Thoughts about this and that..

Posting tonight at the old campground - Been a way a long time, but who knows?

Maybe I learned something. So...

I wish Hillary Clinton would stop trying to be/to pretend to be relevant.

Every time I see her I think of her being president, thoughtful, etc, even despite her overly-hawkish inclinations.

But it also reminds me of her 2008 primary Pennsylvania campaign, in which her people played a reprehensible race card throughout central and western PA to the predominantly Irish and Polish voters, warning that "one of them" in the White House means "one of them" could just come into your house at any time.

It took David Axelrod to design a remedy, with Obama's people asking: "How would you feel if a black man kicked open your door and ran into your house? How about if he was a fireman there to stop your house from burning down?"   

But wottehell, boss -- not like she was the only one.

Poppy Bush with his venomous Willie Horton commercial -- "The N---rs are coming! And Dukakis is letting them out of Prison." Not only virulently racist, but it wasn't even Dukakis who authorized the furlough.

But for someone who got seriously viciously outright disgraceful, someone who race-baited  African-Americans as mindless monsters, it took another privileged rich kid from New York -- Nelson Rockefeller, the allegedly "moderate/liberal" New York Governor who ran for re-election touting his "compassionate" alternative to prison for mentally ill people who committed crimes...commitment to a mental hospital with, oh yeah, an indeterminate sentence (i.e., forever.) 

    

For those of us who saw his commercial, it was more memorable than the anti-Goldwater one LBJ ran, counting down to a mushroom cloud.

It was even more memorable -- if not as sexily sexist enjoyable --  than Apple's 1984 warrior babe running down a theater aisle, blouse bunnies bouncing, running down the theater aisle to throw a hammer at the screen. 

Rockefeller's ad opened with a static camera long shot down a bare hall, an African-American man all the way on the other end, pushing one of those wide dust brooms toward the camera, bit by bit coming closer and closer while a nattering voice talked about the harshness of prison sentences and blah blah and the man got closer and closer, bigger and bigger -- enormous! 

A black man so big that the late lamented NFL defensive lineman of the Rams and Colts and Steelers,  6'9" 290 pound, Big Daddy Lipscomb would have said "Holy shit! Closer and closer until his demented-looking face filled the entire screen at which moment, the voice said "NELSON ROCKEFELLER!" 

And the black monster popped all the way back to the far end of the hallway.

The script talked about the plan for putting a mentally deficient criminal into a Funny Farm forever, and  that therefore his plan was blah blah compassionate, but no mistaking what was really being said visually -- Nelson Rockefeller is all that stands between you and THEM...and they're getting closer all the time.

Ironically, the phony "moderate/liberal" label is what kept him from being president -- he was up for -- and lobbying for --  Nixon's replacement VP for Spiro Agnew. But the Republicans decided he was "too liberal," and gave it to Gerald Ford, whose heading of the Warren Commission Report featuring Arlen Spector's "single bullet theory" proved his obedient bonafides.

And this brings us to Donald Trump, whether or not he is a racist or a cynical hypocritical opportunist. I rely on something Noam Chomsky once said, that "they" -- the presidents and senators and etc -- were not hypocrites, but true believers, because if they didn't really believe the crap they spouted, they wouldn't be able to do the job, the internal conflict would be too much. 

And Trump, of course, ISN'T doing the job, merely posing as a president, and not very well at that. 

And he needs long periods of diversion in order to do the smallest of presidential-type things ("Presidential-type" being akin to "cheese food" or "natural flavorings" -- a sort of almost nearly similar if you don't look too closely fabrication designed to be an inexpensive replacement for the real thing, sort of a pod person or product.)

 But Trump had been shrewd enough to realize no one in his right mind would ever vote for him, so he designed a base composed of  mentally aberrant people -- racists, religious fanatics and fabulists who believed "I was  born too late," that the world was much better back then in some whenever or other, without any of the things that upset them and make them have to think. 

And Trump found it simple to convince them that they're really the smart ones who figured out that everyone else was being fooled, but not them. And pardoning them for any nasty side of it, meaning he made sure they understood they were being Anti-Obama because of his politics and not his skin color. And anti-Hillary because of her duplicity and not her vagina. 

In essence, Trump created a playbook partly from observations made by Eric Hoffer in his 1951 book The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements, observations he made as a longshoreman on the docks of San Francisco such as:

"Mass movements can rise and spread without belief in a God, but never without belief in a devil... Charlatanism of some degree is indispensable to effective leadership. There can be no mass movement without some deliberate misrepresentation of facts...Add a few drops of venom to a half truth and you have an absolute truth...Passionate hatred can give meaning and purpose to an empty life. Thus people haunted by the purposelessness of their lives try to find a new content not only by dedicating themselves to a holy cause but also by nursing a fanatical grievance. A mass movement offers them unlimited opportunities for both."

And Trump added to it one crucial caution made in those good old days Trump  held up like a gold ring on a merry-go-round -- a caution made by Don Marquis of Archy and Mehitabel fame::

"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you;
But if you really make them think, they'll hate you."

So he got the nomination.

But, to her neverending regret -- and ours -- Hillary decided that she should convince people to think, and if they did, they would see that she was -- if not the real thing, at least a better, more functional, ultimately safer imitation of the real thing.

And well, it might have worked -- actually it did work and she won the votes in most states, but lost the slave-owner protection device called the Electoral College. And also, in other states, the voter prevention laws set up by the Republican party made sure that people who DID think didn't get to vote.

But he has a problem. The problem is one usually referred to as "riding the tiger," because the other thing Trump knows is who those people are,the ones he calls his base -- fanatical true believers, a political lynch mob  -- and if they ever realized how he's betrayed them, they'll turn on him and it won't be "Lock him up," but "String him up!" and "Race-traitor!"

 Or shoot him down, they being a lot of gun owners -- the kind that other gun owners despise for giving them a bad name. Automatic weapons. People with Anti-tank cannons and Anti-aircraft missiles in their basements. And he knows he has to keep them, if not happy, at least pacified.

So he keeps reminding them of who he is, and how he's on their  side -- like leaning on the NFL, an industry with a majority of young, strong, big rich black men, saying it over and over again, that their "Owners" need to teach them some manners  -- reminding his base that things were better -- that America was GREAT -- when we had slavery.

Owners and Players.. football players.

But also the other sort of "Players" -- young strong big black men who used to have big hats and lime-green Cadillac convertibles with leopard-skin upholstery and lots of drugs and lots of women, and now have black Escalades with dark tinted-glass windows, a fair amount of gold and diamond bling, and chilled bottles of Cristal or Dom Perignon or -- even better -- one of the Krug single vineyard champagnes or Jay-Z's favorite Armand de Brignac Ace of Spades. And lots of drugs and lots of women. 

And Trump is telling all his acolytes -- yeah, have their Owners put THOSE Players in their place.

2016 was a strange time, with distracting wild cards. 

And Trump's followers no less stuck in fantasy than the rest of us, who look disapprovingly at them. Case in point -- there was never any way our favorite fantasy grandfather,  Bernie Sanders, could win anything in the south, being, as they would put it -- a Yankee Commie Jew Carpetbagger.

And even though Joe Biden could have won it -- all he needed to do was apologize for the way he savaged Anita Hill, and put Clarence "Uncle" Thomas in the Supreme Court. But the human-ness we love about him and which is why we would have all voted for him, was also that of a man who had to remove himself from the game for something more important than being president -- time to mourn the death of his son.  

So here we are, looking to 2018 for some relief and to 2020 to put someone in the White House whose job will be to undo the vicious, racist, gynophobic rabid lynch mob bullshit meanness of the Trump years. 

Maybe, but not so likely if we keep thinking some super man or woman is going to come along and fix us -- someone we can follow. 

I remember the line from Man For All Seasons when King Henry VIII went with his entourage up the Thames to walk and talk with the man he loved and admired, Thomas More, to plead for him to validate the divorce, and as they walked, Henry pointed to the clamoring crowd of followers, and said (a rough approximation of the quote from memory):

"Look at them, they're following me. Some want wealth., Some want power.  Some want property. But most of them follow me because I'm moving and they'll follow anything that moves."

And that's us -- you and me.

And the one bright spot I can see from here, is another caution I learned in the 60's -- and which Trump doesn't seem to know, or if he does, thinks it doesn't apply to him, because he's rich and all.

But it does:

"Be careful the asses you kiss on the way up --

Same ones you'll have to kiss on the way down."  

As in apologies and all the social niceties a weak man, Like Trump, never can allow himself to do. 

But while the schadenfreude of watching him fall will be one of the best ones ever, there will still be the question of "What now?" once he's gone.

Got no answer for that one.