Popular culture this week.
The movies:
Superman is dead.
Lois Lane is dead.
Lex Luthor is President.
Otis is vice president.
Then there’s Music, Merry Music we remember:
Remember “Back Home Again in Indiana”.
If not search it and listen to the tune.
Then fit this lyric to that tune:
“Back home again,
in
Nawth Korreee-ahh;
That’s where
I GOTt taken,
To THAH cleanah…”
And so it goes in the United States of Trump…
Pardon the bad “Hogan’s Heroes” dialect:
Eye vas hone-ley volloy-ing oor-durz, eezt vaht Zheena Azbell vill zey.
This is Part II about the times, rise and fall of Steve Wynn. As you may recall, Part I ended:
Wynn had found the formula, a prescription that says the building is the star and if you can build a star building, they will come. But what building should it be, and at what cost? And where? Las Vegas? Or Atlantic City? And, later, what do you do for an encore besides build a hotel named Encore? Maybe learn some Chinese.” Now let’s go on to Part II.
The #meToo movement and events have touched many lives in the past six months. One of the most prominent men captured in it is Steve Wynn, who I first met in the fall of 1981 when as a member of the New Jersey Casino Control Commission we held the first plenary license hearing for the company he then presided over, the Golden Nugget Corp.
As I like to recollect, his attorney, former New Jersey State Senator and later New Jersey Superior Court Judge Martin (“Marty”) Greenberg asked this as Wynn took the witness stand: “Tell us about yourself Mr. Wynn” and a day and a half later he had completed his answer.
Of course there were more questions and cross-examination by the Division of Gaming Enforcement representing the Attorney General’s department. But it seemed like there was but one question and one answer because Steve Wynn is and always has been a magnetic personality, an evangelist for his industry, it’s “Elmer Gantry”, as you will discover in this very long, perhaps interesting piece (the mob is in it, that’s always interesting). Continue reading “#meToo, Et Steve”
Couldn’t help myself. Didn’t want to so it just came and I posted this to FB tonight and so I’ll enter it here.
Musings. A drama. Off off off off off off Broadway. So far off it’s awful offal like the man. The setting. The Rose Garden. All the roses are dead. The plot: Comes a tsunami in November. Both houses. Impeachment looms. The imbecile resigns. Dialogue; a soliloquy: “Got everything done I said I would, you can go back, check the list, check it all off. Mike’ll do a great job with the rest, knows how to put women in their place; back in the 14th Century. But he’s a great guy, loyal guy, bent over every time I told him to, really good guy. He’ll get the rest done but, you know, he prays a lot; for bad things to happen to people we don’t like. Says it’s Christian. I wouldn’t know. Me? I could care less. Only shmucks pray. I don’t pray. Don’t have too. I’m big, really big, bigger than God. I’m great, absolutely great. Going back to what I’m really good at. Business. I’m a great businessman. Just ask all the people I left behind as roadkill. I got more to kill on the road. What? What? What? What’s dementia. What, what, what dementia? Who’s fat. I’m not fat. I weigh 239, naked like I was with Stormy, a trim, fighting 239. Oh, right,faburlous, amazing, the best, my all time favorite — ‘lock’er up’. Lock up who? I dunno know, never did. Lock’er up. Oh Flynn ? What? They already locked him up. They didn’t lock him up? He made a deal? Whats’ the deal. Remember, I’m the deal-maker, I’m the great business man, the greatest ever. Just ask Sarah, she tells any lie I tell her to tell. Every day she loves to lie for me; eats another box of cookies and goes out and tells more lies for me. Love liars. Roger, Jared, Ivanka, oh, I v’ant Ivanka. Yah, I know it’s sick but God couldn’t have made Ivanka. Only I could, so only I should have her. My daughter, she’s my kind of woman, that’s why mine always look like her. Jared? My kind of people, just don’t turn your back to him. Write him a check, he likes checks, loves the Saudis. Talk about check books, whoa, they got big check books! And camels. They got camels.
Great people the Saudis, spend a lot of money at my hotel. The best, the best, the best..” (Stage Direction: Exit off the far edge of the world, fall into space, revolve forever, shouting “Lock me up, lock me up, lock…”
Here is something to munch on the weekend that Russia votes and, speaking of Russia, a weekend on which Trump stayed in Washington to brood and fulminate in the White House about, among other things, well, Russia of course
Russians will reelect Vladimir Putin as president March 18, 2020, which as this is written is tomorrow.
Why is it a foregone conclusion?
Because, given the chance to choose free, open, decent democratic government, Russians have failed history and themselves at every opportunity and will gladly and willingly do it again in the farce of their 2018 presidential election.
Continue reading “Coming Soon to a Theater Near You: The Vote in Russia”
Three men, we know (if only from the lyrics of “Hamilton”) wrote the 85 Federalist Papers, Alexander Hamilton wrote 51, James Madison wrote 29 and John Jay wrote 5 to explain and urge ratification of the U.S. Constitution, which was written in 1787 and ratified in 1787 and 1788, bringing into being in 1789 the form of the government of our American federal republic.
One of the leading objections during the campaign for ratification was that the Constitution did not plainly declare and assure certain essential rights that the minority of free white men, who alone were politically empowered, believed they had as citizens of the new republic. It cannot be gainsaid that when the founders wrote “We the People …” as the opening words of the Constitution’s preamble, they absolutely meant “We the Free White Men…” Women had no legal, much less political rights and slaves were — well they were slaves with no rights whatsoever.
There are 195 nations in the world. They have just concluded two weeks of meetings in Bonn, Germany to carry forward the Paris climate change agreement. This year two holdouts, Nicaragua and Syria, joined the Paris agreement.
One nation, only one, the United States, announced it would withdraw although the technicalities of the agreement postpone finality of the withdrawal until 2020 (if we get to 2020).
In 1935 watching events unfold in Europe Sinclair Lewis wrote “It Can’t Happen Here”, a novel whose plot is about a take-over of the United States by forces of the extreme right using tactics akin to those that brought the Nazis to power in Germany with an American flavor.
“It Can’t Happen Here” of course was a fast written topical novel of its time and most agree that the man Lewis had in mind as his model for a far right leader was Sen. Huey P. Long, the bellicose, dangerous authoritarian from Louisiana assassinated in 1935. If you’ve read “All the King’s Men” the novel by Robert Penn Warren or seen either of its movie versions, especially the 1948 version with Broderick Crawford, then you know the Huey Long story. Continue reading “It’s Happening Here”
Unalphabatized here are words historians will certainly use 50 years from now when they write the terrible history of these times — terrible being but an example of the words that capture what has happened to this country and seemingly will continue for more time to come.
Imbecile, imbecilic crazy ,nuts, scary, moronic, moron, imbecility, lunatic, lunacy, ignoramus, ignorant, dumb, stupid, maniac, maniacal, sadistic, sadist, fool, foolish, ignoble, idiot, idiotic, weird, bizarre, reprehensible; catastrophe, catastrophic.
Base, evil, devil, asinine, ass, insane, conniving, conniver, clown, clownish, disaster, disastrous, demented, grim, grime, grimy, gross; corrupt, corrupting, corrupted, crank.
Misery, miserable, misanthrope, misogynist, racist, sexist, misogynistic, bigot, bigoted, bigotry; calamity, calamitous, horrid, horrible, awful, atrocious, contemptible, crude, cruel, leach, leche, lecherous.
Nasty, nastier, nastiest; rude, rudest, rudely, wicked, inhuman, inhuman, crazy, putrid, contemptible; liar, lying, lied.
There are yet more but many if not all of these will be necessary to describe what Nov. 8, 2016 led to – though where it will end is now impossible to know but certain to be — and there’s that word again — terrible.
Korea’s history is thousands of years. We are concerned now with the last 72.
From about the middle of the 14th Century, Korea was a kingdom and then briefly claimed to be an empire. That ended in 1910 when Japan invaded, on its way to empire after defeating Russia in 1905, and annexed Korea – virtually enslaving its people. Such was the state of Korea as WWII drew to its atomic close.
Under agreements between the Big Three (the U.S., the Soviet Union and Great Britain), the Soviet Union had agreed that following the surrender of Germany in WWII it would enter the war against Japan, ready to shift massive forces from Europe to its borders with northern China and Manchuria — both under Japanese control.
The strategic thinking was that this would prevent the transfer of Japan’s huge army on the Asian continent to the home islands where the U.S. expected intense, horrific fighting after what had happened on Okinawa in the Spring of 1945 (An example? Thousands of brain-washed Japanese civilians, men and women, jumped from high cliffs to their deaths, often holding their children, having been told and believing American troops would savage and kill them all).
In the first part of August 1940, as Britain found itself under the Nazi blitz in the Battle of Britain, the British Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, met secretly in the North Atlantic with the American president, Franklin D. Roosevelt aboard U.S. and British ships anchored in Placentia Bay off Newfoundland.
The two men had been in contact since Churchill’s return to government in September 1939 at the outset of WWII when he became First Lord of the Admiralty, the equivalent of the U.S. Secretary of the Navy. Roosevelt had been assistant secretary of the Navy during the Wilson administration from 1913 to 1920. Both men liked ships and the sea.
On Churchill’s return to government from the political wilderness in which he had been shunned and mocked through the 1930s for harping on the threat growing in Germany, Roosevelt had instigated a private correspondence with Churchill outside regular government channels. Indeed it was a peculiar thing for an American president to engage in direct, and unofficial correspondence with a member of the British cabinet. If a president had something to say to the British he would do it from secretary of state to British foreign secretary or perhaps directly to his British counterpart, the prime minister. Continue reading “The United Nations”
When you watch the Ken Burns series about what we Americans call the War in Vietnam that begins Sunday on PBS remember that there are some things that preceded what became the defining event in the lives and times of the Boomer Generation, the generation whose excrescence and whose tumult, inconsistency and ignorance has gifted us with Donald Trump. (I’m not a Boomer,having been born during the “good “war)
Everything in history, government, policy and politics connects.
There is a connection between Trump — a Boomer, the ultimate expression of the Boomers — and the War in Vietnam. It is a connection about more than his claim to flat feet that kept him from fighting and dying for the nation of which he knows nothing, absolutely completely and totally nothing.
But then he was not alone in evading the draft, the fighting and all of that which will be presented in the PBS series at least in the way of presenting history developed by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick, his partner in history. Far more young American men evaded the draft than served in the military during the Vietnam war.
Watch the series knowing that the French, during the consummate era of European Imperialism, the one during to which Queen Victoria gave her names — (and whose children or their descendants a generation later either ruled over or had married into all the ruling families that set Europe ablaze in the Great War, that begat the Second World War, that begat American hegemony and global dominance in the American Century – the century that ended last November 8):
Watch it knowing that the French began the War in Vietnam in 1870 when they took possession of what they called Indo-Chine (sounds so mysterious and romantic en Francais; there is an interesting but very disturbing film of that name that starred Catherine Deneuve made back in the 1970s).
They walked in and took it and made Vietnam, once a kingdom and an empire — they made it their colony. They literally enslaved the people, chose from among them to create an elite they converted in language and religion as part of their selection.
Move on 50 years to post-WWI in Europe, in Paris actually, where a young Vietnamese student finds himself exposed to the ferment of ideas and ideologies sweeping Paris. One is Marxism, an ism that has planted a flag far to the east in Moscow and Petrograd.
The young Vietnamese student is Ho Chi Minh.
He is awakened. He returns home bearing the seeds of a Marxist but also nationalist determination to unchain Vietnam from France, to create a movement for national liberation.
With others he foments a revolution against the colonial power and so begins decades and decades of rebellion, turbulence, terror exacted by the French and war in Indo-Chine.
The Japanese intervene, taking opportunity from the fall of France to Nazi Germany to seize Vietnam in 1940 even before in 1941 later they march into the British colonies in Singapore and Malaysia, overrun the American colony in the Philippines and grab the Dutch East Indies (Indonesia) as the Japanese Empire extends to the barbarous means, methods and reaches that will in the end deservedly destroy it in the climax of WWII.
The war ends and the U.S.A. dominates the world but recognizes there is a check if not checkmate in the world in the form of the Soviet Union. In the reordering of the world that follows, the redrawing of boundaries, recreation of nations and creation of new nations out of former colonies, the U.S. allows France to reassert itself in Indochina — in Vietnam (they do the same in Algeria and is it any wonder that France yet seethes in the throes of its brutal Algerian colonization and fruitless struggle to suppress Algeria’s national liberation movement and moment).
We allowed the French to reoccupy Vietnam even though Ho Chi Minh and his forces had from 1940 forward to the end of the way fought the Japanese as they had the French, because their real goal was not a socialist or communist Vietnam but an independent Vietnam.
Ho took his case to the allies after the war and got turned down and then did the only likely thing, resuming the fight against the French in a war of national liberation. It ended badly for the French in 1954 at a place called Dien Bien Phu, in a valley where a main French force was encircled and defeated by the Vietnamese from the high ground above, resulting in an end to hostilities and a negotiated truce agreement.
The resulting agreement provided for the French to leave, divided Vietnam into two nations, North and South Vietnam and called for a national plebiscite in 1956 on whether to have one or two Vietnams.
But the south and its French-trained and French and U.S. backed tyrant, Ngo Dinh Diem (the first of many U.S. puppets in Saigon with U.S. backing) refused to conduct the vote.
We knew and Diem knew that a majority of Vietnamese would have voted for one Vietnam. But in the U.S. view that would have been a communist Vietnam because the U.S. did not see Ho Chi Minh as George Washington but as Lenin.
So while the majority would have voted for one country and peace, the Vietnamese got two countries and a war that history says claimed more than 3 million lives in Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos (including more than 58,000 Americans whose names are on the wall in Washington).
Without the plebiscite Ho resumed the fight, in the rise of what we came to call the Viet Cong, who our military dubbed “Charlie”, Ho loyalists in the south. So there came to be two civil wars in Vietnam, one between North and South and one within the south in which one side was abetted by the U.S. fighting against North Vietnam but also against the South Vietnamese.
I have not looked up anything in writing this except some spelling but would add one other fact dredged from memory. It’s this: When JFK died he died ambivalent about taking the U.S. deeper into Vietnam. History has taught us that JFK was not the man we want to remember but it also contains signals that he had given serious thought to containing our effort in Vietnam before it consumed us.
And so the fact dredged from memory is that when JFK died our total presence in Vietnam had reached only 1,600 military personnel who were there as advisors to the South Vietnamese army.
At the height of our involvement in about 1967/1968 there were 565,000 American military in Vietnam and only when the U.S. commander, Gen. William Westmoreland, asked to go to more than 700,000 did President Johnson finally say no.
You remember the rest or at least remember the War in Vietnam as you do in your personal remembrance or from reading about it or hearing about it from your parents or grandparents — with the understanding that in this country the War in Vietnam was as much about the war against the war, about the anti-war movement, as about the actual war there.
Ken Burns and Lynn Novick have an interesting way of presenting history (you will recognize the voice of the narrator – Peter Coyote — who has narrated others of their major series) and this no doubt will be very compelling television in a time when television changes almost every day as does everything else.
I think I read that their first episode Sunday will begin at the end of WWII in 1945 when the fateful decision was made not to reward Ho Chi Minh and Vietnam for fighting the Japanese by granting them independence but to return them to French subjugation. Really though, it should begin at least when that subjugation began 75 years earlier.
Every time I turn around these days it seems someone is observing that something or other or such and such happened 50 years ago today or this week or is about to next month. History it seems comes in bites of 50 years.
Me? My war ended 50 years ago this just past August when I got discharged from the U.S. Army.
No, I did not go to Vietnam. I went to Ft. Dix for 6 months where they trained me to be an infantryman and then they sent me to Panama where a guy whose job included meeting the incoming troops to pull out those with some education changed my assignment and my luck .
I spent the next 17 months working in an office and came home and so my war, at least, ended then. Three months before I became a soldier I went to an anti-war demonstration and not long after I got out I went to another.I knew why I was against the war and it had nothing to do with getting drafted because I got drafted.
For most it has long seemed to me the anti-war movement was more about “don’t draft me” or “don’t draft my boyfriend” than about the wrongness of the war and the U.S. then For me it was about we were wrong, they were right and we should not have been there killing them and getting ourselves killed.
Now, of course, we do business with them, want to do more and Vietnam in fact is one of the 11 other nations besides the U.S. that were involved in the Trans-Pacific Partnership that President Obama had built as a counterweight to China in trade and finance across Asia, the South Pacific, Australia and New Zealand.
The ignoramus in the White House ripped up that treaty. When he did that he did two things. He lost the War in Vietnam for the second time, he delivered the future of the world’s economy to China and ended the American Century.
But that will be a subject for another series by other video historians 50 years from now – if there is a 50 years from now, if there is still history then.
Winning just 194 seats to 241 for Republicans in the House of Representatives last Nov. 8, Democrats face a daunting task in 2018 to win the 218 seats needed to retake the chamber because, politically, Republicans own the south as Dixiecrats once did.
The crimson flood that drenched Dixie is perhaps currently best demonstrated in the Aug. 15 GOP primary for the U.S. Senate between three arch-reactionary candidates. One is named Strange and the other two named Brooks and Moore could just as well be called Stranger and Strangest for all that they relate to what some of us still like to think is the norm in the United States — a dubious proposition of late.
If Democrats are going to retake the House they have to gain 24 seats outside the south in places like Orange County, Calif. Orange County is shared among seven House districts — four held by Republicans. But the county, once a bastion of Reagan conservatism, has taken on an increasingly blue tinge and Democrats see chances of gains there in 2018.
Among the few seats Democrats gained last year were one in Florida and one in Virginia, leaving Republican southern congressional totals hardly dented. In the 11 states that fought the United States as the Confederate States of America, Republicans came out of the 2016 election with 99 seats. The 11 states are Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas and Virginia.
Bill Moyers, a key assistant to President Lyndon B. Johnson, is said to have said that on the day LBJ signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 into law LBJ, a southerner, said prophetically, “I think we have just delivered the south to the Republican Party for the rest of my life and yours.” LBJ died in 1973. Mr. Moyers, of course, is still very much alive.
LBJ, a southerner, knew and prophesied that after nearly three-and-a-half centuries of slavery, rebellion, Civil War and Jim Crow race did and would trump all else in the south, where Republicans seized their opportunity with a race-based “Southern Strategy” that, 50 years later, is now their Trump-card across the south.
The strategy worked. It propelled Republicans to control of the House the same way “Jim Crow” gave Democrats a near lock on the House from 1932 to 1994.
There is hard evidence for this in the House majorities elected in 1962 and 2016.
Elected in November 1962 and sworn into office in January 1963, the 88th Congress relied on a truly bipartisan majority to pass the 1964 Civil Rights Act over near unanimous opposition from southern House members.
The House elected in 1962 had 258 Democrats and 177 Republicans. Republicans had a slim Republican majority of 165 to 162 seat outside the 11 deep-south states. But in those 11 states Democrats won 96 seats to just 12 for Republicans.
In 1964, 136 Republicans joined 154 Democrats to pass the civil rights law. But in the 11 southern delegations the vote was 8 Democrats yes against 87 Democrats and 10 Republicans opposed to civil rights.
That moderated Republican Party no longer exists.
Fast forward to 2016. The House elected Nov. 8 returned 241 Republicans and 194 Democrats — almost a mirror reversal of 1962 in the national totals but also in the 11 southern states.
In the south there were 99 Republicans elected to 39 Democrats (since 1962, population shifts have increased those 11 states total of House seats from 112 to 138): Most of the Democrats’ southern house seats are in gerrymandered minority-population heavy districts or in rare southern blue territory like the Washington, D.C. Virginia suburbs or around university cities.
This is the resulting House math:
Total seats: 435. Needed to control: 218.
With a head start of 99 seats in the Confederacy, Republican math is 218 minus 99 = 119 seats needed from the remaining 297 seats in the other 39 states — 34%.
For the Democrats, reduced to 39 seats in the former Confederacy, the basic calculation is 218 minus 39 = 179 seats needed from the remaining 297 seats in the other 39 states — 61%.
If you then factor in dozens of other decisively Republican districts in red states like Utah, Arizona, Oklahoma, Kentucky Kansas, Indiana, and West Virginia; if you add in GOP districts in big chunks of overall blue states that locally vote Republican for Congress, like central Pennsylvania and upstate New York, if you recognize that even a blue state like New Jersey, with 12 total seats, elected 5 Republicans — then the Democrats’ number becomes all the more daunting.
They need to win 80% of the 297 seats outside the 11-state GOP confederate base. On Nov. 8, Democrats won 155 – 52% — of those 297 seats to 142 for the GOP. To get to 218 seats they need to win 24 more, probably almost all outside the deep-south unless they can begin to find one or two more in Dixie that they can turn.
Is it possible for Democrats to ride a decisive national election some day, perhaps 2020, to regain House control? Could the present circumstances in which the nation feels like it is unraveling produce a wave election in their favor in 2018? Both outcomes are possible. Neither is in any way knowable now.
It could become more possible after the 2020 Census — providing Democrats win back state legislative chambers and governors’ offices because state legislatures draw the congressional maps following each census and governors sign the maps into law.
The first House election in which new maps will be in effect will be 2022. Coming out of the 2016 election, Republicans have control of two-thirds of governors’ offices and two thirds of state legislatures.
So for now while the Stars and Stripes flies atop the U.S. Capitol, it is the Stars and Bars that guarantees Republican control of the House.
The House delegations elected last Nov. 8 in the 11 southern states broke as follows between the two parties.
Alabama, 6R, 1D
Arkansas, 4R, 0D
Florida, 16R, 11D
Georgia, 10R, 4D
Louisiana, 5R, 1D
Mississippi, 3R, 1D
North Carolina, 10R, 3D
South Carolina, 6R, 1D
Tennessee, 7R, 2D
Texas, 25R, 11D
Virginia, 7R, 4D
Peeling the Onion 