Krazy Kat Sings the Blues

"Krazy"

Just finished reading Michael Tisserand's "Krazy," a fascinating biography of George Herriman, the genius behind the “Krazy Kat” comics and a cartoonist who for a half century ensured that fine art and poetry was available six days a week to anyone who a had a dime.

“Krazy Kat” is the tale of a perverse love triangle anchored in violence but executed with such faithfulness and constancy that it becomes one of the great love stories. For thirty years Herriman drew the same plot line daily: Krazy Kat is in perpetual swoon for Ignatz Mouse, who responds to this adoration by hitting Krazy in the head with a brick. Officer Pupp, a bulldog policeman, relentlessly pursues his goal of incarcerating the brick thrower.

With these endless variations on the same theme, Herriman created an art form as iconically American as the 12-bar blues. Herriman’s drawing is justly celebrated as being the apex of cartooning. His economical pen strokes speak volumes. His language is a wild patois of Shakespearean English and minstrel-show slang. After Herriman, who lived in Los Angeles, discovered the Arizona desert, he began to place his characters in a gorgeous landscape of mesas, adobe haciendas, “luffly” clouds, and looming cacti. In his stunning full-page Sunday episodes, Herriman fearlessly experimented with his spatial real estate—optionally telling the story vertically, horizontally, and diagonally—and with bold expanses of blacks and vibrant colors. Younger cartoonists made regular pilgrimages to see Herriman and elicit advice. Herriman was a taciturn man who was self-effacing to a fault, but the one thing he always suggested to his worshippers was to “be original." and Herriman was certainly that. (Krazy Kat's gender was kept purposefully fluid throughout the years, for instance.) Herriman showed that the comic strip had no limits, and in so doing he paved the way for Dr. Seuss, Charles Schulz, Walt Kelly, R. Crumb, and Art Speigelman—all of whom revered “Krazy Kat.”

Tisserand does a marvelous job of recounting the career of a famously reclusive person who tried to leave as few footprints as possible. Tisserand keeps the book interesting and entertaining by giving us vivid accounts of the early days of the comics, the influence they had on silent movies and vice versa, Los Angeles in the ‘20s and ‘30s, and the passion that American artists and intellectuals had for Herriman’s work.

The book also opens a window into an under-investigated aspect of Jim Crow era racism—the American blacks who passed for white. Herriman’s grandparents were all African Americans, and Herriman’s birth certificate lists his race as “colored.” Herriman was raised in the Treme section of New Orleans in a Creole family well-known for being active in Republican politics. His father moved his family to Los Angeles when George was ten and thereafter the Herrimans passed as white. This fact was not publicly known during Herriman’s lifetime. The reality that America’s greatest comic artist was an African American is only now beginning to sink in and take its rightful place as a key part of Herriman’s story. Tisserand does a brilliant job of demonstrating that there are clear clues to Herriman’s racial background in those daily strips. Just another reason to celebrate and be fascinated by “Krazy Kat.” Well worth reading, if only to inspire you to experience, or reacquaint yourself with, Herriman’s brilliant fable.

The Resistance Begins

Joined a large, passionate, and vocal crowd in front of the Cadman Plaza Federal Courthouse in Brooklyn tonight, where a hearing was underway for immigrants who had been detained today at JFK Airport in NYC. It turned out to be a pivotal hearing. Federal Judge Ann Donnelly, an Obama appointee, ruled that the 100 to 200 people who were detained today at U.S. airports could NOT be immediately sent be sent home. It's unclear whether Federal authorities will try to put these poor people in detention, but Judge Donnelly said that if that is attempted she would be glad to see the plaintiffs in court again. This is what it sounded like outside the courthouse after the ACLU attorneys had announced the judge's decision and were walking through the crowd after leaving the courthouse. This is what real America and real democracy looks and sounds like, folks. Please join and contribute to the ACLU. They are going to be out there in the forefront of the battle against Trump. This is going to get very, very bad, people. We have to throw all the sand we can into the gears and bring down this government. For every happy moment like this there will be a hundred acts of cruelty by Trump and the Republicans. There's no compromise with racism and facism--all you get is a little less racism and a little less facism.

Two Crowds

I attended both the Inauguration and the Women's March in D.C. this weekend. As I posted on Inauguration Day, the crowds were surprisingly small. I've read estimates if 250,000, and although I had a limited perspective and am no expert, that feels about right to me. Spicer is correct that it took quite a while to get through security. When I left, right after Trump's motorcade went by, there were still a few hundred people waiting to get in. But the idea that hundreds of thousands of people tried to get in but couldn't is complete fantasy. This photo is one I took while I was standing at Pennsylvania Avenue and 8th Street NW and listening to Trump's Inaugural address as it was being broadcast over loudspeakers minutes after noon. The Inaugural parade went from the Capitol to the White House on Pennsylvania Avenue, so this photo was taken right on the parade 3/4 of a mile west of the Capitol, at about the halfway point of the parade. There were access points to both sides of Pennsylvania Avenue. I was on the north side. As you can see very clearly in this photo, there were almost no people on the south side of Pennsylvania, and the viewing grandstands were empty. (There weren't many folks on my side if the street, either.) The Women's March, by contrast, filled the entire mall and all the avenues and side streets in the Federal District. EASILY four or five times the crowd at the Inaugural. Any statement that the Inauguration was the biggest in history or exceeded the size of the Women's March is an utter, and purposeful, lie.

The Women's March

It WAS a women's march. Many men and children made the journey, but this was an event organized by women, it was the response of women to the sexual predator who now lives in the White House, and the collective voice of this phenomenal outpouring was decidedly female. I marched for my mother, who is too old to march but who is still standing up for the sisterhood.

I'm staying at a motel in Falls Church, Virginia. I tried the motel shuttle to the subway, but it was full of women heading out. I called cab. It was 8:30 in the morning. Several hundred people were already massed in front of the station. I finally clawed my way into a packed car full of pussy hats. We spent the first three hours in a claustrophobic mob in the Mall. The sheer size of the crowd caused the plans for the event to be thrown out before the march even began. There was no visible organization and no instructions. After 1 pm people just started moving out. I ended up marching up Pennsylvania Avenue to the White House, but the entire Federal District was completely filled by protesters. The march was almost impossible to process visually. The crowd stretched on forever, in every direction, filling every boulevard and side street, for hour after hour. I will never forget the sights I saw today.

It was a lovely day, full of energy, good humor, helpfulness, and earnestness. Kindness was a major theme today. Our Predator-In-Chief was the primary focus, but the only real flash of group anger was when we passed the Trump International Hotel.

Three million people around the world in more than six hundred different protests marched against our new President today, on his first day in office. He responded predictably, angrily insisting that his Inauguration outdrew the protests. I was in the thick of both events, and this is a bald-faced, naked lie. The Women's March drew at least five times the crowd that showed up for the Inauguration. Today's protests were about millions of people serving notice to Donald Trump that they are acutely aware of his lies, his racism, his misogyny, his fascistic self-image, and, most off, his colossal smallness (if there is such a juxtaposition). It was a privilege to be there. It was thrilling to the bone. Everyone who marched today left with the understanding that this was the start of the resistance.

Trump's People

I spent a good bit of today in D.C. with Trump supporters and it'll take me some time to process it. I am benefitting from coming of age during the domestic civil war over Vietnam. I had a Nixon fan spit in my face in 1968, so I am not buying the notion that the nation has never been so polarized. Those were grim days. Father against son. Young versus old. Political leaders murdered and maimed. A President run out of town on a rail. But I saw better days down the line, and so while I can totally relate to the "I'm Too Old To Be Protesting This Shit" sign I saw today, I know what people can accomplish when they stand up and fight, and I know that these people, while they are as American as any of us, are NOT the majority, just as they weren't the "silent majority," as they claimed, back in the '60s.

They are certainly not the face of America--they are overwhelmingly white and fueled by male anger. Yes, many of them are the working poor who have been robbed blind for decades by corporatist Republicans and Democrats, but they don't speak for all of those folks, either. They haven't even bothered to do their homework on who it is that is engineering the flow of wealth to the robber barons of today. (They just elected one President!) This is a mean-spirited fringe that views the recent, pretty-much-standard-issue centrist Democrat President as a literal agent of Satan. This is an angry tribe with a seemingly endless capacity for blaming every challenge and setback in their lives on imaginary hordes of people of various colors who are stealing their jobs, destroying their religion, taking their guns away, usurping the man's proper place at home and at work, spending their tax dollars on booze and heroin, teaching their children to be godless communists, passing out mountains of booty to everyone in this country but them, and on and on and on. (These memes were all the rage in the Sixties, too.)

This group will be just as horribly double-crossed by Donald Trump as they were by the other politicians who promised them the moon and did nothing for them--even more so, because they believe him more. In an election year in which the entire country was desperate for change, the Democrats nominated a figure who represented the past, the FBI interfered blatantly, and, as always, most of us stayed home, the hard-core Trumpists provided the difference in putting a walking instrument of terror in the White House. They've succeeded in putting something in motion that will require a superhuman effort to roll back, but don't mistake them for the majority of Americans. And don't use their betrayal by politicians to excuse their racism, their misogyny, and their desperate thirst for an American strongman to start giving THEM the free stuff. Looking forward more than I can tell you to spending time with a different slice of the American demographic tomorrow and a much-needed reaffirmation of the true American spirit.

Day One in Trumpworld

My first day as a citizen (hopefully a very poor one) of Trumpworld began here in D.C. with "Let me in!" and ended with "Let me out!" Took me two hours to get through a security pat down and get to Pennsylvania Avenue. My first disappointment was discovering that barricades did not allow me near the Bikers For Trump rally, where they had formed a self-described Wall of Meat to protect the new President. The crowds were very small, even with the insane security hurdles. Split slightly in the protesters' favor. (At least in my section.) Listened to Trump's extremely disturbing speech (you could almost see the flying monkeys launching into the slate-grey sky from the Capitol dome) over a loudspeaker. Waited in the cold for another two hours for the parade and was finally treated to a very brief glimpse of four black SUVs abreast, inside one of which was the new President. There were two hours of parade left, but everyone regardless of persuasion streaked for the few exit points, which were quickly clogged. All in all, a grim, sobering day. Very much looking forward to joining friends at tomorrow's Women's March. Given the muted attendance today, that event has the potential to outdraw the Inaugural. Take heart, people!

Ringling Brothers Barnum and Bailey Circus Acquired by Trump Circus

After 146 years in continuous operation, the Ringling Brothers Barnum and Bailey Circus is folding its tent. The iconic “Greatest Show on Earth” is being acquired by Trump Circus, a new company owned by Eric Trump that in no way is under the control of, or operates to the benefit of, the new President.

We interviewed Ricardo R. Ringling, the 24-year-old owner of Ringling Brothers, yesterday in his spacious tent in Sarasota, Florida. Mr. Ringling was, frankly, inebriated, and our interview was constantly interrupted by sobbing and/or angry employees stumbling in and out to either say their farewells to him or to curse his name.

“I’m willing to go hoof to hoof with the animal-rights weirdos. I’m game for competing against television, movies, video games and the Internet. Whatever. Bring it on. But there’s no way any circus can compete with the new President. No fucking way. How’s a three-ring circus gonna compete with a show that’s got, like, 300 rings all going on at the same time, twenty-four seven,” groused Mr. Ringling.

“To be honest with you, these Trumps don’t want any other circus competing with them. They showed up at the tent at 3:30 in the morning two days ago and gave me one of those offers I couldn’t refuse. A buyout. Ten cents on my every dollar. But I’m gonna say no? Are you kidding me? They would slap the IRS on me in a hot minute, and believe me, one audit and I’m dead. So now everything you see here is the property of Trump Circus, as of last night.” Trump Circus is a new company owned by Eric Trump that in no way is under the control of, or operates to the benefit of, the new President.

“We’re like one big, weird family here,” Mr. Ringling continued between swigs from a large decanter. “My main concern was what happens to the animals. And the clowns. And the acrobats. The animals are all going to good homes. We got rid of the elephants already—a couple of them went rogue, but most of them got gigs with the Republican National Committee last year. Fine, I say. Let those guys clean up after ‘em, for a change. The tigers are going to Ivanka Trump’s fashion business, I guess. Not sure what’s up with that. We were hoping that the chimps would get placed at Fox News, but none of them are blondes, so I think they’re gonna become anchors at the Russian Television Network. They’ll make monkeys outta those commies, believe me. Why, Mr. Muggles can ride a bicycle! That’s more than anybody at RTN can do, I’ll bet. The clowns are getting all kinds of LinkedIn offers from the new administration. Chuckles just dropped by this morning to tell me that he’s gonna get the Secretary of State gig ‘cause Rex Tillerson isn’t going down to well in the hearings. Elastic Girl, our contortionist, got hired as the new President’s press secretary. If you think Kellyann Conway is flexibile with the truth, wait’ll you see Elastic Girl in action. She’s the most popular girl in the troupe, and for good reason! The Flying Wallendas are packing it in—retiring. Trump Circus wanted them to perform without a safety net. That’s a damn shame. Anyway, it’s not my problem any more. Trump Circus will have to figure all of that out.” Trump Circus is a new company owned by Eric Trump that is in no way under the control of, or operates to the benefit of, the new President.

We asked Mr. Ringling if he had any advice for Eric Trump.

“Not really,” he mused. “I guess I would tell him to not get confused between the circus and the real world. The circus seems like non-stop fun, and it truly is great when the lights are on. You talk about ‘make America great again’? We were the Greatest Show on Earth for like a hundred years. We were IT, baby. We were huuuuuuge. Then the people got tired of us. And the libtards starting coming at us. Life wasn’t so much fun after that. You’d take the greasepaint off every night and look in the mirror and it’d hit you that the whole thing was just a big con. A big fraud. As hard as this is, deep down I’m glad to get off this goofy merry-go-round. Hey, what the hell. Best of luck to Trump Circus.”

Trump Circus is a new company owned by Eric Trump that is in no way under the control of, or operates to the benefit of, the new President. Its first public performance is scheduled for January 20th in Washington, D.C.

the story of the century

If there was a competition for rhetorical gymnastics, it would be named after Donald Trump.

He’s the first politician in American history to not even pretend to have consistent positions. Each night the bombast screen is wiped clean, and with each new dawn comes a spew of statements that are typically the exact inverse of the statements from the day before. In a single, one-hour interview with the New York Times, Trump flip-flopped six times.

Trump has seemingly never held a consistent position on ANYTHING.

Actually, that’s not true. There is one issue on which his position is, and always has been, crystal clear: Russia.

Trump has been aggressively adamant to the point of hysteria that the Russians are our friends, that the future will be about an American/Russian partnership, that Putin is a real leader (like he will be), and that the Russians did not interfere in the recent elections. This is a remarkable anomaly given Trump’s endless elasticity about every other issue under the sun.

I was talking to a friend recently about how remarkable this was and about how it made no sense politically. The smart response for Trump to the Russian hacking would have been to meet with the intelligence community, tell them that he appreciated their conclusions and that he would act on them, and then ignore the whole thing and wait for the hoo-haw to die down. Instead, the President-elect completely torpedoed his relationship with his own intelligence agencies, hurt their morale, and appeared to the world to be at war with his most important advisors. Trump hasn’t even been sworn in yet and he’s speeding backwards at ninety miles an hour. I told my friend that if I were a reporter I would go totally deep on the Russian story because there had to be a big story behind Trump’s startling and unique consistency on this one topic.

Remember how Watergate unfolded? John Dean ratted out Nixon and his former mates in the President’s inner circle in extraordinary detail in several days of public testimony. His tale was completely implausible. The general consensus was that his claims were so outrageous that they couldn’t possibly be true. A President would never approve the payment of hush money to criminals, much less approve a slew of break-ins and robberies aimed at his political opponents. A President would never tell the director of the FBI to burn evidence in his fireplace or urge his employees to lie under oath and engage in a cover-up. Dean had no documents to back up his fantastic claims, and he was destined to go down in history as an unhinged sociopath who concocted a web of lies to bring down his former boss to save his own skin.

Then came Butterfield with his tapes, and nearly every bizarre claim and arcane detail that Dean made in his testimony turned out to be eerily accurate. And the tapes revealed other horrible truths that would have been branded as science fiction had we not had the President’s voice putting the noose around his own neck.

So a few days ago I told my friend that the only explanation for Trump’s obsessive defense of the Russians was that they had something on him. But that seemed so utterly fantastic and Manchurian-candidate-like that I added that I must have finally fallen prey to one of the hundreds of grotesque conspiracy theories that so many people embraced during this weird election cycle.
Now CNN has a new report out on the briefing that the heads of the CIA, FBI, National Intelligence, and the NSA gave to Donald Trump last Friday. That was a weirdly historical occasion in which the intelligence leaders presented evidence to a President-elect that a foreign country deliberately meddled in a Presidential election.

As it turns out, that’s not all they informed Trump about. They also presented him with allegations that are currently sweeping through the global intelligence community. Allegations from sources that some intel pros feel could be credible that the Russians have “personal and financial information” on Trump that they could use to compromise him. The intelligence heads deemed this information so explosive that they limited the disclosure of it to President Obama, President-elect Trump, the top four Congressional leaders, and the ranking members of the House and Senate intelligence committees.

That pretense of confidentiality turns out to have been a huge joke, because it turns out that these allegations have been an open secret in U.S. political circles for months. Mother Jones even reported on some of this a week before the election.

It was the anti-Trump Republicans who started this ball rolling. They hired a former British MI6 agent to try to dig up dirt on Trump’s ties with the Russians. Once Trump was nominated, it seems that the Clinton campaign moved this former agent over to their payroll, and the skullduggery continued. This explains the letter that Harry Reid sent to FBI Director Comey in October demanding that he disclose any information he had about Trump coordinating with the Russians.

It gets even weirder. Just last month Senator John McCain gave the FBI copies of written memos from the former British agent detailing exchanges of information between Russian officials and several members of the Trump campaign staff. McCain had been given them by a former British diplomat. (The FBI had already been given copies of these memos by the former British agent last August.)

So last week’s briefing was more historic, more bizarre, and much, much more troubling than we thought. For this was the first time (we hope, anyway) that a President-elect was informed by U.S. intelligence just prior to being sworn in that potentially credible evidence revealed that he might be the subject of a blackmail attempt by a foreign power.

It also reveals that the Russians were working the Republicans and not just the Democrats.

In addition, it indicates that the Clinton campaign had memoranda detailing collusion between Trump and the Russians and decided not to use it.

It also makes clear that FBI Director Comey had information that had the potential to harm both Presidential candidates, but chose to publicly reveal only the information about Hillary Clinton. There has to be a statute or two that was broken when the head of the FBI tried to determine the outcome of the election.

This would explain why Trump has been attacking the credibility of the intelligence community so vigorously and why the Trump camp rushed to announce a reorganization of the CIA before Trump was even inaugurated.

It may turn out that no Alexander Butterfield, Carl Bernstein or Bob Woodward will surface with tapes, documents, or emails giving incontrovertible evidence that Donald Trump is being set up by the Russians. These charges, despite them being serious enough that the heads of the four biggest intelligence agencies included them in Trump’s personal briefing last Friday, may never be substantiated and thus pass into folklore as a fevered dream by the defeated Democratic faithful that was briefly given legs by the lamestream, liberal media.

Then again, it may turn out to be the story of the century.
 

The old-fashioned way

WASHINGTON, JANUARY 2, 2017: DONALD TRUMP TO REPORTERS: "IF YOU HAVE SOMETHING IMPORTANT, WRITE IT OUT AND HAVE IT DELIVERED BY COURIER, THE OLD-FASHIONED WAY, BECAUSE I’LL TELL YOU WHAT, NO COMPUTER IS SAFE.”

I never woulda predicted how a new President would affect my chosen profession. Not in a kazillion years.

When I first started bein’ a bike messenger in D.C. back in the ‘80s, I couldn’t even begin to pedal fast enough to keep up with the business. Messages and packages was flyin’ all over the place, and we must’ve had fifty guys workin’ at just my company alone. And there was dozens of outfits, let me tell you.

Then in the ‘90s the computer showed up, email came in, and the all the tires went flat, if you get my metaphor. Overnight. By last year, we was down to just legal crap—papers that ya had to get signed and notarized—gift packages to the politicians’ girlfriends, and the occasional envelope stuffed with cash from K Street. There were about six of us left. We were a dyin’ breed, like the dinosaurs.

And then Trump gets in. This is where the irony comes in, ‘cause he won because of emails—Hillary’s secret shit that proved she was a child molester and all kindsa other awful stuff. A real monster, she was. Everybody’s sayin’ that Putin stole these emails off the Internet to throw the election to Trump.

But Trump’s not buyin’ it. This is when he showed me what a visionary he was. Most people think that to be a visionary you gotta be looking FORWARDS--to new stuff. That’s bullshit. REAL visionaries look BACKWARDS, because everybody older than ten understands that the old days were better. Just ask anybody. We all had work and everybody was happy. We had a system that everybody understood, and it worked. Then we lost our way as a society and everybody got dissatisfied and the eggheads and the computers started running the show. And then you have the lamestream media—Walter Cronkite and those know-it-alls who got us all confused.

Trump was the only politician who got this. The only one who saw that we had to go backwards so we could go forwards. He was way too smart to fall into the same email trap that that old bitch he beat fell into. So he calls a big fuckin’ press conference and says “Screw this computer stuff. It’s only confusing everyone. From now on, if it’s important, it goes by courier.”

Well, nobody believed he would pull it off, but nobody said anything against it, either. Everybody hates their computers. They never work right. And all that money for printer cartridges—what the fuck is with that? So he tapped into that adversity, and suddenly us bike messengers was back in business.

And I mean BACK IN BUSINESS. Within three fuckin’ months there was fourteen new courier companies. Every Federal building, including the goddamn White House, had a courier stand. Bikes lined up for blocks, just like the taxi stand at the fuckin’ airport, waiting for important secret messages in sealed envelopes. We’ve gone international, too. Half those secret documents go overseas, ya know. I flew business class to Moscow six times last year.

And it’s not just us bike messengers who are makin’ out like kings. My brother in law Eduardo works for Office Depot in Jersey and every time I see him, at Christmas or whatever, he’s telling me how the filing cabinets are flyin’ off the showroom floor. And paper—my god!—everything has to be in triplicate or fourplicate or fiveplicate, ya know. Those hanging file folders. Paper clips. Stamps and fuckin’ ink pads. That shit was just flyin’ off the shelf. ‘Course, by then it was all made in China. But if you worked at Office Depot like Eduardo, or you was a government secretary, you was happenin'.

It isn’t all peaches and cream for us couriers, though, I have to admit. Ya hafta wait a long time sometimes for the government folks to get the package ready for ya, and the receiving end is a freakin’ nightmare. You hafta bring back a receipt for every goddam agency. The State Department wants a receipt. The FBI wants a receipt. The NSA wants a receipt. Kellyanne Conway wants a receipt. So you gotta deliver all of them, too. Man, if people thought the government moved slow BEFORE, they’d flip if they saw it NOW. But, hey—it’s job security!

This whole racket has had a few setbacks recently, I have to admit. There was that guy—forget his name—who was stuffing all his top-secret deliveries into his closet and handing in phony delivery receipts. And—this wasn’t at my courier agency, mind you—they figured out a few months back that the Russians had hacked the text messages of a courier dispatcher and were using them to figure out where the secret messages were going and then stealing them the old-fashioned way—by using inside moles to make copies. So the microfiche guys have made a comeback, too!

So bringing back couriers hasn’t solved all the problems in the world, mind you, but with Trump’s backwards vision—I know several folks in the White House now that I’m there so often, and they say he’s NEVER used a computer—the bike courier business is great again, to coin a phrase!

Those folks in the White House tell me that Trump hates cell phones, too. Can’t wait to see how fast and how far he runs backwards on those goddam things. We’ll have pay phones again! Go ahead and laugh. Don’t underestimate this guy.

Trump want his enemies to define him

On September 11, 2013, when most of us were mourning the anniversary of a terrorist attack that took the lives of 3,000 fellow Americans, Donald Trump sent out this tweet:

“I would like to extend my best wishes to all, even the haters and losers, on this special date, September 11th.”

Today, after winning a Presidential victory despite losing the popular vote by nearly three million ballots, our new Chief Executive had this message for the 74 million Americans who cast votes for candidates other than him:

“Happy New Year to all, including to my enemies and those who have fought me and lost so badly they just don’t know what to do. Love!”

James Buchanan looked aside as the Civil War began. Warren Harding screwed his mistress in the White House while his Cabinet looted the country. Herbert Hoover didn’t understand that the Great Depression required bold measures. John Kennedy was a reckless philanderer who lied to the nation about his health problems. LBJ engineered the nightmarish quagmire in Vietnam. Richard Nixon’s penchant for petty criminality led to disgrace. George Bush invaded and conquered a foreign country on false pretenses and ruined the economy on the way out of office.

We had dishonest Presidents. We've had bad Presidents. We’ve had failed Presidents. We’ve had criminal Presidents.

But we’ve never had a President like Donald Trump.

He never laughs. He never jokes. He’s never poked fun at himself. He’s never displayed even a whiff of graciousness. He knows no history, and he has no interest in keeping up to date on what is happening today. He doesn’t read. He seemingly has no close friends. He has no attention span. His first and only instinct, in moments of both triumph and reversal, is to lash out. He’s demeaned every sector of this country, including his own family. His is the thinnest skin ever draped over a politician’s frame. His only hero is an international murderer and thug. His insularity and total self-absorption are even more deep seated than his overt racism and misogyny. He has no class.

So, even before taking office, Trump has made it clear that he thinks of me and many millions of his fellow Americans as the enemy. Personally, I don’t see Donald Trump as a personified enemy because I haven’t seen enough humanity in him to warrant that status. (“I alone understand the problem and I alone can fix it” are surely the most terrifying words to pass from a President’s lips.) Our next Chief Executive is too egocentric to grasp that, as much as most Americans are appalled by his temperament, it’s not him personally that they will turn on. It’s Trumpism that they will reject, and the depth of that rejection will start to become apparent--to everyone except Donald Trump--on Inauguration Day. It’s all too true that we underestimated Donald Trump. If he thinks that we’re paralyzed and don’t know what to do, he’s making a similarly profound mistake.

The Front Page

Saw "The Front Page" on Broadway today. Ridiculous cast: Nathan Lane, John Slattery, John Goodman, and a slew of other great actors. Lane is the quintessential Broadway star. Robert Morse stole the show in a great cameo. Fun stuff. Really looking forward to catching Cate Blanchett in her Broadway debut next month doing Chekhov.

New Sheriff in Town

Attention, all you tired, poor, huddled masses yearning to breathe free, this is the government of the United States of America speaking. Fuck you! Listen up, you sad, pathetic losers. Things have changed. There’s a new sheriff in town who was elected in a massive landslide and He makes all the decisions now, and He says you’re fucked. To the one hundred million people who are now banned from entering the most terrified nation on earth, fuck you. If you ask us why you are banned when none among you has ever carried out a terrorist attack, shut your fucking mouth. You say that you went through a years-long vetting process to get a green card and permanent-resident status from us and are only trying to return to the U.S.? Well, fuck you, too. Don’t tell us about being innocent people trying to rescue your families from horrific war zones. Go fuck yourselves. Hey, you Muslim, Sharia-law-loving bad guys—get the fuck out of the way and make room for the Christians. And to the REAL enemy, the American press, just shut your fucking mouths and listen to US for a while, because we alone understand the problem and we alone can fix it. And here’s a fuck you in advance for the pussy snowflakes at home who don’t like our methods. We’re making lists, and once we seal our borders to Muslims and brown people, we’ll be coming for you next. Don’t bother thanking us, world, you’re very fucking welcome. Signed, the government of the United States of America.

Obama's Russian Mistake Has Come Back to Haunt Us

President Obama offered up a confoundingly absurd defense of his administration's response to its early knowledge that the Russians were trying to hack the election. He claims that he personally warned Putin to "cut it out," and that he's now going to strike back--a month AFTER the election. Obama claims that, although he was convinced the reports were true, he didn't want the interference of a foreign government in our electoral process to "become a political football." God forbid! He felt that rather than retaliate immediately or make it clear to the American public what he believed was going on, he needed to stick to just stating the facts and not imputing any "motives" to the actions of the Russians. God forbid! Conservatives love to portray liberals as murky-thinking ineffectuals with no sense of how the real world works. It's usually an absurd stereotype, but every once in a while, like in today's presidential press conference, it comes to life.

Barrelhouse Chuck

Barrelhouse Chuck Goering passed away yesterday. I met Chuck when he was still a teenager in Seattle. He had a band called Blue Lights and his plan even then was to move to Chicago and become a great blues piano player. Well, Chuck certainly realized his dream. He relocated to the Windy City and spent years learning from and befriending blues piano titans like Sunnyland Slim, Little Brother Montgomery, Blind John Davis, and Pinetop Perkins. Chuck took care of Little Brother Montgomery in his last years. Chuck’s own career took off, and he became the in-demand piano player for shows and recordings for likes of Kim Wilson and other blues luminaries. I had some great times with Chuck. Once when he came to Seattle with Kim Wilson he asked me to take him to the Experience Music Project museum. Turned out Chuck was a huge Hendrix fan, and he wanted to see the exhibit there on Jimi. He really had a ball. That’s what I will remember about Chuck—his infectious enthusiasm and passion, and his positive energy. We’ve lost a huge talent and a great human being with his passing.

November 22, Then and Always

I was in seventh grade. Band practice was just beginning in the band room and I was getting my trumpet out of its case. The principal came on the intercom and told us that the President had been shot and killed. We lived in a rock-solid Republican suburb in Seattle where Kennedy was very unpopular, but I saw many people--children and adults--crying that day before my Mom came and picked me up. My parents were Democrats. I had watched the Democratic convention on television with them three years earlier. My folks had been big supporters of Adlai Stevenson. A spontaneous demonstration of support for Stevenson erupted on the convention floor. I asked my parents if this Stevenson character was the same guy who Eisenhower had buried in the past two elections and they said that he was. I liked this Kennedy guy. President Eisenhower seemed like an ancient, mumbling relic, and this Kennedy dude was young, handsome, smart and energetic. The hell with this Stevenson has-been, I thought. Time to back a winner. I went in my room, grabbed some cardboard, wrote “Kennedy” on it in big black letters with a felt pen, taped it to a ruler, and rejoined my folks in the living room, where I paraded back and forth in front of them with my homemade campaign sign. I’m sure I cried too on November 22, 1963. I still remember the unbelievable, crushing sequence of events over the next few days—the President’s body landing in Washington DC accompanied by Jackie and the Johnsons, the capture of Oswald, the murder of Oswald on live television, the funeral cortege and the shattered Kennedy family. There’s never been another week like that one.

Election Day

I voted for Clinton this morning so that a proud fascist is not elected President of my country. Trump’s very candidacy as the Republican nominee is a wake-up call for all of us. The reality that more than 40% of my fellow Americans will vote today for a proud racist who has no understanding of the Constitution is hard to deal with. But Trump will lose today because he has embraced the absolute worst aspects of our collective reality. It’s a good thing to shine the light of day on the seamiest parts of our nature in the process of rejecting them. Trump has been more honest than his recent Republican predecessors, who quietly tolerated racism and catered to the hate groups with coded language. We need to remember Trump when GOP leaders revert back to this slightly more subtle form of bigotry, and we need to remember the progressive vision that Bernie Sanders crystallized for us this year as we aggressively challenge the new President to move in that direction.

I’m thinking today of my mother and all of the women in my family. Women are voting today who were born before members of their sex were allowed to vote in this country. This is a long overdue step forward for our country. I was proud to vote twice for the first African American President, and I’m proud to vote today for the first female President. I had been feeling that historical significance of today’s vote was being lost in the horrific backwash of Trump’s campaign, but a friend recently signed me up as a token male member of an overwhelmingly female pro-Clinton Facebook group, and it’s been truly moving to read the posts by these women explaining what this election means to them. This is the significance I’ll try to take away from this election--not the dark, odious spectre of homegrown fascism.