Eric The Blue

Trump. Langer. Voter fraud.

Being interested in Donald Trump and golf, I can't let the Trump-Bernhard Langer-voting fraud dust-up pass without commentary.

Last Monday, Trump was conducting a meet-and-greet with Congressional leaders when he repeated his claim about having lost the popular vote only because of the 3- or 4- or maybe 5 million people who voted illegally for Hillary Clinton.  (A hundred per cent of the millions of cheaters are Democrats.)  When a Democrat within earshot told him he was full of it, Trump related the story of Bernhard Langer's voting woes in Florida. According to the New York Times, three witnesses, congressional staffers, gave the following account of Trump's anecdote:

Mr. Langer, a 59-year-old native of Bavaria, Germany — a winner of the Masters twice and of more than 100 events on major professional golf tours around the world — was standing in line at a polling place near his home in Florida on Election Day, the president explained, when an official informed Mr. Langer he would not be able to vote.

Ahead of and behind Mr. Langer were voters who did not look as if they should be allowed to vote, Mr. Trump said, according to the staff members — but they were nonetheless permitted to cast provisional ballots. The president threw out the names of Latin American countries that the voters might have come from.

Mr. Langer, whom he described as a supporter, left feeling frustrated, according to a version of events later contradicted by a White House official.

The anecdote, the aides said, was greeted with silence, and Mr. Trump was prodded to change the subject by Reince Priebus, the White House chief of staff, and Senator John Cornyn, Republican of Texas.

Just one problem: Mr. Langer, who lives in Boca Raton, Fla., is a German citizen with permanent residence status in the United States who is, by law, barred from voting, according to Mr. Langer’s daughter Christina.

“He is a citizen of Germany,” she said, when reached on her father’s cellphone. “He is not a friend of President Trump’s, and I don’t know why he would talk about him.”

The Times's story created enough buzz so that Langer himself put out a statement:

The voting situation reported was not conveyed from me to President Trump, but rather was told to me by a friend. I then relayed the story in conversation with another friend, who shared it with a person with ties to the White House. From there, this was misconstrued.

Yes, "misconstrued." 

In one version (Trump's), it's Langer himself who's standing in line to vote.  In another, it's a friend of Langer's, and the story made it's way back to Trump, who, not having heard it directly from Langer, was off about some of the details.  Whatevs.  I think it's fair to make the following observations.

1. Langer's version is in line with his daughter's on the question of Trump's relationship with Langer--they don't know each other.  So Trump, who has on other occasions revealed that he is afflicted with a bit of the star-fucker syndrome, was lying about Langer being a friend. 
2. In a line of people waiting to vote, how can you identify the illegal ones?  Easy, they have brown skin!  (The German citizens, on the other hand, look like real voters.)
3. What the hell kind of a gated community does Langer--or his friend, if that's the story--live in if they have to stand in line to vote with brown-skinned people?
4. I love the detail about how Trump's story was greeted with embarrassed silence, and his chief of staff quickly changed the subject.
5. On the question of voter fraud, this is what Trump's got?  "I know a guy in Florida, and he was standing in line to vote, and what happened to him is . . . ."  It's like how he knows that immunization shots given to kids cause autism.   "I know a guy, and he had a beautiful child, but then, after being immunized . . . ."  Don't pay any attention to the conclusions of social science on voter fraud, or of medical science on immunizations and autism.  Trump knows a guy! 
6. In Trump's version, related by the three staffers, the irony is delicious.  Trump tells a story that purports to prove that illegal immigrants cast votes for Democrats.  Actually, however, a rich white guy who in fact is ineligible to vote, being a citizen of Germany, is pulled out of line and not permitted to cast a ballot for Trump--exactly what should happen. 
7. It's obvious that Trump is just making stuff up, lying extemporaneously until his handlers can distract him.  Someone should ask him what he thinks the impact of a few million illegal voters was on down-ballot races, such as those for U.S. Senate, where Democrats gained two seats after, for example, prevailing narrowly in the Nevada contest.  He hasn't thought about it.  His lies are meant only to prop up his own ego and he is oblivious to any other aspect of what he alleges.  In his view, only he is the victim of millions of illegal votes having been cast--and he won.

When I was young and Mary Tyler Moore was on tv

 

The Huskers cover "Love is All Around," the Mary Tyler Moore Show's theme song.  Watching the opening sequence played again and again since she died yesterday has made me nostalgic for the days when Dayton's and Donaldson's faced each other across 7th Street along the Nicollet Mall, currently disfigured by renovation.  I worked part-time at Dayton's for a year or two and took my meals at the Harvest House Cafeteria, which was just over your left shoulder when you got to the top of the escalator Mary is ascending in the Crystal Court.  For a song, you could get a thousand buttery calories--say, salisbury steak with scalloped potatoes, green beans, bread and butter, pie and coffee.  The Nankin--cheap, mediocre Chinese, and lots of it--was another option.  You can tell from the restaurants that poor people are now supposed to stay home in their poor neighborhoods.  Not even a McDonald's downtown.  Subway, I guess.

I got a bad case of the old-man grumpies.  Things used to be a lot better when Nixon was president.  Here is Philip Roth on the current occupant:

“I was born in 1933,” he continued, “the year that F.D.R. was inaugurated. He was President until I was twelve years old. I’ve been a Roosevelt Democrat ever since. I found much that was alarming about being a citizen during the tenures of Richard Nixon and George W. Bush. But, whatever I may have seen as their limitations of character or intellect, neither was anything like as humanly impoverished as Trump is: ignorant of government, of history, of science, of philosophy, of art, incapable of expressing or recognizing subtlety or nuance, destitute of all decency, and wielding a vocabulary of seventy-seven words that is better called Jerkish than English.”

We shall overcomb

"The peaceful transition of power"--is there not something vaguely alarming about the easy yet portentous way in which the phrase falls from the lips of Americans around inauguration time?  The gravity of the pronouncement suggests that "the peaceful transition of power" is another aspect of "American exceptionalism," although--as the examples of the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Switzerland, Israel, Australia, Belgium, Chile, Canada, Iceland, New Zealand, Malta, Spain, Italy, Japan, and six or seven others show--we are not really in this regard exceptional.  When a "peaceful transition of power" occurs in any of these countries, do citizens and journalists feel the need to blare "Congratulations!" 70 zillion times a minute, or is it regarded as so routine as not to require commentary?  To me, it seems more exceptional if you don't need to talk about it. 

This whole question of "American exceptionalism" is fraught.  Usually it seems like just a stick for conservatives to swing at liberals who complain about, say, the comparatively high rate of infant mortality in our country.  You think too many babies aren't living to celebrate a birthday?  You hate America!  But, considering the inaugural address, maybe not as much as the new president.  He wants to make America great again, but it is unclear when in his mind it ever was great.  I suppose it would have been achieved without his assistance and that must be the problem.  "The American carnage ends today!"

What exactly is he talking about?  The unemployment rate is at 4.7%.  The number of Americans without health insurance is at last on the decline.  Gay people can marry and we are still awaiting the dreadful consequences of that development.  Osama bin Laden is dead but of course there is something new to hyperventilate about.  Keep out the Muslims!  Back in the day when I might have considered voting for a Republican here and there, they were calmer.  Maybe the new president will be so distracted by the daily insults to his vanity that he will forget about the wall, the registry, &c.  That spectators at his Friday inaugural were outnumbered by protestors the next day clearly irritated him.

I like a lot of the signs I saw in television coverage of those protests.

We need a leader, not a creepy tweeter.

Get your small hands off my pussy (and NATO).

He's orange, he's gross, he didn't win the popular vote.

I was watching the news the other evening, and they showed Trump declaring to a roomful of sycophants that his cabinet will have the highest IQ of any ever assembled--before cutting away to show Rick Perry, the next head of the Department of Energy, testifying at his Senate hearing. 

 

Trump plays golf

 

Why all the hubbub about repealing the ACA, aka Obamacare?  I think the Republicans in Congress voted to do that 367,898 times over the past few years, but now that they actually can accomplish it, there's all this Sturm und Drang, and for all I know people will still be buying medical insurance on the exchanges when Mexico is paying us for the built Wall on the installment plan. (It's going to be a terrific Wall!)

During the campaign, Trump said repealing Obamacare ("a total disaster") would be at the top of his to-do list, and that he would replace it with "something terrific."  (When mortals clear their throats, stalling for time, Trump makes the sound turr-IFF-ik.")  Does "terrific" mean something better than what existed before the ACA was adopted and twenty million fewer Americans had health insurance?  Because it wouldn't be hard to go back to that.  Just vote to repeal the ACA for the 367,899th time, without worrying about a replacement.  They weren't worrying about a replacement the first 367,898 times, so why now?

Else, show us what you got that's "terrific."

Health insurance is for many people a life-and-death question, but for whatever reason, my attention is easily drawn to such matters as Trump's golf game.  Here is an account from a reporter, David Owen, who not long ago played a round with him on one of his branded courses.  The idea was to review, for Golf Digest, the quality of Trump's courses.  I like the following:

In my own article, I did write nice things about Trump’s courses. But Trump, nevertheless, was upset. He called the editor of Golf Digest to complain, and then he called me, on my cell phone. I was in the city on a reporting assignment unrelated to golf, and had the surreal experience of being chewed out by a future President of the United States while standing among the gravestones in the burial ground next to Trinity Church. He wasn’t upset that one of the article’s illustrations had been of a golf ball wearing a turf toupee that looked a lot like his deeply mysterious hair, or that I’d mentioned his asking two little girls at Mar-a-Lago if they wanted to be supermodels when they grew up, or that I’d described nearly tipping him five dollars after momentarily mistaking him for his club’s parking-lot attendant, or that I’d written that he’d introduced one of his club’s members to me not by name but as “the richest guy in Germany.” He was upset that I hadn’t written that he’d shot 71—a very good golf score, one stroke under par. I hadn’t written that because he hadn’t shot 71. . . .

And Owen goes on to explain how they'd been horsing around, taking extra shots, picking up on the green, etc., and that if the next president, who hit the ball a long way but had a lot of trouble from a hundred yards in, was going to say he had shot a 71, he might as well have said 69.  This reminded me of the casual way in which the Speaker of the House once claimed to have been a sub-3-hour marathoner ("two-fifty-something") when, in fact, he finished the only one he ever ran in more than 4 hours.  Maybe the macho swagger of so many political conservatives inclines them to, um, exaggerating their prowess in the accredited  proving grounds of the American masculinity cult.  You can sense a similar impulse, I think, in the way their tongues lovingly loll over the syllables in the names of the guns they own--a SIG Sauer P220 Combat, or whatever.  A guy with one of those in his britches isn't going to be caught worrying about sick people with no health insurance. 

Clownish

 

Trump's small quirks tend to be obscured by the outsized ones, like the way you might overlook the unusually small penis of an overfed slob.  Pursuing this analogy, the tiny organ of his press conferences is the penchant for dopey props that are laughably deficient for the purpose of persuading anyone who might need persuading.  In his most recent presser, part of the plan was to assure people that the president-elect isn't in it for himself or his own financial gain, and that there will be no conflicts of interest.  The approved way of accomplishing this end has been for people in government, including presidents, to sell off their assets and place the proceeds in a blind trust to be managed by some disinterested neutral.  Trump's not going to do that.  Instead, he had his lawyer explain that they have a plan, a very good one, a terrific plan, and we don't need to know the details because look at all the papers spread out on this table in front here!

In front, there was a long table filled with papers and stuff.  It looked like maybe someone had just gotten back from a shopping spree at Office Depot.  The lawyer allowed that these were just some of the papers.  There were even more where those came from!  Trump stood off to the side, gravely contemplating all the paper.  An honest man, to be sure.  I mean, look at all the paper!

I think it might have been at the last press conference before this one that the front table was filled not with papers but with displays of Trump company products--a Trump slab of beef, a bottle of Trump vodka, I can't remember what else.  It looked like the set-up for one of the games on The Price is Right.  The concept there was to put to rest the notion that Trump wasn't much of a businessman.  Look at that steak!

What a clown.

 

The Merkle incident

 

Channel skimming yesterday afternoon, I hit on the installment of Ken Burns's baseball epic that describes the really crazy events that occurred during the National League pennant race of 1908.  The Chicago Cubs ended up prevailing and went on to win the World Series that year, a feat the team would not repeat until the most recently completed season.  Considering what happened in a game played between the Giants and the Cubs, in the Polo Grounds on September 23, the 108-year drought could have, probably should have, been longer.

The two teams were, with the Pirates, locked in a three-way race for the pennant as the regular season wound down.  In the September 23 game, the Giants and Cubs were knotted 1-1 when the Giants came to bat in the bottom of the ninth.  With two out and a runner on first base, the Giants' Fred Merkle, a 19-year-old rookie and the youngest player in the National League, singled, advancing the runner to third.  The next batter, Al Bridwell, followed with what should have been a game-winning hit to the outfield.  That's when the craziness began. 

In those days, the boundary between playing field and spectators was often not defined, and this was especially true at the Polo Grounds, where in 1908 there were no bleacher seats and in the cavernous centerfield fans just stood behind a rope line.  As the winning run headed home, gleeful Giant fans surged onto the field, and Merkle, on his way to second base, peeled off and headed for the dugout.  Was he too eager to celebrate with teammates?  Did he want to get off the field without being mobbed by fans?  He never spoke about it and we'll never know.  But he did not make it as far as second base, and Johnny Evers, the Cubs second baseman, called for the ball from the outfield.  His idea was to get the ball, stand on second base, and claim that, as Merkle had been forced out, the side had been retired and the run did not count.  (It's one of baseball's basic rules that a run cannot score when the third out of an inning is made as the result of a force, even if a runner touches home plate before the force out is actually recorded.)

There are different versions of what happened next.  It's  possible that the ball Bridwell hit was relayed to Evers from an outfielder.  It's also possible that the ball Bridwell hit was lost somewhere in the melee on the field.  According to one account, an alert Giants player got the ball and, to foil Evers, heaved it into the grandstand.  But, whatever the details, Evers did get a ball, maybe a new one from an umpire, and, standing on second base, insisted that Merkle was out and that the inning therefore was over without a run scoring. 

The second base umpire was named Hank O'Day.  He called Merkle out. 

The game should then have continued to extra innings, but under the circumstances that was impossible.  The celebrating Giants fans who had flooded onto the field could not easily have been removed without inciting a riot.  The Giants insisted they had won and wouldn't retake the field in any event.  The next games were played without a resolution to the September 23 contest.  There was a good chance that the question would become moot, but when the season ended, the Giants and Cubs were tied for first place with identical records.  The National League ruled that the pennant would be determined by a one-game playoff--in effect, a replay of the September 23 game.  It was set for October 8 in the  Polo Grounds.

Besides being on their home field, the Giants would have their ace, Christy Mathewson, pitch the playoff game.  Mathewson, of course, was one of the greatest pitchers of all time, and 1908 was one of his best seasons.  He started 44 games, pitched 390 innings, had 259 strikeouts, eleven complete game shutouts, an ERA of 1.43, and was the winning pitcher 37 times.  The Cubs also had an ace, Mordecai "Three-Finger" Brown, but, since he had pitched in eleven of the Cubs' final fourteen stretch games, they started Jack Pfiester.  When the Giants got to Pfiester for a run before he could retire the side in the bottom of the first inning, the call went to Brown, who pitched out of trouble.  He went the rest of the way, allowing only one more run, in the seventh inning.  By then, the Cubs had nicked Mathewson for four runs, and they won the playoff, 4-2. 

Because they had avoided losing the September 23 game, and then were able to beat Mathewson on October 8, the Cubs won the 1908 National League pennant.  They then defeated Ty Cobb's Detroit Tigers in the World Series, four games to one.  The Cubs would next win the World Series in 2016.

The picture at the top is of the Polo Grounds, circa 1905. It was in Upper Manhattan, along 155th Street, and the home field of the New York Giants from late in the 19th century until the franchise moved to San Francisco after the 1957 season. 

Trouble Boys

When I started reading Bob Mehr's Trouble Boys: The True Story of the Replacements, I was sort of dreading its length: 432 pages, not counting the Notes and Index, and they aren't small pages with big type and margins.  I'm pretty sure it comes in at more than 200,000 words, which could have been a lot of fawning adoration, or a prohibitively high pile of gossipy speculation, or a seemingly endless sprawl of self-congratulatory hipness.  But now that I'm around half through it, I wish it could be even longer, because I'm going to be sad when I'm done.  The impression one has is of a knowledgeable fan who's done his homework, really a lot of homework, and is intent on telling the story without any pretentious trimmings.

For me, one of the book's big and unanticipated attractions is how the city of Minneapolis, in which Paul Westerberg, Chris Mars, and Bob and Tommy Stinson were in the 1970s growing up within a few blocks of each other in a south-side neighborhood, functions as another memorable character in the story. Certain fans will want to know the addresses.  Westerberg's house was at 4126 Garfield Avenue.  The Stinsons were first at 3628 Bryant Avenue, then later at 2215 Bryant.  The former address is the one in which Westerberg, walking home on a fall day in 1979 from his janitor job in downtown Minneapolis, first heard the Stinsons playing and crept around the bushes trying to peer into the basement; the latter address is the one shown in the famous Let It Be album cover, where the band members are sitting on the roof outside the bedroom window of the Stinsons' sister, Lonnie--if you look closely, you can see Lonnie's softball trophies in the background.  The main north-south street in the neighborhood is Lyndale Avenue; the Stinsons were two blocks to the west, the Westerbergs a block to the east and five blocks further south.  It's not surprising Westerberg heard the Stinsons practicing on his way home from downtown.  He would have been walking southerly somewhere in the Lyndale corridor, and they played loud.

We don't learn Chris Mars's exact address but it was near 37th Street and Garfield Avenue.  So Westerberg was about two-thirds of a mile from the Stinsons, and Mars was less than that from both the Stinsons and Westerberg.  I used to marvel at how Dave Winfield, Paul Molitor, and Jack Morris--three baseball Hall-of-Famers--were all growing up at the same time in St. Paul, Minnesota.  But how about these four guys growing up not just in the same city but within a few blocks of each other?  If you want to let in the whole city, Prince was a year older than Westerberg, and went to the old Central High School about a mile to the east of where the Replacements grew up.

It's remarkable how contained by the neighborhood these young lives seem to have been.  One of the ten million interesting bits dropped into the narrative concerns how, after the band was established and had gained a certain notoriety around town, Westerberg and his first kind of serious girlfriend had to improvise dates around the fact that the budding rock star had no place of his own, no car of his own, no driver's license, and no money.  They would go on long night walks with each other, often in Lakewood Cemetery, where Minneapolis's rich and prominent are buried in grounds adjoining the east side of Lake Harriet.  (The cemetery would have been comparatively secluded, and with benches.)When Westerberg eventually made the acquaintance of Bob Stinson, he immediately recognized him as the weird-looking guy he often saw riding the 4 bus, which to this day runs on Bryant Avenue between downtown and West 50th Street.  At about the time the Replacements began rehearsing together in the basement of Mrs Stinson's house at 36th and Bryant, I began living on my own for the first time, in south Minneapolis, maybe a mile and a half to the southeast of the Stinsons, at 14th Avenue and East 40th Street.  Many of the Replacements' early gigs were played at places--Duffy's, the Longhorn Bar, and of course soon the 7th Street Entry--that I was just discovering.  The whole scene described by Mehr seems so familiar, and for me is so strongly connected with youthful discovery, that, reading along, the sensation can be bittersweet.  Mehr is not from around here and a slightly haughty pleasure arises from noticing the occasional mistake. For example, he places a certain sober club that the Replacements were scheduled to play--only to have the show cancelled when they were busted fortifying themselves with alcohol that afternoon--at 26th Street and Chicago Avenue, "in southeast Minneapolis."  You can understand the mistake, because 26th and Chicago is to the southeast of the downtown business district, but natives know that "southeast Minneapolis" means "by the U" or, more specifically, south of East Hennepin Avenue and east of the Mississippi River. 

I don't think I saw the Replacements play in those early days.  I didn't become a fan until later, so it would have been just by accident, and I don't think I would have forgotten an accidental exposure.  I'm not crediting my musical acumen.  They were an eye-full, the principal exhibit being bassist Tommy Stinson, the "weird-looking" Bob's half-brother, who was 13 when they landed their first gigs.  At You Tube, you can see a multi-part video of an early Replacements show at 7th Street Entry.  Tommy was probably 14 then, but he didn't really look it.  The sight of this tow-headed little boy on the stage at the Entry with the other Replacements, just playing the shit out of his bass guitar, loud and fast and super-aggressive, jumping around in exhilaration--you wouldn't forget seeing that live.  Mehr describes a "typical" day during this period.  The three older fellows would hang around Peter Jesperson's--Jesperson, there's a story!--record store at 26th and Lyndale, listening to music and reading magazines, waiting for Tommy to be done with his day at 8th grade so that they could rehearse in the Stinsons' basement.  Tommy dropped out of school when the band began to tour.

Well, read it, if you're at all interested.  The book contains multitudes. On keeping with the theme of their lives in the neighborhood, it may seem surprising that Westerberg didn't connect with the other guys until 1979, the year he was 19.  (His birthday is December 31: "Income tax deduction/One hell of a function.")There they all were, living so closely together, and with the same passionate interest, all with loads of talent. Maybe it's because Westerberg did not attend the public schools.  Mehr at least suggests that Westerberg's Catholic upbringing might have had more of an influence on him than many would believe.  Flannery O'Connor, whom Westerberg apparently read devotedly for a time, once wrote that in Hemingway's fiction there is a "yearning for Catholic fullness of life."  There's something like that in a lot of Replacements songs, I think.

Jesus rides beside me.
He never buys any smokes.
Hurry up, hurry up, ain't you had enough of this stuff?
Ashtray floors, dirty clothes, and filthy jokes.