You Are Of Course Happy For Me
...Trump is making unsupervised calls to foreign leaders with no briefings or guidance from anyone. The transition hasn't even checked in with State Department or the Pentagon...Donald Trump revealed that his late mother was a big fan of the Queen during his first phone call with Theresa May. The US president-elect also asked the prime minister to pass on his regards at her next audience at Buckingham Palace, according to sources.
The two leaders held a ten-minute conversation last Thursday lunchtime during which he called the UK a “very special place for me and my country”.
As well as invoking his late mother, Mary, who was born in Scotland, Mr Trump offered a casual, open-ended invitation for Mrs May to get in contact if she crosses the Atlantic.
“If you travel to the US, you should let me know,” he told her, according to an official transcript of the conversation. The informality of the invitation raised eyebrows among British officials.He also invited the Irish prime minister to come to the US for St Patrick's day. God only knows what puerile nonsense he's saying to everyone else. This is a guy who ran on a platform based on the idea that the rest of the world is laughing at us.
It's almost a parody of simple narcissism: ten-year-old Richie Rich, calling up all his friends and his Aunt and his Grandma to tell them about this really neat prize he won at school. He'll leave out the part where he beat up some other kids, stole things, and acted like an unconscious, self-serving ass to get that prize -- because it's all about him, you see, and of course everyone is just as excited about his triumph (for him) as he is.
They'd better be. They'd just better.
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And, What Mike Davis Said (courtesy of The Soul Of America): This is a point which has been unacknowledged in nearly every Monday-Morning-Quarterback analysis of the election, whether good or bad. That a large number of Americans responded to Sanders' ideas may or may not have been 'the real revolution' in U.S. politics (the anti-HRC feeling was a factor).
I'd argue that support for Sanders and Trump was an expression of the same general uneasiness -- that in every major category the United States has been moving in the wrong direction for a long time, compounded now by the obvious enrichment of a tiny segment of the population at the expense of everyone else. But we'll all get a chance to see whether Mike was correct, because the details are in the demographics (italics mine).
I'd argue that support for Sanders and Trump was an expression of the same general uneasiness -- that in every major category the United States has been moving in the wrong direction for a long time, compounded now by the obvious enrichment of a tiny segment of the population at the expense of everyone else. But we'll all get a chance to see whether Mike was correct, because the details are in the demographics (italics mine).
_____________________________But whatever the hypothesis, it must take account of the real revolution in American politics, the Sanders campaign. The downward or blocked mobility of graduates, especially from working class and immigrant backgrounds, is the major emergent social reality, not the long agony of the Rustbelt. I say this while recognizing the momentum given to economic nationalism by the loss of five million industrial jobs over the last decade, more than half of them in the South.
But Trumpism, however it evolves, cannot unify millennial economic distress with that of older white workers, while Sanders showed that heartland discontent can be brought under the umbrella of a ‘democratic socialism’ that reignites New Deal hopes for a Economic Bill of Rights. With the Democratic establishment in temporary disarray, the real opportunity for transformational political change (‘critical realignment’ in a now archaic vocabulary) belongs to Sanders and Warren. We must hurry.
i am currently taking a community college class, where I am at least twice the age of the professor, and the students are traditional college age with a couple in their mid- to late-20s
ReplyDeletespeaking of age, at the invitation of our professor i spoke from my position of years and years of experience - i am a time traveler from the first half of the twentieth century - to the class on the day after the election when we were all so surprised by the election results - saying that although the results are not so good - from our perspective - back at the turn of the millennium, which only the professor could remember, we had to wait a month for the election results
have you see Michael Moore's film Fahrenheit 911? i learned things about what happened then that I did not hear from the corporate media
i could have quoted to them, but didn't, something from the satirical comedy troupe Firesign Theatre, notionally interviewing people in the street about their views of the future: "THIS is the future. You got to LIVE it, or LIVE WITH it."
nowadays, i would add to this, "And, sooner or later, get out of the way."
and speaking of the future, I have ordered Bernie Sander's most recent book, Our Revolution: A Future to Believe In
if Trump is able to deliver on his promises about improving the economic conditions of the ordinary people of this country, then the future Bernie believes in will never happen - but i am pessimistic about how successful the Trump/Pence regime will be along those lines, and can imagine that just as something surprising happened this year, something surprising may happen in the next several years as well - indeed, as Yogi Berra could have said, you never know when something surprising might happen