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Snippets

Like many of us, I have had a lot of insect bites. Most are only aggravating—the itching of mosquito bites. But sometimes they are more serious. I got what I thought was a wasp bite on a sandal-shod foot. It felt as if a cigarette was being put out on me. The calf ballooned. The doctor gave me an antibiotic that in due course brought back my lovely looking leg which — in days of yore — drew compliments. Years later I got a bite on my elbow, which did not seem to be anything important. But I developed a fever and soon the temperature was hitting levels that I had seldom had. The elbow became more and more tender, and when it was bumped and I let out a little scream, I finally went to the doctor, who again prescribed an antibiotic. This time it did not work, and I went back to the doctor. He said he was sending me to the hospital. I needed an antibiotic that had to be injected for several days in a row or delivered by an IV drip. He could not do it because his office was closing for summer vacation. I said that I did not want to go to the hospital. The spouse, who was with me, spoke up, “Couldn’t I inject him?” The doctor looked askance, but the spouse told him that she had gone to medical school and had gotten a Ph.D. She continued that she ran a research lab and regularly injected animals. He did not ask with what. He did say, “Maybe it’s possible.” The spouse: “Where does the injection go?” The doctor: “In the ass.” Saucers. The spouse’s eyes became as big as saucers. “Ohhhhhh, I can do that,” she convincingly said, and the doctor consented. She injected me over the next few days, and I got better. The injections hurt, but not much. When they were through, the spouse said, “That was FUN.”

A character in Death Comes for the Fat Man by Reginald Hill gives marital advice: “Never give your wife a surprise she doesn’t know about.”

Our president said recently that Benjamin Netanyahu is a war hero and continued, “I guess I am, too.” His act of martial bravery in his estimation was ordering the bombing of Iran. In the eyes of many including the prosecutors of the International Criminal Court, Netanyahu is a war criminal for Israel’s actions in Gaza. And Trump, who has supported those actions?

A recent article in The New Yorker by David K. Kirkpatrick quotes an ethics expert who says that “when it comes to using his public office to amass personal profits, Trump is a unicorn—no one else even comes close.” Another presidential observer concludes that the Trumps “have done more to monetize the presidency than anyone who has ever occupied the White House.” But while Trump’s monetization of public office may far outstrip all others, other presidents have benefited from their presidential actions, including our first chief executive. The Whiskey Rebellion in western Pennsylvania sought to prevent taxes on whiskey. George Washington personally led troops to suppress the insurrection. Easterners, including the first president, had long speculated in western lands. Land values soared after Washington’s actions; properties were sold; and profits were taken. Brady J. Crytzer in his book The Whiskey Rebellion: A Distilled History of an American Crisis states, “Later, when speaking of the insurrection in terms of his personal wealth, the president admitted, ‘this event having happened at the time it did was fortunate.’”

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Trump versus Madoff

Near the end of his book Madoff: The Final Word, written shortly before our president won his second term, Richard Behar asks comparative questions about the con man Bernard Madoff and Donald Trump:

“Should there be an attempt at an analysis and comparison of Madoff and Trump—arguably the greatest fabulists of (for Madoff) the contemporary business world and (for Trump) the political world? Do they know when they lie? Do the 2020 presidential election deniers have anything in common with investors who blindly followed Madoff? And can denial be contagious and transmissible across huge segments of society?”

There may be intriguing comparisons between the two, but the fabulists were of different sorts. To effectuate his Ponzi scheme, Madoff faked stock trades. Of course, Madoff knew that he was not making the trades. He lied about them. Lies require an understanding and concern for the truth. Lying calls for a degree of craftsmanship that weaves in the truth in order to get the lie accepted. Harry G. Frankfort in his marvelous little book, On Bullshit, says: “In order to invent a lie at all, [the liar] must think he knows what is true. And in order to invent an effective lie, he must design his falsehood under the guidance of that truth.” Thus, Madoff made up the trades, but not the prices for the supposed transactions. He backdated the “trades” and then could pluck out real stock prices to make it seem that his funds had made profits. If someone had checked his trading ledgers, they would see entries that Madoff bought a security for x dollars on a certain date, and indeed the stock did sell for that amount then. The business record would also show that on another date, Madoff sold the shares for more than x dollars, once again a valid price for that date. The prices were real; the trades were a lie, but in hopes of being believed, he lied under the guidance of truth.

Frankfort makes a distinction between the liar, who has a concern for the truth, and the bullshitter who does not. A bullshitter’s “statement is grounded neither in a belief that it is true nor, as a lie must be, in a belief that it is not true. It is just this lack of connection to a concern with truth—this indifference to how things really are—that I regard as of the essence of bullshit.” And since our president does not seem to craft lies as much as utter falsehoods with an indifference to the truth, he is, by this definition, not a liar.

The bullshitter has more freedom than the liar. The bullshit artist “does not limit himself to inserting a certain falsehood at a certain point, and thus he is not constrained by the truths surrounding that point or intersecting it. He is prepared, as far as required, to fake the context as well.” Frankfort continues, “He does not care whether the things he says describe reality correctly. He just picks them out, or makes them up, to suit his purpose.” The bullshitter is not rejecting the authority of truth, as the liar does. Instead, “he pays no attention to it at all.”

Many wonder how Trump can tell so many falsehoods, or how he can repeat falsehoods that have been repeatedly debunked, or how he can assert things that on their face are blatantly false. They haven’t recognized that while a liar and truth-teller are on opposite sides of the same contest, the bullshitter is not even in this game. Trump does not grapple with the authority of truth, as the liar does. Instead, as with any bullshitter, “he pays no attention to it at all.”

If Trump lied, he would not be as dangerous. Frankfort writes, “By virtue of [not paying attention to the truth], bullshit is the greater enemy of the truth than lies are. . . . Through excessive indulgence in [bullshit], which involves making assertions without paying attention to anything except what it suits one to say, a person’s normal habit of attending to the ways things are may become attenuated or lost.”

There may be many causes for Trump’s bullshit—his narcissistic ego is a prime reason, but there is at least another one. “Bullshit is unavoidable whenever circumstances require someone to talk without knowing what he is talking about.” Those of us concerned with the truth should give up the notion that Trump will learn what is true and what is not and that the falsehoods will decrease over time. As long as Trump continues to talk about things he knows little to nothing about, the bullshit will continue.

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First Sentences

“How are new art forms born?” Questlove (with Ben Greenman), Hip-Hop Is History.

“I am your maid. I’m the one who cleans your hotel room, who enters like a phantom when you’re out gallivanting for the day, no care at all about what you’ve left behind, the mess, or what I might see when you’re gone.” Nita Prose, The Maid.

“You open your eyes at dawn and turn in the cool bedsheets.” Ezra Klein & Derek Thompson, Abundance.

“People don’t tap their watches anymore; have you noticed?” Anne Tyler, Three Days in June.

“A certain grim but familiar pattern typifies reports from the Holy Land.” Oren Kessler, Palestine 1936: The Great Revolt and the Roots of the Middle East Conflict.

“The phone rang. Again. It was the fourth time in eight minutes.” Louise Penny, The Grey Wolf.

“It is twenty minutes past midnight on the morning of Wednesday, May 7, 1986, and the Senate Finance Committee has been working almost nonstop since early the previous morning.” Jeffrey H. Birnbaum & Alan S. Murray, Showdown at Gucci Gulch: Lawmakers, Lobbyists, and the Unlikely Triumph of Tax Reform.

“When the train stopped I stumbled out, nudging and kicking the kitbag before me.” J.L. Carr, A Month in the Country.

“In the beginning the door was open. The Founding Fathers celebrated the multiplicity of difference in their young republic and recognized that filling the country’s vast, open spaces with newcomers was necessary for securing its future.” Michael Luo, Strangers in the Land: Exclusion, Belonging, and the Epic Story of the Chinese in America.

“Louisa is a teenager, the best kind of human.” Fredrik Backman, My Friends.

“If you stand outside the wall, it is impossible to gauge the size of the city.” Stephen R. Platt, Imperial Twilight: The Opium War and the End of China’s Last Golden Age.

“The heat moved like a feral thing through the streets, fetid and inescapable.” Tim Mason, The Darwin Affair.

“The first time that history’s greatest fraudster contacted me was in January 2011, a month after his eldest son, Mark, hung himself from his dog’s leash on the second anniversary of his father’s arrest.” Richard Behar, Madoff: The Final Word.

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Snippets

The response to a mass shooting in a liberal state or city: If only you had gun-friendly laws, a good guy with a gun would have stopped the carnage. There have been mass shootings in Montana and elsewhere where the restrictions on guns are few. Where was that “good guy” with a gun? And the mass shootings continue.

A highly placed source has confidentially informed me why so many ICE agents wear masks. They are concealing that they are aliens. No, not people from a foreign government, but beings from another planet. Apparently, ICE cannot find enough American humans to do the job.

A new friend insisted that I read Showdown at Gucci Culch: Lawmakers, Lobbyists, and the Unlikely Triumph of Tax Reform (1987) by Jeffrey H. Birnbaum & Alan S. Murray. The book chronicles the passage of the 1986 tax reform bill. The book contained more detail than I cared to read, but some details had an up-to-date relevance. For example, the authors point out that at the close of nineteenth century, federal revenue came from tariffs and excise taxes, which operated similarly to sales taxes as an exaction on consumers and placed a heavy burden on low-income Americans. An income tax was considered a fairer way to raise money to fund the government. The Revenue Act of 1913 simultaneously imposed a tax on large incomes and reduced tariff rates. We are now taking the opposite course by reducing taxes on large incomes and increasing tariff rates. The 1986 tax reform was led by President Ronald Reagan, and we are diverging from it. That 1986 package incorporated the largest corporate tax increase in history. Now, of course, we are reducing corporate taxes. We now also ignore what is known and obvious: Our taxes are uneven and unfair in part because some people simply don’t pay them. In 1986, there were estimates that every dollar of increased IRS enforcement led to the collection of ten dollars of previously uncollected tax revenue. We, of course, now reduce enforcement by the IRS.

As the night wears on, my curiosity increases. What will Dee Dee Gatton be wearing at The National News Desk?

Pesky pronouns. I call the Roomba “he.” The spouse calls the Roomba “she.” What is right? Neither of us thinks of Roomba as an “it.” Surely not “they.”

I was driving across Manhattan to get to the entrance of the FDR drive at 96th Street. The traffic slowed as I got to the traffic light. I could see a panhandler approaching. Most often I gently shake my head indicating not today, but this was one of those every so often days when I dug for my wallet. The spouse beat me and handed me a bill. The panhandler blessed me, smiled, and asked what I had not expected. “Are you a Yankee or Mets fan?” I replied, “How many Mets fans do you get here.” He did not answer but said that Aaron Judge had just driven through. The panhandler told me that Judge was on his way to Yankee stadium where the team was playing the Astros that night. Just before the traffic started moving again, he said, almost laughing, “He makes a gazillion dollars, and he did not give me a cent.” And then, “Have a good rest of the day.” I turned to the spouse, “I still love New York.”

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In Spite of the People

Texas is seeking to further gerrymander its congressional districts in favor of Republicans. Two-thirds of Texas House seats are currently held by the GOP even though the statewide vote for Trump in 2024 was only fifty-six percent. The Texans are now seeking to ensure that eighty percent of the seats are filled by Republicans. Texas Republican votes will in essence be weighted more heavily than Democratic ones. Slightly more than half the voters will pick four out of five Representatives while slightly less than half will pick twenty percent of the seats.

The United States Supreme Court faced a similar situation in the second half of the twentieth century. At that time some states did not require periodic redistricting of their state legislatures. With population growth and shifts, legislative districts that once may have held equal populations became unequal, but each was still entitled to the same representation in the state capital. For example, in Tennessee, two-thirds of the state representatives were elected by one-third of the state’s voters. One Alabama district had a population of 634,864 and another had 15,000, and each had one state senator. Within each district, votes were equal, but when the state was looked at as a whole, votes were unequal.

This only changed because the United States Supreme Court adopted what now is called the one-person, one-vote doctrine. The constitutional guarantee of equal protection, the Court recognized, requires that each vote within a state be equal to all the other votes in the state, and therefore legislative districts must have comparable populations.

The Court actions comported with a constitutional theory about the Court’s role in our government. In 1938, the Supreme Court said that courts must have a strong presumption that our laws are constitutional. Under our system, the elected legislatures and executives (the political branches) adopt our laws. If a law is perceived as bad or unreasonable or unwise, it is up to those elected branches to change it. It is not for the federal courts to determine the wisdom of a law. However, the Supreme Court also outlined three exceptions to that strong presumption of constitutionality. First, constitutionality cannot be assumed for a law or action that appears on its face to violate a provision of the US Constitution, especially the Bill of Rights. The Court also said that it would scrutinize closely laws that discriminate against “discrete and insular” minorities, especially racial, religious, and national minorities, particularly those who lack sufficient numbers or power to seek redress through the political process. Finally, the Court should not grant a presumption of constitutionality to laws and practices that restrict the political process. The Court, in other words, should have a more active role when laws and practices prevent the political process from mirroring the will of the people.The political process in Tennessee and Alabama was not likely to change the inequality of voting districts. Representatives from small districts were not willingly going to give up their disproportionate power. The system that gave some voters more power than others stayed in place until the Supreme Court acted. The Court furthered political democracy by doing so.

Partisan gerrymandering is akin to those unequal districts the Supreme Court confronted in the twentieth century. The political process will not remove anti-democratic congressional boundaries when the line-drawing party perennially controls the state legislature. Although the minority party is not what the Supreme Court meant by a “discrete and insular minority,” it is very much like one since the political process cannot prevent discrimination against it. And if a party has gerrymandered congressional districts, it almost always also has gerrymandered state legislative districts. When that is the case, and it is true throughout this country, a mere majority in the state does not change the control of the legislature. Thus, a controlling party can distort the political process to continue its control. Gerrymandered state legislatures have drawn lines so that one party will have more state representatives than is warranted by the statewide popular vote. To change the legislature, the out-of-power party must not only retain its majority in the districts where it now wins but must also get majorities in the districts that are stacked against them. In reality, one party will need a supermajority of votes to get the governmental reins while the party that gerrymandered can retrain control with a minority of the vote.

The Supreme Court has recognized that “partisan gerrymandering” may be “incompatible with democratic principles.” Even so, the 5-4 2019 decision Rucho v. Common Cause, written by Chief Justice Roberts, said that “partisan gerrymandering claims present political questions beyond the reach of the federal courts [Emphasis added].” If gerrymandering is a “political question” as the Court stated, you might think that there would be a political process to address its abuses, but the Court, for the good reason that there is none, did not suggest any. It is as if the umpires turned their backs and walked off the field saying that while it does not seem right, the home team can call balls and strikes. And, thus, due to the Court’s inaction, the constitutional rights to equal protection and due process do not govern partisan gerrymandering.

With the abdication of the United States Supreme Court, some who seek better, more democratic government have gone to state courts contending that partisan gerrymandering violates state constitutions. The results have been mixed. Some state supreme courts have adopted the U.S. Supreme Court reasoning and will not consider partisan gerrymandering cases, while a minority of state courts have held that partisan gerrymandering does violate their state constitutions.*

In some ways, however, this just compounds the problem. Many states can freely gerrymander while a few states cannot. As a result, the political parties of the gerrymandering states have even more power than if all states gerrymander. They get the unwarranted number of representatives from their states and still get the deserved number from the other states.

Gerrymandering not only makes votes unequal. It also increases uncompromising partisanship. In a “safe” district, a candidate does not have to appeal to the other side — or even to the center — to get elected. The candidate merely must win the party’s primary. The candidate does not ever have to appeal to the majority of the electorate, but only to the partisans voting in the primary. And when elected, members from a gerrymandered district can indulge their partisan ideology without political retribution. We become a more polarized country as a result.

It also affects the mindset of elected officials. In the early days of the country, the electoral franchise was limited. Property requirements prevented some people from voting, and, of course, women could not vote. They, however, were not unrepresented. The elected official represented everyone in the district because everyone in the district was counted whether they could vote or not.** We see that today in a modified form. Children cannot vote, but the elected official represents them. The representative theoretically represents everyone in the district. But with gerrymandering that is not how many elected officials operate.

Recent raucous town halls should remind us of that. Conservative commentators point out that calls went out for Democrats to attend the town halls, and therefore the town halls should be discounted. In essence, the commentators are saying that critics should be disregarded. After all, those critics do not vote in the only election that matters in a gerrymandered district—the primary. When elected officials feel that they do not have to listen to people in their districts, they no longer feel that they have to represent them. But gerrymandering encourages our elected officials to act as if they represent only those who will vote in a primary.

The next midterms will raise important issues. The Republicans worked hard to pass that Big, Beautiful Bill. They claim it is good for the country. The tax cuts will increase prosperity. The changes to Medicaid will improve the program. Those who voted for or support the law should be willing to explain and defend the BBB. Those who voted against or oppose it should also be willing to tell their constituents why. And, of course, there are other important issues. Increasingly, however, the next and future elections will not be decided by the issues but will be decided instead by which side can gerrymander more and better.

It was funny, and ludicrous, when Pat Paulsen, the comedian a generation or so ago, who “ran” for President, said, “I want to be elected by the people, for the people, and in spite of the people.” We now live in a world where “in spite of the people” is, alas, a dominant political strategy.

_________________________________________________________________

*Civics courses have taught that the lower houses of the national and state legislatures are the most democratic and representative of our governmental institutions because the fewest number of voters select these representatives in frequent elections. With gerrymandering, however, these bodies have become increasingly unrepresentative of the people. However, officials elected in statewide elections are not gerrymandered into office.

Civics courses have often concluded that the courts are the least democratic of our institutions since they are the most removed from the electorate. But when state supreme court judges are elected in statewide elections, not in gerrymandered districts, the state supreme courts are more democratically selected than gerrymandered legislatures.

** Trump has now suggested that not everyone within a district should be counted for the census. Undocumented people, e.g., have heretofore been included in the census count, and hence should have been represented by the elected representatives of their district. Trump wants to exclude those people from the census. Will he exclude children next?

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The Texas One-Step

Texas is not normal. This is demonstrated again by its present redistricting efforts. Republicans plan to redraw election boundaries so that Republicans will grab five more seats in Congress. The House delegation from Texas would then be eighty percent instead of the two-thirds it is now. (Trump won fifty-six percent of the vote in 2024.)  Democratic state legislators have two-stepped out of the state to prevent a quorum in the legislature so that it cannot operate. Threats of removal from office and fines have ensued. Even talk of losing parking places is circulating. National politicians have asked that the FBI be used to bring the Dems back to Austin although the legal ground for such federal action is not explained. Texas is not normal.

 The “normal” process is that states only redistrict after each decennial census. This must happen if the number of representatives apportioned to a state has changed because of a population shift. The number of representatives in the House has been capped at 435 since 1929. If one state’s population has grown so that it is entitled to more representation than it had previously, then some other state will have to lose representation, a decision made by Congress after the census. Both of those states will need to draw up new districts.

Even if the number of representatives has remained the same, the state may still need to redistrict because of population shifts within a state. Thus, each state redistricts every ten years after the decennial census. That does not mean, however, that redistricting cannot happen more frequently. Neither the Constitution nor federal law prohibits mid-decade redistricting.

Not all states, however, can easily redistrict mid-decade. While Texas is different (duh) and does not prohibit it, some states do restrict themselves to redistricting only every ten years. Furthermore, some states have tried to remove partisanship from redistricting by ceding districting authority to a nonpartisan commission. Some states have placed the commission mechanism into their state constitutions so that partisan legislatures cannot wipe out such commissions. If these states want to respond to the Texas gerrymander with their own, they first have to amend their state constitutions, and that can take years. For example, in New York a constitutional amendment must be passed by two successive legislatures and then adopted in a statewide vote of the electorate before it goes into effect.

Of course, the Texas goal is not just to redraw district lines. The aim is that more districts will send more Republicans to Congress. Originally gerrymandering was about individuals. Legislative districts were manipulated to have a particular person elected or defeated, but that changed over time to ensure that the member of a particular party, no matter who the individual candidate was, would win the seat. In a successfully gerrymandered district, the election is not about voter turnout, issues, or even personalities. The outcome is set by the district lines that are drawn before the election. The ballots are a mere formality. As a political scientist has said, “In elections, the voters choose the legislators. With gerrymandering, the legislators choose the voters.”

One of the pillars of our government will crumble further as gerrymandering spreads. The House of Representatives, with single-member districts and elections every two years, was the branch of the federal government that was supposed to be most in touch with the people and most responsive to shifts in political winds and fortunes. For example, after the1894 midterms elections, Democratic representation went from 218 in the House to 93. This kind of shift was possible then, but it is unimaginable today because few House seats are truly contestable. The overwhelming majority of seats are “safe.” A political scientist reports that fifty years ago only 25% of House seats were in uncompetitive, gerrymandered districts compared to 60% in 2016. In 2024, reports say that fewer than fifty House spots are not safe. The House as a representation of the people sensitive to changes in the political winds has largely vanished. With gerrymandering, the results are foreordained before an election. If Texas gerrymanders and other states seek to gerrymander to balance Texas, democracy will shrink further.

I see reports of elections from various autocratic countries where the leader gets a ludicrous percentage of the votes, often just short of 100%. The election, of course, is a sham. Meaningless voting means that that country is not a democracy. A gerrymandered district in the United States where the election is meaningless is not part of a democracy either.

We can expect that if Texas gerrymanders mid-decade to deliver more seats for the Republicans, other states will gerrymander further to increase Democratic seats. States that tried to find ways to redistrict in a nonpartisan fashion will feel foolish and try to change their systems. More gerrymandering will ensue. Elections will matter less and less. The House and democracy will further decline.

Just another reason to be depressed.

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Snippets

I was walking from the pickup counter to my car with a medium-sized, chocolate-and-vanilla, soft-serve twist cone. A thirteen-year-old boy asked, “Is that good?” “Delicious,” was my response. “This is what I usually get.” He, proudly it seemed, said that he was from Missouri and had never had one. I asked where he was from and he repeated, “Missouri.” I said, “No. Where in Missouri?” “Jeff” came the response from him and his nine-year-old brother. My blank looked elicited from their mother, “Jefferson City.” After the briefest pause the somewhat condescending, “The state capital of Missouri.” After an inquiry, the family said they had relatives in New Jersey and had decided to meet in the Poconos, which is close to the Garden State but not to Jeff. It was not my place to question vacation choices. I went to my car and licked the satisfying twist cone driving to my Poconos home. I decided that if they did not have vanilla-and-chocolate twist cones in Missouri, that was another reason not to live there.

I did not look forward to the history book group’s selection of Imperial Twilight: The Opium War and the End of China’s Last Golden Age (2018) by Stephen R. Platt. I expected a dry, confusing book, but Platt’s writing was so good that “page turner” came to mind. The book was more about the Chinese British background to the 1839-40 Opium War than about the war itself. I am not sure how much I will retain, but I learned a lot. For example, I had not known that Formosa, now Taiwan, was controlled by the Dutch in the 1660s. China succeed in driving away coastal pirates of that era who then settled in Formosa. After China built up its naval forces, it defeated the pirate armada, and Taiwan was incorporated into the Chinese empire.

Opium was originally an upper-class indulgence in China. Only a small fraction of the country used the drug, and few were debilitated by it. Most of the drug was imported from British India where the opium poppy grew well. The demand for opium increased when it was learned that it could be mixed with tobacco and smoked and not just eaten. The practice started in Java. The Dutch brought opium smoking to Taiwan. From there it spread to mainland China. Smoking, however, used more opium than eating it, and British profits soared.

Not surprisingly, the Brits were incensed when the Chinese official Lin Zexu sought to suppress opium use in the nineteenth century by confiscating the British opium. (Lin Zexu is a hero in Chinese textbooks. His birthday is celebrated in Taiwan, and a statue of him stands in New York City’s Chinatown with the inscription “PIONEER IN THE WAR AGAINST DRUGS.”) Britain then waged a successful war against China to keep open its profitable opium trade. A result was that the opium trade from India to China skyrocketed.

Since silver was the medium of exchange for opium, Chinese silver was draining out of the country. China responded by increasing its domestic production of the poppy, and cheap opium was available by the 1870s. Its use spread to all classes. This was not a happy-ending story with salutary lessons.

However, I was also struck by another fact in the narration. Stephen Platt reported that the Chinese during this time sentenced to death a person for “extreme indecorum.” Although I would not bring back that strict penalty, I would be in favor of that punishing that crime today…but only if I could administer it.

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To Kayfabe or Not to Kayfabe

Hulk Hogan’s death and comments about his cultural significance have inspired me to re-post two previous entries about the connections between professional wrestling and our politics and society. This is the second one. It first appeared on ajsdad.blog on April 22, 2024.

News over the last month has me wondering again about how people in important positions with at least a modicum of intelligence continue to maintain that the 2020 election was stolen. Some do so because they are not concerned with facts. John Eastman, one of Trump’s lawyers, comes to mind. A judge recently ordered the disbarment of John Eastman because, the judge wrote, Eastman, in representing Trump, made “false statements about the 2020 election without conducting any meaningful investigation or verification of the information he was relying upon.” (Emphasis added.) In short, he didn’t seem to care whether his statements were true or false.

Others, whether lawyers or not, do a lawyerly dance. (A bad metaphor; I have seen lawyers dance, and seldom is it a pleasing sight.) For example, news reports state that interviews for positions with the Republican National Committee have included the question: Was the 2020 presidential election stolen? Many have given an answer that does not answer the question by saying that there had been irregularities in that election that had created “cause for concern.” No evidence cited.

Recently that guy whom you would not recognize if you brushed shoulders with him on the street, Mike Johnson (reminder: He is Speaker of the House), met with Trump and issued vague statements about “election integrity.” This was said not with irony even though Johnson tried to undercut election integrity in 2020 by failing to vote to certify the vote, and Trump is the chief underminer of election integrity in our history. No facts were presented to indicate that we have a problem with our elections.

And then there are those who, when it suits them, maintain that they did not really believe their own falsehoods. Ronna McDaniel, after she resigned as co-chair of the Republican National Committee (as an unacknowledged act of “wokeism,” the RNC has both a male and female co-chair), was signed as a political commentator by NBC. A backlash ensued because throughout November and December 2020, McDaniel supported former President Trump’s efforts to throw out the election results. At one point she even called Michigan election officials to ask them to delay certifying the state’s results. As late as 2023 McDaniel said that Biden had not “won it fair.” Now, however, she smiles and says that she was only kidding and indicates that she never believed the election theft claims. “When you’re the R.N.C. chair, you kind of take one for the whole team, right?” Apparently, you “take one for the team” even when the team is trying to overthrow a democratic election.

A common thread through all of this is that Trump supporters feel that they can create their own “reality” (remember “alternative facts”?). Without any sense of irony, they seem to think that they can change “reality” when a such a change suits them. In considering this phenomenon, I did what any deep-thinking political scientist would do: I looked for guidance from pro-wrestling.

Shortly after Trump became president, I wrote that his rallies bore a strong resemblance to the “promos” of pro wrestlers. (See blog post of January 26, 2017, “Shut Up, You Elites.”) In that post I concentrated on the performances of Donald Trump. A wrestling fan since childhood, he sponsored two of the early WrestleManias.

Trump, however, has been more than a fan of pro-wrestling; he was featured in one of the WWE storylines. I don’t remember all the ins and outs of this “drama,” but as I recall, Vince McMahon, then the head of the WWE, backed one wrestler and Trump another. Either Trump or McMahon would have his head shaved depending upon which wrestler lost. The buildup went on for weeks or maybe even months, but, of course, no one could really believe that Trump was going to become bald to further wrestling ratings. The mere thought of it, however, whipped up the crowd, and in the end, Trump helped shave McMahon’s noggin.

The ties between Trump and McMahon are strong. Vince’s wife Linda McMahon donated $7 million to pro-Trump super PACs in 2016 making her one of the largest Republican donors. Trump responded by appointing her Administrator of the Small Business Administration in Trump’s first term, where she is said to have performed credibly. Now she is Secretary of Education, and I will restrain myself from saying anything further about that. The ties are so close that Abraham Riesman in his recent book RingMaster: Vince McMahon and the Unmaking of America reports that Vince McMahon may be Trump’s closest friend. McMahon “is said to be one of the only people whose call Trump takes in private, forcing his retinue to leave the room so the two old chums can chat in confidence.” It comes as no surprise that Trump is a member of WWE Hall of Fame, inducted in 2013.

The recent bits of news, however, made me think not just about the possible connections between Trump’s rally performances and pro-wrestling, but also about the connections between wrestling fans and Trump’s supporters. My cursory internet research found no data about the percentage of Trumpistas who are also devotees of the WWE or similar organizations. I did, however, come across an article by David S. Moon, a Senior Lecturer at the UK’s University of Bath entitled “Kayfabe, Smartdom and Marking Out: Can Pro-Wrestling Help Us Understand Donald Trump?” Political Studies Review, Volume 20, pp. 47-61 (2020). I am seldom astonished by anything in the academic world, but I was somewhat surprised to learn that there is an academic field of professional wrestling studies, with its own association and journal. However, what most interested me about Moon’s article was what it set out to explore: “How to explain a cynical American electorate’s engagement with and emotional investment in the campaign of such an obvious political fraudster.”

The exploration starts with the historical premise of pro-wrestling captured by the term kayfabe. Abraham Riesman explains: “Kayfabe (rhymes with ‘Hey, babe’) is a term of unclear linguistic origin. It emerged from the worlds of carnivals in the 1800s and, in its original definition, simply denoted the public-facing fictions of professional wrestling. . . . It referred to the business’s central conceit: that it was a legitimate, unscripted athletic competition.” (My understanding is that entire matches are not necessarily scripted but only the beginnings and ends with the middle improvised by the wrestlers.) Reisman further explains that a work was anything that was scripted (kayfabe), and a shoot was anything that was real.

The performers were expected to maintain their characters or storylines even outside the arena. They were “to stay in kayfabe” or “to kayfabe.” If a wrestler was billed as Native American, he couldn’t be known to be Italian. (The real name of Chief Jay Strongbow was Luke Joseph Scarpa.) If two wrestlers were supposed enemies, they could not be seen drinking together in off hours. In a famous incident, the fierce “enemies” “Hacksaw” Jim Duggan (James Edward Duggan, Jr.) and the Iron Sheik (Hossein Khosrow Ali Vaziri), broke kayfabe when they were caught driving together under the influence of drugs and booze. The WWE fired them not for the drugs and booze but for breaking kayfabe.

Of course, never in the history of wrestling did all the fans believe that the matches were genuine contests. The industry divided its fans into marks who believed wrestling was real and smarts who accepted it was fiction. No one knew how big each category was, but the assumption was that the majority were marks. That may never have been true, but Riesman reports “that wrestlers believed that fans believed it.” (Riesman’s emphasis.) Thus, the pro-wrestling industry thought that breaking kayfabe would undermine the industry.

The WWE itself, however, broke kayfabe. Vince and Linda McMahon did it to avoid regulation. When pretending to be an authentic sporting event, pro-wrestling came under the jurisdiction of state athletic commissions, but the WWE wanted to avoid the health regulations and other measures that were mandated for athletes. The McMahons publicly acknowledged kayfabe, and pro-wrestling now became “sports entertainment.”

The end of the pretense, however, was not the end of pro-wrestling as once feared. It goes suplexing along. Both Moon and Riesman conclude that kayfabe still exists, but in a new form. Moon states, “The term kayfabe has taken on a different meaning. It now describes a new form of audience engagement that involves in the first instance, a willing suspension of disbelief with which performers, promoters and the audience all ‘keep kayfabe’.”  

Might not this also describe much of our modern politics? Surely neither Trump nor his supporters can believe all the things he says — some of which is ignorant blathering and some of which is blatant lying. Some of his supporters now even acknowledge that they did not believe what they said when they echoed Trump. But Trump and his supporters keep kayfabe. They all suspend disbelief in order to act as if what is being said is an authentic reflection of the world. But what is the point to this? In wrestling it is to entertain and be entertained, but while politics may provide entertainment, it is far more serious than that.

Riesman also writes that wrestling fans today know it is fiction, but now there is a new status, which the author calls neokayfabe. Wrestling is a lie, yes, but the fans now believe that “the lie encodes a deeper truth, discernible to those few who know how to look beyond what’s in front of them. To these fans adept in reading the signs, another narrative emerges, and another beyond that. Suddenly, the pleasure of watching a match has less to do with who wins than with the excitement of decoding it.” The smarts now are different. In the past they understood the scripted nature of what they saw, but now smarts want to be insiders, learning the rules of the game, getting smart to how the business works. The audience tries to guess the outcome not from who is the better wrestler but from the promulgated story lines and from guesses or knowledge about who is favored and disfavored by the wrestling bosses and others who create the story lines.

It is a small jump from this to Trump’s politics. Many are convinced that what is said and done on the political surface is not real. It needs to be decoded. Other forces control. Call those forces the “deep state” or “conspirators in our law enforcement and justice system” or “communists” who promulgate environmental regulations. Of course, these political smarts don’t take Trump at his word—who could?—but you can understand the world if Trump’s pronouncements are decoded. It becomes a visceral activity, not a cerebral one. Wrestling is in essence a conspiracy, and so is politics, or at least Trumpian politics.

I thought these insights explained a lot about Trump supporters. They did not believe the fraudster but were operating in a world of neokayfabe where the surface hid the true meanings. However, as I thought more, I doubted my analysis. It butted up against data, information, facts. For example, polls indicate that most Republicans maintain that Trump did not try to undermine the election. Half say that he did not take top secret and classified documents from the White House. My notion was that Trump supporters were, in wrestling terms, smarts, but polling indicates many are not. Perhaps most undercutting my neokayfabe approach is that polls show that the percentage of diehard Trump supporters who believe that the 2020 election was fraudulent and stolen is increasing. In the wrestling world, fans go from marks to smarts, but in the political world, it has been the opposite.

 Of course, it is possible that Trumpistas stay in kayfabe even when responding to a pollster; that is, they don’t believe the election was stolen but will maintain the fiction when asked. But now I feel that I have entered the world of neokayfabe on top of neokayabe. Shouldn’t I take them at their word or are these many, many people also fraudsters? I feel like a cartoon character whose head is about to explode.

It is a strange world where one can make more sense of pro-wrestling than of aspects of the political world.

Posted on by rjonakait

Shut Up, You Elites

Hulk Hogan’s death and comments about his cultural significance have inspired me to re-post some previous entries about the connections between professional wrestling and our politics and society. Today’s thoughts originally appeared on ajsdad.blog, July 2017.

His hair is distinctive, one could say impossible, but there it is. A microphone is only a few inches from his lips, but he still leans into it. He does not really yell into the mike, but the voice is certainly not conversational. His words can be adamant; they can be bullying. He denounces enemies, enemies that stand in the way of greatness. He talks about the alliances he has entered or created and how strong they are. He makes promises about how he will perform, performances that he guarantees will be great. There is nothing nuanced in what he says; there are no ambiguities. It is a world of black and white; of good and bad; of greatness or failure. There is not a single shade of gray.

He pauses often, seemingly waiting for his audience to catch up. The audience reacts visibly and audibly. Each denunciation, each bragging claim elicits a hoot and a holler. He encourages the audience to mock his opponents, and the crowd often responds with a sing-song chant. This is an interactive, audience-participation performance. The speaker supplies the initial energy, but he soaks up energy as the frenzied crowd reacts to him.

The audience doesn’t really care about the specifics of his promises. They know that many can’t be kept. Indeed, they won’t be surprised if contradictory promises are made in a week or a month or that the alliances announced today are changed tomorrow or that the enemy previously castigated in absolute terms is now a dear friend with whom he has been secretly colluding. The audience is there not for truth, but for an attitude, and he supplies and feeds that attitude.

This audience seems bound together by something more than what most audiences have. They know that others, “nice” people, “successful” people, “elite” people, not only do not share their enthusiasm, those others, this group knows, think there is something wrong, ludicrous, maybe even shameful or dangerous and low class in what this audience feels. Here, however, together with this crowd and this performer who understands their visceral reactions, each can indulge the passions they all enjoy, and this brings them closer together.

Perhaps this is a Trump rally, but what I was trying to describe is pro wrestling. Since the rise of Trumpism, I have thought that those who are mystified by the appeal of Donald Trump might learn something by trying to understand the allure of professional wrestling.

The theatrics of professional wrestling remain strikingly similar to what they were in my childhood of Verne Gagne with his sleeper hold and his between bout pitches for a nutritional supplement. There were good guys (Wilbur Snyder, for example) and bad guys (definitely Dick the Bruiser) in a simulated reality of pain, danger, and improbable heroics. The business, however, has changed in some important ways.

What I watched growing up was largely regional. Different parts of the country had different wrestling companies. As a friend once said about a wrestler, “He was the world heavyweight champion of the greater Cleveland area.” The spectacle might have been similar everywhere, but the performers changed with the territory.

Vince McMahon of what is now the WWE (World, or maybe Worldwide, Wrestling Entertainment) changed that. His wrestling organization, started in the Northeast by his father, did not respect others’ territories. He drove many regional operations out of business or bought them out as they started to fail. WWE now dominates the business, and wrestling fans today all see pretty much the same product. The rise of cable television, the Internet, and other media has given more choice for news and entertainment and has fragmented popular culture. We don’t share as much in common as we once did.

Professional wrestling, with its nationalization, has gone in the opposite direction. The odds are overwhelming that its fans all know, and probably have opinions about, Kevin Owens, The Undertaker, the New Day, and Triple H. Wrestling is one of the few popular forces that is producing an increasingly unified cultural base, but a base that is out of sight to the rest of America.

The wrestling business has also changed because, while it is not trumpeted, it is not now a secret that the contests are not real sporting events. Back in the day, some fans may have thought that the spectacle was a legitimate sport, but today it is acknowledged that wrestling is “sports entertainment.” All but the most naïve of wrestling fans know that while the wrestlers can be athletic and do take risks, the violence is simulated, and the outcomes follow predetermined story lines. Wrestling’s popularity has fluctuated through the years, but its popularity does not seem to have been harmed because those involved no longer steadfastly maintain that it is “real.” Instead, it has always been a form of reality TV; something that pretends to be real.

The allure of pro wrestling to the outsider is hard to fathom, but it must have something to do with the power of simulated reality, violence, the simplicity of good and evil, outrageous characters, and the continuing tensions of soap opera. As epic poems, sagas, novels and movies show, we want, maybe need, superheroes and supervillains. At least some of the time, we don’t want nuance, caveats, and tough choices. During the wrestling shows, we have those heroes and villains and only easy choices. Who and what is good or bad is crystal clear.

It is not my point and beyond my abilities to analyze the allure of wrestling, and anyway, the appeal may largely be visceral and, thus, cannot be satisfactorily explained to those who don’t feel it. What should be recognized is that the spectacle has had an enduring appeal, and if I am right, that Trump at a rally performs much like a pro wrestler talking to the audience, and that audience responds much as a wrestling crowd does. It may make sense for those who can’t grasp Tumpism to try to grasp pro wrestling.

When Trump was gaining traction in the political arena, this wrestling fan thought back to one of the WWE storylines. It featured Donald Trump. Oh, yes, Trump has been a part of pro wrestling for quite some time. As I recall, Vince McMahon backed one wrestler and Trump another, and Trump and McMahon agreed to have his head shaved depending upon which wrestler lost some big event. This billionaire-baiting went on for weeks or maybe even months, providing us with the recently reprised and altered video of Trump “taking down” Vince McMahon in a moment of made-up macho madness. But of course, no one could really believe that Trump was going to appear bald to further wrestling ratings. The mere thought of it, however, whipped up the crowd. Politicos have studied Trump’s business records and pop culture critics have talked about The Apprentice, but pundits mystified about his appeal should also have been studying Trump on Monday Night Raw and then watching more of the wrestling shows.

Perhaps roots of Trump can be found in Huey Long and William Jennings Bryan, but we should also consider Gorgeous George. Gorgeous George was–perhaps next to Milton Berle–early television’s biggest star. Professional wrestling has always presented itself as what is now called reality TV, and GG was America’s first huge reality TV star. Gorgeous George (George Raymond Wagner), often shortened by TV announcers to Gorgeous or Georgie, was in wrestling parlance a “heel,” a bad guy. (Good guys are “babyfaces” or just “faces.”) But he broke stereotypes. In what was supposedly a testosterone-fueled world, his character displayed effeminacy. Flunkies would precede him up the arena’s aisles spraying perfume in his path. He entered the ring wearing elaborate robes no “man” would have been caught in—festooned with ostrich feathers, for example. No one but his valet was allowed to touch his robe, and the referee in a Chaplinesque routine would be repeatedly blocked from doing so. And he had that hair. It was some sort of yellow or straw color never seen in nature, and it was curled and primped in ways that only permanents and feminine implements could produce. His hair was secured with what otherwise would have been called bobby pins; his were labeled Georgie pins. Before a match, he would elaborately remove and toss them to the crowd. The hair was central to the character. The storylines often said that he would not fight someone unless the opponent contracted not to touch his hair. And late in his career, as other wrestlers were eclipsing him, he fought a match where the loser would have his locks sheared. Gorgeous lost the match and his hair.

There is a line leading from Gorgeous George to Trump. This path meanders with stops for Muhammed Ali and James Brown, both reportedly fans of Gorgeous. It goes through Ric Flair, William Regal, and other wrestlers. But although the line goes to him, Trump in some ways has flipped (piledriven?) the Gorgeous George persona on its head. Gorgeous played the heel to fill the arenas with those who came to jeer him. Trump, too, acts the heel, but not to the faithful in front of him. Trump unites with the audience, and together they act as the heel to all who are not Trump’s fans or are, like Vince McMahon, Trump’s real or imagined nemeses. It provided pleasure akin to that at a wrestling spectacle when he would say–and the crowd would join in denouncing–little Marco, that nasty woman, the lying press. The fantasy of pro wrestling, however, becomes dangerously real when Trump wants the audience to join him in jeering at and taking down legitimate news media. Wrestling stars in the ring have a made up and scripted role, but Trump seems not to realize the President of the United States is not a fictional character.

Gorgeous entered the arena to work and work up the audience. When the crowd frenziedly taunted him, he would shout back, “Shut up, you peasants.” The crowd would roar with delight. Trump’s has shifted the heel’s performance. His audience roars because Trump and his audience together seem to shout to all those that are not enthralled by him, “Shut up, you elites.”

Posted on by rjonakait · 1 Comment

Snippets

The reports from Texas repeatedly said that it was a girls’ Christian camp. Would the flooding tragedy have been different if it had been a boys’ camp? Or if it had been a Girl Scout camp? Or an unaffiliated camp?

Do the Christian parents who sent their girls to the camp view God differently now?

 Trump was surprised that the President of Liberia spoke English so well. He would no doubt also be surprised that English is an official language of over twenty African countries, including Botswana, Cameroon, Ghana, Kenya, Namibia, Nigeria, Rwanda, Tanzania, and Uganda.

I have been giving inspirational talks to youth groups, and I always tell them not to let others tell you what you can do. I tell them to consider Beethoven. People told him that he could not be a composer because he was deaf. But did he listen?

What is Beethoven doing now? Decomposing.

In his book A Good American Family: The Red Scare and My Father David Maraniss reports that Arthur Miller, who was part of David’s father’s college circle, thought that Americans tended to blame themselves and not the system. Thus, the country had no revolutionary movement even during the Depression. Even if that was true then, it is at best only partially true today. People still don’t blame the system if they are not thriving, but they don’t blame themselves. They blame the “other”—Blacks, browns, immigrants, Jews.

I know that “conservative principles” is an oxymoron. Instead, there is one conservative principle. That is to reduce taxes on the wealthy. To make that palatable the conservatives might also have to reduce taxes on the non-rich, but the goal is to reduce taxes on the rich. Conservatives may talk about other goals. For example, when they are not in power, they are concerned about the deficit and debt. But when given a choice about reducing the debt and reducing taxes on the rich, they always pick the latter. Conservatives also denounce government interference in private and business affairs, but when Trump does it, no conservative seems to point out Trump is acting against basic conservative principles. Although there are many examples, I thought this again when Trump suggested that he would block the construction of a new football stadium if the Washington football team did not change its name back to the Redskins. Apparently the private corporation should not make this decision. The president should.

Perhaps I am wrong about there being only one conservative principle. In Trump’s first term, he was clearly motivated to oppose any policy or initiative if it had been adopted by Obama. Now Trump-led conservatives are opposed to anything that looks like what they think is DEI.

Perhaps, you think, they have another principle: opposition to antisemitism. Although under the banner of antisemitism, Trump is trying to coerce or perhaps destroy various institutions, you should doubt whether antisemitism is the principle driving Trump’s actions. Recently during a House Education and Workforce Committee hearing, Rep. Mark Takano asked Education Secretary Linda McMahon whether refusing to hire a Holocaust denier at a university like Harvard would constitute an impermissible ideological litmus test. McMahon deflected by stating that “there should be diversity of viewpoints relative to teachings and opinions on campuses.” The administration’s preferred definition of antisemitism is one promulgated by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance. The IHRA gives examples of contemporary antisemitism. The third example: “Denying the fact, scope, mechanisms (e.g. gas chambers) or intentionality of the genocide of the Jewish people at the hands of National Socialist Germany and its supporters and accomplices during World War II (the Holocaust).” The fourth example: “Accusing the Jews as a people, or Israel as a state, of inventing or exaggerating the Holocaust.” So the Trump administration is against antisemitism, but favors “viewpoint diversity.” Apparently hiring the antisemite is ok because it will further viewpoint diversity. On the other hand, the real principle is that Trump wants to control as many elite institutions as he can.

“Times have changed and times are strange/Here I come, but I ain’t the same/Mama, I’m coming home. . . .” R.I.P. Ozzy.