Author: odd man out

Tom Wolfe’s works will live on! Really!!!

~ odd man out

After hearing Tom Wolfe had died, I thought of that scene in The Bonfire of the Vanities where master of the universe Sherman McCoy, under arrest, is paraded past reporters with Styrofoam peanuts clinging to his expensive suit.

…They were all over his shirt and pants. The rain was streaming down his forehead and his cheeks. He started to wipe his face, but then he realized he would have to raise both hands and his jacket to do it, and he didn’t want them to see his handcuffs. So the water just rolled down…

No writer was better at using the third-person narrator to get inside the heads of his characters, at using specific details to show their states of mind, at dissecting their passions and pretensions. The fictional Sherman McCoy was no less vividly drawn than the real-life Leonard Bernstein in “Radical Chic,” and the real-life Ken Kesey in The Electric Kool-aid Acid Test.

I was working for a daily newspaper when Bonfire came out. The reporters and editors who actually read books — there were more than a few of us — were only mildly surprised by Wolfe’s seamless transition from nonfiction to fiction. In his nonfiction he combined first-rate reporting with cutting humor, a hyperactive prose style and a talent for socio-historical analysis. In his fiction, he used the same elements.

A lot of journalists back then wanted to write like Wolfe, just like folk musicians in the 1960s wanted to write like Bob Dylan, and short-story writers in the 1990s wanted to write like Denis Johnson.

And so what if Wolfe’s style was inimitable? He inspired a lot of us to find our own paths, to put our era in perspective, and he’s still influencing young writers who aspire to write something more ambitious than nuts-and-bolts journalism.

Footnote: Wolfe once told Rolling Stone: “I’ve taken what I think of as the ‘man from Mars approach’: I’ve just arrived from Mars, I have no idea what you’re doing, but I’m very interested.” Nowhere is this approach more successfully realized than in Acid Test, an amazing piece of journalism-sociology-history that’s still as exciting and insightful as it was when it was first published, fifty years ago.

For news without context, tune into NPR

~ odd man out ~ 2 Comments

I fell asleep with the radio on and woke Monday to what I thought was the sound of my friend Swamp Rabbit pleading for a drink. But no, it was the squeaky little voice of Ivanka Trump’s Ken doll, Jared Kushner, who was telling the world via National Public Radio how terrific it was to be present in Israel for an event celebrating the movement of the U.S. embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.

Meanwhile, not many miles from the celebration, Israeli soldiers at the Gaza border were shooting Palestinians, who had responded to the embassy move — a strong signal that peace talks were dead — by burning tires and trying to breach the border fence. By day’s end, 58 had been killed and well over a thousand wounded.

NPR mentioned the slaughter a few times as they reported on the dignitaries at the new embassy site — Barbie and Ken, Trump toady Steve Mnuchin, mega-donor Sheldon Adelson, and so on — but the network made no mention of the web of corruption that binds Republican big shots to thugs like Israeli Prime Minister “Bibi” Netanyahu.

For context regarding the embassy move — for instance, why is it happening? — Twitter was a better place to start than NPR.

NPR is almost as useless as it is ubiquitous. It has some good reporters and covers a lot of territory, but its news directors were neutered years ago when the Breitbarts of the world began accusing the network of liberal bias.

Footnote: I’ll bet Robert Mueller wasn’t following the fete in Jerusalem. More likely, he was sifting through evidence of how Kushner has been manipulated by Israel and other foreign powers.

A fictionalized Trump? Too cliche

~ odd man out

Does anyone doubt that Donald Trump, if elected president of a country with no democratic traditions, would have quickly muzzled any news organizations that didn’t suck up to him the same way Mike Pence does?

I asked my friend Swamp Rabbit, only because the answer is so obvious. Trump’s tweets remind us that the leader of the so-called free world has no sense of irony, no self-awareness, no tolerance for viewpoints that challenge his delusions of grandeur.

Trump’s favorite put-down is “fake news,” but he can’t get through a public statement without telling a lie, or a series of lies, depending on how long he talks. He accuses reporters of being negative but built his whole campaign on the (correct) assumption that he could win by exploiting the fears and resentments of working-class whites.

“Blah, blah,” Swamp Rabbit said. “Let it go, dude. Get on with your miserable life.”

He was right. Bitching about the malicious fraud in the White House won’t change anything. It might not even be therapeutic.

The problem is I write fiction and consider Trump an affront to good fiction, just as he is to good government. I take it personally. He’s an insult to countless fiction writers who labor to make their characters come alive on the page.

“That don’t make no sense,” Swamp Rabbit said. “Just ’cause you don’t like him don’t mean he ain’t alive.”

I tried to explain: Fictional characters don’t have to be likable, but they do have to seem genuine and show some glimmer of inner life. They needn’t evolve into full-fledged heroes or villains, but they must change, or at least learn something new about themselves, in order to fully engage smart readers.

Trump seems neither genuine nor capable of change. He’s a villain, but a predictable villain, greedy, vulgar and vain. Incapable of self-examination. The presidential Trump is as mean and contemptible as the pre-presidential Trump. He’s a cartoon villain — a character drawn from reality TV, not from reality.

“What you sayin’?” Swamp Rabbit said. “What’s wrong with Trump being a cartoon? Most people like cartoons.”

I like cartoons,” I replied. “I just don’t like cartoons that become President of the United States.”

Clarification: Trump would fail as a primary character in realistic fiction, but he’s a good fit for satiric fiction, or for the theater of the absurd. He’s a dead ringer for the cartoonish title character in Alfred Jarry’s Ubu Roi.

Fool me once… OK, now fool me again

~ odd man out ~ 2 Comments

The race is on. In one lane we have Donald Trump using false evidence from Benjamin Netanyahu as an excuse to scuttle the Iran nuclear deal, a first step in drumming up support for another Mideast war.

In the other, a diverse crew of investigators sifting through a trove of Trump lies, sorting them out, preparing a case that might topple our home-grown Mussolini.

So far Trump is winning, and each day brings more evidence that we’re right to worry — that Trump really might start a major war if that’s what it takes to keep Robert Mueller from overtaking him and making an airtight case.

This morning I visited my friend Swamp Rabbit, who is totally opposed to worrying. He thinks taking deep breaths and letting time pass is the best way to deal with situations you can’t control.

“But this is like the Iraq War in 2003, Rabbit. The chief and his minions let loose a stream of lies about a nonexistent threat, the media plays along with the lies, or do a halfhearted job of debunking them. Propaganda tamps down potential public outrage. The bombs start falling.”

“That’s just your ‘magination,” the Rabbit said. “Ain’t no way we gonna get fooled into fighting another of them disaster wars.”

“That’s what they said after Vietnam, you dumb rodent.”

My insult pissed him off. “You’re projecting, Odd Man. You got a shitty part-time job and can’t keep up with your bills or support your writing habit. Just because you in a downward spiral don’t mean the world is, too.”

I saw his point but resented his insistence that my bleak personal situation belied evidence that the world was in trouble.

“Trump is an existential threat,” I said. “He’s a monster con man with no redeeming qualities.”

“No shit,” the Rabbit replied. “But it took an army of morons to create the monster. It’s a little late to talk them into changing their minds, doncha think?”

“Maybe not. If public opinion can’t stop him, what will?”

The Rabbit broke the seal on a bottle of Wild Turkey and took a quick drink. “There’s Congress,” he said. “And then there’s the courts.”

I groaned and almost said something nasty, but in the end I just asked him to pass the bottle.

Footnote: As George W. Bush once said, “There’s an old saying in Tennessee — I know it’s in Texas, probably in Tennessee — that says, fool me once, shame on — shame on you. Fool me you can’t get fooled again.”

Emotional weather report for April

~ odd man out ~ 3 Comments

…High tonight, low tomorrow, precipitation is expected.
– Tom Waits

Nature was at war with itself last month – solitary balmy days sandwiched by cold snaps with gusty winds, the sky still bright at 7:30 pm, but with temps in the thirties. I ran at dusk, watching the light shift as clouds rushed in, reshaping ordinary things into creatures I couldn’t trust, and vice versa.

The dinosaur up ahead turned out to be a mobile crane with steel jaws. The old woman scrubbing bed sheets was a chopper draped in a tarp that flapped in the wind.

The north wind hit me full force on Broad Street. I turned my head and saw THE CHURCH OF JESUS CHRIST OF LATTER-DAY SAINTS stenciled in gold on an impressive glass entryway and, on either side of the entryway, the words TAX TIME printed in big bold caps on tall cardboard signs. I guessed that Mormons had abandoned their South Philly mission to a platoon of accountants.

I turned west on Passyunk and saw the sky split in half, a big black cloud on the right, a pink sunset bleeding into clear blue on the left. Kanye West was on the corner, scolding black people for choosing to be slaves. Stormy Daniels stumbled out of Fatso’s Bar, followed by Donald Trump’s slack-jawed lawyer – Cohen, his name is.

My life passed before my eyes. Everything reminded me of past mistakes and false assumptions. The skinny old smoker outside 7-11 was at death’s door. Or would he outlive me by 20 years?

I stopped running and phoned my friend Swamp Rabbit. “It’s high anxiety,” I said. “You know any remedies?”

“Time,” the Rabbit said. “This time next week it might be 90 degrees. This time next year, or the year after, Trump might be making a deal to stay out of jail.”

“You can’t control what’s coming, so get a grip,” he added. “Get some new glasses, too.”

Rabid Rudy just won’t fade away

~ odd man out ~ 2 Comments

In 1951, Douglas MacArthur, grand poobah of the armies and supreme egomaniac, announced his retirement by telling Congress, “Old soldiers never die, they just fade away.”

That was then.

Nowadays, old soldiers and politicians and grifters and lawyers fight to their dying breath to not fade away. For example, Rudy Giuliani spent a decade and a half praising himself for having been mayor of New York in 2001 when those two planes took out the twin towers. As Joe Biden famously said, “…There’s only three things [Giuliani] mentions in a sentence — a noun and a verb and 9/11…”

But something new has come up. Giuliani, who more than ever looks and speaks like a rabid chipmunk, has elbowed his way back into the news by becoming the new legal rodent on Donald Trump’s sinking ship, where he’s quickly proven to be even dumber than long-time Trump lawyer Michael Cohen.

On Wednesday night, Giuliani told Fox News talking head and Trump ass-wipe Sean Hannity that Trump had reimbursed Cohen for the $130,000 Cohen said he gave porn star Stormy Daniels to keep her from going public about having an affair with Trump. This, of course, directly contradicted Trump’s claim that he knew nothing about a payoff to Daniels.

Stormy’s hired gun Michael Avenatti reacted to Giuliani’s remarks by telling CNN “I said it weeks ago, I’m going to say it again: Mr. Trump will not serve out his term. No way. No how. He will be forced to ultimately resign. This is a bombshell.”

A bombshell Trump set off by scraping the bottom of the barrel to find a lawyer who will delay the inevitable. Giuliani is doing the opposite. We should thank him for not fading away.

Correspondents celebrate failure to do their jobs

~ odd man out ~ 2 Comments

I heard comedian Michelle Wolf interviewed on the radio today. She made news Saturday at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner by tweaking chronic liars Sarah Huckabee Sanders and Kellyanne Conway, but one of her best lines was directed at the liar-in-chief and his symbiotic relationship with correspondents and their bosses:

What no one in this room wants to admit is that … [Trump has] helped you sell your papers and your books and your TV. You helped create this monster, and now you’re profiting off of him.

It wasn’t even a joke, but that’s my point. Wolf isn’t a dazzling wit in the style of Stephen Colbert, who skewers Donald Trump on a nightly basis for fans who already know Trump is doing great harm to the notion that we live in a democracy.

In fact, Wolf is about as subtle as a flying mallet, maybe because she knows you can’t get the attention of the journalists who enabled Trump without hitting them over the head with the obvious — i.e., that they knew Trump was unqualified to be president and deliberately failed to communicate this truth to their audiences when it could have made a difference.

Remember, Trump lost the popular vote by a large margin, and there’s a good chance he would have lost the election if swing voters, and non-voters, had known more about his background. But the media rarely questioned Trump’s boastful lies while he was campaigning, choosing instead to present them as what Conway would call “alternative facts.”

By shining a brighter light on facets of Trump’s career — for example, his years as a casino mogul in Atlantic City — media outlets could have completely discredited him. But they chose instead to soft-pedal his personal history, lest they be accused of “liberal bias,” a charge that might adversely affect their ability to suck up to the insiders who provide them with so-called scoops.

Check out how Margaret Talev of the White House Correspondents’ Association responded to Wolf’s performance:

Last night’s program was meant to offer a unifying message about our common commitment to a vigorous and free press while honoring civility, great reporting, and scholarship winners, not to divide people. Unfortunately, the entertainer’s monologue was not in the spirit of that mission.

Talev is an idiot, or worse. A free press cares about truth, not civility. The truth will inevitably “divide people” because it alienates those who want to suppress it. Any journalist who doesn’t accept these common-sense facts should have her press credentials revoked.

Footnote: I don’t mean to imply Colbert doesn’t pack a punch. He used the flying-mallet approach on George W. Bush at the 2006 correspondents’ dinner. At least Bush, unlike Trump, had enough balls to show up for the event.

Another: Sure, a lot of mainstream journalists are doing good work now and might help topple Trump, but where were they early on, when the beast was slouching toward Washington, D.C.?

Starbucks helps widen the great divide

~ odd man out ~ 1 Comment

Headline from a opinion piece by a lifelong black resident of Philadelphia:
“Starbucks wasn’t created for black folks, it was made to push us out.”

The piece appeared this week in response to the widely reported arrest of two young black men at a Starbucks in Philly’s affluent Rittenhouse Square section. The store manager called the cops on the men, who were sitting at a table but hadn’t yet bought anything. A customer recorded the arrest with her phone, the video went viral, and protests ensued.

The Starbucks story sounds like it’s about racism, and it is, but it’s also about classism. The fact that arrests were made, and made almost immediately, demonstrates how high a priority Philly cops place on protecting residents of affluent neighborhoods from real and imagined dangers.

Put another way, it’s likely that arrests wouldn’t have been made — that police wouldn’t even have been called — if the incident had occurred at a Starbucks in a poor neighborhood, where people are less likely to raise a fuss unless something truly criminal is taking place.

Wait, I forgot — there are no Starbucks in poor neighborhoods. The mere presence of a Starbucks in a neighborhood indicates that property values are booming to the point where poor people, black and white, have been pushed out, or soon will be pushed out, by people who can afford higher rental and mortgage payments.

(Check out the Zillow study, conducted in 2015, that documents the role Starbucks plays in the “gentrification” of city neighborhoods.)

Now Starbucks has announced it will close 8,000 stores for an afternoon next month in order to hold “racial-bias education” sessions for its employees. This may be a smart corporate strategy for avoiding lawsuits, but it will do nothing to allay the xenophobia and intolerance so prevalent in wealthy enclaves where residents have enough clout at City Hall to make cops jump through hoops at their command.

Racial bias sessions won’t keep wealthy residents from raising a stink when someone plays a flute in the square, or when the so-called Friends of Rittenhouse Square try to ban wall sitting there.

More broadly, the sessions will do nothing to relieve tensions in big cities like Philly, where the gulf between rich and poor residents continues to widen.

Pistol-packing pol doesn’t mind dying

~ odd man out ~ 1 Comment

Now the senator came down here/Showing everyone his gun…
— Bob Dylan, “Stuck Inside of Mobile With the Memphis Blues Again”

This guy isn’t a senator. He’s Rep. Ralph Norman, and he is fast, fast on the draw. So fast that he made the news last week by whipping out a loaded handgun while having “coffee with constituents” at a restaurant in Rock Hill, SC.

“I don’t mind dying, but whoever shoots me better shoot well or I’m shooting back,” he later said.

“I don’t mind dying” is a line from Bo Diddley’s “Who Do You Love?” The narrator of the song is a boastful young rowdy looking to impress a girl named Arlene. Norman is a middle-aged Republican drone who’s also looking to impress Arlene, I guess.

The congressman told his coffee mates that he’d protect them with his gun. He vowed to not end up like Gabby Giffords, the ex-congresswoman who was shot in the head by some hombre while meeting with constituents in Arizona back in 2011.

But what if some bad guy had walked over to the table, picked up the gun, pointed it at Norman, and said “Who you gonna protect now, cowboy?”

Norman told reporters his intent was to demonstrate that “guns don’t shoot people; people shoot guns.”

One of them should have replied, “Anyone who would say something that stupid shouldn’t be allowed to have a gun, or hold public office.”

Trump has nothing to ‘lose’

~ odd man out

Reporters and White House insiders seemed to agree yesterday that Donald Trump was “losing it” I wondered what they were talking about. Did they mean his ability to put aside personal problems and focus on the welfare of others? Was it his sense of humor, his grip on reality, his human decency?

He never had any of those things, so how could he lose them? He is what he is – the ultimate ugly American, obsessed with the ownership and sale of things, content to believe that greed, fraudulence, ignorance and arrogance are virtues, not flaws.

Trump apparently threw a tantrum in the White House after learning the FBI had raided his personal attorney’s home and office. Later, in front of reporters, he called the raid “an attack on America,” as if nailing down evidence of his corrupt conduct, in and out of office, was akin to Pearl Harbor or 9-11.

But there’s no point ranting about Trump, he is what he is. What’s exasperating is his fan base, that malignant mass of white Americans who refuse to renounce him, to admit they were suckers for having voted for him. Many of them admire him, precisely because his persona reflects their own worst selves.

Trump tweeted this today:

Russia vows to shoot down any and all missiles fired at Syria. Get ready Russia, because they will be coming, nice and new and ‘smart!’ You shouldn’t be partners with a Gas Killing Animal who kills his people and enjoys it!

Nice and new and smart. Gas killing animal. In a little while, Trump fans might get to see the real-world consequences of having elected a fake macho man who thinks it’s a good idea to risk World War III by punching adolescent threats into his phone.

The awful truth: Our fearful leader is happy to risk World War III, if only to divert attention from the Mueller probe, which seems to have hit pay dirt. That’s the kind of guy Trump is.