v a l l e j o n o c t u r n o

You often monopolize conversations

 

From TruthDig Bill Blum writes:

This column is about Trump. There will be future ones on Clinton. And here’s my take, with no punches pulled: If Trump is elected our 45th president, he could well be the most profoundly disturbed occupant of the Oval Office since Richard Nixon, our 37th, whose extreme paranoia brought us Watergate and precipitated the most far-reaching constitutional crisis of the late 20th century. 

Some readers, particularly on the progressive left who by orientation are predisposed to policy critiques, may not be comfortable with my approach. Some may even ask if it isn’t a waste of time to examine the psyche of a president or a presidential hopeful, noting that even a paranoid Nixon agreed to end the Vietnam War and opened the door to normalized relations with China. So why not just stick to policy?

To such doubters, I would say that few people, including world leaders, rarely represent pure evil or insanity. Most are capable of the occasional act of goodness or kindness or wisdom, even if by accident. But to gain a more complete understanding of any person—especially someone on the national stage, who once in office will be subject to the external pressures of social and political movements and public opinion and be responsible for the well-being of millions—a more nuanced and dialectical methodology is required that takes account of both the objective and subjective realms of human interaction. 

So comfort be damned. As we head for the general election in November, when it comes to the former reality-TV show host, I’m not going to be content to focus simply on what the Republican standard-bearer has to say about Mexican rapists, building a wall, Fox News’ Megyn Kelly “bleeding from her whatever,” New Jersey Muslims cheering the fall of the World Trade Towers, being the “only one” who can save America from chaos, crime and radical Islamic terrorism, or any of the other abject falsehoods, outbursts and calumnies he’s uttered or tweeted.

I’ve decided to probe the why behind such seeming lunacy. To do that, I’ve done something positively un-Trumpian: I’ve consulted the experts and dug deeply into the public record.

Here’s what I’ve found thus far:

The Diagnosis

A consensus has emerged that Trump suffers from narcissistic personality disorder (NPD). Unless you’ve tuned out of politics completely in this election year, you’ve no doubt heard the word “narcissist” bandied about in connection with Trump, along with labels like “bombastic,” “hyperbolic” and “politically incorrect,” and criticisms that he lacks the temperament and judgment to be president.

But NPD is more than a label, or a momentary mood or affect. It’s a sickness.

The Mayo Clinic, in a website entry posted before Trump’s current presidential bid was a twinkle in anyone’s eye or a nightmare in anyone’s mind, defines it thusly:

Narcissistic personality disorder is one of several types of personality disorders. Personality disorders are conditions in which people have traits that cause them to feel and behave in socially distressing ways, limiting their ability to function in relationships and other areas of their life, such as work or school.

If you have narcissistic personality disorder, you may come across as conceited, boastful or pretentious. You often monopolize conversations. You may belittle or look down on people you perceive as inferior. You may feel a sense of entitlement—and when you don’t receive special treatment, you may become impatient or angry. You may insist on having ‘the best’ of everything—for instance, the best car, athletic club or medical care.

At the same time, you have trouble handling anything that may be perceived as criticism. You may have secret feelings of insecurity, shame, vulnerability and humiliation. To feel better, you may react with rage or contempt and try to belittle the other person to make yourself appear superior. Or you may feel depressed and moody because you fall short of perfection.

Many experts use the criteria in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5), published by the American Psychiatric Association, to diagnose mental conditions. This manual is also used by insurance companies to reimburse for treatment.

DSM-5 criteria for narcissistic personality disorder include these features:
● Having an exaggerated sense of self-importance.
● Expecting to be recognized as superior even without achievements that warrant it.
● Exaggerating your achievements and talents.
● Being preoccupied with fantasies about success, power, brilliance, beauty or the perfect mate.
● Believing that you are superior and can only be understood by or associate with equally special people.
● Requiring constant admiration.
● Having a sense of entitlement.
● Expecting special favors and unquestioning compliance with your expectations.
● Taking advantage of others to get what you want.
● Having an inability or unwillingness to recognize the needs and feelings of others.
● Being envious of others and believing others envy you.
● Behaving in an arrogant or haughty manner.

Although some features of narcissistic personality disorder may seem like having confidence, it’s not the same. Narcissistic personality disorder crosses the border of healthy confidence into thinking so highly of yourself that you put yourself on a pedestal and value yourself more than you value others.

In a Vanity Fair article published in November, a group of six mental health professionals weighed in on the subject of Trump’s narcissism and gave the diagnosis an unequivocal thumbs-up. One interviewee, a clinical psychologist who lectures on manipulative behavior, went so far as to say of Trump: “He’s so classic that I’m archiving video clips of him to use in workshops because there’s no better example. … Otherwise, I would have had to hire actors and write vignettes. He’s like a dream come true.”

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Get There Faster-A Mental Retreat

 

From The California Magazine, Chris Colin writes:

In March 2014, the CEO of AirHelp, Henrik Zillmer, appeared on Fox to explain his company to the channel’s business anchors. Are you an airline passenger whose flight was delayed or canceled? For a cut, AirHelp’s app will assist in securing the hundreds of dollars you might be entitled to. On-screen, in his open collar and suit jacket, Zillmer exuded the low-key poise of someone on his tenth startup, which he was. The anchors peppered the Danish-born executive with questions, and he coolly fielded them before a backdrop of downtown San Francisco.

In the two years after that Fox interview, the company Zillmer launched with three people grew to more than 200, with backing from Y Combinator, Khosla Ventures, Ev Williams, and other high-profile investors. So it was unusual this past spring when, on three occasions in the Peruvian Andes, Zillmer ceased to exist.

Michael Costuros killed him. Or rather, Zillmer paid Costuros to kill him, or at least to facilitate the temporary annihilation of his self by seeing what the hell one of the world’s most powerful natural hallucinogens would do to his consciousness, his spirit, and, above all, his business prospects.

For the past five years, Costuros, a 44-year-old Marin County executive coach, has led an annual trip to South America for entrepreneurs keen on “leveraging the healing power of ayahuasca.” Where ayahuasca retreats typically identify as places for deep healing and spiritual growth, Entrepreneurs Awakening also promises benefits such as “a new level of innovative thinking” and “increased tactical clarity.” Indeed, it’d be hard to conjure an exercise more disruptive than sacramental mind expansion; a recent Onion article proposing remarkably similar retreats for tech CEOs only affirmed that the whole thing makes sense on some level.

Cut to this past spring, when Zillmer, a former lieutenant in the Danish army, was gearing up for ten days in the Sacred Valley of the Incas. He’d be joining nine fellow entrepreneurs there, each having paid a little less than $10,000. Chris Hunter, co-founder of the company behind the alcoholic energy drink Four Loko, signed on in hopes that it would help him navigate some sticky professional relationships. Jesse Krieger, publisher of Lifestyle Entre­preneurs Press, wished for insight into growth strategies. Other participants included the founder of a financial technology company, the scion of a footwear empire, and a firearms executive looking for a pivot. Under the guidance of Costuros and a local shaman, they would participate in a San Pedro ceremony — San Pedro is another powerful plant-based psychedelic — followed by two separate ayahuasca ceremonies.

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An Anticapitalist Movement

From Jacobin, interview with David Harvey:

Neoliberalism is a widely used term today. However, it is often unclear what people refer to when they use it. In its most systematic usage it might refer to a theory, a set of ideas, a political strategy, or a historical period. Could you begin by explaining how you understand neoliberalism?

I’ve always treated neoliberalism as a political project carried out by the corporate capitalist class as they felt intensely threatened both politically and economically towards the end of the 1960s into the 1970s. They desperately wanted to launch a political project that would curb the power of labor.

In many respects the project was a counterrevolutionary project. It would nip in the bud what, at that time, were revolutionary movements in much of the developing world — Mozambique, Angola, China etc. — but also a rising tide of communist influences in countries like Italy and France and, to a lesser degree, the threat of a revival of that in Spain.

Even in the United States, trade unions had produced a Democratic Congress that was quite radical in its intent. In the early 1970s they, along with other social movements, forced a slew of reforms and reformist initiatives which were anti-corporate: the Environmental Protection Agency, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, consumer protections, and a whole set of things around empowering labor even more than it had been empowered before.

So in that situation there was, in effect, a global threat to the power of the corporate capitalist class and therefore the question was, “What to do?”. The ruling class wasn’t omniscient but they recognized that there were a number of fronts on which they had to struggle: the ideological front, the political front, and above all they had to struggle to curb the power of labor by whatever means possible. Out of this there emerged a political project which I would call neoliberalism.

Can you talk a bit about the ideological and political fronts and the attacks on labor?

The ideological front amounted to following the advice of a guy named Lewis Powell. He wrote a memo saying that things had gone too far, that capital needed a collective project. The memo helped mobilize the Chamber of Commerce and the Business Roundtable.

Ideas were also important to the ideological front. The judgement at that time was that universities were impossible to organize because the student movement was too strong and the faculty too liberal-minded, so they set up all of these think tanks like the Manhattan Institute, the Heritage Foundation, the Ohlin Foundation. These think tanks brought in the ideas of Freidrich Hayek and Milton Friedman and supply-side economics.

The idea was to have these think tanks do serious research and some of them did — for instance, the National Bureau of Economic Research was a privately funded institution that did extremely good and thorough research. This research would then be published independently and it would influence the press and bit by bit it would surround and infiltrate the universities.

This process took a long time. I think now we’ve reached a point where you don’t need something like the Heritage Foundation anymore. Universities have pretty much been taken over by the neoliberal projects surrounding them.

With respect to labor, the challenge was to make domestic labor competitive with global labor. One way was to open up immigration. In the 1960s, for example, Germans were importing Turkish labor, the French Maghrebian labor, the British colonial labor. But this created a great deal of dissatisfaction and unrest.

Instead they chose the other way — to take capital to where the low-wage labor forces were. But for globalization to work you had to reduce tariffs and empower finance capital, because finance capital is the most mobile form of capital. So finance capital and things like floating currencies became critical to curbing labor.

At the same time, ideological projects to privatize and deregulate created unemployment. So, unemployment at home and offshoring taking the jobs abroad, and a third component: technological change, deindustrialization through automation and robotization. That was the strategy to squash labor.

It was an ideological assault but also an economic assault. To me this is what neoliberalism was about: it was that political project, and I think the bourgeoisie or the corporate capitalist class put it into motion bit by bit.

I don’t think they started out by reading Hayek or anything, I think they just intuitively said, “We gotta crush labor, how do we do it?” And they found that there was a legitimizing theory out there, which would support that.

Since the publication of A Brief History of Neoliberalism in 2005 a lot of ink has been spilled on the concept. There seem to be two main camps: scholars who are most interested in the intellectual history of neoliberalism and people whose concern lies with “actually existing neoliberalism.” Where do you fit?

There’s a tendency in the social sciences, which I tend to resist, to seek a single-bullet theory of something. So there’s a wing of people who say that, well, neoliberalism is an ideology and so they write an idealist history of it.

A version of this is Foucault’s governmentality argument that sees neoliberalizing tendencies already present in the eighteenth century. But if you just treat neoliberalism as an idea or a set of limited practices of governmentality, you will find plenty of precursors.

What’s missing here is the way in which the capitalist class orchestrated its efforts during the 1970s and early 1980s. I think it would be fair to say that at that time — in the English-speaking world anyway — the corporate capitalist class became pretty unified.

They agreed on a lot of things, like the need for a political force to really represent them. So you get the capture of the Republican Party, and an attempt to undermine, to some degree, the Democratic Party.

From the 1970s the Supreme Court made a bunch of decisions that allowed the corporate capitalist class to buy elections more easily than it could in the past.

For example, you see reforms of campaign finance that treated contributions to campaigns as a form of free speech. There’s a long tradition in the United States of corporate capitalists buying elections but now it was legalized rather than being under the table as corruption.

Overall I think this period was defined by a broad movement across many fronts, ideological and political. And the only way you can explain that broad movement is by recognizing the relatively high degree of solidarity in the corporate capitalist class. Capital reorganized its power in a desperate attempt to recover its economic wealth and its influence, which had been seriously eroded from the end of the 1960s into the 1970s.

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Putin's Puppet

From Slate, Franklin Foer writes about Trump's Russian connections:

One of the important facts about Trump is his lack of creditworthiness. After his 2004 bankruptcy and his long streak of lawsuits, the big banks decided he wasn’t worth the effort. They’d rather not touch the self-proclaimed “king of debt.” This sent him chasing less conventional sources of cash. BuzzFeed has shown, for instance, his efforts to woo Muammar Qaddafi as an investor. Libyan money never did materialize. It was Russian capital that fueled many of his signature projects—that helped him preserve his image as a great builder as he recovered from bankruptcy.

The money didn’t come directly. Hunting for partners with cash, he turned to a small upstart called the Bayrock Group, which would pull together massive real estate deals using the Trump name. Its chairman was a former Soviet official named Tevfik Arif, who made a small fortune running luxe hotels in Turkey. To run Bayrock’s operation, Arif hired Felix Satter, a Soviet-born, Brighton Beach–bred college dropout. Satter changed his name to Sater, likely to distance himself from the criminal activity that a name-check would easily turn up. As a young man, Sater served time for slashing a man’s face with a broken margarita glass in a barroom brawl. The Feds also busted him for a working in a stock brokerage tied to four different Mafia families, which made $40 million off fraudulent trades. One lawsuit would later describe “Satter’s proven history of using mob-like tactics to achieve his goals.” Another would note that he threatened a Trump investor with the prospect of the electrocution of his testicles, the amputation of his leg, and his corpse residing in the trunk of Sater’s car.

What was Trump thinking entering into business with partners like these? It’s a question he has tried to banish by downplaying his ties to Bayrock and minimizing Sater’s sins. (“He got into trouble because he got into a barroom fight which a lot of people do,” Trump once said in a deposition.) But he didn’t just partner with Bayrock; the company embedded with him. Sater worked in Trump Tower; his business card described him as a “Senior Advisor to Donald Trump.” Bayrock put together deals for mammoth Trump-named, Trump-managed projects—two in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, a resort in Phoenix, the Trump SoHo in New York. Several of those projects broke ground, but they were a mere prelude. “Mr. Trump was particularly taken with Mr. Arif’s overseas connections,” the Times reported (after buyers of units in the Trump SoHo sued him for fraud). “In a deposition, Mr. Trump said that the two had discussed ‘numerous deals all over the world’ and that Mr. Arif had brought potential Russian investors to Mr. Trump’s office to meet him.” Trump described the scope of their ambitions: “[T]his was going to be Trump International Hotel and Tower Moscow, Kiev, Istanbul, etc., Poland, Warsaw.”

Based on its cast of characters, Bayrock itself was an enterprise bound to end in a torrent of litigation. The company’s finance chief Jody Kriss has sued it for fraud. In the course of the litigation, which is ongoing, Kriss alleged a primary source of funding for Trump’s big projects: “Month after month for two years, in fact whenever Bayrock ran out of cash, Bayrock Holdings would magically show up with a wire from ‘somewhere’ just large enough to keep the company going.” According to Kriss, these large payments would come from sources in Russia and Kazakhstan that hoped to hide their cash. Another source of Bayrock funding was a now-defunct Icelandic investment fund called the FL Group, a magnet for Russian investors “in favor with” Putin, as a lawsuit puts it. (The Daily Telegraph has reported that Bayrock mislabeled FL’s investment as a loan, in order to avoid at least $20 million in taxes.)

These projects are simply too ambitious, too central to his prospects, for Trump to have ignored the underlying source of financing. And it was at just the moment he came to depend heavily on shadowy investment from Russia that his praise for Putin kicked into high gear. In 2007, he told Larry King, “Look at Putin—what he’s doing with Russia—I mean, you know, what’s going on over there. I mean this guy has done—whether you like him or don’t like him—he’s doing a great job.”

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A Psychic Island

From Norman Mailer, in Miami and the Siege of Chicago, his prophecy on the the Republican party in 1968:

They had been a damned minority for too long, a huge indigestible boulder in the voluminous ruminating gut of every cow-like Democratic administration, an insane Republican minority with vast powers of negation and control, a minority who ran the economy, and half the finances of the world, and all too much of the internal affairs of four or five continents, and the Pentagon, and the technology of the land, and most of the secret police, and nearly every policeman in every small town, and yet finally they did not run the land, they did not comprehend it, the country was loose from them, ahead of them, the life style of the country kept denying their effort, the lives of the best Americans kept accelerating out of their reach. They were the most powerful force in America, and yet they were a psychic island. If they did not find a bridge, they could only grow more insane each year, like a rich nobleman in an empty castle chasing elves and ogres with his stick.

Why Trump?

From London review of Books, Elliot Weinberg writes about the lackluster Republican lineup for President this year:

Last January, the unpronounceable Reince Priebus, chairman of the Republican National Committee, surveying his party’s throng of presidential aspirants, tweeted: ‘It’s clear we’ve got the most well-qualified and diverse field of candidates from any party in history.’ Why, the world wonders, did they end up with Donald Trump as their nominee?

The primary voters could have picked Rick Santorum, the former senator from Pennsylvania, once the third-ranking Republican in the Senate, and, with four million votes, the runner-up to Mitt Romney in the 2012 primaries. Santorum is not only opposed to abortion, but all forms of contraception, even among married couples. (‘It’s a licence to do things in the sexual realm that is counter to how things are supposed to be.’) He has said that a child conceived by rape is a ‘gift from God’, and compared homosexuality to ‘man-on-dog’ sex. He signed a pledge written by the religious group Family Leader that life for African Americans was better under slavery. He has claimed that the ‘American left hates Christendom’, that separation of church and state is a communist idea, that ‘radical feminism’ has given women the idea that it is ‘socially affirming’ to ‘work outside the home’, and that schools in Massachusetts have banned children’s books featuring heterosexual parents. His wife home-schools their seven children, and he believes that education is the responsibility of parents, not ‘government workers’, otherwise known as teachers. When Obama proposed a plan to make universities more affordable, he commented: ‘President Obama wants everybody in America to go to college. What a snob!’

The voters could have picked Rick Perry, the former governor of Texas, whose personal summer hunting camp was called ‘Niggerhead’. He is the author of On My Honor: Why the American Values of the Boy Scouts Are Worth Fighting for and Fed Up! Our Fight to Save America from Washington. He has said that ‘there’s something wrong in this country when gays can serve openly in the military, but our kids can’t openly celebrate Christmas or pray in school.’ The American Cowboy Culture Association has given Perry its ‘Top Cowboy of Texas’ award. He wears boots with the word ‘Liberty’ embossed on them, and bragged that he shot a coyote that was bothering his dog when he was out jogging. (In Texas, one presumably jogs with weapons.) As he said, ‘I happily cling to my guns and my God, even if President Obama thinks that that is a simpleminded thing in his elitist heart.’ At one point in 2012 he was the frontrunner, but his campaign crashed when, in a debate, he pledged to eliminate three cabinet-level government agencies, but couldn’t remember the third. Unfortunately this time, his frequent factual confusions (the legal voting age, the century when the US became independent, the location of Juarez, Mexico) did not dispel the rumours that, as a Republican governor anonymously remarked, ‘he’s like George W. Bush, but without the brains.’ When asked how old the earth is – a Creationist litmus test – Perry said he doesn’t have ‘any idea’: ‘I know it’s pretty old. So it goes back a long, long way.’

They could have picked Bobby Jindal, the former governor of Louisiana, who bankrupted his state by drastically cutting taxes on the rich – after unsuccessfully attempting to eliminate all personal and corporate taxes. Born Piyush Jindal, a Hindu, he converted to Catholicism and renamed himself after a character on the 1970s television comedy The Brady Bunch. A graduate of Brown and a Rhodes scholar, he cut state funding for higher education by 80 per cent and instituted a law allowing the teaching of Creationism in science classes. Although Louisiana is one of the poorest states, Jindal remained firm in his opposition to Washington and refused hundreds of millions of dollars in federal grants for health, welfare and education. He believes that America is mired in a ‘silent war’ between Christians and the left, but his advocacy of ‘religious liberty’ – for example, the right of a business to refuse to serve a gay couple – does not extend to Muslims, whom he would monitor and regulate. He has claimed that parts of Europe are ‘no-go zones’ under Sharia law, where police authorities are terrified to go and where women must wear veils, but, in a television interview, could not name any specific examples.

They could have picked Carly Fiorina, the only Republican woman in the race, who, like Donald Trump, argued that we need a businessperson, not a politician, to run the government. Under her leadership as the CEO of Hewlett-Packard, 30,000 American employees lost their jobs, the company vastly increased its debt and had no net income gains, and its stock price fell by 50 per cent. She was fired. She then ran unsuccessfully for senator in California, most notably producing the ‘demon sheep’ television advertisement, still popular on YouTube as one of the most bizarre political ads of all time. She believes that concern about climate change is like worrying about the weather. At one point, she was leading Hillary Clinton in the polls, but she may have been damaged by her repeated insistence that she had seen a film where members of Planned Parenthood discuss selling foetal organs: ‘I dare Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama to watch these tapes. Watch a fully formed foetus on the table, its heart beating, its legs kicking while someone says we have to keep it alive to harvest its brain.’ Regrettably, not even the most virulent anti-abortion groups could produce a copy of this tape. Trump, in a characteristic moment, said of her: ‘Look at that face! Would anyone vote for that? Can you imagine that, the face of our next president?! I mean, she’s a woman, and I’m not supposed to say bad things, but really, folks, come on. Are we serious?’ Ted Cruz, having already lost the nomination, inexplicably named her as his vice-presidential running mate.

They could have picked Dr Rand Paul, opthalmologist, freshman senator from Kentucky, and son of über-libertarian Ron Paul. (Contrary to rumour, he is not named after Ayn.) Paul is opposed to government ‘interference’ in all matters (gun control, health, aid to the poor, civil rights, environment etc) with the exception of abortion. In his first year in the Senate, he introduced a bill to cut $500 billion from the budget and eliminate or drastically diminish most regulatory or welfare agencies. An isolationist opposed to foreign aid and military intervention abroad, he was the only Republican in the debates, besides Trump, to criticise the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, and, as a libertarian, the only one to denounce mass government surveillance under the guise of ‘anti-terrorism’. He has called for a transformation of the Republican Party: ‘Remember when Domino’s finally admitted that it had bad crust? They got rid of the old crust and made better pizza. I’m all for getting rid of the old crust in the Republican Party.’ Dr Paul is opposed to the mandatory vaccination of children.

They could have picked George Pataki, the long-forgotten former governor of New York, who appeared out of nowhere for a moment and then vanished again. They could have picked someone named Jim Gilmore, but nobody knew who he was. They could have picked Scott Walker, governor of Wisconsin, who kept repeating that he was the son of a preacher man, had never gone to college, and that he would be tough with Isis because he had stood up to the local teachers’ union when he slashed the education budget in his state. (The Twittersphere enjoyed juxtaposing photos of hooded executioners wielding scimitars with sneakered greyhairs holding protest signs.) They could have picked Chris Christie, governor of New Jersey and widely characterised as the Tony Soprano of American politics – unfairly: Tony was more effective – known for his impressive girth (despite stomach-stapling), his vindictiveness towards his enemies, his legislative largesse towards his campaign contributors, and his bullying insults on the campaign trail. Like the other candidates, Christie is opposed to the admittance of any refugees from Syria, but, in perhaps his most symptomatic moment, he said he would also forbid orphaned toddlers to enter. (After dropping out, Christie weirdly turned himself into Trump’s poodle, or St Bernard, staring blankly in a corner of the television screen as Trump pontificated.)

They could have picked poor Jeb Bush: the brother, the son and the presumptive nominee as heir apparent. Poor Jeb, who initially raised more money and spent more money than the other candidates combined. Poor Jeb, whose demeanour at the debates was described by someone as that of an exasperated substitute teacher in front of a class of unruly high-schoolers. Poor Jeb, who, stung by Trump’s nickname for him, ‘Low Energy’, rebranded himself on campaign signs and brochures as ‘Jeb!’ Jeb!, who suggested that national health insurance programmes would somehow become obsolete because of gadgets such as Apple watches. Jeb!, whose solution to the economic crisis was ‘People need to work longer hours.’ Jeb!, who kept changing his mind about whether his brother was right or wrong to invade Iraq. Jeb!, who said that his brother ‘kept us safe’, apparently forgetting when 9/11 occurred. Jeb!, who delivered what he considered an ‘uplifting message’ to African Americans from a South Carolina hall full of white people: We won’t ‘take care of you with free stuff … You can achieve earned success.’ Poor Jeb!, who, as governor of Florida, stated that evolution should not ‘be part of the curriculum’ in public school science classes, intervened to prevent the family of a brain-dead young woman from ending her life support, and opened the nation’s first Christian prison.

They could have picked Mike Huckabee, the guitar-playing Arkansas radio preacher – ‘I didn’t major in math. I majored in miracles, and I still believe in them, too’ – and former governor who won the Iowa caucuses in 2008. Huckabee believes ‘that there’s more freedom in North Korea sometimes than there is in the United States,’ because ‘Christian convictions are under attack as never before … We are moving rapidly towards the criminalisation of Christianity.’ He has noted that ‘in the world I come from and choose to live in, “gun control” means that you hit the target,’ and ‘when Christians are asked to accept gay marriage it’s like asking someone who’s Jewish to start serving bacon-wrapped shrimp in their deli.’ Opposed to provisions for contraception in Obamacare, he said: ‘If the Democrats want to insult the women of America by making them believe that they are helpless without Uncle Sugar coming in and providing them a prescription each month for birth control because they cannot control their libido or their reproductive system without the help of the government, then so be it.’ On climate change, he stated: ‘I believe most of us would think that a beheading is a far greater threat than a sunburn.’

They could have picked John Kasich, a former Congressman and Fox News host, currently governor of Ohio. Known throughout his career as a phlegmatic and abusive man, widely disliked in Congress, he underwent an image makeover for the presidential campaign. He became, in his own words, a ‘prince of light and hope’ and the ‘only adult in the room’, who tried to keep things ‘on the sunny side of the street’. The New York Times even endorsed him as the Republican candidate, despite a long anti-union, anti-tax, pro-gun, pro-capital punishment, anti-mass transit, pro-impeachment of Bill Clinton, anti-voters’ rights, anti-abortion, anti-environmental regulations, pro-privatisation of prisons, pro-Creationism in science classes record. In a state where 20 per cent of the population belongs to minorities, the members of his cabinet were all white.

They could have picked Dr Ben Carson, a neurosurgeon, who, with his unfocused gaze and mumbled rambles about the ‘fruit salad of life’, often seemed as though he’d spent too much time in the hospital pharmacy. An African American, he called Obamacare ‘the worst thing that has happened in this nation since slavery’, declaring it to be, in fact, ‘slavery in a way’, because its passage was part of a larger Leninist push to impose communism on America. He said that if people want to know the truth about President Obama, they should simply ‘read Mein Kampf’ and the works of Lenin, and that ‘if there were no Fox News and if there was no conservative radio, we would already be Cuba. I know [Obama] realises that they’re impeding his agenda of fundamentally transforming this nation into something else.’

In one of the debates, Carson suddenly announced that he had inside information about Chinese troops in Syria, but he became better known for his Egyptology: ‘My own personal theory is that Joseph built the pyramids to store grain. Now all the archaeologists think that they were made for the pharaohs’ graves. But, you know, it would have to be something awfully big if you stop and think about it, and I don’t think it’d just disappear over the course of time to store that much grain.’ He has also explained that the ‘Adversary’, Satan himself, entered the heart and mind of Charles Darwin and persuaded him to come up with the theory of evolution to undermine God’s word. He plans to write a book called The Organ of Species, ‘to talk about the organs of the body and how they completely refute evolution’. Donald Trump, for some reason, compared the somnambulist Carson to a child molester: ‘You don’t cure these people. You don’t cure a child molester. There’s no cure for it. Pathological, there’s no cure for that.’ In Carson’s home there is a large painting of Jesus with his hand on Dr Ben Carson’s shoulder.

They could have picked Marco Rubio, the Cuban-American freshman senator from Florida, who openly declared the Senate a waste of his time and had its highest absentee record. A protégé of Jeb Bush, he stabbed Jeb! in the back and divided Florida Republicans by declaring his candidacy now, instead of waiting his turn. Widely hailed as the ‘Republican Obama’ – a bright young man of minority origin – he seemed more like the popular mayor of a small Sunbelt city than a potential president. He was mysteriously considered to be a ‘moderate’, despite hardline positions on Creationism, gay rights, military intervention, immigration, environmental regulation etc. On climate change, although he comes from the state most threatened by rising seas, he notably declared that ‘you can’t change the weather’ by passing a law in Washington. Asked how old the earth is, he replied: ‘I’m not a scientist, man.’ He has proposed completely eliminating the taxes paid by the rich: capital gains, dividends, interest, estate and property. He believes that abortion has become an ‘industry’: ‘You’ve created an incentive for people to be pushed into abortions so that those tissues can be harvested and sold for a profit.’

Rubio has revealed that Obama is part of a treasonous conspiracy: ‘One of the things I’m criticised for is saying the truth, and I’ll continue to say this: Barack Obama is undermining this country. He is hurting this country. He is doing serious damage to this country in a way that I believe is part of a plan to weaken America on the global stage. This is the truth.’ A press release was more explicit: ‘We are the only campaign who is exposing President Obama for his deliberate actions to destroy our country.’ Ridiculed by Trump as ‘Little Marco’, Rubio made the fatal error of trying to out-Trump Trump by making jokes about Trump’s hair and penis size and speculating that, backstage at the debates, Trump was wetting his pants. He sounded like a kid repeating his older brother’s bad language. In a television ad, he had declared: ‘Our goal is eternity – the ability to live alongside our Creator for all time.’ But apparently at a loss for what to do before eternity, if he can’t be president, he recently announced that he would run for re-election to the Senate that he hates.

*

They could have picked Ted Cruz, the freshman senator from Texas. Cruz may be unique among politicians anywhere in that every mention of his name is always accompanied by remarks on his loathsomeness. John McCain has called him a ‘wacko bird’, the former speaker of the House, John Boehner, ‘a jackass’ and ‘Lucifer in the flesh’. Lindsey Graham, the Republican senator who was very briefly a candidate himself, joked: ‘If you killed Ted Cruz on the floor of the Senate, and the trial was in the Senate, nobody could convict you.’ George W. Bush, with his usual rhetorical panache, said: ‘I just don’t like the guy.’ (Among other things, Republican Congressmen were not amused when Cruz called Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell a liar on the floor of the Senate.) There has even been an article by a neurologist explaining how the structure of Cruz’s face inspires revulsion. Nevertheless, he finished in second place behind Trump, with almost eight million votes.

He is a graduate of Princeton – his freshman roommate has apologised for not smothering him with a pillow – and Harvard Law School, where, he claims, there are 12 professors ‘who would say they were Marxists who believed in the communists overthrowing the United States government’. He has accused Obama of being ‘openly desirous to destroy the constitution and this Republic’, and has noted that ‘the simple and undeniable fact is the overwhelming majority of violent criminals are Democrats,’ and that ‘the reason Democrats are soft on crime is that convicted felons tend to vote Democratic.’ (Actually, in the 2012 national elections, nearly six million felons were forbidden, under disenfranchisement laws, to vote.) Apparently forgetting that the government has a legislative branch, he has pledged that, on Day One of his presidency, he will eliminate Obamacare and revoke the nuclear agreement with Iran, which, he says, has made ‘the Obama administration the world’s leading financier of radical Islamic terrorism’. He has also vowed to abolish the Internal Revenue Service, the Department of Energy, the Department of Education, the Department of Commerce, and the Department of Housing and Urban Development. He brags that ‘If I am elected president, we will utterly destroy Isis … We will carpet bomb them into oblivion. I don’t know if sand can glow in the dark, but we’re going to find out!’ (It has been speculated that he does not know what ‘carpet bomb’ means.) He supports Trump’s plan to deport 11 million undocumented migrants immediately – 3 per cent of the US population – but, unlike Trump, he would not allow what Trump calls the ‘good ones’ to reapply. He believes that the 1992 United Nations resolution Agenda 21 – a non-binding call for environmental sustainability signed by 178 heads of state, including George Bush Sr – is an attempt to ‘abolish … golf courses, grazing passages, and paved roads’. According to Cruz, ‘the originator of this grand scheme is George Soros, who candidly supports socialism and believes that global development must progress through eliminating national sovereignty and private property.’ He has said that ‘the scientific evidence doesn’t support global warming,’ and that there ‘has been no significant warming whatsoever for the last 18 years’. He maintains that ‘Sharia law is an enormous problem’ in the United States.

Cruz speaks with dramatic pauses in the rising and falling tones of a television evangelist, and his favourite adverb is ‘prayerfully’, especially preceding ‘consider’, so that ‘carefully consider’ becomes ‘prayerfully consider’. He believes that ‘any president who doesn’t begin every day on his knees isn’t fit to be commander-in-chief of this country.’ He has cast himself as the scourge against the ‘Washington cartel’, neatly conflating American politicians with drug dealers and oil sheikhs. When the Republican governor of Iowa failed to endorse him, he said: ‘It is no surprise that the establishment is in full panic mode. We said from the beginning that the Washington cartel was going to panic more and more. As conservatives unite behind our campaign you’re going to see the Washington cartel firing every shot they can, every cannon they can. Because the Washington cartel lives on cronyism, it lives on making deals, it lives on picking winners and losers and supporting corporate welfare and cronyism.’ When he came in third in the South Carolina primary, he said: ‘Indeed, the screaming you hear now from across the Potomac is the Washington cartel in full terror that the conservative grassroots are rising up.’ He was evasive when asked how, as the sworn enemy of this cartel, which seems to include nearly the entire United States Congress, he plans to get anything done as president.

Even more than most politicians, he suffers from messianic delusions. He has said repeatedly that ‘we have to awaken and energise the body of Christ,’ and that ‘if we awaken and energise the body of Christ – if Christians and people of faith come out and vote our values – we will win and we will turn the country around.’ In a pep talk to his volunteers, he said: ‘I want to tell everyone to get ready, strap on the full armour of God, get ready for the attacks that are coming.’ The reference is to Ephesians 6:11-13: ‘Put on the full armour of God, so that you can take your stand against the devil’s schemes. For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms. Therefore put on the full armour of God, so that when the day of evil comes, you may be able to stand your ground.’

With the Republican convention only days away, many Republicans, worried about their own re-election, have decided to stay away. Even Ohio governor John Kasich is avoiding the most important Republican event in his state since 1936. They are appalled that, given the ‘well-qualified and diverse field of candidates’, the voters have chosen a man of so little knowledge and such extremist views. Speakers, outside of Trump’s family, Dr Ben Carson and – perhaps hoping for a miracle from his Lord – Ted Cruz have been hard to find. Ohio, under kindly Uncle Kasich, has ‘open carry’ laws. After the shootings in Dallas, jumpy policemen are awaiting streets full of demonstrators packing AR-15s.

A Dreadful Mistake of Historical Importance

From The New Republic:

This particular kind of dread is familiar to every elementary school child. It’s defined by the realization not just that you’ve made a huge mistake, but that you knew you were making a mistake all along, and suppressed your courage or your conscience.

Whether that dread crept up on Republicans at that moment, or at any point during Trump’s meandering, grisly, hour-long acceptance speech, it will catch up with them eventually. Whether they know it or not, this is what has happened to them.

An analogy to Iraq is useful for two reasons. The Iraq war was a terrible idea on the merits, but what made it a career-defining political blunder for its supporters is that plenty of people—members of Congress and regular voters alike—knew and said it was a bad idea, tried to stop it, and were ignored.

There is perhaps a degree collective absolution in universal error. If everyone makes the same mistake, they can all legitimately claim nobody was around to lead them down the righteous path. But that didn’t happen during the Iraq war debate, and it didn’t happen in the lead up to the Republican National Convention.

There is a whole movement called #NeverTrump; there are members of Congress who are part of that movement; just 24 hours ago, the runner up in the Republican primary stood before the delegates, and 20 million TV viewers, and told them “vote your conscience.”

When Trump loses the election badly, after normalizing white ethnonationalism, leaving a destroyed Republican Party in his wake; or when he wins, and proceeds to damage the country in one of the many ways he’s intimated (by abandoning allies, or defaulting on the debt, or expelling a significant percentage of the workforce), not only will repairing the damage be a long and painful process, but for his enablers there will be political hell to pay.

Nobody understands what awaits them better than the Democratic Party’s nominee. But for her Iraq war vote, Hillary Clinton might well be winding down the second term of her presidency. But like many others in her party, she tarnished herself with poor judgment and cowardice, and it derailed her plans. Like #NeverTrump conservatives now, Barack Obama was there back then, to remind her and Democratic voters that not everybody had made such a grave blunder, and voters punished her for it.

If there’s solace for Republicans like Paul Ryan and Marco Rubio in this analogy, it’s that many election cycles later, Clinton is again very well positioned to win the presidency. Perhaps they, too, will be offered redemption years down the line. But that will depend on how much damage they’ve just inflicted, in their moral laziness, on their party, the country, or the world. We don’t know the answer to that yet. But we’re about to find out.

 

Cortijo's Sound

 

From Viojoteca.com:

Rafael Cortijo Verdejo es una de las figuras más innovadoras e importantes para la historiografía musical puertorriquena. Su ingenio marcó un hito en pleno desarrollo de la bomba y la plena, sirviendo de punta de lanza para el posterior surgimiento del sonido de la salsa.
Cortijo nació el 11 de diciembre de 1928, en la calle Colón de la parada 21 de Santurce. Aprendió a dar toques de tambor en rumbas callejeras, sin realizar estudios en música. Aun así, fue un sabio de la tumbadora y desarrolló un estilo único con destrezas nunca antes escuchadas entre los músicos de la época. Innovó en la creación de su combo, introduciendo dos trompetas, dos saxofones, piano y timbales en la ejecución de bombas y plenas, pero reteniendo su sabor tradicional y su base rítmica.
"Fue un científico del ritmo y un hombre lleno de ideas. Sus iniciativas (musicales) lo hicieron grande", opina Sammy Ayala, su compadre y uno de sus primeros cantantes. La proyección de su trabajo transportó nuestros ritmos nacionales fuera de los arrabales para situarlos en los mejores escenarios dentro y fuera de Puerto Rico. Sus arreglos musicales -en gran parte trabajados por Quito Vélez- no eran muy elaborados, en cambio su sonoridad devolvió a la percusión el predominio que había perdido por la fuerza que habían adquirido agrupaciones estilizadas, como la Orquesta Siboney y la de Rafael Munoz.

Rafael Cortijo constituyó la primera banda integrada por negros -rompiendo la barrera del racismo- y logró trabajar en los más prestigiosos hoteles de San Juan. Como líder de grupo, Cortijo marcó una nueva etapa de progreso para sus músicos -hasta entonces tratados con indiferencia por su extracción social y racial- e insistió en subirles el salario. Antes, cuenta Sammy Ayala, sólo se pagaba $25 por seis noches por considerarse "músicos de la calle y sin escuela". Con Cortijo llegaron a cobrar hasta $12 por baile.
Su propuesta artística fue revolucionaria. Su conjunto fue toda una atracción porque sus integrantes tocaban de pie y los cantantes no paraban de bailar. En los momentos de auge del salón neoyorquino El Palladium -donde se lucía Tito Puente, Machito y sus Afro Cubans y Tito Rodríguez- Cortijo hizo vibrar la sala en cada una de sus actuaciones.
A los 14 anos de edad, Rafael Cortijo tocaba congas y bongó en las orquestas de Frank Madera, Miguelito Miranda y Agustín Cohen. También transitó por el Conjunto de las Hermanas Sustache, el Grupo de Monchito Muley, la Orquesta de Parques y Recreos, la Sonora Boricua, Miguelito Miranda, Frank Madera y el Grupo de Mario Román.
En 1942 se inició como músico profesional en el Conjunto Monterrey de Juan Palm ("Mentokín") y en 1954 figuró como conguero en el combo del pianista Mario Román. Ese mismo ano, Román se fue de la Isla cediéndole al músico de Santurce los derechos del grupo y su contrato en el sector la Marina de San Juan, surgiendo así Cortijo y su Combo.
En 1955 integró al cantante de la Orquesta Panamericana, Ismael Rivera, para que lo acompanara en una grabación con el sello Seeco. El primer álbum fue "Cortijo y su combo: Invites you to dance", en el que aparece como vocalista Nelson Pineda cantando el tema "Zumbador". En esa producción también figura Roy Rosario, el sonero original del grupo, quien interpretó "Conocí a tu papá" y "Amárrala con cadena". Junto a ellos, Sammy Ayala e Ismael Rivera.

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Daguerreotype

Left: Boulevard du Temple Paris. The oldest surviving picture of a living person, 1838; Right: Portrait of Dorothy Catherine Draper. The earliest surviving photograph of a woman, 1839 or 1840.

The Art of the Steal

From Daily Kos:

Melania Trump’s stunning plagiarism at the Republican National Convention should by all rights be fatal to her husband’s campaign for president, not merely because she plagiarized but because of who she plagiarized from. Melania, who claimed beforehand that she wrote her speech "with as little help as possible," stole from none other than Michelle Obama, whose family has been the target of the right’s most bitter hatred and ridicule for a decade now.

Donald Trump has argued again and again that Barack Obama is an incompetent danger who is trying to drive the country aground, yet it’s the words of Obama’s own wife that the Trump family has seen fit to appropriate as its own. Those two things are impossible to square. If the Obamas are so odious and hazardous, how could their values be worth adopting? Or to reverse the equation, since the Obamas’ values are so evidently worthy of adoption, as Melania demonstrated through her theft, then the case against the Obamas falls apart.

The particular passage that Melania chose to lift makes her transgression all the more devastating. Michelle Obama spoke eloquently about working hard and treating others with respect and dignity. “Your word is your bond," she said—and so, in an extraordinary irony, did Melania repeat after her. If you copy without attribution a passage about hard work, dignity, and your word being your bond, then you lack all dignity yourself.

Donald Trump did not speak these words himself, but he cannot disavow them. He personally introduced Melania on stage before she spoke, and the very purpose of her address was to promote an image that her husband wants to see promoted. Indeed, in a statement, Trump’s campaign stood behind Melania’s speech and refused to acknowledge any plagiarism.

So how can Trump go forward now, after admitting that the Obamas’ values are his values? He cannot—he simply has no argument left to make.