Trump's Plan for Gaza
I happened idly to be watching the press conference live when Trump first spoke of turning Gaza into a theme park, Gazaland. (There is a genre of "history watched live": many people (not including me) saw Jack Ruby kill Lee Harvey Oswald on live TV; I watched the World Trade towers fall.) This moment had huge subtext: the easiest, most obvious insight is that a sociopath was envisioning ethnic cleansing; that his sophistical vision of a "beautiful" home for them in Egypt and Jordan, put through the English-to-English translator, might simply mean corpses in piles. But, on a somewhat comic level, it was also Trump thinking like Trump: a real estate developer at heart, he is probably incapable of looking at any space without imagining the cheap, flashy thing he would build there. This brings a flash of insight, that billionaires are so often driven to kitschify the world, while authoritarians like to combine kitsch with murder. Something we will soon know about the time to come: Will this plan fade away like most of Trump's impulsive blitherings? Hitler would already have had troops on the way.
A Meditation on Joy Reid
Joy Reid was unexpectedly, stunningly fired by MSNBC this week, along with every other person of color in the prime time line-up. I was about to say I didn't exactly like Joy Reid, but that's not really true: I wasn't at ease with her. Her intelligence, strength and anger made her the kind of person you would always be afraid of fucking up with: people before whom you need to parse every word, review every sentence you are about to say to try to assure it contains no unconscious racism or other stupidity. I remember as a teenager referring in a conversation with an African American man, a sort of street preacher, to a "bunch" of other Black people nearby, and being schooled that bananas come in a bunch, but that the Black people were a "group". It is only about the last fifteen years (I am seventy) that I have been able to talk to Black people, at ease, for hours at a time, without feeling this anxiety. I still feel a form of it, however, speaking to trans people, whom I have only started to meet, and befriend, much more recently.
In student conduct proceedings at a private university last year, I slowly became aware of a phenomenon: the relatively liberal, sympathetic and flexible white disciplinary bureaucrat across the table was being nicer to white girls than to any woman of color. I am certain he would have been shocked and humiliated had I called this to his attention. But I also saw that most of the white women students, fierce activists and leaders of protests, were able to deploy a sort of charming white girl deference during their forty minutes with him. Arab American students wearing jihabs did not, and he spoke to them with more anger and agitation-- and distrust.
Joy Reid lacks even a drop of that learned deference. Even Rachel Maddow, who is very similar in many respects, knows how to do it a little; but (in another form of unconscious racism), I believe that much of the older white audience conceives Maddow as a sort of model daughter and granddaughter-- but not Reid.
The epiphany that I actually do like Reid, though she makes me nervous, come from the fact that, if I turn on the TV and she is on, I have an immediate reaction of sympathy and interest, more so than most other MSNBC hosts, even Maddow: what will Joy Reid say next? Whatever it is, I will either agree with it; or, if it is unexpected, experience a Click; consider it; agree two thirds of the time; respectfully disagree the balance. Some of my (bragging alert) most proud moments have been when people say to me, "Only you...." Joy Reid had that quality, more than any MSNBC host: Only Joy Reid would say that, think of that, and have the courage. And I kept watching.
The world is burning. Reid was a firefighter. We need her. Why are the victims of the blaze firing the firefighters?
Roy Cohn
Cohn died in 1986 at age 59. He was McCarthy's notorious right hand, and later was Trump's lawyer; he taught Trump the McCarthy playbook, and Trump, angry at Jeff Sessions in the first term, exclaimed "Where's my Roy Cohn?" I see, once again, the dead hand of the past reaching to strangle the present; this is a lesson in history. To grown-ups whom I talk to every day, born in or after 2000, the 1950's seem impossibly far away, and therefore not connected in any way to the present; in that world-view, Roy Cohn could have no more lasting effect on us than Marie Antoinette. But, in an alternate world-view I have painfully learned, even a century is a mere blink of an eye. When I was a child in the 1960's, there were still living people born under slavery; my own grandparents had been born in the nineteenth century. Of course, all you need to do to reach this perspective is to stand human history next to geological time, or the life-cycle of the sun (half done, I believe). Sub specie aeternitatis, (patting self on back for using that phrase) the vengeful battle of the red states against the blue is a late battle in the Civil War. "History", says Stephen Dedalus in Ulysses, "is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake".
Dan Bongino
The Times just reported: "On his show last month, [Dan] Bongino gloated over the angst Trump’s nominees were causing career civil servants, cheering on the president’s 'total personnel warfare.' Then he took out two plastic toy robots, an orange one to represent Trump and a blue one he called 'liberal screaming Karen.' He used the Trump robot to beat the lady one, smashing it over and over. 'Yes!' he exclaimed. 'This is how we fix this place.'” Now Trump has appointed this crazy ex-Secret Service agent deputy director at the FBI.
As with Gaza-land, I am waiting for the reveal: Talk, or action? For my adult life, the extreme right has done more posturing and chattering than anything else. Trump's first term, contrary to fears, turned out to be mostly chatter. But this feels different, and a lot like the German 1930's. Yesterday, I added these words to my 15,000 page (no shit) Mad Manuscript on the idea of free speech: "Ernst Rohm, the soon-to-be-murdered chief of the SA, 'was continually criticicizing the regime [for] its repression of freedom of opinion. He denounced Goebbels, Goring, Himmler, and Hess in the bitterest terms'. Joachim Fest, Hitler (San Diego: Harcourt, Brace Jovanovich 1974), tr. By Richard and Clara Winston p. 451 It seems sociopathic on my part to find this funny, but seriously? The SA had recently murdered 'the editor of a Social Democratic newspaper' and a 'Social democratic lawyer'”. pp. 400-401