Category Archives: Americana

Taylor Swift, Donald Trump, and the advantage of being a performer

Americana

If you didn’t follow the Taylor Swift Trial a couple of weeks ago, I understand. A celebrity’s trial has to be one of the lowest forms of news, but, if you weren’t following the trial, you missed an epic performance by Ms. Swift (and I mean that in the best possible way). Very basically, the guy on the right, DJ David Mueller, groped Ms. Swift – in the middle, for those of us who might not know her – and she complained to his boss (or her mother complained, I didn’t follow it that closely). He was fired and, after a couple of years, he sued Taylor Swift for 2+million and an apology. She countersued for $1. In the ensuing trial, Taylor Swift pretty much destroyed the prosecuting attorney and the jury ruled in her favor after a very short deliberation. To quote CNN, who says it better than I can,  

Taylor Swift took the stand in a civil trial on Thursday.
 
Swift was confident and assertive in her testimony. She rejected Mueller’s claim that their interaction was basic “jostling” for a photo and dismissed the possibility that she had misidentified Mueller. “This is what happened, it happened to me, I know it was him,” said Swift, who was 23 at the time of the incident.
 
She said she had no reaction to learning that Mueller, then 51, had been fired over the incident. “I’m not going to allow you or your client to make me feel in any way that this is my fault, because it isn’t,” she said. “I am being blamed for the unfortunate events of his life that are a product of his decisions and not mine,” Swift added later.
 

At one point, McFarland brought up a photo from the meet-and-greet that shows Swift, Mueller, and Mueller’s then-girlfriend Shannon Melcher. Each side of the trial has attempted to use the photo to bolster their argument, but Swift rejected McFarland’s claim that the photo showed nothing inappropriate. “Gabe, this is a photo of him with his hand up my skirt — with his hand on my ass,” she said. “You can ask me a million questions — I’m never going to say anything different. I never have said anything different.”

In addition, Swift repeatedly peppered her responses with tough comeback lines.
Looking at the photo, McFarland asked Swift why the front of her skirt did not appear to be lifted. “Because my ass is located in the back of my body,” Swift said. McFarland also noted that Swift was closer to Melcher than Mueller in the photo. ““Yes, she did not have her hand on my ass,” Swift replied.
 

On facebook, Laura Atkins remarked at how mature and self-assured Swift was and that was my thought. The more I think of it, however, the more it seems to me that Taylor Swift is mature and self-assured because she has been on stage for more than the last decade. She has learned all the things it takes to be a good performer and those are very close to the skills needed to be a good witness. Reading and responding to a crowd is similar to reading and responding to an accusing attorney. Like Taylor Swift, Donald Trump is a performer and he knows how to read and interact with a crowd. Most politicians sort of lecture us, a performer interacts with the crowd. She or he jokes and laughs with the crowd. A good performer is part of the crowd, while most politicians are separate and above the crowd. A year ago, at a party, an acquaintance said that Trump was going to win; not that he might win or could win but that “he will win”. When I asked why he said because he is a performer, not a politician. After watching Taylor Swift, I understand what he means.   

The 2017 eclipse from Eastern Oregon

Americana, Around home

Michele and I went to Eastern Oregon to watch the eclipse. Our theory was that it is the closest place that would most likely have no crowds and clear skies. Actually, I didn’t go to watch the eclipse as much as to watch people, especially Michele, watching the eclipse. My experience is that people who are interested in something like this are also usually very interesting themselves. Getting ready to go, our biggest worry was that it would be so crowded that the local gas stations would be sold out of gas and we would not even be able to get near a place to watch.  

Our plan was to get as high as possible so we could see the moon’s shadow race across the landscape. Several months ago, Michele called Peter and  Ophelia in Boise Idaho, near the Oregon border, and asked them what their plans were. That prompted Peter to make a couple of recon runs and he thought the best place would be Lookout Mountain near Lime, Oregon which was right at the center of the Totality. We were going to a wedding in Napa on Saturday evening and the eclipse was on Monday; Lime is day’s drive away so it seemed perfect. Then we started reading about the expected crowds and the campgrounds being sold out and all motels and Airbandbs in Oregon being sold out a year in advance and we started worrying that Lookout Mountain would be a magnet. Michele began to say things like “Well if we can just get to the Oregon border on Interstate 84, near Ontario, we’ll be in the Totality Zone and that will be a win.”

Pre-eclipse Sunday, as we were getting close to our destination – about two hours out – we switched into desert survival mode, getting gas every time the tank dropped down to 3/4s. The first station had pretty long lines, partially because it was Oregon which doesn’t have self-service, but also because the traffic was getting denser. But when I asked how busy it was, the attendant said it was terrible, they had 795 cars yesterday; when I asked what a normal day was, he said about 200. That translates to four times normal and normal for Eastern Oregon is almost empty so our too packed to move fears were much assuaged. A couple of hours later, we drove up an empty washboard dirt/rock road to a ridge below Lookout Mountain and it was astoundingly deserted. 

We found a wide spot in the road that was wide enough to park and set up a table, had a can of fine wine, cold chicken barbecued the Friday before, an Asian salad kit from Whole Foods, and watched a memorable sunset. After the sunset appreciation period, a couple of guys – that were parked at the next wide spot in the road – came over for a drink. It turned out they were rocket engineers from NASA – JPL, actually – and they had spent months pouring over topo maps of the Western United States before deciding that the hill by our car was the best place in the United States to watch the eclipse. By sheer luck on our part and stellar reconnaissance skills on Peter’s part, we had ended up at a superior location.  

Below is a gratuitous picture of Michele enjoying a lazy morning by sleeping in. We were on a ridge and it was windy all night so we used our cooler, “camping box”, and table, as a wind break. Behind her is the hill from which we watched the Great American Eclipse. The light was already getting dim by the time we got to to the top of our viewing hill and the temperature was noticeably dropping. There we ran into the biggest crowd, sixteen by actual count, that we saw all day. It seemed to be all NASA or NASA related and it was the kind of crowd that, during totality, when Michele, looking at a very dim Mercury, said “It’s dark enough that I can see a star.”, six people said “planet” together; it was the kind of crowd that wore their dark glasses even as it got darker, to improve their night vision; it was the kind of crowd that laid out a piece of paper to watch for Shadow Bands, although, all I ever saw were crescent-shaped patterns.   As the moon moved across the sun, cutting off the light, from 1% to 95%, the change was slow and not noticeable without actually stopping and consciously looking around. Yes, it was getting colder and the shadows were getting softer but it was still very much daylight even if it was slightly green. We stood along the ridge, in the cold air, watching for the distant mountains to disappear in a dark shadow traveling at something like 2000 miles per hour, then – suddenly – it got dark, and a NASA guy near me, who had been wearing two pairs of dark glasses, quietly said “Look at the corona without your eclipse glasses and let your eyes adjust to the corona, look at how soft and delicate it is.” I looked up and it seemed huge; a giant black hole surrounded by a lacy corona reaching way out into the night sky. A night sky that was dark but only dark enough for us to see Venus and tiny Mercury almost swallowed by the corona.

This was my second eclipse, the first being in Fatehpur Sikri, India and what I most remember about that eclipse was looking around and seeing bright light off in the distance….in every direction. About the time I got focused enough to get several pictures of the light around us, the double glasses guy softly said, “Five seconds to the diamond ring.” I looked up again and the moon seemed to be close enough to touch, black and silent in the cold night sky, surrounded by a lacy corona. Then a speck of light shown from the upper corner of the black moon, instantly – seemingly – the spec became a bright light and, then exploded into The Sun too bright to look at even though it was probably 99% of totality. It was daylight again, dim and cold and slightly green, but daylight. The Great American Eclipse of 2017 was over.   

….all men are created equal….

Americana
Painting, by Kerry James Marshall, who was born in Birmingham (Alabama) and grew up in South Central (Los Angeles), at a show at MOCA

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed...Thomas Jefferson with Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, Roger Sherman, and Robert Livingston.

If you’re not outraged, you’re not paying attention, Heather Heyer, killed in Charlotteville.

We are a racist nation with the bigotry of slavery in our DNA. For a long time, it seemed that that racism was in remission but President Donald J. Trump has both stirred up that racism and given it permission to come out of the muck and into the light. I don’t know if Trump is racist, but, in the end, it makes no difference, he has used racism to get elected. But we are also a nation trying to overcome that despicable past and it is worth noting that Heather Heyer, the person killed by a demented terrorist in Charlotteville, is white. May she Rest In Peace and may we find new Outrage by her death.

 

 

A couple of thoughts on political discourse

Americana, Politics
Trump-01894

Any data that do not fit the solution or theory we have already clung to are ignored or discarded. Merim Bilalić and Peter McLeod, “Why Good Thoughts Block Better Ones” in Scientific American. 

“Can’t we all just get along?” Rodney King

Persuasion may play a part in a man’s conversion, but only the part of bringing to its full and conscious climax a process which has been maturing in regions where no persuasion can penetrate. A faith is not acquired; it grows like a tree. Its crown points to the sky, its roots grow downward into the past and are nourished by the dark sap of the ancestral hummus. Arthur Koestler, The God That Failed

A couple of days ago – maybe a week, depending on how long it takes to write this – an old friend that I haven’t seen anywhere but on Facebook asked me, “What is it that concerns you about a lack of dialogue between “liberals” and people who disagree with them? That if they talked to each other more it would change things? I think that until willfully ignorant people start educating themselves about reality, we have to just do the best we can to limit the damage they’re doing.”, and I didn’t know how to answer. I didn’t know the answer and I’m not sure I still do; still, those are the best questions so I’ll give it a try.

Every one of the following sentences should start with I think, or, In my opinion, so consider that included. The answer to the first question is implied in the second question, as corny as it sounds. Yes, if we did talk to each other, it would change things. But the third sentence highlights the problem; if it is only the other person who is willfully ignorant and needs to start educating themselves before we even have a conversation, then the conversation is probably not going anywhere. If we define the problem as “We are right and they are wrong and the only answer is for the other guy to change”, we have done two things that are sort of contradictory: we say your opinion is worthless, so worthless that you are not worth even listening to, and we give them all the power by saying that we can do nothing to bring change, they are the only ones that can bring change.

Our beloved country has been drifting in the wrong direction for several decades and Trump is a giant leap in that wrong direction. Still, I understand why some people voted for him; what I do not understand is why most of those people would still vote for him and the only way I am going to find out is to listen to them. I have learned a couple of things by listening. One is that different Trump voters have different reasons they voted the way they did, the Trump voter block is not monolithic. Some voted for Trump because they expect they will pay less taxes and they will probably be right. I don’t think that is a good reason, not even a moral one, but it is rational. Some voted for Trump because they think the country is such a mess of vested interests that throwing a grenade in the works is the only way to stop it from getting worse. They might be right, the country might get better under Trump but that is unlikely and there is a real possibility that Trump might make the situation much worse. I’m sure that some people voted for Trump because they are bigots – although I have never talked to anybody who has said they voted for Trump because they don’t like black people or Jews – and lots of people voted for Trump because he isn’t Hillary.

I have no data to prove that listening to the other, honoring that the other has a point of view worth considering, actually works to calm the turbulent waters of conflict, but I do have lots of anecdotal evidence that yelling or mocking the other doesn’t work.

Explain to me why North Korea is an existential problem

Americana, Politics, Psychological Musings

Korea-00830

Across 25 years and five administrations, we have kicked the North Korean can down the road. We are now out of road. National Review

The threat, dubbed “the worst problem on earth,” has persisted across U.S. administrations and only grown more alarming over time. Outgoing President Barack Obama warned Trump during the transition that North Korea was the most urgent and vexing problem to confront. NPR

Across the political spectrum, all the news reports on North Korea act as if North Korea is an existential threat to the World and, especially, the United States. I don’t understand it. Nobody seems to have an explanation of why North Korea is such a big threat (I’m guessing somebody must have but if so, I missed it). We are told that Kim Jong-un is crazy and while he does seem to have a crazy haircut, he doesn’t seem to do crazy stuff. Except for the Kim Jong-uh is crazy stuff, nobody explains why North Korea is such a big problem, they just assume that you know, or everybody knows, that it is obvious.

What I do know, or think I know, at least is that North Korea is a country of about 25 million people ruled by Kim Jong-un, the grandson of Kim Il-sung, the dictator appointed by and backed by the, then, Soviet Union. North Korea is next to China in the north – and China is North Korea’s biggest trading partner and, theoretically, its biggest external influence – and South Korea in the south (duh!). Its people are starving poor and it still has a larger standing army than we do with (although it is considered to be ill-equipped by modern standards). What it does have is a limited nuclear capacity and an increasingly sophisticated ICBM program which North Korea is trying to parlay into an operational nuclear missile fleet – that’s probably the wrong word – capable of hitting anywhere in the United States. The treat of this program has scared the shit out of us going all the way back to the first Bush. The mainstream media have fanned these fears for over twenty-five years alternating between mocking Kim Jong-un – and he does seem easy to mock – and screaming “The sky is falling!” with no explanation of why this is such an existential problem.

What I think, or know I think, at least is that all this hysteria is made up, there is no real danger, North Korea is like a spoiled kid trying to get the world’s attention. Let’s just imagine, for a minute, that North Korea is fabulously successful in their schemes and they have a hundred nuclear-tipped ICBM ready to go. What are they going to do with them? Nothing, the same as Pakistan or Russia (Russia has about 7,300 nuclear warheads, with about 1800 ready to fire, by the way). If they use them on us or South Korea or Japan, the retaliation would annihilate North Korea along with the Kim Jong-un regime. The only thing a nuclear weapon does is prevent an attack. I read that North Korea is irrational to want nuclear weapon, I think it is irrational to not want them, just ask Moammar Kadafi. We have demonized North Korea since Jun 25, 1950, and we do have a record of attacking countries that we demonize. I think what North Korea wants is attention and the Kim Jong-un regime wants recognition as legitimate.

Demonizing North Korea sells newspapers and magazines, it gets people to watch the nightly news, and it gives the American regime in power a useful distraction. It does not contribute to a better world.