10.12.16
And who does this remind you of today? The next president
I was house-sitting a couple days ago and one of the books on hand was a copy of Roger Ebert’s movie reviews. (Rates are pretty cheap if you’re in Pasadena. I’ll go for some cheap cava, a steak, charcoal to grill it, a few books and unlimited access to whatever’s on your tv while sitting. I take care of all security and your pets’ needs.)
On Roger & Me, Michael Moore’s breakout work, his documentary to still lead all others:
“Roger & Me” does have a message to deliver– a message about Corporate Newspeak and the ways in which profits really are more important to big American corporations than the lives of their workers. The movie is a counterattack against the amoral pragmatism of modern management theory, against the sickness of the “In Search of Excellence” mentality.
Moore has struck a nerve with this movie. There are many Americans, I think, who have not lost the ability to think and speak in plain English– to say what they mean. These people were driven mad by the 1980s, in which a new kind of bureaucratese was spawned by Ronald Reagan and his soulmates– a new manner of speech by which it became possible to “address the problem” while saying nothing and yet somehow conveying optimism.
Hillary Clinton, who barring the end of the world, I’m assuming will be the next president of the United States is just the person described in the above cut-out.
You can read her election book, “co-authored” with Tim Kaine, or sift through the e-mails dumped by Wikileaks and others and it’s all the same. Someone who never met a situation or position that couldn’t be finessed with language, someone saying she’s a centrist, a pragmatist, or constructing a private position that has to differ from a public position because “Abraham Lincoln,” the movie.
It is part of what I call the Thomas Frank blues, the recognition that the Democratic Party, as it’s running in this election cycle, stands only for the status quo of money and so-called meritocracy. And that four years from now it will be the same, the national rage worse, inequality greater, more war and social unrest, no progress on anything, but with the wealthy and the president still proclaiming the country to be stronger than ever, first in everything, the indispensible nation.
Said another way, from the Conversation:
The Democratic Party in America bears a significant share of the blame for the rise of Donald Trump. As Thomas Frank describes in his book, “Listen, Liberal: Whatever Happened to the Party of the People???? It has become too much the party of the “Professional Class???- those with graduate degrees – and has all but abandoned its historical role as the party of labor and the little guy.
History suggests that the inchoate rage Trump is tapping into may solidify into something far more ominous than a wall on our southern border. Hillary Clinton seems constitutionally incapable of addressing that rage constructively; I have my doubts that she is even capable of understanding or empathizing with it. That means it is up to those who do understand it to make our voices heard in a way that can’t be ignored.
It was now Clinton’s turn to show her stuff. If Trump had responded to Holt like a voluble golf caddy being asked to discuss the finer points of ice hockey, Hillary Clinton chose a different course: she changed the subject. She would moderate her own debate. Perhaps Trump thought Holt was in charge of the proceedings; Clinton knew better.
What followed was vintage Clinton: vapid sentiments, smoothly delivered in the knowing tone of a seasoned Washington operative. During her two minutes, she never came within a country mile of discussing the question …
In contrast to Trump, however, Clinton did speak in complete sentences, which followed one another in an orderly fashion. She thereby came across as at least nominally qualified to govern the country, much like, say, Warren G. Harding nearly a century ago. And what worked for Harding in 1920 may well work for Clinton in 2016.
Of Harding’s speechifying, H.L. Mencken wrote at the time, “It reminds me of a string of wet sponges.??? Mencken characterized Harding’s rhetoric as “so bad that a sort of grandeur creeps into it. It drags itself out of the dark abysm of pish, and crawls insanely up the topmost pinnacle of posh. It is rumble and bumble. It is flap and doodle. It is balder and dash.??? So, too, with Hillary Clinton. She is our Warren G. Harding. In her oratory, flapdoodle and balderdash live on.