The Complicity of the Textbooks
In Teaching White Supremacy, Donald Yacovone traces how the writing of American history, from Reconstruction on, has falsified and illuminated our racial past.
Wednesday, October 5, 2022
Act 3 Scene 322 Another day in the life. Willie Loman is sitting on a footstool in one corner of the stage staring into space. In the background Peggy Lee is softly singing "Is this all there is?" Richard Pryor gets the audience rocking with an hysterical monologue. A chorus sings "Nearer My God to Thee." The orchestra strikes up "Dixie." George W. Bush makes a cameo appearance, winking at the audience, saying, "Miss me yet?" Senator Rubio comes on stage in blackface playing Kingfish. Porky Pig closes saying, "Tha tha tha tha that's all folks." The stage goes black.
Tuesday, October 4, 2022
Sean Wilentz on "Confidence Man"
With a sharp eye for the backstory, Haberman places special emphasis on Trump’s ascent in a late 1970s and 1980s New York demimonde of hustlers, mobsters, political bosses, compliant prosecutors and tabloid scandalmongers. This bygone Manhattan that Tom Wolfe could only satirize in “The Bonfire of the Vanities” is the fundament to any understanding of what makes Trump tick. “The dynamics that defined New York City in the 1980s,” Haberman observes, “stayed with Trump for decades; he often seemed frozen there.” Zombielike, he swaggers and struts and cons on the world’s largest stage, much as he did when gossip columnists fawned over him as The Donald; and he will continue his night of the living dead, with menacing success, until someone finally drives a metaphorical stake through his metaphorical heart
The rote rap on Trump is that he was a bumptious, hyper-ambitious real estate developer from Queens who never earned the respect of the Manhattan society pooh-bahs and who vowed to beat them at their own game — a vow that eventually led him to the Oval Office, astonishing even Trump. That storyline appears in “Confidence Man,” but Haberman knows it is superficial.
For one thing, there were countless other outer-borough operators on the make in 1980s New York, one of whom Haberman astutely calls Trump’s “mirror image” despite their obvious differences: the Rev. Al Sharpton of Brooklyn, both men shameless headline grabbers who smeared opponents and basked in newfound glamour; they were slightly clownish intruders who refused, she writes, “to be thrown out of their new ring” by a disdainful city establishment.
Inside that cauldron of fakery, Trump, no rugged individualist, and padded with his father’s millions, gravitated to a specific milieu of arrivistes whom he equated with supreme power, class and ruthlessness. He held in especially high regard the bully George Steinbrenner, from the outer outer borough of Cleveland, and became a constant presence in the Boss’s Yankee Stadium box. (I’d not known until reading Haberman that Trump, a wimp when it came to sacking underlings, found his tag line for “The Apprentice” by impersonating Steinbrenner barking “You’re fired,” over and over, not least at the Yankees’ oft-discharged manager Billy Martin.)
Off to one side there was the raffish schemer Roger Stone, a well-digger’s son from Norwalk, Conn., who got his start as one of the political saboteurs for Richard Nixon’s 1972 reelection campaign, and whose Washington lobbying mega-firm (with Paul Manafort as one of his co-partners) came to represent the Trump Organization’s interests. From the outermost borough of Adelaide, Australia, there was the unscrupulous media mogul Rupert Murdoch, who had already turned the liberal tabloid New York Post into a right-wing scandal sheet and who in 1985 completed the acquisition of 20th Century Fox that would eventually give the world Fox News, commanded by another member of the New York gang, Roger Ailes. There was also the high-profile, media-savvy U.S. Attorney Rudy Giuliani, from Brooklyn like Sharpton, and he and Trump would circle each other until they seriously hooked up some years later.
Trump’s chief mentor, and a consigliere to most of the big shots named above, was the legendary underworld and overworld fixer Roy Cohn. The pampered son of a kingpin in Bronx Democratic politics, long notorious for his McCarthyite Red Scare grandstanding, Cohn, as Haberman details, connected Trump with Stone as well as with organized crime while giving him master classes in high-stakes con-man strategy and tactics. Whenever Trump today intimidates the press with threats of retaliation, whenever he defends his aggressions by claiming to be the victim, whenever he calls his accusers (especially if they represent the federal government) life-destroying, treasonous “scum,” he is channeling his mentor, Cohn.
Haberman offers plenty of material about how these men did it all with virtual impunity. Of course, there would be the occasional fines and sealed judgments — and Cohn was disbarred weeks before he died of AIDS, abandoned by Trump, who knew the score on being heartless. But as Haberman describes, Trump went to great lengths to square himself with a paragon of the city’s power elite, the longtime Manhattan district attorney Robert Morgenthau, including making generous donations to Morgenthau’s pet charity, the New York Police Athletic League, the one charity commitment, Morgenthau would joke warmly, that Trump could be counted on honoring. Not until Cyrus Vance Jr., who had a fine pedigree but was no crusader, succeeded Morgenthau in 2010 did Trump and his properties, after Vance backed off for years, finally face serious investigation by the D.A.’s office — and even then, prosecutors on the case quit in protest when Vance’s successor suddenly seemed to drop it.
“Confidence Man” likewise enlightens about the massive oversights by the press and the broader world of publishing, especially in New York, not simply in failing to expose the corruption that Haberman catalogues but in creating and then abetting Trump’s celebrity. There were certainly exceptional naysaying reporters, notably Jack Newfield’s protege at the Village Voice, Wayne Barrett, who, at Newfield’s urging, dug deep into Trump’s shady dealings. Barrett’s and the Voice’s condemnations sparked a brief aborted federal investigation, but they weren’t about to shake the inertia at the most influential outlets, topped by the New York Times. Neither did the late lamented Spy magazine’s bull’s eye satirical shots at the “short-fingered vulgarian” provoke inquiries, although they did provoke Trump to threaten lawsuits and are said to anger him to this day.
Indeed, the higher- as well as the lower-end media became Trump’s vehicles, sometimes absurdly. Haberman relates, for example, how in 1984 Cohn, the grand wizard of press manipulation, placed a profile story in The Washington Post’s Style section, followed up independently by another piece in a magazine called Manhattan, Inc., that — though skeptical and even arch about Trump — fed impressions that the brash young dealmaker might seriously serve President Ronald Reagan in top-level arms-control negotiations. Much later, in 1997, when Trump had fallen into one of his disastrous business troughs, a New Yorker profile, though as unguarded as any such piece was likely to be, helped advance his latest comeback. More famously, the queens of tabloid gossip, Cindy Adams and Liz Smith, aided by the New York Post’s garish Page Six, rendered Trump an epic figure. Long before “The Apprentice”completed his makeover as America’s fantasy mogul, driving the phony image to the credulous beyond the Hudson, the publishers, editors and scribes of the Manhattan press, forgoing the facts, had crowned him the king of New York.
Some of the episodes in Haberman’s later chapters on Trump’s presidency have already stirred controversy. Beneath the buzz, though, many of the richest storylines from the Trump White House, as reported in “Confidence Man” and elsewhere, have a distinctly New York ring. “Where’s my Roy Cohn?” Trump snapped in 2018, in anger at his attorney general, Jeff Sessions, the very conservative former senator from Alabama, who had recused himself from the Justice Department’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election and whom Trump eventually ousted.
Before he was twice impeached, Trump found his man, yet another New York mouthpiece, William Barr, who as attorney general happily did Trump’s bidding in, among other things, lying about the damning Mueller report on the Russian interference — until Trump lost reelection and Barr, well-schooled in transactional loyalty and with his reputation as a supposed “institutionalist” tarnished, declined recruitment into Trump’s coup and at the last minute jumped from the sinking ship. The manic and often antic crimes of Stone, pardoned and unpardoned, add another layer of continuity, a louche link with the old Cohn-centered netherworld.
Haberman’s contribution in “Confidence Man,” though, is much larger than its arresting anecdotes. Later generations of historians will puzzle over Trump’s rise to national power. The best of them will have learned from Haberman’s book that none of it would have been possible but for a social, cultural, political, media and moral breakdown that overtook New York beginning in the 1970s, a fiasco of trusted institutions that, having allowed the Trumpian virus to grow, failed at every step to contain its spread, then profited from, aided and even cheered its devastation.
“It’s up to you, New York, New York,” runs the song that became a city anthem in these years, and so it truly was up to sophisticated, cosmopolitan New York with respect to checking Trump. But New York blew it on every level — and alas, even with “Confidence Man” in hand as a guidebook to that failure, it may be too late to start spreadin’ the news, with American democracy now at stake.
Sean Wilentz, a professor of history at Princeton, is the author, most recently, of “No Property in Man: Slavery and Antislavery at the Nation’s Founding.”
What does it mean to be a Republican right now?
I don't know what the Republican Party stands for now, other than placating Trump. It doesn't even stand for America's national interests anymore.
I don't think it really means anything right now. For a lot of people, it means supporting Trump. That's one of the main reasons why I left the Republican Party and registered as an unaffiliated voter in March of 2018. At that point it was clear to me that the Republican Party had become a Trump personality cult. Four years later, it's much worse. I don't know what the Republican Party stands for now, other than placating Trump and opposing anything that the Democrats do just for the sake of opposing them. There are no real principles involved. The Republican Party doesn't even stand for America's national interests anymore. Look at what some Republicans have been saying about Russia's war against Ukraine.
-Ex Republican George Conway in Salon.com
In honor of Albert Einstein I woke up this morning thinking about gravitational waves (He's been proven right once again. The only time he was wrong was when he suggested that we'd be vacationing on Mars in 50 years), but I quickly pivoted to what's for breakfast and my tasks for the day. With all due respect to Einstein, gravitational waves are a tough subject to wrap your head around particularly when you have my head. You dig?
Sunday, October 2, 2022
The present political chaos is connected with the decay of language.
— George Orwell (1946)
Words have meanings. Words have power. Words influence the way people think and act. Words must be used with precision if the people who read them are not to be misled.
No honest journalist would disagree with any of those four sentences.
Yet one of the reasons why the American experiment in democracy, equality, freedom and diversity is in grave danger is that certain words have been stripped of their meanings — and in some cases have been used in direct opposition to their actual meanings — and are reflexively, almost automatically, repeated in the mainstream media.
At least some journalists, at some point in their education, read George Orwell's 1946 essay, "Politics and the English Language." It's time for them to read it again, and pay closer attention this time.
"To think clearly," Orwell writes, "is a necessary first step towards political regeneration." Clear thinking requires the careful use of words. Language should be "an instrument for expressing and not for concealing or preventing thought," but as we all know. in politics words "are often used in a consciously dishonest way." Republican pollster and consultant Frank Luntz gave us such intentionally misleading terminology as "pro-life" and "death tax." The wholesale adoption of the former by the mainstream media has contributed significantly to the denial of women's control of their own bodies that we now confront.
What has been even more damaging, however, is the constant repetition of other misleading words, including "populist," "conspiracy theory," "Republican" and, most important of all, "conservative." People in the media mechanically repeat these with no apparent thought to their meanings or their effects on people reading or hearing them. As Orwell says, "bad usage can spread by tradition and imitation, even among people who should and do know better." Journalists and pundits may often be "almost unconscious of what [they are] saying, as one is when one utters the responses in church."
A great deal of political language is, as Orwell puts it, "designed to make lies sound truthful," and it is unfortunately often easier to turn to that "catalogue of swindles and perversions" than to consider what a word means before repeating it.
Want a daily wrap-up of all the news and commentary Salon has to offer? Subscribe to our morning newsletter, Crash Course.
Merriam-Webster defines "populist" as "a believer in the rights, wisdom or virtues of the common people." Affixing the label to Donald Trump and the politicians who adhere to him, who believe nothing of the sort, helps them to deceive those common people.
Embedded in "conspiracy theory" is the word "theory," which in scientific usage refers to an explanation that has been repeatedly tested against evidence without contradiction. While it's true that in common usage, "theory" has a more general meaning, to suggest that there is a cabal of Satanic cannibal pedophiles who drink the blood of children, headed by Hillary Clinton and various other famous people, and from which Donald Trump will save us, does not qualify as a theory in any sense of the word. Yet the media persistently refers to such patently absurd delusions as "theories," inadvertently carrying them into the realm of potentially serious discourse.
"Republican" is of course still the name used by the antidemocratic, anti-republican and authoritarian forces that have taken control of that political party. Those forces refer to the rump movement that may still believe in a republican form of government as RINOs (or Republicans in Name Only) when that label better applies to them.
But by far the most dangerous manifestation of the media's ingrained tendency to aid and abet the enemies of democracy through the careless use of language, intentionally or otherwise, is the ubiquitous use of the word "conservative" to describe extreme right-wing radicals and their beliefs, which only seek to conserve white supremacy — and more specifically the class or caste supremacy of a small minority of wealthy and nominally Christian white men — and the bloated fortunes of the super-rich.
As historian Nancy MacLean shows in her 2017 "Democracy in Chains," many of those behind the scenes in the far-right movement that has been building for the past 40 years or more do not see themselves as "conservative" in any sense. They were and are radical right-wing revolutionaries. They embraced the term "conservative" as a marketing label, largely in order to conceal their true intentions from a public that would almost certainly reject those goals.
Many of those behind the scenes in the far-right movement of the past 40 years or so do not see themselves as "conservative" in any sense. They were and are radical right-wing revolutionaries.
There are indeed still conservatives on the American political landscape, like them or not: George Will, Bill Kristol, Liz Cheney, Mitt Romney, George W. Bush. But Ron DeSantis and Greg Abbott, as their recent words and deeds make clear, are not conservatives. Shape-shifting MAGA sycophants like Blake Masters, Kari Lake, J.D. Vance and Mehmet Oz are not conservatives. Openly insurrectionist members of Congress like Paul Gosar, Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert are not conservatives. Spineless House Republican leaders Kevin McCarthy and Elise Stefanik are not conservatives. The Proud Boys, Oath Keepers and other right-wing militias are not conservatives. Authoritarian-worshiping Fox News personality Tucker Carlson is not a conservative.
These far-right extremists that media habitually call "conservatives" are conservatives in name only. Start calling them something that actually describes who they are and what they stand for.
"The invasion of one's mind by ready-made phrases," Orwell pointed out, "can only be prevented if one is constantly on guard against them." It is essential to think about "what impression one's words are likely to make on another person."
By ROBERT S. MCELVAINE in Salon.com
Saturday, October 1, 2022
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)