Arguably my politics are the furthest left in my family. I think I might have gotten that from my paternal grandmother who was a suffragette. Growing up I always thought of my father as pretty liberal, but even he had his moments. He once took the time to photocopy—and blank out the cartoons in—Playboy’s 1967 interview with New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison. He kinda, probably, believed conspiracy theories, but he was also quick to correct me when I repeated the infamous 100 miles per gallon conspiracy theory, telling me that science just didn’t work that way.

My dad also watched a lot of television. I haven’t watched network television for decades, but thanks to DVDs, and now Netflix, I have been able to go back and watch some shows that my dad enjoyed and I have begun to recognize a subtle, or perhaps not so subtle, agenda that makes more sense to me than previously.

As a reader (and writer) of fiction I’m perfectly comfortable with the observation that all fiction revolves around lies informed by a bit of truth. Fiction has always been that way and must continue to be so. Fiction has a power that those in power understand. One of the most important classes I took as an undergraduate was Soviet Literature with Dr. David Williams. The class focused on novels written in the Socialist Realism tradition. The books were good.

Here in the West we tend to not think of our literature in that way, but those works exist here as well. Possibly the greatest proponent of the American genre was Tom Clancy who wrote what I used to call Military Technology Porn, but now I would place in what I’m calling Make America Great Again Porn: entertainment that appeals to the prurient interests of the entertained.

There has been much discussion in the past two years about exactly when was the America that supporters of President Donald John Trump wish to return to. There have been no good answers to that question. There have been no good answers because that time when America was last great exists only in their imagination, an imagination created by the fictional worlds of Tom Clancy, television and movies.

I want to suggest that three shows that my dad enjoyed are ground zero for this dystopian Our Town: 24, (2001-2010); Blue Bloods, (2010-?); and the reboot of Hawaii Five-O (also 2010-present).

What do the shows have in common? Law enforcement professionals cowboys who, in the purported interest of protecting America, don’t just cross lines, they obliterate them. They threaten, beat and torture all in the interest of law and order—there’s a reason that Dick Wolf chose that title—who long to live in the myth of Americas wild west.

They yearn for West World.

On Sunday, I extensively explored an op-ed by George Monbiot. Today I read another of his op-eds. I must confess that if I hadn’t read the first, I probably wouldn’t have read the second.

Why? Because he makes the case that President Donald John Trump was right about at least one aspect of the recent G7 summit in Quebec. Writing in Donald Trump was right. The rest of the G7 were wrong for The Guardian, Monbiot argues:

He gets almost everything wrong. But last weekend Donald Trump got something right. To the horror of the other leaders of the rich world, he defended democracy against its detractors. Perhaps predictably, he has been universally condemned for it.

His crime was to insist that the North American Free Trade Agreement should have a sunset clause. In other words, it should not remain valid indefinitely, but expire after five years, allowing its members either to renegotiate it or to walk away. To howls of execration from the world’s media, his insistence has torpedoed efforts to update the treaty.

In Rights of Man, published in 1791, Thomas Paine argued that: “Every age and generation must be as free to act for itself, in all cases, as the ages and generations which preceded it. The vanity and presumption of governing beyond the grave is the most ridiculous and insolent of all tyrannies.” This is widely accepted–in theory if not in practice–as a basic democratic principle.

Even if the people of the US, Canada and Mexico had explicitly consented to Nafta in 1994, the idea that a decision made then should bind everyone in North America for all time is repulsive. So is the notion, championed by the Canadian and Mexican governments, that any slightly modified version of the deal agreed now should bind all future governments.

I can see what he’s talking about, but my concern is that with a set sunset date on any treaty, a country could reap the benefits for five, ten or twenty years and then, when the going gets tough, bail. Imagine if something like

Before this week I’d never heard of Monbiot, but glancing at his website this morning, I realized that I need to dig a bit deeper into who he is.

Many of our presidents have formalized their foreign policy positions id doctrines—think Monroe, Truman and Reagan—but none, until now, has reduce their world view to a three-word rap beef. I give you The Trump Doctrine.

Jeffrey Goldberg, writing in A Senior White House Official Defines the Trump Doctrine: ‘We’re America, Bitch’ for The Atlantic, explains:

Many of Donald Trump’s critics find it difficult to ascribe to a president they consider to be both subliterate and historically insensate a foreign-policy doctrine that approaches coherence. A Trump Doctrine would require evidence of Trump Thought, and proof of such thinking, the argument goes, is scant. This view is informed in part by feelings of condescension, but it is not meritless. Barack Obama, whose foreign-policy doctrine I studied in depth, was cerebral to a fault; the man who succeeded him is perhaps the most glandular president in American history. Unlike Obama, Trump possesses no ability to explain anything resembling a foreign-policy philosophy. But this does not mean that he is without ideas.

Over the past couple of months, I’ve asked a number of people close to the president to provide me with short descriptions of what might constitute the Trump Doctrine.

What Goldberg discovered should surprise no one. That he got the quote so easily should be scary.

The best distillation of the Trump Doctrine I heard, though, came from a senior White House official with direct access to the president and his thinking. I was talking to this person several weeks ago, and I said, by way of introduction, that I thought it might perhaps be too early to discern a definitive Trump Doctrine.

“No,” the official said. “There’s definitely a Trump Doctrine.”

“What is it?” I asked. Here is the answer I received:

“The Trump Doctrine is ‘We’re America, Bitch.’ That’s the Trump Doctrine.”

It struck me almost immediately that this was the most acute, and attitudinally honest, description of the manner in which members of Trump’s team, and Trump himself, understand their role in the world.

I have heard Trump described as the quintessential New Yorker. Wannabe, maybe. Trump is neither Tupac nor The Notorious B.I.G. and the world is not an East Coast-West Coast rivalry. Treating American foreign policy in such a cavalier manner is doubleplusungood.

[Update at 0523 on 14 June: Of course Jordan Klepper was thrilled.]

Welcome to amateur hour. Uncle Joe did a better job and the results were genocidal.

Back in January I related my experience of the story in a comment to Jill Miller Zimon’s post on The Goldwater Rule. I wrote:

I’m reminded of a story about a truly insane leader and master of propaganda with great power: Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin.

This is how I heard the story.

Stalin was previewing a propaganda film concerning grain harvests in Ukraine. The film showed dancing Kulaks celebrating the bounty of a record harvest. Stalin was well pleased with the film and those around him were doubly pleased that the great man approved of their work.

Then the shit hit the fan.

At the end of the film Stalin stood up and said, “These Kulaks are doing too well. Cut their rations in half!”

Everyone in the room froze. They knew that the film was propaganda, that the harvest had been horrible and that the peasants were starving. Did their leader actually not know that? No one spoke other than to acknowledge the order. The rations were halved and tens of thousands of Ukrainians died.

Now President Donald John Trump has commissioned a propaganda film of his own to play to an heir to Stalin. In ‘Harebrained’: National Security Council owns up to widely derided Trump video for The Guardian, Julian Borger writes:

The National Security Council has said that it made the video Donald Trump showed to Kim Jong-un at their Singapore summit on Tuesday in an unorthodox effort to persuade him of the benefits of denuclearisation.

The four-minute video in Korean and English was made in the style of an extended action movie trailer and portrayed Kim and Trump as men of destiny with the future of the world in their hands.

The video, which Trump showed to the press after playing it on an iPad for Kim, is credited to “Destiny Pictures Productions”, prompting a flurry of press inquiries to a film production company of that name in California.

Mark Castaldo, the company’s founder, said in an email it had “no involvement in the video”.

“Woke up to 100’s of e-mails and calls from all over the world. Crazy” Castaldo said in a tweet, adding that he was trying to find out “why they used my company name”.

Garrett Marquis, an NSC spokesman said in a statement: “The video was created by the National Security Council to help the president demonstrate the benefits of complete denuclearization, and a vision of a peaceful and prosperous Korean peninsula.”

When asked about the decision to present the video as made by a non-existent company, an NSC spokesman said there would be no further comment.

“From my understanding, they were just using ‘Destiny Pictures’ as a play on words. It just so happens there’s a studio by that name in California,” said Ned Price, a former NSC spokesman.

“Leave it to this White House to fail to conduct basic due diligence. And that, of course, leaves aside the fact they thought it prudent to try to out-North-Korea North Korea in the propaganda department.

“The whole enterprise reeks of amateurism and comes off as an attempt to check the box on a harebrained idea that presumably originated in the oval office,” Price added

Does any other kind of idea originate from our current oval office?

Trevor Noah also has a take that I don’t think is what Trump had in mind.

I was working as an editor 1985 when Coca Cola made the disastrous decision to fuck with the so-secret-they-keep-it-in-a-vault formula for their signature beverage. Over coffee with a friend who worked for Beverage Industry magazine I was told that then chairman of the company, when asked in an interview, whether the move was actually a public relations coup to strengthen what became known as Classic Coke, replied: “We’re neither that smart nor that stupid.”

The International House of Pancakes—the favorite 3 a.m. hangout for college students in Fort Collins, Colorado back in 1974—thinks it is that smart. Paul R. La Monica, reporting in IHOP reveals the mystery of IHOb for CNN, writes:

The mystery of IHOb is solved.

IHOP said on Monday that it’s temporarily changing its branding because the B stands for burgers.

It’s only a marketing campaign. IHOP isn’t changing its name. But the chain of breakfast diners took social media by storm last week with the cryptic announcement that it was flipping the lowercase “p” in its logo and making it a “b.”

IHOP, of course, stands for International House of Pancakes. But IHOP — sorry, IHOb — wants to be known as a place to get lunch and dinner, not just breakfast and brunch. It’s adding several burgers to its menu, including a Big Brunch burger with bacon, a fried egg and browned potato on top.

“We are definitely going to be IHOP,” Darren Rebelez, president of IHOP, told CNNMoney. “But we want to convey that we are taking our burgers as seriously as our pancakes.”

An IHOP in Hollywood is getting new IHOb signs, and some others might get the treatment. The new IHOb Twitter account even retweeted photos and video of a construction crew putting up the new sign in LA.

Clearly the stunt worked, but my favorite quote on the story came in a tweet from burger and breakfast competitor Wendy’s: “Not really afraid of the burgers from a place that decided pancakes were too hard.”

Ouch…

Also, this is just first segment of Klepper’s show last evening. I don’t think I’ve ever done this before but the whole episode gets the HCWW seal of approval.

You know, having a print of this hanging in your home would probably be a good idea (a small print is available for as little as $25), but that could be a bridge too far right now. Having an image from our past, that reminds us daily where we came from—akin to my writing corner—so that we might emulate Oprah Winfrey is a good starting point.

Angela Helm, writing in Oprah Keeps Painting of Enslaved Family in Her Home to Keep Her Grounded for The Root, explains:

The indomitable Oprah Winfrey, who was recently honored with an entire exhibit of her life and work at the National Museum of African American History and Culture, will never forget those who made it possible for her to become the trailblazing pioneer she remains.

According to a segment shared widely by CNN, during the opening of the exhibit last week, Winfrey said that she keeps a 6-foot painting of an enslaved woman on the auction block, holding her daughter’s hand placed, prominently in her home so that amid all of that opulence (because you know Oprah’s Santa Barbara, Calif., manse is nothing if not fabulous), she remains grounded.

“I cannot come in the door … or I cannot leave, without passing that painting,” said Winfrey of the work that she says she’s owned for 30 years, titled, To the Highest Bidder, by Harry Roseland. “I am reminded of where I come from every day of my life.”

The past is never dead. It’s not even past…

When I was an undergraduate student at Ohio University I worked a couple hours a week at the local food co-op to get a discount on foods. I stocked shelves, sliced and wrapped cheese and generally did scut work. I enjoyed what I did. This was also my introduction to the whole organic/vegetarian/vegan world. One day I was browsing the book rack and found a 10th Anniversary Edition of Frances Moore Lappé’s Diet For A Small Planet (I’ve since added the 20th Anniversary Edition to my shelf.) That one book informed most of what I know about ecological eating, but Lappé fell short of convincing me to go all in on and eating only plants.

That was my mistake.

Reading George Monbiot’s op-ed piece, The best way to save the planet? Drop meat and dairy in The Guardian, this morning, may have tipped the scales. Monbiot writes:

Whether human beings survive this century and the next, whether other lifeforms can live alongside us: more than anything, this depends on the way we eat. We can cut our consumption of everything else almost to zero and still we will drive living systems to collapse, unless we change our diets.

All the evidence now points in one direction: the crucial shift is from an animal- to a plant-based diet. A paper published last week in Science reveals that while some kinds of meat and dairy production are more damaging than others, all are more harmful to the living world than growing plant protein. It shows that animal farming takes up 83% of the world’s agricultural land, but delivers only 18% of our calories. A plant-based diet cuts the use of land by 76% and halves the greenhouse gases and other pollution that are caused by food production.

Part of the reason is the extreme inefficiency of feeding livestock on grain: most of its nutritional value is lost in conversion from plant protein to animal protein. This reinforces my contention that if you want to eat less soya, then you should eat soya: 93% of the soya we consume, which drives the destruction of forest, savannah and marshland, is embedded in meat, dairy, eggs and fish, and most of it is lost in conversion. When we eat it directly, much less of the crop is required to deliver the same amount of protein.

This was Lappé’s central lesson. On page 70 of my paperback is her Figure No. 1: A protein factory in Reverse. The reality here is dramatic. A healthy adult human can live on a pound of foods from plants: grains, lentils, &c. To produce a pound of chicken or eggs requires three pounds of grains and soy; to produce a pound of turkey requires four pounds of grains and soy; to produce a pound of port takes six pounds of grains and soy; and the meat that breaks the bank, beef, demands 16 pounds of grains and soy.

The feed, as Lappé details is just part of the ecological load. Factor in water, fossil fuels, disruption of indigenous wildlife, manure disposal and pollution and a host of other environmental demands and meat, no matter how humanely produced, is simply too dangerous to the only planet we have.

So, this is my summer project. By the time school starts in August I will be meat-free. Fish, dairy (mostly cheese) and eggs are probably going to take a little longer. It’s taken me nearly 40 years to get here, but better later than never.

Angela Helm, writing in 26-Year-Old Wins Local Office in Georgia, Takes Her Oath of Office on Autobiography of Malcolm X for The Root, has the story:

Since Tuesday’s elections held throughout the nation, an already iconic photo has been sweeping the internet—of 26-year-old Mariah Parker taking her oath of office as Athens-Clarke County, Ga., commissioner for District 2, with her mother holding, not the Bible or Quran, but another good book: Alex Haley’s Autobiography of Malcolm X.

Parker, who reportedly won by only 13 votes, ran as a progressive, and on her campaign website she declared that “it’s time for bold, progressive leadership in Athens.”

“My platform centers around economic and racial justice,” said the millennial,
according to the Red & Black. “The policies of this town have been structured, deliberately, to ensure that a certain class of people will continue to thrive and a certain class of people will continue to not.”

Looks like it was the ballot, this time…

We salute the rank, not the man.

That makes sense when you’re in the military, and for all the women and men currently serving in our armed forces, President Donald John Trump is their commander and chief. They may hate, love or be indifferent to his politics or manner, but they must still salute the rank.

The rest of us are different. We The People elected him to office and We The People can remove hims from office. The president works for us and we are the ones who get to say you’re fired.

Gary Younge, writing in Despite all the warnings, we are normalising Donald Trump for The Guardian, gives an outsider’s view:

During the presidential election the Huffington Post’s US site carried the following editor’s note at the end of every story about the Republican nominee: “Donald Trump regularly incites political violence and is a serial liar, rampant xenophobe, racist, misogynist and birther who has repeatedly pledged to ban all Muslims–1.6 billion members of an entire religion – from entering the US.”

Shortly before 6am on that long election night – in between Trump’s winning Iowa and being declared the victor in Pennsylvania – the Washington bureau chief announced that the note would be removed, “in respect for the office”, and that it was time for a “clean slate”.

A year before his election, Fiona Hill, who would become one of Theresa May’s joint chiefs of staff, tweeted: “Donald Trump is a chump #trumpisachump”. Six months later Nicholas Timothy, who would become May’s other joint chief, wrote: “As a Tory I don’t want any ‘reaching out’ to Trump.” Once Trump was elected, however, May couldn’t reach out fast or far enough–the first foreign leader to meet the president, just a week after his inauguration.

During the primaries former Republican presidential hopeful Mitt Romney tweeted: “If Trump had said 4 years ago the things he says today about the KKK, Muslims, Mexicans, disabled, I would NOT have accepted his endorsement.” Almost two years later, Romney decided to run for the Utah senate seat and Trump endorsed him. “Thank you Mr President for the support,” he responded.

According to Tim Shipman’s account in Fall Out, a month before the US election the foreign secretary Boris Johnson told a friend: “This is an election that is going to expose America’s primal pysche as never before. If it is Trump, it will be a victory of really base daytime TV Redneck America.” Last month there was Johnson, on breakfast TV (Fox & Friends) insisting that Trump could be a candidate for the Nobel peace prize, as he unsuccessfully pleaded with the president, via one of his favourite TV shows, not to abandon the Iran nuclear deal.

Power, or even the perception of power, is everything. Younge continues:

Power can apply a soothing balm to a raging conscience. In its absence, all kinds of moral positions can be staked out in bold, vivid rhetoric. But it is only in the presence of power that these values are tested. For it is only then that there is a price to pay. In those moments we see whether the lines people have drawn have been carved in stone, so they can stand by them, or etched in sand, ensuring no permanent trace.

So it has been with Trump’s elevation. Once his candidacy proved viable there was a broad consensus that it should not be normalised. This was not simply a politician with whom some had policy disagreements; here was a man who practised a style of politics that could not be indulged. He advocated violence at his own rallies, branded journalists scum, brazenly invented facts, employed unvarnished racism, xenophobia and misogyny on the stump and refused to accept the result if he lost. To treat him like any other candidate would be not only to legitimise such political behaviour but reward it. That is why it will be important to demonstrate during his July visit to make clear to the world that we have clear moral lines and the man who is ostensibly our main ally has crossed them many times.

Trump has shown us that the vast majority of politicians are just toadies hoping to suckle at the teat of power.

And there’s not a clever plan in sight.

Waiting for Trump to self-destruct is not a political strategy.

Younge concludes:

The remarkable thing about this week is that – compared with his behaviour in other weeks – it’s not that remarkable. The political situation in America is many things: it’s exhausting, exasperating, terrifying, volatile, vulgar, unsustainable and unhinged. The one thing it is not, is normal.

When will the frog jump out of the pot…?

For millennia empires have imposed their mother tongue on the conquered. The message has always been: we don’t learn your language, you learn ours. And one of the ways that the conquered have retained their independence has been to hold onto their own language. As long as their language exists, they are not truly conquered.

Reading Damian Le Bas’ I don’t look like most people’s idea of a Gypsy in The Guardian—the piece is an excerpt from his The Stopping Places:A Journey Through Gypsy Britain—this morning came across this reflection:

Almost everyone who has studied Romani in Britain has remarked on how adept its speakers are at coming up with names for things. In some ways, talking Romanes means having to be constantly inventive and alert, both in terms of creating words and also interpreting the new ones that get spun off the cuff and thrown into daily Traveller conversation. There is no stigma attached to inventing words, as there so often is in English; nor are new words looked down upon as annoying neologisms that we’d be better off without. Invented words are more likely to be smiled upon or chuckled at as evidence of a witty, intelligent mind; one with a good and flexible grasp of the ancient Travellers’ tongue.

Besides, if Romani is to retain one of the functions which has kept it alive thus far–and which it has in common with almost all minority languages–namely, to stop outsiders knowing what you are talking about, then it will always be necessary to invent new ways of saying things. According to a Belarusian Romany man I once met, a word is no longer a truly Romani word once its meaning becomes known amongst the gadzhe–it is useless, dead, and best left where it is. This is an extreme opinion, but it points to a common anxiety: that the language will lose its power if it becomes too widely known. Yet words come and go as they please, like mood and temper; traded by friends, explained by lovers, and hurled across the fray. Every Gypsy who “gives away” the Romani language risks the accusation of treason.

Languages never truly translate. They can’t. Literal meanings have shading, context, history. There is power in the words we speak and write and when the words cease, so do people. This is the reason why the Irish insist that their children learn Gaelic and Jews drag their children to Hebrew school three times a week. Its why Native Americans are struggling in the 21st century to keep the voice of their ancestors alive. Language is the ultimate vaccination against assimilation.

Le Bas clearly has a far broader agenda beyond language and roots. The essay, and I imagine the book, is mostly about understanding himself and like all writers he writes to answer his own questions.

That he may answer some of our is just a bonus.

Why the fuck do we have to keep forcing Democrats to be Democrats? Maybe because the Democratic Party has ceased to be a party run by Democrats? Or, that they’ve never been Democrats in the first place?

Case in point: Cynthia Nixon. The Nation has put Nixon on the cover of the 2-9 July issue addressing just those questions. In Cynthia Nixon for Governor: New Yorkers deserve a true progressive champion. the magazine’s staff writes:

Ever since Cynthia Nixon announced her long-shot campaign to become New York’s next governor, the current incumbent has been a changed man. Not only has Andrew Cuomo publicly reconsidered his longtime opposition to legalizing marijuana and issued an executive order restoring voting rights to felons who have been released on parole, he also spoke out against the wave of federal immigration raids across the state. After first refusing to endorse a $19 billion plan to overhaul New York City’s crumbling subways, the governor now supports it. Somewhere under a sofa in Albany, he also found a spare $250 million to begin to address New York City’s ongoing public-housing emergency. Thanks to the “Cynthia effect,” Cuomo has even managed to find the political muscle to broker an end to the Independent Democratic Conference, a breakaway faction of state senators who caucused with the Republicans, stymieing progressive legislation.

Cuomo is so not-a-democrat that he accepted contributions from Charles and David Koch. Cuomo’s father, who served three terms as governor of New York State, would not be pleased. Nixon’s progressive credentials, however, are solid.

Over a long career as an activist and advocate, Cynthia Nixon has proved that she’s on the side of workers and citizens. She was arrested protesting inadequate school funding back in 2002, during the peak of her fame on Sex and the City. She’s a proven fighter not just for education, but for marriage equality and women’s rights. Right now, some of her proposals may lack the granular details that could help to persuade skeptical voters, but there is no doubting her tenacity, her good faith, and her probing intelligence.

“It’s not a pipe dream,” Nixon insisted when she spoke with The Nation’s editors, pointing out how much “a real progressive governor, a real Democratic governor” could accomplish. “If we’re going to enact single-payer health care, let’s do it in New York,” she added.

With Donald Trump in the White House and Republicans in control of Congress, the states must be the laboratories of progressive reforms that can put the economy back to work for the 99 percent. Previous generations of New Yorkers led the way on public health, public housing, old-age pensions, and worker protections—and with Cynthia Nixon at the helm, the state can do it again.

Just do it.

Some fifty years ago, when I was only beginning to be interested in politics—mostly, I confess, because of the Vietnam war and the very real chance that I would be drafted (I still have my unburned draft card) and dragooned into traveling to foreign places, meeting exotic people, and killing them—there was a popular slogan among the supporters of Richard Nixon that hearkened back more than 150 years: My country right or wrong.

Of course that wasn’t the whole quote, but that was the easy-to-remember slogan for those who were frightened by Blacks, Hippies, Communists and other political deviants. The whole quote, attributed to 19th century naval hero Stephen Decatur, goes:

Our Country! In her intercourse with foreign nations may she always be in the right; but right or wrong, our country!

Near the end of the century, Carl Christian Schurz altered the jingoistic trope, to admonish:

My country, right or wrong; if right, to be kept right; and if wrong, to be set right.

Where Decatur expressed a simple patriotism, Schurz went deeper and directly to the heart of the duty of all citizens to their country.

In 2016 we had: lock her up, build the wall, drain the swamp and the ubiquitous Make America Great Again!. This week Ralph Nader looks at where the recent torrent of slogans (and slogan voters) are taking us.

Nader, in Slogan Voters: The Road to Political Masochism, writes:

Nearly a year and a half into his presidency, Donald Trump continues to hold his base and maintain an approval rating of around 40 percent–close to the same percentage he polled at just after his inauguration. Let’s try to figure out why.

It can’t be because he lies as a matter of daily routine. It can’t be because he’s giving away our store to big business–engaging in crony capitalism, creating more tax loopholes for corporations, shredding corporate crime enforcement, knowingly exposing Americans to more toxic pollution, committing more business fraud, adding more hazards to the workplace, cutting access to health insurance, and thereby making Continue Reading »

Have Coffee Will Write—Facebook and Twitter free since 2013…

[Update at 0454 on 7 June: Yeah, that didn’t work out so well.]

For several years now I’ve been waking up earlier than I like. Typically I wake up after five, sometimes six, hours of sleep. I drop right off but rarely do I sleep for seven hours and I can count on one hand the number of times in the past 10 years that I’ve gotten eight hours of sleep.

I’ve been to the sleep clinic, I’ve tried a continuous positive airway pressure machine (with various masks). I’ve taken melatonin (in both 3 milligram and 6 milligram doses). I’ve meditated, sipped a cup of warm milk or Sleepy Time (a girlfriend gave me my first box while I was still in the Navy) tea. I’ve listened to dozens of CDs touting various sleeptracks. I’ve read dozens of articles in both the popular and scholarly press. (His columns on sleep were what got me started reading Oliver Burkeman on The Guardian.)

Sometimes I sleep more. Sometimes I don’t. I haven’t found the right solution.

Yet.

This morning I read Charles Anderson’s Sleep Radio: New Zealand station that wants listeners to switch off and embedded the link—see the bottom of my right-hand column—for John Watson’s Sleep Radio.

Anderson writes:

John Watson is the first to admit that his DJ skills put people to sleep. Luckily for him, that is the point.

For the past four years Watson, who lives in the tiny New Zealand township of Te Aroha, has been broadcasting to the world. But instead of seeking an engaged listenership, Watson wants those who tune into his station to literally fall asleep. And they do.

People from as far away as Afghanistan, Israel, Russia, Hungary, Taiwan and Puerto Rico log on to Watson’s station Sleep Radio. Someone in Prague has been listening for three days straight.

The idea of a radio station that sends listeners to sleep came to Watson after he had a heart attack 10 years ago. Following five coronary artery bypasses he began to suffer from chronic depression and insomnia.

“I never used to have trouble going to sleep but now I was lying awake watching the sun rise and feeling like a zombie,” he said.

Watson, 62, was treated with medication and started seeing a counsellor who suggested he try relaxing, ambient music to help him sleep. Soon he found there was not a lot out there for sleep music aficionados.

I’ll let you know how this experiment works out in a week or so.

I know that someone is going to claim that checking on a person who is feared to be suicidal can be dangerous, but this is not the way you do a wellness check. Micah Lee and Alice Speri, reporting in Police Broke Into Chelsea Manning’s Home with Guns Drawn — in a “Wellness Check” for The Intercept, write:

Shortly after Chelsea Manning posted what appeared to be two suicidal tweets on May 27, police broke into her home with their weapons drawn as if conducting a raid, in what is known as a “wellness” or “welfare check” on a person experiencing a mental health crisis. Manning, a former Army intelligence analyst turned whistleblower and U.S. Senate candidate, was not at home, but video obtained by The Intercept shows officers pointing their guns as they searched her empty apartment.

The footage, captured by a security camera, shows an officer with the Montgomery County Police Department in Bethesda, Maryland, knocking on Manning’s door. When no one responds, the officer pops the lock, and three officers enter the home with their guns drawn, while a fourth points a Taser. The Intercept is publishing this video with Manning’s permission.

“This is what a police state looks like,” Manning said. “Guns drawn during a ‘wellness’ check.”

I once made such a call—thankfully a false alarm—but the police officer who responded was kind, caring and fully professional. If I had thought for a moment that a squad of police would enter with guns drawn, I would not have made the call. As Lee and Speri note, in the first six months of 2018, police: have shot and killed at least 64 people who were suicidal or had other mental health issues, according to the American Civil Liberties Union.

The problem, mental health experts say, is that police should not be the ones to check on suicidal people in the first place. In 2017, mental illness played a role in a quarter of 987 police killings, according to a tally by the Washington Post. People of color experiencing mental health crises are particularly at risk.

Our jails and prisons have become the Dickensian substitute for our mental illness facilities closed in the ’80s. Our police, with no degrees in psychology or mental health are expected to do the work of professionals laid off in budget cutbacks.

Can there be any wonder that hundreds who need helped are falling to bullets instead?

I’m on vacation and I’ve been spending part of my time catching up on recycling or filing papers from my flotsam (a Navy habit, my trays are labeled flotsam, jetsam and salvage) box. One piece, which I’ve taped to my headboard comes from Gavin Aung Than’s Akira Kurosawa: The Note Taker which is Gavin’s interpretation of a portion of Kurosawa’s Something Like An Autobiography.

Reading Kurosawa through the lens of deliberate practice, I was struck with this passage:

In order to write scripts, you must first study the great novels and dramas of the world. You must consider why they are great. Where does the emotion come from that you feel as you read them? What degree of passion did the author have to have, what level of meticulousness did he have to command, in order to portray the characters and events as he did? You must read thoroughly, to the point where you can grasp all these things. You must also see the great films. You must read the great screenplays and study the film theories of the great directors. If your goal is to become a film director, you must master screenwriting.

The advice may be universally applied to any chosen endeavor but Kurosawa’s insights are particularly vital for anyone who wishes to create.

Oh yeah the cartoon on my headboard is the final panel.

On 5 August 1974, Mary Lawton, acting Assistant Attorney General, Office of Legal Counsel for the United States Department of Justice wrote:

Under the fundamental rule that no one may be a judge in his own case, the President cannot pardon himself.

If, and this is a really, really big if, Vice President Michael Pence is truly the loyal soldier President Trump believes him to be, Trump does have an out. Lawton continues:

If under the Twenty-Fifth Amendment the President declared that he was temporarily unable to perform the duties of the office, the Vice President would become Acting President and as such could pardon the President. Thereafter the President could either resign or resume the duties of his office.

Of course there is a matter of an arrogant statement of power. Newt Gingrich explains:

Former House Speaker and Trump ally Newt Gingrich warned President Trump against pardoning himself should special counsel Robert Mueller pursue charges in the ongoing Russia investigation, telling “CBS This Morning” on Tuesday that it would be an “arrogant statement of power” if he did so.

“I don’t think he can pardon himself, that would lead to a reaction in the Congress that would be devastating,” Gingrich said.

Gingrich’s comments come after Mr. Trump declared Monday that he has the “absolute right” to pardon himself, but added he had done nothing wrong. The president asserted his presidential power as the White House is honing its political and legal defenses against the special counsel’s Russia probe. Gingrich, however, said that Congress has the “absolute right to impeach him.”

“If a president was dumb enough to pardon himself, that would be such an arrogant statement of power that the House would probably impeach him in a week and the Senate would convict him,” Gingrich said.

As I’ve written before—for a different reason—the vice president is literally Trump’s get-out of-jail-free card.

I’d buy Gingrich’s analysis if we were dealing with a rational president.

We aren’t.

Legendary journalist Seymour Hersh has published his memoir: Reporter. [Update on 1 June at 1543: Mano Singham published his review of Hersh’s book on 30 June.] Hersh is perhaps one of a double handful of reporters who rose to national status because of their courage and tenacity in reporting the truth. What makes him stand out is that unlike others in this rarefied air, Hersh was not a one-trick pony. He broke story after story after story.

Jon Schwarz, writing in Seymour Hersh’s New Memoir Is a Fascinating, Flabbergasting Masterpiece for The Intercept, begins at the beginning, at what he later writes could have been—but wasn’t—Hersh’s origin story. Schwarz ledes:

At the beginning of Seymour Hersh’s new memoir, “Reporter,” he tells a story from his first job in journalism, at the City News Bureau of Chicago.

City News stationed a reporter at Chicago’s police headquarters 24 hours a day to cover whatever incidents were radioed in. Hersh, then in his early 20s, was responsible for the late shift. One night, he writes, this happened:

Two cops called in to report that a robbery suspect had been shot trying to avoid arrest. The cops who had done the shooting were driving in to make a report. … I raced down to the basement parking lot in the hope of getting some firsthand quotes before calling in the story. The driver – white, beefy, and very Irish, like far too many Chicago cops then – obviously did not see me as he parked the car. As he climbed out, a fellow cop, who clearly had heard the same radio report I had, shouted something like, “So the guy tried to run on you?” The driver said, “Naw, I told the nigger to beat it and then I plugged him.”

What happened then? Did Hersh, who would go on to uncover the My Lai massacre in Vietnam and become one of the greatest investigative journalists in U.S. history, sprint to his publication and demand that it run this explosive scoop?

No. Hersh spoke to his editor, who told him to do nothing, since it would be his word against the police.

Hersh carried the lesson with him to Vietnam and beyond.

Two hundred and seventy-four pages after the Chicago anecdote, [Hersh] describes his coverage of a massive slaughter of Iraqi troops and civilians by the U.S. in 1991 after a ceasefire had ended the Persian Gulf War. America’s indifference to this massacre was, Hersh writes, “a reminder of the Vietnam War’s MGR, for Mere Gook Rule: If it’s a murdered or raped gook, there is no crime.” It was also, he adds, a reminder of something else: “I had learned a domestic version of that rule decades earlier” in Chicago.

“Reporter” demonstrates that Hersh has derived three simple lessons from that rule:

1. The powerful prey mercilessly upon the powerless, up to and including mass murder.
2. The powerful lie constantly about their predations.
3. The natural instinct of the media is to let the powerful get away with it.

When journalist make the big bucks, when they revel in their access, when they look first to their own press before they write about the powerless, they cease to be journalists. They ignore these three rules and lower themselves into the pit; They become nothing more than flak catchers.

Writing as the fictional Martin J. Dooley, muckraker Finley Peter Dunne once mused:

Th newspaper does ivrything f’r us. It runs th’ polis foorce an’ th’ banks, commands th’ milishy, controls th’ ligislachure, baptizes th’ young, marries th’ foolish, comforts th’ afflicted, afflicts th’ comfortable, buries th’ dead an’ roasts thim aftherward.

The middle part, the comforts th’ afflicted, afflicts th’ comfortable, is as good a standard as any journalist could set his keyboard to.

The standard is doable. Hersh has proven that.