A Hole in One

Last summer, after Joe Biden's stupendous pratfall of the first debate, after Trump's weird iconic brush with death in Pennsylvania and with Biden's hard-won ejection from the race and the substitution of his Vice President at the top of the Democratic Ticket freshly transpired,  I saw one of the most frightening videos I think I had ever seen.    It was a digest of a golf game played for charity -- eighteen holes. Trump played with a golf pro I don't recall the name of at one of his clubs, I believe in New Jersey.   The pro was a clean cut bro with obvious barely contained admiration for his partner.  (They referred to each other as "Partner" so frequently between the two of them that I wanted to call in a gay marriage priest for them after a while.)

The video I learned later was taped within days of the debate-- one of the strangest moments of which involved Biden caught in a fib about his handicap and both candidates talking trash about the others' game-- but before Trump's momentous Pennsylvania rally and Biden's exit from the race.  In the video, Trump did not take advantage of Biden's absence or his sensational weakness to rub his face in his embarrassing self-exposure as a genuine dotard.  The subject of politics-- or of Biden's golf chops-- in fact never came up.  Instead the content of the video was a friendly and lively game of golf with Trump appearing to be in complete control.   He joked amiably, talking only golf as he drove the cart, arm draped over the steering wheel, speeding along the narrow path like he knew what he was doing. On the links he solicited and followed the sage, Caribbean-lilted advice of his wizened caddy, Neville, an oracle on the approach to take on each hole given current conditions and wind speeds and directions.  

I'm no golfer, but to my mind, Trump's game looked top notch.  I thought if Biden had stayed in the race, and this video had gone viral, it would have been over for the Democrats, and probably should have been. It was still a bit early to have formed an opinion about Kamala's chances, but the Trump of the golf video was immensely charismatic and dare I say, likable.  The decency of Trump keeping Biden's name out of his mouth when he could reasonably have been expected to lord his capacities over the dubious shell of a candidate-- of a human, and no doubt of a golfer-- that Biden had exposed himself to be was especially appealing.*

But there was a reason Trump had never seemed so likable to me: he was happily occupied with something other than absconding with the American treasury and imposing fascist rule on the rest of us.  The contrast with how Trump had been at the reins of American power made the point for itself: instead of making himself and the rest of us miserable with the nastiness of a return to political office, why did he not just retire to a life of unmitigated golf for the rest of his days?  What did he need with the headache of some dumb office he had already held that he was frankly lucky to escape with his life from?  Wouldn't it be better for him to happily engage in an activity that I admired his skill at rather than one at which his pathological incompetence kept me in a state of unrelenting pissed-off-ness.  Wasn't it better to have my admiration?  How could I convince him?

Maybe he'll read this and reconsider this fascism thing.

From https://trumpgolftrack.com/ June 30, 2025.  Woodrow Wilson (another presidential dickwad) reportedly played over 1000 rounds of golf in his 2 terms but he had only a 100 handicap. Wilson's green time makes Trump (on track to match his previous term's achievement of over 300 rounds for a total of more than 600 rounds in his two terms) look like a piker but in spite of a reputed tendency to take liberties with the game, Trump has an estimated handicap of 2-- a presidential best.  His habit has cost taxpayers an estimated $52M since January.  Come on, Partner.  It's time to retire and hit the green like you mean it.

~~~~~

* Which, granted, could have been edited out by the channel it appeared on.  It's not like he wasn't capable of it.

Midsummer Intra-Traumatic Dance Disorder

Ladaniva - Shakar

Celia Cruz & Johnny Pacheco - Quimbara

Fcukers - UMPA

Gang of Four - I Found That Essence Rare

Jun Miyake - Lilies of the Valley

Atarashii Gakko! - Candy

Hayk (apricota) & Arni Rock ft. Sone Silver - Taran Taran

Mike Kelley - Tijuana Hayride (from Day is Done - ft Tricia Ridgway)

Jermaine Stewart - We Don't Have To Take Our Clothes Off

Pascuala Ilabaca y Fauna - El Baile del Kkoyaruna (Dance of the Miner)

Oliver Tree - Swing and a Miss

Angela Autumn - Dancer

Pochonbo Electronic Ensemble - Chollima on the Wing

Cloth - Polaroid

Imani Coppola - Legend of a Cowgirl

Suburban Lawns - Flavor Crystals

The Yardbirds - Over Under Sideways Down

Ian Dury and the Blockheads - Wake Up and Make Love with Me (Live)

Mahala Rai Banda - Mahalageasca (Live)

Strategery

Before:

After: 

They knew what they did.*

~~~~~~~

* See here for an instance of the pot calling the kettle black: 

[Eric] Voegelin defines stupidity as a “loss of reality.” The loss of reality means a “stupid” person cannot “rightly orient his action in the world, in which he lives.” ... Limited in intellectual ability, lacking any moral compass, grossly incompetent and filled with rage at established elites who they see as having slighted and rejected them, they remake the world into a playground for grifters, con artists and megalomaniacs.

They knew not what they did

I've seen a few too many videos lately of leftists barely able to contain their delight over the plights of formerly ardent Trump supporters and voters in the last election who "f'd around and found out,"  a dismayingly large number of whom are immigrants who never dreamed that Trump's campaign promise to deport millions and revoke the citizenship of "criminals" in the process could be made good on themselves or their loved ones.  Several of these made TikToks or social media posts mocking the notion that Trump's anti-immigration rhetoric could have anything to do with the "good ones" like themselves and their extended families.  The priority for these voters was terminating Bidenomics and replacing it with an America made great again by Donald Trump.  

Then there are the teachers and school administrators in Red States who voted for Donald Trump because that's who they are, but who are now shamefully faced with the fact that Trump's delivery on his promises to cut waste in government including elimination of Federal funding from the Department of Education in the service of fulfilling the long term Republican dream to do away with free public education for all threatens their livelihoods and their lives' work.

Lastly there are the laid off government employees and those whose work was funded (or produce purchased) by USAID money.  Again, the priorities they pushed to the fore in making their decision in November were the result of calculations that did not include their own vulnerability to Trump's fulfillment of his promises to his billionaire enablers.

Still to come, those Trump voters suddenly finding themselves dropped from the rolls of Medicaid or finding themselves up shit creek with the Social Security Admin without a paddle or void forbid being inconvenienced along with the rest of us by the impending termination of the US Postal Service.

There's no question that some of these voters were never going to vote for anyone but Trump for all of the reasons that leftists and liberals detest-- right along with the immigrants who needed to believe Trump was talking about other immigrants were farmers and teachers now facing their own unforeseen difficulties as a  result of voting to give ejecting millions of immigrants the try they thought it deserved if it meant a restoration of an America that may never have existed to begin with.   I can understand enjoying a bit of schadenfreude at their compulsive conservatism coming back to bite them on the ass.  

But I derive absolutely no pleasure from the horrified regret of the millions who voted for Trump out of a desperate need to believe that it had to be better than repeating the Presidential politics that they surely thought lay behind the misery of their lives in the 2020's.  For their votes I blame the Democrats for not prioritizing the needs of their immiserated electorate, and I blame the media for having its thumb stuck up its ass (as usual), as much as I blame the self-serving deceitful seduction of the Republicans who are masters at amassing enough votes to get within range of winning for their suppression tactics to succeed and remorseless in punishing the saps who were duped into voting for them with the power they needed their votes to get.  I blame those who let Joe Biden run again unchallenged in spite of his ongoing deterioration (never mind the myopic lunacy of letting him run at all in 2020 in his already decrepit state).  I blame the finality of Election Day.  I blame the founding fathers for devising such a fucked up system and misnaming it Democracy.  

The Democrats assumed the modest infrastructure spending and stabilizing of the domestic economy would help the public to forgive the administration's priorities in foreign affairs characterized by its spending of billions to enable conflicts in Ukraine and Gaza.  Foreign wars aside, whatever good Biden did domestically was cancelled out by his eagerness to restore things to the way they were before COVID-- as though prematurely cancelling the relief instigated in the early Trumpian days of the pandemic that accidentally exposed the ability of the Federal government to marshal the resources to make people's lives easier, keep them housed and out of debt would be greeted with gratitude.  Biden thought he was doing a good thing bringing things back to how they were before the pandemic, but people's lived experience belied the rosy news in the business pages and on Wall Street.*

I don't blame low information voters who pinned their hopes for better times on a change in the White House.  I don't blame those so turned off by the process that they didn't vote.  I still have a hard time forgiving those who knew well enough that a second Trump term would be bad news but who withheld their votes from Kamala Harris anyway.  They knew what we were in for with Trump's re-election, but take none of the blame for letting it happen because they are satisfied with what it accomplished: punishing the Democrats.  As if being a democrat isn't enough punishment.

Is anybody happy?  Does misery at least still love company?

~~~~~

* According to a University of Chicago study, a good economy is always good for Republicans.  But who is the economy good for?  More jobs don't necessarily mean better jobs.  When in the last 40 years has the average American experienced anything like the relief from hard times that they got during the COVID crisis that the elite were so eager to bring to a close?

From Blakullafarden to Akbank Bunka

Halsing Suite No. 1 for Guitar: IV. Ganglat "Blakullafarden" A traditional Swedish folk "walking song" from the Hälsingland region arranged for guitar and performed by Jakob Lindberg:

 From the same Suite of Suites of Swedish folk tunes this time from Dalecarlia,  here is Dalecarlian Suite No. 1 for Lute: I. Preludium:

Lindberg's younger brother is Christian Lindberg, a premier trombonist, conductor, and composer of some wildly different music.  Here for instance is Lindberg performing his own Elvis in Memoriam from his Asa Suite with the Australian Chamber Orchestra:

Lastly, here is Turk Jazz, the 3rd movement of Lindberg the Younger's Akbank Bunka suite, performed by Pacho Flores on trumpet with the Arctic Philharmonic based in Tromsø and Bodø, Norway:

Bonus: While we're talking Swedish folktunes, here's one from the region of a quarter of my ancestors, Skåne.  The tune is one of my favorites, Lönsbodapolkan performed by Tvåtakt:

Gimme

Some questions we know the answer to immediately.   Others we have to think about.  There's a class of question that due to the circumstances in which you encounter it demands an instant response but that always gives me pause.  This is a question I encounter more and more at the payment card pad at the retail establishment checkout.  

The first time I remember seeing it was at a PetSmart.   I had swiped my debit card and before I was asked for my PIN I got an unexpected insertion: How much did I want to contribute to homeless pets?  There were an assortment of choices, ranging from nothing to $5, with possibly an option for Other for those finding themselves in a superlatively generous mood.  My reflexive response was "Why does PetSmart want to know?"  It grated at my sense of injustice that some faceless big box store, a black hole of wealth and finance masquerading as a pet shop having opened up my wallet for the purchase of essentials had found some way to coax me to voluntarily open it further ostensibly for the benefit of unseen, merely evoked immiserated animals-- but who knew what actually for?  At best I could imagine PetSmart was shaking me down for their own glory-- cajoling me into funding what some suit fancied to be a PR coup for the company.  At worst, they were performatively seeing how much extra cash they could trick their customer base into coughing up for nothing at the register. I reflexively refused the first several times I encountered the option.

I don't remember when or why I gave in, but I now pretty regularly give the dollar every time.  My working theory is that what happened was COVID-- somehow the knowledge of an increase in homelessness among pets due to the COVID deaths of their owners or other misfortunes related to the upheaval of the disease may have done some work on me and inspired me to use the occasion of the cash register question as an opportunity to satisfy myself that I was in a some small way contributing to the solution of a crisis.  Once I had experienced the ease of giving a buck on top of the hundreds of dollars I was spending each month on my pets, it soon became habit.  Occasionally it occurred to me to question whether my acquiescence to the pleading was serving anybody but the corporation, but it was always after the fact, when I was walking out the door with my purchases and never when I could actually do anything to get to the bottom of the problem.  In fact, it wasn't until just now when I googled "Who benefits from PetSmart's cash register charity?" that I learned that the recipient of PetSmart's customer's spontaneous cash register largesse is "PetSmart Charities LLP."

According to its homepage, 90 cents on every dollar collected at the cash register goes toward the care of homeless pets. But why take PetSmart Charities' word for it?  It takes some digging, but of course there's dirt if you look for it.  Knowing what I now know, I'm sympathetic to my gut resentment at a corporation for expecting me to just hand over money to let them do as they see fit with it with no accountability, no accounting of how it's spent, no input from me in what is done with it.  I don't doubt PetSmart owes a debt to the society we share that lets them grow unfettered-- but I'm uncomfortable with leaving the repayment strictly up to the corporation.  Will it cause me to break the habit of donating?  Probably not.

PetSmart is of course not the only establishment wheedling money out of its customers as long as they have their credit cards engaged.  Drugstores, restaurants and supermarkets among others as I'm sure you're aware also engage in periodic campaigns of fundraising.  My usual supermarket has recently initiated a drive to raise money to combat hunger for vets.  I have seen the prompt the last 2 times I've checked out, and confess that much like my initial response to the homeless pet question at PetSmart, I have found myself reflexively refusing.  

I admit I bristle at the easy sleasy "patriotism" of corporations falling over themselves to lead the mandatory chorus of "Thank you for your service" to soldiers and veterans. What service?  Interfering in democratic elections abroad in order to impose crackdowns on popular socialist movements?  Installing dictators of the corporate class's liking where the US might otherwise have difficulty imposing its hegemony?  Killing innocent foreign citizens with bombs?  Killing American citizens with drones? Thwarting peace, threatening war, crushing autonomy, making the world safe for neoliberalism, finance and corporate exploitation and unsafe for freedom for regular people especially if they're dark skinned and poor?  Shaming Americans into thanking the military for its service is a smokescreen for the owner class's responsibility for how unsafe for true freedom worldwide-- including in America-- the US Military's mission has been in my lifetime.  I can't think of a single military operation that hasn't benefited the haves at the expense of the have nots.  Its ever expanding budget taken largely out of American taxpayer's hides* squeezes out spending that would actually make people's lives easier. Our military is deployed on the wrong side of every conflict and never on my behalf.  And its outsized demands for energy and resources is largely responsible for the planetary climate crisis that is fueling conflicts worldwide.

On the other hand, I realize that the pathways to becoming a soldier or a vet are more complicated than my feelings about the military, and it is an injustice that the country that expects young men and women to volunteer† for the overseas adventures of its small but dominant overclass takes such poor care of those who have served that many of them starve or go homeless.  Take better care of your proxies yourselves, you ungrateful bastards!  

In the meantime, now that I've talked it out, I've decided: I will do what I can to help out fellow exploitees of the system at the cash register.  Fuck it!  Solidarity!

~~~~~

* And less and less out of the overstuffed pockets of the tax shirking owner class whose sloppiness and greed and hostility to the rest of the world cause the emergencies that members of the military are then tasked to risk life and limb and mental health to deal with.

† It was considered a victory when the draft ended in the fallout from the American public's disenchantment with Vietnam.  But truthfully, in a more democratic society (one much more democratic that the US), military service that serves the people should be a duty that is shouldered by all citizens.  Perhaps if everybody had an equal chance to be selected for military service, a more democratic congress would be more selective about the engagements that call for military deployment.

The door is open

My brother thirteen is ready for a General Strike.  Laid off from work in the days of COVID, he has lately been participating in more than his share of the many marches and demonstrations that have sprung up in response to the plethora of outrages coming out of the Trump II White House.  Marches have their place- but there is something to be said for the General Strike as an effective weapon against the authoritarianism that is threatening to turn Americans into complicit abettors in TwentyFirst Century Fascism.  

My brother thirteen is all about the General Strike.  He was ready May 1.  In principle I support the idea-- I find the daydream of a work stoppage across the land a tantalizing fantasy, but the May 1 movement my brother informed me about remained a daydream when the day rolled by,  I told thirteen I would gladly  participate in any organized General Strike as long as it wasn't just a Bluesky thing.  It needs to be The Big One-- a voluntary mass stoppage of work and of commerce participated in so broadly that it causes the severe pain in those it is designed to communicate to.  It needs to be a threat that normies take seriously.  I will commit to it the day I overhear my work colleagues discussing it. There is talk of General Strikes if you look for it-- but you have to want to find it.  But until it is a phrase buzzing from late night talk show hosts' lips, and tossed about in the banter that precedes workaday meetings, I don't think I'll be joining.

Taylor Lorenz recently made a video about the "Someone Needs to Do It" Meme.  I can wholeheartedly relate to the sentiment.  A General Strike would be better because it's something we could all pull the trigger on. How satisfying would that be?  But while we wait for a movement to congeal around an act that demonstrates the power and the seriousness of the anti-fascist masses, I concur with Taylor Lorenz that hoping for the vicarious thrill of some anonymous working class hero's taking of matters into his or her own hands is not an unpleasant way to pass the time.  It's just too passive a pastime, and history suggests there are ways for the non-violent among us to spring into action.

I think of G.A. Cohen's parable of the self-imprisoned man from Karl Marx's Theory of History:

A man is in a windowless room whose door he mistakenly thinks is locked. Unlike a man in a locked room, he can leave it. Yet since he does not know he can, he is not likely to try the door. One reason why people sometimes do not exercise their power is their lack of awareness that they have it.

Now is the time for us to collectively walk through that door.  Whenever we agree is Now.