My father took this blurry snapshot with a Brownie camera from the top of Omaha Beach on June 9, 1944, three days after the invasion. His generation fought and died in Europe and in the Pacific to make sure that we would never have to fight fascism here at home. I never dreamed I would ever say this, but we squandered that legacy. The only fitting tribute to the sacrifices made by defenders of the United States throughout our history is to have the courage to call domestic fascism for what it is and to not flinch in our commitment to root it out and destroy it.
The Morning After
The mixed results from yesterday’s election resist instant analysis, but some things seem pretty clear. This post will probably strike many as being too positive—the election was certainly not the blue wave that we hoped for—but today I feel that the positive news is less known and understood than the many dangers, including Trump’s possible reelection, that we still face.
Trump is less powerful today than he was yesterday. This is the most important measurement of what happened yesterday.
He lost one branch of Congress, which means he will actually have to suffer some kind of oversight. Dennis Nunes and the other fawning, ring-kissing toadies in the GOP House will be replaced in January by smart, not-overly-civilized, partisan brawlers like Nancy Pelosi, Adam Schiff, and Jerry Nadler. The Republicans in Congress will no longer be able to avoid voting on issues that most voters actually care about.
Some of the coalition that won for Trump in 2016 went back under Democratic control. The upper Midwest (big Democratic wins in Michigan, Illinois, and Iowa) and Pennsylvania, which were critical to his 2016 victory, broke away from him. Suburban women really did turn against him, as predicted, and the Democrats made real gains among independents who gambled on Trump two years ago. Two-thirds of those confounding “swing” districts (districts that voted for Obama and Trump) returned to the Democratic fold. The Democrats won the vast majority of the 37 “split” districts that voted for a different party for President than for Congress. Virginia and Nevada seem much more blue today.
Taking back the House was a big deal. Democrats had to overcome a built-in, 7% gerrymandered advantage for the GOP nationwide to pull this off. That is insanely difficult. It looks as if the Democrats will win with a comfortable margin, too, having won about 35 additional seats. The Democrats will assume leadership over all House committees and the subpoena power that comes with it.
It would have taken a miracle for the Democrats to take back the Senate. That is not a rationalization, it’s just a fact. The Democrats faced the worst Senate roadmap imaginable: they had to defend 26 seats in a single election, and ten of those were in states won by Trump in 2016. The Senate has an even worse built-in advantage for Republicans than the House because a lightly populated rural states (aka Republican strongholds) get just as many Senators as blue states like California, which includes 37 million people. (Who are, by the way, just as American as North Dakotans. The Trumpists I know talk about the people who inhabit the East and West Coast as if they were a plague of locusts instead of citizens. “Thank god the Californians don’t run this country,” they say, when what they are actually saying is “Thank god the majority of Americans don’t run this show.” The Senate continues to solidify its position as America’s single biggest roadblock to progress.) And despite some brutal, heart-breaking losses, Democrats won Senate seats in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Montana, and West Virginia, which went for Trump in 2016. (FYI, the Senate roadmap in 2020 will be almost equally as bad for the GOP, which is important.)
Yesterday was oh-so-close to being a legitimate blue wave. I agree that the only thing that really counts in politics is whether you win or not, so this is definitely a blatant rationalization, but there were a slew of excruciatingly close races in Republican-controlled states in which the Dems came up short by just a few thousand votes. Cruz beat O’Rourke in Texas by 1.7%. Scott is beating Nelson in Florida by .4%. McSally is leading Sinema in Arizona by .9%. Kemp leads Abrams in Georgia by 1.6%. Gillum lost to DeSantis in Florida by .6%. These were losses that have the potential to crush Democratic souls, if only for their impact on redistricting after the 2020 census, but you can’t deny that there is a Democratic Party in Texas (and two new Democratic House members) this morning thanks to Beto O’Rourke.
American government looks more like America today—thanks to women. Women were the primary drivers of the Democratic takeover of the House yesterday. If you think that there needs to be less testosterone in American politics, yesterday represented progress. They started working on this the day after Trump was elected, and they continue to lead the resistance, and to lead it effectively. Women ran for office at record levels yesterday—the vast majority of them Democratic—and many won. In January there will be 100 women in the House for the first time. Two Muslim Democratic women and two Native American Democratic women were elected. Kansas elected its first woman governor. Four Democratic women elected to the House in Pennsylvania. Texas elected its first two Latinas to the House. And Colorado elected its first gay governor yesterday.
The Democrats are Dems were impressively disciplined in this election cycle. Instead of taking Trump’s bait on immigration, they focused on health care, which is not only the most important issue to Americans but also the issue on which the Republicans have literally no story as well as a horrific track record.
The way forward for the Democrats is to embrace progressivism. It’s an undebatable fact that the blue wave didn’t materialize in large part because Republicans ran up HUGE majorities in rural districts that couldn’t be overcome. And it’s true that the brilliant races run by killer progressive candidates like O’Rourke and Adams failed. But their progressivism made those races close, built up progressive campaign infrastructures in red states that will pay off further up the road, improved the Democratic bench, and, most importantly, forced the Democratic Party to actually stand for something in red states instead of continuing the truly dismal strategy of trying to camouflage themselves as something they are obviously not.
A lot of the GOP bad guys on the “most-wanted list” are out of a job today. Kris Kobach, whose only talent is keeping people from voting and who would have finished the destruction of Kansas begun by Sam Brownback, is headed to Fox News. Dean Heller in Nevada wrapped himself up in Trump’s robes but gave the Dems a pickup in the Senate. Scott Walker, the biggest union buster in recent history, was finally toppled in Wisconsin. Bruce Rauner, who wrecked Illinois’ credit rating, went down in flames. Congressman Dana Rohrabacher, who Kevin McCarthy thinks is on the Russian payroll, lost in California. A real pleasant shocker was the defeat in Texas of Pete Sessions, the incredibly powerful chairman of the House Rules Committee. Virginia Congressman Dave Brat, who complained last year that women voters were getting up in his grille, lost—to a woman, of course. Jason Lewis in Minnesota, another one of those right-wing talk-radio hosts, and who once said that single women are “ignorant of the important things in life” and actually complained about not being able to call women “sluts” was ousted by a female Democrat. Claudia Tenney in New York, who claimed that most mass shooters were Democrats, went down. Kim Davis, that county clerk in Kentucky who refused to grant gays marriage licenses, is looking for new opportunities this morning.
The pollsters were pretty accurate. Most predicted the Democratic takeover of the House and the continued GOP control of the Senate and very close gubernatorial races across the country.
The “booming” economy is mythic. The exit polling showed that 74% of the voters felt good about the economy, so most analysts are interpreting the Democratic gains as showing that a robust economy may not be enough to get Trump re-elected. I think that there is truth in this, but I also think that the pundits and the press are ignoring the reality that most Americans don’t feel that they are anywhere near out of the woods economically and don’t appreciate the GOP tax cut for the ultra-rich folks.
The Democrats don’t have to attack Trump directly to beat him in 2020. No Democrat will do a better job of inspiring voters who still care about things like morality, human decency, and leadership to turn against Trump than Trump himself. He will do that job for us. Trump will go down in history as the greatest progressive organizer since FDR. Debating policy, facts, morality, the Constitution, and the law with Trump is a complete waste of time. Fact checking and counting his lies will never defeat Trump.
The Democrats can use the House to define their message for 2020. I hope that Nancy Pelosi will be handing over the reins to a younger, more progressive Democrat before 2020 (supposedly there is such a deal), but the Democrats are lucky that they will have someone with her experience and negotiating savviness at the helm over the next year. The Democrats won’t get any legislation actually passed and signed off on by Trump over the next two years. I’ve heard many people today fantasizing about the amazing deals that could be made between Pelosi and Trump. This is laughingly delusional. Trump has shown repeatedly that his complete and total ignorance of both the legislative process and what is actually in any of the bills that have been debated or voted on since he became President makes him the worst dealmaker ever in the history of politics. As soon as the Republicans define their legislative goals, he attacks them on Twitter. As soon as his GOP Congressional leaders work a deal with the Democrats, he sabotages them. This will continue for the next two years. But the Democrats now have the opportunity to spend their first 100 days introducing a small number of big bills that actually outline a domestic program—for instance, shoring up the Affordable Care Act until 2020, raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour, protecting voters rights and eliminating voter suppression, and re-committing to the environment. These bills won’t get passed, but they will force Republicans to actually vote on them and to establish a voting record that can be used against them. The first priorities should be bringing those bills to the House floor for a vote and preparing—thoroughly, in order to be successful—for the investigations into the mind-boggling corruption of Trump’s family, team and cabinet. Adam Schiff and Jerry Nadler are just the right kind of committee chairman to run those investigations. (As I write this Trump is clearly moving end the Mueller investigation, so the Democrats may have to fill the huge void that will be left.)
You can see a successful Democratic coalition taking shape. That coalition (which will have enough critical mass to win in 2020 but will assuredly not be anything like insurmountable) will be made up of women, minorities, gays, young people, seniors who worry about health care, and upscale suburban whites who like tax cuts but who also support gun control and the environment. (The environment could be a much bigger issue for the Democrats, given that the South is being particularly impact by it. I thought it would be a much bigger issue in Florida.) The Democrats could keep the House, take advantage of a much better map to win the Senate, and win the White House in 2020. Yesterday didn’t make that ultimate dream less of a reality.
Trump can be reelected in 2020. People forget that Trump won because of 35,000 votes cast in five states. Several of those states went Democratic yesterday, so his reelection prospects, which are still all too real, got a little harder. But he still has a slim path to victory, and he will stop short of nothing—and I mean nothing—to win in 2020. This is a man who sent troops to fight an imaginary foe in order to win the midterms. We haven’t seen anything yet.
Losing the Senate means that the GOP will continue to pack the courts with right-wing judges. This is another real, existential threat to the country because it is how the Trumpists could continue to run the country even if they lost Congress and the Presidency, and now they will have two more years to create a judiciary that will undo any legislation passed by a Democratic Congress and Presiden.
Medicaid expansion seems irreversible and unstoppable now. This is a big win for Americans, folks. Voters in the ultra-red states of Idaho, Utah, and Nebraska approved the expansion, and the voters of Maine now have a Democratic governor who will not veto the expansion they voted for. Something like 1.6 million more Americans will get affordable health insurance. The ACA changed the dialogue around health care, and now the Democrats can fully embrace “Medicare for all” and set the stage for a single-payer program.
Racism still works, but not everywhere. Trump’s campaigning for the midterms, which was conducted only in red, predominantly rural states, was an endless sewer stream of nothing but racism, and no one can now deny that the Republican Party is an out-in-the-open white supremacist party. So the biggest shock (even though by now it is no surprise) from yesterday’s results is how many Americans still vote support openly racist politicians, starting with our President. Steve King, who is an American Nazi, won reelection in Iowa. A Republican running for Congress in California who claims that the Holocaust never happened got 43,000 votes. A former leader of the American Nazi Party got 44,000 votes for Congress in Illinois. DeSantis ran a blatantly racist campaign in Florida and won. How else do you explain that a brilliant black candidate like Andrew Gillum lost in Florida, but that an incredibly bland, white candidate like Bill Nelson won in the same state? And the polls predicting solid margins for Gillum show that voters are still not telling the truth to pollsters when it comes to minority candidates. But racism seems to have backfired with non-rural voters and in more urban/suburban states. Bill Schuette in Michigan, Scott Walker in Wisconsin, and Scott Wagner in PA all ran anti-immigrant ads and lost. Racist ads didn’t work against Antonio Delgado and Sharice David. Anti-immigration hardliners Lou Baretta in Pennsylvania, Chris Kobach in Kansas, and Virginia’s Corey Stewart all lost and lost big.
It was one step forward and one step back for voting rights. Florida voters (almost unbelievably, given that Gillum lost) voted to restore voting rights to 1.5 million ex-felons. That’s nine percent of the voting-age population in that state. This was a huge win for Democrats yesterday. Voting rights were expanded by voters in Maryland, Nevada, and Michigan, but similar measures were defeated in Arkansas and North Carolina. And the loss of the governorships in Florida, Texas and probably Georgia will mean voter suppression will continue in those critical states. Importantly, however, anti-gerrymandering initiatives that took away redistricting decisions from the state legislatures in favor of independent redistricting commissions passed in Colorado, Michigan, and Utah. And the Democrats won control of the state houses in New York, Minnesota, New Hampshire, Colorado—big wins in terms of redistricting for 2020. But the loss of the governorships in Florida, Ohio, Iowa and probably Georgia mean that the Democrats will not be able to undo gerrymandering in those key states.
Millenials and minorities didn’t give Democrats the lift that the early voting indicated they would. The phenomenal spikes in young-voter participation in early voting in the end just meant that younger people were smarter about when to vote. In the end, the percentage of yesterday’s vote represented by millennials was 13%, a modest increase over the 11% in the last midterms. As far as minority turnout goes, African American voting was up 1% over 2014 and Hispanics were up 4%. All increases, but the Democrats still need to work harder to win these groups to make their theoretical winning coalition a reality.
The Green Party may cost the Democrats the Senate seat in Arizona. I can’t even discuss this rationally or comment on it without unleashing an avalanche of profanity. But if you think willfully stupid, woefully misinformed, or astonishingly naïve voters only exist in the Republican Party, you are wrong, wrong, wrong.
But the other big takeaway and growing realization is that the ballot may not be enough to remove Trump. Trump is not just a politician, he’s the leader of a movement that represents all the worst aspects of America, and his tribe is fanatically loyal and getting only more so. If we think of Trump only as a politician, we will never be free of him.
As Trump noted the night before the election, when asked about the possibility of the Democrats winning the House: “I don’t care. They can do whatever they want and I can do whatever I want.”
And he proved this morning, with his takeover of the Justice Department, that he is committed to not only obstructing justice but obliterating it.
The Night Before
On election night 2016 I left my office on W. 26th Street in Manhattan early and headed to the Javits Center. America was about to elect its first woman President, and I wanted to call my Mom from the official Clinton victory party. After standing in line for nearly two hours I realized that I wasn’t going to get into the building, so I took the subway uptown back to my apartment. As I watched the stunned, tear-streaked faces in the Javits Center on television over the next few hours, I thanked god that I was not trapped in that vast funeral parlor.
My oldest son had decided that summer to try to become an FBI agent. He had done all the interviews, taken the exams, solicited letters of recommendation, and completed his physical. At about 1 a.m., just when I had decided that I couldn’t possibly watch the election horror show for another second, I got a text from him: “The FBI offered me a job today.”
I called him and asked him what he was going to do. “I can’t take that job,” he said. “That would be like joining Trump’s Gestapo.” I told him to sleep on it—that maybe the FBI would need men like him more than ever over the next few years. He turned them down a few days later, and I was never so proud of him. I often think of him when I consider what Trump has done to the FBI in the interim.
These past two years leading up to tomorrow’s voting have seemed like an eternity. But we haven’t sat idly by. We started demonstrating—the worldwide Women’s March, which took place on Trump’s first day in office, was the largest political protest in history. We began organizing and launched 1,500 resistance groups based on the Indivisible model all across the country. Thousands of us, mostly women, decided to run for office. We began registering people to vote. We put such constant pressure on Republicans in Congress that forty of them were convinced to retire without a fight. We won some key interim elections, including a Senate seat from Alabama (!), thanks primarily to the votes of women. We waited patiently for Robert Mueller to gather his evidence and issue his findings and his indictments while we chafed at his silence and feared for his professional life. We didn’t resort to violence.
The Trumpists, on the other hand, have moved even more quickly than we feared they would. Immigrants from specific countries—countries that had done us no harm—were banned from America. Trump called racist murderers in Charlottesville “good people.” The FBI and the Justice Department were politicized. Immigrant families were ripped apart and concentration camps were built—and quickly filled—on the southern border. Trump stood before the world and said that the word of the two-bit dictator of Russia was more credible than all the U.S. intelligence agencies. One trillion dollars was added to the deficit overnight to give the ultra-rich a massive tax reduction. Congressional districts were gerrymandered in favor of the GOP and hundreds of conservative judges were appointed to the bench—there is no mystery about how the Republicans plan on continuing their tyranny of the minority. Republican-led state governments began planning months ago to suppress voting by minorities and young people tomorrow. The GOP came within one vote of repealing the Affordable Care Act without a replacement. Foreign allies were abandoned and insulted while our government cozied up to murderers and tyrants. A man accused of sexual assault was given a lifetime appointment to the Supreme Court after a phony investigation. Trump’s closing arguments this month have been the most odious, reprehensible statements ever made by a President—pure, full-throated, hysterical, and impossibly crude stream of fear, naked racism and blatant lies. If the Democrats win, he shrieks at his rallies, “lock your windows and lock your doors.” Troops have been sent to the border to defend our country from brown women and children. “Barbed wire used properly can be a beautiful sight,” says the President of the United States of America.
Tomorrow we may get more than a glimpse of our country’s future. Will Trump go down in as the greatest progressive organizer since FDR, or will the shadow of his Yankee Doodle brand of fascism be the introduction to a deeper darkness?
It is the struggle of our generation, and the ballots that will be counted tomorrow represent the first, and the most important, test of the resistance. Most likely we will suffer some heartbreaking losses and some truly inspirational triumphs. But I believe that, despite the trauma of 2016 and thanks to the efforts of millions of Americans, Trumpism—for Trump is just the mouthpiece of a vast national madness—will be less powerful on Wednesday than it is tonight.
That will be real progress and cause for celebration, but it won’t be the end of it. Far from it, because Trumpism does not respect voting, the electoral process, the will of the people, or the resolve of its opponents. When asked today how he felt about the prospect of losing the House of Representatives, Trump was blunt:
“I don’t care. They can do whatever they want and I can do whatever I want.”
That’s not going to work.
The Longevity of the Grievous Angel
The Byrds’ album “Sweetheart of the Rodeo” is fifty years old this year.
Gram Parsons, the visionary behind that trailblazing record, didn’t even come close to that life span. He died five years after the release of “Sweetheart,” at the age of twenty-six. Bandmate Chris Hillman compared Parsons’ brief life to “a classic Tennessee Williams play, about Southern money and alcoholism. Just a tragedy.”
Parsons was a walking contradiction. He discovered Merle Haggard at Harvard. Born into vast wealth, he was a passionate evangelist for shitkicker music. He was natural charmer and a notorious asshole. In his brief career Parsons showed flashes of a strong work ethic—he wrote dozens of stellar tunes, started a musical movement, and recorded six albums. But he squandered opportunities and shunned gigs because he lived off a family trust fund that enabled him to spend long periods neglecting his career in favor of hanging out with the Rolling Stones.
Parsons was born and raised in Florida. His father, Ingram Cecil “Coon Dog” Connor, was a country boy with PTSD from World War II and self-esteem issues, primarily due to the fact that he married Avis Snively, heiress to a multimillion dollar orange juice fortune. Coon Dog shot himself just before Christmas when Gram was 12. Gram’s mother remarried a man named Bob Parsons, and Gram took his last name. Parsons pulled out all the stops when it came to ingratiating himself with his stepson. When Gram formed a folk group, Bob Parsons bought Gram a teen club so he would have a place to perform.
The teenaged Gram Parsons was a good-looking kid who always had the best musical gear, the best clothes, and the best-looking girlfriends. He went to the best prep schools and, even though he was an indifferent student, was admitted to Harvard. Gram only lasted a semester in Cambridge, but he put a band together and the guitar player, John Nuese, turned Gram onto the Bakersfield sound of Merle Haggard and Buck Owens, and from then on Parsons was a committed student of—and a zealous advocate for—country music. After a stint in New York, Parsons arrived in Los Angeles in November of 1966. On his first day in town, Parsons’ stole David Crosby’s girlfriend away from him.
Lee Hazlewood signed Parsons to a recording contract. A country album, “Safe At Home” by the International Submarine Band, was released but went nowhere. In 1968 Parsons met Chris Hillman, the bass player for the Byrds. The Byrds were looking for a keyboard player and Parsons, a competent piano player and organist, auditioned and got the gig. Byrds leader Roger McGuinn had no idea that Gram was into country music when he hired him.
Chris Hillman had begun his career as a bluegrass mandolinist and had recorded some country-tinged tunes with the Byrds, and he and Parsons bonded immediately over their love for country music. The next thing McGuinn knew he had been convinced by Parsons and Hillman that the Byrds should book time in Nashville to record a real country album.
Commercially, this seemed daring and suicidal. The Byrds’ were the best-known American rock group, but their record sales had been slowing. 1968 was the height of the violent culture battles over the Vietnam war, and the rock and roll audience associated country music with pro-war rednecks.
“Sweetheart of the Rodeo” predictably kicked off with another trademark Byrds cover of a Bob Dylan tune, but this one—”You Ain’t Going Nowhere”—was pointedly introduced by the buoyant sound of Nashville studio legend Lloyd Green’s pedal steel guitar. (Honky tonk pianist Earl Ball and the brilliant guitarist Clarence White also joined the group in the studio.) Hillman and Parsons certainly succeeded in recording a legit country album. The original mix had Byrds leader McGuinn singing three tunes and being overshadowed by newcomer Parsons, who crooned twice as many. Parsons brought two great original tunes (the now-classic “Hickory Wind” and the prophetic “One Hundred Years From Now”), a Merle Haggard tune (“Life in Prison”), a George Jones cover (“You’re Still On My Mind”) and a countrified version of William Bell’s soul ballad “You Don’t Miss Your Water.”
After the “Sweetheart” sessions were over, Parsons joined the Byrds on the road. But tensions between him and McGuinn grew, and Parsons quit the group the night before they were to leave on a tour of South Africa, enraging Hillman and McGuinn. While the Byrds figured out how to perform as a trio, Parsons stayed in London to spend time with new found friend Keith Richards.
Roger McGuinn re-entered the studio as soon as he got back to LA. He had decided that he had surrendered far too much of “Sweetheart” to Parsons, so he replaced Parsons’ vocals on three tunes with his own. (Today you can buy a version of the album with Parsons’ original vocals restored. If you’re not familiar with the album and are interested in checking it out, get that version.)
“Sweetheart of the Rodeo” got predictably mixed reviews from the critics and did not sell well. I saw the Byrds play a schizophrenic set of their big hits and their new country stuff at Eagles Auditorium in Seattle after the album came out, and the crowd enthusiastically booed the new material. But “Sweetheart” left an imprint with the rock fans who had grown tired of psychedelia and who related to Dylan’s latest—the ultra-sparse “John Wesley Harding” album—and the Band’s rootsy debut release, “Music From Big Pink.”
Back in LA, Parsons reconciled with Chris Hillman and convinced the bassist to leave the Byrds and join him in starting a new group that would go all out behind a new kind of country-based sound. The pair rented a house and began writing songs every day. They recruited the third leg of their creative stool, Sneeky Pete Kleinow, a Hollywood animator (he worked on the Gumby show) and brilliant pedal steel guitar player who took his infernal instrument into uncharted sonic waters with the help of distortion pedals and other effects.
A&M Records came knocking and Hillman, Parsons, Kleinow, bass player Chris Etheridge, and a revolving cast of drummers closeted themselves in the studio as The Flying Burrito Brothers. The result was even more trailblazing than “Sweetheart of the Rodeo,” which was a wild shift in direction but a pretty standard country record. The album by this new group—“The Gilded Palace of Sin”—was a big step toward Parsons’ vision of a country-based sound that he called “cosmic American music.”
All but two of the songs on “The Gilded Palace of Sin” were written by Parsons and/or Hillman, and they brilliantly transplant country music sensibilities to the seamy world of the LA record business. Groupies, drugs, corrupt attorneys, earthquakes, political protests, assassinations, and other big-city pitfalls weave their way through the tunes. “Hot Burrito #1,” written by Parsons and Etheridge, may stand as Parsons’ masterpiece both in terms of the songwriting and in his ability to deliver heartache vocally. The two covers on the record are both by soul-music legend Dan Penn—Parsons’ vision included a marriage of cowpunk country with Southern soul. Musically, the group’s sound is based heavily on the harmonies of the Everly Brothers and the multitracked layers of Kleinow’s soaring pedal steel. The marketing and the presentation was right in line with Parsons’ bold style. The album cover showed the Burritos in the desert adorned in the rhinestoned Nudie suits favored by traditional country artists, but these outfits were different. Hillman’s sported peacocks, Sneeky Pete’s boasted a gold pterodactyl in flight, and Parsons’ jacket featured marijuana leaves, naked women, Benzedrine, and, on the back, a large cross.
But the band stumbled out of the gate. They had come up with the idea of touring behind the record by train (Parsons was afraid of flying), and the result was the ingestion of massive quantities of drugs and alcohol during the day and sloppy, under-rehearsed shows each evening. A&M lost their shirt and a lot of confidence in their new act. “The Gilded Palace of Sin” peaked at #164 on the charts and quickly sank out of sight. A single, produced by rhythm-and-blues legend Johnny “Guitar” Watson, flopped. Chris Etheridge quit. They tried recording an album of country standards, but those tapes were kept in the vault. An album of second-rate original material was rushed out. The Burritos appeared at the disastrous Altamont festival, and Gram Parsons essentially dropped the Burritos in favor of Keith Richards’ company. After Gram showed up for a gig unable to play or sing, Hillman smashed his guitar in a fury and fired him from the Burritos.
Parsons slid into a solo deal with A&M Records and recorded most of an album (the tapes have never surfaced) with Beach Boys producer Terry Melcher before taking off to live with the Rolling Stones in the south of France. Parsons was a full-blown heroin addict by this point, and he was eventually asked to leave.
Mo Ostin signed Parsons to Reprise Records, a move that surprised many given Parson’s dissolution. But Parsons rallied to write a six fine new songs, and Parsons went into the studio with Elvis Presley’s Vegas band and a new singer named Emmylou Harris who Chris Hillman had discovered singing in folk clubs in Washington, D.C. The result was “GP,” a very solid offering that mixed Parsons’ unique, moody originals with country music covers, and proved that the singing duo of Parsons and Harris was a match made in hillbilly heaven.
But history repeated itself, and the tour in support of “GP” had flashes of brilliance, but many of the shows were like the one I caught at Max’s Kansas City in New York. The band was embarrassingly unprepared and sloppy. Parsons was pasty and flabby, his hands trembled, and he was completely unwilling or unable to assert any control over the show. Bizzarely, given Parsons’ catalogue, much of the set consisted of hoary old rock and roll tunes, and Parsons didn’t have the voice for that kind of material.
But Reprise stuck with him and a second album was recorded, again with Elvis’ band and Emmylou Harris. Parsons only offered a couple of new originals, but those were augmented with older tunes by him and by a carefully selected group of tunes by other songwriters beautifully arranged by Glen D. Hardin. What makes “Grievous Angel” a classic is the now fully realized duet singing of Parsons and Emmylou Harris, which ranks among the greatest vocal partnerships.
Parsons’ friend Clarence White was tragically killed in July of 1973. At White’s funeral Parsons elicited a promise from Phil Kaufman, his friend and road manager, that when Parsons died Kaufman would take his body out to the desert near Joshua Tree—a favorite spot of Parsons’—and set fire to it. Parsons was scheduled to start another tour in October, and a few weeks before hitting the road Parsons and two female friends rented a motel room in Joshua Tree. Parsons spent the afternoon of September 18 drinking tequila and taking barbituates, and as dark fell he was visited by someone who sold him some morphine sulphate. He injected a large quantity and overdosed. His companions spent a half an hour trying to resuscitate him before finally calling an ambulance. Parsons was declared dead at a nearby hospital a few minutes after midnight.
In death, Gram Parsons exceeded anything that Tennessee Williams could have devised. Bob Parsons made arrangements to have Gram’s body flown to New Orleans, but Phil Kaufman showed up at LAX in a borrowed hearse with phony paperwork claiming that the family had changed their plans and wanted the Parsons’ body released to Kaufman. It was a completely insane ruse. And it worked. Kaufman and an accomplice drove Parsons’ coffin to Cap Rock near Joshua Tree, poured five gallons of gasoline on it, and lit it. As a fireball rose in the desert sky, the two rock-and-roll-star arsonists took off for LA, where they later paid a $750 fine for abandoning a corpse. The “Grievlous Angel” album was released posthumously.
Gram Parsons never had a hit record and played a stadium, much less sold one out, but he made an indelible mark on a great many young musicians. A young Glenn Frey, later of the Eagles, absorbed many lessons watching Parsons’ performances at the Palomino Club. Richie Furay of Poco, a friend of Parsons, wrote a song about him. The Rolling Stones allowed Parsons’ to release his cover of “Wild Horses” before their original version hit the market. Elvis Costello, Steve Earle, and Gillian Welch are all Parsons devotees. Parsons Nudie suit hangs in the Country Music Hall of Fame.
The musician who has done the most to establish and maintain the Gram Parsons legend is Emmylou Harris, whose “Boulder to Birmingham” speaks of her devastation after his death. Emmylou regrouped, convinced James Burton and the Elvis show band who had played on “GP” and “Return of the Grievous Angel” to record and tour with her as well. Emmylou had a #4 country hit on her first solo album and never looked back.
“It’s impossible for me to talk about my music, or myself as a person, without talking about Gram,” Harris has said.
I bought “Sweetheart of the Rodeo” after seeing that Byrds show when I was in high school. I grew to love it and still return to it often. I was reminded of the initial controversy it caused and of its chilly reception when last month Chris Hillman, Roger McGuinn, and Marty Stuart headlined a Sweetheart of the Rodeo Fiftieth Anniversary tour that performed before rapturous crowds.
I saw Parsons perform five times, which is pretty good for a fan who never lived in LA. The first time was at the Seattle Pops Festival in the summer of 1969, when Gram and the Flying Burrito Brothers played what many claim was their best live show. A month later I went to the second Sky River Festival in Tenino, Washington, and the Burritos performed all three days. I made crude cassette tapes of one of their sets and took some home movies of Parsons on stage in front of a huge American flag, stripped to the waist and wearing war paint. Those were all lost somewhere along the line. And I was in the audience when Gram and Emmylou played Max’s Kansas City in New York.
I’ll pay it back as best I can this week when I take part in the ninth annual Gram Parsons tribute at the Conor Byrne in Seattle organized by the great Country Dave Harmonson, who is an even bigger Parsons freak than I am. (Which is saying something.) It never fails to be a remarkable night, my favorite gig of the year. Four solid hours of Parsons music—a first set consisting of his tunes from his stints with the International Submarine Band, the Byrds, and the Flying Burrito Brothers followed by a second set in which Dave and his great band guide the singers through the entirety of the “GP” and “Grievous Angel” albums, performed in sequence. That’ll be me singing “Hickory Wind,” that beautiful Gram Parsons song I first heard fifty years ago.
(If you’re not familiar with Gram Parsons, the “Sweetheart of the Rodeo,” “Gilded Palace of Sin,” “GP,” and “Grievous Angel” albums are required listening. No less than seven books have been written about Parsons’ life and music—the best, by far, is David N. Meyer’s Twenty Thousand Roads.)
A "Ferocious Murder" in the White House
After nearly three weeks of denials, the White House has finally admitted that Lady Liberty, the symbol of freedom and American ideals who welcomed visitors to the New York city harbor, was murdered inside the White House.
Lady Liberty, a gift from the French government who had lived in the United States since 1886, went missing after visiting the White House on October 2 to have her first face-to-face meeting with Donald Trump and to lobby the President on the issue of immigration.
Unbeknownst to her, eighteen high-level Trump administration officials and advisors—Attorney General Jeff Sessions, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, former Trump advisor Steve Bannon, Vice President Pence, counselor Kelly Anne Conway, White House lawyer Rudy Guiliani, White House chief of staff John Kelly, senior advisor Stephen Miller, FBI director Christopher Wray, press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders, media personality Alex Jones, national security advisor John Bolton, Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Ben Carson, Fox News commentator Sean Hannity, prominent white supremacist David Duke, Republican operative and wife-swapper Roger Stone, evangelical leader Franklin Graham, and Chris Cox, the founder of Bikers for Trump—had arrived at the White House earlier that day in separate cars for a secret meeting with Donald Trump.
Second-hand accounts of the meeting with Trump vary somewhat, but all agree that the President’s message to the attendees followed these lines: Lady Liberty had outlived her usefulness, she was too closely associated with criminal immigrants, as a European she was not the right symbol for Trump’s nationalism, she carried a book that wasn’t the Bible, she was “off brand” because she wasn’t “hot enough,” she was “a weird green color that didn’t look American,” and that Trump “wanted her head.” After Trump retired to his private residence to watch an episode of “Judge Judy,” the attendees were ushered into the White House’s ultra-secure Situation Room.
At that moment, about 2 p.m., Lady Liberty was checking in at the main White House entrance. Video footage, widely broadcast since her disappearance, clearly shows the copper icon entering the building.
The White House was strangely empty. Employees had been told that morning that they could take advantage of a surprise day off. The only people in the building besides Lady Liberty were the eighteen elite Trump loyalists. In their minds, what was about to take place—the killing of Lady Liberty, ordered by the President—was never going to be known beyond the walls of the White House.
What they didn’t know was that reporters from the Washington Post were listening in. Just how this was accomplished—whether the Post focused a directional microphone on the building from the outside or successfully leveraged a bug planted in the Situation Room by Omarosa Manigault—has not been established. One of the attendees may have taped the event and leaked it. Another theory is that Lady Liberty gave her cell phone to a Post reporter before entering the White House and may have broadcast her own abduction via her iWatch.
The Post isn’t saying how it was obtained, but the newspaper obtained a live audio soundtrack to what happened inside the Situation Room and has published these details:
Lady Liberty was seized by Vice President Pence and chief of staff Kelly immediately after entering the White House and taken to the Situation Room.
In the course of seven minutes Lady Liberty was first tortured by Sarah Huckabee Sanders and Kellyanne Conway, then had her arms cut off with a blowtorch wielded by Steve Bannon, and was finally dismembered and killed by former surgeon Ben Carson using a concrete saw. As the mutilation began Carson put on headphones and was heard to say to his colleagues: “When I do this job, I listen to music. You should do that, too.” At this point the Situation was flooded with the tunes of Kanye West and the volume turned up to drown out Lady Liberty’s screams.
When the Washington Post first broke the explosive story of Lady’s Liberty’s brutal demise, the White House insisted that she had left the White House via an exit in the rear of the building after meeting with and getting her photo taken with Trump.
A few days later CNN broadcast White House surveillance videos of a man dressed as Lady Liberty leaving the rear of the White House. Post reporters believe that this man was Stephen Miller wearing Lady Liberty’s clothing.
After several days of silence, the White House finally admitted that Lady Liberty had been killed on the premises by a “rogue operation.” The following day Sarah Huckabee Sanders claimed, with no evidence, that Lady Liberty had been killed accidentally after “a fist fight.” The next day, Sanders told reporters that the Lady in the Harbor had died after being put in a chokehold by Rudy Guiliani during “an interrogation gone wrong.” President Trump said that he found these explanations “credible.” FBI Director Christopher Wray noted that, while tragic, Lady Liberty’s death could not be investigated by the FBI because she was not a citizen of the United States. Republican members of Congress have not commented on Lady Liberty’s demise or the White House’s role in it.
This morning several news sources reported that Lady Liberty’s body parts had been discovered in a scrap-metal yard in South Carolina owned by Alex Jones.
Amidst the unraveling of the many versions of the White House’s official story, President Trump just tweeted this: “The cover-up—done by the Deep State—was the worst in the history of cover-ups. I am firing the man responsible—deputy attorney general and big-time fink Rod Rosenstein—forthwith. Bad guy!”
We Are the Terrorists
This is an emotional day, and we don’t yet know the identity of the terrorist or terrorists, but it is possible to catalogue the indisputable facts behind the situation.
Live explosive packages were sent to former President Obama, Hillary Clinton, George Soros, former Attorney General Eric Holder, Representative Debby Wasserman Schultz, Representative Maxine Waters.
There are also unconfirmed reports of other suspicious packages being mailed to other individuals and groups.
The early word from law enforcement is that there are similarities between these packages. We don’t yet know for sure, but given that these packages were mailed inside the United States, this is likely domestic terrorism.
What we experienced today is REAL terrorism, not to the fake terrorism constantly spun up by our government for political benefit.
This is concerted terrorism that is politically motivated.\
The link between all of the people and organizations targeted by this terrorist or terrorists is the fact that all of them have been the targets of vicious attacks from Trump and the Republican Party that go beyond political attacks and into the realm of threats. This is a fact. Trump and the Republican Party have made threatened these people and organizations with imprisonment, called them “the enemy of the people,” claimed that they were not actual Americans, accused them of coddling or colluding with ISIS and other terrorist groups, threatened to remove their Secret Service protection, and relentlessly branded them as the biggest threats to America.
Trump has instigated violence against his opponents at his rallies, referring over and over again to the “good old days” when political opponents were “taken care of.”
Trump has praised the vicious, and murderous treatment of political opponents by the tyrannical leaders of other countries, including Saddam Hussein, Kim Jong Un, Rodrigo Duterte, Prince Mohammed Bin Salman, and Vladimir Putin.
There is no morality, much less moral leadership, in the Republican Party. They have, and will continue to be, purposely silent about Trump’s fascist message as long as they can win primaries.
Today’s GOP is the party of white supremacy, authoritarianism, domestic terrorism, and treason.
Trump and the GOP have yet to pay a real price for abandoning core American principles, and they won’t change their ways if this does not happen. It’s not at all clear that they will change even if they DO pay a price.
Trump and the Republicans are just the most public faces and the loudest cheerleaders for all that is dark, monstrous, and un-American in this country.
We are the terrorists. The millions who support Trump and vote for Republicans are endorsing domestic terrorism, institutionalized racism, and fascism.
Trumpism has already claimed a life in Charlottesville.
Trumpism will lead to more violence and more deaths.
That is not a political or a partisan statement. It’s not a declaration of war against people I don’t agree with. It’s the plain, obvious truth.
Frank Hurley: Pictures of Life by the Fathom
Today is the birthday of Frank Hurley, the unflappable Australian who brilliantly documented—in spite of endless challenges—one of the greatest survival sagas in human history.
Hurley was born in Sydney in 1885. The purchase of a Kodak Box Brownie when he was seventeen put him on the path to becoming a professional photographer with a successful postcard business and a reputation for being willing to put himself in danger to get a choice shot.
In 1908 the 23-year-old Hurley talked himself into a job as the staff photographer for an Antarctic expedition led by fellow countryman Douglas Mawson. Returning three years later, Hurley produced a documentary from his footage.
In 1914 Hurley parlayed that experience into a similar role on British explorer Ernest Shackleton’s Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition. Amundsen had beaten Scott to the South Pole two years earlier, and Shackleton’s goal was to make the first land crossing of Antarctica. Shackleton would sail his ship, the Endurance, to the north end of the continent and then cross the continent on land. Another ship would sail to the south end of Antarctica and lay supply depots for Shackleton and his men.
Frank Hurley sailed with Shackleton on the Endurance, taking along his still camera, a movie camera, and a portable darkroom in which he developed his heavy plate-glass negatives. Hurley would also pioneer the taking of color photographs on this expedition.
By the time they entered the ice on the Weddell Sea, Hurley had deeply impressed his shipmates. “H is a marvel,” one wrote. “With cheerful Australian profanity, he perambulates alone aloft & everywhere, in the most dangerous & slippery places he can find, content & happy at all times but cursing so if he can get a good or novel picture. Stands bare & hair waving in the wind, where we are gloved & helmeted, he snaps his snaps or winds his handle turning out curses of delight & pictures of Life by the fathom.”
Shackleton’s plans were ruined when the Endurance became trapped in the sea ice before reaching the continent. The ship was slowly crushed, and Shackleton ordered it abandoned in October of 1915. Hurley meticulously and artfully photographed the agonizingly slow death of the Endurance. Shackleton and the crew spent the next six months floating with the ice. Their only hope was to use the ship’s lifeboats to reach one of the nearby islands. Hurley had to leave behind most of his photographic negatives—they were too heavy. After a brutal seven-day voyage in these small, open boats across storm-tossed seas and dangerous ice flows, they reached the uninhabited and rarely visited Elephant Island and made a raw camp.
They were never going to be rescued from Elephant Island, so Shackleton and five men pushed out to sea in a 23-foot lifeboat to try to make it to South Georgia Island, where there was a Norwegian whaling station. Winter was approaching. The men faced gale-force winds and had to chip off the ice that constantly accumulated on the boat. They took turns collapsing on the small boulders with which they had filled the bottom of the boat for ballast. They navigated by dead reckoning. Seventeen days and 800 miles later, they reached South Georgia Island. They had made one of the most amazing boat voyages ever accomplished.
But the tides and storms had forced Shackleton and his men to land on the uninhabited side of the island, and the James Caird was in no shape to get them to the other side. Shackleton decided to take to men and strike out for the whaling station. For thirty-six straight hours, with no map, they crossed over mountain ranges and glissaded down a glacier. Their faces were smeared with whale blubber, their hair was matted and caked with salt, their clothing had been reduced to rags, and they were suffering from frostbite. They met two children, the first humans other than their shipmates that they had seen in eighteen months, who ran from them. Moments later they stumbled into the whaling station. “Who are you,” a whaler asked. “I am Ernest Shackleton” was the response. The Norwegian wept.
The southern winter had come, and Shackleton had to make four attempts to rescue his men on Elephant Island before he finally reached them in a commandeered Chilean ship five months after he had parted from them. All were rescued. Shackleton had not lost a single man during the two-year ordeal.
Unbelievably, a couple of hundred of Hurley’s plate-glass negatives and quite a bit of his movie film also survived. The voyage of the Endurance, while a failure, became legendary. Frank Hurley used his still photographs and movie footage to produce a documentary of the experience, “South,” in 1919.
After his Antarctic exploits, Hurley enlisted in the Australian Imperial Force in World War I, and took countless stunning battlefield photos. After the war he became a successful producer of movie documentaries and dramatic films. He was nominated for an Academy Award in 1941. Hurley once again served as a battlefield photographer in World War II, after which he resumed his film career and published several books. He died in 1962.
Frank Hurley’s unforgettable photographs can be found in the book he co-wrote with Shackleton, “South with Endurance,” and Caroline Alexander’s excellent “The Endurance: Shackleton’s Legendary Antarctic Expedition.” F.A. Worsley’s “Endurance” is a brilliant recounting of Shackleton’s epic adventure. Hurley’s stunning documentary “South” is available on YouTube.
Dead and Buried
I could say something cruel about the New York Yankees, but I'm not going there. No, I'm not going to be one of those smug Yankee haters. Not a word about the Bronx Bombers strafing their own fans and dropping two consecutive games in their fancy schmancy new Yankee Stadium. Far be it from me to point out that a bunch of impostors in pinstripes had the bases loaded in the ninth and couldn't get the job done. Nor shall I stoop to mention that their 2018 season is now officially dead and buried.
No, the Yankees have suffered enough. They had to watch themselves play, after all. I shall instead take the high road of good sportsmanship and extend a heartfelt "better luck next year" and a limp pat on the back to the entire Yankees team, organization, and their entitled fan base. As the immortal Bard himself wrote in Julius Caesar, "When beggars die, there are no comets seen."
Yankees Lose to Red Sox, On The Brink of Elimination
So very, very , very sorry for the 49,652 New York fans who witnessed the horrific slaughter at Yankee Stadium tonight. Oh, the humanity! My thoughts and prayers go out to them! All those $746 tickets wasted! All those sobbing junk bond traders puking in their limousines! The Yankee's best pitcher best was their catcher! Rudi Guiliani was helicoptered out after Boston's seven-run fourth inning so he could salvage the evening by burning a little midnight oil on Trump's legal defense, which would be a LOT more fun than watching that game!
The Yankees tried really, really hard. They earned their $167 million dollars by blasting five whole singles, and they scored enough runs to win but Boston scored a few more. (Fifteen more, actually.) The Yankees' offensive blitzkreig tonight was pretty amazing when you consider all the running around they had to do chasing those 18 hits that dropped in all over the place and the whiplash they were getting while watching all those Red Sox crossing home plate. They did their best. They are a professional team, and they'll be ready to play tomorrow in their fabulous pinstripes. None of you Yankee haters should get cocky or snarky or anything.
Thirty Days
Spent this afternoon canvassing for Carolyn Long, who is running for Congress in Washington State's 3rd District.
One month left before Election Day.
Buster Keaton
Happy 123rd birthday to Buster Keaton.
One evening when I was in college I plunked myself down in a stiff lecture-hall seat for “Wednesday Night at the Movies,” which is what we called the American film studies class taught by Andrew Sarris, the film critic for the Village Voice. Sarris was a world-class windbag—his lectures were often longer than the films that followed them—but he knew his stuff cold, and I saw many cinema classics for the first time thanks to his class. Sarris’ topic on this particular night was Buster Keaton, and the chosen feature was “Steamboat Bill, Jr.”
I didn’t know it, but there was a Keaton revival mushrooming at the time. The Great Stone Face’s rightful place in cinema history had been obscured by the enormous shadow of Charlie Chaplin for decades, and many of his films were thought to have been lost forever. In a weird circumstance that could have come right out of “Sherlock Jr.,” Keaton’s homage to sleuthery, his old Hollywood mansion had been purchased by the actor James Mason, and Mason had discovered a stash of flawless prints of many of Keaton’s films in a hidden compartment in the house. Raymond Rohauer signed a distribution deal with Keaton, and it was one of his prints that Sarris was screening that night.
Most film professors would have opted to show Buster’s much-honored masterpiece, “The General,” but I owe Sarris one: “Steamboat Bill Jr.” was, for me, the perfect introduction to Keaton.
First, it’s propelled by one of Keaton’s most charming story lines—an effete man-child struggles to gain the love of rugged father by helping him save his decrepit steamboat business.
Second, it’s set in Keaton’s favorite milieu—the great outdoors, where the laws of physics (especially gravity and momentum) and the natural cycle of wind, rain, and fire rule but where steady, resolute men can harness those forces to do amazing things.
Third, it’s a silent film, so outside of the rare, terse titles (Keaton’s films had the fewest, shortest titles of the silent era) the film is a relentless visual feast, a cavalcade of pure-cinema moments that deliver everything from subtle character revelations to perfectly executed sight gags to jaw-dropping, what-did-I-just-see impossibilities. You could make a strong case that Buster Keaton was the greatest stunt man in the history of film, and some of his greatest physical feats and gymnastic pratfalls are immortalized within the frames of “Steamboat Bill Jr.”
Within a few months, the Elgin Theater in the Village hosted a major Keaton retrospective, and I was there every night. I remember sitting at one showing behind a street performer I had seen in my neighborhood named Philippe Petit, who two years later would become famous for his high-wire walk between the twin towers of the World Trade Center—exactly the kind of person who would appreciate Buster Keaton and who would have been appreciated by him.
When Buster Keaton entered his formative years, he was already a seasoned, professional clown. From the age of three, his miniature Irishman character was a key part of his parents’ highly successful vaudeville act, which consisted mainly of Keaton’s father throwing him all over the theater in a cyclone of familial violence. Buster (whose nickname was bestowed on him by family friend Harry Houdini) discovered that he got bigger laughs when he froze his little face into a mask of adult-level seriousness and endured his treatment silently. He was purely visual comedian from the very beginning.
Buster left the family act when he turned 22 in 1917. He signed a lucrative contract to be a part of a major Broadway show, but before rehearsals began he ran into Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle, an acquaintance from vaudeville, on the street in New York City. Arbuckle had gone into the movie business, and he invited Keaton to visit his New Jersey film studio the next day. Keaton ended up an extra, and stole the film.
Before he left that day, Buster had the cameraman open the camera and explain how it worked. Within a week, Keaton had gotten out of his theater contract and signed with Arbuckle at one sixth the salary. Two years later, after starring in a series of shorts, Keaton owned his own studio and was producing highly successful feature films.
Keaton’s films were instantly popular because they were distinctly different. His stoic everyman character made Chaplin’s tramp look manic by comparison, and, unlike Chaplin, Keaton never went for pathos. Buster spurned the easy, cost-effective use of constant cross cuts to achieve visual effects in favor of long, extended, uninterrupted camera sequences. The power of Keaton’s films was that what you saw was actually what happened in front of the camera. But despite his theater background, Keaton never ever thought of film as a way to photograph what would happen on stage. He understood immediately that film was an infinitely better medium for his comic genius than the theater ever was or would be. And so, from the very start, Keaton’s films were films. The best of them—“The General,” “The Navigator,” and “Steamboat Bill Jr.’’—are some of the purest films in the history of that medium, even though they are some of the first.
In his short homage to vaudeville, “The Playhouse,” Keaton plays everyone—the performers, the musicians in the pit orchestra, the audience, even a chimpanzee. The nine members in the minstrel show act? Nine separate Busters, all on screen at once, singing and dancing in unison. The film people in Hollywood returned again and again to see minstrel act in “The Playhouse” and to try to determine how Keaton achieved it. Buster had covered the camera lens with nine strips of tape. One strip was removed and at a pre-arranged signal Buster, placed at the far edge of the stage, started the routine. The film was then rewound back to the starting point, another sliver of the lens was exposed, and Buster performed the act again. The same film was exposed and rewound nine times—and in those days cameras were hand cranked—and no seams are visible in the shot.
Although he worked all his life, Buster Keaton lost control of his films as talking films were introduced and lost a couple of decades to alcoholism. He lived to beat the bottle, marry the love of his life, retire to a modest ranch outside of Los Angeles, to see his own resurrection as a film genius, and to attend film festivals in the U.S. and Europe dedicated to his phenomenal body of work.
(The director Peter Bogdanovich just released a solid documentary, “The Great Buster,” but the best telling of Buster’s life and career remains Kevin Brownlow’s three-part television series from 1987, “A Hard Act To Follow.” All of Keaton’s features and most of his short films are available from Kino Films.)
Devin Field Week
Truly a huge week professionally for my son Devin Field.
Devin will perform a standup comedy segment on ABC's Jimmy Kimmel Show (Devin is a writer on the show) this Wednesday night, October 3. Some guy named Ryan Gosling is also on the show.
Only two days later, on Friday, October 5th, Devin will be featured in his own half-hour comedy special on Comedy Central at 11 p.m.
Amazing to see this talented guy putting it all together.
Otis Rush
I remember the first time I heard Otis Rush's "I Can't Quit You Baby." Few recordings have ever stunned me like that one. In the late 1980s the Slamhound Hunters, the band I was in, had the awesome privilege to open for and back up Otis for a three nights at the Fabulous Rainbow in Seattle. For me, standing three feet from Otis when he sang and played his upside-down guitar was a thrill of a lifetime. He was incredibly nice during the entire run and his performances were really joyful and musically cosmic. Otis Rush was born to play the blues, that is for sure. RIP.
Sexual Assault Hotline Calls Spike During Kavanaugh Hearing
I am a man and I have never experienced a sexual assault. I am really, really struggling today.
One in six women in this country have experienced a rape or an attempted rape. There are more than 26 million women in this country who are reliving those experiences.
I'm going to visit my 90-year-old mother today. She's devastated. I have nothing for her except my sympathy.
Real progress is measured by actions and results, not by empathy. We have not made any progress since Anita Hill came forward in 1992. We keep destroying and re-assaulting the brave women who come forward and we keep rewarding known sexual predators with our most powerful jobs, including seats on the Supreme Court and the Presidency. And let's be honest—Donald Trump is not the first sexual predator to hold that office.
It's impossible not to struggle when you have to face the reality that at a single point in our messy history as a country every institution--the voting citizenry, the courts, the executive branch, the Congress--that you've counted on in some fashion to keep us progressing and to provide some kind of balance has failed utterly. Constitutionally, today, there is no there there.
In time, I'll resurrect my hope that the 2018 midterms will give us a Congress that actually works, if only to keep myself from becoming completely disoriented.
What do those 26 million women have to hope for? How do they keep their sanity? What are we going to do for them, and when?
The Only Prosecutor With a Vagina Who Would Take This Shitty Gig
Trying to follow the glacial pace of the perpetually interrupted, aimless questions of Rachel Mitchell was like watching a slow-motion film of a sloth going to sleep. She reminded me of a deeply committed middle-school vice principal trying to get to the bottom of who removed the missing pencils from the supply cabinet. When she finally delivered her final, 23-miles-per-hour knuckleball directly at Ford's ankles, it turned out to be the killer observation that the absolute worst way to respond to Ford's accusation was to have the kind of hearing that the Republicans had devised. !!!!!!
Republican Suicide Watch
It’s hard to imagine how Thursday’s Senate Judicial Committee hearing with Kavanaugh and Ford will be anything but a shudder-inducing orgy of GOP self immolation. Once again, we will watch open mouthed as the Eleven White Male Republicans on that Committee voluntarily push their faces into the whirring blades of a fan of female fury. When the Republicans have to grapple with women’s issues in public, the one thing you can be sure of is that they will leave their anemic blood splattered all over the walls.
You can’t fault them for not wanting anyone in America to watch Orrin Hatch interrogate Ford or to have to apologize for him the next day. Very bad optics, indeed! But their solution to that very real problem—to hire an outside female to do their dirty work for them—will leave each of them with a great big “C” for cowardice carved into the middle of his forehead. Instead of having the guts to do their jobs and question their tormentor themselves, they will literally hire a queen of the Quislings to complete the rape that Kavanaugh couldn’t finish. They will bravely hand their jobs over to the one person in that room on Thursday who will definitely know the least about what happened. As students of the Confederacy, they will be borrowing a page from the official slaveowner’s manual: when one of your human chattel needs a whipping, double the punishment by forcing another slave to wield the lash.
Supposedly each Senator will get five minutes—five minutes!—to question each witness. So viewers will see the Democratic senators, two of whom are former prosecutors, asking their own questions, as if they were real U.S. Senators, and then watch as each of their Republican colleagues cedes his time to the Great Inquisitor With A Vagina and then sit, mute, peeking through her skirts like the close-minded, sexist sphinx that he is.
Who on earth thought up this shit?
The horror movie won’t stop there. The Republicans will adamantly contend that they are defending an innocent man, but their actions will show them to be scuzzy mob lawyers who you can always count on to know an unlicensed doc who can patch up gunshot wounds on the sly or to create new, phony rules to “ram this thing through.” An innocent man would welcome the facts, but there will be, unlike other confirmation hearings, no FBI investigation. The only other person in that bedroom in 1982, Mark Judge, is in hiding and won’t be called as a witness. Nor will the corroborating witnesses of Dr. Ford. Nor will the second accuser and her corroborating witnesses. Nor will the former classmates who came forth yesterday to counter Kavanaugh’s claims of spotlessness in his Fox News interview. Nor will the third accuser who has hired Michael Avannati and is expected to explode upon the scene tomorrow night with tales of gang rape. But you can be sure that the Democrats and Dr. Ford will mention these people, and often.
Thursday’s hearing will be a sickening tableau, something between the Salem witch trials and the Stalinist show tribunals, but less entertaining.
Twelve hours later, on Friday morning, those eleven male GOP senators will nevertheless approve, thanks to their one-vote advantage on the committee, Judge Kavanaugh’s nomination, after which they will retire to their Washington, D.C. watering holes and strip clubs to savor the sweetness of their victory.
But there will be two more votes ahead of them. The vote on Kavanaugh by the entire Senate, and the vote on November 6th. That’s when the reviews of Thursday’s Grand Guignol spectacle will finally come in.
Bad Old Joe
Joe Biden is one of the front runners for the Democratic nomination for President in 2018.
What the hell?
This is the party that a year and a half ago nominated an emblem of its past who then lost an election to an outfront psychopath with no political experience.
This is the party that supposedly champions the needs of younger voters.
This is the party that supposedly champions the rights of women.
So why would Democrats even consider running a 76-year-old white man in 2018?
Many older Democrats are so nostalgic for the past that they confuse it with their future. These are the folks who were attracted to Hillary Clinton in part because she was a talisman from the Good Old Days Of Bill, who look fondly upon Joe Biden because he was part of the Golden Age of Obama, and who are ready to vault any Congressman named Kennedy right into the White House because they still swoon for the Camelot or yore, when Democrats were suave and sexy. The flip side of this myopic homesickness is that these people overlook the fresh talent in the Party. This childlike sentimentality would be almost charming if it wasn't so deadly dumb politically.
Other Democrats feel good about Biden because he is a true genius at personifying the Regular Guy Union Democrat that used to win elections for the party. This is a real skill that seems genuine and not an act, and it's attractive in an era in which the Democratic Party has lost such voters, but it's also speaks to a yearning for a demographic that has already left the building and for unions that the Party allowed to be crushed.
Another attractive--and absolutely genuine--quality of Biden's that has helped his popularity is his empathy for his fellow human beings. This is also powerfully attractive today, given the heartless bastard who lives in the White House and the sneering viciousness of the Republic Party.
And there are Democrats who like Biden because for the past ten years he has been enjoying the quiet, out-of-the-fray womb of the Vice Presidency, where he has been identified with zero-downside causes like a cure for cancer.
Today NBC is airing an interview with Biden in which the old everyman and Obama sidekick shows why his 2018 Presidential campaign (he's definitely running) will end up as--just like his disastrous runs in 1988 (thirty years ago!) and 2008--in a smoking ruin.
NBC predictably asked Biden about his role in the public lynching of Anita Hill by the Senate Judiciary Committee in 1991. Those who weren't alive or politically cognizant then would do well to look into that sordid chapter and Biden's behavior at that time. Biden, the chairman of the committee, enabled Hill's testimony and in the end voted against Clarence Thomas, but during the publically televised hearings Biden stood back and let his Republican colleagues viciously slander Hill and destroy her reputation.
So today's interview was a great opportunity for Biden to forthrightly address, here in the very real MeToo era, his role in the character assassination of a victim of sexual assault. He could have shown his human side and admitted the obvious--that in 1991 he was not sufficiently empathetic to either Hill or the issue of sexual harassment, that he didn't do anything to help the search for truth during those hearings, that in the interim he had educated himself and faced up to his shortcomings, that this period of education and self reflection led to his sponsorship of the Violence Against Women Act and other efforts, and that he had apologized to Hill.
Instead Biden reverts to the Really Stupid Joe who had to quit his first Presidential campaign because of plagiarism and lying about his law school record and his last because he finished FIFTH in the Iowa caucuses. Biden insists in the interview that he not only relates to the MeToo movement now but that "I think I got it in 1991"--which, if true, would make his actions even more inexcusable. He lamely blames his inability to protect Hill from a public lynching or to allow other, corroborating witnesses to testify, on the rules of the Senate--a truly cringeworthy dodge, even by political standards. And he repeats a comment he made last December--that he owes Anita Hill an apology.
He's never apologized to her. Anita Hill says that whenever her doorbell rings unexpectedly her family jokes that it must be Joe Biden come to apologize.
What the hell?
Obstructing Justice in Broad Daylight
Trump has issued an unprecedented order to publicly release classified materials--selected material targeting individuals who Trump is trying to smear--that are part criminal investigations that have not yet been concluded. This material, which includes emails by and from those individuals and selected portions of FISA warrants, will not be redacted (which will reveal the secret sources of the FBI and the DOJ) or scrubbed for purely personal information that has nothing to do with the investigation, which is, for all kinds of good reasons, the standard practice.
Trump has the legal right to do this, as he is the final arbiter of what information is classified or unclassified.
But this is the latest attempt by Trump to obstruct justice--out in the open and in public--and is certainly, without a doubt, grounds for impeachment. Unless, of course, we have a situation where a President under investigation is actively partnering with members of the House, who have the responsibility to bring impeachment charges, to obstruct that investigation. That's ANOTHER impeachable offense.
FBI Director Christopher Wray and Deputy Attorney General in charge of the Mueller investigation Rod Rosenstein have been attacked for months and threatened with impeachment (oh, the irony) by GOP Congressmen and Trump co-conspirators Dennis Nunes and Mark Meadows for not turning over this classified information.
On May 1 Rosenstein issued this warning to the Trump Gang:
“I can tell you that there have been people that have been making threats against me privately and publicly for some time, and I think they should understand by now the Department of Justice is not going to be extorted. We’re going to do what’s required by the rule of law, and any kind of threats that anybody makes are not going to affect the way we do our job."
Trump has finally issued his order. Will Christopher Wray and Rod Rosenstein finally live up to their oaths to uphold the Constitution over the interests of the President and their party and provoke a Constitutional crisis? Democratic Congressman Adam Schiff hinted yesterday that a revolt is at hand, but we have waited nearly two years for Republicans within the government to stand up for the Constitution.
We'll know very soon whether we still have a Department of Justice or an FBI.
News Flash From the Battlefield
For the second time during President Trump’s war on the United States of America, one of the his biggest offensive weapons has been attacked by his own Navy.
Just over one year ago, the HMS Obamacare Repeal, the largest legislative carrier in the Trump navy, was sunk instantly after suffering a direct hit from a kamikaze aircraft launched from the Arizona and piloted by turncoat airman John McCain.
Military observers confirm that the HMS Kavanaugh, Trump’s newest warship, was attacked at 7 p.m. Eastern time tonight by another jet fighter launched from the decks of the Arizona, this time piloted by the traitorous Jeff Flake.
A second major attack by his own forces is certainly a major, humiliating defeat for the beleaguered President. The loss of the HMS Kavanaugh could be a death blow to Trump’s war strategy. The Kavanaugh, launched only last month, is a state-of-the-art destroyer designed to be impervious to the United States’ pitifully antiquated offensive weaponry. Constructed this year at the Republican Naval Yard according to exacting specifications derived from years of input from the most brilliant conservative military planners, the Kavanaugh was, according to a recent tweet by the President, “totally unsinkable.”
It is nighttime on the Potomac, and details of the attack are few and incomplete. There are unconfirmed reports of fires breaking out on board the ship and of the crew (the Kavanaugh is manned by Republican Senators on the Judiciary Committee) making preparations to abandon ship.
We will publish new details on the situation as they develop.
The Seattle Storm, WNBA Champions
Finally getting around to congratulating the 2018 WNBA champions, the amazing Seattle Storm. The face of Seattle's most successful sports franchise, Sue Bird, has now won an NCAA championship, an Olympic gold medal, and three WNBA championships, and it looks as if she is game to pound the hardwood for another season. Breanna Stewart and Natasha Howard were also brilliant all season. And the team's preemptive rejection of a White House invitation that wouldn't have been offered anyway makes their 2018 campaign a perfect season.