Update — Justice Kennedy, worse than a hypocrite

Posted on July 3, 2018 by oddmanout215

Jeffrey Toobin is a lawyer who writes for the New Yorker and appears on cable news shows, portraying a legal expert of sorts. Which is why I was surprised to see this in a recent column of his:

So there is some irony in Kennedy’s decision, last week, to turn over his precious seat on the Supreme Court to the least dignified man ever to serve as President.

Toobin had just noted that U.S. Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy’s favorite word was “dignity.” He’d used it nine times in an opinion he wrote in the 2015 ruling that guaranteed the right of same-sex marriage in all fifty states.

I thought Toobin would circle back to further explore the irony of Kennedy’s gift to the undignified Donald Trump. But he merely stated the obvious — Trump will choose someone more consistently right-wing to replace Kennedy. Someone who will “tarnish” his legacy.

My first thought was “What legacy”? When did Kennedy ever take the side of working people against the rich and powerful? He voted against his right-wing colleagues on gay rights and abortion rights, but surely he knows his decision to step down on July 31 will give right-wingers just enough time to appoint someone who will work to scuttle those rights.

Toobin apparently chose to ignore the follow-up stories after Kennedy’s announced his retirement — stories that trace the cozy connection between the Trump and Kennedy families.

This would seem to indicate he’s ignoring the main story. The question is why. My guess is that Toobin is too much of a mainstream tight-ass to mention the possibility that Kennedy is as corrupt as all the other people who have chosen to play ball with Trump.

It seems Toobin would have us believe the myth of the Supremes — that all of them are eminent and distinguished and dignified, when in fact most are merely lawyers who went to good schools (usually) and rose through talent (sometimes) and luck to a place where they could wield great power.

Footnote: Last week I naively speculated that Kennedy’s loyalty to the Republican Party may have won out over his commitment to individual rights. But now it seems his greater loyalty may have been to Trump, not the party.

One more: The best piece I’ve seen on this subject was by Michael Tomaski and was headlined “Anthony Kennedy, you are a total disgrace to America.” Pretty blunt, but I’ll take blunt truth over civility any day.

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Justice Kennedy — defeatist or hypocrite?

Posted on June 29, 2018 by oddmanout215

Anthony Kennedy was the U.S. Supreme Court’s swing vote, but he usually swung far to the right. He deserves a lot of credit for helping George W. Bush’s steal the presidential election in 2000. We can also thank him for his critical role in the Citizens United decision, which allows corporate kingpins to funnel huge amounts of money to the candidates who would do their bidding.

This week, Kennedy capped his career by helping to strip organized labor of its right to collect dues from nonunion members, even though union and nonunion workers benefit equally when unions negotiate contracts.

And he struck a major blow for racism by backing Donald Trump’s Muslim ban – “travel ban” is the euphemism – a Supreme Court decision that will live in infamy, like Dred Scott v. Sandford (upholding slavery) and Plessy v. Ferguson (upholding “separate but equal” laws) and Korematsu v. United States (upholding internment camps for Japanese Americans in WWII).

Slate’s Richard L. Hasen wrote that Kennedy’s recent court decisions reflected the “depressing defeatism” of an old man who knew his time to retire had come. Hasen quoted from the one-and-a-half-page concurring opinion Kennedy wrote to clarify why he went along with the majority vote on the Muslim ban. It sounds almost like an apology:

There are numerous instances in which the statements and actions of Government officials are not subject to judicial scrutiny or intervention. That does not mean those officials are free to disregard the Constitution and the rights it proclaims and protects. The oath that all officials take to adhere to the Constitution is not confined to those spheres in which the Judiciary can correct or even comment upon what those officials say or do. Indeed, the very fact that an official may have broad discretion, discretion free from judicial scrutiny, makes it all the more imperative for him or her to adhere to the Constitution and to its meaning and promise.

Kennedy surely knew Trump had no interest in “adhering to the Constitution.” He saw and heard Trump’s many public comments about Muslims and knew the travel ban initiative was motivated by racism, not concern for national security.

And he knew it’s the Supreme Court’s job to stop a president from abusing the powers of his office, especially in an era when the majority party in Congress is a rubber stamp for the president’s whims and prejudices.
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So why didn’t he do the right thing? Too defeatist, I guess, or maybe too much of a hypocrite to admit that loyalty to party (he’s a Republican with libertarian leanings) was more important to him than “judicial scrutiny,” even though the party currently is marching in lockstep with a president who aspires to be a dictator.

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They really don’t care — ALL of them

Posted on June 25, 2018 by oddmanout215

“I really don’t care, do u?” was the message scrawled on the cheap jacket Melania Trump wore on her way to visit a detainment facility – a jail, really — for kids who were separated from their parents by U.S. border guards.

Was there a hidden meaning, or was Melania merely stating the obvious?

The Washington Post received thousands of e-mails from readers responding to reports of the incident. Most of the e-mail writers expressed contempt for Melania and said they weren’t surprised by her stupidly insensitive fashion choice.

Many of them seemed fixated on the notion that Melania is a whore, what do you expect? They mentioned that she had worked in the soft-core porn industry.

One person wrote “…there are names for women who are willing to sell their, uh, integrity for money.”

Another asked “Why would anybody care about the overt opinion of an individual who has sold both her body and her soul to the devil for the metaphorical 30 pieces of silver?”

Whoa! Washington D.C. is crawling with prostitutes and most of them are men. They attach themselves to men who have money and power, and they do whatever they must to keep their jobs. They trade their souls — and their bodies, sometimes — in the hope of furthering their careers by pleasing their sugar daddies.

Centers of power have always attracted such men, but the current crop of prostitutes seems more blatant and shameless, probably because Trump is a dictator-type who demands out-loud professions of loyalty from underlings.

A case in point: Can you think of anything more sickening than the video of Trump’s cabinet members sitting around a table and pledging allegiance to him, one by one? What sort of men would behave like this? They couldn’t have been more obsequious if they’d got on their knees and fellated him.

So let’s not make too big a deal of Melania’s behavior. Her face is inexpressive, maybe because of Botox. She doesn’t say much, and her rare public statements would seem to indicate she’s not too bright. She may have unwisely sold her body to a bloated ogre in return for financial security. (Nothing new about that.)

But she’s not destroying the environment, or chipping away at our First Amendment rights, or giving further tax breaks to billionaires. She’s not in the same league with the whores who help Trump make policy.

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OK, you’re in love, but can you sell my novel?

Posted on June 20, 2018 by oddmanout215

An editor friend just called to apologize, he hasn’t had time to read my new manuscript because he’s having his roof replaced and can’t hear himself think. I said hey, no hurry, it will still be there when you find time, unless I rewrite it.

I was kidding. I’m done with the novel until I find an agent for it. I’m doing my research again.

Most literary agents seem to be young women looking for Young Adult and Romance and Queer and so on. (What is it with the YA craze in publishing? Do you know any teenagers who put down their phones and video games long enough to read?)

A lot of agents post descriptions of the sort of manuscripts they prefer. A surprising number say they won’t represent a writer unless they “fall in love” with his/her manuscript. As if falling in love weren’t a highly overrated reason for doing something, especially something business-related.

Some say they’re looking for either literary fiction or genre fiction, as if those categories are always separate and mutually exclusive.

Some are enormously successful. I recently visited the website of an agent who represents a formidable bunch of thoroughbred writers. I pictured them in her stable, being fed and groomed in luxury stalls. I could go for that.

Yes, it’s delusional to think an A-list agent will look at my manuscript and phone me, even if my unsolicited query letter indicates I’m snarky and self-effacing, in exactly the right proportions, and a joy to work with, and in the vanguard of writers who are inventing The Next Big Thing.

But one never knows, do one?

Just this morning I looked at my ringing phone and saw the call was from New York City, and my pulse quickened. Could this be love? It was a recorded message from someone trying to sell me something. I don’t know what the product was because she was speaking Chinese.

Long ago, I reluctantly concluded the best way to get an agent’s attention is through referrals. This time, lucky for me, I know a friend of a friend of a friend who knows a friend of a big-name agent in Manhattan. I’ll let you know when I make the connection.

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Running out of gas with Steppenwolf

Posted on June 18, 2018 by oddmanout215

So I was on the highway, on my way to a sales job near Allentown with my stomach in a knot because I knew the job would suck. It was Throwback Thursday on the college radio station and the DJ was playing songs that, way back in the day, were mainstays on the big commercial stations. The Steve Miller Band’s “Living In the USA” came on. I hear you, Steve, we’re living in a plastic land, somebody give me a cheeseburger, how are your royalties doing?

And then Steppenwolf’s “Born To Be Wild,” an anthem of the road if there ever was one. The guitar churns like glass in a garbage disposal. The keyboard clings like wet cement. The overall effect is dark and dirty, like exhaust fumes from a sixteen-wheeler, but energizing, like good meth.

I cranked up the volume and pushed the rented Ford to 90 mph and remembered “Born To Be Wild” playing long ago when I climbed a high fence to get to my impounded car – I’d parked in a loading zone — and then tried to drive the car through the car lot’s locked gate in order to avoid paying the parking ticket. Bad idea.

The verses triggered more ancient memories, one after another, and a brief feeling of nostalgic transcendence.

Get your motor running/Head out on the highway/Looking for adventure/In whatever comes our way…

But the Ford’s gas gauge had a glitch. It said I had enough fuel for forty more miles but then, within a mile, the figure dropped to four miles. I was thirty miles from my destination, so I pulled off the highway to search for a service station before I ran out of gas.

Too late. The car chugged to a halt soon after “Born To Be Wild” faded out. I found myself stuck in a semi-rural scene with old houses and vast backyards. It was 6 pm, still plenty of light. I knocked on the doors of several houses and looked around for man-eating dogs.

A bearded man opened the fifth door I knocked on. I paid him ten bucks to drive me to the nearest service station. I filled a gas can, but when we got back I couldn’t pour the gas into the tank because the car had a built-in anti-syphon valve. It took me a half-hour to force-feed the gas tank.

I felt exhausted and marooned, and battered by the big existential questions. Who am I? How did I get here? Where can I get a macchiato in the middle of nowhere, or even a decent cup of coffee?

I got back on the road, smelling of gasoline, with the radio off. “Born To Be Wild” played in my head, mocking me, reminding me that most of my adventures these days are misadventures. They pull me out of the elaborate routines I’ve established to make enough money to support my writing habit. They pull me out of my safety zone and wake me. Who needs that?

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The outsider who made friends everywhere

Posted on June 12, 2018 by oddmanout215

Anthony Bourdain, who was 61, wrote Kitchen Confidential, the definitive book about working on the wild side in the restaurant business. He created several acclaimed TV series, using food as a device for exploring foreign cultures and making friends with people who were off the radar of the rich and powerful. He became a father at age 50 and, more recently, was dating a beautiful actress who helped get him involved in the #MeToo movement.

Then he hanged himself in France, where he was filming an episode of “Parts Unknown.” WTF?

I’m spooked because I identified with Bordain as he portrayed himself in his writings. We liked the same writers. He was an outsider by nature who, in his youth, preferred the company of those “who worked while normal people played and who played while normal people slept,” as he told NPR.

He embraced the lifestyle of the bar/restaurant worker, a mix of order and chaos, of hard work and hedonism. He loved the work but hated restaurant owners and managers. He enjoyed being a team player so long as the other team members were outsiders, like himself.

But part of him lived at a distance from the kitchen brigades, outside of the outsiders, examining his life as “a working journeyman chef” and wondering what to make of it. This went on even after he turned to writing to explore his contradictory feelings about the role he was playing, which was also the life he was living.

“Why do I, a fairly educated sort of swine, take such unseemly pleasure in the guttural utterances of my largely uneducated, foul-mouthed crews?” he asked in Kitchen Confidential.

And why did he love the “clatter and spray of the dishwasher, the sizzle as a filet of fish hits a hot pan, the loud, yelping noise — almost a shriek — as a glowing sizzle-platter is dropped into a full pot sink…” And the after-hours part of the routine, the sex and drugs and rock ‘n’ roll part, followed by oblivion and revival and a new cycle of work and play.

Kitchen Confidential, published in 2000, is Bordain celebrating his life as an outsider. Its success opened the door to his TV success and, ironically, to his appreciation of life in the straight world.

But the book wasn’t Bordain’s way of waving goodbye to his dark side. Anyone who believes it was probably didn’t read it and is probably a fan of poorly written books with sappy endings. By all accounts, he remained as cynical as he was generous, restless rather than contented, disarmingly honest and tirelessly curious.

Was it manic curiosity that compelled Bordain to keep circling the globe for new adventures, or was he running to escape the hellhound on his trail?

Stupid question. No one really knows what motivates others, or what drives them to despair. I’m just glad he did so much good work and touched so many people before he decided to check out.

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‘Disinvited’ Eagles weren’t going anyway

Posted on June 8, 2018 by oddmanout215

Swamp Rabbit was getting on my case for not being a football fan.

I’m a fan of the players,” I said. “It’s the NFL I hate — the overpaid commissioner and the spoiled rotten billionaires who own the teams. I hate the way they suck up to the U.S. military and bow down to Donald Trump when he waves the flag at them.”

Swamp Rabbit wasn’t listening. “You live in Philly and you don’t even like the Eagles. I saw what you wrote about them.”

“Au contraire, rabbit. I wrote that Eagles fans get carried away when the Eagles win. They act like holy rollers at a revival meeting.”

I added, “But I like the Eagles, especially since Trump disinvited them to the White House because he knew only a handful of them would show up.”

Swamp Rabbit dissed me some more. I shouldn’t get sports mixed up with politics, he said. Sports-watching should be an activity that brings people together instead of dividing them along political lines.

“Tell it to Trump,” I said. “He said players who knelt during the playing of the national anthem were unpatriotic, even after the players explained they were taking a knee to protest police brutality and meant no disrespect to the country. Trump made an issue of it because 70 percent of NFL players are black, and he knew calling them unpatriotic would play well with his racist supporters.”

“Football ain’t politics,” Swamp Rabbit insisted. “It’s a place to escape politics.”

“There’s no escaping Trump,” I said. “He seeps into everything.”

I told Swamp Rabbit about the airborne toxic event in Don DeLillo’s novel White Noise. A big black cloud descends on a small town, causing fear and suspicion. People exposed to the cloud develop symptoms — sweaty palms, deja vu, etc. — but it’s unclear whether the symptoms are caused by actual exposure to the cloud, or by exposure to news reports about the cloud.

“Trump is an airborne toxic event,” I said. “Thanks to the media he’s everywhere, spreading fear and suspicion, even when there’s no reason for people to feel those things. Even when the subject matter is only football.”

“The media should ignore the guy,” Swamp Rabbit said. “Maybe he’d just go away.”

“I don’t think so, rabbit, but dream on.”

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Trump claims the right of kings. Anyone surprised?

Posted on June 6, 2018 by oddmanout215

Who would have thought Donald Trump, not even half-way through his term, would claim he can pardon himself if convicted of crimes? (Not that he would do anything wrong, of course.)

I asked my friend Swamp Rabbit and he said, “Anyone who knows Trump’s history and isn’t a total dumb-ass would have thought it.”

Trump’s tweet was a wake-up call to all the peeps who think our much-lauded system of checks and balances guarantees that a dictator type like Trump will never defy the law in order to hold onto power.

And it was a warning to special counsel Robert Mueller and his posse as they strengthen their case regarding the Trump team’s possible collusion with Russian hackers who helped him win the 2016 presidential election. (Actually, he lost by about 2.9 million votes, but that’s another story.)

We’re likely to hear the word “self-pardon” fairly often as Mueller gets closer to nailing Trump.

Just the other day constitutional scholar Jonathan Turley wrote that Trump can indeed pardon himself, even though “a self-pardon would be [an] ignoble and self-defeating act.”

Some scholars disagree with Turley, but the fact that Trump has made the idea of self-pardon a point of debate is evidence of flaws in the laws governing the executive branch.

The flaws were always there, but it took a third-rate Mussolini to bring them to light.

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A caffeinated confession

Posted on June 1, 2018 by oddmanout215

I’ve never been a Starbucks fan. Its stores are more like over-priced ice cream parlors than coffeehouses, and there’s something spooky about customers sitting by themselves, staring at their laptop screens.

That said, I’m glad the “anti-bias” training went well this week at 8,000 Starbucks outlets, and that employees will henceforth treat all customers like humans, even if they’re non-white and aren’t carrying a laptop.

The training was about damage control following the arrest of two black men last month at a Starbucks in Philly’s affluent Rittenhouse Square neighborhood. The manager called the cops on the men for sitting while black, or for trying to use the bathroom while black. The arrests became national news.

Yesterday I rode my bike to the Starbucks closest to my home in the Tinicum swamp. It was a long ride because, as I noted at the time of the arrests, Starbucks only opens stores in neighborhoods that have been ethnically cleansed. Oops, I meant to write “gentrified.”

I had an espresso macchiato and asked a barista what his training session had been like. It lasted too long, he said, but the company threw in free meals. From now on, store policy will be to let anyone who enters the store use the bathroom, and employees will be expected “not to treat people like jerks.”

Well, there you go. Race relations will improve a hundred percent, just like that, and Starbucks fans can get back to enjoying their pumpkin lattes and chocolate croissants and Facebook friends in peace.

I’ll get back to my neighborhood coffee shop, Dirty Andy’s, and order up a cup of joe. Andy will say nope, all we have today is a cup of mud. I’ll have a cup of mud and listen to “Big Joe and Phantom 309” on the jukebox.

Or maybe I’ll pedal a few extra miles to a Starbucks. Corporate coffeehouses suck, but that macchiato was pretty good.

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Philip Roth’s many phases

Posted on May 25, 2018 by oddmanout215

Time flies faster as you grow older. One day you wake up and read Tom Wolfe is dead. Blink a few times and there goes Philip Roth, too.

I was drawn to Roth’s fiction indirectly, around the time he was helping introduce “Writers From the Other Europe” to American audiences. I remember reading Milan Kundera’s short stories in Esquire and thinking that Roth had great taste, his own work was probably worth a good look.

I knew Roth had spent time defending himself against people who used his fiction as evidence that he was a Jew-hating Jew, a sexual deviant, a misogynist and worse. The sort of dreary people who automatically equate fictional points of view with an author’s real-life beliefs, and assume his/her characters are nothing but thinly veiled real-life characters.

“Wow, I wonder if he’s really describing so-and-so?” they will ask, or “Is that sneaky bastard writing about me?”

I knew he’d tried to make peace with detractors who said his short-story collection Goodbye, Columbus cast Jews in a bad light and that, years later, he’d provoked them all over again with his breakthrough novel Portnoy’s Complaint, whose young, sex-obsessed, guilt-ridden Jewish narrator calls himself “the Raskolnikov of jerking off.”

I didn’t know he’d go through many more phases as a novelist, experimenting with the form, becoming more productive as he aged, refining his acidic sense of humor, poking fun at critics by inventing protagonists who closely resembled him — Nathan Zuckerman, David Kepesh — or actually bore his name. (In Operation Shylock, the “real” Philip Roth chases a Philip Roth imposter all over the map and addresses one of Roth’s favorite concerns: that our increasingly chaotic world is making it harder to write “realistic” fiction that’s as bizarre and unpredictable as real life.)

Or that he’d go on a creative tear in his 60s and 70s that resulted in major works like Sabbath’s Theater, an eloquent rant whose aging protagonist definitely does not go gentle into that good night.

Or that his concern about the durability of fiction would culminate in his last major success, The Plot Against America, in which aviator and Nazi sympathizer Charles Lindbergh defeats Franklin D. Roosevelt and becomes president in the World War II years.

Last year the New Yorker asked Roth a point-blank question: Does Donald Trump outstrip the novelist’s imagination?

Roth’s email response: “It isn’t Trump as a character, a human type — the real-estate type, the callow and callous killer capitalist — that outstrips the imagination. It is Trump as President of the United States.”

I know what he meant. It’s much easier to picture Charles Lindbergh, a flawed hero, as president than a cartoonish con man like Trump in the role. But I’ll bet Roth would have done justice to the Trump era in his fiction if he’d been born a decade or two later.

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