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Ghostwriter Wanted (Some Collusion Required)
Recently The Daily Beast reported that Donald Trump is already excited about the idea of writing a “tell all” memoir:
[Trump] is planning on it being explosive and assumes (not without reason) that it will be a New York Times bestseller. And since the early days of his administration, he has conveyed his eagerness to get started on the project. “He sounded excited about it,” said one person who was present last year when the president made comments about writing a memoir. “He said it would sell better than even The Art of the Deal.”
Another source, who is a friend of Trump’s, said the president has casually discussed how such a book could be used to dish dirt and settle scores with his foes in the media, the Democratic Party, non-loyal Republicans, law enforcement, and even individuals in his own administration. Trump, according to this person, noted that this memoir could help “correct” the “fake news” already published in popular books and newspapers, and give him the opportunity to spin a juicy yarn on his time at the heights of power.
********
Mick Mulvaney stared at me from behind his desk in the chief of staff’s office. The man exuded honesty, integrity, and principle in a way matched only by the likes of McConnell, Nunes, or Ross.
“Blood test go OK?” he asked.
I nodded. “And you’re sure my family is all right?”
“You bet. I checked their handcuffs and gags myself. And there’s Netflix and Amazon in the safehouse.”
“Thank you.”
He peered down his granny glasses at me as the quizzing began. “What great author do you see Trump most resembling?”
I thought for a beat.
“Shakespeare?”
Mulvaney scowled. I tried again.
“Faulkner?”
The scowl deepened. “Think harder. In human history, who’s the greatest author in the English language—or any language, for that matter?”
I racked my brain. Then it came to me.
“Donald Trump?”
Mulvaney’s scowl transformed into a broad grin.
“Circle gets the square. You’ve read his previous bestsellers, I presume.”
“Naturellement.”
“Sorry?”
“Yes, I have.”
“What do you think the president’s greatest literary strength is?”
“I think he’s very good at creating fiction.”
“The president sees this book as a chance to set the record straight; to call out all the ‘fake news’ he’s been subjected to for the past three years.”
“Right.”
“Also he wants people to know he has really long fingers.” Mulvaney winked. There was a pause. “And everyone knows what that means.”
I forced a smile. There was another pause, until Mulvaney spoke, helpfully:
“It means he wants people to think he has a really big dick.”
“I think people are well aware that Mr. Trump is a really big dick.”
“Has one, has one,” Mulvaney corrected.
I made a note and took advantage of the lull to ask a question of my own.
“Will there be much back and forth with Mr. Trump while I’m writing? Normally I’d interview the subject at—”
Mulvaney cut me off. “We need someone who can run with this without needing their hand held. Dig?”
“No problem. But I assume, when it’s done, Mr. Trump will at least read it over to approve it?”
Mulvaney furrowed his brow. “We’ll give him the manuscript, yes.”
That furrowed brow worried me. “Are you saying he doesn’t have the attention span to read his own book?”
Mulvaney was silent, furrowing some more. I narrowed my gaze.
“He can read, right?” I asked.
“We’ll get Bill Barr to do a four page summary and someone can read it to him.”
I decided to let it go. “Any books he particularly admires that I might want to read, as models?”
“Two Corinthians.”
I wrote that down.
“Any thoughts on titles?” he asked while I was writing, as I thought he would, and I had some ready to pitch.
“Sure thing. How about, Trump: Almighty God-Emperor and Savior of Democracy (Part I)?”
“Bit subtle, don’t you think?”
“How about No Collusion: How I won the Presidency Without Really Trying?”
“I like it, but a bit narrow. Think bigger.”
“Mein Kampf?”
“Love that. Might be taken, though—we’ll do a copyright search.”
“Any topics you’d like me to avoid?”
“Just his refusal to release his tax returns, his multimillion dollar deals with Russia that he lied about to the American people, the $50 million bribe he offered Putin in the form of a penthouse apartment, the money laundering for Russian oligarchs, the real estate fraud, felony campaign finance violations, hush money for mistresses, anything having to do with abortions he might have paid for, the Trump Foundation, the Trump inauguration, his previous marriages, his temper, his early onset dementia—“
I stopped him. “I get it,” I said. “And I presume there will be an audiobook too?”
“For sure. The President will read it himself.”
My eyes must have gotten big, because Mulvaney’s got narrow. “He can read!” he barked, reading my mind.
“Of course.” A coughing fit came over me. Mulvaney looked rattled. He looked down, mumbling to himself, and I noticed for the first time that in his hand he had prayer beads. “If they’ll let him record it from Sing Sing,” he muttered.
“What’s that?” I asked.
“Nothing,” he said, regaining his composure. “Anyway, we can always get Alec Baldwin to do it.”
I nodded. He seemed mollified. “Any other questions, or can we button this thing up?”
“Just one. Why don’t you just hire Tony Schwarz again?”
Mulvaney’s lip curled into a sneer. Actually, it may have done that around 1967 and been fixed that way ever since.
“That is a name we don’t mention around here. The man you’re talking about proved to be a shameless publicity hound and traitor to his country. Wouldn’t you agree?”
I hesitated.
“We’re also looking into that rumors he might be Jewish. Jared’s on the case.”
I was confused. “But isn’t Jared—”
Mick cut me off again. “It’s because of people like Schw—I mean, that author—that we’ve developed the GLAS protocol.”
“GLAS protocol?” I asked.
“Ghostwriter Loyalty Assurance System. It’s all in the fine print in the contract. A microscopic silicon chip will be inserted behind your ear, subcutaneously. Should you violate the terms of your contract at any time—say, by getting all uppity and mouthing off to the press—a small electrical shock will be applied remotely, as a reminder of your obligations. Should you continue to act out, the voltage can be increased accordingly. And should you prove completely uncontrollable, the chip is capable of releasing a nerve agent into your bloodstream that will induce a violent and painful death within 24 hours.”
“Is that legal?”
“Normally no. But as a great man once said, it’s not a crime when the president does it. Cool with that?”
“Actually, that’s not much worse than some of the deals I’ve signed in the past.”
“Anything else? I have to get over to the Oval Office and look at paint swatches for the re-education camps.”
“One last thing. Not to be crass, but…..about the pay?”
Mulvaney waved his hand dismissively. “Oh, there’s no money upfront. It’s an honor just to be asked to write this book, don’t you think?” He continued before I could answer. “But don’t worry: you’ll make a killing in profit-participation. It’s the same deal President Trump has always given his contractors. Ask anyone in Atlantic City.”
I frowned. He seemed to sense my anxiety.
“Hey, if you can’t trust Donald Trump, who can you trust?”
I threw up in my mouth a little.
Mulvaney opened a desk drawer. “So, if there’s nothing else, it’s just a matter of dotting i’s and crossing t’s…..”
He pulled out a fountain pen. I could see that it was filled with my own blood, which the White House medical staff had drawn earlier. He held out the pen and slid the contract across the desk, nodding for me to sign on the line which was dotted. “Just think,” he said, smiling, “you’ll always be remembered for your part in telling the Trump story.”
As I took the pen, I smelled sulfur.
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The Right Wing Loop of Malicious Ignorance
Those of you who have argued politics with strangers on the Internet (try it, it’s fun!) will be familiar with the following dynamic:
1. You post something that suggests that Donald Trump might not be the best president ever.
2. They reply with an angry, insulting remark—usually containing an obscenity, often involving your mother and farm animals.
3. Trying to stay on the high road, you reply with evidence to support your side of the argument, often in the form of a link from the New York Times, Washington Post, New Yorker, Atlantic, New Republic, etc. You know: credible journalism.
4. They sneer at the very thought, suggesting—without reading the piece, of course—that these publications are worthless even to line a birdcage, seeing as they are tools of a vast liberal conspiracy.
At that point I typically bail, as there is no point carrying on a discussion with someone engaged in the right wing’s infinite loop of malignant ignorance.
This insidious phenomenon has been much remarked upon, but to recap quickly:
Because the Right is propagating an ideology that runs contrary to demonstrable reality (on climate change, economics, foreign policy, immigration, nuclear proliferation, et al), when confronted with facts that they cannot logically refute, right wingers habitually adopt a strategy of murdering the messenger. In the Republican world, even the most legitimate news organizations—like the aforementioned publications and their kin, the very gold standard of American journalism—are all lower than supermarket tabloids, controlled as they are by George Soros, the Clintons, and Barbra Streisand. Not a word in them can be taken seriously, or even merits the energy to move one’s lips to read.
It’s a perpetual motion disinformation machine which no critical data can penetrate, because such data is heresy by definition.
Needless to say, this dynamic is toxic for a functioning democracy, as it makes intelligent debate impossible. It is an insidious, deliberately Orwellian subversion of truth as a common metric and a serious danger to the health of the republic. And Donald Trump, an inveterate, pathological liar and con man par excellence, is both the ultimate product of this mentality and its perfect standard bearer, the drum major marching at the head of the parade of proud Know Nothings that the modern GOP has become.
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Der Roof Ist On Fire
From the very beginning of the Trump presidency there have been widespread fears that he would eventually reach a point of such pressure, and of such panic at the threat of being exposed as the criminal he is, that he would precipitate some kind of fake international crisis to distract the public and justify seizing imperial-like powers. A Reichstag fire is the usual metaphor, although the Gulf of Tonkin or sinking of the Maine would also suffice.
In many ways, the “national emergency” over the border wall is that long awaited, all-but-inevitable Reichstag fire.
Yes, there are other motives in play. Obviously, Trump is desperate to fulfill his signature campaign promise—or what Rep. Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) more correctly calls “a campaign applause line”—and satisfy his xenophobic base. As part of that, he is trying to save face and somehow spin his humiliation at the hands of Nancy Pelosi and the Democrats as a “win,” a contortion that strains the credulity of even his reliably slavish followers (See Ann Coulter.)
But at the same time, the wall is undeniably a means of distracting the public from the slowly closing jaws of the Mueller probe and Trump’s myriad other existential problems on the legal and counterintelligence fronts. It’s no coincidence that his rambling, free association Rose Garden announcement came hot on the heels of several bad moments for the White House.
One was this week’s court hearing for Paul Manafort, where the usually sphinx-like Mueller team revealed the centrality of Manafort’s coordination with Konstantin Kilimnik to their case. (“This goes, I think, very much to the heart of what the special counsel’s office is investigating,” prosecutor Andrew Weissmann told the judge.)
Another was Andrew McCabe’s jawdropping revelation that the FBI and DOJ actively looked into recruiting Cabinet members, and even Mike Pence, in an effort to invoke the 25th Amendment and carry Trump out of office rolled up in duct tape.
And lastly, there was Friday’s revelation, in a court filing, that the special counsel has proof that Roger Stone had direct contact with Wikileaks and Russian hackers. (News that the White House likely knew was coming. Trump is frequently at his craziest right before big, damning stories like that drop.)
So the camouflaging aspect of the “national emergency” should not be underestimated. Indeed, the mere fact that I am writing about it—even if just to point out its insidiousness—is proof that it is at least partially working to steer the national conversation away from more substantive matters, especially those involving his legal jeopardy.
I understand that the Reichstag comparison is not perfect, in that the burning of the German parliament was a manufactured pretext for the Nazis to consolidate power, not primarily a Wag the Dog style distraction from other issues per se. But in another way, the comparison is very apt, in that this fake emergency represents Trump literally usurping powers that rightly belong to Congress. If he is allowed to succeed in doing that, where will he stop?
But here’s the thing about the Reichstag comparison. By definition, it presupposes that the invented crisis will fool people. That’s the whole enchilada—the whole reason that a despicable regime would manufacture a distraction of that sort.
The wall is not quite doing that. Outside of Trump’s base, which would believe him if he pissed down their collective throats and told them it was lemonade, the majority of Americans see right through this idiotic non-emergency.
So it turns out Trump can’t even misdirect effectively.
When Bush, Cheney, Rummy, Wolfowitz and the rest of Team Slam Dunk told the American people the epic lie that Saddam Hussein definitely definitely absolutely positively 100% had weapons of mass destruction, they at least did a reasonably convincing job of it……until our troops got on the ground in Iraq and no WMD were anywhere to be found.
Next to Trump, though, they look like geniuses.
But does Trump really need to bother with misdirection? His followers don’t need anything to distract them, as they readily swallow his lies whole. The sentient majority of the American public knows he’s full of shit and isn’t fooled by any of this. I suppose there is a small slice of the electorate that remains susceptible to his bullshit, but they are statistically insignificant.
For as we’ve seen, neither the facts nor the will of the majority seem to matter anymore in these United States. And if the Supreme Court permits this blatantly unjustified usurpation of authority, they will be handing Trump—of all people—a serious escalation of imperial powers, regardless of whether the American people know it’s a scam or not.
Chancellor Schicklgruber never had it so good.
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Oh, How Our Standards Have Fallen
My Facebook friend Cecilia Di Trastevere recently posted this photo. It’s funny, but also deeply sad—and instructive.
Remember 2016, when so many people—large segments of the press and punditocracy very much included—were saying of Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, “Ah, they’re both really bad.” Do you remember that? Because I do.
I think the last two years have made it resoundingly clear how utterly untrue and dishonest that was. Even if one didn’t care for Hillary (and full disclosure, I was a fervent supporter) the false equivalence was absurd. Now we are suffering the results.
These days, that mode of thought is so shockingly dated that it might as well be Spanish cartographers warning Columbus that he was going to sail off the edge of the earth. Even people who thought Donald Trump would be a bad president didn’t think he’d be this bad. On the contrary: especially among conservatives and right wingers who loathed Hillary (and yet weren’t that bothered by Donald), the mantra was that he would BECOME presidential. That he would “pivot.” He was supposed to pivot during the primaries, then after he secured the nomination, then after he took office….
Yet he never did.
It took a long time for some folks to admit that he wasn’t ever going to pivot, or become presidential, or drop the incendiary demagogic rhetoric, because all those things were simply beyond his ken. He is what he is, and that’s all he would ever be.
And what he is is a troglodyte.
One may dislike Hillary Clinton or her policy positions, or both, or think Donald Trump—for all his faults—is better equipped to carry out the kind of policy agenda that conservatives desire. (I’ll leave out those who admire Donald Trump personally because this discussion is confined to people in their right minds.)
But after watching him in office for two years, even Republicans who support the agenda that Trump is carrying out on their behalf—tax cuts, deregulation, and all that rot—cannot possibly contend that this man isn’t a willfully ignorant cretin, however useful he has been to them.
(Again leaving out the Kool-Aid drunk, criminally insane, and neo-fascist white supremacists, which I realize excuses the majority of the GOP.)
We know that even the Republican leadership in Congress privately ridicules him, alternating with wee-hours-of-the-night handwringing over the damage he is doing to the country, if only when he hurts the GOP’s own “brand” with self-inflicted wounds like the unconscionable 35-day federal shutdown…..not to mention the bodyblows he has delivered to the rule of law, respect for a free press, and the credibility of the intelligence community, just to name a few. (Their culpability in the Faustian bargain they have made is a topic for another day. Suffice it to say that there is a looming housing shortage in the Ninth Circle of Hell.) For those few Republicans with a shred of principle or conscience—admittedly, a group that could meet in a broom closet—Trump continues to be a deeply worrying threat to the very foundations of American democracy and the place of the United States on the world stage.
For the rest of us, he is something even worse: a man so manifestly unfit to govern; so proudly stupid; so malignantly narcissistic; so lacking in simple human empathy; so pathologically dishonest, unjustifiably arrogant, borderline mentally defective, corrupt, incompetent, racist, and petty that it beggars the imagination. (And those are his good points.) Not surprisingly, he is presiding over a kakistocracy even worse than the worst predictions from the most pessimistic observers when he pulled out an unlikely Electoral College win with some help from guys in furry hats in November 2016.
And that “rest of us” now comprises a resounding 63% of the country who disapprove of the job Trump is doing in office. And that statistic fails to capture the depth of the unhappiness. That isn’t garden variety “disapproval” of presidencies past. It’s not people sneering at Carter putting solar panels on the White House roof, or criticizing Reagan’s showdown with air traffic controllers. It’s to-the-marrow outrage and panic.
You do still hear a few Republican deadenders defensively argue that “Hillary would have been even worse.” But with all due respect, no one with detectable brainwave activity can seriously make that claim, not even diehard conservatives. One senses that, when they say that, with arms crossed like angry toddlers, even they know it’s risible. But they cling to it nonetheless because, frankly, they got nothing else. They have bought into this travesty, foisted it on the rest of us, and now have no other option than to double down, or else admit their colossal mistake and prostate themselves in abject repentance. (Not a move typically in the right wing quiver.)
From caging babies to robbing the poor to give to the rich to handing the Kremlin top secret information in public view to gleefully accelerating the ecological demise of the entire planet to reducing the federal government to a shambles in an effort to build a magical wall, at every turn Trump has been even more jawdroppingly bad than we imagined he would be.
So we’ve now gone from “Clinton is no better than Trump” to “Any functioning adult would be better than Trump.”
But a lot of people already realized that in 2016.
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Misogyny: Alive and Well
MISOGYNY: ALIVE AND WELL
The very first post in this blog back in May 2017 was about misogyny. I’m sorry to report that it has not been eradicated in the twenty-one months since then.
Maybe next year.
In retrospect, when we consider the steep drop from the false equivalence between Hillary and Trump that was prevalent in 2016, to our present understanding that a putrid bag of dog feces would be a better president than he is, the role of simple misogyny in Trump’s “victory” is impossible to deny.
I know there were a lot of factors in play. I know it’s a fool’s errand to pin the blame any single one of them. But at the same time, it’s hard to dispute one basic argument:
A male candidate with the exact same profile as Hillary—same strengths, same flaws, same everything—would never have lost to Trump, even with the same tactical errors in swing states, even with Comey’s Halloween announcement, even with the Russians helping the GOP.
I realize I am violating Michael Lewis’s “undoing project” principle (I cite it frequently, because it is frequently germane), but in this case it is a useful thought experiment.
I bring this up not to reopen old wounds or re-fight old battles, but as a reminder going into 2020 that we would do well not to repeat the kid gloves treatment we as a people gave Donald Trump, and the disproportionate abuse to which we subjected everyone else.
By the same token, it’s sweet that the one American politician who has been able to best Trump, to frustrate him, to humiliate and embarrass him over and over again on the national and even global stage, is a woman—and a 78-year-old, immensely experienced, veteran Democratic woman to boot. Which means Nancy Pelosi shares more than a little in common with a certain presidential candidate from four years ago, for whom she now inevitably serves as a surrogate in the public imagination.
After years of mostly low-key public service in terms of the awareness of the average American, the past two months have seen a massive, out-of-nowhere groundswell of love and admiration for Nancy. (Forgive me for using Trump’s devastating nickname for her.) The reason, per above, is her demonstrated ability to beat him like a conga at Club Babalu. And let us recall that there was talk after the midterms, briefly, that she shouldn’t even get a second term as speaker. That speculation now looks shortsighted and uninformed at best, as people who know politics, and who know Pelosi, might have told us.
But even as Nancy Pelosi has become a progressive darling, I have already heard bile and hatred spewed at her for no other discernible reason than the fact that she is a woman. Sure, there are plenty of male Democrats who get shit from Trump Nation, but there is a special edge to the hatred toward Pelosi, the same as there was a special edge to the hatred of Hillary.
Gee, I can’t imagine what they have in common.
Oh, right—vaginas.
It’s a pointed reminder that the toxic sexism that was aimed at Hillary has not gone away.
Few of these critics can name even one policy position of Pelosi’s that they oppose, or really anything about her, except that she hypocritically has a wall around her Pacific Heights home in San Francisco…..which it turns out, she doesn’t.
Barack neither. Yet that lie is so alive and well that Trump himself felt emboldened enough to repeat it on national television during the State of the Union address, omitting only their names, since his audience knew full well to whom he was alluding.
Some of this bile aimed at Nancy, not surprisingly, has come from Republican women, just as there were plenty of Republican women consumed with vicious, full-throated hatred for Hillary. The self-loathing mentality of female Trump supporters would require a book-length investigation by a world-class team of psychiatrists, but for the short version, I refer you to Frantz Fanon’s theory of the colonized mindset.
While we’re on that topic, however, our famously fork-tongued fake President takes great delight in the idea that he can even get women to buy his sexist bullshit, often crowing that he won 53 percent of the female vote. Hold on to your hats, but he’s not telling the truth. That’s actually the percentage of white women who voted for him. 96% of black women voted for Hillary; Trump’s real share of the female vote was 41%.
But maybe he’s using some sort of Dred Scott 3/5ths-of-human being calculation.
Of course, 41% is still appallingly high, given Trump’s demonstrable animosity and contempt for the female of the species. But such are the depths and breadth of misogyny in our country, even among women themselves.
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Sending Don Spelunking
In the three short weeks since the Democrats took control of the House, Nancy Patricia D’Alesandro Pelosi has repeatedly owned Trump, including two big wins last week alone—Trump’s surrender over the State of the Union and his capitulation over the shutdown—not to mention numerous televised zingers that made him look like the floundering bozo he is. (“The beaded curtain”…..”Don’t characterize the strength I bring”…..“I don’t think he knows what it means,” etc.) Even though he will now get to give the SOTU before Congress that he so openly covets, Trump’s meek acknowledgment that he can only do so if Mistress Nancy says it’s OK was memorably emasculating.
It’s clear that Trump—an inveterate misogynist with massive emotional and psychosexual insecurities—has no idea how to handle a strong woman who refuses to blink at his juvenile bullying, or kowtow, or play any of his stupid games (except when she does and is better at them than him). Watching Pelosi bat him around like a cat playing with a mouse is some small consolation after the bitterness of Hillary’s defeat, and of course an encouraging omen for what the next two years might bring.
It takes nothing away from Mrs. Pelosi’s skill to note that Trump got himself in this mess in the first place. Writing in The New Yorker, John Cassidy succinctly summarized the irony of our fearless leader’s latest self-inflicted wound:
The rabid support of his anti-immigrant base is what sustains him, and with Robert Mueller’s report looming it is arguably more critical to him than ever. But with every day that the shutdown continues Trump is becoming more unpopular in the country at large, and increasingly cut off from other elected Republicans who might otherwise be inclined to rescue him. Caught in a trap of his own making, it’s unclear who is left to offer him a way out. Sad!
So it was that Trump was, for once, forced to bow to reality, whose existence he usually manages to avoid even acknowledging. It was sweet to see.
Of course, this settlement is a temporary solution only, one that merely kicks the metaphorical can down the proverbial road for three weeks. But in the interval perhaps Trump can find a more lasting way to save face, or at least hope people forget. (Good luck with that.) He may yet—as he hinted—declare a national emergency (and/or try to divert federal funds, or misuse the US military) though the pushback will likely be even worse than if he had done so weeks ago. And we shall see if he can even stick to his promise, as Ann Coulter—his other chief female tormentor, this one on the right, who slut-shamed him into this debacle to begin with—immediately slammed him for today’s decision, calling Trump “the biggest wimp ever to serve as president.”
But if Trump reverses himself yet again, does that mean he’s not a wimp, or that he’s an even bigger one, after caving to Coulter, then Pelosi, then Coulter again?
Trump may be a bad negotiator and a spineless punk, but he’s very good at “Mother May I.”
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The Hardware Problem
is it possible for a machine to be “conscious” in the way that humans are?
I don’t see why not.
(Whether or not humans themselves are truly “conscious” in the first place is a whole different question. Pretend there’s a long tangent about philosophical zombies here.)
This issue takes us into the realm of philosophy of mind, and specifically, what the Australian philosopher David Chalmers memorably dubbed “the hard problem.” To wit: how can that squishy mass of gray matter inside your cranium give rise to a situation in which you feel sad when you hear Hank Williams, or moved by Henry Fonda’s speech at the end of The Grapes of Wrath, or joyous when you watch your child takes her first steps?
Many many others have pondered the same thing over the millennia, but no one previously had summed it up quite so pithily as Chalmers. What is consciousness anyway? This dilemma, as he noted, is much more complicated and daunting than “the easy problems” of understanding how the brain goes about its routine business of translating trillions of electronic impulses per fraction of a second to coordinate the insanely complex machine that is a human body. (Yeah, super easy to grasp all that.)
But the “hard problem” is very very hard indeed. It stands at the intersection of neuroscience, philosophy, and religion, encompassing such disparate concepts as mind-body dualism, the Buddhist idea of anatta, the myth of a coherent Self, and the absence of free will…..all stuff that will keep you up nights in a cold sweat if you think about it too hard, unless you’re stoned to gills, or have passed through to the other side and acceptance of the undeniable reality of Nothingness.
You won’t be surprised to learn that we are far from solving this riddle. (Maybe a machine will crack it someday, ha ha.) But in the mean time, I see no reason why a sufficiently complex and sophisticated supercomputer—in other words, an artificial intelligence by the very textbook definition—could not have just as much consciousness as a human being. That that consciousness is generated by a mass of silicon chips rather than organic tissue strikes me as utterly irrelevant; it is the complexity of the system, not the nature of the materials comprising it, that is germane. I put no stock in the usual fairy tale argument citing some mystical, metaphysical “spirit,” or soul, that is the ghost in the machine.
Indeed, there may already be machines that are “conscious” by our generally accepted definition of the term, but simply are as yet unable to communicate that to human beings. Or perhaps they are communicating it, and the mass of humanity hasn’t yet gotten the memo. (I’ll keep checking my email.)
The Turing test is supposed to be a way of telling man from machine, but even that does not purport to establish the existence of consciousness or lack thereof. (A computer might fool you without being “conscious” by the common understanding of the term.) It is also another marker of how much value we put in this arbitrary—dare I say, bigoted—distinction between “natural” and “artificial” life. I can imagine the day when the entire term “artificial” will be politically incorrect, if not outright verboten, when it comes to discussing intelligence, consciousness, or ontology full stop.
So please add a new “ism” to the identity politics order of battle: matterism, let’s call it (a cousin of speciesism), the discriminatory view that only human beings are truly conscious, or at the very least that the consciousness of silicon-based life is inferior to that of carbon-based life.
It ain’t necessarily so.
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Why I Am Fine with the Robot Uprising
How far back goes the fear of machines rising up and overtaking humanity? Certainly to the Industrial Revolution, and I’ll wager all the way back to a Kubrickian scene of prehistoric man realizing, “Whoa, Grok can use bone as weapon!”
Indeed, war between man and machine is practically the single most prevalent subject in all of science fiction, in a dead heat with extraterrestrial life and space travel. In fact, it is the very plot of the 1920 stage play that gave us the word robot, ”R.U.R,” by the Czech playwright Karel Čapek, derived from the Slavic word “robota” [rah-boat-ah], meaning “work.”
And man’s fear of uppity robots shows no signs of abating—on the contrary. As technology continues to advance at a dizzying rate, the issue has passed from dystopian science fiction to a genuine worry that occupies prestigious scholars, futurists, public intellectuals, and other thinkers, often leading to exceedingly grim forecasts of the rise of a godlike artificial intelligence that renders humans extinct, or makes us wish we were.
So the question before us is this:
Would that really be such a big deal?
I am not bothered by the robot uprising. I view it as a natural (though not inevitable) next step in the evolution of life on Planet Earth. In the same way that dinosaurs gave way to mammalian life and eventually homo sapiens, why shouldn’t carbon-based life eventually give way to something superior….and is there any reason that superior form of life might not be silicon-based?
There is panic at this idea. I get that. But if those machines are indeed superior, doesn’t Darwin demand that they rise to the top of the pyramid? I’m sure veal are not happy at their place on the food chain either, but if they don’t like it, they should have developed opposable thumbs.
Thus it is very possible we are living in the twilight of carbon-based life as the dominant force on Planet Earth. Which is convenient, as we are about to make the planet uninhabitable for such life, leaving it in a state where only machines can survive anyway.
But you say: even if they are intellectually and physically superior, shouldn’t we still be alarmed at the notion of being enslaved by sadistic robot masters? Yes, but It’s far from a foregone conclusion that that is the form that the Silicon Caliphate will take. Much of mankind has been enslaved by sadistic human masters throughout recorded history, which is kind of worse, friendly fire-wise. Do we really think our robot overlords are going to be more horrible? Sure, The Matrix would be a miserable existence, but so was Zimbabwe under Mugabe, Chile under Pinochet, or Mississippi under the Confederacy.
In short, given the mess humans have made as masters of the planet, I’m not sure that robots would do worse.
I’m sure we’ll make great pets.
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Manufacturing Crisis
We all know that nothing is beyond the pale for Trump, that he is perfectly willing to do extreme and indefensible things that no previous President in modern times would have contemplated, or gotten away with. So there is no reason to think he won’t declare a recklessly unjustified national emergency for his own self-aggrandizing ends. Especially when his only other option is humiliating defeat.
Needless to say, the only “crisis” is one of Trump’s own making, which—unfortunately for him—a plurality of Americans seem to recognize. (Not counting the broader crisis of his residency in the White House in the first place.) But none of that matters.
What I suspect will happen is as follows:
With victory impossible and no compromise that allows him to save face, Trump will cave on the shutdown while portraying his capitulation as heroism.
He will continue to blame the Democrats but claim that he is personally re-opening the government in order to alleviate the pain of the federal workforce and the country at large, even though he is the one who inflicted that pain.
His disciples will cheer. The GOP will go along with the farce and the right wing media will fall in line and spread the lie.
At the same time, Trump will declare a national emergency and try to use federal troops or other resources to build the wall, diverting funds from other federal resources in the process, improperly if not outright illegally.
This he will depict as a clever maneuver that enables him to go around the “obstructionist” Democrats and deliver on his signature campaign promise despite the triple-thick canopy of bureaucratic red tape, while simultaneously “saving” the country from the Democrat-driven shutdown. (Those commie bastards!) His base will also eat that up, ignoring its fundamental dishonesty and anti-democratic nature.
That declaration of a national emergency will in turn trigger an avalanche of lawsuits and other countermeasures challenging his right to take such action. A gobsmacking legal shitshow will ensue, contributing to what is already a slow-motion constitutional crisis in progress.
I want to be very clear. I am not at all sure the courts will prevent Trump from carrying out such an order, however absurd. They might not. I was quite confident that the Supreme Court—like several lower courts before it—would shoot down Trump’s ridiculous and patently unconstitutional Muslim ban. Instead, five right-leaning justices tied themselves in knots trying to explain why it wasn’t a ban based on religion at all, even as Trump repeatedly insisted it was.
So Trump may prevail in this “national emergency” ruse as well. But it won’t be pretty. And regardless of outcome, the battle could drag on for months.
Ironically, the border crisis will be yet another maelstrom bedeviling this administration, along with the Mueller probe, the emoluments case, investigations by the US Attorney for the Southern District of New York and the New York State Attorney General, and the coming wave of new investigations by the angry, subpoena-wielding Democratic majority in the House of Representatives. None of which, it goes without saying, is good for Team Trump.
Like they say on the tee-vee, winter is coming.
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Is This America?
I am angry, but I am also filled with sorrow.
Sorrow over a travel ban based on religious belief, no matter how gymnastically its defenders in the courts and media say it isn’t (though not the administration itself, which gleefully announces its bigotry)….
Sorrow that we are forcibly taking small children from their mothers and fathers, lying about the rules that allegedly “demand” that we do so, housing these children in cages, denying them human contact, and disappearing them into a bureaucratic black hole from which they may never be reunited with their parents….
Sorrow that one such seven-year-old child died of dehydration and exhaustion in the custody of the US government. I’ve heard all the excuses the administration and its supporters have made for that. But there is no excuse for that….
Sorrow (and my stomach turning) at the sight of US law enforcement agents firing CS gas across the border at indigent, barefoot children, and at the demonization of refugee families fleeing violence and anarchy for which the US bears significant blame in the first place, and at blaming these desperate, ragged people for their own plight and their own suffering….
Sorrow at the vilification of immigrants legal and otherwise full stop, a process grounded in nothing but mindless hate, and a betrayal of the most basic principles this country claims to stand for…..
Sorrow at the obliteration of anything resembling a coherent foreign policy, and as result, the incalculable damage to American security; at the wanton smashing of diplomatic relationships carefuly cultivated over more than seventy years; at the abdication of American leadership, at the abandonment of loyal allies, and at the toadying to dictatorships and police states and the encouragement of despots….
Within that, sorrow at the toleration—and tacit endorsement—of the brutal murder of a journalist, and not just one, in the larger picture. Sorrow at the transformation of the United States into a satellite state of the Russian Federation and the gobsmacking, overt subservience toward its leader….
Sorrow at the absolute celebration of Dickensian greed, the con game perpetrated on the good people of this country, the shameless implementation of a Robin Hood-in-reverse economic policy that mortgages the future of our children and grandchildren for the enrichment of an already obscenely rich few….
Sorrow at the wanton despoiling of our air and water in exchange for mere pieces of silver, and the ostrich-like denial of settled science in order to squeeze out those short term profits, even if it means the destruction of the very planet itself….
Sorrow at the inexplicable elevation of this godawful family—stinking like a fish from the head down—to the very pinnacle of public life, and at the endless Mummers Parade of criminals, grifters, gangsters, and swine they have brought with them and installed in positions of power as public “servants,” very often with the unabashed intention of destroying the very agencies they command. The steady exodus of these same cretins in disgrace—and sometimes in shackles—one after another, speaks to the kind of people this administration attracts….
Sorrow at the underhanded subversion of democracy, a campaign that, as George Packer points out, is perhaps the most dangerous threat of all in that it obliterates our fundamental means of remedying all these other problems….
Sorrow at the steady drumbeat of attacks on the rule of law, on a free press, and on free speech in general. Sorrow at the destruction of truth and objective reality itself as common metrics, and the endorsement of shameless deceit and hypocrisy as the new normal….
Sorrow at the divisiveness roiling our nation, though I continue to reject the wildly disingenuous false equivalence that “both sides are equally to blame.” (Fine people on both sides, you know.) In other words, sorrow at the resurgence of racism, misogyny, bigotry, and xenophobia, and at how eagerly so many of our countrymen have thrilled to this appeal to the basest and most vile human instincts. In so doing they have revealed the ugliest possible face of our country, one that we all wanted to pretend wasn’t there—the racists and bigots included—but that has reared its head with a vengeance, giving the lie to our self-flattering delusions of collective enlightenment.
I say “our” because we as Americans are all culpable. We cannot slough responsibility off on our government, which after all, is supposed to represent the will of the people, even if it pointedly does not at the moment. But even that does not absolve us. These episodes are a permanent stain on the United States of America and on all of us as citizens thereof.
So when I see all this, all I can ask myself is:
Is this America?
There is certainly a dark, Zinn-ish view of our history that betrays no surprise over what we are experiencing, and I concur that it did not spring fully formed like Athena from Zeus’s forehead.
That is precisely what alarms me.
Because, as many wise observers have noted, this poisonous excuse for a president and the havoc he has wreaked is merely a symptom of a deep sickness, not its cause.
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“She Worked for Me”
I recently wrote about the death of another pop music icon, David Bowie, and the ways in which freshly deceased pop stars are typically met with a posthumous wave of adulation (fat lot of good that does them). The great Aretha Franklin was no exception.
Except in the aptly named White House.
“I want to begin today by expressing my condolences to the family of a person I knew well,” Trump told his Cabinet in remarks widely circulated soon after her death. “She worked for me on numerous occasions. She was terrific—Aretha Franklin—on her passing. She brought joy to millions of lives and her extraordinary legacy will thrive and inspire many generations to come.”
Let that sink in a moment.
“She worked for me.”
Really??? That’s the central point of Trump’s so-called tribute to Aretha?
It’s not even remotely true, of course, but the real significance is what the comment says about Trump, and by extension, the people who support and admire him.
Aretha Franklin played some concerts at Trump hotel/casinos. That is hardly “working for” Donald Trump. That’s like saying Picasso was an employee of the Prado, or Prince was in the NFL because he played at the Super Bowl. Or me claiming the Fire Department “works for me” because they came to check a gas leak in my building.
Trump’s insistence on that framing of his brief path-crossings with Aretha Franklin speaks to his infantile desire to be the boss of everybody…..even in their own obituary, which, as with all matters on heaven and earth, he somehow managed to make about himself.
As David Graham wrote in The Atlantic, Trump cannot conceive of any higher compliment than being graced with his presence. In Trump’s mind, everyone lives only to serve him and bask in his wonderfulness…..and that goes double for women and people of color. (That same disrespect was reflected this week in his clash with Pelosi.)
To give it the most generous possible interpretation, if Trump was merely acknowledging that he had met Ms. Franklin in person (as he did when memorializing G.H.W. Bush) he could have stopped with “a person I knew well.” That was a lie itself, but at least it wasn’t also a despicable racist dig that placed himself in the superior position and Aretha in a servile one.
His disrespect for the Queen of Soul is of a piece with his well-documented contempt for African-Americans in general, and African-American women in particular. Would we expect any less from a rich, obscenely entitled 72-year-old right winger, raised in privilege by a father who played footsie with the Klan and was sued by the federal government for racial discrimination bad enough that Woody Guthrie wrote a song about it?
We know that Trump is very bad at the ceremonial aspects of his job, particularly when it comes to honoring other human beings or comforting his fellow man in times of grief, and the reason why is clear: because he lacks even the tiniest kernel of human empathy. He relates to others only as servants to his own mythical magnificence. His discomfort with sickness and death and inability to display—or even fake—normal human compassion as consoler-in-chief is yet another way he is manifestly unfit for the duties of the office he unaccountably holds.
Trump’s epoch-shattering pettiness and his astonishing unwillingness to set aside personal differences even when honoring the dead (see also John McCain) is a stark genetic marker of his malignant narcissism. The best he’s done—at George H.W. Bush’s recent funeral—is quietly sulk because he’s not the center of attention…..and in that case only because the Bush family cleverly managed to hem him in with some jiu-jitsu. If Trump fits the famous description of a person who wants to be the bride at every wedding and the corpse at every funeral, all I can say is that there are millions of Americans who are with him on the latter count at least.
Even without the pointed barbs that characterized McCain’s funeral—the same weekend as Aretha’s, as it happened—Trump inevitably suffered by comparison at Bush’s memorial as he sat petulantly in the front row while the nation listened to tribute after tribute to the basic personal decency of “41.” (Though we ought not to forgive or forget the role the Bush dynasty played in giving us Trump in the first place, from Willie Horton to the invasion of Iraq.) I don’t exactly know how any of that fits in with Trump’s refusal to recite the Apostles’ Creed. I suspect he thinks Apostles Creed is Carl Weathers’ grandson.
Trump, of course, is not alone in his condescending attitude toward a group of people he is wont to call “the blacks.” Playing right into one of the worst and oldest stereotypes of dumbass white people, Fox infamously misidentified Aretha when it broadcast news of her passing, running a photo of Patti LaBelle.
I don’t have the column inches—or patience—to list all of Trump’s public displays of racism (for starters, see: NFL), but one of the worst and most telling of them remains his attacks on the so-called Central Park Five, the young black men convicted of assaulting, raping, and brutalizing a white female jogger in 1989. The five men variously spent from six to thirteen years in prison before being exonerated by DNA evidence. (A serial rapist imprisoned for other crimes confessed and was proven to be the attacker.) Back in ’89, Trump, then just a private citizen and douchebag-about-town, took out full-page ads in four New York City newspapers calling for the reinstatement of the death penalty in New York state, with the Central Park jogger case the obvious subtext. (Just in case you thought racism, birtherism, and sticking his big fat nose where it doesn’t belong were new things for Don.)
But much more shocking is the fact that as recently as 2016 Trump continued to insist that the Central Park Five were guilty and ought to be in prison, even though they’ve been indisputably proven innocent and another man confirmed as the perpetrator.
I don’t even know where to begin with that demonstration of unmitigated racism, barbarity, and wholesale contempt for justice and the rule of law. I can only say that it’s appalling that it hasn’t gotten more attention, even as I understand that “outrage fatigue” has never gotten an aerobic workout like the one the Trump era is giving it.
So compared to shit like that, Trump’s megalomania and racism in insulting Aretha Franklin is neither surprising nor near the top of the list of his worst moments. But it’s still galling, especially when deployed in reference to an artist of her gifts. I don’t think anyone expected soaring, poetic rhetoric from the Donald in memorializing one of the greatest and most influential singers of the past century, but what he did say was even worse than I anticipated. Once again, every time I think he’s hit rock bottom, Trump has managed to surprise me by beginning to dig.
That’s why “She worked for me” has stuck with me, amid all of Trump’s other appalling turns of phrase. It’s no news flash that Donald Trump is a racist, a misogynist, and a small, small man. But every once in a while we get a perfect little economic encapsulation of all those things.
So there you have it. Trumpism—your one-stop shop for racism, sexism, classism, and narcissism.
Rest in peace, Aretha. When comes such another?
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Another Brick in the Head
The best theater of this past week was the rare sight of a public, face-to-face rebuke of the fake president right there in his own Oval Office, with the cameras rolling. Nancy Pelosi kept her cool and showed why she’s the boss—and likely secured her second Speakership—as a flustered Trump repeatedly interrupted and mansplained and basically behaved like a dick. (Stop the presses.)
Pelosi and Schumer also got Trump to go full Colonel Jessup and embrace the Code Red of the looming government shutdown. Generally, one doesn’t want to take credit for something that will leave millions of government employees without paychecks at Christmastime, but remarkably, Trump did.
I watched the whole thing, and while I enjoyed seeing a pair of senior Democrats take the ignoramus-in-chief to task on national television, I have no doubt that the xenophobes and nihilists who comprise Trump’s Twelfth Man came away thinking him the winner, and admiring him even more for his (insane) commitment to building their big, beautiful racist wall. Everything in America is a Rorschach test these days, and a case study in confirmation bias.
That said, it’s clear that even Trump thought he lost that round, based on reports that he left the meeting throwing file folders and yelling at his staff. (Also known around the White House as “Tuesday.”)
And hey, anyway, what happened to that promise that Mexico was gonna pay for the wall? Conveniently forgotten I suppose. In the words of Gomer Pyle, surprise surprise surprise. Since getting his ass handed to him (by—gasp!—a woman), the closest a humiliated Trump came to addressing that broken promise was a characteristically ridiculous tweet with some baffling math about how his new trade deal with Mexico equates to a check from President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador with “para el muro” in the memo line.
But the mere fact that he even tweeted that suggests he knows people are talking about that famous, fatuous claim, and he feels the need to defend it, however poorly.
The irony, of course, is that even if you think the lunatic, laws-of-physics-defying quest to build a wall to keep brown people out of America is worth shutting down the government over, it’s comical to believe that Trump will keep his promise to own that decision.
Donald Trump said live on national television that he would not blame Schumer and the Democrats if there is a shutdown.
Donald Trump will blame Schumer and the Democrats if there is a shutdown.
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Just the Tip
Now that Michael Cohen has been convicted, Trump—with characteristic chutzpah—claims that the transactions were a private matter unrelated to the election, even though another one of his lawyers, a former US Attorney for the SDNY and oh yeah Mayor of New York City, went on Fox and said the opposite. Donald Trump didn’t go to law school, but Rudy Giuliani did, and he ought to know better.
Giuliani later compared Trump’s offense to a parking violation, which is ironic for a guy who treated jaywalkers like ax murderers when he mayor. Mr. Former Tough Guy Prosecutor is suddenly very forgiving of criminal activity…..perhaps because he knows he is guilty of some himself and fears the reckoning that is coming.
So we can dispense with the idiocy and dishonesty of Trump’s defenders with one simple question:
If the payoffs were neither illegal nor related to the election nor any big deal, why did Trump lie about his knowledge of them, on camera, on Air Force One no less?
Having initially insisted that he didn’t have know about Cohen’s actions (using his patented Roy Cohn deny-deny-deny strategy), Trump has now been forced to deal with incontrovertible evidence that he not only knew about the payoffs, but directed them. We already have him on tape discussing the hush money with Cohen; this week it was revealed that our fearless leader was also the heretofore unnamed third party present when Cohen and National Enquirer boss David (wait for it) Pecker discussed this preemptive “catch-and-kill” strategy as far back as 2015.
Sometimes it’s not so good to have been in the room where it happened. (Aaron Burr: re-think your goals.)
Trump’s new position, as of this week, is that the payoffs weren’t illegal, and he didn’t order them anyway, or if he did he didn’t know they were illegal, and it was Cohen’s fault for following his orders when he shouldn’t have.
Got all that? Don’t worry, no one else did either. It was among Trump’s least convincing bullshit storms ever, which is saying something. For a famously bold liar, he is starting to sound a lot like Ralph Kramden.
But deceit is Trump’s go-to move—his only move, really—even if he is doing a worse-than-usual job of it in the face of mounting evidence implicating him. He is the scorpion carrying the Republican Party frog across the river, if a scorpion could have a combover. (That frog is named Pepe, by the way.)
The laughable GOP efforts to downplay this turn of events, on the hand, are just another sorry chapter in the Republican Party’s pathetic surrender to this contemptible grifter and its willful destruction of its own brand. But far from achieving the desired effect of stanching the bleeding, the Republicans’ continuing defense of Trump is nothing but slow-motion seppuku. For we all know—as does the GOP leadership—that this week’s revelations are hardly the last of Trump’s crimes that they are going to have address. On the contrary: hush money to porn stars and Playboy centerfolds is only the tippy top of a giant iceberg looming in the North Atlantic, directly in the path of the SS Individual-1.
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Time May Change Me
The departure of an icon always triggers a tsunami of nostalgia, regret, and kind feelings from the general public, with casual fans—and often even non-fans—suddenly realizing (or at least declaring) how much they loved the dearly departed. So it was, inevitably, with Bowie, who truly did bestride this narrow world like a colossus, albeit one in platform boots and an orange mullet.
Bowie was subjected to an especially severe case of what I call the Tito Puente Effect. At the beginning of the movie Stripes there is a throwaway bit in which Bill Murray’s slacker character gets an earful from his irritated girlfriend over laying around the house all day doing nothing but playing Tito Puente records. In response, Murray deadpans: “Tito Puente is gonna be dead, and you’re gonna say, ‘Oh, I’ve been listening to him for years, and I think he’s fabulous.'”
The fact is, Bowie was a disruptive figure who—in his early years especially—inspired as much confusion, anger, and backlash as he did praise. Sic semper with the great innovators.
When I first became aware of Bowie around 1974, I distinctly remember hearing a DJ on my local Top 40 station in Washington DC playing “Young Americans” and then snickering to his audience, “That was David Bowie, a guy who takes the ‘L’ out of ‘flag'”
I’d like to say it’s the kind of remark that would be unheard of today, or at least get the DJ fired, but it really isn’t, at least not in big chunks of red state America. Anecdotal though it is, it’s a slur that represents how Bowie was viewed by a lot of mainstream America at the time…..and not just by “rock & roll is the devil’s music” troglodytes and other outliers. (This was a DJ on a Top 40 station in a major metropolitan area, the nation’s capital no less.) After all, an enormous part of Bowie’s impact was the transgressive nature of his gender-bending look and manner, so it was no surprise that it triggered homophobes and neanderthals of all stripes, from those afflicted with virulent gay panic to those who reflected the more conventional and commonplace bigotry of the era. The very things that his fans loved about Bowie were the same things that pissed off parents and squares and meatheads. That’s the point of youth culture.
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The Blue Wave
We had less than 24 hours to absorb the epic import of the Democratic Party regaining control of the US House of Representatives before the raging id with a combover that pretends to be President of the United States threw the country into chaos again by firing Jeff Sessions.
The two events are, of course, inextricably connected.
It didn’t take a psychic to understand that Trump’s inflammatory / batshit rhetoric in the run-up to the midterms—the caravan of ISIS-infiltrated bloodthirsty barefoot children, the evil gun-grabbing Democratic mob, the press as the “enemy of the people,” etc—was a sign of panic and desperation at the thought of losing his Congressional firewall. Once that happened, the almost immediate firing of Sessions laid his strategy bare, and his fears as well.
It’s very simple. Trump is rightly terrified of the Mueller probe and is acting hastily to shut it down. (Indeed, it’s very possible that he has already been subpoeaned and indictments are on the way, including one for Don Jr., a backstage drama to which we the people are not yet privy but is secretly motivating our mad king’s frantic actions.) With the Democrats in control of the House and able to ramp up the investigative pressure, he is now beginning to be cornered, and like the rat he is, more dangerous than ever.
The election returns were barely in when, with his characteristic Roy Cohn-protege manner, Trump threatened “a warlike posture” if the Democrats dared do their job and exercise oversight over him. For anyone who’s spent even five minutes in grade school, it was the transparently desperate act of a craven bully trying to bluff his foes into not hitting him where he knew it would hurt him the most.
You don’t scare us, Cadet Bone Spurs.
But at the same time, Trump was anything but bluffing in reminding just how nasty he could be. Indeed, he preemptively went full Pearl Harbor even before the day was out.
Thus the ongoing constituional crisis in which we have been iiving for the past two years has dramatically escalated. It’s about to be D-Day for the Democratic Party and the resistance and the rule of law full stop.
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The Politics of Insanity
The Republican Party is arguing that no public figure can be held accountable for how a deranged individual misinterprets or distorts his or her words. Tru(ish), but it’s a question of how much—or little—misinterpretation is involved.
Do we blame the Beatles for Charles Manson? No. But I might, if instead of ”Helter skelter/I’m coming down fast,” the lyrics had said, “Go up in the hills and find a pregnant actress to massacre.”
Trump’s irresponsible, unprecedented demonization of his foes and his active encouragement of a climate of violence cannot plausibly be dismissed when considering the murders and attempted murders we have just witnessed.
Crazy is as crazy does.
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On Losing a Rifle
Short of actively committing a crime, in the peacetime US military the worst thing a soldier can do is lose a weapon.
In combat it’s different, for obvious reasons. Government property lost or damaged in a war zone—to include weapons—is routinely written off without many questions asked. But in peacetime, control and accountability of firearms is paramount, second in importance only to the safety of personnel, with which it is of course intertwined.
If you lose your rifle, the world comes to a screeching halt. Training stops. Everything stops, and every swinging dick is put to work looking for the missing weapon, round the clock, under excruciating pressure, sometimes for weeks on end. It’s an offense so egregious that not only is the careless soldier himself subject to non-judicial punishment under the Uniform Code of Military Justice, but his or her entire chain of command is held responsible. An NCO or officer who has a soldier lose a weapon is personally accountable for that loss as a failure of leadership and positive control. It can be a career-ender.
Why do you think that is?
I guess it’s because the Pentagon understands that it’s a bad idea for private citizens to have military-grade rifles that were designed for just one purpose: to kill human beings as quickly and efficiently as possible in a combat environment.
Last spring, I wrote a pair of essays for this blog about gun violence in America, the need for common sense firearms regulation, and the battle over the Second Amendment. (Why Can’t I Own an M-1 Tank?, March 3, 2018 and Blood On Their Hands, March 8, 2018.) No topic that I have ever written about—not even abortion—has generated the level of vitriol that rained down on me in response to those essays. Not even close. (That in itself speaks to the bizarre American obsession with guns.)
Many of my, uh, let’s-be-generous-and-call-them critics seemed fixated on terminology, like what constitutes an “assault rifle.” They cling to their semantics like shipwreck victims hanging onto floating debris.
In the wake of Parkland, Las Vegas, Orlando, Sandy Hook, Aurora, Virginia Tech, Columbine, or any other mass shooting you care to name, not to mention the “routine” everyday carnage on the streets of various American cities, somehow it is not a pragmatic discussion of how to stop this madness that dominates the national conversation, but rather, an idiotic hairsplitting debate about terminology.
But the US military does not need to bother with how-many-angels-can-dance-on-the-head-of-a-pin-style pissing contests about whether the Founding Fathers intended the American public to own AK-47s and AR-15s. An institution of profound practicality, the military is concerned only with the patently obvious dangers thereof, and its own desire not to be complicit in that homicidal/suicidal dynamic.
So we can talk about the definition of “semi-automatic,” about trigger pull speed, muzzle velocity, cyclic rate, magazine capacity, bump stocks, three-round burst suppressors, and anything else you want. Who cares? The pointless obsession with these meaningless distinctions is all camouflage designed to obfuscate the truth rather than illuminate it—either dishonestly for the general audience, or as a form of self-delusion, or some combination of both.
Personally, I don’t give a shit. I know a battlefield weapon when I see one.
Like art or pornography, it’s hard to define but easy to understand intuitively. The US Army seems able to grasp it, and why civilians have no business owning such weapons.
Maybe someday the rest of the country will catch up.
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