Which Trump were you watching last weekend? The moronic mediocrity with a skimpy vocabulary who can't keep focussed and who's as self-absorbed as an infant? Or the shrewd new president who bolstered his crucial constituency in the rust belt and dealt with an economic abyss that no one else over the past 30 years dared touch? Me -- I'm rivetted by both and, as a result, more than a bit confused.
How did Auden (W.H.) get it so right? He died in 1973, but his lines come to mind during the 21st century's most wracked moments.
Sept. 1, 1939, was written around that date from "one of the dives/ On Fifty-second Street" in New York, at the end of "a low dishonest decade," the 1930s. It included the Great Depression and the global spread of fascism, with World War Two just ahead. Fair enough, he was there.
But on Sept. 11, 2001, with Auden long dead, his poem seemed to rise from the rubble in Manhattan -- reprinted, quoted, viral etc. That was at the end of a proud, boastful decade, which followed the Soviet Union's demise, with smug Western declarations of victory and much reaping of economic spoils.
Not Rex delivers an alternative poem in the epic style on the coming dark age of Trump.
The arc of U.S. history is on full display as the peaceful transition of power takes place from the administration of President Barack Obama to that of incoming president-elect Donald Trump. The first African-American president is about to hand the reins of power to the very man who led the racist "birther" campaign to delegitimize his presidency. As Trump continues to shock the world with his middle-of-the-night tweets, the flurry of Senate confirmation hearings exposed the hollow rhetoric of Trump's pledge to "drain the swamp." Among the controversial and divisive cabinet nominees is his pick for attorney general: Jeff Sessions, the junior senator from Alabama.
Donald Trump will soon sweep into the office of the U.S. presidency, buttressed by both houses of Congress firmly in Republican control. A wave of regressive executive orders and legislation are already being prepared to ensure that Trump's first 100 days effectively erase the Obama presidency. Where Trump was once the most prominent "birther," attempting to deny President Barack Obama's legitimacy with a racist campaign accusing him of being born in Kenya, Trump now will wield a pen to legally undermine Obama's legacy. But Barack Obama is still the president of the United States until Jan. 20, and retains the enormous executive powers that the office bestows.
For the second time in four years the U.S. electorate has voted against neoliberalism. The scale and the meaning of the victory has been underestimated as conservatives and liberals alike emphasize the vote count for the Democrats and the Republicans. Roughly 61,900,000 people voted for Obama and 58,650,000 chose Romney. The apparent proximity of these numbers should not obscure other understandings of the victory.
The Christianity on display in the race for Republican presidential nominee is, you should forgive the expression, a godsend to nouveau atheists like Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris and, posthumously, Christopher Hitchens. They're the kind of pious, pompous targets those guys would pray for, if they did.
"The president is wrong." So says one of the newly appointed co-chairs of U.S. President Barack Obama's re-election campaign.
Those four words headline the website of the organization Progressives United, founded by former U.S. Sen., and now Obama campaign adviser, Russ Feingold. He is referring to Obama's recent announcement that he will accept super PAC funds for his re-election campaign. Feingold writes: "The President is wrong to embrace the corrupt corporate politics of Citizens United through the use of Super PACs -- organizations that raise unlimited amounts of money from corporations and the richest individuals, sometimes in total secrecy. It's not just bad policy; it's also dumb strategy." And, he says, it's "dancing with the devil."
Back when Barack Obama was still just a U.S. senator running for president, he told a group of donors in a New Jersey suburb, "Make me do it." He was borrowing from President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who used the same phrase (according to Harry Belafonte, who heard the story directly from Eleanor Roosevelt) when responding to legendary union organizer A. Philip Randolph's demand for civil rights for African-Americans.
While President Obama has made concession after concession to both the corporate-funded tea party and his Wall Street donors, now that he is again in campaign mode, his progressive critics are being warned not to attack him, as that might aid and abet the Republican bid for the White House.
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