I'm of two minds about Kamala Harris’s acceptance speech at the close of the Democratic National Convention last night. On the one hand, I am genuinely impressed with how she has risen to the occasion in the 4 or 5 weeks since Joe Biden stepped aside from the campaign and threw his endorsement for his replacement behind his Vice President. I don't think it can be a huge revelation that I did not know she had it in her. It’s now clear to me she has it in her.
On the other hand, what is the it that she has in her? I'll admit, my optimism about the difference that she would make as President has not been perfectly cautious. My hopes had been involuntarily raised. In that spirit, I am taking it for granted that there may be divergences from the current admin that she might have to sit on until she is sitting in the Oval Office. But if you take her speech at face value, there was a lot in it to dislike. Too much to dislike to really leave a lot of room for any reveling in what there was to like. I think she was effective in making a case for herself versus Trump from the perspective of “Trump’s a dangerous nut who will make your life worse and I’m not.” But I was turned off by a few things (and I’m not even talking about the rest of the night/convention with its absence of a Palestinian and the presence of Republicans and military wackadoodles like Leon Panetta and that sheriff from Michigan).
But just in Harris’s speech, I hated the formulation of economic policies around the middle class and opportunity and affordability. I mean maybe my ears have been un-tuned from that kind of talk—I don’t hear it as sweet music for the masses, I hear it as fuck you if you’re not in the middle class or if you don’t have what it takes to be. I’ll grant she’s trying to sing to people who get horny when you talk about that stuff including our punditry and too much of our Pavlovian electorate, but to me it sounds like garbage. The domestic stuff wasn’t all bad, it was just not good enough. The international part of the speech just sucked pretty much from one end to the other. Why are we still talking about NATO in 2024? Even my CNN-watching wife said she threw Gazans under the bus with her comments about Israel. That’s pretty bad. But the rest of it sucked too. I hated it. Nevertheless, again you could argue she’s not performing for me.
The thing is she thinks she’s got me. She thinks “The left will hate this (including the snub of the Palestinians) but they’ll eat shit. They always do. The AIPAC wing? Middle-America Independents? Suburban Republican women unhappy with Trump? They won’t eat shit, but the left will.” Therefore, only the left are fed shit. Our palate for it is not appreciated, it is taken for granted. Meanwhile, even in 2024 after all we've been through, extreme care is taken to see that not a molecule of shit pollutes the feast laid out for the small but loud asshole wing of the Democratic Party.
I would have forgiven the pandering to straw dolts (is anybody who matters really impressed by that military and immigration bullshit?) if they had let the Palestinian speak. It was a calculated fuck you really. A performative fuck you performed for the benefit of assholes. The thing is if they had let the woman speak (Ruwa Romman, the first Palestinian elected to the Georgia house who is on the record pro-Kamala and whose speech was perfectly palatable to all but the most sicko Zionist) it would have given a boost to the people they needed to boost. Instead it’s now a problem that they have to either fix or let fester. As Sam Seder put it last night, finding room for a 2 minute speech “would have cost them nothing” and made a huge difference. It was a mistake. Plain and simple. They fucked up and made a bad choice.
Instead they chose to pander to a certain type of Dem. While they told those opposed to the genocide in Gaza to go to hell for a bit, the people they didn’t want to tell to go to hell are idiots who have to be told not to go to hell or else they’ll fucking do it. I can’t help but think about a Matt Karp study of 2020 that basically confirms that they’re not wrong in a way. The ficklest elements of the dem electorate have a thick stupid streak that responds to triggers, and yet they are needed in order for Dems to win.
Non sequitur alert: While thinking about this, my brother thirteen who has been looking for work for over a year sent me this infographic about candidates for employment:
I have become aware of a challenge on social media to post the covers of "20 books that have influenced your life" with no comment-- just the covers. I'm not on social media, so I will present them here. And I'm too lazy to figure out how to screenprint 20 covers and manageably arrange them in a post, so I'll just give title and author for most. I might as well have not even bothered, right? I needed a topic anyway, so be that as it may:
Chicken Soup and Rice - Maurice Sendak
Cat's Cradle - Kurt Vonnegut
Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
The Education of H*Y*M*A*N K*A*P*L*A*N - Leo Rosten
Ethan Frome - Edith Wharton
The House of Blue Leaves - John Guare
Blues People - Leroi Jones (better known as Imamu Amiri Baraka)
Inter Ice Age 4 - Kobo Abe
A Clockwork Orange - Anthony Burgess
Canapé-Vert - Pierre Marcelin and Philippe Thoby-Marcelin
Language in Thought and Action - S.I. Hayakawa
With William Burroughs: A Report from the Bunker - Victor Bockris
No More Police - Mariame Kaba and Andrea J. Ritchie
Nickel and Dimed - Barbara Ehrenreich
Orientalism - Edward Said
The Shock Doctrine - Naomi Klein
Democracy in Chains - Nancy MacLean
Pictures at a Revolution - Mark Harris
The End of the Road - John Barth
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I feel like I'm leaving something out.
To this purpose, various methods and accessories have been devised to convey just the amount of information necessary for any interaction behind the wheel. From the beginning, a convention of hand signals extended out the driver's rolled down window have been used to communicate one's intention to other drivers. As automobiles became more common, communication features were added to the design of cars militating against the need for drivers to risk their limbs for the cause of safety. Turn signals on the front, rear, and now side mirrors of cars were added to convey one's intention to obstruct or impede the flow of traffic in order to exit the straightaway.* Flashing "hazard" lights in the front and rear (aka "flashers") could be engaged to draw attention to a sudden need to reduce speed or to be temporarily stopped. Honking horns were added as an automotive way to express one's disapproval of the asses who forget to use turn signals or flashers.
To these voluntary instruments of communication, a couple of automatic signals could be added. First, whenever the driver steps on the brake pedal, bright red brake lights at the rear of the car intensify as an automatic message to the driver of the following vehicle to apply their own brakes (thus initiating a chain of calls and responses that extends the length of the trail of cars behind the car that initiated the round of Telephone).† Second, placing the car in reverse engages a set of non-colored lights that unambiguously indicate to those approaching from behind the reverse direction of the car. Trucks and some recent passenger car models accompany the lights with a sequence of warning tones or of short punctuated beeps of the horn. The automatic nature of these brake and reverse gear signals might have an analog in human communication of such involuntary physical responses as a flushed color to signal embarrassment, dilated pupils to indicate attraction or a yawn to convey, "You're boring me."
Before the feature was added to passenger cars, some drivers supplied the reverse beeps on their own by means of staccato taps on the horn. In short, the horn is the feature most commonly resorted to for voluntary communication, and reflective of this is the variety of messages that a horn can convey. Along with the two already discussed, the sounding of a horn can mean:
Most drivers through experience know the range of meaning of a high beam flash though they might have to flip through the possible alternatives in their mind to arrive at the likelihood that the flash was directed at them and what their expected response should be. When no context can be ascertained, making the flash of an oncoming car seem random, it's a good bet that the meaning is a camaraderly "Watch out! Speed trap ahead!"
When it comes to automotive communication, context is everything. And when one's meaning is in doubt, one can always resort to classic hand gestures to provide emphasis and clarification.
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In the context of the strangest presidential race of my lifetime, I've constructed a bit of a narrative for myself about this moment. I'm not a political scientist so don't expect conventional wisdom. I think it all started with the financial crash of 2008, 4 cycles ago (the second strangest presidential race of my lifetime). By weird coincidence, the victor of a tight race between Democrats was a relative unknown who chose as his slogan Change You Can Believe In. After 9/11 and 5 years of a catastrophic and criminal war in Iraq undertaken by the republican nepo baby president, and in the midst of a cratering economy, Hope and Change were in short supply, and the candidate who physically embodied both won (in spite of, if not aided by, his selection of the most entrenched Democrat-- a chronic unilateral bipartisan, performative punisher, and entitlement tinkerer with a Senate career stretching back to the days of Nixon-- as his running mate.) His solid victory over a media darling phony "Maverick" careerist whose ratfucking campaign cynically threatened to put an obtuse nutjob who happened to be a woman a frail elderly heartbeat away from the presidency just to fuck over the dems who had voted for the African American over the former first lady in the primary, was the closest I had ever been to elation about the outcome of a presidential election.
When Obama failed to deliver on either Hope or Change, opting instead to stay the course in affairs domestic and international and bail out the scoundrels whose profligacy with risk had engendered the financial crisis that he had been mandated to address while letting their underwater victims sink, it set in motion a discontent that set the stage for the populist shock of 2016 in which neoliberalism's anointed heir Hillary Clinton had to beat back a more serious left populist challenge from Bernie Sanders than anyone had anticipated in the primary only to go down in defeat (thanks in part to party defections on the part of disgruntled Sanders supporters, but more importantly to a surge in non-voters fed up with the process) to the right faux-populist juggernaut of Donald Trump in November. The Democratic response was to blame Russia. When that didn't work as expected, impeachment was tried. But as historically has happened whenever Democrats get their ass kicked by history, the ultimate effect of Trump's win was both an unhinged Trump derangement and the typical rightward lurch in an effort to court wayward suburbanites (something that seems guaranteed to happen when Republicans win, not Democrats, belying the theory of third party purity voting on the left).
The result in 2020 was Joe Biden, whom Obama strongarmed into the winner slot of the democratic nomination when the unimpeded progress of actual primary voters was strongly favoring a Bernie Sanders victory after several of the early primaries and caucuses. An early clue to how things might go could have been discerned from the trajectory of a number of candidates, several of whom, after beginnings more reflective of the desires of younger Democratically leaning voters were shepherded rightward by mysterious forces over the pre-primary debate season. Among them was Kamala Harris -- a rookie Senator with a problematic history as a California DA-- who had made her name by tough challenging of Brett Kavanaugh in his beer and tear soaked Senate hearings as Supreme Court nominee (he went on to be confirmed anyway) who had started her 2020 campaign in favor of Medicare for All, even through a first debate that many thought she won by making points at the expense of Joe Biden. With the faint whiff of the possibility of front runner status, she immediately started equivocating on how universal her universal healthcare would be, an indication of a readiness to sacrifice principles for ambition that probably contributed to the disintegration of her campaign before the first primary vote was cast-- and that likewise recommended her to be selected as Biden's running mate at the convention. Although conventional wisdom insisted the increasingly doddering Biden was the best Democrat to challenge Trump, the truth was he was the most acceptable to forces in the Democratic party that did not want to test polls that consistently showed Bernie beating Trump in the General. Having secured the nomination with the coordinated cooperation of the field of 2020 also-rans, the Biden campaign's strategy was heavily oriented toward suburban centrist voters, but Trump's mishandling of the COVID crisis may have destined him for a single term no matter who was at the top of the Democratic ticket. In 2020, more came to the polls to cancel the Trump show than to renew it for another season.
In spite of the recycled feeling of a Biden presidency and an insistence on the part of the old guard that it was Biden's neoliberal staleness that voters wanted, all signs seem to indicate that the order that Biden represents is done. In spite of a plenitude of the expected and promised deafness to those outside of the Beltway establishment (his role in encouraging Ukraine to scuttle peace talks early on and instead pursue a military victory over Putin's invasion in the spring of 2022 and his support of Israel's genocide in Gaza being prime cases-in-point) his own presidency especially in terms of domestic policy reflected the change in the air in a stealth under the radar quasi Rooseveltian agenda that his lifetime in politics could hardly have predicted. But while neoliberalism is experiencing death rattles that make Biden appear practically sprightly by comparison, its tentacles on the order of things refuse to let go. This is how we got here, with party and media elites turning a blind eye to Biden visibly "missing a step" (to be charitable) in order to prolong the farce of his re-election bid until it could no longer be ignored. And this is why, it could no longer be taken for granted that the defeat of the threat of Trump with his demonstrated knack for gaming the anti-neoliberal tide required a steady course into a second Biden term. And lastly this is why we can look for signs to indicate whether Biden's chosen replacement, his VP Kamala Harris, would be a last gasp of a dying order, the midwife of a new age or just an incompetent flop and we are not likely to get an answer in the 100 days we have left before the General Election. Especially if she has upped her campaigning game since 2019. We can dread. We can hope. We can wait and see.
You can't expect electoral democracy to fix itself. It won't happen. So while we await the sortition revolution, you have to take what you can get and make the best of it.
What a month we're having. At the start of it, we were coping with Biden's reveal during the democratic debate late last month of what everyone knew but dared not say about his fitness for re-election, the president's decrepitude overshadowing his opponent's unhinged string of lies. After a week of watching the incumbent flail in several public fora in an effort to clear the low bar of demonstrating a modicum of remaining competence for politicking even in the face of a mounting movement within the upper echelons of the Democratic party (and the media) to urge him to step aside, it was beginning to look from my humble vantage (and to my great disappointment) like he might have weathered the storm. To make matters worse, amid Biden's feeble but firm protestations against calls for him to end his campaign, last weekend we were treated to the spectacle of Donald Trump surviving an assassination attempt with a mere nick to his ear and a killer iconographic moment. It seemed as if all hope was lost in any effort to defeat Trump in November-- a rather bleak state of affairs given the rising specter of the very autocratic, gains-cancelling Project 2025 threatening to be instantiated on Day 1 of Trump's increasingly assured re-election among its emboldened architects at the precious interest Heritage Foundation. I had resigned myself to bearing witness to a slow motion car crash between now and November as Biden made daily assurances that he would resist any and every call for him to step aside.
Daily headlines indicating that the end was near for Biden rang increasingly hollow. It wasn't until Obama telegraphed that he might be onboard with a different name at the top of the ticket that it felt at last like the appearance of a fracture in the wall of Biden's defenses. After one final report of the incumbent's intention to defy the riptide of discontent with his continued bid for re-election among the elite, at long last the news came today-- it was true. He was stepping aside from the campaign. He had endorsed the nomination of his Vice President Kamala Harris as his replacement at the top of the ticket. Thank the void at the center of the universe!
After a year of my own discontent with Biden's bid for re-election, it has been a little de-moralizing rooting for the orchestrations of the idiotic donors, media and other elites who saw nothing wrong with Biden standing for another term throughout an entire primary season in which serious challenges within the party were ignored when they weren't actively quashed, until that debate in which the problems that everyone knew were there could no longer be ignored. When Bernie Sanders and the squad alone urged caution in switching out the winner of the primary mid-stream, it gave me extra pause. And as a result of acknowledgement of the particular perils of Project 2025 especially in light of the uncertainties about whether Biden would be replaced and if so who with, I found myself making arguments that came uncomfortably close to "Vote Blue No Matter Who." If I search within myself, they were identical. My plan this week was in fact to make another case against Third Party voting-- something that might have been easier had I not attempted to prepare myself for it by listening to some conversations online to the contrary that reminded me that if nothing else (and there really is nothing else that third parties are good for in this unfortunate winner take all system), at least they are proving grounds for policies and programs the best of which often eventually find their way into the platforms of the duopoly-- never by themselves, but always ministered by those aiming to change the mooshiest party from within.
It would be easy to beat myself up about the strange bedfellows I have fallen into company with in my desire to defeat Project 2025.
But today, I dream and take a moment to rejoice.
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| A bunch of sharp tacks or what! |
A series of unfortunate events:
Bernie Sanders Urges Joe Biden to Remain in the race - Weeks after Biden's disastrous debate performance, calls for his resignation from the ticket were coming from every quarter of the Democratic and Media establishments. (From the Republican quarters, not so much.). While Biden himself and his organization gave no indication of any intention to comply with the elite consensus, representatives of a certain contingent of earnest resigned Biden voter kept showing up in public forums to complain about the machinations. It was true: every 3rd tier democratic operative you've never heard of and editorial board joined in on a chorus respectfully thanking Joe Biden for his service but raising intimations that perhaps it was time for him to pass the mantle to the next generation of Democrat (or better yet, younger) to a clamor. In response to the commandeering of the ticket post primary season by a coterie of professional pols and pundits (and speaking on behalf of the bewildered stalwarts complaining of a need to stick not necessarily with Joe Biden as with the wisdom of primary voters), Bernie Sanders's appeal to leave things as voters think they left them this spring makes a populist kind of sense. Biden's steadfast refusal to leave the ticket in any hands other than his own has for the time being caused some of the clamor to mute. Still for about 10 minutes this weekend, before Joe put his foot down in Michigan and before the nasty incident at Trump's rally in Pennsylvania, I couldn't help but find myself daydreaming about the difference it would make in an otherwise dismal election year to have some new exciting juice replacing Biden's iron-poor blood at the top of the democratic ticket. It didn't last. It never does.
Trump Iconography Enhancement - I’m hoping the full account of what transpired in Pennsylvania this weekend comes out soon to militate the assured sympathy vote. It’s almost a little too perfect. How did just the ear get clipped with semi-automatic fire? Lucky motherfucker? Or did Jesus intervene? Suffice it to say the annoyance factor of campaign 2024 continues to pile on.* (If Biden had left the ticket by now would Trump's ear be intact?) Before the Trump incident, I watched a debate between Cenk Uygur and Allan Lichtman on whether Biden should drop out. Lichtman (one of those perennial NPR and PBS consultant types) is the guy who developed 13 “keys” that he claims are more predictive than polls. He’s predicted every election since 1980 except 2000 (for “excusable” reasons) — in 2016 he thought Trump would win the popular vote too; otherwise he’s been spot on. Lichtman insists Biden’s keys favor him. The two strongest of them for Biden this year are incumbency and an uncontested primary <easy... count to 10...> neither of which would transfer to Kamala Harris (or any other replacement) if Biden merely exits or is expelled from the race. Lichtman is so beholden to his keys that he thinks the best way to replace Biden on the ticket would be for him to resign the presidency so that incumbency could transfer to Kamala through proper channels. Uygur has been predicting a Trump blowout for a long time—it’s why he ran for that brief moment back in winter—and he’s of course urging the dems to switch to somebody-- anybody-- whose brain is not half gone (to use Uygur’s words.) And of course Biden doubled down on remaining the candidate. For about 5 minutes this weekend, before all of that I was daydreaming about a shake-up in the dem ticket generating some deserved excitement as the only means of deterring a Trump victory. I’m hopeless now. I wonder if any of Lichtman’s keys got re-set by Trump’s propaganda windfall.
Project 2025 Comes Out of the Closet - Kevin Roberts, president of the anti-American Heritage Foundation, the main architect and steward of Project 2025 recently explained on Steve Bannon's podcast the high hopes that he and his cohort have for what a Trump re-election will mean: "...we are in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.” I have 0 respect for Dems—nevertheless, it’s looking like it’s once again for the third election in a row either the Dems or Trump; and Project 2025 underlines for me which of those 2 has to win, whether the name on the ticket is Joe Biden or Howdy Doody. (At least this is the panic I find myself in lately.) I am less and less convinced that my panic is a) typical and 2) necessarily warranted, as I realize I might be more panicked than necessary due to problems of personality, intellectual shortcoming and character in myself that are exceptionally egregious. But as of today I can’t see myself, given the incredibly flawed system we have, not voting against Trump, which I equate with voting Dem. I also think, and could be wrong but I’m feeling more and more like the way to stick it to the duopoly (this duopoly, the American anti-democratic system of elite maintenance of itself) is really to commandeer one and or both of the parties and force them to bend correctly to the people’s will. This strikes me as a more realistic and productive way to fritter our time until the sortition revolution than offering a third party as a landing (and dying) place for the votes of the malcontented.
J.D. Vance for Vice- Trump is officially nominated and has named former hillbilly, Trump skeptic/explainer, and venture capitalist J.D. Vance of Ohio as his running mate. Vance is a horrible muppet of Peter Thiele, but in light of everything else this has the impact of a grain of sand thrown into an abyss.
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| Do you count 8 of Lichtman's keys that apply to Biden in his present state v Trump? I don't. Even if you grant that Dems did not allow a contentious primary, a primary is a rather arbitrary time frame. There is contention now for Biden's removal from the ticket. |
