We Don't Need No Stinking Badges

One of the best blogs I've found is called Gin and Tacos, written by a political scientist professor. Here's what he said recently about Trump:

The most incredible thing about the Trump campaign from an academic / political science perspective is that we have the rare opportunity to observe a major party campaign with no ideological content whatsoever. There is no coherence to anything about Trump, policy-wise, and this reflects his supporters' similar lack of meaningful ideology. On what rare occasions that he does put forth an actual idea it 1) makes no sense and 2) bears no identifiable relationship to any other idea he mentioned before or since. It is the definition of random. His appeal, in the eyes of his supporters, is that he is Tough or Bold or some personal characteristic that one could only get from watching and listening to Trump if one does not understand what anything in the realm of ideas in American politics actually means. Moreover, one must explicitly not care what any of it means.

For example, Trump recently stated that his bold plan for dealing with the national debt was that, as a brilliant negotiator, he would convince holders of Treasury obligations to take a haircut – in other words, to accept fifty cents on the dollar or something like that, as a bankruptcy court might force creditors to do during a liquidation or reorganization. This is almost too stupid to bother explaining why it is stupid, as though the Treasury of the largest economy on the planet is no different than a failing casino trying to talk down its debts to a bunch of Mustache Petes who put up the initial investment. It is such a stupid idea that it falls short of qualifying as an idea; it's the kind of thing someone who has absolutely no idea how anything related to the economy works would think is a really brilliant solution.

The problem, from Trump's perspective, is that there simply aren't enough such people in the electorate. Converse estimated (again, his estimates have been subject to much debate) that no more than 1 in 5 voters fall into this category, and since then most analyses have treated that as incautiously high. If there's one thing academics like more than calling people stupid, it's rationalizing ways that apparently stupid people are actually smart. Regardless, on the rare occasions that Trump says anything policy-related my mind automatically goes to Converse, because nothing he says bears any resemblance to a definable political ideology. And that's what Trump supporters like about it. To them it sounds brilliant, because they don't even understand the issues well enough to understand why his proposals are ridiculous.

http://www.ginandtacos.com/2016/05/08/loud-racist-and-signifying-nothing/

Believe it or not, the conclusion per se is optimistic for the survival of the republic. It suggests that there are not enough idiots in the electorate to actually elect Mr. Trump. But in this post Mr. Tacos has not addressed the other factor in this coming election: the credibility of anything at all Mrs. Clinton actually says. We're in the very odd situation of ending up with two candidates who are, neither, credible, although for different reasons. Apparently the big money is going to favor Mrs. Clinton, as it has already in the sense that the big money is willing to pay her half a mil to give a speech of an afternoon. People who already support Mrs. Clinton, and desperately want Mr. Sanders to just STFU and go away, seem to daily find new brightness in her "positions." Today I notice that she's opening the door to an early age medicare opt in, which is a kind of single payer position. Great. Very much fine with me. I can assure you that once you are out of the work force (however that is defined), you are on your fucking own, buddy.

But campaign positions are notoriously ineffable. And Mrs. Clinton (and her husband, the co-President to be) are notoriously ineffable. Nothing in Mrs. Clinton's campaign speech, or in the Democratic Party Platform to be negotiated in July, is law or policy. The Clintons, throughout their long career in politics, have always been willing to sacrifice principle when it was politically expedient. There was a retarded man executed in Arkansas during the campaign of '92 solely to inoculate Bill and Hil from the charge that they might be somehow "soft" on the death penalty. This poor victim of the Clinton ambition told his executioners that he'd like them to save his piece of pecan pie for later, after the execution, because he was full.

Mrs. Clinton will not reduce the value of United States treasuries. That we can be sure of. And that's a plus I think. As far as your social security check? I don't think I'd trust either of them with it if it was already endorsed. What we're watching is the self-destruction of the basic system for finding a President. It's an important job, but one of the parties entrusted to running the machinery now has the official position, held and acted on since Reagan, that government is "the problem." If you start out with a contradiction, it's you who have the serious problem. The other party distrusts democracy more implicitly. My former Governor, Jim Hunt, invented the so-called "super delegate" category in 1982 to protect the Democratic Party from democracy. Back in the middle of 2014 or so, the most powerful faction in the Democratic Party--the Clintons--made sure that the super-delegates were on their side, and that no one of note would run against them. The best Sanders can do is make things look sort of sticky for Mrs. Clinton by managing to win a majority of state primaries. This seems to be happening. If Sanders wins California, he could look a lot like "the popular" choice. But the super-delegates will counteract that illusion, and the Clinton faction will be correct when they say that they are just playing by the rules.

After the election, Mr. and Mrs. Clinton will continue to have the ear of the "job makers," and vice versa. The job makers will continue to live a life of stability. A continuation of the Obama administration, but with a bit more steel where the Middle East is concerned, is likely. Interest rates will remain at or near record lows. There will be ups and downs in the markets. And over where my bronze star holding World War II 92-year-old veteran father-in-law spends his days watching a blur of TV, because his eyes and his mind are both fading away, the minimal attending staff gladly takes up our offer to bring them a Big Mac and a soft-serve hot fudge sundae for their supper. No doubt the corporation that owns his facility and hundreds of other facilities scattered across many states is holding its own on Wall Street. Hey, the attendants have Jobs! And here in NC, the issue of the moment isn't the chronic and on-going erosion of middle class life, it's the idiotic bathroom law which forces people to actually visit the wrong bathroom, while claiming to do the exact opposite. A corollary of Orwell's Law might well be the rise in apoplexy amongst the more cogent and observant class. This, in turn, will slowly raise the percentages of likely Trump voters through attrition. Ultimately, more money will be made. As Bob Dylan said, "I can't help it if I'm lucky." We are indeed in an idiot wind.

Army Hero Dies at 79

Here's the link. I don't think I'm supposed to quote the New Yawk Times without paying them.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/07/us/donald-w-duncan-79-ex-green-beret-and-early-critic-of-vietnam-war-is-dead.html?_r=0

Let's note that this "early critic" was absolutely right. He came back from Vietnam, disillusioned, before the Voting Rights Act was passed. The great amnesia and insufferable ignorance under which the United States labors continues. Yet it is possible to find clarity, even when one is actually, as Mr. Duncan was, in the "belly of the beast." The NYT, you'll note, finds that Mr. Duncan was "radicalized." Even now, so long after the war, the paper of record can't manage to admit that he was, very simply, right, when so many were wrong. I guess the Wall Monument sort of does that bit of reporting for them.

General Loan later immigrated to the United States, and, I believe I read in his obit, ran a Chinese restaurant in northern Virginia somewhere or other. His fame via this photo perhaps greased the money skids for him. And he, too, was but a cog in the machinery.

[photo by Eddie Adams]

For more reading, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Bright_Shining_Lie

Keep NC Gay... What? No. I Meant "Happy"

The fundamental driving force behind North Carolina's HB-2 is probably the great and hoary urban/rural conflict, wherein rural counties tend to be much more conservative socially, and urban counties tend to be more progressive and open-minded. We used to sing a song about this, which I learned the words to back in '72 I think, as it was one of the original songs on our set list back when we were playing places like the Endangered Species, a basement bar on Rosemary Street run by two lunatics, Big Dale and Little Dale. "I Wish I'd Bought Me A Half A Pint And Stayed In The Wagon Yard."

I am a jolly farmer, last night I went to town,
To take a bail of cotton, I'd worked the whole year round.
I hitched my team in the wagon yard and bought me a bottle of gin,
And went out to see them 'lectric lights, and watch the cars come in.

Now listen to me farmers, I'm hear to talk some sense,
If you want to see them 'lectric lights, just look right over the fence.
Don't monkey with them city duffs you'll find they're slick as lard.
Just go and get you a half a pint and stay in the wagon yard.

Now I'm a deacon in a hard shell church, down near Possum Trot,
if the sisters hear about my spree, it's bound to make them hot.
I went out on a party, I led the pace that kills.
When I woke up, that gang had gone and left me with all the bills.

I found them over on the corner, near the Soul Salvation Hall.
That drunken bunch was out there singing Jesus Paid It All.
They put me out in a dry goods box, Lord, my pillow was hard..
I wish I'd bought me a half a pint and stayed in the wagon yard.

[originally recorded by Lowe Stokes and his North Georgians, circa 1930]

I won't type up all of it here, it hurts my head to try to remember all of the lines. Al McCanless put in a nice minor chord on the first measure of the bridge, which spiffed up our version from the 78 rpm recording we got it off of. He and Tommy and Jim had been doing the song before the Red Clay Ramblers started, in '72, so it was easy to keep on at it. But we thought it was a funny song even then, and people laughed at it and with us, not only in the red nest of Chapel Hill, but up at Janette Carter's Carter Fold, in Hiltons, VA, which is as damn rural a place as you'll ever find anywhere within driving distance of North Carolina, and noted bluegrassers such as the Country Gentlemen have recorded it as well, even without a fiddle.

Now we got a guy running on the Republican ticket for Attorney General by the name of Buck Newton. He's from Wilson, NC, which is one of the places you can find the best BBQ on the planet, and from more than one fine eatery no less. Newton is currently an NC senator in the Legislature, and voted for HB2 of course, a preposterous piece of government dictate which in the Looking Glass way the Rethugs like to do it these days is being parsed by its authors and our weak-kneed Republican governor Pat McCrory as a sensible response to "government over-reach." Newton said in a speech this week, believing perhaps that sunspots were interfering with all recording devices, or perhaps that he was speaking only to the true believers:

"Go home, tell your friends and family who had to work today what this is all about and how hard we might fight to keep our state straight," Newton said during a rally in support of House Bill 2, the controversial measure passed in response to Charlotte's transgender nondiscrimination ordinance.

http://www.wral.com/newton-says-dems-a-little-sensitive-in-reaction-to-hb2-comment/15665696/

Buck. Of course that's his name, or at least the name he adopted before he ran successfully for state senator in one of our many predominantly rural counties, where for a century tobacco was king. When people from reality overheard Buck's remarks, they said, well, that's what we've been telling anyone who will listen. Because it's certainly right out there in Buck's timeless locution. The goal of this law is indeed to keep NC straight. It is expertly crafted by people with law degrees (and some of 'em surely get their ideas from the Koch's ALEC organization, which crafts all manner of laws ostensibly as an aid to over-strapped legislatures all over the country, and in fact as an aid to a successful state-by-state reactionary revolution which depends in significant part on fundamental flaws in the US Constitution, such as the tragic fact that representation is grossly undemocratic, e.g., Rhode Island gets two Senators, as does California.) How the law works is, a person who self-identifies as a given gender different from their birth gender is placed in an immediate legal quandary concerning which bathroom to use. To put it over-simply, use the restroom they "look like," or the restroom that corresponds to their genitalia at birth. There are already reports of persons removing themselves to other buildings where there exist neutral facilities rather than risk some sort of confrontation. The risks come with high stakes, obviously.

Buck just says "you Democrats are being sensitive, I never said anything about sex." What weasels the NC Republicans have become. They have a psychological problem. Having taken this short-sighted, un-thought-out position and made it into law no less, they are surely seeing, at least when they look in the mirror in the bathroom of their choice, the plain contradictions contained in the law. Making things worse, Ted Cruz, Presidential Candidate, has jumped on board. How can an authoritarian possibly back down? If only Pat McCrory had saved all of them from themselves! But the Governor is a party man, first, last and always. Possibly the advent of Trump will save the day, since he's maintaining a more common-sensical position at least at the moment. As soon--next week perhaps--as it becomes obvious that Trump is the Republican Presidential Nominee, good party men will be doing figure eights as grand as Jimmie Johnson's, or Junior's.

Hey Buck. Head on back to the wagon yard. You can explain to your agricultural constituents, over a nice G&T, why NC needs to somehow replace the millions in lost revenue which this vicious law has engendered. Maybe the Legislature can forego air conditioning this long hot summer to save some money.

[photo from WRAL-tv]

Moving Midway: A Documentary From My Home Town

I watched Godfrey Cheshire's terrific documentary "Moving Midway" twice. Godfrey Cheshire is a film critic. He started his career around here when he founded a weekly newspaper in the '70s called The Spectator and published his film reviews in it. In 1991 he moved to New York City and began writing for larger publications up there. It's obvious he learned, in the process of writing about films, how to make one.

Midway starts out as a personal story. Midway is a big plantation house, built in 1848 as a present from a father to a son. It was one of a number of plantation houses situated on a gigantic plantation, 26000 acres I believe the film states at one point, which lay in eastern Wake and western Johnston counties. Hundreds of slaves did the work. This area of central North Carolina has suffered an explosion of population growth starting in the 1970s, and what was once a rural landscape has become, at the time the film begins, an urban hodgepodge of four lane highways, new subdivisions, and shopping mall after shopping mall. Already just across US 64 (once and still called the Tarboro Road by the folks who live in Midway by inheritance) a big mall has sprung up, and fifty-five thousand vehicles pass the front gate daily. The current owner of Midway, Charles Silver, decides, he tells his cousin Godfrey Cheshire, to literally move the house and some of the outbuildings away from this impending juggernaut. One part of the story, then, is a literal engineering marvel: moving such a building successfully from where it sits to... somewhere else. When the story begins, the end point is not known, and one of the chapters in the tale involves the actual negotiation and successful purchase by Mr. Silver of a piece of land close enough and big enough to make the move possible. A feature of this move becomes something more remarkable in the process: the move is to some degree overland, not down a handy paved highway.

(This sort of move was accomplished back in 1999 down on Hatteras Island, when the Hatteras Lighthouse was successfully moved away from the encroaching Atlantic Ocean. In that case they used the same sort of hydraulic jacking system, and of course the structure itself was even heavier than Midway house. The best part of that move, however, was that they were able to lay rail and moved the lighthouse, inch by inch, on a path that was already engineered level and plumb, which limited the danger of wracking to an absolute minimum. It was a remarkable move documented in its own right. As I was driving down Hatteras to the Ocracoke Ferry on a semi-weekly basis back in those days, I could personally note the changes as the lighthouse made it's journey, across the horizon and the line of the road.)



So this is one part of the Midway story. But it turns out that it not the deepest part. That part belongs to the massive and ongoing denial which the South's white culture maintains, even today, and since the beginnings of this dark foundation stone of America: slavery. After Mr. Cheshire's initial engagement with his cousin Charles Silver and Mr. Silver's decision to move the house, he meets one Robert Hinton, a black professor of African American Studies at NYU who grew up in Raleigh and started his educational journey by graduating from Raleigh's segregated Ligon High School in 1959, two years before I graduated from Raleigh's white segregated highschool, Needham Broughton. As Hinton remarks, "I didn't have the money for psychoanalysis, so I studied history." He wrote his dissertation, from Yale, on the transition from slavery to agricultural labor in the South. Hinton, it turns out, is the descendant not only of slaves who worked on the Midway Plantation, but literally the descendant of the owner of Midway, who had a sexual relationship with the black cook. Hinton and Cheshire, Hinton and Charles Silver and his two younger brothers, are cousins.

As Silver's mother, and her sister Cheshire's mother, also relate: "I am certain we treated the slaves kindly. We are not a cruel family." Across this chasm stretched a tightrope, which the film pretty successfully negotiates. Robert Hinton is credited as the documentary's historian, as he should be. Just like Jackie Robinson, he sees the world aright. It turns out that there are black Hintons galore in the Midway area. Another is Algia Mae Hinton, a Piedmont blues singer and guitarist who was accompanied for many years by Libby and my friend, the blues artist Lighting Wells. Her music underscores the documentary, and there's a nice little "extra" included in the DVD featuring her singing and playing, with Lightning appearing behind her.

Cheshire also chooses to tell the story of the Southern "Plantation Myth," as part of the larger context for Midway Plantation. He reminds the viewer of Gone With the Wind, a film still given great prominence in our critco-historical story of American Film, and probably watchable sometime this year on TCM. He reminds the viewer, too, of Birth of a Nation, which memorialized all the myths of segregation and the southern fear of black people, which justified and indeed exalted lynching and the general terrorism under which black people lived once they had achieved "freedom" in 1865. Birth of a Nation, another extra notes, has been banned from view in some American cities including Los Angeles.

The documentary is riveting at every level. Towards the end, Robert Hinton admits that he doesn't care at all about whether this house is saved, and would like to see all of North Carolina covered with asphalt, as a memorial to the slave labor his people endured. He says, to Cheshire, "I'm kinda sorry I like you, it would have been easier to hate you."

It might be remarked that quite a few notable Republicans (and certainly some Democrats as well, even now) believe the convenient myth that black people were "happy" and well-treated back in those antebellum days. Cliven Bundy, point man for the mining industry, comes to mind, and also Sarah Palin. There's an ongoing battle right now in many places in the South to finally remove statuary that exalts Civil War "heroes" such as Robert E. Lee, not to mention Nathan Bedford Forrest.

[a hat tip to Lawyers, Guns and Money, who posted this picture]

That's part of an ongoing effort to deal with Robert E. Lee at the University of Mississippi. These myths, which perpetuate denial on a multi-generational basis, continue. Last year I got into an email conversation with some guy who was a member of the Sons of the Confederacy, on the question of whether slavery was the "cause" of the Civil War. He never budged. I finally thanked him for his time and gave up. When you quote long passages straight from the mouths and writings of the people who started the war and even then Southern apologists refuse to change their minds, you have reached the land of the clinical. I guess it's harder for the children of the slave owners to see what's true, but I really don't know why that is. Thomas Jefferson knew he had black children. White America didn't know until someone sleuthed it out with DNA study. His black descendants knew all the time, through all the generations. This question is even explicitly broached by Cheshire when he goes to a big reunion of the black Hintons. "Why didn't our families meet long ago," he asks. The black widow of a Hinton who had done a lot of research on the subject of his ancestors shrugs. "Well, we live in the South, what good would it do."

You can rent this film via Netflix or Amazon, or buy it for less than $12.00. Every one should see it. It explains a lot.