Maher might want to amend that joke. This week, amid the midterm election debacle, everybody in the administration must have done a shot after every GOP seat lost in the Senate…in the House of Representatives…in governor’s mansions…and, maybe now, among White House staffers.
I’m sure these rounds
were led by Pete Kegseth.
(The photo of Bill Maher accompanying
this post was taken by David Shankbone, November 2007, at the PETA screening of
I Am An Animal: The story of Ingrid Newkirk and PETA.)
Joe Klein’s note of caution following the defeat of
Donald Trump in the 2020 Presidential election is worth bearing in mind today,
even as progressives sing “Happy Days Are Here Again” and celebrate what The
Daily Show termed “The Bluebonic Plague” suffered by the President’s MAGA
allies at all levels of government.
Certainly Democrats can be glad that the President can no longer run amok with Cabinet and judicial appointments
unhindered by spineless Capitol Hill operatives, and that their majorities are
so sweeping that they are unlikely to be hindered by Democratic Socialists (far
smaller than their GOP counterpart, the Freedom Caucus) or the defection of
Pennsylvania’s answer to Lurch of The Addams Family, John Fetterman.
It’s also heartening to see how deflated (if still
delusional) Trump has sounded following the resounding rebuke of the midterms.
Nevertheless, multiple obstacles remain if Democrats
are to undo the devastation following Trump’s return to power in January 2025. Despite
the catastrophes that inevitably befall administrations, he has proven, time
and again, to be the Rasputin of modern American politics: a figure who can
survive multiple wounds that would be fatal to normal mortals.
So much of that endurance derives from the
unscrupulousness that Klein identified nearly six years ago. Learning all too
well the lessons taught by his father and his longtime lawyer-mentor Roy Cohn,
Trump has become masterful at dodging the law and projecting valid charges back
onto accusers.
At the same time, he has administered a massive shot
of cynicism that the American body politic, already enervated by this virus,
will have enormous difficulty eradicating.
The barriers in overcoming Trump’s certain vetoes are
only one example of why Democratic officeholders and the voters who put them in
office will need to maintain patience and hard-headed realism before 2028.
Even one of their best potential tools—their
investigative power as lawmakers—has its limitations, as expertly outlined in
commentator and former GOP speechwriter David Frum in a podcast discussion with Dave Rapallo, former longtime staff director of the House Committee on
Oversight and Reform.
Yes, Trump is, by standard measures, a lame duck. But
as with everything else with him, all tradition falls by the wayside.
The first assumption is that he will leave office on
January 20, 2029. Often, his apologists claim that he doesn’t really mean some
of his stunning breaks with precedent, then excuse his attempts to transform
his free-floating speculations into actuality.
Nevertheless, it’s notable that in 2016, shortly after
he said, “Russia, if you're listening, I hope you're able to find the 30,000
emails that are missing," Putin’s intelligence service “began targeting
email accounts associated with Hillary Clinton for possible hacks,” observed special
counsel Robert Mueller.
In that light, it’s disturbing that he has joked about
running again, despite the 22nd Amendment’s limits on Presidents to
two terms. His defiance of a measure that his own party was instrumental in
passing 75 years ago, in belated frustration over FDR’s four successful
Presidential races, should not be lightly dismissed.
Or consider this: how can he prevent being indicted 2
1/2 years from now? Only two methods guarantee that outcome: supporting a bid
to succeed him by Don Jr. (even if his only son is unaware that Ohio is already
a state) or keeping the job himself.
A tenacious hold on the party faithful could complicate what seem like efforts by Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Vice-President J.D. Vance to distance themselves from the Iran War.
In the best of times, a
President can wield tremendous, nearly unhindered power in foreign power, and
that remains even more the case with a President who launched and continued
with an invasion of Iran without even a by-your-leave consultation with
Congress.
So pardon me if I part company with New York Times
columnist Lydia Polgreen who summarized the election results as meaning,
“Decency won.”
A cornered rat remains dangerous, so it’s premature to
think that Trump won’t inflict fresh damage. Don’t be surprised if so many of us turn on the evening news, after the current hallelujahs fade, and ask, a la
Dorothy Parker, “What fresh hell is this?”
I took this nighttime picture of the U.S. Capitol in November 2015, before the "crisis of democracy" of the last decade began in earnest. The aftermath of this midterm election will determine the next phase of that crisis.
Growing
up, I read a shortened version of this tale focusing on the six-inch citizens
of Lilliput that was marketed as children’s literature. It wasn’t until
college, when I read all four “books” in the Travels, that I realized it
was far more:
*a satire
of the political scene of Swift’s time;
*a parody
of the “true accounts” of the travel genre so popular in the Age of Discovery;
*an early
example of science fiction;
*a searing
denunciation of what Mark Twain would later call “the damned human race”; and
even
*an
exercise in irony at the expense of narrator Lemuel Gulliver so sustained that
it effectively became a forerunner of modern fiction in undercutting any notion
of objective truth.
The ruse
that Swift concocted in sending his manuscript to Benjamin Motte for
publication paralleled the game he shortly played with readers’
expectations.
The
manuscript arrived with a cover letter from a stranger named Richard Sympson stating
that he had just edited a travel narrative by his cousin Gulliver, a surgeon; that
Sympson could vouch for Gulliver’s truthfulness; that Motte had three days to
decide whether wished to publish it, based on the initial “Satyrical” first two
books; and if the answer was yet, Motte would pay two hundred pounds upfront
the subsequent two parts of Gulliver’s narrative.
Where to
start with all of this?
*The names
“Gulliver” and “Sympson” were pseudonyms;
*A friend,
fellow satirist John Gay, wrote by hand the cover letter to disguise Swift’s
authorship;
*Yet
another friend (still unknown) wrote the manuscript, again with no clue that
Swift was involved;
*Though
the first two books might have been a bit satirical, the last two represented a
political hot potato—but, per the agreement with “Sympson,” Motte would still
have to pay for it.
Once
readers started leafing through the book, they had to make sense of yet another
letter, this time purporting to come from Gulliver to Sympson, in which the
putative explorer scolds the publisher for releasing this “very loose and
uncorrect account of my travels.” At this point, any reader would be bound to
ask what on earth he was reading.
Starting
with the first book, set in Lilliput, Swift upset readers’ notion of security
by playing with notions of size and proportion. Gulliver wakes to find that
six-inch people have strapped him down to the beach. This also begins his
instinct for unconsciously assuming the mental habits of the strange peoples he
visits—in this case, failing to see the ludicrousness of the Lilliputians’
charge that he has engaged in sexual intercourse with the treasurer’s wife in
the land.
Like his
title character, Swift was, to use the modern cliché, a “fish out of water”—the
Anglo-Irish “Dean” of St. Patrick’s Cathedral, Dublin, an outsider who came to
view English politics and government with the disdain he had once felt for the
Irish Catholic majority in Ireland.
In Book 2,
Gulliver is so self-absorbed, so much the “ugly Englishman” that he is shocked
to hear the king of Brobdingnag call his countrymen “the most pernicious race
of little odious vermin that nature ever suffered to crawl upon the surface of
the earth.”
Even in
his narrative, Gulliver’s failure to make the most elementary mental
connections indicates a terrible inability to understand the world—a failure that
will finally prove disastrous to him.
In the
final book, Swift makes horses capable of reason. Gulliver himself manifests
his incredible lack of perception through his ignorance of the significance of
words. Immediately after saying of the first “yahoo” (i.e., a filthy, vicious
human-like creature ruled over by intelligent horses) that he never saw such an
awful animal, he writes that the beast “roared” at him. Later, however, he
himself roars when he’s squeezed and when the female yahoo tries to mount him.
His roaring
means that Gulliver himself is a yahoo, but he glosses over this painful secret
quickly, unaware that he has given a clue to his dread secret already.
Gulliver
may be betrayed as a yahoo, but as the narrow of his own adventure he betrays
his own mindlessness to the reader. Perhaps Swift is suggesting that, insofar
as human beings shy away from and lie about the dirty little secrets
confronting them, they run the risk of joining Gulliver in a circle of
mindlessness.
This
week—and month—devoted to Halloween, TV schedules are filled with all kinds of
horror. Much of it is filled with obvious plot twists and onscreen gore. Few of
these programs compare in subtlety and scariness to The Bad Seed, an
Eisenhower-era shocker that, despite its attempts to placate Hollywood’s
censorship office, can still send chills up the spine seven decades after its
release.
It’s a
sign of our degenerating popular taste that some online viewers actually
thought this movie moved too slowly. Listen, this is hardly Henry James’ Turn
of the Screw, okay? You don’t need to see knives raised or blood spilled to
feel the suspense ratchet up in this thriller.
You
thought that the “Mean Girls” of the Lindsay Lohan movie were bad? They only
murdered reputations. Pig-tailed blonde Rhoda (Oscar-nominated Patty McCormack) is onto bigger game. Her sweet smiles mask a penchant for lying,
theft...and much worse.
The only adult
who senses the monster beneath Rhoda’s placid, perfect surface is Leroy, a spiteful,
leering, Uriah Heep in gardener’s garb. It takes one to know one, as they say. Yet
even he doesn’t grasp just how evil she is for the longest time.
Like other
characters in the film, Leroy went through a transformation from the printed
page to this 1956 film version, then again into a 1985 made-for-TV remake and a
2018 cable thriller, with Blair Brown and Rob Lowe taking turns as Rhoda’s
puzzled, terrified parent.
The depiction
of the novel’s Leroy, an African-American in the Deep South, would strike
modern readers as racist. For whatever reason, he was transformed for the stage
and screen as poor white trash.
The
dialogue above is as deftly acted as scripted, with Jones’s Leroy modulating
from mocking and antagonizing the little girl into grasping that she really is
capable of the evil he was only implying before.
In the Fifties, parents threw up their hands over how they could have given birth to and raised troubled, even delinquent, teens. The Bad Seed dared to imagine that the problem dated from the beginning—through heredity.
To me,
that’s a far more frightening explanation than the one offered in the Sixties
and Seventies by Rosemary’s Baby and The Exorcist: that it was
all the fault of a devil, working black magic outside a poor, innocent darling.
Incidentally,
McCormack—as remarkable a child actress as Broadway and Hollywood have ever
seen—is 80 years old now. Eight years ago, in a clever bit of stunt casting in
an otherwise inferior remake of this cult classic, she did a cameo as little
Rhoda’s psychiatrist.
You can
just imagine the writer of the teleplay, Barbara Marshall, gleefully rubbing
her hands together before typing this bit of dialogue for “Dr. March” (a nod to
the author who created it all): “I told Emma she reminds me of me."
