Snatch it back and hold it

By Mr Amos Wells Blakemore, Jr. late of Chicago, Illinois by way of West Memphis, Arkansas, and known better to the world as Junior Wells:

Rocky Horrors

Debra Messing is at it again.  She can't seem to let go of the notion that Susan Sarandon is responsible for Trump being in the White House.  What did Susan Sarandon do?  She inserted herself in earnest once again in the 2020 Democratic primary by publicly endorsing Bernie Sanders' candidacy.  After Sanders conceded the 2016 Democratic Primary to Hillary Clinton, Sarandon, who had already fallen out of love with Clinton in 2003 when the then New York Senator voted for the Iraq War,  publicly urged the disaffected to vote with their feet and abandon the ship of the Democratic party.  Her own vote was for Green candidate Jill Stein, but she intimated that even Trump would be a safer pick than Hillary Clinton.  Less fracking, she predicted; less war. 

Like Susan Sarandon, I was bitterly disappointed after the 2016 primaries.  It was hard not to crash after soaring on an unprecedented opportunity in my lifetime to dream with some realistic hope about an opportunity to vote for a Socialist in the General Election.  When Sanders conceded, I remained unenthused about his challenger, the nominee, and briefly, quietly contemplated abstaining from voting for president in November.  But on listening to the arguments of Stein, Sarandon and others and especially due to increased exposure to the cesspool of Trump, I was not convinced.

I have no regrets about voting for Hillary Clinton to avoid Trump in 2016, but neither do I harbor any special animus toward Susan Sarandon, at least, for voting her conscience.  Her supporters are right - Sarandon has many times over earned the respect of those on the left for putting her beliefs into action consistently for years.  I have never thought (for longer than an instant or two anyway) that Trump's election is owed to Sarandon's abstention from voting for his most serious opponent.  In the fight between Sarandon and Messing, my money is on the actual fighter.

Where I disagree with Sarandon's 2016 stance is not out of blame for Clinton's loss.  Rather it is with the notion that anyone with eyes open about Donald Trump before the general election can be excused for shirking in the effort against him.  Pissiness about Bernie Sanders' loss in the primaries is an especially feeble excuse considering Sanders' own commitment to Clinton's campaign following her nomination.  But by all indications at the time, Susan Sarandon's withholding of support for Clinton was due to a confidence in her impeccable moral purity that constrained her from participating in a Clinton victory, a purity that was no doubt persuasive and influential-- and certainly encouraging-- to some small percentage of similarly disgruntled Bernie supporters in swing states.  I've talked about my feelings about  the begrudgers, but I have to confess I reserve a special place in my personal conception of Hell for the saintly abstainers who actively sought to side with the Trump voters against Clinton in the wishful belief that Trump's blatant horribleness would "heighten the contradictions" inherent in the system and perhaps instantly foment revolution.  What made them so singularly special that they could be excused from the duty to vote responsibly, heedless of the Republican congress that Trump, if he won, would have at his disposal?  How bad does the greater evil have to be to vote for the lesser evil if Trump is not it?  How come they got to vote for the dreamy far out radical?  Why was it up to me to vote for the war-mongering fracking neoliberal in an effort to save our mutual society from the fake tanned, pussy grabbing, incurious, racist fascist bastard?

Is the effect you're getting the effect you want?  Was Susan Sarandon wanting to punish Hillary Clinton in 2016?  Was she hoping to signal a greater virtue in voting for Trump?  She is a dramatic actor.  I now suspect she was just being dramatic.   An interview with The Guardian in November 2017 if accurate and fair strongly suggests that far from being a super virtuous superwoman of the left whose vote for Jill Stein was too superior for its mighty purpose to be comprehensible to mere run-of-the-mill pants shitters who voted for Clinton to avoid Trump (I include myself), Susan Sarandon was a common naïf who assumed Clinton was going to win and was compelled to use her public platform to make clear that she wanted to claim no part in it.  In spite of her bluster about how Clinton was more likely to start a war and to pursue frantic fracking than Trump, in the Guardian intereview, she referenced the safety of her district for Clinton among the conditions that enabled her protest.  Explaining her stance in the general election, the article quotes her as saying, "Well, I knew that New York was going to go [for Hillary]. It was probably the easiest place to vote for Stein."  She has this to say about her widely cited argument in an interview with Chris Hayes on MSNBC in the runup to the election that Hillary Clinton was "more dangerous than Trump":

I don’t mind that quote ... I did think she was very, very dangerous. We would still be fracking, we would be at war [if she was president]. It wouldn’t be much smoother. Look what happened under Obama that we didn’t notice.

Acknowledgement that Clinton would be smoother (if not by much) than Trump doesn't sound like a pure belief in Clinton surpassing the danger of Trump.  The virtue is cast in doubt even more by the argument that Clinton was going to win anyway.

 In other words she spoke one thing publicly but justified her actions on a faulty foundation of the tragically mistaken belief about what the outcome of the election would be which in 2017 she apparently indicated regret in having wrong.  Could her story be unique?  The humanness of her mistake (if the impression left by the Guardian article is fair) gives me an odd kind of hope.  I don't doubt that there were some small number of Clinton abstainers who genuinely evaluated Clinton's capacity for malevolence as on a complete par with if not surpassing Trump's.  But Susan Sarandon, who is as virtuous as they come in leftist politics, appears with hindsight at least (which is 20/20 mind you) to not be among them. 

What about Debra Messing's intentions?  Does she want a mea culpa from Susan?  Does she want to lock Sarandon's support for whomever the Democrat is in 2020?  I suspect she's just being dramatic -- and hoping in the process to preemptively ridicule the wasting of votes on anything other than anti-Trump in 2020*.   But based on the frantic righteous (and absolutely correct) defense of Susan Sarandon that Messing's repeated attacks inspire, I'm not so sure she's helping her own cause.  Let's get the best candidate for 2020 now, and stock up on outrage until we need it. It's too late from a planetary perspective to quibble over purity displays in the general election.  It's too early politically to do anything but get the nomination right.
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* Would Debra Messing support the ticket in November even if the nominee were Bernie Sanders?  I'd really like to know.

Daddy-o

I generally have high standards in my choice of entertainment, but occasionally I get sucked into certain unpardonable indulgences.  One in particular is a very popular streaming show of a sci-fi nature* with no particular redeeming value-- not even a personal one I could point to, like, "It's so bad it's good" ... or "It fills some cultural void in me" ... or "I like it".  This show is actually not good at all and it's not even not good in an interesting way.  It's not a show I would necessarily want to participate in discussions about.  With one exception.  One of the main characters on the show is a singularly average looking small town police chief.  He's paunchy, balding and middle aged.  He's got a mustache-- not a stylish job, just hair on the lip.  He also has, not a beard, but several days of beard growth.  He's got a big fat head that his Smokey-the-bear police hat is too small for.  I. Hate. Him.  The average looks are not the problem-- the non-Hollywood casting is one of the few things I admire about the show.  What gets me is the flavorlessness of the role in combination with the cockiness of the performance.  There's a swirl of picky little things I contend with every time the character shows up:   His touch with comedy is not light.  There's not a tremendous amount of intelligence shining from within.  He's not merely crabby, he oozes entitlement to be crabby.  While he's called upon to mete out justice without a lot of formality, Dirty Harry style, he's not particularly deft with the tough guy act. Most galling of all, for some reason this guy with the sex appeal of a turnip is called upon to parade his half-naked dad-bod around in one context or another every other show it seems.  I haven't taken the trouble of remembering the character's name but in my mind it's Dad (even though I couldn't tell you whether the character actually has children.  It's not the children that makes him Dad.  It's the mustache.).

On principle, I don't fast forward through shows I'm watching-- not even the not particularly good ones.  It's a solidarity move.  It doesn't seem fair to people who actually watch the shows. But the antipathy I feel for this character has tempted me to make an exception in his case.  On the other hand, I have to admit to a certain fascination about how this vacuum of charisma continues to be a center of the show.  It's like a kind-of-near train wreck that didn't-actually-happen.  I can't take my eyes away from it even though there's not really anything I could point to to look at.

My daughter, who does not watch the show, tells me that she hears that this character has a fan base among her cohort, the millenials.  What could they possibly see in him, I wonder.  She tells me it's exactly what I hate: that he's just a big dumb Dad.  They like him because he's a Dad??!  Ugh!  I suppose it should have been obvious to me since there is literally nothing else going on with this guy.

What is it with young people and their capacity to be entertained by Dad figures?  Someone my daughters' age enthusiastically recommended I watch a Bert Kreischer comedy special.   I'm going to give them one more chance at a recommendation to redeem themself.  I've also learned from my daughter about a popular video "dating game" released not too long ago in which the object is for the protagonist, a new-Dad-in-town, to choose a "date" from among a selection of other Dads in the neighborhood.  What!?  You're kidding me.  Is it a horror game?  No!  Is it political education disguised as discomfiting social satire?  No!  You mean, it's just supposed to be fun?  Yes. And young people actually buy and play this game?!  Yes, they do.  I'm not at all worried about this up and coming generation, until I hear about shit like this.

Always on the cutting edge of music I noticed in my YouTube recommendations not long ago new videos from Soccer Mommy and Hockey Dad.  Something is really terribly wrong when college students are naming their bands after their parents.†  This indicates to me a failure of parenting.

We're supposed to be progressing, but instead we're indulging in stale, dad-aged obsessions like racism and misogyny again.

Kids!  Dad is not cute!  Dad is not cool!  Dad is Donald Trump.  Jordan Peterson will not save you.  Joe Biden will not save you.§  You're not supposed to like Dads, you're supposed to resent them.    You're supposed to rebel against them.  They are the enemy!  They are old, they are overweight (and if they’re not overweight, they’re vain), they are angry, they have terrible taste in music.  They watch Fox News.  They criticize you for no reason.  They laugh at cruelty. They have stopped learning.  They don't understand you!  What's more, they made this world that you're inheriting.  They could have done something about global warming but they only made it worse.  They could have made this a safer, fairer world but instead they acquiesced to the most evil systems of politics and economics in the world and a devotion to or at least an okayness with a bullshit concept called the free market.  And now we're enslaved to it. You want to fix it and they're telling you what they always say about anything that could make your life better: We can't afford that!   This is a lie.  It's just a reflex with them.  They don't know what they're talking about, but they do know that you can't have what you want.  They have ruined your future.  And they did it accidentally on purpose because it was more fun for them, it was easier for them, and they could get away with it because nobody could tell them what to do.  They are selfish. They are uninformed and proud of it. They are complacent and they have taught you to be complacent too.

So drop the obsession with the old man, kids!   When it's time for Fathers' Day, just remember this:  Every day is Fathers' Day...

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* It's the one where all the originally pre-teen characters still wear rugby shirts and beanies and socks with shorts even though the actors portraying them are by now beyond puberty.

† It really pains me to report that Soccer Mommy is actually pretty good.  I refuse to listen to Hockey Dad.

§ Bernie Sanders will save you.

Pwease no steppy!

When we see the scurvy, morally decrepit Reprobate-in-Chief literally hugging the American flag for the cameras like the perverted weirdo that he is and spouting inane platitudes about the US of A it's not difficult to understand what Samuel Johnson meant when he called patriotism "the last refuge of a scoundrel."  But is that all that patriotism is?  In the relative halcyon days of the early 1960's when life was somewhat sweet; when our commonality was celebrated and we were engaged actively (if not always unanimously) in the broadening of it to include Americans of all types, backgrounds and walks of life; and when the memory of our collective successful struggle to defeat Hitler and fascism in World War II-- the last defensible international endeavor undertaken by our military-- was still rather fresh in our minds, it was assumed that Patriotism was a virtue shared by (or available to) all Americans.  I confess, when I see Trump mugging like a dope, the impulse to want to slap the flag out of his filthy mouth is probably as close to that classical ideal of patriotism as I ever get.  But I was witness to the absconding of the concept of Patriotism by the jingoistic scoundrels of the right when Presidents Johnson and Nixon's escalation of the dubiously conducted Vietnam war turned popular opinion against it, and it became difficult to see it as anything other than a veil behind which the worst impulses, deprivations and policy impositions of the ruling class were routinely masked.  They must have thought we were idiots.  Given their successes and the way they translate to our tribulations, they may have been right.

Still it is not correct to say that "the last refuge of a scoundrel" is all that patriotism is.  When you see it manifested in spontaneous expressions of gratitude for the service of those suddenly revealed to have served in the military, or in the ubiquitous square flag decals and slogans that have become de rigueur decorations of the back of dump trucks and semis, or in the flag pins that had better adorn the lapels of our elected representatives, it's clearly also a kind of obsessive compulsive disorder, a manic escalation of the competition to display one's unbridled devotion to the country-- even though no one asked or particularly cares unless reminded to, and certainly not to an extent that merits the shameless exhibitionism.  The gratitude is backhanded-- it's really an assertion of ownership.  In the service of their overseas adventures, in response to the emergencies that arise from their clumsy lack of neighborliness in the world, you give your life and limbs.  As thanks to you for your willingness to proxy in person for their aggressions, they wear a pin.

Ostensibly, patriotism according to Merriam-Webster is "love for or devotion to one's country."  Given the arbitrariness of the circumstances of one's country and the many ways it could have gone differently, I can see how the patriotic impulse could be considered nothing more than an adaptive behavioral tic to the situation you find yourself in, but a virtue?  This is one of those things that survival sense dictates we should probably not probe too deeply (because challenges to it engender such inchoate and hot emotions in those who think with their fists), but it withers under any kind of honest rational scrutiny.   It's telling that the usage samples in the Webster definition reveal nothing but pathology about the meaning of the word:

Although poles apart ideologically, they are both unashamed of their patriotism.
— Christopher Hemphill

 You may not agree with him politically, but no one can question his patriotism.

They supported the war with a fierce patriotism.

As Voltaire noted, "It is lamentable, that to be a good patriot one must become the enemy of the rest of mankind."  Patriotism, being based on the accident of one's birth, or at best fanaticism about one's chosen home, is the sort of thing that is both indefensible and something to be used usually in its least defined and most undefended state as an instrument to cast aspersion on the integrity of one's adversaries.  While it shares this feature with much of religion, at least religion is codified to an extent that it can be argued with.  Still my lack of religion and basic disdain for patriotism if disclosed publicly would disqualify me from public office and from the trust and basic respect of a good majority of the country.  If you wanted to impugn my character on the basis of my lack of patriotism, you could absolutely do it; I'd only be consoled that at least the feeling is mutual.

I'll grant that my experience of patriotism as on balance a pathology causes me to disfavor it, but is there anything to redeem the concept for me?  Am I the pathological one for having such animosity to it?    No one defends the patriotism of citizens of other countries; likewise it is only American patriotism that I as an American am qualified to consider.  It seems to have been a useful quality for the American revolutionaries who sought to divorce the territory from Great Britain, since it seized them with an image of something worth defending.  I'd be loath to argue that the enlightenment ideals of the original patriots were not something to be patriotic about and it would have done them no good to dwell on how far their own behavior and lifestyles deviated from it.  That our nation would then go on and wield patriotism as an excuse to persist in enslaving humans to perform our labor for free and to engage in genocide against the original inhabitants of the continent as we expanded our borders exemplifies the type of mischief that it can accomplish.

The problem with Patriotism is that it's usually either isolationism, nationalism, imperialism or war-mongering pretending to be a virtue.  The masquerade becomes a reflex.  The mindless devotion becomes the point, and through the lens of Patriotism, those who point out the widening gap between the ideal of America and the reality can appear as opponents rather than champions of an America worthy of devotion.  I've been encouraged by a proliferation of the champions recently, maybe best exemplified by the freshman class of Congress, but I'm not ready to let go of the sense that their challenge to the status quo could be met as usual by the masterfully practiced enemies of progress at any turn.

The idiosyncrasy of one nation's patriotism over another's raises an obvious point.  The US did not always exist and there is no reason to think it will exist in perpetuity.  Perhaps a revolution may some day come out of the observation that the dysfunction of a place is directly proportional to its size.  Perhaps the world will for instance one day reject the tyranny of beholdenness to a few primarily unjustly advantaged super-powers and the elites that prop them up, favoring instead a return to an organization along the line of mutually cooperative and peaceable micro-states,  the concept of empire having been relegated to the dustbin of history.  In this case, the memory of patriotism toward the former empire will be exposed as vanity.  Why wait?  Be skeptical now.

The logical endpoint of organization of the world into micro-states  (Burj Al Babas, Turkey)