If we ever needed solid evidence that the United States of America is a single-party state ruled by the Pro-War Pro-Business Party, consider the comparison of how the party fought a threat from the Right in 2016 and is now freaking out from a nearly identical challenge from the Left. Post Iowa-New Hampshire I’ve listened to pundits make the obvious comparison.

Just as the reasonable Ghidorah—Rafael Edward Cruz, John Richard Kasich and Marco Antonio Rubio—trampled the PWPB’s right-wing darling John Ellis Bush in 2016 and then clawed itself to shreds while Donald John Trump waltzed to the White House, so too has the middle-way Cerberus—Peter Paul Montgomery Buttigieg, Elizabeth Ann Warren and Amy Jean Klobuchar—thrown down the PWPB’s left-wing sweetheart Joseph Robinette Biden and will gnaw their legs while Bernard Sanders rolls onward to the Oval Office.

The only wildcard in the game is Michael Rubens Bloomberg and his $2 billion—roughly the annual interest on his $62 billion empire—fuck-all-of-you campaign.

Matt Taibbi, in New Hampshire 2020: In Supreme Irony, the Horse Race Favors Bernie Sanders: Sanders and Trump are political opposites, but they’re on the same path to victory for Rolling Stone Magazine, joins the meme. He writes:

Bernie Sanders won the New Hampshire primary Tuesday night. Second-place finisher Pete Buttigieg earned 24.4 percent of the vote, while Amy Klobuchar, not long ago polling in single digits, came out of nowhere with 19.8 percent, a classic New Hampshire outlier result.

The words “eked” and “narrowly” are getting a workout in headlines today. There is a Yeah, but… passage in nearly every major media write-up of Bernie’s win. “Sanders cements his front-runner status, but his narrow margins… show how volatile this race is,” is how The New York Times put it.

In reality, the results for Sanders cut both ways. On one hand, it’s amazing he can win any state after years of propaganda depicting him as a half-dead cross of Hitler and Stalin (MSNBC before New Hampshire outdid itself with Looney Tunes commentary about “executions in Central Park” and a “digital brownshirt brigade”).

On the other hand, there are signs after New Hampshire that some of the relentless corporate messaging against Sanders is landing. This will inspire orgies of excitement—it’s already happening — as pundits revel in every storyline suggesting Democratic voters are scrambling to find an “electable” alternative.

Good. Let them. I saw this movie in 2016 and have a fair idea of how it ends. It just won’t be horrifying this time.

Well, horrifying is in the eye of the beholder, but I take Taibbi’s point. He continues:

Four years ago, after New Hampshire, it was crystal clear that Donald Trump was not only going to win his party’s nomination, but that his path was being actively cleared by the Republican Party establishment and the national news media, whose half-baked efforts to stop him were working in reverse. I wrote this in February 2016:

The [Republicans] sent forth to take on Trump have been so incompetent, they can’t even lose properly. One GOP strategist put it this way: “Maybe 34 [percent] is Trump’s ceiling. But 34 in a five-person race wins…” The numbers simply don’t work, unless the field unexpectedly narrows before March.

Early mixed results guaranteed that Ted Cruz, John Kasich, Jeb Bush, and Marco Rubio would not drop out soon enough to give any of the others a chance. As a result, the following was obvious at this time four years ago: “Trump will probably enjoy at least a five-horse race through Super Tuesday.”

In hindsight, those Republican challengers were so villainously terrible that none would have beaten Trump in a two-person race. Still, Bush’s backers knew their man was roadkill by New Hampshire, yet didn’t pull the plug. Kasich, who in a rare moment of self-awareness was ready to bail after Iowa (“If we get smoked up there, I’m going back to Ohio,” he fumed in New Hampshire), let himself be fooled by one surprise second-place finish.

All pledged to be committed to stopping Trump but accelerated his victory by staying in too long.

Yeah, the Warican-Businocrats are so last century.

Bonus No. 1: Does Bernie have a ceiling? and Will Obama intervene to stop Bernie?

Bonus No. 2: We hear and read a great deal about strong men out of control in Russia, Turkey, Brazil and The Philippines, but we’re much less informed about Australia’s pasty white prime minister: It turns out Scott Morrison and his friends can do whatever they like. What a shock.

Bonus No. 3: A wholesale ass-whuppin’ may descend upon you like a Florida Hurricane.

Bonus No. 4: From 12 May 2019—On the Trail With Bernie Sanders 2.0: Can the Vermont senator win over Trump voters and harness his grassroots army to transform the Democratic Party?

Bonus No. 5: Prager U Wants You! (To Become a Conservative). (Am I the only one who sees Prager U and thinks insult?)

Bonus No. 6: The Pundits Wrote Off Bernie’s Candidacy. In Iowa and New Hampshire, He Proved Them Wrong.

Timing may be everything, but the punch line can demand, must demand, the careful construction of a foundation along with the piece-by-piece framing of a skeleton that allow the reader to bloom. This is tricky for writers because we can rush to get to the point. Mosley cautions against rushing, or even having a point.

On the first page I came across this thought: Plot is the structure of revelation. This is a lesson that too many beginning writers—myself included—don’t learn quickly. We want to the reader to be impressed with our cleverness and in that rush we fail to prepare the reader and, more importantly Mosley argues, allow them to even get ahead of the writer; to glimpse the horizon. Mosley writes:

If we chose the right moment to reveal a truth about the story, we might create an epiphany for the reader that is striking, maybe even life altering. And yet the potential for epiphany is a minor benefit compared to the trace elements that come slowly to awareness during the unveiling of the story being told. (2)

The unveiling of the story. I liken the process to how so much travel happens today. We drive to a generic airport, board a generic airplane, fly to another generic airport and ta-da! we’re there, not really understanding where there is or how where we find ourselves relates to any other part of our experience.

I really like how Mosley uses trace elements here. At the end of the day all salt–NaCl—is sea salt, but the traces elements make all the difference. As a writer I have much to learn about words as trace elements.

Previously…

My further notes on Mosley’s Elements of Fiction may be found in my electronic chapbook.

Different people have different reasons for taking part in historical reënactments. Sometimes there is the fantasy attraction of dropping into an alter ego; sometimes there is a safe-space allure that gives permission to be a bad person; sometimes the exercise is a learning experience that opens minds to comprehending what may be the incomprehensible.

Museum experiences can be that way. I remember my trip to the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C. and watching people to see how they would react to two exhibits: the gate to Auschwitz and the open cattle car. Most people I saw didn’t hesitate. Others paused to consider what they were about to do and a few turned away.

We can’t really know how will react until an experience becomes real. What might start out as a lark, a bit of fun, can become, for good or ill, transformative. Julian Lucas explores one such experience in Can Slavery Reënactments Set Us Free? for The New Yorker, he writes:

A gunshot echoed over starlit forest near the town of Marine on St. Croix, Minnesota. It was late October, already frigid, and chasers had pushed our group of ten fugitives to the edge of a lake. For a moment, we’d hesitated, shouts drawing closer as the black water winked, but the shot drove us all straight in. My legs went numb; Elyse, a high-school sophomore, exclaimed, “My God!?” Submerged to the waist, I waded through marsh grass and lamplight toward our conductor, who silently indicated the opposite bank. The Drinking Gourd shone overhead with exaggerated clarity. This was my third Underground Railroad Reënactment.

An hour had elapsed by the time we crossed the lake: seven teens, two elementary-school teachers, one “abolitionist,” and me. I had no idea where we were, only that it was about two hundred miles from Canada, where Justin Trudeau had just won reëlection after a blackface scandal, and forty from the waters of Lake Minnetonka, in which Prince orders Apollonia to “purify” herself in “Purple Rain.” As we stepped ashore, I thought of my enslaved forebears, wondering what they might make of our strange tribute.

“That’s what you’re concerned about, your ChapStick?” Elyse chided Max, a blond boy in a blue hat and checkered Vans. His lip balm was ruined—as was my notebook—but the baby doll he’d sworn to carry North was dry. (Elyse dubbed him Mother Max.) The whispers stopped with the arrival of our conductor, who led us on a rough path uphill. I was still smarting from a branch to the forehead when he stopped to deliver the night’s sixth lecture: “My name is Henry David Thoreau. This is Walden Pond.”

Wait. What?

For more than three decades, students have reënacted escapes on the Underground Railroad at schools, camps, churches, museums, and juvenile-correction centers across the United States. Millions have undergone an experience that can range from a board game to an immersive nightlong ordeal, complete with horseback-riding paddy rollers and an armed Harriet Tubman. One group’s living-history lesson is another’s exercise in leadership training, anti-racist therapy, or even behavioral reform. Many believe that Underground Railroad Reënactments, or U.G.R.R.s, have the power to morally transform American youth.

You might call it the fugitive cure. Though it’s left an impression on everyone from Lena Dunham to Disney’s former chairman Michael Eisner, the U.G.R.R. began in Minnesota, with a small organization currently known as the Kambui Education Initiative. Last fall, I flew to Minneapolis for the group’s final reënactment of the year. It took place at Wilder Forest, a thousand-acre recreation area now home to the charter school River Grove. A forty-minute drive from the city, past horse farms and slivers of lake, it’s rustic enough to pass for the nineteenth century, when St. Paul’s real Underground Railroad spirited the captives of summering slaveholders through woods not far from these.

Teaching all of this is hard. I’m reminded of advice from one of my educational role models Abraham Joshua Heschel who suggested that the task of an educator is not to fill the empty head a pupil, but rather to light a fire under the student. To much education in America is of the former. What the UGRR experience accomplished may be the latter. Lucas continues:

“Democracy has to be born anew every generation, and education is its midwife,” John Dewey, a forerunner of today’s experiential educators, wrote. But how does one “teach” slavery as a matter of experience? The rise of remembrance culture created an imperative not only to honor but in some way to relive. What may have begun with the neo-slave narratives of the nineteen-seventies and eighties, like Octavia Butler’s “Kindred” and Toni Morrison’s “Beloved,” migrated to popular explorations of slavery’s afterlife. In 1993, the year Morrison won the Nobel Prize in Literature, Disney announced a ride, never completed, in which visitors would “feel what it was like to be a slave [and] to escape through the Underground Railroad.”

In the next decade, Colonial Williamsburg staged a slave auction; a replica of the Amistad set sail from Mystic Seaport; and the “experimental historian” Anthony Cohen had himself crated and shipped from Philadelphia to New York in homage to the antebellum fugitive Henry (Box) Brown. With financial backing from Oprah, Cincinnati constructed an imposing Underground Railroad Freedom Center that fronts the Ohio River. The National Park Service consecrated more than six hundred sites in a coast-to-coast Underground Railroad “Network to Freedom.” In Maryland, Congress established a four-hundred-and-eighty-acre Harriet Tubman Underground Railroad National Historical Park; Obama’s Treasury Department planned to put Tubman on the twenty-dollar bill.

By 2016, when Colson Whitehead’s “Underground Railroad” won the National Book Award for fiction, slave narratives had become inseparable from the fraught politics of commemoration. In one sly passage, the novel’s fugitive heroine finds a job on free soil as a “slave” in a museum diorama, raising the question of whom the slave-narrative renaissance really serves. Do fugitive lives belong to everyone, as models and martyrs of democracy? Or are they victims of appropriation, their stories warped by repetitive reconciliation myths and kitsch entertainment? Can “embodying” the past empower the living, or does it trivialize history and traumatize its inheritors?

This is the difference between a teacher and a classroom hack.

Bonus No. 1: Fiona the Underemployed Bettong vs the cashless welfare card.

This morning while researching single-term vice presidents—I was pondering the nightmare of President Donald John Trump ditching Michael Richard Pence (either before or after the election) and naming either his eldest son or his daughter to be his vice president, setting them up for a run in 2024. In the course of that research I discovered the tale of Henry Agard Wallace.

In replying later to a comment by Ryan, I found the 7 October 2013 article by Alex Ross in The New Yorker: Uncommon Man—The strange life of Henry Wallace, the New Deal visionary. Ross ledes:

“Meet the new Assistant President,” James Reston wrote, in the Times, in October, 1941. “His decisions in the next few months or years will undoubtedly affect your job, your rent, and the price of your groceries. And, what’s more important, his decisions may determine the outcome of the war and the basis of the peace.” Reston was describing Vice-President Henry Wallace, the farmer-intellectual from Iowa, who had taken charge of economic planning on the eve of America’s entry into the Second World War. Wallace’s Washington career had begun just eight years earlier, when Roosevelt appointed him Secretary of Agriculture. Disciplined and visionary in equal measure, Wallace had established himself as one of the stars of the New Deal, helping to restore order to the farm business. He was also considered something of an oddball: insiders mocked his fascination with plant genetics and gossiped about his enthusiasm for Nicholas Roerich, a Russian painter turned Theosophical guru. Nonetheless, Roosevelt’s faith in Wallace gave him stature. One adviser implied that Wallace had been picked as Roosevelt’s running mate in 1940 not because he supplied a political advantage but because the ailing President saw him as a worthy successor.

I think Wallace is important because of what is happening in the Democratic Party nominating process today. The last sentence in Ross’ lede implies that the political elites knew that Roosevelt was unlikely to survive his fourth term and feared what Wallace might do if given even a partial term as president. The elites have been fucking with us for decades. Ross continues:

Others in the Roosevelt circle took a much dimmer view of the idiosyncrasies of the “Assistant President”—his righteous liberal crusades, his distaste for machine politics, his pro-Soviet leanings. The President agreed, with some ambivalence, that he should be dropped from the 1944 ticket. Still, a Gallup poll showed that Wallace was by far the most popular of the Democratic candidates, and at the Democratic Convention that year he came close to defeating the Party bosses’ choice, Harry Truman. On the second day of the Convention, there was a huge pro-Wallace demonstration; Claude Pepper, the Florida senator, later said that if he had managed to place Wallace’s name into nomination that evening the Vice-President would have kept his position—and become President upon Roosevelt’s death. When Pepper was only a few steps from the lectern, Party leaders succeeded in having the session adjourned. The next day, the nomination went to Truman. Four years later, Wallace launched a rancorous third-party campaign against Truman, effectively destroying his own reputation.

I think that Bernie and Henry would have approved of each other. Wallace was simultaneously a visionary and a mystic. Ross writes:

As the New Deal lost momentum, Wallace became its most forceful defender. At the same time, he anticipated problems that were not yet on many people’s minds. In 1936, he wrote, “Probably the most damaging indictment that can be made of the capitalistic system is the way in which its emphasis on unfettered individualism results in exploitation of natural resources in a manner to destroy the physical foundations of national longevity.”

Wallace’s mystical propensities now had national ramifications. One day, he became fascinated by the pyramid-with-an-eye figure that appeared on the American seal, and proposed that it be incorporated into the national currency. Roosevelt had it placed on the dollar bill, where it remains, to the delight of college stoners.

As 1944 approached, Wallace’s star became tarnished, in part, by a diplomatic trip to China and Siberia. Ross continues:

A diplomatic amateur, he was too easily impressed by whichever host responded to his interests or appreciated his gifts, which included a shipment of fifty baby chicks and a glow-in-the-dark portrait of Stalin executed in radioactive paint.

After Wallace returned home, the drama of the 1944 Convention played out. Roosevelt offered wan public support for his Vice-President while privately cutting him loose. Wallace felt betrayed, and after Roosevelt’s death, in April, 1945, his bitterness metastasized. Truman seemed to him the puppet of warmongers. Even though Wallace had been moved to the Commerce Department, he persisted in speaking out on foreign affairs. In 1946, he proposed that America reject “British imperialistic policy”—a shot at Churchill, whose Anglo-Saxon braggadocio he detested—and respect the Soviet sphere of influence. Truman reviewed the speech in advance and approved it; after Wallace gave the speech, however, Secretary of State James Byrnes objected, and Truman asked Wallace to resign. A few weeks later, Wallace assumed the editorship of The New Republic, and berated Truman at every opportunity.

Wallace famously ran for president in 1948 at the top of the Progressive Party ticket and was soundly trounced by Thomas Dewey and Harry Truman. That was his last hurrah. Ross concludes:

With the onset of the Korean War, he backed away from his party and revised his foreign-policy positions. In 1952, he published an article, “Where I Was Wrong,” in which he abruptly announced that Soviet Communism was “utterly evil.” He drifted back to the Republicans, voting for Eisenhower in 1956, and meeting secretly with Nixon, in 1960. For the most part, though, he avoided politics. On a farm in upstate New York, he immersed himself in agricultural research. He died in 1965, from Lou Gehrig’s disease.

Wallace was, in the end, a dangerously incoherent politician. Even as he swung from Iowa Republicanism to far-left internationalism and then rightward again, he had an air of being inflexible: he might be called an impressionable moralist. As Devine puts it, he “abhorred negotiated solutions based solely on power considerations.” In other words, he abhorred politics. There is no telling what might have happened had he become President. Perhaps he would have appeased the Soviets; perhaps he would have dragged the U.S. into a confrontation.

Yet Wallace deserves to be remembered as something other than a failed messiah. For one thing, the man once attacked as the greatest living threat to the American way succeeded in making a vast amount of money. The companies he founded—Pioneer Hi-Bred, the hybrid-corn concern, and Hy-Line Poultry Farms, a chicken-breeding operation—became agricultural giants. If you had eggs this morning, there is a good chance they came from a Wallace chicken: forty-four per cent of the world’s eggs are produced by hens that derive from the genetics of Hy-Line poultry stock. In the late nineties, DuPont bought Pioneer Hi-Bred for nearly ten billion dollars. It is one of history’s little ironies that the organic-eating grandchildren of the 1948 Progressives disdain the industrial agriculture that Wallace pioneered.

Reading Ross’ piece from 2013 has made me curious to learn more about Wallace the man. I’ve scanned the list of biographies and none of them leap out at me like David McCullough’s Harry S Truman. I’ll have to look deeper.

Bonus No. 1: Untold History: The Rise and Fall of a Progressive Vice-President of the USA.

Bonus No. 2: Henry A. Wallace Common Man Speech. and the full speech.

Learn more at Brave New Films…

I’ve been waiting for Matt Taibbi to freak out over the Hawkeye Hash that was the 2020 Iowa Democratic Party caucuses last Monday. It took a few days, but Taibbi delivers a two-for for Rolling Stone magazine that is not kind to the Iowa Democratic Party, the Democratic National Committee or

Taibbi leads with 10 Things That Went Wrong In Iowa:. The kicker for the piece is a gut punch: There’s no clear winner in the Iowa Caucus state delegate count, but the depth of this disaster goes even deeper. Taibbi’s ten—how he got the list down to 10 is, but itself, a feat—include:

Misapportioned “State Delegate Equivalents” The formula for determining the number of delegates a candidate receives in Iowa is based upon the number of “state delegate equivalents” received in each precinct. That math is already complicated…

Wrong Head Counts Multiple caucusgoers reported counting heads on their own, only to have precinct chairs come up with, and report, wildly different totals. Joe Grabinski in West Des Moines had issues with both the number of Sanders voters counted and the overall number of caucusgoers. “I counted 308 people, but they said it was 289,” he said. “If that’s off by even one person, it affects the viability calculations.”

Deval Patrick Sweeps Des Moines! The Iowa Democratic Party Wednesday released a batch of results, bringing the total released to 85 percent. It showed former Massachusetts governor Deval Patrick with 1,768 people voting for him on final alignment. In fact, Patrick earned zero delegate equivalents…

Iffy Coin Flips Flips in Iowa happen when the vote totals make it difficult to evenly apportion delegates – a two-way split in a precinct with five delegates, for instance, would need a flip to give one or the other a 3-2 advantage. However, even the coin flips in Iowa were shady…

Bad Instructions There was considerable confusion about a new rule: If you were in a group deemed viable after the first round, you could not move to a different group. These instructions were not followed in every precinct…

Card Confusion “Presidential preference cards” were introduced as a safeguard in case a recount was necessary, but caucusers in some districts filled the cards out wrong…

App Disaster The failures of the Shadow technology have been well-documented…

Procedural Confusion There were controversies over who was allowed to give speeches when, whether or not nonresidents could be precinct captains, and whether groups deemed non-viable on the first round could rally and become viable in the second round. As one caucaser from Boone County put it, “No one seemed to know the rules.”

Tangled Phone Lines In a Bababooey style act of ad-libbed listener nihilism, Donald Trump fans flooded the hotline Democrats gave out for caucus officials to phone in results. The number became public…

Impossible Math The New York Times found “inconsistencies and other flaws” in over 100 precincts, and the Iowa Democratic Party was reduced to being informed in public of this by the paper, whose Nate Cohn called Iowa “the worst conceived and executed electoral contest I have ever seen.”

Democrats deserve every Republican jeer and snort they receive for their lack of preparation, training, testing and security surrounding the cosmic corn-fed caucus cock-up.

Taibbi, in his second piece, goes so far as to compare this week’s events to the greatest military blunder of the 19th century. Writing in Yesterday’s Gone: Iowa Was Waterloo for Democrats, he ledes:

Monday, February 3rd, just before 9 p.m., the airport Holiday Inn, Des Moines. A crowd of supporters and volunteers for Senator Bernie Sanders is buzzing. After four years of being shat upon by party officials and media allies alike (CNN and MSNBC are seen in Sanders crowds as Goebbelsian arms of the Democratic National Committee), Vermont’s anti-corporate crusader has defied odds and soared in polls. All that remains is the Schadenfreude orgasm of a victory speech.

A young animal rights lawyer named Colin Grace is explaining how he got turned on to Bernie. “Honestly, it started by looking into some of the causes of 2008,” he laughs. “Well, then I found weed and became a libertarian.”

A nearby supporter with long hair under a standard issue Spin Doctors wool weed-smoking hat perks up. “Dude, should we all smoke right now?” smiles at a fortysomething named David, patting his chest pockets. “I’ve got the most enormous J.”

Everyone laughs. David and his wool-and-fleece costume looks nothing like the younger Grace in a blue blazer and collar—Grace was a caucus precinct captain tonight—but their stories sound the same. Two elements are near-constants in Sanders crowds: life experience with a broken system (Grace told a story of corporate-captured regulators killing an animal rights bill he worked on), and feelings of sympathy for a Senator also seen as getting the short stick from establishment cheats.

“I was third party in 2016. I supported Gary Johnson,” says Grace. “But then, even from the sideline, I thought, ‘Man, the DNC is rigging this against Sanders.”

“They’re dirty, man,” David agrees. “They don’t even try to hide it.”

Can there be any further explanation why the kicker on Taibbi’s second piece declares: In a fiasco for the ages, the blue party faceplants in Iowa. Then Taibbi wakes up the next morning.

Yesterday’s really gone.

In 1993, liberal America sang along at the Bill Clinton inaugural ball with Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks (and Michael Jackson, whoops). “Don’t Stop” was “Ding, dong, the witch is dead!” for the smart set. The New Democrats ushered in a new reign for youth and modernity against Reagan-Bush reaction.

That’s done. After a vote in Iowa that reeked of third-world treachery — from monolithic TV propaganda against the challenger to rumors of foreign intrusion to, finally, a “botched” vote count that felt as legitimate as a Supreme Soviet election—the Democrats have become the reactionaries they once replaced.

Deborah Van Kleef chose to read Roldo Bartimole’s 17 January piece: HOW GREEDY CAN SHERWIN WILLIAMS BE? at the 7th Annual Cleveland Heights Democracy Day celebration. Roldo has followed that post yesterday with his SHERWIN WILLIAMS TO PLOW INTO THE SUBSIDY POT.

After you listen to Roldo’s piece, I strongly encourage you to return to the beginning and watch the other presentations and readings.

President Donald John Trump has been impeached,acquitted of those articles of impeachment and now truly believes that he is fully empowered by the second article of our Constitution to do whatever the fuck he likes. The toddler-in-chief now believes that the babysitter has been instructed that spankings are not permitted in the White House.

Ralph Nader is not so kind. Writing in The Vengeful, Lawless, Corporate Toady Trump Explodes, Nader goes on a tear:

The day after his acquittal by the Republican Party in a trial that banned witnesses, the unhinged Donald Trump gloated for over an hour on all the television networks. Trump flattered his courtiers, one by one, and fulminated against his Congressional adversaries, Hillary Clinton and ex-FBI chief James Comey.

Donald Trump’s speech degraded his office for the ages. Trump lied about himself and others and received applause from the assembled sycophants. The morning of his speech, Trump attended a prayer breakfast. Trump never goes to church to atone for his habitual, career-long violations of seven of the Ten Commandments. His hypocrisy has no bounds.

Tightening his dictatorial grip on the U.S. government, Trump pledged to destroy his opponents—from Nancy Pelosi to Adam Schiff to the “radical, socialist Democrats.” These shameful threats cannot be taken lightly. Never forget Trump saying Continue Reading »

In 1976—the year I joined the USS Bainbridge—my father shared a remark from a visiting British engineer where he worked. At the height of the bicentennial fever Clive remarked: I really don’t understand all the excitement, my mother’s house is more than 200 years old. He was right, of course, in the scope of human history we are not yet a toddler nation.

Yet, we are rightly proud of most of our history—although we do sometimes get our heritage horribly wrong—and we do our best to immortalize our greatest leaders. The iconic example is the Mount Rushmore National Memorial in Keystone, South Dakota.

Rushmore features four presidents: a George Washington—a Nonfactionalist; Thomas Jefferson—a Democratic-Republican; Abraham Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt—both Republicans. Both Washington and Jefferson enslaved Africans and both Jefferson and Lincoln were attorneys. Washington had a long and distinguished military career and Teddy Roosevelt is the only president to win both the Medal of Honor and the Nobel Peace Prize. Lincoln served briefly in the Illinois militia as a Company Captain during the Black Hawk War and Jefferson was briefly a Colonel in the Albemarle County Militia. While many visit Mount Rushmore every year, most Americans come into contact with our great presidents though the use of our coinage and currency.

Washington appears on our quarter and one-dollar bill. Jefferson is on our nickel and two-dollar bill. Lincoln is our penny and five-dollar bill. Roosevelt has not been so honored, although his cousin Franklin Delano Roosevelt appears on our dime. Two other presidents, Andrew Jackson (the first so elected from the Democratic Party) appears on our $20 bill and president Hiram Ulysses Grant appears on our $50 bill. (Other presidents appear on larger denomination bills no longer in circulation.)

We also honor our presidents with national monuments in Washington, D.C.—named, of course, after our first president. The tallest monument is Washington’s and, by statute, remains the tallest building in our capital. Monuments to both Jefferson and Lincoln are equally famous although other presidents have been honored with national monuments.

There are also private monuments in the form of Presidential Libraries—President Herbert Clark Hoover got the first; Jefferson’s became thee Library of Congress—and ancestral homes of presidents.

Finally, many, many vessels in the United States Navy have borne the name of presidents. In modern times, the navy has chosen to name 9 nuclear-powered aircraft carriers after presidents: seven Nimitz-class and two (to date) Ford-class.

Beyond my own time in the navy, this last category has a particular interest to me because 19 of 44 former presidents have not had naval vessels named for them. Included in that list are the three president—Andrew Johnson, Richard Milhous Nixon and William Jefferson Clinton—who were either impeached or resigned their office in disgrace. While I have no doubt that supporters of our fourth impeached president will fight heroically for some national honor, I do not expect that either our mint—well maybe the $3 bill—or our navy will be so inclined to accommodate them.

Bonus No. 1: Everybody gets a Presidential Medal of Freedom…!

Bonus No. 2: Compare and contrast…

Bonus No. 1: In 2020, 30 pieces of silver equals $150…

Well, the west side of Public Square will finally (we think) get a major building—soaked in subsidies.

Much more than before. We take a Look Back.

In the late 1980s the exact same spot housed substantial buildings, all knocked down in anticipation of a second Dick Jacobs complex—major office building and a major hotel.

Never built for more than 30 years. Why? The subsidies flowed but the downtown market said, “No.” Subsidies didn’t matter. The market did.

It would have given Jacobs a doubling with the subsidies the city also gave him at the neighboring complex – now Key Center and the Marriott hotel. A quarter billion dollars in tax and other relief.

It was the give-away 80s with the two Georges—Forbes & Voinovich—bestowing on the late Dick Jacobs plenty of gifts downtown, not to mention the virgin land at Chagrin Highlands. CH now draws from business from Cleveland’s downtown. Jacobs also was blessed with then Progressive Field, another government- subsidized gift. He could do no wrong.

The same downtown plot now will house, if things work out, the Sherwin-Williams new headquarters, saving the paint company for Cleveland. That part is good.

But the cost that the billion-dollars company will wring from the city of Cleveland, the county of Cuyahoga and the State of Ohio will make the gifts from the 1980 Georges pale in comparison.

But will we ever know the public cost? Not likely.

Today’s “news media” hardly makes much of an attempt to get the actual gimmies the politicians will bestow on Sherwin Williams.

And Sherwin Williams will gladly pocket the dough for at least the next 30 year and keep its corporate mouth shut.

Over the years I have studied the habits of successful writers in my unsuccessful search for the way to image my novels so that I might approach the dream of taking in the whole in one moment the way a Google map presents us with a hear-to-there visualization of our journeys. Approaching the dream is hard enough; grasping the dream is impossible.

I created outlines. I written synopses. I’ve plastered walls with pages. I’ve scribbled on stacks of index cards. I’ve even created Power Point presentations. Each taught me a lesson or two and they weren’t failures per se, but none was fully satisfying. They all left an itch I couldn’t reach. Reading Mosley’s Elements of Fiction taught me that I was approaching the challenge backwards. I was trying to use my mind to organize the novel. When, as Mosley writes:

The act of writing a novel organizes the mind. It sends us on a journey that is uniquely personal. (x)

This is why all writing is rewriting. In the process of producing any first draft we necessarily begin to shape what we think about the subject of what we’re writing. We may not—I know I don’t—begin to see clearly where we’re going until we made the trip a few times. To flog the metaphor just a bit more, making the journey allows us to discover the shortcuts and the scenic routes; the special diners and gas stations from hell.

We just have enjoy the ride or we make ourselves crazy.

Previously…

My further notes on Mosley’s Elements of Fiction may be found in my electronic chapbook.

Bonus No. 1: Iowa Glitch, Biden’s Drop, Romney’s Vote, and Trump’s Acquittal.

Bonus No. 2: Thanks to the government we have a third croquemboules pool! This really is the lucky country club.

Bonus No. 3: Anti-Bernie Sanders Attack Ads Are Going to Be Awesome.

Bonus No. 4: I sooooo understand Pig.

And, of course, the evil fucks at the Democratic National Committee want a do-over.

For the record, I’m an atheist who does not believe in gods and souls, immortal or otherwise. Ohio’s junior senator Robert Jones Portman has professed belief in both but I don’t ever want to hear him do so again. Leading up to the vote on the Senate trail of President Donald John Trump on two articles of impeachment I left two phone messages for my senator.

In them I reminded him that he had taken two oaths before his God: the first when he began his current term of office in the United States Senate; and second at the beginning of Trump’s impeachment trial.

In the first he said he would:

…support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter: so help me God.

In the second Portman swore to:

do impartial justice according to the Constitution and laws: so help me God

In neither oath do the words president or party appear; the oaths invoke only our Constitution. All of this, of course, applies to all the Republicans in the Senate who have ever paraded their Christian faith as a rational for why voters should elect and reëlect them, and people are paying attention. Well, almost all.

Stephen Colbert, in the video above quotes a line from Robert Bolt’s play A Man For All Seasons. This is one of a handful of plays that I own and while I have never seen it performed live, I have watched the film adaptation dozens of times.

When a man takes an oath, Meg, he is holding his own self in his own hands. Like water. And, if he opens his fingers then—he needn’t hope to find himself again.

Only Romney kept his fingers tightly closed.

Sir Thomas Moore literally lost his head over his ethical stance and our president has already tweeted:

Had failed presidential candidate @MittRomney devoted the same energy and anger to defeating a faltering Barack Obama as he sanctimoniously does to me, he could have won the election. Read the Transcripts!

Not to be outdone, the president’s son tweeted:

Mitt Romney is forever bitter that he will never be POTUS. He was too weak to beat the Democrats then so he’s joining them now.

He’s now officially a member of the resistance & should be expelled from the @GOP

Or, as Bolt wrote the scene…

Bonus No. 1: Like the Ipod, clever but not enough.

Bonus No. 2: Romney denies Trump unanimous Republican support.

Bonus No. 3: The State of Our Union is BAD. (Pay attention to whose picture pops ups at timemark 5:31.)

.

When given a choice among evil, incompetent or stupid, which would you go with?

There is good news for Bernie coing from nontraditional voters at satellite caucus location around Iowa, the United States and as far away as the Georgian Republic. These serve as a partial response to the greatest flaw in the Iowa system: that you have to show up to vote and if you have work or are homebound or out of the state/country, well tough.

Ryan Grim, in Nontraditional Voters at Iowa Satellite Caucuses Could Tip the Balance to Bernie Sanders. for The Intercept, writes:

Heading into Iowa, Sen. Bernie Sanders had a mantra he used in his stump speech: If you turn on the TV on caucus night and they say turnout is high, we win. If they tell you that turnout is low, we lose. Simple as that.

Except, of course, it’s not that simple. On Monday evening in Iowa, turnout did not match the 2008 record set as Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and John Edwards battled it out. Yet, Sanders still won the most votes so far, both on the first and final ballots, even as the delegate total remains unsettled.

The strategy may, however, pay off because of a change in the Iowa process this year that created global satellite locations—including one in Tbilisi, Georgia (your organizing may have helped, Tim) which, according to Grim, was the first to Caucus and reports are that Sanders led the delegates there. Grim continues:

In all, there were 87 satellite caucuses. According to Iowa Democratic Party rules, the total delegate value of those caucuses will be determined by satellite turnout and in proportion to the total number of people who came out to vote in the regular caucuses. They are to be worth some percent of the total, meaning that the four delegates Sanders won in Ottumwa, for instance, could actually rise or shrink in the final analysis. But what we know about those caucuses suggests that Sanders may have won those caucuses by enough to overcome his deficit with Buttigieg, which at the time of writing sits at 23.987 delegates with 86 percent of the precincts reporting.

Jeff Weaver, a senior campaign adviser, said at a Sanders rally in New Hampshire on Tuesday night that he remained optimistic about winning not just the popular vote, but also the delegate count, citing success in the satellite caucuses. “If you look at satellite caucuses — we don’t have final numbers yet — if you look at new Latino voters coming out in Iowa, new Muslim voters coming out in Iowa, caucus sites in union halls, that’s part of this expansion of the electorate. It takes a while, but I’m very proud of the work we did helping underrepresented communities get represented in the caucus,” Weaver said.

The negative ads run against Sanders at the end of the campaign, he argued, could have depressed turnout. “We were trying to drive as high a turnout as we possibly could in Iowa. Who knows whether the fact that three people weren’t in state for a week, what effect that had on sort of like, the excitement level in the state. It’s impossible to know all the mix. Another thing that happened which was unfortunate was an outside Democratic group-I think really, on the Democratic side, maybe for the first time—came in with some really nasty advertising and frankly that tends to suppress turnout,” Weaver said.

This shit has got to stop. One person, one vote. Any other system is simply not democracy.

Bonus No. 1: Why Is Elizabeth Warren Hiring so Many Right Wing Foreign Policy Hacks?

Be of stout heart. The elites who think they own freedom and that the United States of America is their personal fiefdom are afraid. They are very, very afraid. Fight to the last dog…

The United States remains hobbled by two remnants of our history as a nation founded on chattel enslavement enshrined in our Constitution: first, the single exception found in the 13th amendment (I’ll go there another time) and second, the Frankensteinian creation of a our Electoral College. This second, in the 21st century, is an existential threat to our Democracy.

The electoral college functions like parents on a long vacation drive trying to decide where to stop to eat. Dad asks the kids: what does everyone want? Three kids shout pizza and two demand burgers. Mom and Dad in the front seat share looks and decide the burgers it is for their own private reasons. While three of the kids sulk and the other two gloat, the parents remain firmly in control of decision making in the family.

That’s not Democracy. The founders knew that that wasn’t Democracy, but they built the Electoral College into our constitution because in order to maintain the United part of United States, the slave states needed a way to stop the rest of the country from cutting them out of the process of selecting the President. The Republicans should have abolished the Electoral College after the Civil War, but they didn’t. More than 150 years later our Democracy continues to pay for their mistake.

Democracy is the theme taken on by The New Yorker in what the weekly magazine calls: The Future of Democracy. In the introduction, the editors write:

Our democracy is in crisis. Many institutions of our government are dysfunctional and getting worse. Our electoral system has produced, in a single generation, two Presidents who received fewer votes than their opponents. A changed media landscape has—with the shrewd assistance of malicious actors at home and abroad—loosened our collective grasp on reality. Our politics have become alarmingly acrimonious; one of the potential disasters of the 2020 election is a result that is widely considered illegitimate. Technology is enriching some and leaving many others behind. Meanwhile, as the country’s demography shifts, a nativist far-right is resurgent.

Between now and the election in November, The New Yorker, enlisting a wide range of writers, will be exploring the past, present, and future of American democracy: tallying our problems, reckoning with their implications, and inspecting proposed solutions.

The series begins with a history lesson focusing on the last time that our nation, indeed, the entire world faced global threats to the very idea of democracy from the rise of Strong Men like Benito Amilcare Andrea Mussolini in Italy, Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin in Russia, Adolf Hitler in Germany, Francisco Franco Bahamonde in Spain and Hideki Tojo in Japan.

There were many others, including our own Fritz Julius Kuhn, but these five represented the greatest threat to democracy yet seen. Jill Lepore, in The Last Time Democracy Almost Died for The New Yorker, ledes:

The last time democracy nearly died all over the world and almost all at once, Americans argued about it, and then they tried to fix it. “The future of democracy is topic number one in the animated discussion going on all over America,” a contributor to the New York Times wrote in 1937. “In the Legislatures, over the radio, at the luncheon table, in the drawing rooms, at meetings of forums and in all kinds of groups of citizens everywhere, people are talking about the democratic way of life.” People bickered and people hollered, and they also made rules. “You are a liar!” one guy shouted from the audience during a political debate heard on the radio by ten million Americans, from Missoula to Tallahassee. “Now, now, we don’t allow that,” the moderator said, calmly, and asked him to leave.

In the nineteen-thirties, you could count on the Yankees winning the World Series, dust storms plaguing the prairies, evangelicals preaching on the radio, Franklin Delano Roosevelt residing in the White House, people lining up for blocks to get scraps of food, and democracies dying, from the Andes to the Urals and the Alps.

In 1917, Woodrow Wilson’s Administration had promised that winning the Great War would “make the world safe for democracy.” The peace carved nearly a dozen new states out of the former Russian, Ottoman, and Austrian empires. The number of democracies in the world rose; the spread of liberal-democratic governance began to appear inevitable. But this was no more than a reverie. Infant democracies grew, toddled, wobbled, and fell…

Lepore packs a lot into her nearly 4,700-word piece and you should read the whole from beginning to end, but I’ll make note of this passage:

[In 1931] When Japan invaded Manchuria, the League of Nations condemned the annexation, to no avail. “The liberal state is destined to perish,” Mussolini predicted in 1932. “All the political experiments of our day are anti-liberal.” By 1933, the year Adolf Hitler came to power, the American political commentator Walter Lippmann was telling an audience of students at Berkeley that “the old relationships among the great masses of the people of the earth have disappeared.” What next? More epitaphs: Greece, Romania, Estonia, and Latvia. Authoritarians multiplied in Portugal, Uruguay, Spain. Japan invaded Shanghai. Mussolini invaded Ethiopia. “The present century is the century of authority,” he declared, “a century of the Right, a Fascist century.”

American democracy, too, staggered, weakened by corruption, monopoly, apathy, inequality, political violence, hucksterism, racial injustice, unemployment, even starvation. “We do not distrust the future of essential democracy,” F.D.R. said in his first Inaugural Address, telling Americans that the only thing they had to fear was fear itself. But there was more to be afraid of, including Americans’ own declining faith in self-government. “What Does Democracy Mean?” NBC radio asked listeners. “Do we Negroes believe in democracy?” W. E. B. Du Bois asked the readers of his newspaper column. Could it happen here? Sinclair Lewis asked in 1935. Americans suffered, and hungered, and wondered. The historian Charles Beard, in the inevitable essay on “The Future of Democracy in the United States,” predicted that American democracy would endure, if only because “there is in America, no Rome, no Berlin to march on.” Some Americans turned to Communism. Some turned to Fascism. And a lot of people, worried about whether American democracy could survive past the end of the decade, strove to save it.

“It’s not too late,” Jimmy Stewart pleaded with Congress, rasping, exhausted, in “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington,” in 1939. “Great principles don’t get lost once they come to light.” It wasn’t too late. It’s still not too late.

Although The New Yorker editors don’t mention Jorge Agustín Nicolás Ruiz de Santayana y Borrás and his most remembered aphorism regarding the past, his words must have played some role in the conception of the series. One of the laments I hear from time to time around the bar at the Veterans of Foreign Wars post where I belong is that kids today don’t learn anything about History in school. Lepore’s words do much to fill in some of those gaps.

Bonus No. 1: Michael Moore trashes DNC, Bloomberg while stumping for Bernie Sanders.

Bonus No. 2: A horde of climate ratbags is saving the Earth by sheer force of numbers (and vegan treats).

Bonus No. 3: DNC Insiders Plot Return of Superdelegates to Stop Sanders at Convention.

Bonus No. 4: DNC Plots Superdelegate Change To Screw Bernie.