Useless stuff I’m glad
I learned (mostly in high school)
by David Benjamin
“… And we, so sadly past the bonfire and celebration of our birth,
Shall burn quietly,
Passing, on a zephyr, into a new realm
And blaze anew.”
— David Benjamin
Robert M. LaFollette High school yearbook, 1967
MADISON,
Wis. — Looking forward to seeing my best friend from high school at our
50th reunion, I realized that he and I are probably the only surviving
members of the Class of ’67 who can click our heels in sequence. We did
not seek this knowledge. It was thrust upon us by a blonde named Jillsey
(Class of ’68), who had snagged the female lead (Marian the Librarian)
in the school production of The Music Man. Jill was recruiting
male dancers for the musical’s underpopulated corps de ballet. Dick, her
erstwhile boyfriend, and I, her stalker, were eminently available — and
pliable.
So, Dick and I ended up cavorting on stage in front of
people. Jill also trapped Larry Stamm, whose premature demise — along
with those of Fred Astaire, Eleanor Powell and Gene Kelly — exacerbated
the national shortage of heel-clickers.
If you’ve ever tried
this trick, even once, you realize that it’s way harder than Gregory
Hines (Oh my God! He’s gone, too!) ever made it look. Clicking away ten
times in a row — which Dick, Larry and me had to do — is pure rocket
science.
Since my Music Man moment, I’ve gone older and
fatter, but I can still knock off a few heel-clicks. This useless relict
of my high-school days lets me apart from most of mankind. I cherish it
— rather perversely — more than much of the book-learning I’ve since
forgotten.
Thoughts of heel-clicking reminded me of other
superfluous lessons that were not on the LaFollette High School
curriculum, among which, for example, was the hard-learned conviction
that Girls Are People.
High school, unfortunately, coincides with
puberty. For boys, this clash of hormones with co-education triggers a
case of either reckless lust or paralyzing terror — directed at the
girls who were previously our occasional playmates or, in most cases,
furniture. Suddenly, they had all our attention but were not really
human. Without warning, they became objects of an unspeakable (or
overspoken) desire. This objectification, in those days, was encouraged
by every boy’s guide to manly suavity in 1967 — Playboy magazine.
We prowled our adolescence seeking the Playmate of the Month, but were
willing to settle for the girl in the desk in front of us in Mr.
Swanson’s English class.
(No, the other Mr. Swanson.).
Of
course, most boys, including me, could not find first base with the aid
of Sacajawea and a Rand McNally road atlas. We envied those James
Bondian paragons in our midst, a certain Dave and a particular Mark, who
exercised a wondrous, inexplicable power over girls. They were too
aloof and cool to intimate their secret. So the rest of us muddled about
and scored the occasional date, before which we drenched ourselves in
English Leather. We didn’t progress ’til much later, when we either
joined the Sexual Revolution, or married a girl who knew what goes
where, and when.
Although I failed chronically to win the heart
(or any other organ) of some girl, any girl, I started befriending babes
like Jill, for whom I was every bit as sexy as, say, a day-old oleo
sandwich on the cafeteria floor, but who found me vaguely amusing. I
served her by making jokes, sharing girlish secrets, listening to her
troubles, mocking her vanities and casting wry aspersions on her
cavalcade of airhead boyfriends.
This strategy actually got me
closer to a number of beautiful and vivacious girls than many of their
nominal boyfriends ever got. But those guys got kissed.
Me? Eh.
This
knack — for communicating with women without turning them on— became
the story of my life. Platonic bonding wasn’t in any of my high school
courses, but if not for high school, I might have wasted years wallowing
in meaningless sex.
While I was I learning, more or less, how
to talk to girls, I also learned that love is comedy, that romance is an
accidental mismatch that leads more often to heartbreak than joy. But I
also figured out, by and by, that few heartbreaks are permanent. Many
end with outright relief and most romances, especially those that fail,
come back to mind not painfully, but nostalgically.
There are, I know, several almost-girlfriends from high school whom I’d love to find, to reminisce, to apologize, and laugh.
I
learned as we all do that high-school, finally, is irrelevant. Among my
classmates, I know for sure only two of us — me and Vogt — who are
doing the same thing we did in high school. Vogt studied venomous
reptiles, and still does. I write the same sort of drivel I wrote when I
was 15. Neither of us learned our vocation from our high school
teachers, especially Vogt. (I had English teachers but I fought them
more than I heeded them).
Everyone else either found something
to do that they didn’t even think about in school, or they adjusted
their dreams when reality (or Vietnam) popped up and whacked them across
the chops. But all of us pressed on, did jobs, made careers of one sort
or another, got married, got divorced (or didn’t), found someone else
(if necessary), got older, got fatter (or shrank) and by now we’re all
signed up for Medicare and Social Security.
Best of all, we
mellowed out. Few today cling to the petty triumphs, heartbreaks, loves,
hates and grudges that haunted us 50 years ago. Almost all of the guys
who wanted to take me out behind the gym and beat me up can’t remember
who I was.
Finally, despite its sheer pointlessness, high
school’s one of the most relevant experiences we’ve ever lived. Having
holed up elsewhere in the world, I’ve come to understand that high
school is a rare passage, uniquely American. On the brink of adulthood,
we are plunged — without our consent — into a random society of old
friends and new strangers, forced to communicate, study, experiment,
fight, play, and explore our own insides more intensely than we’ll have
time to do again in our lives, until it’s too late.
High school
is where most of us learned how to relate to others, how not to relate,
how goddamn hard it is to relate, how remarkable it is to find a friend,
to encounter a person — or persons — whom you will trust completely as
long as you live.
When I see Dick, after five or ten years,
there’s no time or space between us. We start up as though we’d been
apart only as long it took for Dick to go to Mr. Meissen’s chemistry
class and for me to muddle through Latin III with Mrs. Atkins.
As the writer in the film Stand By Me
said at the end, we’ll never have friends like that again. Maybe that’s
what the grownups sent us to high school, against our will, to figure
out.
Sunday, August 27, 2017
Tuesday, August 15, 2017
The Weekly Screed (#827)
“… Many sides, many sides…”
by David Benjamin
“We are determined to take our country back. We are going to fulfill the promises of Donald Trump. That’s what believed in. That’s why we voted for Donald Trump.”
— David Duke, former Imperial Wizard, Ku Klux Klan
MADISON, Wis. — Well hooray for David Duke.
Duke scolded Donald Trump for chickening out Monday, when the president grudgingly chided the racist mob who rioted in Charlottesville and murdered Heather Heyer. Said Duke, “President Trump, please, for God’s sake, don’t feel like you need to say these things. It’s not going to do you any good.”
Duke is right. Trump gets no traction from bowing to “political correctness.”
However, looking at the president from a longer historical perspective, Trump’s surrender to civility is hardy a deviation from the norm. Since he began his unlikely White House campaign, Trump has been, ironically, the most politically correct public figure in America.
Certainly, on one hand, Trump has torn up the rhetorical playbook in U.S. politics. On the other hand, however, whenever he’s had the chance to candidly express his true feelings, he has backed down, as he did Monday in the least convincing presidential denunciation of racism since Andrew Johnson. Yes, Trump has pushed the envelope to its breaking point. But his signal failure — as a public speaker and the leader of a popular movement — is his reluctance to keep going and bust the envelope wide open.
Trump’s dilemma is one of the great rhetorical challenges in political history. All it takes to be conventionally PC is to practice the thoughtfulness, good taste and common courtesy that most people learn in childhood from parents and teachers. But when you style yourself as the patron saint of anti-PC, you have a responsibility to your insatiable believers to strip away the veneer of polite society, to seek out and articulate, brazenly, the vilest, most hateful and inflammatory, most “incorrect” terms available in the vast and vivid English language.
To suggest that Trump has fallen short of that ideal would be a big-ass understatement. Consider, for example, his terminology for the ethnic minority whom his father, Fred, systematically banned from his tenements in Queens. While most polite people prefer to say “black people” or “African-Americans” (I’m nostalgically attached to W.E.B. DuBois’ usage, “black folks”), Trump’s earliest euphemism was “the blacks.” If you listen carefully, you hear in that superfluous “the” an awkward air of condescension. Whenever Trump invoked “the blacks,” my memory heard the ugly word, “nigra,” which was adopted by genteel Southern bigots in the civil-rights era as a reluctant compromise between “Negro” and the déclassé “n-word.”
Trump finally got around to adopting the PC term, “African-American,” but it tripped not lightly off his tongue. He sounded like a first-year French student trying to pronounce “l’avenue des Champs Elyseés.”
Of course, “African-American,” or even “Negro,” was not the word bandied about the mansion when little Donny was growing up in Jamaica Estates. Nor is it the word his believers yearn — ache — to him him roar. David Duke has Trump pegged. He knows how much Trump wants to call a spade a spade — and a Scaramucci a wop. Duke can imagine — as can I — what would happen if Trump stood up on his golfcart legs before the faithful and said, without fear of consequences, “My fellow white Americans, I am devoted — as every true patriot must be devoted — to our never-ending, sacred mission of keeping the niggers down!”
Kaboom! The result would be a standing — no, jumping up and down — ovation, punctuated by a goose-step conga line, so ecstatic and riotous that Donald would be unable to utter an audible syllable for at least 15 minutes. He would be reduced to simply watching the grateful pandemonium he hath wrought, glowing orangely, strutting like a fatted rooster behind his presidential seal, applauding himself, sticking up his little thumbs now and then, and basking in the racial adoration that will be his lasting legacy in the American saga.
If he ever dared to abandon the prissiness pressed upon him by his pussyfooting advisors, Trump could unleash all the epithets that now stick in his politically correct throat. He could shout “jigaboo” and holler “hebe,” “spic” and “raghead.” He could indulge — cathartically! — in all the terms that demean the biggest minority of all, the group with whom his love/hate relationship will never be resolved: the bitches and broads, sluts, whores and pieces of ass who inflame his lust and (afterwards) incite his manly contempt.
Since Charlottesville, Donald Trump is — more than ever — the Great White Hope. If he’s true to his perfervid disciples, he has to end his flirtation with civilized discourse. If he keeps blowing his dog whistle without providing red meat, eventually even Lassie will turn on him. Trump owes it to the worst of his supporters — the only ones he has left — to be as crude, blunt, hate-filled and bigoted as they would like to be. They can see his heart thumping with spite and fear beneath his mortician’s suit and phallic necktie. But they want to hear it.
Cast off your shackles and spit it out, Donald! Answer the call of Steve Bannon, James Fields and the Daily Stormer. Trade that cockamamie U.S. flag pin for the Stars and Bars. Pull your dad’s white robe out of mothballs. Plant a giant, gasoline-soaked cross on the White House lawn — where Michelle used to grow veggies — and set it on fire. And then shout, Donald! Cry out, for all (white Christians) to hear you, the words of the colored preacher George Lincoln Rockwell used to call “Martin Luther Coon”:
“Free at last, free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last.”
by David Benjamin
“We are determined to take our country back. We are going to fulfill the promises of Donald Trump. That’s what believed in. That’s why we voted for Donald Trump.”
— David Duke, former Imperial Wizard, Ku Klux Klan
MADISON, Wis. — Well hooray for David Duke.
Duke scolded Donald Trump for chickening out Monday, when the president grudgingly chided the racist mob who rioted in Charlottesville and murdered Heather Heyer. Said Duke, “President Trump, please, for God’s sake, don’t feel like you need to say these things. It’s not going to do you any good.”
Duke is right. Trump gets no traction from bowing to “political correctness.”
However, looking at the president from a longer historical perspective, Trump’s surrender to civility is hardy a deviation from the norm. Since he began his unlikely White House campaign, Trump has been, ironically, the most politically correct public figure in America.
Certainly, on one hand, Trump has torn up the rhetorical playbook in U.S. politics. On the other hand, however, whenever he’s had the chance to candidly express his true feelings, he has backed down, as he did Monday in the least convincing presidential denunciation of racism since Andrew Johnson. Yes, Trump has pushed the envelope to its breaking point. But his signal failure — as a public speaker and the leader of a popular movement — is his reluctance to keep going and bust the envelope wide open.
Trump’s dilemma is one of the great rhetorical challenges in political history. All it takes to be conventionally PC is to practice the thoughtfulness, good taste and common courtesy that most people learn in childhood from parents and teachers. But when you style yourself as the patron saint of anti-PC, you have a responsibility to your insatiable believers to strip away the veneer of polite society, to seek out and articulate, brazenly, the vilest, most hateful and inflammatory, most “incorrect” terms available in the vast and vivid English language.
To suggest that Trump has fallen short of that ideal would be a big-ass understatement. Consider, for example, his terminology for the ethnic minority whom his father, Fred, systematically banned from his tenements in Queens. While most polite people prefer to say “black people” or “African-Americans” (I’m nostalgically attached to W.E.B. DuBois’ usage, “black folks”), Trump’s earliest euphemism was “the blacks.” If you listen carefully, you hear in that superfluous “the” an awkward air of condescension. Whenever Trump invoked “the blacks,” my memory heard the ugly word, “nigra,” which was adopted by genteel Southern bigots in the civil-rights era as a reluctant compromise between “Negro” and the déclassé “n-word.”
Trump finally got around to adopting the PC term, “African-American,” but it tripped not lightly off his tongue. He sounded like a first-year French student trying to pronounce “l’avenue des Champs Elyseés.”
Of course, “African-American,” or even “Negro,” was not the word bandied about the mansion when little Donny was growing up in Jamaica Estates. Nor is it the word his believers yearn — ache — to him him roar. David Duke has Trump pegged. He knows how much Trump wants to call a spade a spade — and a Scaramucci a wop. Duke can imagine — as can I — what would happen if Trump stood up on his golfcart legs before the faithful and said, without fear of consequences, “My fellow white Americans, I am devoted — as every true patriot must be devoted — to our never-ending, sacred mission of keeping the niggers down!”
Kaboom! The result would be a standing — no, jumping up and down — ovation, punctuated by a goose-step conga line, so ecstatic and riotous that Donald would be unable to utter an audible syllable for at least 15 minutes. He would be reduced to simply watching the grateful pandemonium he hath wrought, glowing orangely, strutting like a fatted rooster behind his presidential seal, applauding himself, sticking up his little thumbs now and then, and basking in the racial adoration that will be his lasting legacy in the American saga.
If he ever dared to abandon the prissiness pressed upon him by his pussyfooting advisors, Trump could unleash all the epithets that now stick in his politically correct throat. He could shout “jigaboo” and holler “hebe,” “spic” and “raghead.” He could indulge — cathartically! — in all the terms that demean the biggest minority of all, the group with whom his love/hate relationship will never be resolved: the bitches and broads, sluts, whores and pieces of ass who inflame his lust and (afterwards) incite his manly contempt.
Since Charlottesville, Donald Trump is — more than ever — the Great White Hope. If he’s true to his perfervid disciples, he has to end his flirtation with civilized discourse. If he keeps blowing his dog whistle without providing red meat, eventually even Lassie will turn on him. Trump owes it to the worst of his supporters — the only ones he has left — to be as crude, blunt, hate-filled and bigoted as they would like to be. They can see his heart thumping with spite and fear beneath his mortician’s suit and phallic necktie. But they want to hear it.
Cast off your shackles and spit it out, Donald! Answer the call of Steve Bannon, James Fields and the Daily Stormer. Trade that cockamamie U.S. flag pin for the Stars and Bars. Pull your dad’s white robe out of mothballs. Plant a giant, gasoline-soaked cross on the White House lawn — where Michelle used to grow veggies — and set it on fire. And then shout, Donald! Cry out, for all (white Christians) to hear you, the words of the colored preacher George Lincoln Rockwell used to call “Martin Luther Coon”:
“Free at last, free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last.”
Saturday, August 12, 2017
The Weekly Screed (#826)
Big Al, Big Kim and Little Don
by David Benjamin
MADISON, Wis. — It’s fashionable at the moment to discern an uncanny similarity between the “nut jobs” — one in New Jersey, the other in Pyongyang — who’ve been, for several days, pissing figuratively on one another’s shoes.
Indeed, both Donald Trump and Kim Jong Un have superficial affinities. They’re both fat, they favor black suits and they have weird hair. Each is spoiled, pathologically selfish, ludicrously boastful and incapable of empathy. They’re both prone to summoning up large crowds, before whom they love to brag, wave and wallow in adulation. They’re both acquainted with Dennis Rodman, and they both have nuclear weapons at their personal disposal.
But let ’s stop there. The parallel won’t wash.
Kim waddles a straight line, leaving behind a trail of corpses. Donald Trump struts hither and thither leaving tweets, like tiny turds, in his wake.
Kim shoots his relatives when they cross him. Trump puts them on the government dole. Kim is the third in a hereditary line of ruthless mass murderers. Trump is a second-generation slumlord whose only confirmed “kill,” so far, is a luckless Navy Seal named William Owens.
Neither is a world leader in the political sense of the word. But Kim is something genuine and scary. He’s a gangster. Trump is not.
Like Baby Face Nelson, Kim seems unassuming, even somewhat comical, but he’ll gut you like a bass on a slab if you so much as wink at his sister. Trump, on the other hand, will invite to feel up his daughter.
In Trump’s defense, there’s no question that he has made sincere overtures to the wise-guy underworld. His career in three colossally corrupt industries — real estate, casinos and Republican politics — has afforded him ample occasion to rub shoulders with the Mob. But Big Don is more Fredo than Sonny, more Wilmer than Spade.
Trump doth protest so much against Kim because he’s jealous. Kim, at age 32, is the Godfather Trump will never be, even though he’s president of the friggin’ USA. Trump looks around and sees a world full of gangsters — el-Sisi in Egypt, Erdoğan in Turkey, Mugabe in Zimbabwe, Duterte in the Philippines and the capo de capos of ‘em all, Vladimir Putin. All these goodfellas are merrily putting out contracts on their political foes and snickering at Trump because he’s not allowed to kill Bob Mueller.
The true capo creates an atmosphere of unrelenting, oppressive fear. There is a sense about him that, in the midst of ordinary routine and happy fellowship, he will suddenly explode with rage and decide that someone, or some family, some city or perhaps the entire population of Illinois must be mowed down with machine guns, starved to death or beheaded with chainsaws. Afterwards, the body (or bodies) should just lay there, baking in the sun and gnawed by dogs, as a lesson.
Kim Jong Un learned this teaching style from his dad and grandfather. North Korea is a mosaic of mass graves. Kim launched his reign by killing — perhaps using the eeny-meeny-miny-mo method— a bunch of generals, including his uncle. When you see Kim today in a photo joshing with his generals, your best guess is that they’re laughing to keep from crying.
In February, Kim ordered the murder of his brother, in public, with VX gas. Addio, Fredo!
Kim, in sum, is a tough act to match. The best Trump can do, by comparison, is a string of dead casinos on the boardwalk in Atlantic City. Up to now, Trump has yet to snuff even a second cousin. Sad.
Like Trump and Kim, many of our best gangsters have been showoffs. John Gotti was a dapper dresser. Bugsy Siegel loved to shmooze with the press. Putin rides horses with his shirt off. It’s a tradition among mob kingpins to thumb their noses at their worst enemies. For Big Al, it was the FBI. For Putin and Kim, it’s the United States.
For Trump, it’s… no, really? Sidney Blumenthal?
The common thread in all this macho display, however, is that a great gangster only puts his money where his mouth is when he knows he’s already won the pot. For all his bluster, Capone never slapped leather, head-to-head, against the Treasury Department. He knew the FBI was bigger and more powerful than the Chicago mob.
For similar reasons, strangely enough, we can trust Kim Jong Un. He might rattle his sword at Seoul, threaten to nuke Guam, daydream about raining fire on California, but he’ll never do anything to imperil his perch atop his petty little throne in the heart of Slobbovia. Kim might be a grubby little tinpot dictator who looks like the ugliest stuffed character in the toy store window, but he knows exactly how big his britches are.
Like any gangster, he knows how tenuous his dominion, how many others covet his crown, how disloyal are his truest, dearest boon companions, and how one act of bravado or one sign of hesitancy can bring it all down.
Kim has seen the photos of Mussolini strung up in the square like a side of beef. He has read of Capone exiled to Alcatraz. He has watched Warren Beatty blown to bits at the end of Bugsy.
And Trump?
Remember his first presidential trip to Europe. He was standing in a group as new French president Emmanuel Macron approached. Macron seemed poised to reach out and shake Trump’s hand. But at the last minute, gotcha! Macron veered from Trump and rushed to kiss German chancellor Angela Merkel, who happens to be Trump’s worst foe in all of Europe.
WWBAD? What would Big Al do? Or Joe Stalin? Michael Corleone?
Any one of those guys would have all made sure the snotty little Frog was sleeping with the fishes by midnight.
So, WDTD? What was his revenge for this disrespect from a lesser capo? Did Big Don fit Macron for a pair of concrete overshoes. Did he come to the black-tie dinner and splatter Frenchie’s brains with a Louisville Slugger?
(Sigh.) No. All he did, next day, was start up a sit-down, photo-op wrist-wrestling contest with the snotty little Frog.
Guess who won.
by David Benjamin
MADISON, Wis. — It’s fashionable at the moment to discern an uncanny similarity between the “nut jobs” — one in New Jersey, the other in Pyongyang — who’ve been, for several days, pissing figuratively on one another’s shoes.
Indeed, both Donald Trump and Kim Jong Un have superficial affinities. They’re both fat, they favor black suits and they have weird hair. Each is spoiled, pathologically selfish, ludicrously boastful and incapable of empathy. They’re both prone to summoning up large crowds, before whom they love to brag, wave and wallow in adulation. They’re both acquainted with Dennis Rodman, and they both have nuclear weapons at their personal disposal.
But let ’s stop there. The parallel won’t wash.
Kim waddles a straight line, leaving behind a trail of corpses. Donald Trump struts hither and thither leaving tweets, like tiny turds, in his wake.
Kim shoots his relatives when they cross him. Trump puts them on the government dole. Kim is the third in a hereditary line of ruthless mass murderers. Trump is a second-generation slumlord whose only confirmed “kill,” so far, is a luckless Navy Seal named William Owens.
Neither is a world leader in the political sense of the word. But Kim is something genuine and scary. He’s a gangster. Trump is not.
Like Baby Face Nelson, Kim seems unassuming, even somewhat comical, but he’ll gut you like a bass on a slab if you so much as wink at his sister. Trump, on the other hand, will invite to feel up his daughter.
In Trump’s defense, there’s no question that he has made sincere overtures to the wise-guy underworld. His career in three colossally corrupt industries — real estate, casinos and Republican politics — has afforded him ample occasion to rub shoulders with the Mob. But Big Don is more Fredo than Sonny, more Wilmer than Spade.
Trump doth protest so much against Kim because he’s jealous. Kim, at age 32, is the Godfather Trump will never be, even though he’s president of the friggin’ USA. Trump looks around and sees a world full of gangsters — el-Sisi in Egypt, Erdoğan in Turkey, Mugabe in Zimbabwe, Duterte in the Philippines and the capo de capos of ‘em all, Vladimir Putin. All these goodfellas are merrily putting out contracts on their political foes and snickering at Trump because he’s not allowed to kill Bob Mueller.
The true capo creates an atmosphere of unrelenting, oppressive fear. There is a sense about him that, in the midst of ordinary routine and happy fellowship, he will suddenly explode with rage and decide that someone, or some family, some city or perhaps the entire population of Illinois must be mowed down with machine guns, starved to death or beheaded with chainsaws. Afterwards, the body (or bodies) should just lay there, baking in the sun and gnawed by dogs, as a lesson.
Kim Jong Un learned this teaching style from his dad and grandfather. North Korea is a mosaic of mass graves. Kim launched his reign by killing — perhaps using the eeny-meeny-miny-mo method— a bunch of generals, including his uncle. When you see Kim today in a photo joshing with his generals, your best guess is that they’re laughing to keep from crying.
In February, Kim ordered the murder of his brother, in public, with VX gas. Addio, Fredo!
Kim, in sum, is a tough act to match. The best Trump can do, by comparison, is a string of dead casinos on the boardwalk in Atlantic City. Up to now, Trump has yet to snuff even a second cousin. Sad.
Like Trump and Kim, many of our best gangsters have been showoffs. John Gotti was a dapper dresser. Bugsy Siegel loved to shmooze with the press. Putin rides horses with his shirt off. It’s a tradition among mob kingpins to thumb their noses at their worst enemies. For Big Al, it was the FBI. For Putin and Kim, it’s the United States.
For Trump, it’s… no, really? Sidney Blumenthal?
The common thread in all this macho display, however, is that a great gangster only puts his money where his mouth is when he knows he’s already won the pot. For all his bluster, Capone never slapped leather, head-to-head, against the Treasury Department. He knew the FBI was bigger and more powerful than the Chicago mob.
For similar reasons, strangely enough, we can trust Kim Jong Un. He might rattle his sword at Seoul, threaten to nuke Guam, daydream about raining fire on California, but he’ll never do anything to imperil his perch atop his petty little throne in the heart of Slobbovia. Kim might be a grubby little tinpot dictator who looks like the ugliest stuffed character in the toy store window, but he knows exactly how big his britches are.
Like any gangster, he knows how tenuous his dominion, how many others covet his crown, how disloyal are his truest, dearest boon companions, and how one act of bravado or one sign of hesitancy can bring it all down.
Kim has seen the photos of Mussolini strung up in the square like a side of beef. He has read of Capone exiled to Alcatraz. He has watched Warren Beatty blown to bits at the end of Bugsy.
And Trump?
Remember his first presidential trip to Europe. He was standing in a group as new French president Emmanuel Macron approached. Macron seemed poised to reach out and shake Trump’s hand. But at the last minute, gotcha! Macron veered from Trump and rushed to kiss German chancellor Angela Merkel, who happens to be Trump’s worst foe in all of Europe.
WWBAD? What would Big Al do? Or Joe Stalin? Michael Corleone?
Any one of those guys would have all made sure the snotty little Frog was sleeping with the fishes by midnight.
So, WDTD? What was his revenge for this disrespect from a lesser capo? Did Big Don fit Macron for a pair of concrete overshoes. Did he come to the black-tie dinner and splatter Frenchie’s brains with a Louisville Slugger?
(Sigh.) No. All he did, next day, was start up a sit-down, photo-op wrist-wrestling contest with the snotty little Frog.
Guess who won.
Friday, August 4, 2017
The Weekly Screed (#825)
Our common wealth
by David Benjamin
“When a Samaritan woman came to draw water, Jesus said to her, ‘Will you give me a drink?’”
— John 4:7
PARIS — The history of great cities always involves water — how much water the city consumes, where it comes from, what happens if there isn’t enough, who controls the water supply and how do the people get their water.
One of the milestones in Paris’ water saga was in 1609, when the city finished a mighty hydraulic pump at the Pont Neuf, to draw water from the Seine. For 200 years, most poor Parisians depended on this pump, called La Samaritaine. It was marked by a statue of the Samaritan woman who spoke with Jesus at the fountain in Sychar. Ironically, according to John, “La Samaritaine,” a nosy broad with prejudices, never got around to pouring Jesus a drink.
Early in the 19th century, La Samaritaine wore out. Later, many of Paris’ public fountains dried up, when aqueducts were razed in the siege of the city during the Francio-Prussian war. By 1872, Parisians had few sources of clean water. A Francophile British nobleman, Richard Wallace came to the rescue. He underwrote a vast network of graceful “Wallace fountains,” designed by Charles-Auguste Lebourg. Almost 150 years later, they’re still here, still running.
At times in Paris, as in many cities, private interests less benevolent than Sir Richard, gained control of the flow and made water, literally, too expensive for many citizens to drink. Wine was cheaper.
The struggle of Paris, for centuries, to provide this simple necessity to its people got me thinking — from an American angle — about what’s “public” and what isn’t.
Since Roman times in Europe, not much of the turf in what we call Western civilization has been deemed what an American would call “public.” For centuries, every acre of space in the known world “belonged” to various thrones, to the “landed” aristocracy and to a voracious Church fat with private property. For most Europeans, the public space they knew, where they could congregate, court, converse, trade and gossip was a few cobbled meters surrounding a public fountain that was often the community’s only source of water. It was every village’s La Samaritaine.
America was different from the beginning. With vast open spaces and an irrepressible (and often brutal) expansionism, America invented the “public” idea, the right of every citizen to share, enjoy, re-shape and, finally, to preserve great tracts of a continent that had belonged, since the dawn of time, to no one in particular.
America’s founders injected into our seminal documents a concept unthinkable in an Old World where every inch was spoken for and every fungible border stained with the blood of peasant soldiers drafted to perpetuate the dominion of Crown, nobility and clergy. Because we knew the abuses done by these three estates, we invented a secular nation without kings or hereditary elites. We made a government “of the people, by the people and for the people” whose first purpose is to guard the “public trust.”
Of course, the thirst for aristocracy is unquenchable, especially among Americans who believe that personal wealth merits exceptional privilege. We’ve seen the public idea assailed at times by land barons and plantation slavers, oilmen, industrialists, railroad tycoons, financiers, agribusiness, bloated generals and political machines, all ravenous to seize our common wealth and tuck it into their private pockets.
Each time, the people’s government, reminded of its public trust, has fought back. We, the people extended suffrage from property owners (an Old World fallacy) to all men, then to women, and then to fellow Americans whom we had once treated as property.
Horace Mann conceived public education — for everyone — and John Dewey articulated the secular theology of “the American common school.”
Teddy Roosevelt invented the concept of public lands and launched the national park system. FDR lifted up a nation that had been brought to bankruptcy by private greed, conceiving a program of public works that, still today, staggers the imagination. He made care for the aged, halt and helpless an American Commandment. Dwight Eisenhower expanded the public realm to the nation’s highways, Richard Nixon to the nation’s fragile environment. Lyndon Johnson restored black Americans to the public conversation by re-affirming their every stolen right, in particular the right to vote.
Barack Obama took up the cause of public health that had been fostered by both Roosevelts, by Harry Truman, by Johnson, Nixon and Bill Clinton and finally made it happen.
When Woody Guthrie sang, “This land your land, this land is my land, from California to the New York island,” he wasn’t just whistling “Dixie.” He was articulating a concept of nationhood that did not exist anywhere on earth before July Fourth, 1776.
It’s a concept that has had to fight for its life, even in the land of its creation. You hear talk, from our aspiring nobility, about “market solutions” to public problems. They mutter that our “failing” public schools and our great land-grant universities are “government indoctrination centers.” They’ve twisted the public idea into what they call the “deep state.” They want to convince us, the public, that the public idea has been subverted. They propose to replace the public trust with a handful of wise white men — an elite, if you will — who know better than we.
They claim Jefferson, Washington, Madison as their forebears.
“Trust us,” they say.
But, there’s this. A financial empire — immensely powerful and packed with rich, brainy guys — incorporated in the USA, headquartered in Ireland or Barbados, funded by banks in Cyprus and Russia, cosseted by theocrats in the Middle East and married to a dozen mobs in a thousand invisible deals, is accountable to no one, not even to its boards of directors, nor to its clueless shareholders and absolutely not to the public. Catch one of these vast fiefdoms cheating, stealing, lying, destroying an economy and… oops! Poof! Gone, like Alice’s rabbit, into a black hole of tax havens and bankruptcy dodges.
The point of private power is that it’s not public. Nor does it need a republic. It is kings and popes in capitalist raiment. Private power — what FDR called “organized money” — merits no trust, public or otherwise, because its every move is secret.
Better we should trust ourselves. However competent or incompetent our elected representatives, they govern by law, in the open. Our republic is public, accountable to us, the people. If we fail to hold the worse of our chosen delegates to account, the fault is ours.
America, at our best, has been better than La Samaritaine. Here, Jesus, a stranger, could get his drink, a bucket of water, a whole river, with no questions about his alien faith or where he’s from. The motto that always comes to the American mind, especially in hard times, is, “There, but for fortune, go I.”
We have a new potentate, a walking corporation with a million private secrets, who calls our White House “a real dump,” because it has no gold-plated faucets. His motto?
“I’ve got my fortune. Go get yours.”
by David Benjamin
“When a Samaritan woman came to draw water, Jesus said to her, ‘Will you give me a drink?’”
— John 4:7
PARIS — The history of great cities always involves water — how much water the city consumes, where it comes from, what happens if there isn’t enough, who controls the water supply and how do the people get their water.
One of the milestones in Paris’ water saga was in 1609, when the city finished a mighty hydraulic pump at the Pont Neuf, to draw water from the Seine. For 200 years, most poor Parisians depended on this pump, called La Samaritaine. It was marked by a statue of the Samaritan woman who spoke with Jesus at the fountain in Sychar. Ironically, according to John, “La Samaritaine,” a nosy broad with prejudices, never got around to pouring Jesus a drink.
Early in the 19th century, La Samaritaine wore out. Later, many of Paris’ public fountains dried up, when aqueducts were razed in the siege of the city during the Francio-Prussian war. By 1872, Parisians had few sources of clean water. A Francophile British nobleman, Richard Wallace came to the rescue. He underwrote a vast network of graceful “Wallace fountains,” designed by Charles-Auguste Lebourg. Almost 150 years later, they’re still here, still running.
At times in Paris, as in many cities, private interests less benevolent than Sir Richard, gained control of the flow and made water, literally, too expensive for many citizens to drink. Wine was cheaper.
The struggle of Paris, for centuries, to provide this simple necessity to its people got me thinking — from an American angle — about what’s “public” and what isn’t.
Since Roman times in Europe, not much of the turf in what we call Western civilization has been deemed what an American would call “public.” For centuries, every acre of space in the known world “belonged” to various thrones, to the “landed” aristocracy and to a voracious Church fat with private property. For most Europeans, the public space they knew, where they could congregate, court, converse, trade and gossip was a few cobbled meters surrounding a public fountain that was often the community’s only source of water. It was every village’s La Samaritaine.
America was different from the beginning. With vast open spaces and an irrepressible (and often brutal) expansionism, America invented the “public” idea, the right of every citizen to share, enjoy, re-shape and, finally, to preserve great tracts of a continent that had belonged, since the dawn of time, to no one in particular.
America’s founders injected into our seminal documents a concept unthinkable in an Old World where every inch was spoken for and every fungible border stained with the blood of peasant soldiers drafted to perpetuate the dominion of Crown, nobility and clergy. Because we knew the abuses done by these three estates, we invented a secular nation without kings or hereditary elites. We made a government “of the people, by the people and for the people” whose first purpose is to guard the “public trust.”
Of course, the thirst for aristocracy is unquenchable, especially among Americans who believe that personal wealth merits exceptional privilege. We’ve seen the public idea assailed at times by land barons and plantation slavers, oilmen, industrialists, railroad tycoons, financiers, agribusiness, bloated generals and political machines, all ravenous to seize our common wealth and tuck it into their private pockets.
Each time, the people’s government, reminded of its public trust, has fought back. We, the people extended suffrage from property owners (an Old World fallacy) to all men, then to women, and then to fellow Americans whom we had once treated as property.
Horace Mann conceived public education — for everyone — and John Dewey articulated the secular theology of “the American common school.”
Teddy Roosevelt invented the concept of public lands and launched the national park system. FDR lifted up a nation that had been brought to bankruptcy by private greed, conceiving a program of public works that, still today, staggers the imagination. He made care for the aged, halt and helpless an American Commandment. Dwight Eisenhower expanded the public realm to the nation’s highways, Richard Nixon to the nation’s fragile environment. Lyndon Johnson restored black Americans to the public conversation by re-affirming their every stolen right, in particular the right to vote.
Barack Obama took up the cause of public health that had been fostered by both Roosevelts, by Harry Truman, by Johnson, Nixon and Bill Clinton and finally made it happen.
When Woody Guthrie sang, “This land your land, this land is my land, from California to the New York island,” he wasn’t just whistling “Dixie.” He was articulating a concept of nationhood that did not exist anywhere on earth before July Fourth, 1776.
It’s a concept that has had to fight for its life, even in the land of its creation. You hear talk, from our aspiring nobility, about “market solutions” to public problems. They mutter that our “failing” public schools and our great land-grant universities are “government indoctrination centers.” They’ve twisted the public idea into what they call the “deep state.” They want to convince us, the public, that the public idea has been subverted. They propose to replace the public trust with a handful of wise white men — an elite, if you will — who know better than we.
They claim Jefferson, Washington, Madison as their forebears.
“Trust us,” they say.
But, there’s this. A financial empire — immensely powerful and packed with rich, brainy guys — incorporated in the USA, headquartered in Ireland or Barbados, funded by banks in Cyprus and Russia, cosseted by theocrats in the Middle East and married to a dozen mobs in a thousand invisible deals, is accountable to no one, not even to its boards of directors, nor to its clueless shareholders and absolutely not to the public. Catch one of these vast fiefdoms cheating, stealing, lying, destroying an economy and… oops! Poof! Gone, like Alice’s rabbit, into a black hole of tax havens and bankruptcy dodges.
The point of private power is that it’s not public. Nor does it need a republic. It is kings and popes in capitalist raiment. Private power — what FDR called “organized money” — merits no trust, public or otherwise, because its every move is secret.
Better we should trust ourselves. However competent or incompetent our elected representatives, they govern by law, in the open. Our republic is public, accountable to us, the people. If we fail to hold the worse of our chosen delegates to account, the fault is ours.
America, at our best, has been better than La Samaritaine. Here, Jesus, a stranger, could get his drink, a bucket of water, a whole river, with no questions about his alien faith or where he’s from. The motto that always comes to the American mind, especially in hard times, is, “There, but for fortune, go I.”
We have a new potentate, a walking corporation with a million private secrets, who calls our White House “a real dump,” because it has no gold-plated faucets. His motto?
“I’ve got my fortune. Go get yours.”
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