Uncategorized
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Cranked up the volume on his pointless cold wars with China and Iran
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Turned mask wearing into a culture war campaign issue
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Accused a TV host of murdering an intern
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Declared war on voting by mail
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Insisted that James Comey and a variety of others should be in jail
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Pushed an absurd “unmasking” non-scandal
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Insisted that Barack Obama personally led a spying campaign against him
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Retweeted a video saying “the only good Democrat is a dead Democrat”
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Retweeted QAnon conspiracy theories
Frustration
I am beyond frustrated with the willfully ignorant. Those who don’t want to understand the reasons for protests highlighting grave injustices always say the same things: “all lives matter” or “blue lives matter” or “black on black crime is bad so why do we need to care about black lives now?” They choose to be ignorant. There is no self-reflection happening. They already know they are morally superior, so when they see these things happening in society they justify it all away. “He was going for a weapon” or “It was self-defense.”
No. No, it wasn’t. It was murder.
The fact that they can’t see that because it makes them uncomfortable or it shatters their self-worth is pathetic.
There is no need for me to dig deep and figure out where this comes from. I don’t need to know that they were born in a small town with little to no diversity. I don’t need to know that they have never traveled outside of their country let alone much past a hundred-mile radius of that small hometown. I don’t need to know that they don’t have any non-white, non-Judeo-Christian, non-heteronormative friends. It is painfully obvious in their responses when they say, “all lives matter” or any of the other similar refrains from scared white people.
They are racist.
It is frustrating to read people’s social media and email regurgitating the talking points of a propaganda machine. Those people are hearing what they want to hear: you should be scared, you should be aggrieved, you should be prepared because the black and brown people are coming to take your jobs/women/guns/etc. The willfully ignorant lap it up like a bad dog eating their own poop. It is far removed from reality, but they don’t care. It is the reality they prefer to live in no matter who gets hurt so long as it isn’t them and theirs.
They are racist when they tell NBA players to “shut up and dribble” and when they tell college athletes they shouldn’t peaceably march for Black Lives Matter.
They. Are. Racist.
I know they don’t think they’re racist. They think the way they think because they were taught this was right and proper. Everyone around them in their tiny little bubble thinks the same way. Well, the bubble is about to be popped.
It isn’t hard to figure out why these people feel emboldened to say the quiet part out loud. They have a role model and enablers ready and willing to tell them all of those things they believe but knew deep down inside they shouldn’t say were now okay to spring forth like a broken sewage gate. Because Donald Trump is a racist who says racist things on the regular, they’ve decided it’s fine and dandy to express themselves in the exact same way.
I would have thought by now when racist people express racist thoughts and feelings in the age of cell phone video cameras and they subsequently lose their jobs, their friends, and their families, they’d learn their lesson. Apparently not. In fact, you might instead get rewarded for it.
If you point guns at protestors walking down your street, you will a.) make the news, b.) get charged with a felony and c.) get invited to the Republican National Convention to spread more fear and racism. If you don’t find this repugnant, I don’t want to know what would.
Racism isn’t going to go away if Joe Biden wins the Presidency and neither will police brutality.
However, it would be a step in the right direction.
At least we’d have someone in the Oval Office who gave a damn about systemic racism and police brutality. I’d like to think being empathetic to their cries might move someone to take action to stop it instead of stoking the flames of civil unrest.
Maybe I’d be a little less frustrated all the time.
The NBA Strike Is Jarring. That’s the Point.
Will Leitch, writing for New York Magazine, would like to talk about how unprecedented it was for NBA players to simply go on strike.
What was so powerful on Wednesday afternoon — after the Milwaukee Bucks announced that they weren’t going to play their first-round NBA playoff game against the Orlando Magic to demand accountability for the shooting of Jacob Blake, which led to cancellations of the rest of the NBA and WNBA games and several MLB and MLS games — is that sports actually stopped. They stopped! World War I, a pandemic, and now police violence: It takes a lot for this to happen.
It was jarring and disorienting: Wait, there’s no game? They’re just … not playing? We had slowly adjusted to a COVID-induced absence of sports, but this felt different: This felt like a needle sliding off the record. And that it felt so reality-bending is why it was entirely necessary. It is one thing to take a knee during the national anthem as way to protest police brutality toward Black people — considering that doing so got Colin Kaepernick banned from the NFL and turned the act of bending down slightly into the most white-hot political stance imaginable, it’s fair to say that was a pretty big thing. But to say, “We have been pushed so far that we are no longer going to play this game” — something that is essentially unprecedented in the history of sports — is a jaw-dropping moment. And yet, now that it’s happened, it feels like it was inevitable. In fact, it’s a little surprising it took this long.
Sports stopping is a wake-up call. As much as I wanted sports back, here are those athletes stepping up and saying there are more important things than sports.
And that will be with us for a long time.
Rationalizing
Seth Godin is on a roll. This time he’s explaining, in simple terms, no matter what you say or think or make up, the virus doesn’t give a shit about what you say or think or make up.
All of us are good at rationalizing. It helps us process the world, navigate our choices and live with ourselves.
But gravity doesn’t care if you got a lot of sleep last night or not. It’s still the same amount of force.
The pavement doesn’t care if you always wear a helmet on your bike, except just this one time when you didn’t, because you were having a video taken.
Melanoma doesn’t care that you always wear sun screen, except that one day when you were really busy and couldn’t go back to the house for it.
Outside forces don’t care about the situation, because they have no awareness or memory. They simply are.
Newton’s law doesn’t care that you were really distracted and that’s why you weren’t wearing a seatbelt, and the virus that infected your friend doesn’t care about why that person in the office decided not to wear a mask, either.
People are very good at stories. That’s our core technology. Everything else in the world, though, has no interest in them.
Smart.
Spit Takes
Anti-science is no way to go through life, son
Here’s how the United States is going to beat COVID-19–Coronavirus saliva tests. Meryl Kornfield, writing in The Washington Post, outlines how this got started and how it will work moving forward.
As the United States grapples with building testing capacity to meet the growing demand as people resume going to school and work, officials have placed their hopes on several solutions, including saliva testing. Because the test doesn’t require chemical reagents or swabs that have become scarce during the pandemic and offers a faster turnaround than the standard test, some believe it could offer the country a way to determine the spread of the virus quickly.
These tests, developed at Yale University and the University of Illinois, are pretty amazing. I know nearly first hand because my wife is employed at Illinois and my step-daughter is an incoming freshman. They’ve been tested multiple times and the experience was painless and fast. They get their results in just a few hours.
Illinois is leading the way.
One of the research groups is led by Martin Burke, a chemist at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign who has already launched a similar saliva test he developed at the university’s campus to screen more than 50,000 students, faculty and staff members. The test’s quick turnaround time has allowed the school to reach its goal of 20,000 tests per day, or its aim to test students twice per week, Burke told The Post.
Millions of students are returning to college campuses this fall, and some have already been sent home because of outbreaks. As schools have wrestled with implementing coronavirus precautions and screening, Burke believes the speed and affordability of the saliva test could be scalable for others — if they have the availability of a lab. Frequent testing would can guarantee an infected person is notified and quarantined promptly before passing the virus to peers.
Illinois students can go to one of 40 testing stations across their campus, self-administer the test and get their results on a university-created app within three to five hours, Burke said. The school retrofitted its veterinarian laboratory to handle screening the student population. Burke hopes the capacity will be expanded to offer testing to other people off-campus.
No other campus has anything even close to this level of sophistication. Plus, the news just came down that the Illinois rapid saliva test for COVID-19 is now operating under FDA Emergency Use Authorization. The University isn’t messing around.
When these tests get implemented nationwide, we will finally be able to test and track on a massive scale. Once we understand the spread and can start isolating people, then we can slowly ramp up reopening on a more scientific footing and start the real recovery.
Maybe we’ll have in-person sports, concerts, and movies too. Wouldn’t that be nice?
Ayo
#LETSMAKEHISTORY
I am shocked that Ayo Dosunmu is coming back to Illinois Basketball for his junior season. It is a dream come true for Illini fans.
With Ayo back and Kofi Cockburn of Big Ten Freshman of the Year accolades coming back (hopefully… please…), plus two senior leaders in Trent Frazier and Da’Monte Williams, plus ready-to-break-out-of-his-sophomore-slump Giorgi Bezhanishvili, and two top-50 freshmen in Adam Miller and Andre Curbelo, aaaaaaaaand two transfers who sat out last season (Austin Hutcherson and Jacob Grandison) this team has more than Sweet Sixteen dreams or Elite Eight dreams or even Final Four dreams… this team wants to win a National Championship.
It’s what Ayo said he wants. “Since a kid, I’ve been working. My dream is to play in the NBA, but first I need that national championship,” Dosunmu said in a video announcing his return to the University of Illinois.
Making it to the Final Four is an incredible achievement and there are lots of teams pushing towards making the Tournament and going on a run. This upcoming college basketball season, Illinois has a real, legitimate shot at doing it.
If there’s a college basketball season.
Last season, COVID-19 derailed the team’s dream of just getting back to the NCAA Tournament. Even though the trajectory was going up when the crisis hit, everything stopped. It was a profound disappointment not to hear their name being called on Selection Sunday.
As a fan of Illinois athletics, I have an almost desperate need to see sports come back. Admittedly, even more so this particular upcoming season because both the football and basketball programs are going to be good. Really good. Really, really good.
And then there’s this virus.
If everyone would just do their part and wear a mask, socially distance, and continue to wash their hands, this country would knock back the spread and maybe get to have bars and restaurants open safely. Maybe we’d get concerts and weddings back. Maybe we’d get all the sports back. Maybe we’d have a college football season and a college basketball season.
In the meantime, I’m going to bask in this wave of happiness and hopefulness I’m feeling. There happens to be an orange and blue hue to it.
Eulogy for Congressman John Lewis
Barack Obama’s eulogy for John Lewis might be one of the greatest speeches he’s ever given. It was political in a way that honored the civil rights achievements Lewis strived for during his life and challenged everyone to continue. His words were incredibly powerful.
If politicians want to honor John, and I’m so grateful for the legacy of work of all the Congressional leaders who are here, but there’s a better way than a statement calling him a hero. You want to honor John? Let’s honor him by revitalizing the law that he was willing to die for. And by the way, naming it the John Lewis Voting Rights Act, that is a fine tribute. But John wouldn’t want us to stop there, trying to get back to where we already were. Once we pass the John Lewis Voting Rights Act, we should keep marching to make it even better.
By making sure every American is automatically registered to vote, including former inmates who’ve earned their second chance.
By adding polling places, and expanding early voting, and making Election Day a national holiday, so if you are someone who is working in a factory, or you are a single mom who has got to go to her job and doesn’t get time off, you can still cast your ballot.
By guaranteeing that every American citizen has equal representation in our government, including the American citizens who live in Washington, D.C. and in Puerto Rico. They are Americans.
By ending some of the partisan gerrymandering — so that all voters have the power to choose their politicians, not the other way around.
And if all this takes eliminating the filibuster — another Jim Crow relic — in order to secure the God-given rights of every American, then that’s what we should do.
Baseball Men
Keep your eye on the ball
Here’s a guest post by my friend Grant Chastain. While not really a direct response to The Asterisk Season, it was his unvarnished thoughts on the current state of baseball. He graciously allowed me to present it here.
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Baseball is a pastime that’s almost entirely about tradition. That’s why there are still people complaining about lights for nighttime games at Wrigley, much less the Jumbotrons they’ve got in right field. It’s why we’re still debating the purity of the Designated Hitter. No other sport values verisimilitude the way that baseball does. Not just values it, or appreciates it — baseball actively REQUIRES it. Every single fan and pundit-related argument about the sport for the past 30 years has been in the service of keeping the venerated old wheat and separating it from the new-fangled chaff. And yet it’s not annoying, and doesn’t seem like it’s pandering to an aging audience. Every single fan of the sport that enters each stadium knows what they’re going to get when they arrive.
That’s also how you know that Rob Manfred doesn’t GET baseball. It’s supposed to be more than just salvaging a season, or seeing if you can save 30 ownerships a few shekels as we watch 2020 go down the drain. We all suspected he didn’t get it when he referred to taking back the 2017 trophy from the Astros a futile gesture because “you’d just be taking back a piece of metal.” But railroading a 60-game season down the throats of the MLBPA without player buy-in just proves it. Rob Manfred’s not a baseball man that happens to deal in numbers, like Bud Selig or Fay Vincent were. Rob Manfred is a NUMBERS man, that happens to deal in baseball.
Baseball Men can keep their jobs if they’re qualified, because they’re hard to come by. But Numbers Men? Numbers Men are all around us. And you know what happens when a Numbers Man can’t produce numbers? He gets shown the door. And that’s as true in any business as it is in Major League Baseball. Manfred’s got no pedigree to keep his job aside from his promise that he’ll Bring Up Those Numbers. And that’s why he’s pushing for a season, regardless of risk, or value, or any other factor.
I hope this season doesn’t happen, but I suspect it will. And of course I’ll watch.
I’m a Baseball Man.
The Asterisk Season
Jeff Passan and Jesse Rogers, writing at ESPN, start their baseball story like this:
Major League Baseball plans to hold a 60-game season that will begin around July 24 but first needs players to sign off on a health-and-safety protocol and to pledge to arrive at home stadiums by July 1 to prepare for the season, sources familiar with the situation told ESPN.
It is my firm belief there is no way the players are going to sign-off on whatever the health and safety protocols are going to be. Why? Because there is a GLOBAL PANDEMIC OUTSIDE AND IT’S NOT GOING AWAY!!!
Sorry. Didn’t mean to yell right there, but sometimes you have to make your voice heard.
Everyone seems to underestimate the danger COVID-19 brings to people. You might be a lucky one who gets it, gets over it, and moves on. You might not be. And if you have a compromised immune system or other underlying health concerns, you don’t want to get this virus.
Will Leitch in New York Magazine has written about the terribleness of this moment in time concerning sports and, specifically, baseball.
I learned to love sports because I loved baseball first. I’ve written books about it, and I spend weeks every year visiting stadiums around the country. My taciturn, midwestern father and I talk about baseball in a way that we’ve never been able to talk about anything else. And I’ve afflicted my 9-year-old son with this disease. Three months into all this, he still comes upstairs every morning to ask me if I know when baseball is coming back yet. I write about baseball professionally, for this publication and several others, including MLB.com itself. I had a few pieces in the World Series program last year, and seeing my name and my words that close to my favorite sporting event on the planet has the 7-year-old version of me doing backflips. An alarmingly high percentage of the most memorable moments of my life involve baseball in some way, shape, or form. This is my sport.
Baseball is my sport too. In fact, it’s my family’s sport. My Uncle Tom was drafted by the St. Louis Cardinals and played in their minor league system. My Uncle John chose to pursue a family instead of joining his teammates at spring training for the Pittsburgh Pirates. I have two other cousins who played professionally, but never really made it past A ball. John and Tom became coaches, scouts, and raised their families. My Dad learned baseball from his older brothers and was often a coach for my brother and me.
For me, there is nothing more energizing than to sit and watch a Major League Baseball game with my Dad and my brother (an excellent college player and coach himself) and talk about what’s happening on the mound, behind the catcher’s glove, and in the dugouts. I love watching my nephew throw his wicked curveball and make hitters look ridiculous.
Baseball is my family’s sport.
I want baseball back, just to have a small taste of something nostalgic and normal. Baseball is not boring to me. Each pitch changes the trajectory of the game. It’s something new each time. New and old.
I love that game 32 is meaningful and also not meaningful in a long 162 game season. A relaxing afternoon of watching pitch and catch can be soothing to me. It can be as restorative as sleep, a deep meditation with the smells of freshly cut grass, leather, and sunflower seeds. A 60 game season is a sprint. Nothing is relaxing or soothing in it. A season like this will be here and over so fast no one will care except billionaire owners trying to staunch operating losses in the millions.
Most importantly, what if there’s a horrible outbreak of COVID-19, and the shortened season is cut short again? Who do we blame? What if an athlete or coach dies because of this? I don’t need baseball that much. Do you?
There should not be baseball played in 2020. I think the players will reject the protocols. I think if a majority vote to report and play, several stars of the game will sit this season out. It’s not safe. Nothing has changed.
If there’s any season, fans won’t take it seriously. It will be a full asterisk season. The only fans who will care will be the ones of the team that wins the World Series.
And it will still be the asterisk season, and it will still be meaningless.
The 2020 Season
Baseball during the time of COVID-19
Mark Feinsand, writing for MLB.com, has outlined the Major League Baseball official announcement of a 60-game regular-season schedule to begin on July 23 and 24.
MLB has submitted a 60-game regular-season schedule for review by the Players Association. In order to mitigate travel, the schedule would include 10 games for each team against its four divisional opponents, along with 20 games against the opposite league’s corresponding geographical division (for example, the AL East will play the NL East, and so on). […]
The designated-hitter rule will be used in both leagues in 2020, part of the league’s health and safety protocols for this season.
I’m really surprised the health and safety protocols passed inspection by the player’s association, but here we go. Putting that aside and the what-ifs of players/coaches contracting the virus and what that could mean for a club, this seems… fine. I still think they should have canceled the season, but I’m not the one with millions of dollars on the line.
The new rules are a bit of a trip. I hate the runner on second to start extra-inning games, but it won’t be carrying over to the 2021 season. However, the DH, which I don’t really hate, most definitely will. No more pitcher’s batting. I suspect that’s a good thing.
Masks in the dugout? Whatever.
Also, am I missing if fans are going to be permitted inside the stadiums? Maybe for just the playoffs?
Juneteenth
Seth Godin on Juneteenth —
Today is Juneteenth, a holiday that should be more widely observed.
It doesn’t mark the date of Lincoln’s proclamation that freed the slaves, nor does it occur on the day that the 14th amendment was passed. Both were overdue and urgent and important steps forward. Instead, it commemorates the day that a last group of slaves (outside of Galveston, TX) heard that they had been freed years earlier.
Holidays are symbols. They can cause us to pause for celebration or grief, for togetherness or simply to smile. Holidays are worth recalling because they give us a chance to connect and recommit to an idea that matters to us. This is a holiday about freedom delayed.
Change is hard, but delaying what’s right is toxic. Today we can remember just how much we have to do and realize the ability each of us has to see and alter the systems around us. Not simply today, but every single day. A chance to make things better.
I will admit that I did not know about this holiday until recently. I’ve been doing my best to educate myself better. I hope you do too.
Get to Work
The other day, in a phone call with my parents about my weekend, I said, “I was enjoying my white privilege painting my front porch.” I was trying to make a joke, but my wife pointed out that it sounded like I was being a dick. It made me pause and reconsider.
I am about to turn 52. I was born in the middle of the year everyone is referencing now, . My life began in central Illinois, a couple of hours away from major cities like Chicago, St. Louis, or Indianapolis. My upbringing included all the privileges, blinders and biases that come with being a white kid growing up in small town America.
Today there is real rage and I can understand it, but I’ll never share in it. The closest I can get is to mourn for the families of George Floyd, and Ahmaud Arbery, and Breonna Taylor, and so many others. I can point to places online to help foster support such as these two articles, “ How to Support the Struggle Against Police Brutality “ and “ 75 Things White People Can Do for Racial Justice. “ I can try and make a difference in my own life and one of the most simple ways is with understanding, listening, and challenging myself.
I decided I needed to do more reading about the situation and see things from a different perspective. I’m sure there are plenty of better writings, but these were the ones that caught my eye, no doubt, due to their authorship.
The first thing I read was this editorial by Kareem Abdul-Jabbar :
Yes, protests often are used as an excuse for some to take advantage, just as when fans celebrating a hometown sports team championship burn cars and destroy storefronts. I don’t want to see stores looted or even buildings burn. But African Americans have been living in a burning building for many years, choking on the smoke as the flames burn closer and closer. Racism in America is like dust in the air. It seems invisible — even if you’re choking on it — until you let the sun in. Then you see it’s everywhere. As long as we keep shining that light, we have a chance of cleaning it wherever it lands. But we have to stay vigilant, because it’s always still in the air.
Then I found one by Arnold Schwarzenegger:
We can do better. We have to be willing to listen, to learn, to look in the mirror and see that none of us is perfect. We have to be willing to see one another as Americans, and not as enemies. We have to be willing to sit down and do the hard work of reform without worrying about stupid party lines.
I’m ready to listen and work to make America better every day. Are you?
George Clooney , writes a piece that ultimately has the right solution.
The anger and the frustration we see playing out once again in our streets is just a reminder of how little we’ve grown as a country from our original sin of slavery. The fact that we aren’t actually buying and selling other human beings anymore is not a badge of honor. We need systemic change in our law enforcement and in our criminal justice system. We need policymakers and politicians that reflect basic fairness to all of their citizens equally. Not leaders that stoke hatred and violence as if the idea of shooting looters could ever be anything less than a racial dog whistle. Bull Connor was more subtle.
This is our pandemic. It infects all of us, and in 400 years we’ve yet to find a vaccine. It seems we’ve stopped even looking for one and we just try to treat the wound on an individual basis. And we sure haven’t done a very good job of that. So this week, as we’re wondering what it’s going to take to fix these seemingly insurmountable problems, just remember we created these issues so we can fix them. And there is only one way in this country to bring lasting change: Vote.
Finally, today Barack Obama decided to weigh in on things. It’s so nice when an adult speaks:
I recognize that these past few months have been hard and dispiriting — that the fear, sorrow, uncertainty, and hardship of a pandemic have been compounded by tragic reminders that prejudice and inequality still shape so much of American life. But watching the heightened activism of young people in recent weeks, of every race and every station, makes me hopeful. If, going forward, we can channel our justifiable anger into peaceful, sustained, and effective action, then this moment can be a real turning point in our nation’s long journey to live up to our highest ideals.
Let’s get to work.
Yes. Let’s do this.
Anger is a Gift
I won’t do what you tell me
My friend Grant Chastain is on a roll and unleashing his honest emotion. I’m reprinting his Facebook post for those who don’t follow him or care to be on Facebook anymore.
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It’s temporarily quiet, and I’m talking in terms of milliseconds, when Zack de la Rocha whispers four words in my ears — ‘Anger is a gift’ — and I pull my truck out into the already-sparse traffic of Chandler, Arizona, with music blaring as loudly as the speakers will allow. Music that, incidentally, no one but myself is around to hear.
There’s hardly anyone on the streets right now, at 7:30pm. Arizona Governor Ducey has declared a curfew that will begin at 8:00. People are shuffling off to their homes, unsure of what that means. Specific language in the edict has basically ensured that anyone with a basic need can still be out — unless, of course, you plan to protest. Those Americans will no longer be allowed on the streets in a half-hour. It’s hot at this hour, still over 110 degrees, and relatively tranquil-looking at first glance.
Calm like a bomb, Rage Against the Machine would (and did) once say.
It’s 7:30pm and I am heading back to the grocery store, which I will soon discover has been picked over very thoroughly — as bad as it was during the initial days of COVID-19. But this time, it’s not a pandemic or a fear of missing out on essential goods that has caused the shortage. It’s a fear, and a deep-seated one — and a reasonable goddamn one — that things are going to continue to get worse before they get better.
If you were one of the ones that cleaned out the Fry’s grocery store at Rural & Ray Road on Sunday night… congratulations. You may be an asshole, or you may be an ally, but you’ve at least grasped that this situation is a little different this time around.
Phoenix, Arizona is about a zillion miles away from the depiction of Bedford-Stuyvesant we remember in Spike Lee’s “Do The Right Thing,” but there’s one lesson we all took away from that film when we came here, and that is this:
Anger plus injustice plus high temperatures is a recipe for a DEEP BOIL. It rages, just underneath everyone’s skin, and doesn’t easily recede. We are all angrier when it’s 110 degrees. And it’s not helped by the sneaking notion that — again, in the words of Zack — “some of those that work forces, are the same that burn crosses.”
I’m not black, or Latin, or any color that is most commonly on the end of direct police attention. I’m in very little danger of being profiled. But I am angry. And anger, as Zack told me in 1992 in the song “Freedom,” is a gift.
It’s a gift, because it means you can still differentiate right from wrong, even when the people on the receiving end of oppression don’t look like you.
It’s a gift, because you can think back to the first time you heard those words, that song, and realize that very little has changed from a systemic standpoint in the nearly 30 years since you heard it.
It’s a gift, because it means you have an outlet to scream from the street corners and rooftops that shit needs to change. That you won’t accept white supremacy in any form, fashion, venue or occupation. That you will demand more from the people in charge of our safety and security, by demanding that those principles be upheld for ALL PEOPLE, regardless of their color. Even if our President does nothing about it, and calls the tiki-torch KKK from Charlotteville “fine people.” Even as he classifies anti-fascism — a tenet that everyone from your great-grandfathers, who went to war to put an end to that ethos — a “domestic terrorism entity.”
Anger is a gift… but like all gifts? It has a price tag.
The price you will pay is that you’ll be forced to come to some uncomfortable truths about the situation. That the reason we are in this situation right now doesn’t begin and end with George Floyd. Not really.
It’s not about Armaud Arbery being shot by two vigilante good-ol-boys, who were simply dispatching some good-old-fashioned-Southern-justice on the poor guy. It’s also not about the fact that none of us might have never known about the situation unless video evidence was released, after the district attorney had initially decided not to file charges against his murderers.
It’s not about Breonna Taylor, a dedicated award-winning EMT who was shot and killed while sleeping in her home in the commission of a no-knock botched police raid meant to be sent to a completely different home, and of a man that was (at the time) already in police custody. It’s also not about her live-in boyfriend, who now faces charges for shooting at the policemen that invaded their space in the dead of night without warning.
It’s not about Freddie Gray, or Sam Dubose, or Philando Castile. Tamir Rice, Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Trayvon Martin. It’s not about any one of those men. It’s not about Ferguson, or Minneapolis, or Cleveland, or Charlottesville, or Atlanta.
It’s not about NWA telling us about it in 1988, and again in an award-winning film in 2015. It’s not about Jay Z telling us about getting pulled over for doing 55 in a 54. It’s not about Ice T getting more static over a song called “Cop Killer” than actual COPS that are KILLERS get 25 years later. It’s not about KRS-One telling us that there’s a lot of similarity between overseers and officers.
It’s not about police agencies feeding you the same old horseshit about how body-cameras aren’t feasible since “the NFL has cameras on every angle of a game and there are still uncertainties,” as one Texas sheriff good-ol’-boy was quoted.
It’s about all of it. Every last bit.
This country has been built on a rock-solid bed of “let’s move on” when the answers are multi-faceted, or we can’t seem to agree on a single answer to solve the problem. We love it when the answers to the Jeopardy questions are easy. We don’t listen to men like Colin Kaepernick when he suggests that, hey, maybe it might be nice to stop policemen from killing people, and maybe kneeling during the anthem might be a way to bring some attention to the larger problem. Instead, our President calls him a bum on Twitter, and we decide that maybe since we haven’t seen any black men getting profiled as we’ve been intently paying attention during the Bears/Packers commercial break, maybe Kaepernick isn’t 100% correct. So we do nothing, until the next tragedy occurs.
I’m imploring you to keep your anger warm. It’s a fragile flame, but if we are to demand more… we need to surround it with our hands, and keep it crackling. Your anger will keep you motivated to require more from those you entrusted to keep you safe. Your protest will keep the microscope on the situation. This is the gift that we have, but we will only have it for as long as the motivation for change lasts.
Participate in this if you can. Donate if you cannot. If you cannot donate money… donate your visibility so others can keep their own flames going. Demand more. Do not let your attention recede.
Anger is your gift.
Use it.
Mentally Unhinged
The pathology is the point
Never once have I spent my time going over and reading the tweets Donald Trump puts out on his account. The ones that have crept up into the news are always shocking and stupid, and mostly just frightening. I would never subscribe to get his tweets delivered to me. Why would I want to subject myself to such horror?
I’ve done what most sane people have done: I don’t read them at all. If you value your sanity, I’d say no one should read them.
I aggressively unfollow idiots and stupid people on social media. Trump is not only an idiot, willfully ignorant, a racist, a rapist, and a manbaby, he’s also unworthy of my time. Twitter is a time suck. It is designed, like Facebook, to keep you on the platform and engaging with others. I choose not to have those engagements.
There is nothing someone like Trump can tweet that will be insightful, interesting, or illuminating. We already know who he is and what he is. Everything he does when not on Twitter emphasizes his acute horribleness. Twitter is just another platform for him to espouse his horribleness. I choose not to engage.
Jack Shafer writing for Politico says this:
Why must we fetch every bone that Trump hurls into the high, prickly brush? Well, he’s the president, and he wouldn’t make such an extreme charge if it weren’t true, would he? But he does, and he does all the time. This tidy list from Business Insider demonstrates his historic capacity for making baseless but grotesque claims of criminality and deception: implicating Ted Cruz’s father in the Kennedy assassination; claiming that Obama wasn’t born in the United States; surmising that Justice Antonin Scalia did not die of natural causes; accusing Joe Scarborough of complicity in the death of an intern; asserting massive voter fraud in the 2016 presidential election; saying windmills cause cancer; connecting the Clintons to Jeffrey Epstein’s death; and the Bidens-in-Ukraine baloney.
His tweeting is all about deflecting from his very real political problems. Guess what? I don’t have to pay attention, and neither do you.
Frankly, Twitter should delete his account. They will not do that. Twitter should delete the bots populating their site too, but they won’t do that either. Part-time CEO Jack Dorsey has chosen not to make moderating his platform a priority. This is wrong, and this is the inherent problem with social media in general.
Interacting with Trump is a fool’s errand. It has no real effect other than amplifying his horribleness to people who either don’t understand or relish in his horribleness. These are also people I don’t want to engage with or spend any time thinking about. I don’t need to raise my Twitter profile by “pwning” the MAGA crowd. I just ignore them. Unhinged rants don’t need any oxygen, so I don’t feed the animals.
Make no mistake, he’s unhinged. Trump is clearly deranged and has successfully removed himself from reality.
Kevin Drum on Mother Jones posted the following:
In the past few days Donald Trump has:
All of this has happened during an enormous pandemic which should be occupying all his time. Instead, he’s virtually ignoring it because he can’t figure out what to do aside from handing it over to his son-in-law and then hauling out his iPhone to tweet about something he heard on Fox & Friends.
Is Trump mentally unstable? I don’t know. But he’s sure not mentally all there, is he?
Andrew Sullivan writing about Trump last week thinks he’s “completely bonkers.”
Yesterday, at a Ford plant in Michigan, the president reiterated that he was once named “Man of the Year” in Michigan, something that never happened and an honor that doesn’t exist. He insisted that Obama had left no pandemic preparation behind — “we took over empty cupboards. The cupboards were bare” — which is untrue. He said he owned a lot of Lincolns but then he said he didn’t. When referring to the anti-Semite and Nazi-supporter Henry Ford, he ad-libbed, “Good bloodlines, if you believe in that stuff. Good blood.” In a factory where mask-wearing is legally mandatory and where every other executive was wearing a mask — and one who spoke with a Perspex visor on as well — Trump refused to wear one in public, though he apparently put one on behind the curtain. When asked why he wasn’t wearing one, he said: “I don’t want to give the press the pleasure of seeing it.” The official taxpayer-funded White House trip was also used to give an overtly partisan campaign speech, breaking the law. Just one completely bonkers day from a president who has effectively refused to do the job.
Later in his piece he says Trump is suffering from a delusional pathology.
I know we’re used to it, but there is no rational or coherent explanation for any of this. There is no strategy, or political genius. There is just a delusional pathology in which he says whatever comes into his head at any moment, determined entirely by his mood, which is usually bad. His attention span is so tiny and his memory so occluded that he can say two contradictory things with equal conviction repeatedly, and have no idea there might be any inconsistency at all.
This pathology is also why no one should spend any time at all following Trump’s vomiting on social media. It nearly always is incoherent, a lie, a projection, or a panicked attack on something he saw on Fox News. His supporters eat it up because they, too, want to live in the President’s imaginary reality. However, the problem with imaginary realities is that the real world doesn’t go away because it’s inconvenient. COVID-19 is not going away. Hundreds of thousands of people are dead and dying because reality finally smacked the orange manbaby in the face. He is desperately trying to change the narrative, but again reality has its own narrative, and it’s one a vast majority of people are seeing for the first time. No amount of spin, pivoting, or “other blaming” is going to work when more than 100,000 Americans are dead, millions are out of work, and a vote to remove this cancer is a few short months away.
Of course, who knows what will happen over the summer. Unfortunately, one thing you can be sure about is that Trump will say something ridiculously stupid. And I’ll be doing my best not to pay attention.
Newsletter vs Blog
Email is still the killer app
Robin Rendle on newsletters versus blog posts:
I think the weird thing about newsletters is that they’re so…formal. It would make for a cruel and unusual punishment if I sent an email out to a bunch of people that was nonsensical, doesn’t conclude properly, doesn’t have some sense of progress or I-don’t-know-what. But with a blog post? I don’t care!
In fact, that’s the graceful thing about blogs and personal sites. They can be just for you; scribbling down notes in a public but non-important way. It doesn’t have to lead anywhere, and there doesn’t have to be this big pretense that you’re the smartest person in the room.
A blog post can start in the middle of nothing, go nowhere, and then just…
Ha.
There’s a real point here in that a blog or a personal site can be just for you. This site is pretty much just for me. If someone else likes what I’m writing, I appreciate it. However, I’m not writing for any other audience than myself.
I never could figure out a newsletter format that felt natural and entertaining. Doing a newsletter has been a joy, but it also can be a hassle and a chore. I don’t want to do anything that’s a chore, especially if I’m doing it voluntarily. Writing should never be a chore. For me, doing a regular newsletter is a chore, and that’s why I completely revamped this website to be the be-all, end-all of me online.
On the other hand, I love reading formal newsletters from people I find fascinating and interesting. Here are a few of my favorites:
Warren Ellis’ Orbital Operations
Dave Winer’s Scripting News
Kai Brach’s Dense Discovery
Heather Cox Richardson’s Letters from an American
Will Leitch’s This Here Newsletter
Fear Mongering
Michael Moore was not the only person who predicted Trump would win in 2016, but he gets so much credit for going on Real Time With Bill Maher and saying it. If he would have been wrong everyone would say, he overreacted. Since he was right, now he’s some sort of futurist. He is not.
Personally, I think Moore has a pretty good idea of the electorate especially in the midwest. He’s got his finger on the pulse. This insight is even more important as we get going this summer. Still, he’s doing the whole, “Imma gonna say crazy stuff is gonna to happen and let’s see where that goes” again schtick and it’s annoying.
For example in a recent interview with Tom Kludt in Vanity Fair he says the only thing anyone will care about:
He isn’t so sure any votes will be cast at all. “There will be no November 3 election if things keep going the way they’re going right now,” Moore said. “I think he would have figured out a way, even without the coronavirus, but this is a gift to him because I think he never really intended on leaving in the first place. He admires dictators. He admires strongmen, wishes he was one. I think the writing is on the wall right now that he is in deep electoral trouble.”
Legal experts say Trump doesn’t have the authority to delay or cancel the election, but Biden has predicted he may try. Son-in-law Jared Kushner only helped fuel speculation last week that there could be some kind of election holdup, and on the morning after we spoke, Trump threatened to to withhold federal funding to1 Michigan and Nevada over their plans for mail-in ballots. Even if the election does happen in November, Moore isn’t convinced that Biden will be on the Democratic ticket. “This has been a crazy year, a crazy election year, a crazy year on so many levels. Anything you would have predicted back in December or January is out the window. The year we thought we were going to have on any level is out the window. So if it’s all out the window, what else is out the window?” Moore said. “Nothing is lined up right this year. Just because he’s got the most delegates and everybody’s conceded, it doesn’t mean he’s going to be the nominee. They’re not even going to have a real convention. Anything can happen.”
Sure, anything can happen, but seriously none of this is going to happen. If anything can happen, why not convince Barack Obama to run again? He’d win in a landslide and he wouldn’t even have to campaign. What’s that you say? The constitution forbids him running? Who cares? No one voting would care. It’s like saying Trump is going to delay or cancel the November 3 election. It won’t happen.
The only thing I can say for sure is that Trump, win or lose, will contest the results of the election.
Star Trek: Strange New Worlds
Finally, we will have a Star Trek show that sounds like what I’ve been hoping we’d get for quite some time.
CBS All Access has ordered a full series of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, based on the years where Captain Christopher Pike (Anson Mount) helms the U.S.S. Enterprise.
The series will feature Star Trek: Discovery Season 2 fan favorites Anson Mount as Captain Christopher Pike, Rebecca Romijn as Number One, and Ethan Peck as Science Officer Spock.
The series will follow the trio in the decade before Captain Kirk boarded the U.S.S. Enterprise, as they explore new worlds around the galaxy.
I wrote a modest proposal way back in 2001 that asked for several things.
1. The new Star Trek should take place in the future onboard a starship named Enterprise.
2. The new Star Trek probably needs to go back to basics and have a maverick, white, Americanized, male captain
3. The new Star Trek can kill two birds with one stone with a black woman first officer.
4. The doctor/counselor should be a race we have seen before, but not on a Federation ship.
5. The engineer should have an ability unheard of before
6. The head of security should be what Tasha Yar aspired to be.
7. The young fresh-faced ensign is an integral part of the cast.
8. The science officer — See _Real Genius_
9. Something that hasn’t been done before that can connect this series with the previous.
10. Stories, Stories, Stories.
I got the first two in spades, except it’s not set in the future of the Star Trek timeline. I did not anticipate a series focused on Captain Pike, so #3 and #8 don’t really work, but the solution to #9 is interesting. Plus, #4 — #7 hold some intriguing ideas. Lastly, #10 goes without saying. For this series, I might make the idea I had for the science officer part of the engineer’s character.
No air date has been announced, but depending on the timing, but what with Discovery and Picard, Short Treks and the forthcoming Star Trek: Lower Decks all in some stage of production, it’s possible that Trek enthusiasts could wind up with an unprecedented four five different series airing concurrently to geek out over argue about.
I’m looking forward to learning more and casting.
No Shame
Will Wheaton, writing on his site, presents a gentle reminder to everyone who isn’t lazy or selfish out there.
This whole thing we are living through is a lot, and it’s really understandable to want to get back to normal. The thing is, science and virology don’t care about your timetable, and until science and virology have a vaccine for Covid19, this is our reality. Wishing it would go away, and acting accordingly, is only going to make this worse. Refusing to follow medical guidelines, because you’re pissed off and frustrated is only going to make this worse. Ignoring medical advice because you’re bored and want to go to the beach is only going to make this worse.
Selfish, ignorant people are going to make this worse. Don’t be one of them.
He goes on to ask everyone to be mindful and self-aware. He asks everyone to be patient and make the best of the situation. He asks everyone to choose to be kind.
He’s asking nicely and simply. Will is a better man than I am.
When I went out last weekend in my mask, I was shocked at the idiocy of those I encountered who were not wearing masks. The arrogance. The holier-than-thou attitude. These men, nearly all of them were men, would not be caught dead in a mask. Keep it up, and they’ll just be caught dead, I thought to myself.
I wanted to glare at them and mentally shame them into protecting themselves and others around them. An employee at the nursery where I was shopping for flowers insisted a gentleman wear a mask. After the third time, he finally pulled a mask out of his pocket and put it on. Of course, it was off his nose and mostly around his chin after two minutes. My blood began to boil because this asshole would not wear a mask in public.
The stress of everything came crashing around me. Causing a scene was not going to help the situation. So, I did what I could and hyper-focused on my wife and what we were doing and did my level best to ignore the idiots around us.
Later, I found Michelle Goldberg’s story in The New York Times about social shaming.
The only tool ordinary people have to try to combat this deadly entropy is public shame, and so there’s been an enormous amount of it, both online and off. “The Social Media Shame Machine Is In Overdrive Right Now,” said a BuzzFeed headline. Indignant people are posting photographs of neighbors violating social distancing guidelines and flooding the police with tips. The mayor of Providence has urged residents to “socially shame” anyone not wearing a mask or gathering in large groups. “What is clear is that people across Tampa Bay are watching each other in ways that range from vigilant to possibly obsessive,” said a piece in the Tampa Bay Times.
Donald Trump has polarized the response to the coronavirus so that compliance with public health directives is coded as progressive, and defiance is conservative. But people on the left used to know that when it comes to public health, shaming is generally an ineffective strategy. “Shaming people is, I think, like ‘Just Say No to Drugs,’” Gregg Gonsalves, an epidemiologist at the Yale School of Public Health, told me. “It doesn’t deal with people’s psychology, with people’s economic circumstances, their own fears and anxieties, and so it just seems wrong to me.”
It all seems so infuriating.
When I told my wife about my internal dialogue and feelings post-nursery visit, she reminded me that everyone is going through their own emotional problems with wearing a mask. People are just scared. Everyone is waging their own private war right now, and those battles are not straight lines of black and white.
Most of the time, I don’t get worked up about what’s happening outside these four walls. Other times, I think we are all going to die. It’s a roller coaster of emotions and fear. Plus, it’s not always a wave to ride, but a slow roll.
I believe everyone is doing the best they can. Some people are idiots, and some are just struggling. Me shaming anyone isn’t going to help. It doesn’t do them any good, and it won’t make me feel any better. Those shoppers without a mask aren’t evil or stupid. They are just trying to manage this terrible situation the way they think is best. They might be wrong. I think they probably are wrong because I listen to the scientists and the experts, but the bottom line is I can’t change them.
My responsibility is to myself and my family. I want my friends to be safe and healthy. I want everyone to do the right thing and pay attention to the scientists and healthcare workers who know what’s going on. This is a crazy situation, and nobody knows what’s going to happen next.
Everyone just wants this thing to be over and finished. I believe following the proper guidelines will accelerate the end to social distancing and mask-wearing in public. More importantly, it will save lives. I hope you do too. Some day in the future, this will all be over, and the anxiety, fear, and stress will be focused elsewhere. We can still do our best now. We can always keep on keeping on.
And me being angry about the maskless dudebros is wasted energy.
A Good Night’s Sleep
Photographer, writer, editor, and publisher, Rick LePage , wrote an essay a few days ago that I’m just getting around to reading. He starts off this way:
Good sleep is a questionable endeavor these days. It is understandable, given the pandemic, with the lockdowns and quarantines, and its associated fears and anxieties. Drinking is up, exercise is down, and anger and frustration are often at the forefront of my brain. Add to that the raw polarization of our society today, and it is altogether far too wearying, but not in a way that helps sleep. It is, quite honestly, hard to fight it all. There is a reason that Monday seems like Tuesday, which seems like last Thursday, or Sunday. I can’t — and don’t care to — remember what happened then.
I have not been sleeping all that great. I bet you haven’t either. Even though my life has not been completely turned upside down, it has changed.
The information overload is almost too much to bear, and I’ve had to pull back from the news considerably. Beyond the basics that people are dying, so stay inside and stay safe, I can hardly process the rest, nor should I have to do so. I don’t work in healthcare or the government. I’m not an expert on anything that would be worthy during this time. Honestly, there is nothing I can do to help fight this pandemic other than stay inside, wash my hands, and stay safe. I’m not going to fact check everyone’s opinion or spend time researching credentials.
There is no amount of news I could watch, read or research that would change the basics of “people are dying, so stay inside and stay safe.” It is the only way I can make an impact. There is nothing else I can do. I decided instead of drowning in information; I’m drowning it out.
While we may be more connected as a society, my impact on the world is small. I do what I can: stay home, socially distance if I have to go out, wear a mask, and be there for friends and family who are feeling scared or sad. My family limits the time outdoors for food or other supplies. I can walk the dog and get fresh air without putting myself or others at risk.
Spending time on the news of the day outside of headlines is a waste of time and energy. If something is important enough, it will bubble up past these self-imposed barriers.
It is mentally exhausting to follow the constant stream of announcements, advice, memes, news stories, blog posts, and social media swamp. I try to stay calm, find distractions, find the new, and be. Spending time doing practically anything else is wasted time.
To rest my brain and not feel so overloaded, I take time to enjoy the things I like. I realized early in this political landscape that I could not take in the tsunami of constant bullshit. I stopped paying attention to social media. I reactivated my Instagram and started to follow photographers and artists unconnected to the news and the world. I curated my Twitter feed, and I unfollowed many, many people across the board. It’s quieter.
I found blogs and newsletters that are creating amazing things. It inspired me to reengineer this site and make it something worthwhile and representative of me. I cut down on the noise and found a bit more peace.
Of course, I’m just as worried and anxious about the coronavirus as anyone who’s paying attention. I think about what I want to happen over the summer so that some sense of revised normalcy might happen. If and when the world comes back to some semblance of the “before times,” what do I want to do? Where shall I sit and enjoy a meal? Who will I hug first?
I dream of St. Louis Cardinals baseball games and Fighting Illini football and basketball. I think about traveling again to Arizona, California, and Florida. Eating my mom’s cooking and hanging out with my brother’s family and my wife’s family and… and…
And then I remember The Wizard of Oz and Dorothy, who said, “If I ever go looking for my heart’s desire again, I won’t look any further than my own backyard. Because if it isn’t there, I never really lost it, to begin with.”
My backyard is looking better and better every day.
The family is approaching 60 days, staying at home and staying safe. We binge watch new shows, we read, we find new creative projects. Staying at home has not been a burden for my family, and we are incredibly lucky in that respect.
Despite this pandemic and everything that has happened since, life does not stop. We might be calling this The Great Pause, but pressing the pause button on many of the things that make life enjoyable like movies, concerts, dining out, and sports, life goes on. We keep going on, and so does everyone else. Spouses, kids, the family dog, mother’s in law, and friends, all need us. Some need us to make them dinner or listen to them rant and rave about our messed up politics. Some need diapers changed, and water bowls filled.
Nothing is over. Life finds a way to quote Jurassic Park. We have to keep going.
Even if you want to scream into the void or at that asshole not wearing a mask at the grocery store, we have to remember everyone has invisible burdens and pressures. Be kind. Don’t be so hard on yourself or others. We will get through this together.
This pandemic is like a slow-motion 9/11. I mean, you can make the argument that this presidency has been one too, but with COVID-19, we are seeing actual numbers and deaths equalling one 9/11 every day is… checks notes … not good. We are all trapped in quicksand trying to move forward. We are inching our way, wondering when we will find solid ground. It will end someday. We just have no idea when that day will be.
You probably just want some peace and quiet and a good night’s sleep.
Zoey’s Extraordinary Playlist
One of the best things to come out of this crazy time is the ability to try something new. Of course, everyone can try something new at any time-no need for a global pandemic as an excuse to get started. That is factually correct. However, this stay-at-home to flatten the curve life we now lead has created, at least in me, a heightened sense of finding the new. And “finding the new” lead my family to Zoey’s Extraordinary Playlist, which, for of its highs and lows, was 12 hours of entertainment that made me laugh out loud multiple times, made me cry, and made me choose between Team Max or Team Simon. The best part is it allowed my wife and I to binge-watch something other than old episodes of Law and Order: SVU (“ Yo! Are you telling me this guy gets off on little girls with pigtails? “!).
It was awesome.
I was tangentially aware there was a new show with a musical-type thing happening starring that one guy from Pitch Perfect and, I think, someone who used to be on Glee. I had never seen the lead actress before and had generally dismissed the show as one of the many I would never watch.
When my wife said casually, “Wanna try that Zoey show?” I agreed. I was a bit fuzzy on the high concept of the show and was completely blindsided by how delightful, funny, witty, and heart-felt the show was. The first episode caught me completely off guard, and I was hooked.
Basically, the premise is after a freak accident, Zoey can hear people’s thoughts and feelings manifested usually has an elaborate song-and-dance that only she can see. With this newfound power that she conveniently has little control over and with ill-defined rules, she is compelled to help her friends while navigating a sitcom-style love triangle, new responsibilities at her job, and her family’s dying father.
In most of the episodes, Zoey hears someone sing a song that hints at their troubles or lends insight into their character. Sometimes it’s a whole city singing to her “Help” by the Beatles. Sometimes it’s a co-worker revealing that he’s angling for the same promotion by singing, “All I Do Is Win” by DJ Khaled. Of course, her friend-zoned male friend has a secret crush on her, and it’s revealed with him singing “I Think I Love You” by David Cassidy. All of this happens because of her new “power.” The singing and the dance routines are pretty great, and the song choices made me laugh as they fit into each storyline.
It would have been easy for the show to go full sitcom with occasional touches upon more serious issues, but ZEP is a dramedy and as the name implies walks a thin line between drama and comedy.
The first time Zoey sees her father’s feelings in song comes with the caveat that he’s afflicted with Progressive Supranuclear Palsy. The disease has mostly silenced him and keeps him catatonic, but when he breaks into a song, it is both magical and heartbreaking. Played by Peter Gallagher, his songs let us see Zoey’s father as she remembers him and makes the return to his current state ever more difficult.
The show could have been made without the drama part and been successful. However, adding in more profound issues such as dealing with the suicide of a parent or what it means to be gender-fluid and sing in the church choir, ZEP transcends the superficiality of its high concept. The balance is not perfect, but creator Austin Winsberg made a sharp 12 episodes of television. The show, which has not yet been picked up for a second season, stands on its own as a perfect microcosm.
I’m reminded of the first season of Dawson’s Creek. The show’s creator, Kevin Williamson, had no idea if it was going to be picked up for a second season, and just like Zoey’s Extraordinary Playlist created a perfect season with a beginning, middle, and an end that could be the last we see of these characters.
There are a million directions the show could go after this season, but part of me wishes it stays preserved in amber just like this.
The Cancer in the Camera Lens
David Roth, writing for The New Republic, is just at the top of his game. The descriptions here are delightful.
In close up, on television, at a glance, with the volume down, Donald Trump can from time to time look like a president. That effect becomes less convincing the more you pay attention, though. Even under professional lighting, Trump reliably looks like a photographic negative of himself; on his worse and wetter days, he has the tone and texture of those lacquered roast ducks that hang from hooks in Chinatown restaurant windows. The passing presidentiality of the man dissipates utterly in longer shots, where Trump can be seen standing tipped oddly forward like a jowly ski jumper in midair, or mincing forward to bum-rush an expert’s inconvenient answer with an incoherent one of his own, or just making faces intended to signal that he is listening very strongly to what someone else is saying. (These slapdash performances of executive seriousness tend to have the effect, as the comedian Stewart Lee once said of James Corden, of making Trump look like “a dog listening to classical music.”) Seen from this long-shot vantage, the man at the podium is unmistakably Donald Trump — uncanny, unknowing, upset about various things that he can’t quite understand or express.
Roth is a master at describing Trump and this time we are all in with clarity and perfect prose.
This line about the “tipped oddly forward” reminded me of a Tweet I saw.
Trump standing always makes me think of Bugs Bunny nemesis Giovanni Jones. pic.twitter.com/x36rJDxS3W
— ben schwartz (@benschwartz_) April 28, 2020