism, misogyny, etc. have intersectionally inflected the economic situation we find ourselves in today. Also, having witnessed now for most of my adult life how our political system works, it was also clear to me that, like most previous progressive Democratic candidates, Sanders wasn't going to surmount the hurdles erected by the legacy media or the Democratic National Committee, beholden as both are to Wall Street and global corporations. Yet even in failure Sanders' candidacy has proved to be invaluable. He was there to push the party, the discourse, and his main opponent leftward, and to some extent, his efforts have worked.

Hillary Clinton
So, instead of Sanders, we have Hillary Clinton. She is brilliant; she is accomplished; she has a long record of public and governmental service. She would--and likely will--become the first woman president in the history of the US. That will be a major achievement, particularly in symbolic and historical terms; it's easy to forget that only 100 years ago, women in the US could not even vote in presidential elections. As New York's junior US Senator Clinton voted reliably along socially liberal lines, but  then as she has again and again during this campaign, she has shown that her initial instincts are usually primarily neoliberal in economic terms and neoconservative in global interventionist terms. (The recent Wikileaks document dump of emails to her campaign chief John Podesta suggest that her core beliefs are decidedly pro-market and "open borders," and that she views progressive positions as nothing more than a "public face" to gain political and electoral support.) One reason I absolutely could not support Clinton in 2008 was because of her vote for the Iraq War, against all better judgment and evidence, and the Patriot Act. Little in her campaign suggests to me that she has completely reoriented her thinking about the path she has helped to lead us down. And yet, other than voting for Jill Stein, who will not win, or not voting at all, what choice do we have but to vote for her, and for every possible progressive candidate running for Congress, and then demand that they not reprise the 1990s or early 2000s?

Moreover, her history on race and racism leave a great deal to be desired. Beyond her role in the Clinton administration's triangulatory economic and social policies, which often had a racial--and racist--component. More than a few commentators have noted Clinton's adoption of conservative language pathologizing black adolescent criminals in the 1990s, and her support of the odious Welfare Reform legislation, Three Strikes laws, and so forth, and her failure to speak out initially about Stop and Frisk and Broken Windows policies. In fact, I can recall how her husband left his federal judicial court nominee Lani Guinier twisting in the wind because of conservative screeching about her eminently reasonable approach to the voting system, at which point Hillary Clinton cut her longtime friend loose as well, greeting her with the casual and dismissive "Hey Kiddo" when they ran into each other in the White House.

As I acknowledge the reality of Hillary Clinton's record, I want to aver that I believe she will govern along mostly along the lines laid out by President Obama, who has enacted far more socially progressive legislation and some economically progressive policies than he is given credit for, and if she improve and advance some of his signature policies and goals, like climate change and renewable and clean energy, a Medicare-for-all or public option for the Affordable Care Act, closing Guantánamo and winding down the wars in the Middle East, while also reforming the prison-industrial complex, rethinking immigration policy to make it fairer and not just another element on global corporations' wish lists, making college free or subsidizing public higher education, especially community colleges, more fully, and addressing police and state violence against black and brown people, she will be more transformative than she ever imagined. What's clear is that she won't have to lay the foundation, since it's already there. Her major challenge will be to deal with the recalcitrant and ideologically purist--extreme--Republicans in Congress. Given the ongoing collapse of the Trump campaign, she might even have a Democrat Congress to work with, at least for two years, so she had better be ready to hit the ground running.

Donald J. Trump
Under the circumstances of most presidential elections since 1944 or so, a candidate who launched his formal campaign with hateful, racist, and lie-ridden attacks on a friendly, neighboring country and ally, its people and people who have immigrated from it and their descendants, would probably have met enough censure to drop out of the race immediately.* That did not happen with Donald J. Trump, however. Instead, as became clear by the middle of summer 2015, to a large degree because of pockets of dissatisfaction and rage on the right, and because of his incessant lying and hateful rhetoric against Mexico, Muslims, China, immigrants, Latinxs, Black people, women, war heroes, the disabled, and his fellow primary candidates, as well as his outrageous, unworkable, substance-free policies, like building a wall on the US's southern border or rounding up Muslims and putting them in detention camps, he was soon polling as the Republican to beat. Infamously, a roundtable of media commentators, whose performance around Trump's run has been atrocious over the last year and a half, laughed out loud as Congressman Keith Ellison (D-MN) tried to warn them that Trump might win. He got the last laugh but we got Trump as the Republican nominee.

There has been a great deal of commentary about Trump's candidacy since his launch, about his support and supporters, and so on, and I will not rehash it here in full. What I will say is that he has run his campaign, beginning with the GOP primary through the general contest against Clinton, like a reality show, which shouldn't be surprising since his fame today primarily derives from his successful show The Apprentice (which I watched, often with some amusement in its initial years). What does seem surprising to some pundits, however, is that his political persona derives from the simulacrum he presented there. Instead of a business leader or entertainer-as-candidate, however, we have gotten The (Bullying, White Supremacist, Lying Narcissistic, Sociopathic) Authoritarian. (Is there any question why Vladimir Putin spurs Trump's feelings of bromance?) This new reality show, in which we're all playing part, whether we want to or not, has excited a core of white mostly male voters whose support of him tracks well with people polling strongly on feelings of racial resentment and backlash, His quasi-populist proposals, involving revoking free trade, tearing up the US's NATO commitments, and limited family leave, have also appealed voters unhappy with Clinton's candidacy, and with the two victories and tenure of President Barack Obama.

In the case of Trump, the media have been his major abettors, even more so than the Republican Party, which, in real time, took its time coming around to supporting him. There are quite a few Republicans who still refuse to back Trump; one, John Kasich, was one of the leading contenders for the Republican slot, and had he won probably be 10 points ahead of Clinton at this point. Not just Fox News, but CNN and MSNBC, which I've taken to calling Trump Central, turned their screens over to him for hours at a time. None could be bothered, for example, to examine in a sustained way at his tax plan, which would balloon the deficit and federal debt and widen the inequality gulf without resulting positive Keynesian effects, or, until recently, deeply investigate the fact that he probably had gamed the federal tax system and not paid taxes for years, as New York Times bombshell underlined. In fact, it has taken nearly the mainstream media nearly the entirety of the election season to investigate with any doggedness Trump's multiple corporate fiascoes and reliance on taxpayer dollars to keep his bankrupt businesses afloat, his allegedly criminal interactions with Cuba, his flawed and potentially illegal shenanigans involving his foundation, corporate activity and campaign, his sham of a university, and so much more.

His arrogance and self-absorption have finally blown in his face, however. During his first debate with Hillary Clinton two weeks ago, he was the clear loser in terms of substance and style. In it she came off as calm, unflappable, eminently knowledgeable, moderate Democratic politician prepared to handle anything he or the moderator, Lester Holt, threw her way, and to step into the presidency tomorrow. Trump, however, descended quickly into petulance, talking and at times yelling at and over her, mansplaining, uttering patches of peeved gibberish, and finally expressed exasperation that he was faltering against so fully against someone he had clearly underestimated. The debate crystallized what many people, I included, already knew about the two candidates. The Vice Presidential debate last week appeared to boost his running mate, the ultraconservative Indiana Governor Mike Pence, more so than him.

The true showstopper, however, might be the Washington Post's publication on Friday of a 2005 Access Hollywood audio and videotape featuring a live-mic'd conversation between Trump and show host (and George W. Bush's and Jeb Bush's first cousin) Billy Bush, in which Trump utters misogynistic vulgarities and appears to admit to sexual assaults with impunity, saying that he has regularly "kissed" women without their permission, because he is famous and can get away with it, that he has even "grab[bed] 'em by the pussy." Similar recordings, from his appearances on The Howard Stern Show, also have been released. The resulting firestorm was swift and has steadily grown, though he issued a videotaped non-apology early Saturday morning.

Trump's campaign is looking increasingly doomed, with dozens of Republican officials denouncing him, renouncing support for him, and urging him to drop out of the race. Trump will probably hold onto his diehard base, but his support from educated white women voters, whom he must have for any chance of winning, looks increasingly dim. I should note that he's on state ballots across the country no matter what; the cutoff date was September 1. Should he drop out or should his running mate, Gov. Pence, step down, the Republican Party, through the RNC, would be tasked with finding a replacement, either by convening all the national delegates or via an executive board vote. The leading candidate would like be Ted Cruz.

Ratf*cking & Dirty Tricks
One element of the election that I don't think has gained enough coverage is the use of dirty tricks, not just by the two campaigns, but by foreign countries. As we learned this past summer, the Democratic National Committee's servers and accounts were hacked, possibly by Russian state or private actors, or some combination of both, and other major, non-corporate hacks have occurred as well. Information dumps, many of them laundered by Wikileaks, have dribbled out periodically, with one of the most damaging concerning the machinations the DNC former head Debbie Wasserman Schultz's took to ensure Sanders did not win the nomination. As I note above, I figured from the campaign's start that, based on who runs and funds the Democratic Party, this was a foregone conclusion, call it cynicism, realism, pragmatism, or nihilism as you see fit.

In any case, it managed to enrage many Sanders supporters in advance of the Democratic convention, in Philadelphia, from which Clinton nevertheless emerged with a noticeable bump in the polls. The recent emails, which appear to be authentic, again portray Clinton in a bad light. I'll be interested to see what we learn after the election's conclusion about foreign influence and domestic dirty tricks--or ratf*cking as it was called during the Nixon campaign; I imagine it's far more extensive than most voters, or even many journalists, envision. (A Nixon operative, Roger Stone, is closely allied with Trump's campaign.) What's been a bit dismaying is how easily people seem to fall for such things, but then the people behind trickery of this sort tend to understand how human nature and our emotions, even when dealing with obvious propaganda, work, while most of us, unfortunately, do not.

The US Senate
Most predictions I've seen suggest that the GOP will retain the House of Representatives, though were Clinton to ride a wave-type election, it could flip. Only a year ago what appeared more likely was that the Democrats would take back the Senate by a slender margin, thereby enabling a newly elected Democrat's plans, or giving them the power to frustrate a Republican's. The Democrats currently hold 44 seats, with 2 held by independents who caucus with them, and the Republicans hold 4, meaning that the Democrats would need to gain 4 seats to control the Senate if they win the Presidency, with the Democratic VP breaking the 50-50 tie, or 55 seats if they do not win at the top of the ticket. 10 Democratic seats were up for grabs, versus 24 Republican ones.

Right now, those four net seats seem tenuous, though not out of reach. Democratic candidates in Illinois, Wisconsin, Indiana, Pennsylvania seem poised to win and take seats from incumbent Republicans. In Nevada, however, the Democratic seat held by Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid is in currently leaning towards the Republican candidate, Congressman Joe Heck. This would mean only a net gain of 3 seats, and not enough to allow the VP to cast tie votes. Should Nevada, which was trending mildly toward the GOP until recently turn more blue, Catherine Cortez Masto, the Democratic candidate, could slip, and seal the Democrats' control. Another seat on the line belongs to New Hampshire Republican Kelly Ayotte, who has been leading her challenger, Democratic Governor Maggie Hassan. A recent Ayotte gaffe, in which she called Donald Trump a "good model" for children, along with a shift toward the Democratic ticket, could send her home on November 8. Nate Silver's FiveThirtyEight site suggests that it could either be 50-50 or 51-49 on behalf of the GOP at this point, but again, the volatility of events and the electorate's feelings about the choices before them suggest that even with the best models we won't know until November.