Physiognomy

Brooklyn, Clinton/Washington station, waiting for a C train. 8:15 on a recent weeknight. I see a 30-something white man on the sparsely populated platform. Wiry, fidgety, he looks up from his study of a subway station ad, catches my eye. "What's the same about all these people?" He gestures to 30 or so portraits in a grid, all faces seemingly enthusiastic about reporting suspicious activity to authorities. "Just look. It'll come to you." I look. "It's easy!" Well, I say -- they all look happy. "Their noses! Look at their noses!" His words burst from a restraining dam. "See how they're all wide and flat?" Though the racial and cultural mix of this public service campaign has always struck me as exemplary, at a glance the many-hued noses do seem similarly shaped. "They're victims! See how their eyes are spread wide apart? The noses all flat? They're prey, not predators. Victims!" He paces on the platform, spins. He seems eager to expound. Lank hair curls from under his knit cap. I check: his nose is hawkish. I hear you, I say, moving on, not pausing to determine the distance between his eyes.

"No Such Things As Facts"

The political news comes in waves; it’s hard to chart one before the next comes crashing. That’s a truism of the stretch when presidents-elect name cabinet members and make decisions with years or decades of consequences. But in the Age Of Trump the waves seem mightier. 

And the president-elect, as is his wont, continues to toss bright shiny tweets that media magpies can’t resist -- a horde of pop-culture trash. (Hamilton! SNL! Three million illegal votes! Flag burners!) Friends debate whether this is a distraction tactic of Machiavellian brilliance or evidence of an egomaniacal simpleton with the impulse control of a hormonal teen. The debates themselves distract. I’ve already declared my intention to ignore, to the extent possible, Trump’s bluster. The smartest take I saw this week was a Storified set of tweets from Elliot Lusztig. 

Journalists, meanwhile, rip hair and rend garments and try to create strategies for covering the new president. Here are a few takes I’ve appreciated this week. 

1). NYU prof Jay Rosen makes a point we should have all learned from Sen. Joseph McCarthy’s fact-free accusations: Focus, when warranted, not on the charge itself but its absence of evidence. 

2). James Fallows notes that contemporary U.S. news media “are not built” to cover a leader with no evident capacity to distinguish truth from lies. One of his three suggestions echoes Rosen; a second highlights the need to “fight for reality” (and democracy) by citing another terrific essay by Ned Resnikoff at Think Progress; and a third suggests the media should call narcissistic behavior by its proper name. 

3). Fallows encountered this week on the Diane Rehm radio show a Trump stalwart, “journalist and patriot” Scottie Nell Hughes, who opined “there are no such things as facts.” (You can hear Hughes’s remarks around the 14:40 mark of the show.)

That was echoed by former Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowsky, quoted in The Washington Post: “This is the problem with the media. You guys took everything that Donald Trump said so literally. The American people didn’t. They understood it. They understood that sometimes — when you have a conversation with people, whether it’s around the dinner table or at a bar — you’re going to say things and sometimes you don’t have all the facts to back it up."

4). So facts neither matter nor exist. The answer? According to WaPo Editor Marty Baron: Do our job. “The ultimate defense of press freedom lies in our daily work.... Because holding the most powerful to account is what we are *supposed* to do. If we do not do that, then what exactly *is* the purpose of journalism?” 

5). Adding vital context, Matt Lees in The Guardian has a terrific piece on how the sexist Internet trolls behind Gamergate acted as a precursor for far-right Trumpians on how to terrorize foes and influence the press and control a story, all in the name of “ethics” and “justice.” It’s a lesson in contemporary propaganda. 

6). Bonus links: Lees refers to Umberto Eco’s New York Review Of Books 1995 essay outlining 14 elements common to fascist regimes. (Eco calls it “ur-Fascism.”) 

One rule: Ur-Fascism uses Newspeak (from Orwell’s “1984”), “an impoverished vocabulary, and an elementary syntax, in order to limit the instruments for complex and critical reasoning.” That resonated with me especially after reading this Atlantic article by Andrew Simmons, a creative Marin County high school instructor, on teaching “1984” in the Age Of Trump. I have encountered students similar to the young woman who breezily tells Simmons that the novel is “too long, too confusing, and too full of words no one used anymore.” 

I wish you all a week filled with complex syntax and enriched vocabulary. 

All The Rage

I sing karaoke. Three years ago, that’s a sentence I’d have fashioned only in mordant irony. Now it’s a commonplace: I like watching baseball, walking New York City streets, and singing karaoke. Credit or blame can be assigned to my friend P, an artsy fellow with serious vocal chops known to end a stressful workday by walking into a midtown Japanese karaoke club, the type with private booths, and spending a rigorous hour belting pop standards to himself. A great stress release, he said; you’d enjoy it. This first struck me as ridiculous. Now it seems intuitive. 

As I can’t always get to my favored karaoke club or piano bar, I on occasion release stress in my living room, camped close to my speakers and, I trust, not disturbing the neighbors. (No complaints so far; my building’s solid construction -- high ceilings, solid walls, thick floors -- favors their tranquility.) Last week, trying to shake my dark post-election mood, I was learning Rufus Wainwright’s “California,” a sunny-sounding melody that I’d enjoyed but whose lyrics I’d never plumbed. I knew it wasn’t a love letter to my home state; the way at the end of the first chorus Rufus drags out “California, please” is nothing if not sardonic. But further attention reveals deep scorn for its cultural vapidity -- a rainbow postcard etched in acid: 

"Ain’t it a shame that all the world can’t enjoy your mad traditions. 

Ain’t it a shame that all the world don’t got keys to their own ignitions. 

Life is the longest death in California."

Discovering anger as the song’s motivating emotion made it more satisfying to sing. 

This week, seeking more set pieces for my Self-Delusional Cabaret, I listened to the Billy Bragg B-side “Sulk,” another upbeat number whose bitter content -- boyfriend in late-stage relationship meltdown -- perhaps kept Bragg from adding it to a studio album: 

"Why do I want to hide whenever you show up?

You know your moods just make me want to throw up.

Why don't you just bloody well grow up?

You just sulk."

I texted my friend G, a guide for all things pop-culture related. “‘Sulk’ is terrific but kind of hostile,” he wrote. “The audience may be put off. The song makes you the sulker.” Exactly why I like it, I realized. 

By then I’d moved on to Elvis Costello’s “All The Rage,” which overleaps the high bar Elvis has set for angry relationship songs. You can’t pen words to an ex- much more vicious than this: 

"Alone with your tweezers and your handkerchief

You murder time and truth, love, laughter, and belief. 

So don’t try to touch my heart, it’s darker than you think.

And don’t try to read my mind, because it’s full of disappearing ink."

I texted G: What about a set with those two back-to-back?  “Jesus,” he wrote. “Delusional Alienation Cabaret.” 

I recalled a recent first date on which I’d suggested we meet at a karaoke club. (She had sung a bit professionally and seemed kind; I was feeling brave.) We were getting along pretty well, chatting and trading songs, until I broke out my big number, a passionate lament of Chris Isaak’s called “Please”: 

"I keep listening, very quietly. 

You’re discussing your philosophy. 

There’s a long list of what’s wrong with me,

And you go on talking endlessly...

Please. You’re killing me with all these questions."

“Wow,” she said. “Maybe we need to change it up.” She sang “Que Sera Sera.” There was no second date. 

I’m versed in theories of white male American anger. By any standard I’m privileged as all get-out; I have little cultural rationale for packing my share. In my 50s, trailing a handful of failed relationships and years of therapy, aware of the addicts' admonition that rage is a luxury we can't afford, and mindful of how it affects my 9-year-old, I like to think that I’m carrying less of it around. And then I see my list of karaoke favorites includes Fountains Of Wayne’s “Maureen” (wanna-be boyfriend warns woman to stop regaling him with her relationship exploits); Radiohead’s “Bones” (guy who used to fly like Peter Pan is now “crippled and cracked, ground to dust and ash”); and Ben Folds’ “Selfless Cold And Composed” (singer tells his ex- to punch him instead of “smiling like a bank teller blankly telling me Have a nice life”).

What does this have to do with the Age Of Trump? I’ve been telling people I’m in shock. Numbed. Scared. My karaoke set list, meanwhile, sings a different tune. 

Westerlies

I moved this fall to the 12th floor of a 14-floor brick apartment building built in World War II to house workers of the Brooklyn Naval Yard. The apartment's best feature is its southerly and westerly views. While downtown Brooklyn's new glass and chrome towers obstruct much of the view of New York Harbor, I can glimpse bits of it, as well as Staten Island and New Jersey (and, looking northward, the spires of the Manhattan Bridge and the towers of Wall Street). I can watch storms roll from the west and close in on the city; any westerly breeze has few obstructions before it crashes into my building. On stormy days the apartment's sound is a rhythmic drone of wind, with staccato smacks as gusts hit the bricks and whistles as they whip through window cracks. That's been my soundtrack this weekend.

Earlier in the week I picked up from the borough library Victor Klemperer's "I Will Bear Witness." I was ignorant that the diary came in two volumes and ordered, it turns out, the second, from 1942-45. To read its opening pages is to be plunged into the quotidian terror of late-stage Naziism. On a tram on his way to buy groceries Klemperer is confronted by a "dogcatcher" -- a police or military officer, I'm not sure which -- quietly ordered off, and taken for questioning at a local police station. He is instructed to avoid trams to that neighborhood and to limit his shopping to the Jewish section, where offerings are meager by comparison. Though Klemperer must wait hours at the station he is not physically mistreated or arrested. The stop's point, it becomes clear, serves dual purposes of terror and segregation. Segregation not only makes Jews easier to track and herd, it also keeps "good" Germans from interacting with any and thus aids propaganda against the sub-human.

The wind and the diary colored my weekend readings from a variety of reporters and Nostradamuses. Those include a NYT account of a weekend white power conference, a gathering of "people of the sun" that included call-and-response chants in German (including "lugenpresse" -- lying media); Azmat Khan's summary of U.S. government actions to track Muslims since 1996; lessons Americans should draw from the failures of the Israeli left to confront four decades of increasingly radical right-wing politics; plus messages of doom from Andrew Sullivan and Jonathan Chait.

I'm paying special heed to folks familiar with authoritarian governments. Today that includes Sarah Kendzior, who's studied state power in Azerbaijan and Uzbekistan. Her piece in the Dutch publication The Correspondent, How to be your own light in the Age of Trump, has powerful words of warning and advice for living as a dissident. She calls on us to write down our moral values, our personal codes and creeds, and to do so now, before the power transition: "Authoritarianism ... eats away at who you are. It makes you afraid, and fear can make you cruel. It compels you to conform and to comply and accept things you would never accept, to do things you never thought you would do."

I was heartened by the stout constitution and working moral compass evidenced in writer Amy Ferris's Dear Trump Supporter Who Called Me A Cunt. She cites her mother as someone who paid for living with small-minded fear, an example Ferris is determined to resist.

Amid the whipping winds, may we all heed the better angels of our nature.

One week into the Age Of Trump

Wading through the shit flows emanating from 5th Avenue and D.C. feels exhausting. It seems important to try. A few post-election articles have helped me navigate.

1). Insight and outrage fill Ryan Lizza's commentary about the president-elect's first week: 

Donald Trump's First, Alarming Week As President-Elect

What's worst? Assaulting the free press and 1st Amendment on a near-daily basis? Ignoring the rule of law and using the DOJ as a weapon against perceived enemies? Suborning U.S. foreign policy interests to Russia? Normalizing white supremacy and hardcore xenophobia (with the appointment of former Breitbart editor Stephen Bannon as senior counselor), not to mention garden-variety bigotry (with the appointment of a man the GOP in another era rejected for a federal judgeship, Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions, as head of Justice)? Putting paranoid Islamophobia at the heart of national security policy (with the appointment of Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn as national security adviser)? Running roughshod over conflict of interest laws (by, among other things, seeking security clearances for son-in-law Jared Kushner and having Ivanka Trump, designated to run the family business and without security clearance, sitting in on Trump's first meeting with a foreign head of state [Japan])?

2). I was heartened by this smart take on fighting an elected, personality-driven authoritarian from an Italian finance professor, Luigi Zingales, who witnessed the era of Berlusconi. 

The Right Way To Resist Trump

Lessons: The GOP scorched-earth policy didn't make Obama a one-term president. Focus on policy, not personality. Find philosophical areas of overlap, and wage battles for distributed systems of power (such as an independent judiciary and an empowered, adversarial press) and Democratic principles. 

3). And this, from Russian and American journalist Masha Gessen, who witnessed the rise of Putin, strikes me as essential reading for the new era: 

Autocracy: Rules For Survival

Her 5 rules: Believe the autocrat; his words reveal his darkest impulses. Don't put blind faith in institutions (such as an independent judiciary and an empowered, adversarial press). Don't normalize the extreme. Be outraged. Don't compromise core principles. 

Gessen's article strikes me the one most likely to be worth revisiting in the difficult months and years ahead. 

4). In a different vein, Farhad Manjoo's analysis on the destabilizing role of social media to our political and media power structures, and the gains in power for formerly marginalized groups such as white supremacists and hacker collectives, is far-sighted and frightening. 

Social Media's Globe-Shaking Power

Summary quote: "It’s time to start recognizing that social networks actually are becoming the world-shattering forces that their boosters long promised they would be — and to be unnerved, rather than exhilarated, by the huge social changes they could uncork."

5). For political lessons the Democratic Party needs to draw from the election, I haven't seen a smarter read than Bay Area writer Ezekiel Kweku's: 

Skin In The Game: How To Beat White Nationalism In The Polls

Key quote, which responds to a lot of energetic and wasteful discussions I've seen on my social media feeds: "The practice of pigeonholing voters into the categories of 'racist' and 'not racist' is counterproductive. A more useful frame is to decide which voters can be persuaded to vote for Democratic candidates and which can't." 

Peace. 

Election Night, 2016

Thinking out loud: Donald Trump is a reality show contestant. What he says is a distraction. It's not that his words don't matter; it's that tracking them doesn't help, it educates about nothing useful, and it's an enormous waste of energy (not least because he generates so much fear). 

So I'm pledging to follow as little as possible of what the man says over the next four years. I'll track his appointments, his legislation, his policies -- indeed, following those (and fighting many of them), and tracking how they affect our fellow citizens and residents, is a civic obligation of the highest order. But the Twitter feed, the TV appearances, the speeches -- no. 

Neil deGrasse Tyson: "This is the end of nothing. This is the beginning of something new and solemn and so important. You must be part of what comes next."