The Big Miss

President Trump is many things to many people, a walking, tweeting Rorshach.  He is a fascinating character with a unique ability to elicit either blind, irrational hatred or blind, irrational loyalty.  Most people, unfortunately, are utterly incapable of being remotely objective about this man.  This is due to his personality but also, in larger part, to how he is portrayed in the mainstream media. 

Of all the aspects of Trump that I find so interesting, perhaps the greatest of all is how the media, in their insatiable quest to slander and destroy Trump, have almost universally missed the biggest story in the history of modern American politics, the stuff that journalists fantasize about, the stereotypical Woodward-Bernstein moment amplified by a great order of magnitude.  It was right there in front of them.  And they missed it.  Entirely.

To put this into a different light, let's imagine what it would have looked like if the election of Donald Trump, and the investigations associated with that event, had instead been the 2008 election of Barack Obama.  What would that have looked like?

It's 2007.  A political neophyte begins an improbable campaign for the presidency.  He is at first considered a long shot, but it soon becomes clear he may actually capture his party's nomination and then the presidency.  As his chances of election seem to improve, members of the Bush administration become concerned, as they, the divinely appointed guardians of the republic, understand that Barack Hussein Obama simply can not be allowed to become president.

The John McCain campaign pays foreigners for completely unverified rumors than Barack Obama is a Manchurian Candidate, secretly in the pay of, or under the sway of, Saudi Arabia.  On the basis of this picture:

The McCain campaign brings these slanderous rumors, provided by paid foreign actors, to the Bush administration.  The Bush administration uses this "information" to secure warrants to surveil the Obama campaign.

As the Obama campaign gains strength, George W. Bush's FBI director and CIA director urge their inteligence officers to use whatever means they can to prove that the potential future president is a treasonous interloper.

Members of George W. Bush's Department of Justice exchange texts and emails in which they frantically assure themselves that Obama can't possible win, while also working feverishly to fabricate an "insurance policy" for the unlikely event that this incredibly dangerous man is actually duly elected to the presidency.

Obama wins.  The Republicans in Congress, and the mainstream media, spend the next two years investigating Obama-Saudi collusion.  George W. Bush's former FBI and CIA directors appear hundreds and hundreds of time on cable news outlets, sternly assuring viewers that they have secret information that proves the President's treason, and that said treason will be revealed in due time.

When the investigation ends, it becomes clear that there was no Obama-Saudi collusion.  The media and members of the previous administration had used all the combined power of the deep state (yes, there is such a thing) and the public airwaves to try to unseat a duly-elected president who they claimed had commited treason, a crime punishable by death.

How would the media have covered George W. Bush's administration spying on the Obama campaign?  How would they have covered the McCain campaign's use of paid foreign actors' gossip?  How would they have covered FBI agents desparetely pursuing an insurance policy to protect the deep state from the American electorate?

If this had happened to Obama in 2008 instead of Trump in 2016, the media would have gotten it right, I suspect.  They would have reported the truth:  that a sitting Republican administration and a current Republican nominee had conspired to slander and persecute their political rivals, and that the American people speaking via their votes did absolutely nothing to halt or slow this conspiracy.

That scenario would have been reported, rightly, as the biggest scandal in American history, as an attempted coup d'etat orchestrated by elected and un-elected members of the government, with the collusion of the mainstream media.  It would have shaken Washington, indeed the whole country, to its core.  So why did they miss this?

Two reasons.  Hatred of Trump and love for Obama.  They knew Trump was a traitor.  And they knew that the Obama administration could never be involved in such sordid skuldugery.  The rabid, fanatical, dead-eyed hatred of Donald Trump blinded the media to a degree that is impossible to exaggerate. 

Suddenly, the intelligence communities could do no wrong.  Suddenly, reporters did not require verification, or named sources.  "If True...." became a go-to, but soon even that faded away.  Suddenly, it became legitimate to spy on political opponents.

Because of their absurd prejudice, their collective narcissism, their grotesque self-regard, and their crippling confirmation bias, the media missed an unprecedented opportunity to earn the respect of the American people by actually doing their jobs.

During the 1970's, the media breathlessly reported on a president who spied on his political opponents, on American intelligence agencies illegally spying on American citizens of all stripes, from college students to reporters to presidential candidates. 

Thanks to this reporting, the American people learned that intelligence agencies are inherently a threat to a free people, and that we must be on guard against presidents using these agencies for domestic political espionage.  We learned this lesson.  The media taught us this lesson.  Then the media willfully ignored this very truth because....Orange Man Bad.

They have destroyed their credibility.  This is very bad for the country.  But it's not Trump's fault.  He was actually the victim in all of this, no matter how unsympathetic a victim he is.  How did Trump get the media to commit reputational suicide?  He criticized them.  This, they could not abide.  And in their incandescent juvenile rage, they proved that Trump was right, more right than anyone, including Trump himself, could ever have imagined.

   

XLIV

Barack Obama's presidency ends tomorrow.  Another way to measure the passage of time, among other things.  I am 37 years old.  Tomorrow I will be 7 presidents old.

Carter, Reagan, Bush, Clinton, Bush, Obama, Trump.  

As Obama's presidency comes to an end, I am drawn back to the person I was when it began, and I am drawn towards the urge to assess his tenure as opposed to what I imagined it would have been.

When Obama was elected, I was still in my 20's.  Barely, but still.  I had just met my future wife and had just begun training for my future career.  I had not yet purchased my future house, nor the house after that.  I had not yet met my future son, nor my future daughter.  But I simply knew that electing Barack Obama would solve a great deal of America's ills, if not the entire world's.

In other words, I was so much older then, I'm younger than that now.

Synergy much?

To be honest, I am more embarrassed than nostalgic when I think of how I sacrificed my beliefs, my common sense, and my knowledge of history to indulge in the cultish Obama worship of 2008.

But context is important.  Obama would not have been possible without Bush, just as Trump would not have been possible without Obama.  And just as Hillary would have been possible without either or both of them.

Nope.

Nope.

Obama was the perfect rebuke to Bush.  Obama was articulate, erudite, not from a dynasty, opposed to the Iraq war, etc.  And, obviously, he was black.  So here was a chance to undo the worst of Bush's Reign of Error and prove to the world what I already believed; that prejudice was more an exaggerated indulgence of losers and professors than a day-to-day reality in 21st century America.

I cried when Obama was elected.  I cried the next day when my African-American landlord came to the door of my shitty apartment in the shittiest neighborhood in a shitty city and banged on my door, yelling my name.  I knew exactly why he was fired up, and when I opened the door, we instantly jumped into a bearhug.  No words necessary.

I cried when he was sworn in and danced with his wife to "At Last" by Ella Fitzgerald.  In retrospect, that's alot of crying, and perhaps quite pathetic.  But it happened.  I will tell my children about how those days felt.  But I will also tell them about what the object of my embarrassingly naive adoration did once in office.

Obama was a good president by some measures, but there are a few decisions he made which, at this moment in time, seem the most important of his presidency.

1)  Obamacare

Ooof.  Stereotypical liberal nonsense.  Great intentions.  Very expensive.  Does it work?  No, but now that we have it, it would be cruel to undo it.

This was the worst of both worlds.  It used the power of the State to compel people to 1) buy a product from a private company and 2) pay for other people to be able to buy a product from a private company if said other person could not afford it.  Replace "health insurance" with "car" or "iphone" or "blu-ray player" and consider the constitutionality of such a scheme.

If health care is a right, it must be guaranteed by the government and paid for with taxes, not bought from private companies via government coercion.

2)  Libya

Come On.  The primary reason I voted for Obama was that he claimed to be against the Iraq war.  The case for war in Iraq was actually far stronger than the case for the war in Libya, which is like saying that Terminator Genisys was better than Terminator Salvation; damning with faint praise.  Turns out that if you liked George W. Bush's foreign policy, you probably loved Obama's.

3)  Image

Image matters, but not in the way our popular culture supposes.  Obama carried himself with a style and grace that, while not sufficient, were very important.  He presented such a consistent image of poise, measured speech, empathy, and virtue, that it could not have possibly been entirely fabricated.  Nobody can fake it for that long.  This is a good man.

Obama, like all presidents in the last 100 years, has ignored the constitution, rained sudden death upon people and nations without legal sanction, kept secret huge swaths of what should be public information, and fancied himself uniquely endowed to shape history to his whims.

But he was, by some measure, the best president of my life.  There are many moments that make me feel this way, not all from those heady, romantic days of '08 and '09.  Consider:

What a man.  The president cheapens every person.  But what a man.

What the Prequels Got Right

There is, among Star Wars fans, a generational divide that almost always accurately predicts how the fan in question feels about the prequels.  For fans over 30, the prequels were a huge disappointment, a betrayal of their very childhoods.  For fans under 30, the prequels are simply Star Wars movies, and while they may not love them, they see no clear demarcation between perfect originals and awful prequels.

But as time passes, and as the Disneyfication of Star Wars takes shape, certain truths about Star Wars have occured to me.  First, the originals are not perfect.  Second, the prequels got some things right.

The things the prequels got decidedly wrong are in no short supply.  10-year old Anakin.  Awful. A whiny, hairless Ewok. Every line of dialogue spoken between Anakin and Padme.  Unbearable.  Just really, deeply, profoundly terrible.

 Killing Darth Maul in Episode 1.  Idiotic.  Imagine how different the prequels would have been if Darth Maul had survived and stalked Obi-Wan and Anakin for two more movies.  Imagine the tension that would have built over the arc of the story.  Instead, Darth Maul was replaced with this guy:

Sign up now for Medicare part D!

  And, of course...

The official end of my childhood.

But there are many things, in retrospect, that the prequels got right.  Here they are in no particular order:

1)  Politics.  The story-line of how the Emperor (probably the best character in the prequels) came to power was very well done.  The manipulation, the intrigue, the misdirection, were very compelling.  It was House of Card in space, and it added heft and depth to the backstory, making episodes 4 through 6 even better than they already were.

2)  Scenery.  While the prequels are often derided as relying too much on CGI, which is a fair assessment, they are still beautiful to look at.  They bring the universe to life and add exotic and wildly original flair to the setting of the saga.  All lovers of The Empire Strikes back, of which I am absolutely one, should remember that the original version of Cloud City's interior look like it was filmed in the bowels of a sports stadium.  While the CGI scenery of the prequels did not make the movies good, it absolutely made them better than they otherwise would have been.

3)  Originality.  Episodes 1 through 3 are the only 3 consecutive movies in the saga without a Death Star, which should serve as further proof that episodes 4 through 6 were far from perfect and that episode 7 was, without a doubt, the least original film in the franchise by FAR.  (Let's all just stipulate that Starkiller Base was Death Star 3)

4)  Music.  Episode 1, as disappointing as it was, managed to do at least 2 really remarkable things.  The first was introducing a bad guy perhaps as terrifying as Darth Vader.  And again, imagine how much more terror and suspense could have been added had Darth Maul stalked the Jedi throughout 3 movies rather than just 1.  Inversely, imagine the original trilogy if Luke killed Vader in episode 4. 

The second one was introducing a piece of music perhaps as evocative and memorable as any score from the originals, which boasted some of the best scores in movie history.

So while the prequels remain disappointing overall compared to the original trilogy, true fans should reconcile with three truths:  The originals are not perfect.  The prequels are not entirely without merit.  And if Episode 8 ends up being the same paint-by-numbers bore-fest as Episode 7, the prequels will continue to retroactively look better and better.

Knowing When to Quit

For all red-blooded Americans of a certain age, there are heroes of cinema which bring us back to our childhood, back to Nintendo, back to VHS, back to acne, back to basketball all day.  Among the characters who trigger instant and intoxicating nostalgia in my generation are Indiana Jones, John J. Rambo, John McClane, and Rocky Balboa.

And props to Sylvester Stallone for creating and personifying two of these four amazing characters.

Really?  This guy?  Yes.  This guy.

These four characters' sagas share something else: they all disappeared from the screen for over a decade and then came back when my generation was having children of their own.  The actors didn't need the work, but they chose to resurrect their characters, surely acknowledging the possibility of diluting their previous glory.

Indiana Jones is one of the most remarkable characters in movie history, as is Han Solo, both played during the same period by Harrison Ford.  Fans could be forgiven for assuming that the Indy saga concluded with The LAST Crusade.  But no.

When Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull came out in 2008, 19 years had elapsed since the release of the Last Crusade.  In other words, there were adults who saw the 4th Indiana Jones movie who had not been born when the 3rd Indiana Jones movie came out.

And it was awful.  Really, really awful.  There is a 5th installment in the works and, as a child of the 80's, I am positively thrilled by this.  But I doubt it will improve the overall caliber of the saga, and I fear it may in fact only further degrade it.

John J. Rambo is a much more complex character than many people realize.  The original Rambo trilogy, like the original Indiana Jones trilogy, followed a certain arc.  Also like Indy, John J's character took 20 years off between their 3rd and 4th films.

2008's "Rambo" (just call it Rambo IV, honestly) was not nearly as bad as the 4th Indy installment, but it was just as pointless.  People associate Rambo with violence, and not without reason, but in the first film. First Blood, Rambo killed one person (by accident).  In the 4th installment, he kills hundreds.  And he added nothing to his character's arc in the process.

John McClane had a 12 year hiatus between the 3rd and 4th installments of Die Hard.  The 4th film was actually quite good in certain ways.  But also, McClane went from a vulnerable, actual person to someone who literally drove a semi-trailer into a fighter jet.  So.....yeah. 

Overall, however, Die Hard 4 did not detract from the franchise.  But then this happened...

This requires no explanation; it was as bad as it looks

So far, we've covered Indiana Jones, Rambo, and Die Hard.  While I love these characters and will gladly and greedily consume any further movies with any of them, none of these sagas were made better by their additions following more than a decade of dormancy.

Now, for the exception.  Rocky Balboa is the only one of these characters whose latest iterations have added to the character and to the story.  The 6th and 7th installments of the Rocky saga are tremendous.  In these movies, Rocky is.....old.  Sick.  Slowing down.  Pondering mortality.  You know, real life.

He's not driving trucks into jets, he's not surviving nuclear bombs by climbing into a fridge, he's not unloading automatic weapons.  He's a person.  It's real.  It's devastating.  And it's fantastic.

The 6th installment came out 16 years after the 5th.

The 7th installment came out 9 years after the 6th, and at least one more is in the works.  He's not rushing it.  He's not relying on special effects.  He's following the actual moral arc of a character he created 40 years ago, and it is remarkable to behold.

There's such a thing as knowing when to quit.  Luckily for us, Rocky knows when not to quit.

To Invade, Or To Invite (Part II)

 
To invade, or to invite?  If the reader has not read the first half of this post, you can do so below.

The United States has committed grievous sins against the Muslim, specifically Arab, nations over the past two decades.  The only reason we need to consider inviting these people is because we've invaded these people.

The American government, media, and public have a disgusting relationship with this reality, bred through ignorance, evil, or an admixture of the two, which essentially denies our direct responsibility for military actions, whether overt or covert, which have led to the death of well over 1 million Muslims, the displacement and dispossession of millions more, and the undying hatred of tens of millions more.

In the first part of this post I attempted to illustrate a few (among many) examples of how invading Muslims leads to death, debt, and a surrendering of any pretense of moral virtue on our behalf.  Put simply: we borrow money our grand-kids will have to pay back in order to kill people who didn't attack us, and then we deny that we did any such thing.

The other side of this amoral coin is inviting.  Invading and inviting.  We kill people who did not harm us, we destroy their societies, then we invite their wretched and starving and bitter neighbors into our country.  And, just as we deny that we attacked them, we deny that they could possibly dislike us, or even have different values than us.

Muslim civilization is NOT the same as Western Civilization.  I'm starting small here.  Muslims from Muslim majority countries do NOT come from the same civilization as people from America and Europe do.  To deny the difference between civilizations is as intellectually idiotic as denying the difference between Barbecue and Sushi. 

Where most people start getting uncomfortable is when the question arises that asks if the differences between culture can be qualified.  In other words, if two cultures are different, can we then say that one is better than the other?

The purpose of this post is not to answer that question, but to illustrate the danger in denying that differences even exist, even if we refuse to assign different moral values to the different things in question.

Here is what Western Civilization is based on in brief:  rule of law, separation of church and state, limits on the power of the government, legal equality for all minorities.  The West does not do these things perfectly, because the West is run by people and people are not perfect.  

But Plato, one of the founders of Western thought, in the Platonic Ideals, tell us that we need to recognize that perfection is impossible while simultaneously recognizing that not trying to get just a little bit closer to perfection every day is to waste your life entirely.

The West is not perfect, but it has crawled slowly, painfully, bloodily, so bloodily, towards an ideal.  The Muslim world is, by and large, not on that trajectory.  There is no separation of religion and state in mainstream Islamic theology and politics.

Here we have police beating women for being dressed "immodestly".  This was filmed, of course, in New York....or not.

The state of women in the Islamic world is miserable.  The state of ethnic minorities in Muslim nations is deplorable.  The state of Jews in the Muslim world is...well, there aren't any.  But there are Muslims in Israel.  The state of gays in the Muslim world is to be seconds from death at any moment.  I could go on.

This does not mean that most Muslims are bad people.  They simply come from a different culture with different values.  The question at hand is: if we invite people from a very, very different culture into our country, will those people adopt our values, or will they act on the values from their home countries?

Tolerance is great, but tolerating in-tolerance is suicide, especially for minority groups.  Let me be super-blunt: if you are gay, or female, or Jewish, or Christian, or atheist (these groups account for about 98% of the U.S. population), you would be in mortal danger in most Muslims nations if you tried to live the life you take for granted in the United State.

This question, and this tension, is as old as the republic itself.  What types of people can the United States absorb and still be the United States?  Earlier waves of immigrants and refugees were eyed with suspicion, apathy, or outright hatred.

But for most of this country's history, immigrants were from cultures and countries far, far more similar to the United States than 21st century migrants, refugees, and immigrants from the Muslim world.

And, and this is no small point, immigrants from Ireland, Italy, and Mexico were not coming from the very countries that the United States had been invading and destabilizing.

Vito Corleone came to Ellis Island fleeing Sicilian crime in Sicily, not American drone strikes in Sicily.  There's a difference.

We can take the moral leap of welcoming radically different people into our society as an act of mercy and altruism.  OR we can take a much smaller moral hop of STOP KILLING MUSLIMS AND DRIVING THEM OUT OF THEIR HOMES AND INTO OURS. 

To Invade or to Invite? (Part 1)

The American relationship with the Muslim World is at once cynical and naive, simultaneously culpable and ignorant, defined from every angle as an inability or unwillingness to acknowledge obvious truths about the immorality of invading peoples' home and the absurdity of inviting them into ours.

So, to invade, or to invite?  In my opinion, we should do neither.  As a statement of unfortunate fact, we are doing both.  This is immoral and stupid.  Were we immoral without also being stupid, we would pick one or the other.  But, since our policy is both immoral and stupid, we find ourselves doing both.

First things first: what is the cost of invading Muslim nations?

The first Gulf War of 1991, fought to redeem and restore a disgusting, anti-Semitic, medieval family to the throne of an artificial nation created 30 years before as essentially a naval refueling station for the West, killed 150,000 people in 6 weeks.  All for Kuwait.

Because what kind of world would it be without this guy?

The ruling family of Kuwait thanked us for our efforts by carrying out ethnic cleansing, expelling the tens of thousands of Palestinians living and working in their country.  And we thanked ourselves by building what were meant to be permanent U.S. military bases in Saudi Arabia, the holiest land for Muslims.  

Many Muslims were not impressed by the persecution of the Palestinians or the stationing of American soldiers in Arabia.  One Muslim who wrote and spoke about this event extensively in the 1990's comes to mind....

What could go wrong?

After the 1991 war, the United States enforced sanctions on Iraq that killed 500,000 children. Children.  The U.S. did not dispute this fact; instead Bill Clinton's Secretary of State solemnly informed us:

Not big into that whole "conscience" thing, huh?

This is the woman who said that any woman who did not support Hillary Clinton for president in 2016 deserved a "special place in hell".  Way to keep things in perspective, Masters of the Universe!

The 2003 invasion of Iraq led to the death, by decade's end, of one million Iraqis.  But it was all for a good cause, right?  We had to invade Iraq because...oh honestly, fuck it, I can't even pretend to make light of this anymore.

So we switched Presidents in 2009 and got a man who didn't believe in "stupid" wars.  A man who was judicious by nature and who would never overthrow a government he found distasteful because of the sober realization that what replaces such governments is usually much more dangerous.

Ah yes, No Drama Obama would surely spare us any more of this nonsense, for practical reasons if not moral ones.  Yeah, no.

"Hey, nice to meet you.  Now, if you'll excuse me, I need to go borrow some money from China and use it to destroy your
country."

Libya was one of the safest, most prosperous Muslim nations with perhaps the highest degree of respect for and mobility of women.  And now?

The above picture needs no caption; we all know the drill by now.  Christians used to thrive in Libya. Now they are beheaded as the satanic thugs in black gaze across the Mediterranean towards Europe, licking their chops.

When America goes to war, most of our country treats it as a TV show.  It is not.  It is death.  That's all war is.  There's nothing heroic or romantic about it.  It is the ripping apart of human beings, the evisceration of men, children, grandmothers, and everything else.  It is 4 year old boys with their intestines spilling out of their stomach because a cluster bomb exploded too close to their house.  It is the father watching his child die, unable to do anything but swear revenge.

When the United States goes to war, what we are doing is killing people.  Thousands upon thousands of people, most of them entirely innocent.  Even the "guilty" ones are usually "guilty" of nothing other than what most people would do in such situations: defending their homes from invaders.

We need to grow up as a nation.  We need to understand the inherent immorality of war.  We need to stop the narcissistic nonsense that tells that people will "welcome" us if we invade their homes.  We need to develop some sort of consensus that civilized people are supposed to have almost without thinking about it:  killing is wrong.  It may occasionally be necessary, but it's always wrong.  And it always has consequences.

American interventions in the Middle East have not only killed literally millions of people in my lifetime; they have also forced millions more out of their homes.  Those broken and brutalized people are fleeing their homelands.  Before we can assess where they should go, we need to be honest about why they are leaving.

Godspeed, John Glenn

President Kennedy in the rear seat of an open limousine, What Could Go Wrong?

The death of John Glenn makes perfect sense in 2016.  There were few men like him left, men of a simpler time (which is not to say a better time) of clear-cut narratives of American greatness, the brand of greatness that had nothing to do with promising to build rape-proof walls across the desert.

John Glenn was not the first man in space (Yuri Gagarin) or the first man to orbit the earth (Gagarin again).  Nor was he even the first American in space (Alan Shepard) or the second American in space (Gus Grissom).  He was the first American to orbit the earth.

The enterprise which Kennedy set forth and which Glenn pioneered was an audacious human endeavor, and uniquely American.  We promised to achieve something (landing on the moon) for which there was no existing technology, no mental framework, no consensus among experts that the thing was even theoretically possible (what if the lunar surface were covered by a layer of dust that would swallow up any landing craft?)

But the goal was set, and it was set very publicly, ensuring either outright triumph or total humiliation. 

Why would someone strap themselves into a can with less legroom than a compact car and then strap that can on top of a missile and then fire that missile into the atmosphere?  Because that's what it means to be human; you do it because you can conceive it. 

If you had told someone in 1962 after Glenn's flight that we would indeed reach the moon by 1969, they would be capable of believing that.

If you had told someone in 1962 after Glenn's flight that Fidel Castro would live for another 54 years, they would not have been capable of believing that.

If you had told someone in 1962 after Glenn's flight that in 1972 America would abandon the moon and eventually stop even orbiting the earth, they would have been incredulous.

Annnnnnnd we're done here.

In the 1990's John Glenn returned to space on the now-defunct Space Shuttle.  This flight is as fitting a symbol of the demise of the American space program as Glenn's first flight was a symbol of its ascension.

What was the point of that Space Shuttle mission?  Or of any Space Shuttle mission?  To fly around in circles in Low Earth Orbit.  And that's cool, but...

Wait, didn't I already do this?

The Space Shuttle program flew well over 100 missions to nowhere.  It surely made important scientific observations and breakthroughs.  The launch and subsequent repair and improval of the Hubble Space Telescope was surely its most important accomplishment.

Where's that 5/8 wrench?

Why are we not spending more money on this???

But the uncomfortable and inconvenient question surrounding most Shuttle missions, including the two that killed all astronauts on board, was "why is this worth risking human life?".  There was no clear answer to that question.

Just as America's wars during Glenn's life became harder to explain, justify, or identify an ultimate goal, the space program did the same.

When Glenn was young, there was consensus on certain things that has been lost.  Some would argue that we are better off without that consensus, and perhaps we are.  But there is also a clarity of purpose that has been lost.  As Kennedy's contemporaries continue to shuffle off the mortal coil, we are left with that age-old question: is there really any such thing as the "good old days"?