In real life, I’m about to turn 70, or someone who looks a lot like me in the mirror in the morning is about to turn 70. It’s 2020, and I was born in 1950, which would tend to insinuate by basic mathematical calculation that I’m now almost (let’s not get carried away!) 70. My birthday is still a ways away in June.

But just a minute. Me, 70?  That can’t be right. I don’t feel like 70. I don’t think like 70. At least I don’t think that I think like a 70-year-old thinks. And who knows how a 70-year-old thinks anyway? For one, many of us in the past never got to this point in life; lifespans were much shorter. And for two, many of the rest of us who did and have gotten to be 70 and beyond are too busy with aches and pains, doctor’s appointments, yoga, seeking public office, looking for partners in their 20’s and 30’s, getting drunk in the afternoon or Oy vey celebrating a thousand other ways of denying to even think about noting.

That being said, I have to admit that people now ask for my opinion a lot more than they used to. And at times people give me to believe by the way they listen to my responses that my observations of life might actually have some weight. The weight of air, truth be told: Little do these people know how little I know. You’ve lived so much and seen so much, people now say. But just for the record, being 70 or thereabouts doesn’t make anything anyone of us says or does right, deep, attractive or even reasonably well-thought-out just because. Good Lord, Trump is 73. And in the interests of political fairness, Biden is 77, Warren – just like me – is 70 this year, and Sanders is 78.

I didn’t die in my 20’s, or in my 30’s. Or in my 40’s or even in my 50’s though I angsted about dying all through those years plenty – is angst even a verb in English? And, not even as a small aside, I have been known to have suicidal thoughts. Now, many of my friends and family members from those times are gone, internal collateral damage to my obstinate refusal to make a decision to end my life long ago.

Get over it, just get on with your life, I hear you saying. Every single one of us is getting older day in day out. It’s called being alive! (That’s you again.) My New York therapist used to put it to me in as many words during our sessions. You’ll be dead, buried and gone forever, she would say. Whatever this is, this is better, her words.

I get it. I got it even when I wasn’t even close to being 70.

I celebrated my 50^th birthday in a swell hotel in Paris. Swell is arch, of course. But the hotel was swell not because of its meager 2-person ancient elevator, nor for its exorbitant room rates, and not even for its oh so chic and tastefully re-imagined rooms, but because the croissants, butter and jam in the hotel dining room in the morning were why croissants were ever invented. It wasn’t what I had planned on that visit to Paris, but it’s what I remember – I enjoyed the perfect croissant in France on my 50^th birthday.

And for my 60^th birthday, I was in/at/on Machu Picchu –choose your preposition – in Peru. To be honest, I was flailing in the shade of Inca precision rock constructions at a great height fighting for breath due to my asthma for much of my visit. But I was there. And if I’m being totally honest, my favorite part of my visit to Cuzco and Machu Picchu was the one night I spent at the railroad hotel in Ollantaytambo, an overlooked calming way station on the mythical route between present day Peru and its distant past. The esthetic sparseness of my room and its soaring mountain vistas impressed and calmed me. Not to mention that it was there that I first learned how to set my iPad alarm clock. It worked. I made my early morning train –- it was literally outside the hotel door — to get to as it turned out a lack of breath high in the Peruvian Andes.

I remember both decade birthdays for odd unplanned details. My decades have always been mathematically easy. I was 10 in 1960, 20 in 1970 and so on.

Bigger plans tend to go by the wayside. Intentions go by the wayside. Twice in my life, I thought I was going to move to Barcelona. It never happened. I also thought I was going to live in Mexico City. That hasn’t happened either. Unanticipated turns of events, on the other hand, have come about. I lived in an 1850’s cottage down a dirt road in upstate New York for years. And then, I spent years in Sarasota, Florida. Florida is never a place that I would have pictured myself in when younger. And did I ever think I was going to live in South America? No. And yet here I am, 10 years on, a resident of Bogotá, Colombia.

I did spend many of the middle years of my life in New York City, and I celebrated many birthdays there.

I arrived in New York in 1979. I was 29. I hate you, someone said to me at a party just this past weekend in Bogotá – not for how easy it is for me to remember how old I am in any specific year, but because You lived in New York in the 70’s and 80’s!  There it is again, You’ve lived through so much.

Just to be clear, I never went to Studio 54. I never hung out with Andy, or Bianca, or Liza. I never went to the Anvil or any of the other sex clubs. I was just a regular Joe eking out a living at minimum wage in an extraordinary city at an extraordinary moment in time. I loved every moment of those years, every daily sweaty running for the subway, every bounding up staircases at Grand Central and every getting to my morning midtown classroom to teach just on time. I loved every getting home late at night, having earned just that little bit of money that made it possible for me to continue living in New York City.

I loved being young in New York in the 1980’s. Now, people believe that just to have been there, to have walked on those streets where a legal decision allowed booksellers along 2^nd in the 50’s blocks to sell hardcover bestsellers at discounted prices, where pasta was still being freshly made at a popular restaurant window that I passed every day on 43^rd,, where there was still an Automat on 42^nd is the equivalent of having lived through Nirvana. Who knows?

I do remember that my older brother – we were peas of the same pod, literally – when he was visiting from Ireland sat me down in front of the Citicorp Building at 53^rd and 3^rd when I was 32 or 33. I was on a lunch break from teaching classes. Life goes fast, he told me. Embrace this. Live, were his exact words. Don’t fuck around, are the words that I remember, though I don’t think that those are the words that he said. Don’t fuck this up are more specifically the words that I remember now.

Did I or didn’t I fuck it up? I don’t know. My brother, one of my few judges, is long gone. Now, it’s just me.

And where am I going to celebrate being 70? That I don’t know either. But 80 is next on the horizon. And just for the record, and according to what I hear, 80 is the new 60.

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Shuffling through my iTunes library recently, I switched to searching Artist by alphabet mode to help me find a song whose name I couldn’t remember (Song For You  – I know that now.) I knew the song I was looking for was by Rhye. Running down the alphabet list to get to R, I stopped short at B. I had no idea I had so many Bob Dylan songs in my library. I checked. I have more Dylan tracks on my computer than songs by anyone else: 57, as of right now. Of course, in terms of Dylan’s huge output over so many years, 57 is nothing.

I am far from being a Dylan fanatic.

Yes, one of the very first singles that I ever bought was Dylan’s I Want You in 1966 (it’s still in my iTunes library.) I was 16. Prior to that, I remember lying in bed one night and listening to a BBC interview with Dylan and hearing Like a Rolling Stone as it was played for the first time in Britain and Ireland. The song confused my mind state. Dylan was electric, a tempest in a teapot today. But at the time, I felt like I was hearing something that was both immediately defining and predictive all at once. Yes, the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, the Yardbirds, the Who and so many others were putting out new music at just about the same time. But Like a Rolling Stone was different. Like a Rolling Stone broke the mold; it was freewheeling lyrically and musically, completely in control of its own musical space and totally riveting, at least to this 13 year old. Something new was afoot.

But my initial impact with Dylan never turned me into a true Dylan fan. His path and mine diverged. Joni Mitchell arrived. Crosby, Stills and Nash came on the scene. I bought some Dylan albums and rarely played a track back twice other than Sara on the 1976 “Desire” described by Joseph O’Connor in the Irish Times in 2016 as “perhaps Dylan’s most emotionally naked song, as beautiful an expression of the preciousness and frailty of human love as has ever been put on a record.”

 The Vietnam War officially ended in 1975, and we needed a break from the intensity of the late 60’s and early 70’s. Disco arrived, and before we knew where we were, we were somewhere else. Candi Staton, Gloria Gaynor, and Chic took over. We wanted to dance. 1978 brought us Rod Stewart’s If You Think I’m Sexy, and 1979 Cher’s Take Me Home. The tracks, like thousands of others, were vacuous, but they gave us a minute or two metaphorically speaking to catch our breath.

Dylan went on his own way. The 70’s came and went. The 80’s came and went. But Dylan, like the Eveready Bunny, just kept on going. The year 2000 came and went. Dylan kept on making his own kind of music, electric, eclectic, folk rock, rockabilly and blues. His output is remarkable. As of right now, he has released 38 studio albums, 13 live recordings, 19 compilation records, 13 box sets and 13 in the Bootleg series.

If you haven’t given Bob Dylan much attention in a while, take a listen to Sweetheart Like You from the 1983 album Infidels. Or listen to Tight Connection To My Heart from the 1985 Empire Burlesque. Things Have Changed won the Academy Award for Best Song from a Motion Picture in 2001. Beyond Here Lies Nothin’ from Dylan’s 2009 “Together Through Life” is devastating. The video is hard to watch. There is a non-violent version of the video available here. There are certain Dylan songs that I now seem to listen to almost daily; Hurricane (Desire Outtake 1975), with Emmy Lou Harris singing background vocals, is one of those. You’re A Big Girl Now (Take 2), recorded in 1975 but released just last year on The Bootleg Series Vol. 14: More Blood, More Tracks is another. The recording and the lyrics are heartbreaking.

 Time is a jet plane, it moves too fast

Oh, but what a shame if all we’ve shared can’t last

… I’m going out of my mind, oh
With a pain that stops and starts
Like a corkscrew to my heart
Ever since we’ve been apart

 I respond to Dylan’s Pretty Saro, an English folk song from the early 1700s on many levels; its folk heritage and historic reach. But most of all, I relate on Pretty Saro to Dylan’s singing; his voice is purely emotive, and his sincerity is unassailable. This is the Dylan track that has the most plays on my iTunes play list. The song was recorded in 1970, but not released until 2013 on The Bootleg Series, Vol. 10, Another Self Portrait.

In 2015, Dylan shifted the bottom line, once again. He released Shadows in the Night, an album of pop standards from the 50’s and 60’s. It was Dylan’s 36^th studio album. This is the album that brought me back to Dylan. I found Dylan’s arrangements tight and astute, and his assumption of the Sinatra canon somehow authentic and reassuring. And his voice on these songs is richly resonant. Take a listen to Stay With Me. In an interview with Bill Flanagan on Dylan’s official website, this is Dylan’s answer to the question, “If you can sing like that, why don’t you always sing like that?”

 Depends what kind of song it is. “When the World Was Young,” “These Foolish Things,” are conversational songs. You don’t want to be spitting the words out in a crude way. That would be unthinkable. The emphasis is different and there is no reason to force the vernacular. “An airline ticket to romantic places” is a contrasting type of phraseology, than, say, “bury my body by the highway side.” The intonation is different, more circumspectual, more internal.”

He followed up Shadows in the Night with Fallen Angles in 2016, another grouping of pop standards that included Melancholy Mood and Polka Dots and Moonbeams.

Dylan was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature that same year of 2016 “for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition.” Leonard Cohen said, “To me [the Nobel] is like pinning a medal on Mount Everest for being the highest mountain.” Dylan was 75 then. In response to the award, he released a statement announcing that he wouldn’t be attending the award ceremony: “He wishes he could receive the prize personally, but other commitments make it unfortunately impossible.” Dylan was touring.

But Dylan wasn’t done with the standards yet. I Could Have Told You and Stardust are just two of the tracks on the triple CD/ triple vinyl recording Triplicate released in 2017. Triplicate has 30 tracks in all. Take a listen to P.S. I Love You and hear a vulnerability and poignancy that you will rarely hear in Dylan’s own compositions or in any other interpretation of the song, and it’s been covered by many artists including Bette Midler, Billie Holliday and Frank Sinatra. Here’s what Dylan had to say to Bill Flanagan on whether these songs enabled him to go to a place where his own songs couldn’t:

Sure they do. I would never write “Where Is the One,” but it’s as if it was written for me, so I didn’t have to write it. It’s a tough place to get to, it’s vulnerable and protected. You’d have to be like the invisible man to get through, or you’d have to batter down walls, strip yourself naked, and then even if you did get in you’d have to wonder what’s the point. Someone else has been here and gone and took everything. Someone else had to write this song for me. Its nerves are too raw. You leave yourself too open. I’d rather not go there, especially to write songs.

These ultimate Dylan records force us, once again, to reevaluate Dylan, who he has been, what he has contributed and how essential he is in the definition of American musical continuity. Dylan has humanized the standards; he’s taken out the gloss, the stylized 50’s orchestration effects, and brought these songs back to their basics. Along the way, he’s also found a line to connect the music of the 30’s, 40’s and 50’s to his own contribution to American musical history that began in the 60’s.

Dylan turned 78 on May 24, 2019

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Seven days a week, at eleven in the morning, Imad Khachan opens the door of his Greenwich Village chess shop. Chess Forum is the last of the old-style chess parlors in New York City—a holdout in the Big Apple’s rapidly homogenizing retail scene. It’s a place where grandmasters, beginners, celebrities, students, seniors, kindergartners, subway train engineers, policemen, and firemen rub elbows at the well-worn tables. At Chess Forum, $5 an hour gets you a spot for a game of pickup chess or backgammon. If you’re a senior, you’ll get your board time discounted for $1 an hour. And true to Mr. Khachan’s commitment to families and his hope that one day he’ll be lucky enough to help mentor the next big chess champ, kids play free.

Most days, it’s midnight when Mr. Khachan closes up shop. Sometimes, if the competition gets intense, Mr Khachan keeps the lights on until dawn—or at least until the last of the most indefatigable and determined of his regulars have exhausted either their game strategies or their caffeine-induced wakefulness.

Mr. Khachan, a Palestinian immigrant from Lebanon with an abiding love of the written word, emigrated to America with the intention of earning a PhD in literature. Instead, he became a shopkeeper and a chess vendor with writers’ portraits and quotes lovingly arrayed across his shop’s walls. It’s a display that not only seems to broadcast Mr. Khachan’s lifelong commitment to writing and writers but also serves as a gentle nudge to his patrons to take some time out from the game and the daily grind to reflect on some of life’s lessons as illuminated by the writings of some of the greatest of America’s wordsmiths.

In the bittersweet video below, directed by Molly Brass and Stephen Tyler and featured on The Atlantic’s online video series, we get a glimpse into the life of the extraordinary Mr. Khachan.  The portrait of this warm and reflective gentleman is deeply moving. As we get to know Mr. Khachan, it seems inevitable to be reminded of how little many of us know about the distinctive life stories of the millions of immigrants, both legal and illegal, living amongst us as our neighbors or working alongside us or for us. After watching the video, I was struck by how important it is not just to listen to the stories of immigrants but also to actively seek out and share those stories as the most powerful antidote to the corrosive and false anti-immigrant rhetoric bandied about by Trump and others. If the intention of Molly Brass, Stephen Tyler, and Imad Khachan was to encourage us to question   stereotypes and to always be reminded of the distinctiveness of each individual’s life experience, then they have succeeded in that and more.

Immigrants’ economic contribution to society

There is another dimension, too, to Mr. Khachan’s story that goes beyond a single individual’s life story. There is the much larger narrative of how essential immigrants like Mr. Khachan are to the economic life of their adopted homes—whether that’s New York City or cities, towns, and villages across the country.

And how essential to New York’s powerhouse economy are individuals like Mr. Khachan and others who make up the city’s immigrant communities? The answer is unequivocally that immigrants are an irreplaceable part in the engine that powers the city’s economy. The numbers are simply staggering. The facts are nothing less than a deep rebuke to the false narrative that paints the immigrant as a burden to society.

Here are the facts—not the spin—according to the New York City Comptroller’s Office:

• 3 million workers, or 46% of workers, in New York City are immigrants.
• There are 83,000 immigrant business owners, representing 51% of all New York City businesses.
• Immigrants account for $100 billion in earned income in New York City, or 32% of the city’s total earnings.

Watch the video here:

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A simple description of Tara Westover’s “Educated” would be that is a memoir of a childhood and young adult years in a fundamentalist Mormon family in rural Idaho. But it is much more than a chronological retelling of childhood memories based on contemporaneous diaries and journals saved through the years. It is a dissertation on family dysfunction, psychological damage, and the struggle for self-actualization in the face of great opposition.

Born in 1986, Tara Westover is one of seven children in a family dominated by a father with religious beliefs and a social philosophy that many would describe as fanatic. Averse to societal norms, he eked out a living salvaging scrap metal from a junkyard that he maintained on his property in the Idaho hills. He refused to send his children to school; they worked for him in the scrapyard instead, doing dangerous jobs that repeatedly resulted in severe injuries [never to be treated by the highly suspect “Medical Establishment.”]  He viewed women as secondary and required them to be subservient. Westover’s mother obeyed. She became an unlicensed, naturalist midwife and an herbal healer. Westover’s father became obsessed with the 1992 Ruby Ridge incident, in which federal agents shot and killed Randy Weave’s family, and he lectured and preached to his family often about what he saw as the coming End of Days.

None of that sounds too bad—just highly unusual—until you factor in the harsh, unrelenting, physical and psychological abuse Tara suffered at the hands of her father, her loving but complicit mother, and especially her older brother, Shawn. Westover’s memoir chronicles all of it, in vivid and uncomfortable detail.

Becoming educated, as the title implies, is Westover’s way out. But that journey is extremely complicated for a young girl raised in a family that rejects public education, preaches the supremacy of scripture and Mormon doctrine over secular learning, and exerts enormous psychological pressure against Tara’s urge to learn beyond the limits imposed by her family. Her mother taught her to read, but that was the extent of her “home-schooling.” At 17, she managed to convince her family to let her enroll in Brigham Young University [a difficult process, because she had no high-school transcript and even lacked a birth certificate.] In her early classes, she discovered how far behind she was: Once, reading a passage aloud in class, she stumbled over the word “Holocaust,” and asked what it was. The professor thought she was joking and chastised her.

Her tenacity is remarkable—bordering on superhuman. Her academic intelligence impresses teachers, professors and peers, and she pursues higher studies, always opposed by her parents. Time and again, as her formal education moves from undergraduate to graduate to doctoral level, her family rejects her efforts and literally demonizes her—calling her possessed and evil. [Her parents, who never otherwise traveled, flew to England while she was studying at Cambridge, and stayed in her dorm room with her for a week, intending to “exorcise” her.]

Even as she begins to gain some geographical and psychological distance, and begins to be able to analyze and understand the dynamics of her family, she is constantly drawn back in, still craving their love, still wanting to belong, still stung by their ultimate rejection. And virtually every year, when she returns to her home in Buck’s Peak, Idaho, for Christmas, something happens that makes her want to flee, while at the same time feeling the need to stay.

“Educated” gave me an inside view of a world I knew little about, except through stereotypes of off-the-grid, fundamentalist Christian families. This memoir is not an indictment of Mormonism, survivalism, or religion in general. This is personal. Westover’s account includes many difficult memories, described in [often literally] painful detail. She is honest about her ambivalence, her academic insecurities, and her unending internal war between self-actualization and family loyalty. By the end of this engrossing memoir, she has educated herself—and more than just academically. She has paid a big price for her urge to learn. And while I sometimes had to force myself to read certain passages, and wanted to scream at her to not go home, to not get in the car with her brother, to tell someone what was happening to her, I couldn’t put it down. I just hope that Tara Westover has been able to use what she has learned to broker a peace with herself. Sharing her experiences with readers is an education itself.

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Like many of you, I watched Charlie Rose’s Steve Bannon interview on 60 minutes. Lots there to make one sad, lots more to make one shudder. I was struck, though, by certain themes that periodically surfaced during the course of Bannon’s comments.The ideas of  loyalty to a capital “L” leader and the identification of personality with policy colored almost everything Bannon said. I was also struck by his essential pathos; I saw a deeply sad little man, fearful of failure and desperate to be significant.

The German sociologist and philosopher, Max Weber, broke the types of socio-political authority down into three categories: legal-rational, traditional and charismatic. Bannon’s loyalty to Trump resembles the bond that exists between the charismatic leader and his devoted acolyte(s). Examples of such relationships, both positive and negative, abound. On the one hand there’s Jesus and his disciples (or, if you prefer, Robin Hood and his Merry Band), and on the other, probably more pertinent in the current situation, Hitler and his Brownshirts (although, given Bannon’s attire, a double layer of black shirts, perhaps Mussolini and his Blackshirts would be more apropos.) According to most accounts, the relationship of their followers to charismatic leaders are usually emotional in  nature and involve deeply-felt, personal, often self-transcendent devotion. It’s constructive to consider Bannon’s numerous protestations of unconditional loyalty to Donald Trump during the interview from the point of view of an aspirational follower of a man he wants to see as an apocalyptic, charismatic leader.

Bannon’s loyalty to Trump is both absolute and extra-rational. He spoke of his litmus tests for others’ loyalty to Trump — not their ideology or acumen — and quoted a line from The Wild Bunch, that ”when you side with a man, you side with him,” adding that one accepts both “the good and the bad. You can criticize him behind, but when you side with him, you have to side with him.” In other words, for Bannon, policy, polity, and personal ethics are subordinate to personality and the interpersonal relationships it engenders.

Bannon’s loyalty is also militant. Although he praised the“Darwinian” management style that Trump cultivates, the clash of competing egos fighting it out for their master’s attention, once the great man speaks, the matter is settled, and his acolytes are expected to leap to his defense no matter where they stand intellectually or morally. Bannon, tellingly, speaks of himself as a ”streetfighter” who, now that he is exiled from the White House, promises to fight for Trump, whom he envisions as a type of head gangbanger, and act as his “wingman outside for the entire time.”

The glue that binds Trump and Bannon, he seems to believe, is a shared mission, which he, Bannon, articulates and which can be embodied in the person of Trump who serves as a type of totem. This implicit pairing of a “Big Man” and a personality driven political cult aligns with the consensual aspect of the shared, almost ecstatic, fervor often experienced by the followers of a charismatic leader. Bannon doesn’t just speak for himself, he tells us, but represents, in his mind, all American citizens:

… Economic nationalism is what this country was built on. The American system. Right? We go back to that. We look after our own. We look after our citizen, we look after our manufacturing base, and guess what? This country’s gonna be greater, more united, more powerful than it’s ever been. And it’s not– this is not astrophysics. OK? And by the way, that’s every nationality, every race, every religion, every sexual preference. As long as you’re a citizen of our country. As long as you’re an American citizen, you’re part of this populist, economic nationalist movement.

The big, happy American family led by Big Daddy Trump. Or not.

Except for Bannon, there’s no room for “not.” To deny Daddy is betrayal and traitors will be punished.

Public disagreement or even a hint of criticism will result in retribution. Hence, after the Access Hollywood tapes surfaced, Bannon happily agreed with Charlie Rose that he “took names” of those who failed to stand up sufficiently tall for The Donald. We are led to suppose Chris Christie, for instance, suffered the fallout of having been written up in Bannon’s “black book” at that time.

It is here that the sadness begins to manifest itself. When Rose asked him about his exile from the Trump administration, the red-eyed, hung-over looking Bannon almost literally winced, his eyes widened and he seemed to swallow slightly before quickly denying the notion that he had been cast out by the leader of his great “economic nationalist movement.” His assertion that he left voluntarily in order to reenter Trump political streetfight via Breibart.com, his weapon of choice, reeked of defensiveness.

The title of a Guardian column by Richard Wolffe proclaimed that, “if Trump read books, he’d sound just like Steve Bannon.” And while there’s an element of truth in that statement — and more than an element of truth in the Wolffe column which is mostly spot-on — it’s just a shade shy of the real deal. And that whisper of separation is the source of Bannon’s tragedy.

Bannon espouses, no matter how much he denied it to Rose, a racist, authoritarian nationalism with some populist overtones — a vision with serious similarities to that sold by Hitler to war-and-deprivation-weary Germans after World War I. This set of beliefs seem to represent sincere, if unfortunate, conviction on Bannon’s part.

Unfortunately for his “cause,” he persists in casting Trump as the instrument who can realize the dream. But while parts of Bannon’s formula for “making America great again,” seems to be attractive to Trump, he clearly prefers a formula, any formula, for making Trump, not America, great. The guy has problems with both abstraction and with empathy; Bannon’s grand vision has been subordinated to Trump’s intrinsic stupidity and his narcissism. Instead of the powerful instrument that could, under the tutelage of Bannon, create the chaos incipient to a new world order, Trump is a loosely-strung wind harp, subject to any stray breeze that stirs his vanity and triggers his impulses. Bannon is one and only one of those multi-directional breezes.

Make no mistake, Trump is virulent and corrupt enough to do serious damage. But, while he would obviously enjoy the perks of life as a Supreme Leader, he doesn’t have the chops to deliver the type of leadership for which Bannon seems to yearn. Consider that Hitler, absurd as he was, managed to write Mein Kampf all by himself. Although it’s a horrifying, clumsily executed compendium of centuries of continental anti-semitism and other ugliness, it reflects the actual thinking of its author. Trump, on the other hand, had to hire somebody to write The Art of the Deal, a collection of stale business aphorisms and self-glorification passed off as his own work. A man who is regularly and openly satirized via epithets like “the lemon chiffon comb-over,” or “Apricot Idi Amin,” will never cut a heroic figure.

And there it is, Bannon’s tragedy in a nutshell: no matter how much he loves daddy, daddy doesn’t have what it takes to deliver.

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Newly appointed Secretary of the Interior Ryan Zinke made a grand entrance on his first day on the job: He rode several blocks through Washington DC, to his new office, on a horse.  [Not making this up. Check the link.] Accompanying him were mounted U.S. Park Police, a group of chanting Native Americans, a small crowd of onlookers and hundreds of Interior Department staff waiting for him.

It was an over-the-top production number strangely befitting a department head appointed by Reality-TV-Star-in-Chief Donald Trump. Clearly, dignity and humility are out; showmanship is what counts.

It makes me think that other Trump-appointed department heads might benefit [in the eyes of the boss] from a similarly showy first-day entrance—or any day thereafter when theater would be better than actually doing one’s job or facing hard — or basic — policy questions. Using Zinke as a role model, here’s what we might see:

Ben Carson, Trump’s [bizarre] appointee to helm the Department of Housing and Urban Development, coming to work in a mobile home.

Or, Steven Mnuchin, Trump’s billionaire banker Secretary of the Treasury, could arrive in a Brink’s armored car, as fellow billionaire Wilbur Ross—Secretary of Commerce – delivers himself at the wheel of a semi-tractor-trailer truck overflowing with cash.

How about Betsy DeVos, Trump’s no-nothing Secretary of Education, showing up in the [private], luxuriously appointed school bus of her choice?

Isn’t it obvious to Trump’s crack media team that Secretary of Defense James Mattis should forego the limo and go to work in a tank? And visualize John Kelly, Director of Homeland Security, being dropped off at the office by a surveillance drone.

Picture this, too: Rick Perry once famously called for the total destruction of the Department of Energy, but couldn’t remember its name. Now, he’s in charge of it. How perfect would it be for him to arrive at the office, wearing his see-I’m-a-smart-guy glasses, and fall through the door after slipping on a banana peel. Oops.

For Tom Price, who Trump appointed to gut Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security as head of Health and Human Services, the proper, media-savvy form of transportation would be an ambulance, sirens screaming and lights flashing.

Sonny Perdue, former Governor of Georgia, has been picked [pun intended] to head the Department of Agriculture. As Governor, he drew headlines for PAHWAL [piloting a helicopter without a license] and for praying for rain on the steps of the state capital.  Unfortunately, he’s not related to the poultry-magnate Perdues, because a chicken-suit arrival would have been fittingly comic. But he did grow up on a hog farm, so a first-day ride-along on a manure truck might be a good fit.

Personally, I would have preferred that Trump’s Attorney General, the corrupt and totally weaselly Jeff Sessions, had never had a first day in office. I don’t know what vehicle he arrived in on his first day, but I’m hoping that he leaves in a paddy wagon.

As for Rex Tillerson, the new Secretary of State whom Trump is completely ignoring, he has already arrived at the office: The problem is that Trump bought him a Harry-Potter-esque Cape of Invisibility to wear for his first day.

I can’t decide if Ryan Zinke’s first-day stunt reminded me more of a well-known Vladimir Putin image [Zinke kept his shirt on], or of the sheriff-arrival scene of Mel Brooks’ Blazing Saddles. Either way, Zinke’s grand entrance makes me ask myself, once again—as I have been since Donald Trump took office and began appointing the least qualified, most self-promoting, most corrupt people he could find to run the government—who are these people, anyway?

But I must admit that Zinke’s choice of vehicles on which to arrive at work is very fitting—he was, after all, appointed to office by a horse’s ass.

The post New Secy. of Interior rides into office, literally—on a horse appeared first on Occasional Planet.

Everything is political. Our long-running series of political quotes proves that–we think. We’re always on the lookout for quotes–contemporary and historical–that are pertinent to the current political environment.

Our illustrator is Christopher Burke, whose unique, quirky cartoons add a touch of whimsy–which we really, really need in today’s political realm

Ironically, the person who said this was John Boehner, the Republican Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, who was ousted in 2015 by the right-wing of his own party.

The post Political quotes: “Leaders” appeared first on Occasional Planet.

Everything is political. Our long-running series of political quotes proves that–we think. We’re always on the lookout for quotes–contemporary and historical–that are pertinent to the current political environment.

Our illustrator is Christopher Burke, whose unique, quirky cartoons add a touch of whimsy–which we really, really need in today’s political realm.

The post Political quotes: “To err is human…” appeared first on Occasional Planet.

The political documentary, “Weiner,” will probably make you cringe, but not necessarily for the most obvious reasons. Many people who buy tickets may be motivated by the salacious prospect of reliving New York Congressman Anthony Weiner’s 2011 sexting scandal. And, indeed, they will get their money’s worth—including the infamous underwear-bulge shot and a pixellated rendition of Weiner’s genital selfie. But there is a lot more to this film than that.

The documentary begins two years after revelations about Weiner’s sexting habit forced him to resign from Congress. It’s 2013, and Weiner has decided to run for Mayor of New York. Weiner is a liberal firebrand and was once the youngest member of New York’s City Council. His campaign is a big-stage attempt at a political comeback. But a second sexting scandal emerges, and [spoiler alert] Weiner ends up dead last [4.9% of the vote] in the race that swept Bill DeBlasio into office.

Weiner grants almost unlimited access to the filmmakers, allowing us to see him, his family and his campaign workers in some very raw moments. It’s not a pretty picture. You have to wonder why he didn’t stop the film when things turned terribly sour in his campaign and his personal life. The armchair shrink in me thinks that Weiner is such a narcissist, such an egotist, and so needful of attention that he believed that the documentary would offer proof of his political brilliance and worth.

It doesn’t. Instead, what I saw was a totally self-absorbed man—cocky [pun intended], calculating and certain that he is right. And worse yet, a consummate user of people: particularly of his wife, Huma Abedin, a behind-the-scenes political force in her own right. She is one of Hillary Clinton’s most trusted advisers.

And for me, the crux of this film is Weiner’s psycho/political abuse of Huma Abedin. People wonder why she stood next to him when he initially lied about his sexting compulsion, and why she didn’t just dump him. We may never know. But we see several painful scenes [again, why did Abedin not tell the filmmakers to stop?] in which Abedin is clearly seething at Weiner’s attempts to wriggle out of his latest screw-up–and use her connections to help him run for mayor. But the film also makes us aware that Weiner and Abedin have a toddler at home. Did Abedin do what so many betrayed women do—stay with the jerk as a way of protecting her child from hurt? Maybe she’ll dump him when the child is older. But, for now, she seems resigned to staying with Weiner. Isn’t that acquiescence a hallmark of psychological abuse?

Everyone will see what they want in this film: Weiner as a full-on perv; or, Weiner as a lost opportunity for progressives [his self-inflicted downfall is sad, because he appears to be sincerely liberal on policy]; or, Weiner as just another of the self-entitled jerks we all knew in high-school. As with all documentaries, it’s difficult to figure out how much of what happens on-screen is Weiner consciously playing for the cameras, how much is the real guy, and what role editing has played in conveying his obnoxiousness.

For a while, in the 1990s and early 2000s, we could comfort ourselves with the mythology that all of the Congressional perverts and family-values hypocrites were Republicans. Weiner put the lie to that kind of wishful thinking. And if he thought that opening himself up to up-close public scrutiny via this documentary would help people like him enough to revive his political career and gain himself some measure of personal redemption, he was wrong.

Agreeing to this documentary, and appearing [pretending?] to talk honestly about his indiscretions comes off as just another act of narcissism and of the exhibitionism that he so crudely displayed in the first place. Ick. I need to wash my hands.

[Update, August 2016: Another round of sexting by Weiner–in 2015–has surfaced. One of his texts is a dick pic that includes his toddler son in the background. Ugh. Apparently, this was the last straw, and Huma Abedin has announced that she is separating from Weiner.]

The post Weiner: Pictures from an exhibition[ist] appeared first on Occasional Planet.