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

How We Got Here-The Repubs

One great thing about the New York Times Opinion pages is that they have a highly intelligent comments section. After an article where two NYT Conservative commentators who were once closely tied to the Republican party until rercently discuss the evolution and the collapse of the traditional republican party, readers pointed out the hypocrisy and lack of memory these two sorry writers displayed in their so called discussion.

Comment 1

While the xenophobia and racism that has helped form the modern Republican Party has its roots in McCarthyism, Nixon's Southern Strategy, and Reagan's welfare queen rhetoric, the real transition to modern nihilistic Republicanism began with Newt Gingrich, Lee Atwater, and Rush Limbaugh. These three together understood that winning votes wasn't a matter of having attractive policy, it was a matter of good marketing and good media strategy. Atwater introduced modern emotionally-based negative advertising techniques into political ads. Limbaugh developed the provocative style that came to dominate right-wing media. And Gingrich enforced party discipline—ensuring that every Republican was always on brand and armed with the talking points that aligned with the party's messaging and media strategy.

Behind the scenes the Republicans were still serving their wealthy donors—offering tax cuts and deregulation—but the public face of the party was us-against-them marketing, that defined Republicans as true Americans and everyone else as irresponsible and dangerous interlopers. The donors provided the money to fund the ads and media strategy and, in return, they got the tax cuts and deregulation they craved—but to get votes the Republican base was fed a steady diet of fear and loathing of the Other.

Trump was no aberration. He merely dispensed with the veneer of respectability and let the rotten wood be exposed—to the glee of the Republican base and the horror of Bret and David.

Comment 2

“If you could rewind the tape to 1995, is there anything you or anyone in our circle could have done differently to save the Republican Party from the direction it ultimately took?”

This question encapsulates the problem with this entire discussion. The demise of the Republican Party commenced long before 1995. It probably can be traced to the Southern Strategy that eagerly recruited the base of racist xenophobes, to the embrace of evangelicals who reject the basic core of conservatism that requires that we keep government out of the pulpit, the bedroom and the doctor’s office and finally, heresy of heresies to these two disciples of Reagan and Milton Friedman, to Reagan’s restructure of the tax code and Friedman’s rejection of corporate responsibility to anyone but shareholders that are the cornerstones to the income inequality that laid the fertile ground for the populism that overtook their party.

I left the party in the 90s when I recognized the dog whistle racism and rejection of conservative/libertarian principles that evangelicals thrust on the party. I didn’t necessarily see the extremes of income inequality coming, but I inherently knew that it wasn’t conservative to spend more than you took in as revenue and Grover Norquist was wrong that you could starve the beast. You can’t balance a budget if the wealthiest among us are paying a lower percentage of their income than we are spending as a percentage of GDP.

The party was broken long before 1995.

Comment 3

Brooks and Stephens publicly admit their political mistakes, but they don't get to the heart of the matter. All they had to do was read the 1971 Lewis Powell Memorandum and blueprint for the Republican, corporate and 0.1% domination of American democracy to understand what the GOP has wrought on a once great nation. They never mention Ronald Reagan's 1987 catastrophic cancellation of the Fairness Doctrine that eliminated the requirement of news broadcasters to present controversial issues of public importance and to do so in a manner that fairly reflects differing viewpoints, thereby opening the fatal giant windows of right-wing misinformation, disinformation, conspiracy and incitement that hijacked nearly half the nation into an altered state of fact-free reality. They fail to mention decades of catastrophic 0.1% right-wing 'libertarian', 'moneyed speech' lawsuits that methodically converted American democracy into a dollarocracy, a theocracy, a kakistocracy and an idiocracy. They fail to mention that the 2000 Presidential Election and Florida vote counting stoppage was a real tipping point when the Republican Party and its GOP Supreme Court publicly rejected democracy in favor of minority rule by any right-wing means necessary. They fail to mention that the GOP's only real public policy - trickle-down economics - is a fraudulent vehicle to feed the rich. The GOP has been morally, intellectually and economically bankrupt for decades and needs to file for bankruptcy.

 

Gracias Messi

 

 

From Clarin:

Gracias Messi. Gracias por ostentar familia antes que lujo, gracias por enseñarnos que tipos con fama y guita también pueden tener aspiraciones normales, familias que no sean un quilombo, vidas que no transcurran en las redes, esposas con alegrías, miradas y sueños, pero que también son mujeres con brillo propio cuando juegan sus fichas, y pochoclo sobre la falda cuando les toca ser madres.

Gracias, Messi, porque necesitamos referentes que puedan ser ejemplos, y no excepciones, porque necesitamos la normalidad de las tardes en familia, del trabajo con disciplina, de la pasión por lo que se hace, y si algo tuvieron tus goles fue el valor de que millones de miradas se posaran sobre alguien que seguramente tiene despelotes, angustias, incertidumbres, metas, rollos, complejos, y todo eso que nos convierte en humanos.

Gracias, porque no das envidia sino que marcás un camino; gracias porque tu humildad tapa con creces esa vida tan especial que te tocó en suerte y que cada día tenés que manejar para que el entorno no te degluta con sus halagos y te robe la esencia del origen.

Gracias por no ser un renegado, ni un desclasado, ni un imbécil al que se le sube el ídolo a la cabeza. Gracias porque puedo hablar de vos con mis hijos sin tener que ocultar los aspectos tortuosos de un alma sin destino.

Y finalmente gracias por ser un crack en la vida antes que en el fútbol y porque seguramente si repartieras pizza, o fueras ferretero, o vendieras camisetas en el Once, también serías grande como Messi, porque al fin y al cabo sos Messi. Ah… me olvidaba, gracias también a tus viejos porque algo hicieron, a Antonella que siempre está, y a los pibes, que algún día también entenderán lo difícil que fue ser Messi.

Good Riddance

Let's hope the end comes soon from this monster haunting our land:

That is the fate now facing a Republican elite whose only idea is to hide, shirk, and mutter.

Over the months between now and voting day in 2024, Trump will likely face legal jeopardy, criminal and civil. Many in the Republican world hope that those jeopardies will eliminate Trump for them. But when the jeopardies arrive, will they rally to Trump’s defense? That’s what they did when the FBI searched Mar-a-Lago for stolen government documents. Trump’s Republican allies endorsed his false claims to be a victim of state persecution then—and pushed their party to protect the ex-president from the law he had willfully violated. If they repeat that performance, they’ll make Trump a martyr all the way to the nomination.

If they yearn for Trump’s legal troubles to disqualify him, they will have to signal to their supporters that those legal troubles are fair and legitimate, not acts of political persecution by the Biden administration or the New York attorney general. And if Republican leaders won’t stand up for the law, against Trump, they will back themselves into standing up for Trump, against the law. They got a lot of practice siding with Trump against the law from 2015 to 2022, and that practice has brought them to their present predicament. If they want to escape their predicament, they must change their practice.

The choices are fight or yield. Those have been the choices all along, and those are the choices again. If Republicans want a different outcome this time, then this time they’ll have to change their behavior. There is no coward’s way out of the dilemma. Either take the fight to the Minotaur or be devoured by him.

Fiasco in Texas

 

From The Atlantic,  Charlie Warzel writes:

A state compelling social-media companies to host all user content without restrictions isn’t merely, as the First Amendment litigation lawyer Ken White put it on Twitter, “the most angrily incoherent First Amendment decision I think I’ve ever read.” It’s also the type of ruling that threatens to blow up the architecture of the internet. To understand why requires some expertise in First Amendment law and content-moderation policy, and a grounding in what makes the internet a truly transformational technology. So I called up some legal and tech-policy experts and asked them to explain the Fifth Circuit ruling—and its consequences—to me as if I were a precocious 5-year-old with a strange interest in jurisprudence.

Techdirt founder Mike Masnick, who has been writing for decades about the intersection of tech policy and civil liberties, told me that the ruling is “fractally wrong”—made up of so many layers of wrongness that, in order to fully comprehend its significance, “you must understand the historical wrongness before the legal wrongness, before you can get to the technical wrongness.” In theory, the ruling means that any state in the Fifth Circuit (such as Texas, Louisiana, and Mississippi) could “mandate that news organizations must cover certain politicians or certain other content” and even implies that “the state can now compel any speech it wants on private property.” The law would allow both the Texas attorney general and private citizens who do business in Texas to bring suit against the platforms if they feel their content was removed because of a specific viewpoint. Daphne Keller, the director of the Program on Platform Regulation at Stanford’s Cyber Policy Center, told me that such a law could amount to “a litigation DDoS [Denial of Service] attack, unleashing a wave of potentially frivolous and serious suits against the platforms.”

To give me a sense of just how sweeping and nonsensical the law could be in practice, Masnick suggested that, under the logic of the ruling, it very well could be illegal to update Wikipedia in Texas, because any user attempt to add to a page could be deemed an act of censorship based on the viewpoint of that user (which the law forbids). The same could be true of chat platforms, including iMessage and Reddit, and perhaps also Discord, which is built on tens of thousands of private chat rooms run by private moderators. Enforcement at that scale is nearly impossible. This week, to demonstrate the absurdity of the law and stress test possible Texas enforcement, the subreddit r/PoliticalHumor mandated that every comment in the forum include the phrase “Greg Abbott is a little piss baby” or be deleted. “We realized what a ripe situation this is, so we’re going to flagrantly break this law,” a moderator of the subreddit wrote. “We like this Constitution thing. Seems like it has some good ideas.”

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Ciao Javier Marias

Javier Marias passed away this weekend before he could be given the Nobel prize for literature. Again, the irrelevancy of the Nobel shines again. Some recent influential and great writers that did receive it include: Nabakov, Borges, Cortazar, Sebald, Calvino . . . .

Here's a take on his life from The Guardian:

When Javier Marías was a student of English Philology in Madrid in the 1970s he says it was with a sense of "awe and reverence" that he would buy copies of "the then grey-spined Penguin Modern Classics. The authors ranged from Conrad to James, Faulkner to Joyce, Thomas Mann to Ford Madox Ford, Woolf to Camus. Not even Nabokov was allowed to be there." Last year Marías himself became one of just a handful of living writers to join that same list. "I must assume, therefore, that these are much less demanding times than the 1970s," he explains modestly. "But, still, I feel very honoured, even if I can't help thinking I must be a fraud."

Far from being a fraud, it is difficult to think of many other living writers who are such an obvious fit for the list. In brute commercial terms, as was noted at the time, you could say his inclusion is not a bad hedge bet from his new publisher Penguin in the event of his winning the Nobel prize, something he is regularly tipped to do. In purely literary terms there is an even more compelling case. Few writers have sustained such an engagement with the classic (Anglophone) canon. As a translator he has rendered into Spanish work by Hardy, Yeats, Conrad, Nabokov, Faulkner, Updike, Salinger and many others. As a novelist, he has threaded his work with traces of these writers, and is explicitly underpinned by an empathy with Shakespeare and Sterne, as well as Cervantes and Proust.

"I've never had a literary project and feel I have been improvising all my career," he recently claimed. "But I do recognise certain recurring themes: treason, secrecy, the impossibility of knowing things, or people, or yourself, for sure. There is also persuasion, marriage and love. But these things are the matter of literature, not just of my books. The history of literature is probably the same drop of water falling on the same stone only with different language, different manners, different forms adequate to our own time. But it remains the same thing, the same stories, the same drop on the same stone, since Homer or before."

This flair for improvisation has seen him selling millions of books that have been translated into more than 40 languages. His 12th novel, The Infatuations, is published in English next month, and work such as All Souls, A Heart So White, and, more recently, his monumental Your Face Tomorrow trilogy, have received almost universal critical acclaim. And he has not only been garlanded with prizes. Among his other titles he is King of Redonda, a real, if uninhabited, lump of Caribbean rock, the monarchy of which has been passed down through a line of writers.

"I've taken my responsibilities lightly," he smiles, "but I do follow the tradition of an intellectual nobility." He funds a literary prize and awards dukedoms to the winners, which so far have included among others Alice Munro, AS Byatt, William Boyd and Umberto Eco. "JM Coetzee was the first winner, and I was delighted that he accepted and joined in with the playfulness of it. Maybe it is time that I should start thinking about an heir. I inherited through an abdication, so I shall have to find another writer, as it is not passed on by blood but by letters."

Marías has never visited Redonda and lives in a book-packed apartment overlooking one of Madrid's oldest squares where he works on an electric typewriter, doesn't have internet and is equally old-fashioned in his prodigious cigarette consumption. He has a long-term partner, but she lives in Barcelona. "And that is usually my lot. Either my girlfriends have been married at a time when there was no divorce in Spain, or they lived somewhere else or there was something else in the way."

The Infatuations, featuring a rare Marías female narrator, is, among other things, a cool-eyed examination of love; in fact "Los enamoramientos", the Spanish title, could also be translated as "The Crushes". Maria has breakfast in the same café every morning, where she observes a married couple with the same routine. Some time after the couple stop coming to the café Maria learns that the husband has been brutally murdered, and she becomes embroiled in the life of the widow and the emotional ramifications of the husband's death.

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MAGA Republicans

 

From Anne Applebaum at The Atlantic:

MAGA Republicans are rather a threat because their leader does not accept the outcome of elections when he loses them; because he does not believe that the rule of law applies to him; because he does not adhere to the culture of restraint, tolerance, and moderation; and because he is now seeking to help elect other politicians who feel the same way. In their drive to change the political system, and to ensure that they can retain power even if they lose, Trump’s followers have verbally and sometimes physically attacked Capitol police officers, election workers, the FBI, the Department of Justice, and civil servants. He and his acolytes use violent language, and they inspire violence in return. As Biden put it last night, they “tried everything last time to nullify the votes of 81 million people. This time, they’re determined to succeed in thwarting the will of the people.”

Composer, Pianist, and Photographer Sy Johnson Has Passed Away

From the NYT:

Sy Johnson, a Renaissance jazz master — pianist, composer, journalist, photographer — who made his biggest impact as a frequent arranger, orchestrator and all-around right-hand man for the celebrated bassist Charles Mingus, died on July 26 in Manhattan. He was 92.

His wife, Lois Mirviss, said the death, in a hospital, was caused by complications of Covid-19.

The jazz critic Gary Giddins called Mr. Johnson “one of those indispensable people you never heard much about,” and few in the jazz world would disagree. He started out in the late 1950s playing piano, first in Los Angeles and then in New York. He soon branched out to arranging, working not just with Mingus but also with a host of musical luminaries including the saxophonist Lee Konitz and the arranger and bandleader Quincy Jones.

He also wrote words: He conducted a seminal interview with Miles Davis and contributed record reviews to the short-lived quarterly Jazz magazine in the 1970s. He worked on Broadway and even composed his own musical, based on the works of J.R.R. Tolkien. And all along, he toted a 35-millimeter Leica camera, crafting spontaneous, intimate portraits of the jazz scene of the 1960s and ’70s. Many of his photographs were collected in a 2014 book, “Jazz: Personal Encounters.”

Most Pernicious Abuse of Power

As the Trump security scandal rolls out I've been wondering why no one is speaking about it in terms of why he was keeping all this information and the context in which he was doing this. This, instead of looking at this issue in isolation which the media often wants you to do as ultimately if it goes to trial they'll need to prove something and not everything. But here it is, the first article that puts things in true perspective. From David Rothkopf at the Daily Beast:

The seizure of documents at Mar-a-Lago—and what we have learned about the former president’s apparent violation of federal laws by keeping them, mishandling them, and obstructing the efforts to return them—must not be seen as an isolated incident. Trump’s disregard for U.S. national security and in particular his contempt for and struggle with the U.S. intelligence community, has been a theme since he first publicly sought the support of an American enemy to help him win the 2016 presidential campaign.

We now know that Trump and his closest advisers were told many times, even before they left office, that the law required them to return all documents to the U.S. government. We know they were informed repeatedly about their legal obligations with regards to the treatment of classified material. We know they ignored that guidance and removed documents illegally. We know they then were asked to return them. Multiple times.

We know they did not comply. We know that when they were forced to comply, they returned some but not all the documents, and that among these were highly sensitive documents—the mistreatment of which could threaten U.S. national security. We know that these documents were stored at Mar-a-Lago, which had been targeted for years—and penetrated—by foreign intelligence organizations. And we know that even after all this, Trump’s lawyers misrepresented that all documents had been returned.

Subsequently, we know that when all efforts to retrieve the remaining documents failed, the Department of Justice sought a subpoena to reclaim them—and that among what they found were more highly classified documents. Since then, we have also heard Trump claim he declassified the documents, the documents were his, the search was illegal, and that he was the victim. We also heard members of his party support him, despite the fact that Trump’s disregard for the law and his recklessness could well have put the lives of members of the U.S. intelligence community and their sources at risk.

I spoke to several national security veterans about Trump’s latest—and one of his most pernicious—abuses of power.

Former CIA Director General Michael Hayden said of the Mar-a-Lago revelations, “Literally, it’s unbelievable.” He described the kind of secrets that appeared to be in Trump’s possession as the core elements—essential to protect. “It’s the bread and butter of intelligence,” Hayden said.

Former Director of National Intelligence (DNI) General James Clapper observed, “The FBI search of Mar-a-Lago—an obvious target of adversary foreign intelligence—is stunning, but not surprising; it seems entirely consistent with the former president’s apparent disdain for the intelligence community and its rules for protection of sensitive information.”

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Abdul Wadud Gone

Vallejo Nocturno 2022 copyright- Abdul Wadud DC Space 1977

I remember seeing Abdul Wadud play numerous times at DC Space with Julius Hemphill. The two had great synergy and could improvise creatively for hours. Yes, I think in 1977 we knew the importance of both of those musicians and the sounds they created but still after those encounters I never ran into Abdul again, I believe.
From The NYT:

For many of his contemporaries, the first taste of his instrumental prowess came via his appearance on Mr. Hemphill’s 1972 album, “Dogon A.D.” (Like many important recordings featuring Mr. Wadud, it is currently not available digitally.)

Over the title track’s unusual loping groove, Mr. Wadud supported Mr. Hemphill’s saxophone lines with crying, bluesy bowed phrases as well as some select, forcefully plucked notes. Baikida Carroll, the trumpeter on that session — and, like Mr. Hemphill, a member of the St. Louis-based Black Artists Group — remembered Mr. Wadud’s insightful questioning during rehearsals about that composition’s 11/16 meter.

“He asked Julius about the relation of the drum part and the cello part, how they hook up,” Mr. Carroll recalled in an interview, adding that he “pointedly observed” Mr. Wadud’s working methods “because I was, like, This is the cat!”

The composer, trombonist and scholar George Lewis said in an interview that he regarded Mr. Wadud’s playing on “Dogon A.D.” as a landmark of 20th-century music. He tied that performance to Mr. Wadud’s later solo recording, “By Myself,” which is currently out of print.

“There’s the electricity — he’s amplified — there’s the funk, there’s the off-meter; a lot of the stuff that turns up being crystallized in ‘By Myself’ is sort of foreshadowed in ‘Dogon A.D.,’” Mr. Lewis said. “It’s like James Brown — but I bet even James Brown couldn’t have done it if it had been in 11/16.” (A 1977 live performance of the piece is included on a boxed set of Mr. Hemphill’s work, released in 2021 by New World Records.)

Mr. Wadud did not record much of his own music, aside from his 1977 solo LP, but his solo work had an impact. Writing in The New York Times about the Abdul original “Camille,” from “By Myself,” the cellist Tomeka Reid praised him for using “the whole range of the cello” and moving “between lyrical, free playing and groove with ease, something I strive to do in my own work.” In a recent interview, Ms. Reid added, “What Pablo Casals did for the Bach suites, I feel like Abdul Wadud did for the new generation of cello in jazz.”

Around the time of “By Myself,” Mr. Lewis chose Mr. Wadud for an ensemble that performed the Lewis composition “Monads,” his attempt to “come to terms” with the graphic scores of the composer Morton Feldman.

“Abdul knew all about that kind of thing; he knew more about it than I did,” Mr. Lewis said. “That combination, of having the strong kind of Black bass and having all these other possibilities — equally strong — made him someone you could work with who was super versatile and could do anything.”

Some Hope

From The Atlantic's David Frum:

The first fact—the rallying to Trump—reminds us that his narrative of personal grievance still deeply moves Republican voters.

The second fact—the Democrats’ improving congressional prospects—reminds us how little Trump’s grievances resonate with the larger voting public. GOP leaders have made a lot of noise about the Democratic obsession with pronouns. But the Trump Republicans have a pronoun problem of their own: Trump demands, and they agree, to talk about “me, me, me” when the electorate has other, real, bread-and-butter concerns.

Big-money Republicans hoped that 2022 would be the year the GOP quietly sidelined Trump. Those hopes have been fading all year, as extreme and unstable pro-Trump candidates have triumphed in primary after primary. Their last best hope was that the reelection of Ron DeSantis as governor of Florida would painlessly shoulder Trump out of contention for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination. Now that hope, too, is dying.

DeSantis ran in 2018 as a craven Trump sycophant. He had four years to become his own man. He battled culture wars—even turning against his former backers at Disney—all to prove himself the snarling alpha-male bully that Republican primary voters reward. But since the Mar-a-Lago search, DeSantis has dropped back into the beta-male role, sidekick and cheering section for Trump.

Trump has reasserted dominance. DeSantis has submitted. And if Republican presidential politics in the Trump era has one rule, it’s that there’s no recovery from submission. Roll over once, and you cannot get back on your feet again.

Trump specializes in creating dominance-and-submission rituals. His Republican base is both the audience for them and the instrument of them. But to those outside the subculture excited by these rituals, they look demeaning and ridiculous. Everybody else wants jobs, homes, cheaper prescription drugs, and bridges that do not collapse—not public performances in Trump’s theater of humiliation.

Midterm elections are usually referendums on the pressing issues of the day. Voters treat them, in effect, as their answer to the implied question: “Got any complaints?” And because voters usually do have complaints, the president’s party tends to take losses. But this time, the loudest complaints of the “out” party are becoming very far removed from most people’s lives.