Revisiting Neil Postman's bet on Huxley over Orwell.

My old friend John Campbell posted on Facebook: "Aldous Huxley was right, not George Orwell."

Before repeating John's quoted passage from Neil Postman's 1985 book, here is Postman's son Andrew to explain it, courtesy of The Guardian in 2017.

My dad predicted Trump in 1985 – it's not Orwell, he warned, it's Brave New World

...The central argument of Amusing Ourselves is simple: there were two landmark dystopian novels written by brilliant British cultural critics – Brave New World by Aldous Huxley and Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell – and we Americans had mistakenly feared and obsessed over the vision portrayed in the latter book (an information-censoring, movement-restricting, individuality-emaciating state) rather than the former (a technology-sedating, consumption-engorging, instant-gratifying bubble).

Neil Postman, from Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business:

We were keeping our eye on 1984. When the year came and the prophecy didn't, thoughtful Americans sang softly in praise of themselves. The roots of liberal democracy had held. Wherever else the terror had happened, we, at least, had not been visited by Orwellian nightmares.

But we had forgotten that alongside Orwell's dark vision, there was another - slightly older, slightly less well known, equally chilling: Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. Contrary to common belief even among the educated, Huxley and Orwell did not prophesy the same thing. Orwell warns that we will be overcome by an externally imposed oppression. But in Huxley's vision, no Big Brother is required to deprive people of their autonomy, maturity and history. As he saw it, people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think.

What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy. As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny "failed to take into account man's almost infinite appetite for distractions." In 1984, Orwell added, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we fear will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we desire will ruin us.

Trump and toxic masculinity: "The core struggle for men is not with one another, but between our own warring selves."

If the rot is as deep as it seems, many of the enablers will begin slipping away to preserve future self-aggrandizement opportunities. It's likely to end with a whimper, not a bang. Like so many suffering from toxic masculinity, particularly the hardcore narcissists, there is an element of cowardice. 

I Wrote Trump’s ‘The Art of the Deal.’ And I’m Terrified of What He’ll Do Next, by Tony Schwartz (Daily Beast)

... This is toxic masculinity in action—the sense of entitlement, the embrace of privilege, and the wanton exercise of authority over others. It’s also marked by the rejection of any qualities that might be considered feminine, including gentleness, vulnerability, and empathy—the very qualities that Biden is relying on to distinguish himself from Trump.

For Trump, and for so many men desperate to hold onto control they fear is slipping way, the tactics include disparaging rather than encouraging others, reacting harshly rather than reasoning calmly, seeking certainty rather than struggling with complexity, and blaming others in a conflict, instead of first reckoning with their own responsibility. As the psychologist Terry Real puts it, “We raise boys to live in a world in which they are either winners or losers, grandiose or shame-filled, perpetrator or victims.”

The power that most men feel is fleeting and fragile, easily shattered by criticism, and uncushioned by the capacity for intimacy. Without deep relationships, including with themselves, too many men find themselves perpetually looking for ways to fill their inner emptiness and prove their worthiness.

The core struggle for men is not with one another, but between our own warring selves.

ON THE AVENUES: I'm voting for Biden. Otherwise it's Trump's burgeoning fascist GOP death cult.

photo credit

It’s bizarre the way that memories can stay with us for decades, and then we awaken to find it's hard to recall what we had for lunch yesterday.

For instance, I still remember watching a very scary B&W horror flick when I was a little kid, so terrifying that it still resonates decades later.

In one of the pivotal scenes, a scientist is attacked in a cave by his own mutant creation, a gigantic monstrous blood-sucking vampire spider, which drains the man of all his bodily fluids, leaving him shriveled and bleached out, pasty pale, suitable for nothing except empty calories for the carrion flies.

But let’s not dwell on Mike Pence’s deathly pallor in his debate with Kamala Harris on Wednesday.

I hear the fly wants his money back: "Where's the beef?"

---

And so finally the election draws near.

Don’t worry.

I’m not about to climb down from the dizzying heights of the hill upon which I am fully prepared to drink (to die? Seriously? I wouldn’t consider DYING for these amoral, greedy schmucks – and that’s just the NFL owners), this looming height being my deep, pervasive and abiding disgust with America’s fraudulent two-party political duopoly.

As a genuine social democrat trapped in an anti-intellectual milieu filled with progressive poseurs who can’t muster the chutzpah to contest the dimwits on the other side, my hostility to the Democratic Party peaked in early March, when the capitulating centrists pulled every last string, called in all the necessary markers, and vanquished the party’s left wing.

Had I chosen, I might have devoted this column’s weekly inches ever since April to the myriad failures of the Democrats, beginning with our vacuous local party elites here in the New Albanian swampland, then scaling the slimy pole of unprincipled aff/inf/luence until the Democratic National Committee itself came into view, at which point I would be compelled to excuse myself, step away from the laptop, and slip into a Hazmat suit.

Of course, as damning as the indictments capable of being made against the Democrats, the Republicans have devolved spectacularly from merely objectionable into a drain-circling death cult, of which I’ll have more to say in a moment.

In the sense of our hallowed two-party system of spoils, irrespective of which “side” one chooses to inhabit (to squat?), politics today is a dismal, depressing and depraved journey into the very dark heart of human dysfunction.

By extension, this same old song and dance in American idiocy would have remained roughly the same as always in 2020 if not for the emergence of the COVID-19 virus and the pandemic that followed. Literally for once in our lives, there was a new twist in the tale.

One “side” is failing this test far more spectacularly than the other, and they're the ones I'll be voting against.

---

We’ve observed previously that the COVID-19 virus opportunistically targets vulnerable human physiologies. But the extent to which it has done precisely the same in terms of weakened human psychologies and belief systems simply cannot be underestimated.

We’ve seen already thin remaining layers of civility and sensibility stripped away. The science deniers have “enchantingly” multiplied not unlike Pence’s spider-victim-fly diet of pure excrement, waxing orgasmic as they’ve urged old folks to take one for the greater glory of the stock market. The owners of capital meanwhile have used the occasion to double down, while for the rest of us the economy seized up.

Then the deeper ugliness came forward, the accumulated bile, conspiratorial gibberish and raw hatred, much of it borne of generations-long cognitive dissonance, exploding from the ranks of the right-wing’s white know-nothings as Black Lives Matter demonstrations explicated the systemic persistence of racism and absence of social justice.

Through it all, numerous previous unaddressed crises – climate change, health care, income inequality, basic human rights – didn’t exactly disappear.

To be sure, not every Democrat got the pandemic response memo, and even a few Republicans quietly sidestepped their own party’s institutionalized inadequacies, but the primary outcome of the virus’s own truth-revealing capabilities has been the surgical exposure of the GOP’s fundamental(ist) fascination with dying for the “cause.”

And the cause itself? Someone else’s, as it always has been. Mostly the “cause” of bigger money, with a jot or two of apocalyptic religion, wrapped in a flag, although it’s never clear with these retrograde fantasists whether they mean an American or a Confederate flag.

The Republican death cult is the inevitable outcome of five decades spent busily espousing and later gleefully implementing neoliberal, survival-of-the-fittest economic orthodoxy, as abetted by hypocritical end-times Christian theocrats, and washed down with enough white supremacist Kool-Aid to float a fleet of oil tankers.

We should hardly be surprised at this acceptance of death as inevitable. For years, conservatives have responded to gun violence with angry renunciations of any links to gun proliferation or lax gun control laws, offering instead “thoughts and prayers.” The one exception where Republicans express outrage is over the “death” of fetal cells inside women’s bodies—indicating that the fight is less about “murder,” as the anti-abortionists like to call it, than it is about controlling women’s bodies. By and large, the nation’s right-wing factions have for years wanted us to accept mass deaths and preventable mortality as a price for our “freedom.” They expect the same during a pandemic.

But the Republican death cult truly pole-vaulted over the tipping point, and left Democrats in the dust, when BLM became part of our daily discourse, illustrating that James Baldwin’s words ring more presciently than ever before:

When the Israelis pick up guns, or the Poles, or the Irish, or any white man in the world says “give me liberty, or give me death,” the entire white world applauds. When a black man says exactly the same thing, word for word, he is judged a criminal and treated like one and everything possible is done to make an example of this bad nigger so there won't be any more like him.

Structural racism, white fragility, white supremacy – all of it tied neatly together over a period of four centuries.

---

As malicious and looney-bin ludicrous as Donald Trump most surely remains on an everyday basis, allow me to remind you for perhaps the last time that he’s merely a symptom, and symbolic of the rotting disease within.

Trump’s a salesman with only one product, himself, and one true skill, which is enabling the truly dangerous fascists to worship him as an “answer” and purchase the snake oil.

Bullshit.

If it makes sense to you, as it does to me, that to be white is to be racist by nurture, and if whites as yet are the majority in America, if inexorably declining in terms of raw numbers compared to non-whites – and if whites overwhelmingly support Trump in 2020, as in 2016, then logically, Trump is the fruition of American history to the present time, not an aberration at all.

And, if American history since the Reagan era has been an exercise in unfettered capital accumulation by wealthy elites, enabled by neoliberal economic policies on BOTH sides of the duopoly’s aisles, but as always the very heart of the Republican Party’s preference for oligarchies and extractive, robber baron capitalism as its worst, then once again, Trump is a culmination of sorts.

Guns, money and Jesus; that a majority of white “Christians” find it expedient to indulge the worst demons of their nature with respect to racial and cultural distractions merely suggests that Abraham Lincoln’s conception of “better” angels was wishful thinking at best.

Trump’s siren call is for whites to reaffirm their superiority, the supremacist snowflakes having been shaken to the core by the Obama presidency. If lots and lots of us, up and down the spectrum, can make a blood sacrifice of death via COVID, that’s just icing on their cow pies.

---

Yes, I dislike the DNC, the Democratic Party’s hawkish warmongers, its centrist "liberal" cowardice, the neoliberal economic gutting, and the sheer volume of hypocrisy existing on the left side of the aisle.

Why, then, am I voting for Biden and Harris?

Because of the GOP’s death cult.

Because there comes a time when triage is paramount, and the bleeding must be stopped.

Because while there is no guarantee matters will improve with Biden, there is no chance of improvement with Trump, only further degradation.

Electing Biden and the Democrats won't resolve the fundamental problem of why 60+ million Americans have alchemized a narcissistic con man into a deity, and come together to fluff his personality cult.

(The short answer involves racism/caste, a misplaced sense of powerlessness, and no more comprehensive an education than an ordinary house fly.)

It will, however, remove at least one blithering buffoon from the daily news cycle, so maybe...just maybe...we can convince 10% of the 60 million that the issues go far beyond the charlatan-in-chief, who is little more than a figurehead for self-deception.

Personally, up ticket, it will be all Democrats for me. Locally, in spite of the GOP’s ethical chasm, a precious few Republicans will nonetheless receive my vote. One is an incumbent who’s right for the job. Another is a protest vote against the prevailing NAHS student council nepotocracy.

The third is Greg Roution, a man I've never once met. He’s a Republican running for coroner against Anthony Oxendine, a funereal circus-master who once tried to sneak a crematorium through the back door into my neighborhood and became all doofus petulant when his bluff was called. 

That's all, folks. Go out and vote, vote against the death cult's vulgarians, and don't forget:

 ---

October 1: ON THE AVENUES: Welcome to the last will and testament of NA Confidential. 

September 24: ON THE AVENUES: Magic and loss. 

September 17: ON THE AVENUES: Stuck inside of Nawbany with the Flanders blues again.

September 10: ON THE AVENUES: The Weekly Wad lives on in the minds of malcontents.

Fire Donald Trump: "We have no illusions about Biden, but we need him to win."

There are times when it's necessary to stop the bleeding first, then determine what's to occur next. This triage scenario is peak 2020. 

I may, or may not, return to this depressing topic in this week's ON THE AVENUES. It's an article in the works for almost two months, with the lightning speed of daily news cycles rendering moot every effort at topicality.  

But I'm not sure it's necessary to know any more than we do already. Electing Biden won't resolve the fundamental problem of why 60+ million Americans have alchemized a narcissistic con man into a deity, and come together to fluff his personality cult. 

(Short answer: racism/casteism and a misplaced sense of powerlessness.)

It will, however, remove at least one blithering idiot from the daily news cycle, so maybe...just maybe...we can convince 10% of the 60 million that the issues go far beyond the charlatan-in-chief, who is little more than a figurehead.   

Fire Donald Trump: We have no illusions about Biden, but we need him to win, at The Nation

 ... Voting Trump out of office will not in itself heal the terrible wounds inflicted on our body politic over the past four years. But it is the absolutely necessary first step. That means voting for Joe Biden—through early voting wherever possible or by absentee or in-person voting when necessary.

We have no illusions about Biden, who—as we reported here last November—removed bankruptcy protections from student loans, helped write the bill that barred states from capping interest rates on interstate banking, and spent a career in the Senate carrying water for Delaware’s credit card industry. The idea that Biden is some kind of sleeper agent for socialism is a cruel joke, as is the claim that he is a closet radical.

The Democratic primaries did include some candidates and ideas that truly are radical. Bernie Sanders—The Nation’s preferred candidate—articulated a vision of Medicare for All and an America where health and education and economic security are human rights. Elizabeth Warren opposed Biden’s favors for the banks and ran on a platform of taking on the monopolist millionaires and robber baron billionaires who have rigged our economy. Yet both of them are voting for Biden.

So are Angela Davis, Noam Chomsky, and Jesse Jackson ...

Who will Trump's cultists blame when they finally understand they've been conned?

(Be aware: NAC is going away soon)

Donald Trump's entire "career" in and out of politics has been one long, sustained confidence trick. The owners of capital "get it," and shill with enthusiasm because they can only gain from the con man's game.

Generally speaking, when the victims of a con game realize they've been duped, they're angry. It may or may not be the con man's fault, but it's not theirs; no one likes looking in the mirror and confronting their own gullibility.

Politically, it's never been about Trump's narcissistic grifting. Rather, it's about wealth consolidating its power and enhancing its vampiric capital accumulation as the populace is distracted by the grift; and, it's about those Americans, primarily white, who've embraced Trump's con game with open arms.


When they realize they've been had, as inevitably they will, who's up to be blamed? It won't be Trump himself, as rejecting a deity is hard work, and he'll be exonerated by having been "stabbed in the back" or some such nonsense.

It won't be the con man's disappointed victims, swindled and left to founder, because the mirror's cracked by the weight of the dominant caste racism and gibberish.

I think most of us already have a suspicion about the answer to this question, and it's not a pleasant one. In a collective sense, why do humans cherish being conned? Now if you'll excuse me, I have a pitchfork to sharpen.

---

This "Never Trumper" is hilarious. She cannot countenance the grift, but on the other hand, because providing health care and other basic public services would be both unAmerican and unfair to the accumulators of capital, she just might change her mind. 

Yawn.   

Sorry, I don’t mean to make a pro or con statement about what should happen with health care. I’m saying that some version of socialized medicine exists in most European countries, and I think we would agree that they’re all democracies.

I didn’t suggest that the imposition of socialized medicine was somehow going to end our democracy. I merely said that it was going to usher in things that were irreversible that were not going to be good for our country.

WHEN THE MUSIC'S OVER: This three-hour documentary film about George Corley Wallace is a must-watch.

I didn't expect to embark this week upon a long-delayed detour through the life of George C. Wallace (1919-1998) in order to process what obviously are a handful of unresolved issues from my upbringing.





Well, you never know when it's going to happen, do you? Ever since the advent of Donald Trump, the parallels between the coddled New Yorker and the rural Alabamian have been obvious and frequently discussed.

I sat them out, because I really didn't want to think about how my father and so many of his friends were huge Wallace supporters in the late 1960s.

Time to get my act together. Here's an article about the making of the documentary (which was released in 2000). I strongly recommend that you set aside three hours, with strong drink if that's what it takes, and watch the complete film.

My weekly ON THE AVENUES column this Thursday likely will explain the rest ... well, insofar as it can be explained.

Trumpolini's bogus pandemic stats and the flowering of the GOP's death cult.

You're entitled to your own opinion, just not your own facts.

Donald Trump rushed to reopen America – now Covid is closing in on him, by Robert Reich (The Guardian)

The surge in cases isn’t because America is doing more tests for the virus, as Trump contends. Cases are rising even where testing is declining. In Wisconsin, cases soared 28% over the past two weeks, as the number of tests decreased by 14%. Hospitals in Texas, Florida and Arizona are filling up with Covid-19 patients. Deaths are expected to resume their gruesome ascent.

The surge is occurring because America reopened before Covid-19 was contained ...

It's the very Nadir of the Know Nothings.

No, President Trump, Testing Is Not Causing Case Counts to Rise. The Virus Is Just Spreading Faster, by Charles Ornstein and Ash Ngu (ProPublica)

The Trump administration has doubled down on its claims that coronavirus case counts are up because the U.S. has increased testing. However, a closer look at graphs of testing numbers and positive cases shows that this isn’t the case for many states.

The Washington Post's Jennifer Rubin bears scrutiny, given the bizarre inaccuracy of her analysis v.v. the recently contested Kentucky primary.

However, this home run travels about 535 feet.

This outcome is the triumph of Republicans’ tribal politics, in which identification with the cult and assault on the truth win out over common sense, science and even self-preservation. To be a Republican — at least in the eyes of millions of them — means to adopt illogical, anti-factual beliefs and oppositional conduct. You cannot take seriously the threats of climate change or the novel coronavirus because … well, because that is not what Republicans do, and to do otherwise would be to concede that the dreaded radical left and elites (presumably one can be both) are right. At the extremes, Republicans will engage in objectively destructive conduct to prove their point — hoarding hydroxychloroquine even if the Food and Drug Administration says the drug is ineffective or dangerous, and, of course, going without masks.

Yes, that's it.

Trump's biblical photo op? It was American history in a nutshell.

The Economist believes America's chronic anger has led to this violent juncture. That's surely true. But where does the anger come from? It makes sense for the downtrodden to be angry. But why the people who have so much? That's level of fear that's hard to fathom.

'How did we get here?': Trump has normalised mayhem and the US is paying the price, by Julian Borger (The Guardian)

The sheer tumult of the Trump era, the unceasing torrent of events that were unthinkable even hours before, has left a nation constantly off balance, unable to find its bearing and grasp how far it has traveled.

The developments of the past 24 hours were a reminder of how slippery the downward slope has been.

More than a hundred thousand Americans are dead from a pandemic after the government’s botched response; there are armoured cars and troops outside Washington metro stations; men in combat gear carrying sniper rifles were seen perched in the open door of a helicopter flying low over the commercial district. A military chopper buzzed a crowd of demonstrators so close to the ground they were buffeted around by the wind from the rotor, a dispersal technique learned in counter-insurgencies abroad.

On Monday, an entirely peaceful protest was driven out of a city square in front of the White House with teargas, baton charges and mounted police, so Trump could pose in front of a church with a Bible.

A priest and a seminarian, who had been distributing water and hand sanitizer to protesters from the steps of St John’s Episcopal, were driven away by police with helmets and riot shields to create an uncluttered tableau. A Bible was procured for Trump from inside the church for him to hold aloft. Journalists asked if it was his Bible. “It’s a Bible,” he replied.

The rate of fresh affronts has often outpaced the capacity to digest – or even describe – them ...

Social restrictions, bullying and reopening: It's all about consumer behavior.

I'm no fan of Politico, but this piece is solid. Key point:

“Unfortunately, resuming normal activity cannot be achieved by diktat from the top,” said economist Megan Greene, a senior fellow at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. “It needs to start with much more confidence from consumers, and we are still a long way off from that.”

There's plenty of apocryphal evidence derived from the respectively blue and red silos amid the wasteland of social media. Apart from the chest-thumpers with megaphones and chips on their shoulders, my sense is a silent majority of Americans are going to exercise caution in the following months.

How much has the pandemic altered our assumptions?

We're about to find out.

How Trump’s reopening plans could collide with reality, by Ben White (Politico)

Consumer and business behavior are mostly out of the president’s ability to control.

President Donald Trump is squabbling with governors and calling on a new council of corporate executives as he tries to reopen the American economy as quickly as possible. But his powers are limited not just by the Constitution but by the fact that he has limited sway over the real economy.

Trump can fire off tweets, attempt to bully states into lifting social restrictions and otherwise declare America open for business. But he can’t force companies to reopen or ramp up production until owners and executives believe their workers are ready.

He also can’t make consumers flock back to malls, bars, restaurants, sports arenas or other public areas until they feel comfortable they‘ll be safe from the coronavirus ...

"I’d love, in other words, some journalism."

"I have my own theories. Primarily that this is a delayed reaction to the financial crash of 2007, which showed so many Americans that the system was rigged against them. When nobody in power paid a price, they lost faith. The election of 2016, and now 2020, is the outraged response, a decade in the making."

The one way Sanders is the new Trump, by Kyle Pope (Columbia Journalism Review)

THE WEDNESDAY MORNING AFTER THE 2016 PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION, I wrote a piece for CJR criticizing the American press for its coverage of the rise of Trump, which I argued would “stand among journalism’s great failures.”

In the second paragraph, I wrote:

Reporters’ eagerness first to ridicule Trump and his supporters, then dismiss them, and finally to actively lobby and argue for their defeat have led us to a moment when the entire journalistic enterprise needs to be rethought and rebuilt. In terms of bellwether moments, this is our anti-Watergate.

Thought exercise: substitute “Sanders” for “Trump” in that first sentence. Here’s another paragraph:

Too often, the views of Trump’s followers … were dismissed entirely by an establishment media whose worldview is so different, and so counter, to theirs that it became chic to belittle them and wave them off. Reporters’ personal views got in the way of their ability to hear what was happening around them.

It is now obvious that we as an industry have learned nothing from the fundamental failures that led to the election of 2016. It is so apparent in the coverage of Trump, and has been from the beginning of his presidency, that it almost needn’t be said again: The hyper-partisanship, especially on cable news. The lack of follow-through from one outrage to the next. The willingness to let Trump, and his surrogates, set the news agenda again and again. The lack of creativity in covering a president who brings a destructive new imagination to the running of the country.

I am resigned to these shortcomings when it comes to Trump. A journalistic reckoning I hoped would materialize never did; Twitter, outrage, and a million arbitrarily urgent news cycles got in the way. My hope, more recently, has been that the 2020 Democratic primaries could help atone for journalism’s political sins.

It is not going well, as the recent coverage of Bernie Sanders shows ...

LIVE TO EAT AND DRINK: "It’s unsurprising that the two crucial figures in Tiki’s history were notorious liars."

Photo credit.

“It’s hard to appropriate a culture that was made up in the first place.”

“A nostalgia that is nostalgic for nostalgia itself.”

"When 21st century Tiki fails to be authentic, it settles for being authentically inauthentic."

Tiki bars aren't my sort of pleasure, but to each his or her own. This duly noted, here's an absolutely riveting overview of how Tiki ever came to exist in America, why it went away, and speculation about the reasons for the genre's comeback.

This is an uncommonly excellent essay.

The Tiki Bar Resurgence of the Trump Era, by Jackson Arn (The Nation)

It’s tacky and willfully inauthentic. Of course it’s popular again.

“It’s gotten too tacky.”
-- Donald Trump, when asked why he was closing Trader Vic’s at The Plaza, 1989

Ignore, if you can, the fact that the man who spoke these words is famous for gold buildings, gold seat belt buckles, and gold hair, and then ask yourself, “Did he have a point?”

By 1988, the year Trump bought the Plaza Hotel, the Trader Vic’s in the basement—probably the most famous branch of the most famous Tiki bar chain in the world—had become that dullest of things, a New York Institution. Three decades’ worth of prep school kids, ad men, and movie stars had been fattened on its spareribs, Samoan Fog Cutters, kava bowls, curry puffs, and pu-pu platters, and when Trump told the Times about his plans for The Plaza, it was predictably outraged. Even Richard Nixon weighed in: “It was always our daughter’s favorite restaurant,” he said, “and it quickly became mine, too.”

Then and now, Tiki provokes these kinds of strong reactions—either it’s insufferable or it’s the best. It’s my friends’ favorite genre of bar, or it’s the worst thing they’ve ever heard of. With their plastic grass, pink paper umbrellas, and yellowing ceramic skull mugs, Tiki bars have been on the cutting edge of tackiness for the better part of their 80-year history. And yet it is the humble Tiki bar, increasingly, where young urban epicures go in search of fresh-squeezed mixers, painstakingly aged liqueurs, wild-fermented imported liquors—in short, “authenticity.” A slew of high-profile new Tiki spots have opened in the last few years—Manhattan’s Mother of Pearl, San Francisco’s Smuggler’s Cove, Chicago’s Three Dots and a Dash—stocked with world-class ingredients and manned by top-tier bartenders. For Americans who were of drinking age in the middle of the last century, this turn of events must seem especially bizarre—since when were Tiki bars authentic or world-class in any way?

You can’t tell the story of Tiki without bringing up vast ingenuity and equally vast bigotry, heroic soldiers and charming hucksters, avant-garde and kitsch. It’s a cultural phenomenon as crude as the society that birthed it, but in a flailing, babyish way that provokes an amused headshake instead of a gasp. It is also, by its very nature, so overdetermined that it forces people to judge it, second- and third-guessing its excesses. It makes a mockery of indifference. No wonder it’s gotten popular again.

Trump at Game 5: Live by the theatrical gesture, die by the theatrical gesture.

Reminiscent of John 3:16?

I'll remember the World Series as the first time in a long while that I rooted for a National League team. New York Yankees appearances are an exception, and in cases of a Dodgers-Yankees series, I wouldn't watch at all.

I've nothing whatever against the players, but I couldn't abide the Houston front office's tone-deaf response to assistant general manager Brandon Taubman's outbursts aimed at female reporters, which took place following the league championship series.

Seems Taubman outed himself as a douche bag -- albeit it explainable behavior for him given a former career on Wall Street -- and his superiors arrogantly flailed for days before belatedly mouthing platitudes absent sincerity about their comprehension of a changing world.

Around the game, shots of schadenfreude have been chased by I-told-you-so's. Contempt for the Astros runs deep -- and has well before this incident. Jealousy breeds some of it. The organization's arrogance accounts for the rest. The Astros painted themselves as a disrupter and reveled in the commotion. They lived with the perception that they didn't understand people. They fed their process, followed it with fealty, doubled down. They believed in it, and they never had much of a reason not to, not until a week ago, when the assistant GM high on the feeling of winning the pennant opened his mouth, and two days later, when Luhnow and the Astros forgot to abide by that essential principle that has guided them for so long: Bad information leads to bad decisions.

Spare the tears for Taubman. Before we know it he'll be back at an investment firm, screwing taxpayers.

 And the Trump scene at Game 5? Spew feces for a living, and you'd best expect to get feces spewed back at you.

I'm happy the Washington Nationals won; again, nothing against the Astros as players. Even apart from the Houston front office fiasco, witnessing a seven-game pro sports series in which the visiting team won all the games is something we're not likely to see repeated.

Take me out of this ball game at The Economist

Donald Trump’s embarrassing reception at the World Series was a defining moment of his presidency

As a rule of thumb, the more an American president is loved, the more baseball stories there are about him.

Although not Donald Trump.

He had not been to watch the Washington Nationals (the Senators’ successors) before this week. And though he was persuaded to go because the “Nats” were appearing in their first World Series, he was not invited to throw the first pitch. On what he might have expected to be his best day as commander-in-chief (he revealed the killing of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi hours earlier), he was hidden away in an executive suite. The Lerner family that owns the Nats did not want him sitting with them. And the one time he flashed up on the big screen the jeering of the crowd was thunderous. A chant of “Lock him up!” rippled round the stadium long after Mr Trump’s image was replaced by footage of smiling servicemen. “Veterans for impeachment” read a banner behind home plate.

The usual battle lines were drawn.

Mr Trump’s Republican defenders dismissed this indignity as mere swamp gurgling. “You can either be loved in dc and hated in America. Or you can be loved in America and hated in dc,” tweeted Congressman Jody Hice. But it signified much worse for the president and his party than a few thousand hostile bureaucrats.

The newspaper concludes ...

He is not the first president to be booed at a sporting event. Bill Clinton was jeered by a nascar crowd, George W. Bush and Barack Obama at baseball games. But veterans of those occasions (and there were several watching the Nats that night) considered the hatefulness of the response to Mr Trump qualitatively different. This should make conservatives even more worried. For years they have exaggerated the vindictiveness and radicalism of the left to mask the contradictions in their own camp. Yet Mr Trump’s divisiveness has turned this into a self-fulfilling prophecy. Charged with partisan grievance, many on the left want to scrap the electoral college, pack the courts—do whatever it takes to never again be tyrannised by an antediluvian minority. Conservatives may soon have more than the odd gay wedding cake to contend with.

And it already seems certain that the one baseball event Mr Trump will be associated with occurred at Nationals Park this week. Sport lifts people with a feeling of vicarious striving for perfection even when their team loses. And when it wins, as the Nationals ultimately did, bringing Washington its first World Series in almost a century, the memory never fades. This is why sport is so much more loved than politics. Immortalised in baseball history, Mr Trump’s humiliation this week will be remembered long after most of his administration’s scandals have faded into oblivion.

"The unraveling of Rudy Giuliani."

Or, as another writer sought to explain, "How Rudy Giuliani went from a respected federal prosecutor and beloved NYC mayor to Trump's bag man."

Whenever they say it isn't about the money ...

The unravelling of Rudy Giuliani, by Lexington (The Economist)

No one member of Donald Trump’s coterie has fallen further than “America’s mayor”

Had Lexington’s 2007 incarnation been informed that the next Republican president would be a pro-gay, pro-choice, thrice-wed New Yorker, the name of Donald Trump would not have leaped to his august mind. Rudy Giuliani led the Republican primary by a big margin throughout that year. There were, to be sure, doubts about whether the former New York mayor was too socially liberal for small-town conservatives. He had once shared a house with two gay people and a Shih Tzu and, what was worse, acted in a comic skit alongside Mr Trump, that symbol of louche metropolitanism. Moreover America was not given to electing “abrasive” New Yorkers, Lexington cautioned then. But, like many others, he suspected Mr Giuliani’s dynamism and the broad support he enjoyed for his calm leadership after 9/11 and record of crime-fighting could compensate for such handicaps.

It has been pretty much downhill ever since for Mr Giuliani—culminating this week in what appears to be the worst crisis of his increasingly scandal-plagued career ...

(snip)

In truth it is hard to find any altogether convincing explanation for Mr Giuliani’s behaviour. He was once a serious politician prone to indiscipline; now he is wild. Yet a former colleague of his, who knows both men, suggests resentful envy of his old co-star Mr Trump—whom he must secretly disdain—may be eating him alive. If so, Mr Giuliani is going to really hate it when the president and his entire party flatly disown him. That looks like the inevitable next stage in his disgrace.

Hunter Biden, et al: "Donald Trump committed an impeachable offense, but prominent Americans also shouldn’t be leveraging their names for payoffs from shady clients abroad."

More essential reading. If we're to endure this impeachment process, it seems a shame to condone one variety of corruption while prosecuting a second, merely to suit the political objectives of the two-party duopoly.

Anyone got a big-ass broom for both?

Hunter Biden’s Perfectly Legal, Socially Acceptable Corruption, by Sarah Chayes (The Atlantic)

Donald Trump committed an impeachable offense, but prominent Americans also shouldn’t be leveraging their names for payoffs from shady clients abroad.

How did this get to be standard practice?

The whistle-blower scandal that has prompted the fourth presidential impeachment process in American history has put a spectacle from earlier this decade back on display: the jaw-smacking feast of scavengers who circled around Ukraine as Viktor Yanukovych, a Moscow-linked kleptocrat, was driven from power. Ukraine’s crisis was the latest to energize a club whose culture has come to be treated as normal—a culture in which top-tier lawyers, former U.S. public officials, and policy experts (and their progeny) cash in by trading on their connections and their access to insider policy information—usually by providing services to kleptocrats like Yanukovych. The renewed focus on Ukraine raises jangling questions: How did dealing in influence to burnish the fortunes of repugnant world leaders for large payoffs become a business model? How could America’s leading lights convince themselves—and us—that this is acceptable?

Voicing this question now invites an immediate objection: “false equivalence.” Let’s dispense with it. What Donald Trump has done—in this case, according to the summary of a single phone call, lean on a foreign president to launch two spurious investigations in order to hurt political rivals, offering the services of the U.S. Department of Justice for the purpose—is shockingly corrupt, a danger to American democracy, and worthy of impeachment.

But the egregiousness of these acts must not blind us to the culture of influence-peddling that surrounds and enables them. That culture is fundamental to the cynical state we are in, and it needs examining. All too often, the scandal isn’t that the conduct in question is forbidden by federal law, but rather, how much scandalous conduct is perfectly legal—and broadly accepted ...

Proper reading for Independence Day: "How to Properly Criticize RussiaGate."

"RussiaGate has been a great diversion and 'the bear ate our homework' excuse for the awfulness of the dismal, dollar-drenched Dems, the Inauthentic Opposition party."

The author provides a clear summary of "Five Things That Really Happened and One That Might Have Happened," followed by the excerpt below.

How to Properly Criticize RussiaGate, by Paul Street (CounterPunch)

... Seven Ways RussiaGate Still Stinks

That said, the whole big RussiaGate drama and narrative – the dominant U.S. media obsession for two and a half years until its current displacement by the Democratic presidential electoral extravaganza (though Russia-Trump is scheduled for a new boost with Mueller’s forthcoming appearance before Congress) – still stinks for seven basic reasons:

First, there was no great US “democracy” for Russia to “undermine” in the first place. Domestic wealth and power structures, home-grown-oligarchy and plutocracy is what most significantly installed Trump in the White House (even if Hillary was most of the ruling-class’s preferred winner). The United States’ not-so democratic elections are “still unprotected” against the nation’s own capitalist ruling class – and against absurdly anti-democratic partisan gerrymandering (held up as constitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court last week) and racist voter suppression).

Second, other nations like Israel and Saudi Arabia have far more say in US politics and policy than Russia, to say the least.

Third, Superpower Uncle Sam (with more than 800 military bases spread across more than 100 “sovereign” nations) continues to regularly intervene in and otherwise impact the internal affairs of other nations (Russian included) all over the world, with more and more terrible impact than any nation ever.

Fourth, RussiaGate has been a great diversion and “the bear ate our homework” excuse for the awfulness of the dismal, dollar-drenched Dems, the Inauthentic Opposition party. It has helped (as certainly intended) the corporate and imperial establishment atop that party continue to marginalize progressive forces both within and beyond the party – forces who properly note that the Democrats lost the election because of their corporate-neoliberal politics and policies. It has helped the Dem-neoliberal establishment avoid blame for demobilizing the nation’s progressive and social-democratic majority and putting a creeping fascist in the White House.

Fifth, RussiaGate has also helped (also as certainly intended) fuel the continuation of the dangerous New Cold War.

Sixth, RussiaGate has been used to confer fake-democratic and fake-progressive legitimacy on the repressive and imperial National Security State and its vast intelligence apparatus.

Seventh, RussiaGate has distracted and diverted the nation away not only from the dreadfulness of the neoliberal Democrats but also from Trump’s most horrific crimes. The orange-tinted beast has done far worse things than welcome help (of whatever significance) from Russia and obstruct the investigation of his creepy relationship with that nation: sadistic family separations at the border; concentration camps for migrant children and families; pushing to the brink of war on Iran; Eco-cidal energy deregulation to speed the planet’s transition into a giant Greenhouse Gas Chamber (the worst sin of all); burying federal scientific findings on the coming climate collapse; assaulting and degrading women; demonizing immigrants; shutting down the asylum process for Central Americans and Mexicans; declaring fake emergencies in order to do fiscal end-runs around Congress to fund a widely hated Nativist Wall and to sell arms to help Saudi Arabia murder more Yemeni civilians; trying to kick millions off of heath insurance; denying Congress’s power to investigate and oversee the executive branch; suggesting that he won’t accept the results of the 2020 election and that he should get more than two terms in the White House; whitewashing Neo-Nazis and other white supremacists; catering to the fascist National Rifle Association and its mass-shooting terror campaign; and…the list goes on and on.

Here's a scrap for the AdamBot: "The One Thing Trump Gets Right About Tariffs."

"For the past few decades, policymakers have embraced neoliberalism, a broadly open-market political philosophy whose effects have been to redirect more power toward the economically powerful and marginalize the economic majority. Things may be changing."

I don't make it a habit to read Politico, but this one's sensible.

The One Thing Trump Gets Right About Tariffs, by Jennifer M. Harris and Todd Tucker (Politico)

 ... Much as it pains their colleagues—and as hard as it is for Washington to process this—Trump and his backers have a real point. Not about his immigration policies, which are part of a harmful cultural war and stand a real chance of inflicting long-term damage on the American economy. But the administration’s use of tariffs to push its foreign policy goals is not as irrational as Trump’s enemies make it seem. It shouldn’t be this way, but in 2019, if the United States wants to fix some of the big policy arguments it has with its trading partners, it has left little leverage besides the blunt tool of tariffs.

For that, the blame lies with Democratic and Republican administrations alike, including Trump’s predecessor Barack Obama, who collectively have let U.S. economic policy shrink in ambition—a battle fought on a narrower and narrower field, leaving us with so few weapons that tariffs have become the most useful last resort.

A nation as powerful as the United States would traditionally be expected to have a fully developed economic and industrial policy, one that integrates incentives and priorities on the domestic front with carrots and sticks for foreign partners. In that universe, Mexico’s own immigration enforcement might be part of a much wider package of goals negotiated between the two nations, one that creates strong incentives for Mexico to comply, without hurting American consumers and companies the way tariffs would.

This fuller agenda, which some experts call economic statecraft, has been the norm for much of the country’s history. But unlike America's competitors, the United States has largely shelved this kind of economic thinking. President Obama, for instance, pitched the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement as a way to ensure that America, rather than China, would write the rules of the global economy. But under the hood, it was never a very compelling economic argument for the United States: The rules that China negotiates in its own trade deals overlapped considerably with the American proposal, meaning that the TPP was more a matter of diplomatic gamesmanship than a real plan to advance workers here at home

To politicians like Obama, raised in the heyday of global free-market consensus, government industrial policy is a thing of the past, and trade relationships are really just a matter of opening as many markets as possible—regardless of whether the benefits actually outweigh the losses for a given country. The evidence now strongly suggests that consensus has been wrong. To take just one problem, the magnitude of corporate tax evasion made possible by modern trade agreements should make all of us question whether the traditional lifting-all-boats assumptions of trade efficiency still hold up.

With Trump's election, it's now acceptable to at least name the problems the U.S. has confronted on the world stage, ranging from coercive Chinese requirements over our manufacturers to corporations invoking their global supply-chain decisions as a reason we can’t fundamentally rethink U.S. trading rules. But Trump’s solutions to those problems suffer just as much from an absence of creative ambition ...

The Espionage Act: Indicting journalists in a war against freedom of the press.

Then Donald Trump takes power and immediately begins using the playbook refined and sharpened by his predecessor, President Obama.

This isn't a Trump thing or an Obama thing. It's a top-down government power thing, and the unsurprising province of a two-party system power-sharing arrangement.

THE ESPIONAGE AXE: DONALD TRUMP AND THE WAR AGAINST A FREE PRESS (The Intercept)

...Mark Ruffalo [reading Eugene Debs’ speech]: For in every age it has been the tyrant, the oppressor and the exploiter who has wrapped himself in the cloak of patriotism or religion or both to deceive and overawe the people.

Jeremy Scahill: On June 16, 1918, the prominent Socialist labor leader Eugene Debs delivered a speech in Canton, Ohio. In the speech, Debs argued against U.S. involvement in World War I and he praised activists who had been organizing against the military draft or had been convicted of sedition. At the time, Debs was one of the most prominent socialists in the United States and his speech came on the heels of the Russian Revolution and the rise of global socialist and communist movements. Eugene Debs had run for president four times as of the day of that speech. Here is actor Mark Ruffalo reading part of that speech.

MR [reading Eugene Debs’ speech]: The working class who fight all the battles, the working calls who make the supreme sacrifices, the working class who freely shed their blood and furnish their corpses had never yet had a voice in either declaring war or making peace. It is the ruling class that invariably does both. They alone declare war and they alone make peace. Yours not to reason why. Yours but to do and die. That is their motto.

JS: Soon after that speech, Eugene Debs was arrested and he was charged under a new law in the U.S. that had passed just a year earlier. It was called The Espionage Act. Debs and his lawyers argued that his anti-war speech was protected by the First Amendment to the Constitution. And they lost. And Debs was sentenced to ten years in prison. The case eventually went to the U.S. Supreme Court where the justices voted unanimously to uphold the conviction of Eugene Debs. “I believe in free speech, in war as well as in peace,” Debs told the jury during his trial. “If the Espionage Law stands, then the Constitution of the United States is dead.”

From his prison cell, Debs ran for a 5th time for president of the United States on the Socialist Party ticket. He got nearly a million votes, almost three and a half percent — the most ever won by a Socialist at that time. In 1921, President Warren Harding commuted Eugene Debs sentence, but he did not pardon him. Though he did invite Debs to meet him at the White House.

Congress ultimately amended parts of the Espionage Act, but the thrust of the law has remained in effect to this day. Anarchist Emma Goldman was also prosecuted under the act. Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were executed after being convicted under the law ...

This isn't a Trump thing or an Obama thing, either one. It's a power thing, and the province of a two-party system power-sharing arrangement.

Indicting a journalist? What the new charges against Julian Assange mean for free speech, by Julian Borger (The Guardian)

By bringing new charges against the WikiLeaks founder, the Trump administration has challenged the first amendment

By indicting Julian Assange under the Espionage Act, the Trump administration has crossed a line that every other US administration has shied away from: challenging the first amendment in defence of government secrets.

The only reason the 102-year-old act does not criminalise national security journalism is because no administration has sought to put it to the test. The law bans the publication of government secrets and offers no explicit protections to the press under the amendment guaranteeing freedom of speech.

Until now, most legal observers have argued that the law would not survive scrutiny by the supreme court if it were ever used against journalists.

The Obama administration debated whether it could be used against Assange after his organisation, WikiLeaks, published military communications from the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, as well as a huge trove of diplomatic cables. But Obama’s team ultimately decided against taking that step.

Matthew Miller, who was a justice department spokesman at the time, recalled: “The justice department in the Obama administration thought it would be very dangerous to charge Assange with publication, as the Espionage Act doesn’t make any distinction between journalists and non-journalists.

“The second reason – which we never got to – was that no one was sure if it would withstand constitutional scrutiny. It probably wouldn’t,” Miller said. “That said, the supreme court has changed significantly since then, and maybe the DoJ [department of justice] has made that calculation” ...

Russiagate: "The question now is, has the Mueller report finally freed up the rest of us to challenge the more insane flights of fantasy?"

But was it consummated?

As usual The Onion wins.

Shocked Vladimir Putin Slowly Realizing He Didn’t Conspire With Trump Campaign (The Onion)

‘Who The Hell Was I Working With Then?’ Asks Russian President

MOSCOW—Saying that he had been “totally blindsided” by the revelations from the recently released findings of the Mueller investigation, a shocked Vladimir Putin reportedly came to the realization Tuesday that he didn’t conspire with Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign after all ...

... "I spent so much time emailing back and forth with DonaldTrump46@hotmail.com about compromising the democratic voting process, and now it turns out it was all fake?"

America spent the Cold War exaggerating the capability of our Soviet foes, so I suppose we might as well travel the same path with Putin and today's Russians. Concurrently I loathe Trump, but persist in believing we must do things for the right reason -- or it's just more fake news. 

This essay from an old Russian hand amid the journalistic ranks hits all the correct notes. Russiagate has been a massive distraction from discussions that should have been taking place since The Donald became president.

Russiagate: The Great Tragic Comedy of Modern Journalism, by Matt Bivens (Medium)

 ... I was not surprised to see politicians up on their hind legs, panting mindlessly about Russians. But to see journalists at CNN, The New York Times, NPR, MSNBC, competing to be even dumber … hot on the trail of a non-story, recklessly discarding fairness and professionalism … dragging us gleefully down every rabbit hole … applauding the collateral damage to bystanders, as they indulge their collective rage against Donald Trump, their hysterical certainty that he must be a Russian asset … What can I say? It’s been heart-breaking.

I know of smart, progressive-leaning journalists who politically oppose Donald Trump, but who feel like strangers in their own newsrooms, afraid to speak out against this mob psychosis. When I meet old colleagues, we have to feel each other out cautiously, until with relief we realize: Thank God, you’re not one of them — not one of the pod people from “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” that might point at me and scream.

I would hear their tales of the lunacy in their journalistic operations, shake my head in concern, wish them the best. And then I’d go back to my job in the emergency department, taking care of people with heart attacks and strokes and broken bones.

Watching from afar, I would cheer on those few brave enough to ask questions — people like Glenn Greenwald of The Intercept, Aaron Maté of The Real News, John Solomon of The Hill, Masha Gessen at The New York Review of Books, and my old friends Leonid Bershidsky at Bloomberg and especially Matt Taibbi of Rolling Stone. And I would wait for the madness to end. But it didn’t.

And then Stephen Cohen of The Nation, another voice of reason, sent me a copy of his book, “War With Russia?” It’s a collection of his heretical writings about our new, unnecessary Cold War, and the opening essay, adapted from a talk he gave in Washington D.C., made me ashamed of my silence.

“Some people who privately share our concerns — again, in Congress, the media, universities and think tanks — do not speak out at all. For whatever reason — concern about being stigmatized, about their career, personal disposition — they are silent. But in our democracy, where the cost of dissent is relatively low, silence is no longer a patriotic option,” Cohen wrote, adding, “We should exempt from this imperative young people, who have more to lose. A few have sought my guidance, and I always advise, ‘Even petty penalties for dissent in regard to Russia could adversely affect your career. At this stage of life, your first obligation is to your family and thus to your future prospects. Your time to fight lies ahead’.”

Well, what was my excuse?

Special Prosecutor Robert S. Mueller has now turned in his findings, and there’s not much there. For weeks beforehand, mainstream media warned about this — exhorting readers against succumbing to feeling “disappointed”.

Disappointed? I guess, as my friend Taibbi has noted, it would have been an immense relief had the U.S. president been found to be a high-level traitor. We could have all brought picnic lunches to his execution.

Right before the species-ending war with Russia.

In their fanatic loyalty to the narrative, what used to be my favorite media have stridently reminded us that, Mueller aside, “it’s not over!” The “focus of the investigation” will move now to the New York prosecutors, to House committees. The American intelligentsia will continue to dream up wild theories — they’ll be Scotch-taped on every vertical surface, connected by bits of yarn and magic marker scribbles and hyperverbal mania.

The question now is, has the Mueller report finally freed up the rest of us to challenge the more insane flights of fantasy? Or is it instead so close to the 2020 presidential elections — and so legally dangerous for some of the intelligence insiders who have tried to bring down the president — that skeptical journalists more than ever will be bullied to keep silent?

America as planetary policeman: "When an entire political establishment says a decision is mad, I tend to think something in it must be right."

From the very inception of this blog in 2004, our credo has remained consistent.

New Albany is a state of mind … but whose? Since 2004, we’ve been observing the contemporary scene in this slowly awakening old river town. If it’s true that a pre-digital stopped clock is right twice a day, when will New Albany learn to tell time?

Neither Jeff Gahan nor Donald Trump are right very often, but the law of averages as symbolized by NAC's stopped pre-digital clock suggests both occasionally will stumble on truth by accident.

As such, Trump's assertion that "the United States cannot continue to be policeman to the world," while lost amid the clamor of his Mexican wall boneheadedness, is worthy of examination and support. This British fellow explains.

Trump has a point – the world should start solving its own problems, by Simon Jenkins (The Guardian)

For all his antics on the Mexican border, the US president is right to be withdrawing troops from Syria

 ... when an entire political establishment says a decision is mad, I tend to think something in it must be right. Thus with Trump’s announcement last month that he was pulling America’s 2,000 troops out of Syria. “They’re all coming back, and they’re coming back now,” he tweeted emphatically. That he could do this after an amiable chat with Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, and without telling his commanders, was staggering.

Trump’s argument is that getting out of America’s wars was a campaign pledge. The Syrian intervention was never meant to be permanent and had already crippled Isis. “People are going to have to start doing a lot of their own work,” he added, “because the United States cannot continue to be policeman to the world” ...

Going deeper:

Trump is entitled to put “America first” in the Middle East, and that slogan may explain his trade barriers against Canada and China. But like the Mexican wall, such policies have nothing to do with America’s national security. The US must be the safest country on the planet. Its home territory has never been so much as menaced by a foreign power, let alone invaded. Two oceans protect it east and west. 9/11 aside, terrorist incidents have been homegrown. Wars abroad, from Vietnam to Syria, have reflected some neo‑imperial hegemonic urge, similar to that which used to grip Britain. The effect has been to turn the US from policeman to random vigilante.

The politics of fear has long been the default mode of the insecure statesman. The parading of military muscle still permeates the US’s public realm and has become a shop window for what President Eisenhower termed the anti-democratic “military-industrial complex”. Its endless aggrandisement boosts military spending and upholds the cause of an American presence across the globe. It worships daily at the altar of national security.

American aid to Nato has long underpinned Europe’s security, but that does not undermine Trump’s challenge, that the rest of the world should start solving its own problems ...

Satire alert: Trump tells Gahan, "I can fix your Riverview Tower problem."

With apologies to the President.