Watching the Trump campaign this week, I am reminded of a collection of bad movie scenes my brother curated back in the 1990s under the title, Destination: Brain – we informally referred to it as “The Greatest Hits”. As bad sci-fi movie aficionados, Matt and I loved to watch select passages from some of mankind’s worst films but found it tiresome to sit through 90 minutes of boring dreck just to get to that “sweet spot” of bad acting, cheap specials, horrible dialog, etc. Matt cut together Destination: Brain so that we could enjoy those poetically bad movie moments extracted from context, and yet given new meaning by their juxtaposition with other poorly-wrought scenes.
In any case, one of our favorite scenes was from a cheap-ass Frankenstein knock-off with a bunch of no-name actors and the clumsiest monster you ever saw. There is a climactic laboratory scene in which the monster’s arm catches on fire, and he runs around the lab, screaming, trashing the place from end to end. That’s what I think of when I look at where Trump has gone over the last week or so – a crazy-ass Frankenstein’s monster set on fire and spreading his conflagration to everything he touches. Better that he should do it during the campaign than in the oval office, am I right?
I am no fan of Ross Perot, but watching the news cover these serial sexual abuse allegations brings to mind the Texas billionaire’s studied but folksy rejoinder, “This is just sad.” Every minute spent covering this pissing match is another minute of not talking about the serious issues that face us. Not that the mainstream media and the dominant political culture need any excuses to avoid discussion of global climate change, or the ongoing threat of nuclear weapons, or the continuous state of war we’ve been embroiled in since 2001, or you name it. The notion that anyone should need more information about Trump’s past in order to vote against him is … well, it’s just sad. (The idea that any of these allegations would surprise any sentient American over the age of 25 is in itself beyond absurd.)
Tomahawk Thursday. We’re firing missiles into Yemen, nominally in response to missiles fired at our vessels in the Gulf. Of course, we are in so deep with the Saudis bombing Yemen into the stone age that the Houthi rebels (or as NBC calls them, the “Iranian-backed Houthi rebels”) do not distinguish between the U.S. and Saudi. You can kind of see why. That war sucks, and we can do something about it. The fact that we don’t is a crime.
Not-so-great debate. I was witness to the nerve-wracking exchange between former secretary Clinton and Donald Trump, and I have to say that something about seeing the two of them on the stage of a presidential general election debate was disturbing enough even before they said anything. Clinton bested Trump, but that shouldn’t be hard. The guy literally knows nothing about anything. Honestly, the Republican party seems determined to convince people that there’s nothing to the presidency, that any dunce off the street can do the job. Count me among those who do not agree. That rambling wreck Trump would be a total disaster, to borrow one of his favorite turns of phrase. If Monday’s debate proved anything, it’s that.
Gary Johnson, on the other hand, is clearly not the brightest ex-governor on the porch and hasn’t made much of a case for why young people should give their vote to a ticket that’s floated in part with Koch money, most likely. Perhaps his supporters are not aware that he would slash spending on just about any program that ever benefited them in any way. If American style libertarianism is about anything, it’s about that. Not that it’s likely to be much of a problem – he, like Stein, have no conceivable path to victory in this election. All they have is an extraordinary opportunity to hand Donald Trump and the hyper-reactionary Republican party an electoral victory this November that they don’t deserve and that will have repercussions for many years to come.
What would light a fire under these voters? Well, a more determined and effective candidate, for one. The Democrats have a good platform, they just need to push it harder. But there’s also clearly identifying and characterizing the opposition, not in terms of the singular problem of Trump but rather the broader Republican party as it is currently comported. Trump is a bombastic idiot and a hypersensitive man-baby with tiny hands, but his xenophobic rants reflect the core of the party that nominated him. Clinton should make that clear.
Truth be told, I have seldom been so gob-smacked by the stupidity of a presidential candidate. Sure, Dubya was a tremendous dumb-ass. Sure, Dan Quayle couldn’t spell and thought Mexicans spoke Latin. Sure, Libertarian candidate Gary Johnson apparently thinks “Aleppo” is the name of a new recreational drug. Donald Trump is in a whole other category. Basic concepts about the nature of the world appear to be beyond his grasp. At the forum, he repeated his opinion that we should have “taken the oil” when we invaded Iraq. Asked to elaborate, he poked around the notion of leaving a few people there to stand guard over it, as if it was a small, contiguous, manageable object and not a massive natural resource that’s part of the geology of that unfortunate country.
Conway is a good con artist. I suppose you could find her convincing if you choose to forget that in 2012, Trump was birther-in-chief, claiming that his operatives were turning up “unbelievable” stuff on Obama’s birth certificate – a campaign that was always about race, about being the “other”, about legitimacy. I suppose you could buy what she’s selling if you choose to forget the last year or so of fevered rhetoric – NOT gaffes or errors, but deliberate, repeated statements – about immigration, about foreign policy, about law enforcement policy. And I suppose you could believe Conway’s contention that Trump is a hard-working, honest fellow who treats people well if you haven’t been paying attention to the last 30 years of his very public life. I guess you can believe whatever you want to believe if you try really, really hard.
Nuclear summer. Here in New York State, our always forward-looking government recently decided to sink up to around $7 billion over the next dozen years to subsidize our aging nuclear power plants, particularly the Fitzpatrick plant up in Scriba, NY. Part of an effort to advance so-called “clean” energy, we will now be further subsidizing this moribund industry, underwriting the transfer of this 40-year-old plant to another massive electrical utility. Meanwhile, in my home county, they have canceled a major solar energy generation project. What’s wrong with this picture? (Actually, what’s right with it?)
Does this bother the Republican establishment? Not at all. They get a little bothered by his off-hand comments and rejoinders to everyone who looks askance at him. Overt racist policies, ethnic cleansing, etc., inspires mild concern. I think the turning point was Trump’s reluctance to endorse Paul Ryan and other prominent Republicans – that’s getting their attention, and now the party is openly looking for ways to rein him in or read him out. I don’t think either will happen, frankly. His fellow Republicans worry about their seats, not about the planet – they don’t care that this hyper narcissistic man-baby who seems to have a fascination with nuclear weapons might become president.
This is not a great strategy. They’re risking turning off some of their most ardent activists with the bluster, the hyper-patriotism, the parade of military officers, etc. Chants of USA, USA, USA! It’s pretty horrifying on a certain level to see them resort to overt jingoism. But Trump has given them that opportunity, and politics, like nature, abhors a vacuum.
It was a week that started with the obscene bombing in Baghdad, the death toll for which has exceeded 250. As has long been the case, this provoked some small response in American culture because of the magnitude of the crime, but the degree of “hair-on-fire” apoplexy about terrorism has been relatively minimal due to the cultural distance between Iraq and the United States. As these attacks move closer culturally to the U.S., our politicians get more worked up. Forget this export we call “freedom” – that bombing is our gift to the Iraqi people and it just keeps on giving.