Twitter users bashed National Enquirer chief David Pecker after Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos said Pecker tried to “blackmail” him with nude photos. https://t.co/NiWTrURNLm
— HuffPost Politics (@HuffPostPol) February 8, 2019
Category: Media
Blowin’ smoke on Super Sunday
I was sitting on the porch with Swamp Rabbit, trying to nail down the silliest Super Bowl moment. Was it Budweiser’s “Blowin’ In the Wind” commercial or the halftime performance by Maroon 5?
“Ain’t nothin’ silly about ‘Blowin’ In the Wind,'” the rabbit said. “The song plays and you see a beer wagon pulled by them big horses with them wind turbines in the background and them words on the screen: ‘Now brewed with wind power for a better tomorrow.’ It’s a good message.”
“Budweiser is blowing smoke,” I replied. “They’re hooked up with two of the worst right-wing organizations in the country — the American Legislative Exchange Council, called ALEC, and the Chamber of Commerce. No way ALEC will go for clean energy. Climate deniers care about today, not tomorrow.”
The rabbit lit a cigarette and blew smoke at the porch’s tar paper roof. “Budweiser is using wind power, and that helps the environment,” he said. “Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good, Odd Man.”
I told him wind energy is part of Anheuser-Busch’s campaign to make people believe their beer is more “natural” and “organic” than other beers. It’s a propaganda stunt to mislead beer drinkers, a huge demographic that’s easy to fool.
I said, “Next you’ll be telling me Maroon 5 is a great band instead of a third-rate boy band that was hired because a lot of name acts turned against the NFL after they banned Colin Kaepernick for protesting racism.”
The rabbit looked at me and said, “Of course they’re a great band. If they weren’t they wouldn’t be at the Super Bowl.”
He was putting me on, I think. We jawed about the game itself — a mostly dull affair in which the Patriots beat the Rams 13-3 — and about how the Super Bowl disappoints most years because of the gulf between the hype and the reality. I told him the vulgarity of the spectacle is no longer funny once you realize the team owners have the mentality of slave owners.
“If you think it’s that bad, why’d you watch part of the game?” the rabbit said.
I had to think about that. “It’s the dead of winter,” I replied. “I had nothing better to complain about.”
Footnote: Speaking of vulgarity, I worked at an auto show on the day of the Super Bowl. On my way into the PA Convention Center, I passed a guy hawking stuff on the street corner. “Pretzels!” he shouted. “Candy! Cotton Candy! Super Bowl rings!”
There were no takers.
Save the date
The ultimate end-of-year list
I wanted to know why my friend Swamp Rabbit was hard at work writing down his worst blackouts of 2018.
“It’s New Year’s,” he said. “I need to take stock.”
He noted that we humans like to compile lists of things, to put these things in categories, in order of importance. We like to read other people’s lists and compare theirs to ours. List-making helps us feel like we’ve processed and understood all the information the media has bombarded us with.
“That’s ridiculous,” I said. “We don’t understand anything.”
“It don’t matter,” he replied. “All’s we need is the illusion of understanding, of staying on top of things.”
We especially need end-of-year lists, he continued, and it doesn’t matter how ridiculous the topics are — most uninspired movie sequels, hottest male and female pop tarts, most persistent political cliches, most dominant athletes, most submissive athletes, best ukulele players. We need to share these lists, to argue about them.
“I don’t see the point,” I said.
He paused to sip from a juice jar full of bourbon. “There ain’t no point, it’s just fun. Don’t you know what fun is, Odd Man?”
There was nothing fun about 2018, I told him. Humans set new records for killing off other species. Sea levels rose faster than had been predicted. Environmental protection laws were undone by our evil idiot president while floods and fires scarred the landscape. Do people not notice what’s happening?
“You got a good list going there,” he said, ignoring the question. “Ten news stories that prove humans are doomed. You should finish it up and post it on your blog, the peeps will love it.”
Swamp Rabbit had commandeered my laptop and was reading aloud from a column by David Blight, who got rave reviews for his recently published biography of abolitionist orator and writer Frederick Douglass:
Douglass left a timeless maxim for republics in times of crisis: “Our government may at some time be in the hands of a bad man. When in the hands of a good man it is all well enough.” But “we ought to have our government so shaped that even when in the hands of a bad man we shall be safe.”
The bad man in Douglass’s world was President Andrew Johnson, an unreconstructed racist who was impeached but very narrowly avoided being kicked out of office. But Blight, in his column, was also making a point about our current president — who is as bad as Johnson, or worse — and the flaws in the Constitution that allow truly rotten presidents like Donald Trump and Johnson to abuse the power of the office in a big way.
“Them Founding Fathers really blew it,” Swamp Rabbit said.
He explained that there’s no legal remedy for a president who sucks up to foreign dictators. A president who wants to scuttle healthcare reforms, stir up hatred of minorities and foreigners, sabotage efforts to slow climate change, and use the presidency as a vehicle for further enriching himself.
Impeachment is supposed to be an option, but a corrupt and/or mentally imbalanced president isn’t likely to be kicked out of office while the party he belongs to controls the House or Senate. (So much for checks and balances.) And there’s the 25th Amendment, but that wouldn’t work either.
“Them legal scholars don’t even know if a president can be indicted for committing crimes while in office,” the rabbit said. ” Or how to keep him from blowing up the world if he’s in a foul mood.”
“So how do we fix the problem, rabbit?” I said. “Does everything depend on what Robert Mueller finds?”
He called up an article by a psychiatrist who, together with a bunch of other shrinks, devised a plan that would require a president-elect to take a fitness-for-duty exam before assuming office. She explained that the test would measure “trust, discipline and self-control, judgment and critical thinking, self-awareness and empathy,” just like the U.S. Army’s field manual.
“I saw that,” I said, “But how can a test prove what the shrink called psychological pathology? What if Trump’s bad behavior is part of a calculated effort to please the kooks and bigots that make up his base?”
“Them’s good questions,” the rabbit conceded. “The shrinks ain’t quite thought it through, I reckon.”
“So we’re stuck with a loose cannon who holds the nuclear codes,” I said. “What’s your solution?”
“I ain’t got one yet,” the rabbit said, closing my laptop. “I’d ask that Douglass dude, but he left the building in 1895.”
Terrible humans hire terrible humans
File this one under “It takes one to know one” :
President Trump has named Mick Mulvaney, the director of the Office of Management and Budget, as acting White House chief of staff.
In response to the announcement, Mulvaney tweeted: “This is a tremendous honor. I look forward to working with the President and the entire team. It’s going to be a great 2019!”
However, in a 2016 video surfaced by the Daily Beast, Mulvaney called Trump a “terrible human being,” just days before the presidential election.
Mulvaney is the pernicious little grifter appointed last year by Trump to sabotage the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which Sen. Elizabeth Warren helped create to prevent payday lenders and other bottom feeders from fleecing the poor. After Mulvaney’s mission was accomplished, Trump sent him to the OMB.
Now Mulvaney is replacing John Kelly, the four-star bigot who couldn’t keep a lid on his contempt for Trump. The new chief of staff is as terrible as Kelly and should feel right at home in Trump’s Cabinet, a who’s who of terrible humans hand-picked to wreak havoc on the federal government.
I mean people like Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos, hired by Trump to help destroy the public school system; Andrew Wheeler, the former coal industry lobbyist (!) currently in charge of neutering the Environmental Protection Agency; Secretary of the Treasury Steve Mnuchin, dubbed “the foreclosure king” after he made a fortune using deceptive business practices to help banks foreclose on legions of homeowners who fell behind on mortgage payments during the Great Recession.
There are many more, but I can’t go on, it’s too terrible. Pardon the Taxi Driver reference, but let’s just hope the Mueller probe and other investigations bring a real rain that washes Trump and all his scum out of the White House.
And let’s hope the rain comes before Trump does something really terrible in a last-ditch effort to stay in office.
Facebook being Facebook
Digging deep for ‘new’ Beatles gold
I blew my mind out in a car, coming home from a gig in Bethlehem, PA, listening to “Glass Onion” on the radio. First Ringo’s snare and then bang, the whole bad-ass rhythm section and John singing I told you ’bout strawberry fields… Three verses altogether, with a bridge between the second and third. Oh yeah. The cryptic lyrical references to earlier Beatles songs. Each verse ending with Looking through a glass onion. The string section swooning up and down at the eerie fade-out.
I thought whoa, they don’t make them like that anymore, do they? As if to underscore my thought, the DJ instantly played “Glass Onion” again. Afterwards, she announced that she’d actually played two different versions of “Glass Onion,” in connection with the recent release of a six-CD remix of the Beatles’ The White Album.
“I couldn’t tell the one version of the song from the other,” I told Swamp Rabbit when I got back to the shack. “They both sounded great. I’d buy the whole boxed set if I could afford it.”
“Why do a fool thing like that?” the rabbit grumbled. “It’s a lot cheaper to download.”
I had to think about that. You could argue that the purchase would be worth it. Co-producer Giles Martin — son of George Martin, the “fifth Beatle” — did a great job of giving The White Album a “sonic tune-up” without messing around too much with the group’s artistic intentions.
But you could also argue that it’s pathetic of me to think about satisfying my craving for new music by purchasing yet another expensive remix of 50-year-old Beatles songs, even if the sound quality is great.
“What you care about sound quality?” the rabbit said. “The only CD player you own is the one in your beat-up old laptop. Just use your phone.”
My drunken friend had a point. I’m no audiophile, and the culture has changed. Technology marches on. CDs are becoming a thing of the past as streaming services take over. Recorded music has become more mobile, more affordable, more disposable. This is good for casual listeners but bad for new artists, who can’t make nearly as much money on streamed recordings as artists made on vinyl and CDs in the old days.
I thought of those miners in South Africa who have had to dig thousands of feet farther underground to find new gold. How much deeper can the record companies dig before they extract the last classic-rock nuggets?
“Where are the new mines, the new sounds, the new artists for the ages?” I said.
“Maybe they’re out there, maybe they ain’t,” the rabbit replied. “One thing for sure is you ain’t gonna find them by living in the past.”
Footnote: There are 125 tracks in all, if you count the demos and session takes. As one snarky critic put it: “The market for a set like this is limited to fetishists and completists and that strange baby-boomer contingent that can’t quite let go of the idea of actually owning one’s own music.” I’m still in the latter category — I like liner notes and cover art and so on — but I’m not buying the boxed set.
It’s not as if it’s anything important, right?
Cassandra says
I’m on email lists with activists, journalists and other “elites” (as Republicans would call them). Mostly, they are very nice, smart people. But after all these years, their limited and persistent world view still surprises me, and I find myself going back to the old-time blogs to cleanse the mental palate. Because what bloggers have been doing for 15+ years is pointing out the failings of the media regarding the issues of the day, and the media are still more concerned about their own feelings than anything else. They hate self-criticism.
I’m not saying that to be mean; I’m frustrated, and trying to describe the problem.
For instance: The fact that the New York Times has neither retracted nor apologized for the egregious coverage of Hillary Clinton, But Her Emails, Clinton Cash, and the Comey investigation, and their last-minute absolving of Trump’s Russia connection, shows me they are, like any other information, to be taken with salt. A lot of salt! To the media people, the Times is — I wouldn’t say above reproach, exactly, but they are reluctant to acknowledge the ongoing systemic problems and bad incentives.
More than 10 years ago, I was part of a group of bloggers and journalists who worked to put on a conference at Penn meant to prepare journalists for the new online world. I was taken aback once I learned just how large the grudge journalists held against us, and how they were not listening to the useful advice we gave. What they resent the most on some primal level (this is my theory, anyway) is that bloggers are in the habit of saying what we really think, and most of them can’t. Not if they want to keep their jobs. They have to color within the lines.
Also, our instincts have been right a lot more often than theirs. Which of course makes them even more resentful (if they think about the dirty fucking hippies at all these days).
We were right, but so was Cassandra, and no one ever believed her. And what’s their beef? I don’t see many journalists begging readers for money to fix their cars.
Ah, well. Grass is greener, etc.