In the email that delivered today's TMW 'toon, Tom Tomorrow (Dan Perkins) also wrote:
This 'toon was inspired by the 17 year old Kenosha shooter, but also by the general trend of self appointed militia types who are starting to show up at protests, and how they are received by the cops. Police in Kenosha told a group of armed white guys that they “appreciate them” and offered them bottled water. Eventually I’m just going to end up drawing myself each week screaming WE ARE SLIDING INTO FASCISM, but for this week, a slightly more understated take.
I wanted to make it clear that my generic gun nut was not meant to specifically represent the 17 year old kid, which is the purpose of the dialogue in the second panel.
I watched three of four nights of the RNC but in the end I just didn’t want to write about it this week. Though I suppose I could have drawn myself screaming WE ARE SLIDING INTO FASCISM.
The thing I didn’t see coming was that when it happened here, it would all be so very dumb. The next couple of months are really going to be nerve wracking. If we don’t get Trump out of power now, we may never have another chance to turn this thing around.
On that cheery note, be safe and be well!
Dan/Tom
On this dreary note, if we have a (fair & balanced) alarm about a Fascist government (Hitler-Mussolini-Franco-*ILK (*Impeached But Not Removed Lyin' King) in our future, so be it. [x YouTube]
"The Liar Tweets Tonight" (Parody of "The Lion Sleeps Tonight")
By Roy Zimmerman and The ReZisters, featuring Sandy Riccardi
[x TMW]
Here To Help!
By Tom Tomorrow (Dan Perkins)
[Dan Perkins is an editorial cartoonist better known by the pen name "Tom Tomorrow." His weekly comic strip, "This Modern World," which comments on current events from a strong liberal perspective, appears regularly in approximately 150 papers across the US, as well as on Daily Kos. The strip debuted in 1990 in the SF Weekly. Perkins received the Robert F. Kennedy Award for Excellence in Journalism in both 1998 and 2002. When he is not working on projects related to his comic strip, Perkins writes a daily political blog, also entitled "This Modern World," which he began in December 2001. More recently, Dan Perkins, pen name Tom Tomorrow, was named the winner of the 2013 Herblock Prize for editorial cartooning. Even more recently, Dan Perkins was a runner-up for the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Cartooning.]
In today's essay, The New Yorker's Margaret Talbot provides a lengthy — but not tedious or dull — examination of boredom as well as a review of the literature on that subject that describes this blogger's days in most of 2020. If this is a (fair & balanced) view of the embodiment of grumbling about boredom, so be it. [x YouTube]
"The Liar Tweets Tonight" (Parody of "The Lion Sleeps Tonight")
By Roy Zimmerman and The ReZisters, featuring Sandy Riccardi
[x The New Yorker]
What Does Boredom Do To Us—And For Us
By Margaret Talbot
TagCrowd Cloud provides a visual summary of the blog post below
Quick inventory: Among the many things you might be feeling more of these days, is boredom one of them? It might seem like something to disavow, automatically, when the country is roiling. The American plot thickens by the hour. We need to be paying attention. But boredom, like many an inconvenient human sensation, can steal over a person at unseemly moments. And, in some ways, the psychic limbo of the Pandemic has been a breeding ground for it—or at least for a restless, buzzing frustration that can feel a lot like it.
Fundamentally, boredom is, as Tolstoy defined it, “a desire for desires.” The psychoanalyst Adam Phillips, describing the feeling that sometimes drops over children like a scratchy blanket, elaborated on this notion: boredom is “that state of suspended animation in which things are started and nothing begins, the mood of diffuse restlessness which contains that most absurd and paradoxical wish, the wish for a desire.” In a new book, Out of My Skull: The Psychology of Boredom, James Danckert, a neuroscientist, and John D. Eastwood, a psychologist, nicely describe it as a cognitive state that has something in common with tip-of-the-tongue syndrome—a sensation that something is missing, though we can’t quite say what.
Danckert and Eastwood are hardly alone in their inquiries. In the past couple of decades, a whole field of boredom studies has flourished, complete with conferences, seminars, symposiums, workshops, and a succession of papers with such titles as “In Search of Meaningfulness: Nostalgia as an Antidote to Boredom” (been there) and “Eaten Up by Boredom: Consuming Food to Escape Awareness of the Bored Self” (definitely been there). And, of course, there’s a Boredom Studies Reader, which bears the suitably stolid subtitle “Frameworks and Perspectives.”
Boredom, it’s become clear, has a history, a set of social determinants, and, in particular, a pungent association with modernity. Leisure was one precondition: enough people had to be free of the demands of subsistence to have time on their hands that required filling. Modern capitalism multiplied amusements and consumables, while undermining spiritual sources of meaning that had once been conferred more or less automatically. Expectations grew that life would be, at least some of the time, amusing, and people, including oneself, interesting—and so did the disappointment when they weren’t. In the industrial city, work and leisure were cleaved in a way that they had not been in traditional communities, and work itself was often more monotonous and regimented. Moreover, as the political scientist Erik Ringmar points out in his contribution to the “Boredom Studies Reader,” boredom often comes about when we are constrained to pay attention, and in modern, urban society there was simply so much more that human beings were expected to pay attention to—factory whistles, school bells, traffic signals, office rules, bureaucratic procedures, chalk-and-talk lectures. (Zoom meetings.)
Schopenhauer and Kierkegaard considered boredom a particular scourge of modern life. The nineteenth-century novel arose in part as an antidote to the experience of tedium, and tedium often propelled its plots. What was Emma Bovary, who arrived in 1856, if not bored—by her plodding husband, by provincial existence, by life itself when it failed to show the glittering colors of fiction? Oblomov (the eponymous novel by Ivan Goncharov appeared three years after Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary) is a superfluous man on a superannuated feudal estate who passes the time with his family in thick silence and bouts of helplessly contagious yawning. Though it was possible in the English language to be “a bore” in the eighteenth century, one of the first documented instances of the noun boredom’s being invoked to describe a subjective feeling did not appear until 1852, in Dickens’s Bleak House,” afflicting the aptly named Lady Dedlock.
Heidegger, one of the preeminent theorists of boredom, classified it into three kinds: the mundane boredom of, say, waiting for a train; a profound malaise he associated not with modernity or any specific experience but with the human condition itself; and an ineffable deficit of some unnameable something that sounds thoroughly familiar to us. (This third kind might have made a good additional verse for Peggy Lee in her languid “Is That All There Is?”) We are invited to a dinner party. “There we find the usual food and the usual table conversation,” Heidegger writes. “Everything is not only tasty, but very tasteful as well.” There was nothing unsatisfactory about the occasion at all, and yet, once home, the realization arrives unbidden: “I was bored after all this evening.”
One does find intimations of boredom long before its mid-nineteenth-century flowering. Seneca, in the first century, evoked taedium vitae, a mood akin to nausea, set off by contemplating the relentless cyclicality of life: “How long will things be the same? Surely I will be awake, I will sleep, I will be hungry, I will be cold, I will be hot. Is there no end? Do all things go in a circle?” Medieval monks were prone to something called acedia—a “kind of unreasonable confusion of mind,” as the ascetic John Cassian wrote in the fifth century, in which they couldn’t do much of anything but go in and out of their cells, sighing that “none of the brethren” came to see them, and looking up at the sun “as if it was too slow in setting.” As scholars have pointed out, acedia sounds a lot like boredom (depression, too), although a particular judgment was attached to it: acedia was sinful because it rendered a monk “idle and useless for every spiritual work.” Still, these were exceptional harbingers of a feeling that would later be distributed far more democratically. In these earlier incarnations, boredom was “a marginal phenomenon, reserved for monks and the nobility,” Lars Svendsen writes in A Philosophy of Boredom; indeed, it was something of a “status symbol,” since it seemed to plague only “the upper echelons of society.”
This is persuasive, though I suspect that some subjective sense of monotony is a more fundamental affect—like joy or fear or anger. Surely even medieval peasants sometimes stared into the middle distance and sighed over their barley pottage, longing for the next village fête day and a bit of carnivalesque mayhem. In recent years, something like boredom has been studied and documented in understimulated animals, which would seem to argue against its being an entirely social construction. (It certainly seems to be boredom that gets into my workaholic dog when he drags a magazine off the coffee table, always checking first that some human has seen him, and runs around the house with it so we’ll chase him.) The classicist Peter Toohey, in his book Boredom: A Lively History, offers a helpful resolution for the debate between those who say that boredom is a basic feature (or bug) of humanness and those who say that it’s a by-product of modernity. He argues that we need to distinguish between simple boredom—which people (and animals) have probably always experienced on occasion—and “existential boredom,” a sense of emptiness and alienation that extends beyond momentary mental weariness, and that perhaps did not come into many people’s emotional lexicon until the past couple of centuries, when philosophers, novelists, and social critics helped define it.
Historically, the diagnosis of boredom has contained an element of social critique—often of life under capitalism. The Frankfurt School philosopher Theodor Adorno argued that leisure is fundamentally shaped by “the social totality”—and is “shackled” to work, its supposed opposite: “Boredom is a function of life which is lived under the compulsion to work, and under the strict division of labor.” So-called free time—obligatory hobbies and holidays that reconcile us to the capitalist economy’s coldly regimented workday—is really a sign of our unfreedom. David Graeber, in his influential “bullshit jobs” thesis, argues that the vast expansion of administrative jobs—he cites, for example, “whole new industries,” such as financial services and telemarketing—means that “huge swathes of people, in Europe and North America in particular, spend their entire working lives performing tasks they secretly believe do not really need to be performed.” The result can be soul-choking misery. What Adorno called “objective dullness” is at hand, although, Graeber cautions, “where for some, pointlessness exacerbates boredom, for others it exacerbates anxiety.” Punk music evoked boredom as an incitement to quasi-political rebellion—the Clash’s boredom with the USA or Fugazi’s “Waiting Room,” where time like “water down the drain” made a boy lose his patience with the world as it was.
But, while social critics can endow boredom with a certain potent charge, many people downplay or deny their own ordinary experience of it. Maybe it’s the system’s fault, but it feels like ours. Boredom is a distinctly uncharismatic state of being. It “lacks the charm of melancholy—a charm that is connected to melancholy’s traditional link to wisdom, sensitivity and beauty,” Svendsen observes. Ennui would be its chic, black-clad, Continental cousin, but you don’t often hear even the most pretentious aesthetes complain of . Depression has a connection to boredom (“the opposite of depression is not happiness but vitality,” Andrew Solomon has written), but depression is perceived as clinical and chemical, and probably easier to confess to in a lot of social settings than chronic boredom would be. If you are bored, you might well be a bore.
The psychologist Sandi Mann, in her 2016 book, The Science of Boredom, argues that “boredom is the ‘new’ stress”: a condition that people are reluctant to own up to, just as they once were hesitant to admit to stress, but may be doing so more. But I doubt that boredom will ever become the same sort of sure-who-isn’t? complaint that you toss off to an acquaintance in the Starbucks line. To confess that you are stressed implies that you are needed, busy, possibly quite important; to say that you are bored suggests—as it did when you were a child, and adults got exasperated if you kvetched about having nothing to do—that you lack imagination or initiative, or the good fortune of having a job that reflects your “passions.”
“Life, friends, is boring,” John Berryman’s poem “Dream Song 14” goes. “We must not say so. / After all, the sky flashes, the great sea yearns, / we ourselves flash and yearn, / and moreover my mother told me as a boy / (repeatingly) ‘Ever to confess you’re bored / means you have no / Inner Resources.’ ” Though boredom no longer strikes most people as a sin, as acedia was for medieval monks, a dusting of shame still clings to it, especially when it can’t be blamed on a job endured to pay the bills. To be bored more than occasionally seems a small, peevish grievance in the scheme of things, a sort of weak-minded disengagement from a world that demands urgent action to try to set it right (while offering endlessly streaming entertainment to distract us).
The interpretation of boredom is one thing; its measurement is quite another. In the nineteen-eighties, Norman Sundberg and Richard Farmer, two psychology researchers at the University of Oregon, developed a Boredom Proneness Scale, to assess how easily a person gets bored in general. Seven years ago, John Eastwood helped come up with a scale for measuring how bored a person was in the moment. In recent years, boredom researchers have done field surveys in which, for example, they ask people to keep diaries as they go about daily life, recording instances of naturally occurring lethargy. (The result of these new methods was a boon to boredom studies—Mann refers to colleagues she runs into on “the ‘boredom’ circuit.”) But many of the studies involve researchers inducing boredom in a lab setting, usually with college students, in order to study how that clogged, gray lint screen of a feeling affects people.
Creating dull content is a mission they approach with some ingenuity, and the results evoke a kind of rueful, Beckettian comedy. One of James Danckert’s graduate students at the University of Waterloo, for example, directed an exceptionally drab little video that has been used to bore people for research purposes. It depicts two men desultorily hanging laundry on a metal rack in a small, bare room while mumbling banalities. (“Do you want a clothespin?”) Other researchers have had study participants watch an instructional film about fish-farm management or copy down citations from a reference article about concrete. Then the researchers might check how much the stupefied participants want to snack on unhealthy foods (a fair amount, in one such study).
Contemporary boredom researchers, for all their scales and graphs, do engage some of the same existential questions that had occupied philosophers and social critics. One camp contends that boredom stems from a deficit in meaning: we can’t sustain interest in what we’re doing when we don’t fundamentally care about what we’re doing. Another school of thought maintains that it’s a problem of attention: if a task is either too hard for us or too easy, concentration dissipates and the mind stalls. Danckert and Eastwood argue that “boredom occurs when we are caught in a desire conundrum, wanting to do something but not wanting to do anything,” and “when our mental capacities, our skills and talents, lay idle—when we are mentally unoccupied.”
Erin Westgate, a social psychologist at the University of Florida, told me that her work suggests that both factors—a dearth of meaning and a breakdown in attention—play independent and roughly equal roles in boring us. I thought of it this way: An activity might be monotonous—the sixth time you’re reading Knuffle Bunny to your sleep-resistant toddler, the second hour of addressing envelopes for a political campaign you really care about—but, because these things are, in different ways, meaningful to you, they’re not necessarily boring. Or an activity might be engaging but not meaningful—the jigsaw puzzle you’re doing during quarantine time, or the seventh episode of some random Netflix series you’ve been sucked into. If an activity is both meaningful and engaging, you’re golden, and if it’s neither you’ve got a one-way ticket to dullsville.
When contemporary boredom researchers, in the discipline of psychology, write books for a popular audience, they often adopt a brisk, jaunty, informative tone, with a generous dollop of self-help—something quite different, in other words, from the sober phenomenology and anticapitalist critiques that philosophers tended to offer when they considered the nature of boredom. The analysis of boredom that the psychologists put forth isn’t political, and the proposed solutions are mostly individual: Danckert and Eastwood urge us to resist the temptation to “just kick back on the couch with a bag of chips” and instead to find activities that impart a sense of agency and reorient us toward our goals. They can be a little judgy through their own particular cultural lens—watching TV is pretty much always an inferior activity, they suggest, seemingly regardless of what’s being watched. More important, they don’t have much to say about the structural difficulties people might face in establishing more control over their time or agency in their lives. And you don’t have to be Adorno to be attuned to those difficulties. As Patricia Meyer Spacks writes in Boredom: The Literary History of a State of Mind, boredom, which presents itself as “a trivial emotion that can trivialize the world,” speaks to “a state of affairs in which the individual is assigned ever more importance and ever less power.”
Still, if you are looking for some practical ways to recast experiences that are often more tedious than they need to be, there are thoughtful, specific ideas to be found in boredom-studies research. It’s particularly helpful on the phenomenon of boredom in school. In a 2012 survey of American college students, more than ninety per cent said that they used their smartphones or other devices during class, and fifty-five per cent said it was because they were bored. A 2016 paper found that, for most Americans, the activity associated with the highest rates of boredom was studying. (The least: sports or exercise.) Research conducted by Sandi Mann [see abpve] and Andrew Robinson in England concluded that among the most boring educational experiences were computer sessions, while the least were sturdy, old-fashioned group discussions in the context of a lecture. Mann, in The Science of Boredom, makes worthwhile observations about two tactics that help people feel less bored while studying: listening to music and doodling. According to her, doodling (which also works in soporific meetings) “is actually a very clever strategy that our brains conjure up to allow us to get just the right level of extra stimulation we seek—but not too much that we are unable to keep an ear out for what is going on around us.” The boredom trough of school may also be a matter of age: studies that have looked at boredom over the life span have found that, for most people, it peaks in their late teens, then begins to drop, hits a low for those in their fifties, and rises slightly after that (perhaps, depressingly, because people become more socially isolated or more cognitively impaired).
Out of My Skull devotes considerable attention to the question of what boredom makes us do—a live one in the field. It’s become a bien-pensant trend in recent years to praise boredom as a spur to creativity and to prescribe more of it for all of us, but especially for kids—see, for example, Manoush Zomorodi’s 2017 book, Bored and Brilliant: How Spacing Out Can Unlock Your Most Productive and Creative Self. The idea has an intuitive appeal and an illustrious history. Even Walter Benjamin invoked boredom’s imaginative potential: it was “the dream bird that hatches the egg of experience.”
Danckert and Eastwood crush that particular dream bird. They say there isn’t much empirical evidence that boredom unleashes creativity. One study showed that when people were made bored in a laboratory (reading numbers aloud from a telephone book was the chosen means of stultification here) they were more likely to excel at a standard task psychologists use to assess creativity—coming up with as many uses as possible for a pair of plastic cups. Pretty weak tea, in other words. When people wish that we could all be bored more often, or rue that kids are too scheduled and entertained to be, what they may really mean is that they wish we all had more free time, ideally untethered to electronic devices, to allow our minds to romp and ramble or settle into reverie—and that sort of daydreaming isn’t boring at all.
Like some of the other boredom researchers I read, Danckert and Eastwood can’t resist citing a few sensational stories that supposedly illustrate the dire consequences of the feeling—news accounts in which people who’ve committed some heinous crime claim that they did so because they were bored. But those stories don’t cast much light on the general phenomenon. Boredom is a more plausible culprit in certain more common social hazards. Wijnand Van Tilburg and Eric Igou, the leading research psychologists espousing the meaning-deficit theory of boredom, have conducted studies, for example, showing that induced boredom ratchets up people’s sense of group identity and their devaluation of “outgroups,” as well as heightening feelings of political partisanship. But Danckert and Eastwood argue, modestly, that boredom is neither good nor bad, neither pro- nor antisocial. It’s more like a pain signal that alerts you to the need to do something engaging to relieve it. Whether you go on a bender and wreck your car or volunteer at the soup kitchen is up to you.
They strike a similarly mild and commonsensical note when they wade into the discussion of whether boredom might be increasing in this particular stage of late capitalism. Are we more bored since the advent of ubiquitous consumer technology started messing around with our attention spans? Are we less able to tolerate the sensation of being bored now that fewer of us often find ourselves in classically boring situations—the DMV line or a doctor’s waiting room—without a smartphone and all its swipeable amusements? A study published in 2014, and later replicated in similar form, demonstrated how hard people can find it to sit alone in a room and just think, even for fifteen minutes or less. Two-thirds of the men and a quarter of the women opted to shock themselves rather than do nothing at all, even though they’d been allowed to test out how the shock felt earlier, and most said they’d pay money not to experience that particular sensation again. (When the experiment was conducted at home, a third of the participants admitted that they cheated, by, for example, sneaking looks at their cell phone or listening to music.) I wonder if research subjects in an earlier era, before we were so seldom left to our own devices without our devices, would have been quite so quick with the zapper. Erin Westgate, who was one of the authors of the study, developed a deeper interest in how people can be encouraged to enjoy thinking, which sounded to me like a poignant quest, but she said her research showed that it was possible—by, for instance, encouraging people to plan what they would think about when they found themselves alone to do so.
Since, in Danckert and Eastwood’s view, boredom is largely a matter of insufficient attention, anything that makes it more difficult to concentrate, anything that keeps us only shallowly or fragmentarily engaged, would tend to increase it. “Put another way, technology is unrivaled in its capability to capture and hold our attention,” they write, “and it seems plausible that our capacity to willfully control our attention just might wither in response to underuse.” Yet they also say that we don’t have the sort of longitudinal studies that would tell us whether people are more or less bored than they used to be. In a 1969 Gallup poll they cite, a striking fifty per cent of respondents said that their lives were “routine or even pretty dull.” Their lives, not their day at work. Unfortunately, the pollsters didn’t ask the question on later surveys.
In a study that investigated emotional responses to the COVID-19 quarantine in Italy, people cited boredom as the second-most-negative aspect of being required to stay home, just after a lack of freedom and just before a lack of fresh air. In March, an article in the Washington Post explored the upside of the pandemic for researchers in the field of boredom studies. Would boredom be an opportunity for a creative reset, as people are forever hoping it will be, or would ordinary monotony, and its new co-conspirator, quarantine fatigue, lead to risky, self-defeating, or antisocial behavior? Westgate, who has begun an online study of self-reported boredom and people’s responses to it during the shutdown, told me that she thought the covid-19 pandemic did constitute something of a natural experiment. Ordinarily, people cop to being bored for about a half hour a day, so it was hard to catch them in the throes of it, but it might be easier now.
If boredom arises in the absence of meaning, though, the constraints that the pandemic imposes on us may not feel boring, exactly. (Anxiety-inducing, emotionally depleting, fraught with uncertainty, yes.) If you’re leading a more circumscribed existence these days, at least you are likely doing so with the goal of trying to bring the pandemic under control and save lives. And the little kindnesses that we show to the people we’re hunkered down with, and that they show to us, have a certain consequential new hum to them.
Yet there is also something restorative and humane about asserting the right to complain of boredom in a harsh time—an unbridled yearning after the ordinary vividness and variety of life. In a new book called Square Haunting: Five Writers in London Between the Wars, Francesca Wade quotes the historian Eileen Power, in 1939. “Oh! That this blasted war were over,” she wrote. “The boredom of it is incredible. My mind has been blown out like a candle. I am nothing but an embodied grumble, like everyone else.” Sometimes it’s the grumbling that keeps us alive. ###
[Margaret Talbot joined The New Yorker as a staff writer in 2003. Previously, she was a contributing writer at the New York Times Magazine and, from 1995 to 1999, an editor at The New Republic. Her New Yorker stories cover manners and morals, social policy, and popular culture. In 1999, she received a Whiting Writer’s Award. She is the author of The Entertainer: Movies, Magic and My Father’s Twentieth Century (2012), about Lyle Talbot, her father. Talbot received a BA (history) from the University of California at Berkeley and an MA (history) from Harvard University (MA).]
The bio of today's essayist (below) failed to include his three books; see William McRaven's three books here. In today's essay, Admirial (retired) William H. McRaven proclaims that The *ILK (*Impeached But Not Removed) Lyin' King is a present and future threat to the United States of America. If this is (fair & balanced) speaking truth to power, so be it. [x YouTube]
"The Liar Tweets Tonight" (Parody of "The Lion Sleeps Tonight")
By Roy Zimmerman and The ReZisters, featuring Sandy Riccardi
[x WaPo — DC Fishwrap]
Trump Is Actively Working To Undermine The Postal Service — And Every Major US Institution
By William H. McRaven
TagCrowd Cloud provides a visual summary of the blog post below
In the 1997 film “The Postman,” set in post-apocalyptic America, Kevin Costner plays a drifter trying to restore order to the United States by providing one essential service, mail delivery. In the story, hate crimes, racially motivated attacks and a plague have caused the breakdown of society as we know it. In his quest to restore order and dignity to the nation, the Postman tries to recruit other postal workers to help rebuild the US government. But Costner’s character is opposed by the evil General Bethlehem, who is fighting to suppress the postal carriers so he can establish a totalitarian government. Fortunately, our hero, gaining inspiration from the motto, “neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night,” fights on against Bethlehem and saves the country.
Not surprisingly, the movie was panned by critics and was a financial disaster. I mean really, racial strife and a plague so bad that it threatened our society? And even if that happened, who would try to destroy the Postal Service? Where do they come up with these crazy plots?
In retrospect, maybe we should give the movie another look. Today, as we struggle with social upheaval, soaring debt, record unemployment, a runaway pandemic, and rising threats from China and Russia, President Trump is actively working to undermine every major institution in this country. He has planted the seeds of doubt in the minds of many Americans that our institutions aren’t functioning properly. And, if the president doesn’t trust the intelligence community, law enforcement, the press, the military, the Supreme Court, the medical professionals, election officials and the postal workers, then why should we? And if Americans stop believing in the system of institutions, then what is left but chaos and who can bring order out of chaos: only Trump. It is the theme of every autocrat who ever seized power or tried to hold onto it.
Our institutions are the foundation of a functioning democracy. While they are not perfect, they are still the strongest bulwark against overzealous authority figures. The institutions give the people a voice; a voice in the information we receive, a voice in the laws we pass, a voice in the wars we fight, the money we spend and the justice we uphold. And a voice in the people we elect.
As Trump seeks to undermine the US Postal Service and stop mail-in voting, he is taking away our voice to decide who will lead America. It is not hyperbole to say that the future of the country could depend on those remarkable men and women who brave the elements to bring us our mail and deliver our vote. Let us ensure they have every resource possible to provide the citizens of this country the information they need, the ballots that they request and the Postal Service they deserve.
At the end of “The Postman,” our hero’s grown daughter unveils a statue of her father and praises the mail carrier’s courage and perseverance for saving the country. The reviewers at Rotten Tomatoes hated the movie, stating that “'The Postman' would make for a goofy good time if it weren’t so fatally self-serious.” Well, maybe it’s time we all got a little self-serious, before Trump’s actions are fatal to our institutions and our democracy. ###
[Admiral William H. McRaven is a retired US Navy four-star admiral and the former Chancellor of the University of Texas System. During his time in the military, he commanded special operations forces at every level, eventually taking charge of the US Special Operations Command. His career included combat during Desert Storm and both the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. He commanded the troops that captured Saddam Hussein and rescued Captain Richard Phillips. McRaven is also credited with developing the plan and leading the Osama bin Laden mission in 2011. As the Chancellor of the UT System, he led one of the nation’s largest and most respected systems of higher education. As the chief executive officer of the UT System, McRaven oversaw 14 institutions that educated 220,000 students, and employed 20,000 faculty and more than 80,000 health care professionals, researchers, and staff. McRaven received a BA (journalism) from the University of Texas at Austin and was a member of the Naval Officers Training Corps (NROTC). He enlisted in the Navy and rose from Ensign to Admiral by end of his military service. He received a BA (journalism) from the University of Texas at Austin as well as an MS (special operations) from the Naval Postgraduate School (CA).]
On January 22, 2017, Kellyanne Conway, Counselor to the (newly elected) President, described his opening barrage of lies and exaggerations from the Oval Office as "alternative facts" on NBC's "Meet The Press." The deflection against charges of lying in 2017 has morphed into the alternate reality of the party of The *ILK (*Impeached But Not Removed) Lyin'King. And the NY Fishwap's Eags (Timothy Egan) confronts the sham RNC as a "confederacy of con men" piling lie onto untruth onto falsehood in a feverish attempt to draw their minions into an alternative reality. If this is (fair & balanced) muckraking (investigative journalism), so be it. [x YouTube]
"The Liar Tweets Tonight" (Parody of "The Lion Sleeps Tonight")
By Roy Zimmerman and The ReZisters, featuring Sandy Riccardi
[x NY Fishwrap]
Trump Can’t Avoid Reality Forever
By Eags (Timothy Egan)
TagCrowd Cloud provides a visual summary of the blog post below
The alt-reality show on the screen this week, a Republican National Convention without platform or ideas, mixed Dear Leader adoration with primal fear jabs aimed at the weary American voter. And it may work.
But the reality outside the screen was a perfect fusion of elements central to the master con of Trumpism. The trick of tying the president to something more than the blimp of his ego — to religion, family, guns, a border wall, support for the forgotten man and woman, law and order — was exposed as an elaborate fraud in elaborate detail.
Even the riots in the cities, framed by the choreographers of fear as a preview of Joe Biden’s America, could not be time-traveled beyond the irrefutable: The violent dystopia is happening in Donald Trump’s America. The guns of August 2020 are his.
Credit Trump’s television hagiographers, veterans of vanity art from years of crafting the fiction of “The Apprentice,” with trying to make a stump of rotted timber into a golden throne. But they could not whittle away the real events of the summer.
The words of Trump’s own sister, the former federal judge Maryanne Trump Barry, hung over the opening day of the convention. “He has no principles,” she said in a leaked recording from midway through his presidency. “None! None!”
Many a past president has been burdened with siblings who drank too much, talked too much, or grifted too much. But I cannot think of one who was a central witness against the president’s character.
Add Judge Barry’s words to those of Michael Cohen, Trump’s former fixer and one of numerous felons from the law-and-order president’s inner circle. “I was complicit in helping conceal the real Donald Trump,” he says in a new ad. “And I’m here to tell you he cannot be trusted, and you shouldn’t believe a word he utters.”
On convention’s eve, Trump had tried to divert attention from the historic tragedy of his presidency, the death of nearly 180,000 Americans from Covid-19, by promoting a miracle therapeutic. But by day one of the party infomercial, the food and drug commissioner, Stephen Hahn, had been forced to apologize for vastly overstating, in a disgraceful news conference with Trump, the curative effect of blood plasma treatment.
Day 3 of the convention marked the six-month anniversary of Trump’s assertion that the coronavirus might soon disappear. As of that day, August 26, more than 5.8 million Americans had contracted the deadly disease.
In the spiritual realm, the downfall of the president’s most forceful evangelical promoter fit the pattern of the big scam. Jerry Falwell Jr., was ousted from Liberty University after reports that he liked to watch his wife having sex with a former Miami pool boy. This after Falwell had posted a photo on social media of himself with his pants unzipped, standing next to a young woman on a yacht.
Hypocrisy among holy rollers in high places is as old as the stones of Rome’s first church. But in this case, the tie to Trump’s world is telling: Becki Falwell, wife of the disgraced evangelical, was on the advisory board of Women for Trump. She appeared in a campaign video last year promoting — What else? — traditional family values.
Let’s look away from that tawdry spectacle to a pair of bigger grifts, the border wall and the gun lobby. Was anyone surprised when Steve Bannon was charged with defrauding the poor saps who gave millions to his We Build the Wall campaign?
Mexico did not pay for Bannon’s bail. But his arrest is a reminder of the foundational fraud of Trump’s 2016 campaign: that Mexico would pay for a border wall.
Over at the gun lobby, another insider is telling all in a forthcoming book. The National Rifle Association was “rife with fraud and corruption,” writes Joshua L. Powell, who was the chief of staff to the NRA’s leader, Wayne LaPierre. “We only knew one speed and one direction: sell the fear.”
Ah yes, sell the fear: the message of this convention. And using the powerful prop of the federal government, in a Hatch Act crime spree, didn’t bother anyone at the top of this den of defalcators. “Nobody outside the Beltway really cares,” said Mark Meadows, the president’s chief of staff.
He may be right. Even Trump’s biggest propagandist, Sean Hannity, is in on the con. He thinks the president is “crazy,” with a qualifying expletive, according to a new book by Brian Stelter of CNN.
Surely many of Trump’s supporters know they’re getting played. And they don’t mind, so long as they can “own the libs.” The libs, certainly, give them much to want to own. But this is a deadly game Republicans are playing.
On one night, the convention trotted out a pair of gun-toting white suburbanites to scare people into taking up arms against protesters. One night later, a white teenager with a semiautomatic rifle was arrested on a charge of gunning down several protesters.
At the same time, California is burning and the South is underwater. If you play the sucker, you won’t notice that this confederacy of con men has been unable to gaslight the seasonal rage of climate change. Nor would you care. ###
[Timothy Egan is a contributing opinion writer who covers the environment, the American West, and politics at the NY Fishwrap. Egan — winner of both a Pulitzer Prize in 2001 as a member of a team of reporters who wrote the series "How Race Is Lived in America" and a National Book Award (The Worst Hard Time in 2006) — graduated from the University of Washington with a BA ( journalism), and was awarded a doctorate of humane letters (honoris causa) by Whitman College (WA) in 2000 for his environmental writings. Egan's most recent book is A Pilgrimage to Eternity (2019). See all other books by Eags here.]
The NY Fishwrap's Krait (Gail Collins) made her bones as a presidential historian with William Henry Harrison: The American Presidents Series: The 9th President, 1841 (2012). The overseer of this series of presidential biographies was the late Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., a doyen in the US history profession, whose choice of The Krait to contribute to this series of books was a signal achievement for a non-academic historian. That said, fear not that today's essay is boring because The Krait dispenses snark throughout with gleeful abandon. If this is a (fair & balanced) illustration of the function of humor in presidential (and vice presidential) history writing, so be it.
PS: The source of this blog's noms de stylo serpent reference to the three women on the NY Fishwrap's Op-Ed staff began with this 2001 essay by The Cobra (Maureen Dowd) who's been joined by her distaff colleagues: The Krait (Gail Collins), and — most recently — The Viper (Michelle Goldberg). [x YouTube]
"The Liar Tweets Tonight" (Parody of "The Lion Sleeps Tonight")
By Roy Zimmerman and The ReZisters, featuring Sandy Riccardi
[x NY Fishwrap]
Don’t Be Dense, Beware Mike Pence
By The Krait (Gail Collins)
TagCrowd Cloud provides a visual summary of the blog post below
It’s possible you failed to notice, but the Republican convention has a theme for each night. The list sounds a little like a Lord-of-the-Rings theme park: Land of Promise, Land of Opportunity, Land of Heroes and Land of Greatness.
You know Donald Trump’s big day is going to be Land of Greatness, right? Well, obviously. But do you think even the president felt a little wave of irony when he gave Mike Pence responsibility for Land of Heroes?
Lots of ways you could celebrate Pence’s renomination. Male fans might consider announcing that they’ll be following his lead and will go to events where alcohol is served only when they’re accompanied by their wives. The presidential campaign themes are “Keep America Great” and “Promises Made, Promises Kept.” A “Little Woman, Big Chaperone” T-shirt for the vice president’s female followers might be next.
The vice presidency has had its ups and downs. We started out very well indeed with John Adams and Thomas Jefferson. Then, whoops, Aaron Burr. You may remember him as the guy who shot Alexander Hamilton. The only thing we can say about comparing Aaron Burr and Mike Pence is that our current vice president is very unlikely to ever be featured as a lead character in a Broadway musical.
One of my favorite veeps is Richard Johnson, a 19th-century adventurer who was Martin Van Buren’s Number Two. Johnson was apparently picked solely because Van Buren was running against William Henry Harrison, who was famous for defeating the feared chief Tecumseh at the battle of Tippecanoe. When Harrison’s fans yelled “Tippecanoe and Tyler Too!” the Democrats were supposed to retort: “Rumpsey Dumpsey, Rumpsey Dumpsey. Colonel Johnson killed Tecumsey.”
Neither of those slogans was really true, but everyone apparently loved yelling them. They were, you must admit, more fun to shout than “Promises Made, Promises Kept.”
People have generally paid attention to the vice-presidential nomination only when they’re waiting to see who’ll get it. But now that Kamala Harris is such a sensation, maybe the office will have more glamour.
I’ve been into veep-watching for a long time — when I can’t sleep I try counting them all, like sheep. If it’s real insomnia I try to add one little factoid. Like: William King, the only bachelor vice president, was very best friends with James Buchanan, the only bachelor president.
Yeah, people talked. But not for long since King died 25 days into his term.
Pence is very, very conservative on social issues — or at least as conservative as it’s possible to be when your running mate is a well-known former womanizer who conducted his adulterous affair with one future wife on the front pages of the New York tabloids.
In his current job Pence is pretty much tied up with the White House crises of the day, but it’s important to remember he’s very possibly a Republican presidential nominee for 2024. If we have an election in 2024. One of the reasons he’s worth watching is trying to imagine what he’d do if the boss decided to ignore the election results this November.
Back in days of yore nobody cared much about the vice presidency. John Nance Garner said it was “not worth a bucket of warm spit.” [Sic, Garner used a term for another warm bodily fluid (a word that begins with "p" and rhymes with "hiss")] Garner, who served for eight years under Franklin Roosevelt, apparently figured that FDR would retire after two terms and hand over the nomination to his second-in-command. Imagine his surprise when FDR went for number three.
Now there’s a history lesson Pence should keep in mind.
Thomas Marshall, who was Woodrow Wilson’s veep, used to tell the story of two brothers: “One ran away to sea; the other was elected vice president. And nothing was ever heard of either of them again.” You could appreciate his attitude since he was frozen out of everything in the Wilson administration, even after the president himself was paralyzed from a stroke.
But these are stories from the old days, when a vice president counted himself reasonably lucky if he was given a project — an agency or an issue — that gave him an excuse for coming into work in the morning. The job turned into something very different in modern times. Joel Goldstein, a professor at Saint Louis University who has written a book about the vice presidency, notes that Richard Nixon almost never performed the traditional job of presiding over the Senate, preferring to travel and do political work for his boss, Dwight Eisenhower. Which was sort of ironic given that, when Nixon was running to succeed him, Eisenhower was asked about any major ideas his vice president had contributed to the administration. And Ike replied, “If you give me a week, I might think of one.”
The real change began with Walter Mondale, Jimmy Carter’s second-in-command. “Mondale became an across-the-board troubleshooter,” Goldstein said in a phone interview.
Having a relatively powerful, activist vice president worked very well when the guy in question was Mondale. But pitfalls abounded. You may remember that the Republican Dan Quayle made headlines when he corrected a schoolchild for spelling “potato” without an e at the end. “There you go,” he advised the kid after adding the extra vowel. There was some applause from the adults in the room, which just goes to show you that politicians should not always trust the instincts of the base.
Quayle was, by the way, from Indiana. As was Thomas Marshall and — yes! Our man Mike Pence. ###
[Gail Collins joined the New York Times in 1995 as a member of the editorial board and later as an op-ed columnist. In 2001 she became the first woman ever appointed editor of the Times editorial page.Her most recent book isNo Stopping Us Now: The Adventures of Older Women in American History (2019), See other books by Gail Collins here. She received a BA (journalism) from Marquette University (WI) and an MA (government) from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.]
The political philosopher, Richard M. Weaver, wrote Ideas Have Consequences (1948) at the beginning of the Cold War era. In the 21st century, we are witness to "Words Have Consequences." CNN's Brian Stelter provides a valuable lesson in the importance of words in this essay. If this is the (fair & balanced) pursuit of truth in our public discourse, so be it. [x YouTube]
"The Liar Tweets Tonight" (Parody of "The Lion Sleeps Tonight")
By Roy Zimmerman and The ReZisters, featuring Sandy Riccardi
[x NY Fishwrap]
Trump’s Favorite Four-Letter Word
By Brian Stelter
TagCrowd Cloud provides a visual summary of the blog post below
The Trump era is the hoax era. But not in the way he or his cheerleaders claim.
Donald Trump has shouted “hoax” hundreds of times, about everything from climate change to Supreme Court rulings to impeachment. At this point, his copious claims about hoaxes add up to a hoax. And through the history of his use of this single word, we can see how he has fooled his biggest fans but failed to persuade almost everyone else.
During his 2016 campaign, Mr. Trump didn’t rely on the word “hoax.” He didn’t even say “fake news.” He called the news media “sick” and biased, but he didn’t seriously start to deny its legitimacy until January 2017, when he was confronted by evidence that the Russian government aided his election. That’s when he truly needed the news to be fake.
Looking back, Mr. Trump’s exploitation of the term “fake news” to smear journalists was the single most consequential thing he did during the transition period. He built the scaffolding for his supporters to reject any and all information that wasn’t Trump-approved.
After a few months, when “fake news” lost its power through sheer repetition, Mr. Trump introduced something far more sinister: a hoax. Something can be “fake news” by accident — a typo in a quote, a mistake made on deadline — but a hoax is malicious.
Well before becoming president, Mr. Trump had used the word a few times — to dismiss global warming, for instance. It’s “a total, and very expensive, hoax!” he tweeted in 2013. But his “hoax” hoax began in earnest in April 2017, when he told The Times that “the Russia story” — that it intervened in the 2016 election — “is a total hoax.”
His new talking point was set. He told Fox News, Breitbart and The Daily Caller that every charge about Russia could be a hoax.
In the first year of his presidency, Mr. Trump cried “Hoax!” 18 times; in 2018, 63 times; and in 2019, a whopping 345 times, as measured by Factba.se, a database of the president’s tweets, speeches and interviews. The term became part of a feedback loop between the president and his preferred TV producers at Fox News, where his statements are largely treated as truth.
“Hoax is a potent word, in being an angry and mean one,” the linguist John McWhorter told me. It “carries an air of accusation, of transgression.” Mr. McWhorter called it “the quintessence of Trumpian self-expression.”
If you want to understand why a minority of American voters are unplugged from the fact-based news that the rest of the country depends on, just imagine being told multiple times a day that real news is a hoax.
Mr. Trump claimed that Christine Blasey Ford’s accusations that Brett Kavanaugh sexually assaulted her were part of “a hoax set up by the Democrats.” Recently, after the news broke that Russia paid bounties to militants for killing American service members, Mr. Trump tweeted, it’s “just another “HOAX!”
But mostly, “hoax” is used to try to wash away the Russia stain. It became a building block in his permanent campaign of disbelief, just in time for his impeachment in 2019.
Last week [8/18/2020], after the Senate Intelligence Committee released its report, with yet more evidence that Russia had disrupted the 2016 election and that some of Mr. Trump’s advisers were eager for the help, his campaign called it “the Russia Collusion Hoax.”
The word hoax used to be most closely associated with moon-landing conspiracy theories. But in the past decade, many Google searches for the word have been in relation to recent events, like the Sandy Hook school shooting — because of propagandists who falsely say that the massacre of children was fabricated in order to confiscate guns.
And this year, all the top “hoax” searches have been about the coronavirus. Mr. Trump and Sean Hannity each invoked the word once in relation to the virus, and have been on the defensive about it ever since. They both accused the Democrats of politicizing the crisis, calling that a “hoax” — framing the debate as a political, not medical, issue. Democratic leaders were, at the time, in late February and early March, calling on the administration to take the pandemic more seriously.
We will never know how many people fell for the “hoax” rhetoric. But we do know this: When you’re told every day not to peer outside your own bunker, when you’re told that evil forces are trying to make you the victim of a “hoax,” your world begins to shrink.
You don’t know whom to trust or what to believe. In San Antonio last month, the chief medical officer of Methodist Hospital, Dr. Jane Appleby, told the story of a 30-year-old patient, dying of COVID-19, who looked at his nurse and said: “I think I made a mistake. I thought this was a hoax, but it’s not.” ###
[Brian Stelter is the anchor of CNN’s “Reliable Sources.” Prior to joining CNN in November 2013, Stelter was a media reporter at The New York Times. Starting in 2007, he covered television and digital media for the Business Day and Arts section of the newspaper. Stelter was also a lead contributor to the Media Decoder blog. He is the author of both Hoax: Donald Trump, Fox News, and the Dangerous Distortion of Truth (2020) and Top of the Morning: Inside the Cutthroat World of Morning TV (2013). Stelter received a BA (mass communication) from Towson University (MD).]
