Eric The Blue

Happy Memorial Day!

 

Being a member of the FB group "Slim Dunlap Fan Club," I recently had my attention drawn to this two-part interview with the ailing, likable rocker and one-time replacement Replacement (he filled Bob Stinson's spot).  The sense of humor is obviously still intact, as evidenced, for example, by the repartee elicited by the question about his musical Mount Rushmore:

Who belongs on the musical version of Mount Rushmore?
Are there five guys or four on there?

Beats me. We could look it up.
I think there are four, but I’ll give you five names: Hank Williams. Buddy Holly. Chuck Berry. John Lennon. And Jimi Hendrix.

Well, yeah, I'd put whoever is lowest on that list above T.R.  It's also fun to be reminded that Slim, before his stroke, was a golfer.  A friend of mine ran into him once or twice at Rich Acres, the public course in Richfield that was taken when the airport expanded several years ago.  I guess Slim didn't go in for golf apparel and would just stick with his normal uniform of flannel shirt, Levis, and sneakers.  His one concession to the outdoor summer activity was to roll up the sleeves of his shirt.  Fore!

I don't  go in much for the staples of Memorial Day sentiment, so here is John Prine performing "Sam Stone."  Above is Slim's "Times Like This."  We should all be glad that we don't know what will happen to us.

 

Two Republicans

W.C. Fields's account of how he coped with temptation--"it saves time to give in immediately"--describes my approach to the allure of Schadenfreude, a German word for which there is no English equivalent, though it means roughly taking pleasure in the misfortunes of others.  So, did you hear that Kenneth Starr has been ousted as President of Baylor University?  His response to all the sexual assaults perpetrated by the school's football players did not even attain the level of low-energy.  Back in the day, he was known for working himself into a state of high dudgeon over the crossing of sexual boundaries.

Delicious.

On a less partisan, conciliatory note, Wheelock Whitney, a wealthy Republican business leader and man-about-town here in the Twin Cites, died around a week ago.  His Star Tribune obituary, here, is notable for including, in its summary of a life filled with success, some shady spots.  His first wife, for example, was an alcoholic, which spurred Whitney to take action on behalf of her fellow sufferers.  This interest seems to have broadened, for he was an active board member of the Minnesota Council on AIDS as well as the Minnesota Organization on Fetal Alcohol Syndrome.  And there was this section:

A lifelong Republican, he was consistently moderate, even progressive on social issues and conservative on fiscal ones. Wheelock was mayor of Wayzata (1963-68). He ran unsuccessfully for the U.S. Senate in 1964 and for governor in 1982. Until his death he stayed involved with issues, candidates and elected officials. One of his greatest joys was helping to lead the efforts in 2012 to defeat the proposed constitutional amendment to ban marriage between same-sex couples. The fact that Minnesota was the first state in the nation to defeat such an amendment was a source of great pride.

It wouldn't be a sour joke to speak of "the party of Lincoln" if Whitney had been at all representative.

I have just one bit of "insider knowledge" about Whitney.  My next door neighbor Wayne, an African-American and World War II vet, Pacific theatre, now either 93 or 94 years old--I know he was born in 1922--did quite well in his prime as owner of a small general contracting firm.  When he was first starting the business, however, he had a real problem getting funds: it was hard in the 1950s for a black guy with a new business to borrow money.  Somehow or another, it might have been from the service, he knew Whitney, who hooked him up with a banker who made him a loan.  Wayne like almost all African-Americans is a dyed-in-the-wool Democrat.  But in any conversation with him that lasts longer than five minutes--and most of them do--he works it in that he knows Wheelock Whitney, considers him a friend and a Mensch, another foreign word for which there isn't an English equivalent: "good guy" is close but a little pale.

What they like about Trump

For those of us for whom #NeverTrump is a kind of redundancy--too obvious to deserve a group or a hashtag, like #Ilikefoodandcheapredwine--the Trump phenomenon requires an explanation.  What's the attraction?

Let's just accept what seem to be the basics.  Trump's supporters are, compared to the general population, whiter, poorer, male-er, and less apt to have been to college.  Most of that qualifies as understatement.  Among  nonwhites and nonmales, for example, he's something beyond merely unpopular: he is, as the talking heads say when reporting on poll results, "toxic." 

The natural habitat of our composite Trump voter--white, male, unburdened by a college education, working at a job with low prospects and low pay--is Appalachia, the band of rough hilly country stretching from western Pennsylvania to northeastern Mississippi by way of West Virginia and swatches of Ohio, Kentucky, Virginia, Carolina, Georgia, and Alabama: the states, in other words, that are the focus of Trump's evident electoral strategy.  Were he to add Ohio and Pennsylvania to all the Romney states, he'd be within 26 electoral votes of victory.  Florida, which Obama carried by 1% in 2012, has 29 electoral votes.

I remember, around 25 years ago, being told by the Auditor of Hennepin County, where I work, that the single most important variable in voting behavior is household income: the more  you make, the more likely you are to vote, and to prefer the Republicans.  Maybe it was true then.  It isn't true now.  Republicans acknowledge the change when, for example, they complain with increasing bitterness about "elites" and "elite opinion."  States such as Virginia and North Carolina have in recent elections been moving the Democrats' way, and it's not on account of their "hillbilly" regions: it's the thriving urban centers of Charlotte, University Triangle, and the Washington suburbs that are boosting the Democrats' prospects.  Federal tax dollars that are collected in states like Minnesota and Massachusetts are disbursed in West Virginia and Alabama.  Marriages are most apt to fail in the red states of the Bible belt. It's the economy, stupid.  Couples who can afford to dine out and go to the movies are more apt to stay together.  When the husband feels unmanned by an inability to provide, the social fabric unravels.

Conservatives complain that liberals tell nonwhites that their troubles aren't their fault even though (the argument goes) their troubles are their own damn fault.  But Trump's appeal to his voters is the same: he's telling them their troubles aren't their fault.  And the troubles of the white working class are considerable.  A study, widely reported upon, by some Princeton economists (despised elites!) finds that the mortality rate among working class whites is actually rising in the 21st century.  Given the generally encouraging trend of health indicators, this is an alarming development, especially since it is being fueled by alcoholism, accidental drug overdoses, and suicide.

The grievances of these people, including not least their racial resentments, have attracted them to the Republican party, which has accepted their votes and done precisely nothing for them.  The tax code's preference for hedge fund managers over earners of an hourly wage isn't doing Trump's voters any good.  That they have chosen to gob spit upon the Republican "establishment" should not be that great a surprise.  The attraction of the vulgar, blustering, know-nothing, swaggery, presumptive nominee is probably akin to the maxim about "any port in a storm." 

Prince near the end

What's been reported concerning the investigation into Prince's death is a reminder, for those of us who require one, that it's a fiction to suppose that somewhere, if not in penthouse apartments then certainly at the pinnacle of worldwide super stardom, extravagantly gifted people are enjoying extravagant happiness.  It appears that Prince was living alone at Paisley Park--his . . . what? not exactly "home"--self-medicating with opioids to which he had likely been introduced after undergoing a medical procedure for a bad hip.  It was a longstanding problem with which his few intimates were quite familiar.  He knew it was a problem himself and had taken steps to get help.  Too late.

Because of its title, "When Doves Cry" has become a standard in the musical tributes to him.  It's probably more appropriate than people tend to realize.  Prince had many moods, and an almost-end-of-the-road broken heartedness was one of them.  It's there in maybe his most famous recording, the dirge-like "Purple Rain," and it's certainly there in the lyric to "When Doves Cry":

How can you just leave me standing?
Alone in a world that's so cold? (So cold)
Maybe I'm just too demanding
Maybe I'm just like my father too bold
Maybe you're just like my mother
She's never satisfied (She's never satisfied)
Why do we scream at each other?
This is what it sounds like
When doves cry.

Here it is, covered by Patti Smith.

 

Handicapping the presidential race

The chatterers are agog about the polling organization--Quinnipiac--that recently found Trump leading Clinton in Ohio and trailing her, though by a statistically insignificant margin, in Florida and Pennsylvania.  So could Trump win?

Maybe I'm just whistling in the dark, but I seriously doubt it.  Trump's ballyhooed plan to ride the Rust Belt to the White House may be a symptom of weakness. He needs a plan--right?--and what does not appear to be any part of it seems to me significant.  Back in the twentieth century, such western states as Colorado and Nevada were reliably Republican in presidential elections, and New Mexico qualified as a swing state.  Obama, however, carried all three of these states, twice.  Recapturing them does not look like it's in Trump's plans, and it's not hard to figure out why: the red-to-light blue journey of these states has been fueled largely by the votes of a burgeoning Hispanic population that has an even dimmer view of Trump than it had of Romney. 

If one puts the western "battlegrounds" in Clinton's column, what then for Trump?  The eastern battlegrounds!  The big three have been Virginia, Florida, and Ohio.  But Virginia is a long reach.  It, too, was carried twice by Obama, and it has a Democratic governor and two Democratic U.S. senators.  I believe that the last Republican to win a statewide election in Virginia was Governor Bob McConnell, and the effort to keep him out of prison is a full-time job for teams of lawyers.  Virginia's new status as a purple-blue state may be attributed to another growing Democratic demographic--young, hip, well-educated millennials who tend to congregate in and around urban centers, such as northern Virginia within commuting distance of D.C.  These are not Trump's people, either.

That leaves Ohio and Florida.  Of course Trump plans on winning them.  He has to plan on winning somewhere, and they're all that's left!  Problem is, put them together with the Romney states, and it's still not enough to win, which is why there is all this buzz about how the poor oppressed white guys of Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin--all states that no Republican has won for a generation--are going to put Trump over the top.  Quinnipiac suggests, a half year before the voting, that it might be possible, like drawing to an inside straight.  But then there are other polls indicating that Trump is not doing very well in some Romney states--North Carolina, for example, and, of all places, Utah [sic].  (It's a mystery to me why Mormons don't like Trump!)  Arizona could be a problem for him, too. 

There is in nature a powerful force called "reversion to the mean."  I think it applies in presidential elections, too.  Clinton isn't going to carry Utah.  And Trump isn't going to win the election.  I hope (and think).

Will on Trump

George Will's most recent column, "Who will follow Trump off the cliff," begins:

Speaking on "Fox and Friends," of course, Trump revealed something he learned from the National Enquirer, of course.

The implicit equating, by a conservative pundit with a reputation for egg-headedness (because he wears bow ties), of the Fox network with the Enquirer suggests to me that Trumpism has the potential to make some right-handers spit out the poison.  Will proceeds to quote the whole absurd exchange between Trump and the Fox host on the subject of Ted Cruz's father and Lee Harvey  Oswald before concluding:

Parsing Trump sentences is a challenge, but is rewarding because it frequently reveals that he actually has said nothing at all.  When silence descends, there lingers in the air only gauzy innuendo.

This business of speaking and saying nothing has become a sort of poor cousin of a Republican "talking point," now that Trump is the party's presumptive nominee.  Thus Kelly Ayotte, the imperiled Republican incumbent in this year's US Senate race in New Hampshire, on her view of her party's standard bearer: she will "support" but not "endorse" Trump.  The phrase "distinction without a difference" is frequently trotted out to complain about a certain kind of rhetorical trick, but I don't think Sen. Ayotte's gambit comes up to that level.  There's neither a difference nor a distinction between endorsing Trump and supporting him.  Both verbs refer to an action, x, that is accurately defined as supporting (or endorsing) Trump for president.

What lingers in the air isn't in this case particularly gauzy, however.  Will, being a columnist, can say what he thinks.  Ayotte, however, is trying to win re-election, and, being a Republican, perceives that she needs the votes of the Trump demographic as well as those of casual middle-of-the-roaders who could go either way.  So the pissed off white guys are supposed to hear that she supports Trump while the married ladies are supposed to hear that she doesn't endorse him. 

Can this possibly work?  It seems it'd be better just to spit out the poison.

Riddle

Q: Why do old people always ask kids what they want to be when they grow up?

A:  Well, speaking for myself, I'm still looking for a good idea.