The Medium is the Mess

We’ve lately been spending a lot of time with some fine people who work in what’s left of the local news media, preparing for our annual brief appearance on the amateur stage in the Society of Professional Journalists’ satirical song-and-skit “Gridiron” show, and although it’s been fun and a good reason to get out of the house we sometimes wonder what’s the point. The show is a fund-raiser for journalism scholarships, after all, so we can’t shake a guilty feeling that we’re contributing the delinquency of a minor.

Better that those fresh-faced youngsters should be preparing for careers in horse-and-buggy engineering or telegraphy, as far as we’re concerned, and we’re apparently not the only ones who think so. A recent survey by something calling itself CareerCast just published its annual survey of the worst careers to pursue, and for the third year in a row being a newspaper reporter came in number one. Newspaper circulation has been plummeting rapidly, with advertising revenues falling even faster, the resulting salaries are also low, and by now the prestige factor is in negative territory.

Things were vastly different way back when our fresh faces embarked on a career in newspapering. We had recently dropped out of college, and after a series of desultory jobs were eager to accept an offer to be an “editorial clerk” at the local newspaper, which meant writing obituaries and listening to the police scanner and answering calls from irate readers and doing whatever menial errands almost anyone else in the newsroom might find for us, and it was grueling but fun and seemed to hold out some promise. Almost all the reporters were “J-school” graduates who had been inspired by Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman bringing down Tricky Dick in “All The President’s Men,” but we were drawn to profession by “His Girl Friday” and “Nothing Sacred” and all those black-and-white movies about men in fedoras shouting “get me re-write” into a candlestick phone, and we even managed to work our un-credentialed way to a “staff writer” by-line as the last of the up-from-copyboy reporters.

That was so long ago, though, that we were on the job the night Ronald Reagan first won the presidency. It was a grand old time in the journalism industry, when almost every city in the country was becoming a one-newspaper town, and it was before Reagan revoked the Fairness Doctrine and unleashed talk radio and then the internet and all its gloriously unedited commentary and more up-to-the-minute sports results and stock market quotes, and even worse Craig’s List and all the other on-line advertising options, so for a brief shining moment journalism was the monopolistic place to be. Our newspaper was basically printing money along with all its widely distributed daily editions, the raises kept coming along with every threat of unionization, the drama critic and fashion writer were getting annual paid trips to New York City, the political writers got their calls immediately returned from even such disdainful sorts as Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole, and even we were pretty cocky about it.

In retrospect, of course, we should have seen it coming. That night Reagan won the presidency we were the only ones in the newsroom who were glad of it, and we’re still owed twenty bucks from a reporter who bet us that the world surely would end in a nuclear conflagration within four years but who’d moved on by then, and we look back on their discredited crusades against nuclear energy and that “red-lining” nonsense that led to the subprime mortgage fiasco that led to the great recession of ’08, which somehow led to the disastrous Obama presidency with the unabashed cheerleading of our local newspaper, and even without the internet and other aspects of the creatively destructive nature of capitalism it was bound to end badly. Now the paper isn’t even printed here, but is for some reason or another outsourced to the now corporate-sister Kansas City paper, which used to be the paper that our local paper hated to be scooped by on any Kansas story, and what difference, at this point does it make?

Our friends in the radio media aren’t faring much better, with all those internet stations that play only the songs you want to hear stealing their audience, and the conservative talk radio hosts splitting into every smaller shares with every new schism in conservatism, the one of the only people we know from local television was fired for letting the “f-word” slip at the end of a broadcast and is now vying for a state House of Representative seat. It’s a sorry state of affairs for the people who decided to pursue a career in any sort of journalism, and for the city at large.

For all the windmills that our colleagues tilted at over our quarter-century of local journalism, they also pointed to some serious problems that were quickly addressed, and on other occasions they at least forewarned their readers of the problems to come. Our radio friends have warned of us upcoming tornadoes and traffic jams and tax hikes, and even that foul-mouth and quite likable TV reporter also brought us some valuable information, although we’ve told him we’re not supporting his out-of-our district campaign, and we hate to think of what our local officials might be up to without such watchful scrutiny.

Still, we hold out no hope that “J-schools” are going to do any good, given that they all still seem obsessed with inculcating Reagan-hated into their charges, and what with all the computerization in the dying newspaper business there aren’t any copy boys left to work their way up to “staff writer.” Which leaves us wondering how people will know what their public officials are up to and what problems need to be addressed and which problems can only be forewarned, and whether anyone will really care. We’d like to think that there is still a demand for such information and that a free market system will therefor provide a supply, but so far no one’s figured out how to make it profitable, and until then we’ll enjoy the company of our last remaining media friends and encourage those fresh-faced youngsters to into gerontology or video game-making or some other promising field.

— Bud Norman

Popular Culture and Politics and Same-Sex Restrooms

Due to our upcoming brief appearance on the local amateur stage, the rehearsals for which have been taking up way too much of our time, we’ve lately been in contact with younger people. Worse yet, we’ve been in contact with their music, which is as awful as any more seasoned music-listener would expect, and also the similarly suspect political views that go along with it.

We’ve still found enough time to in the day to note a recent spate of stories on the internet about the alleged rights of self-identified transgendered people to choose the public restrooms of their choice and how people who object to same-sex marriages don’t have any right to decline to participate in same-sex wedding ceremonies, and we’ve noted how what’s left of the popular culture has responded. Big time rock stars are canceling gigs in states that refuse to toe the currently acceptable line on such matters, including some that pre-date even our aging selves, and we glumly acknowledge the culture has been declining for a while now. Our musical heroes and heroines from the good old days never had to confront such questions, and who knows where the likes of Little Richard of Chuck Berry might have weighed in if he’d been asked, but we still fondly recall an era where none of this even came up.

The cultural rot has been occurring so long now that even we recognize most of the names. Bruce Springsteen was a big deal back when we graduated from high school, and we still like that “Born to Run” song about the highways jammed with broken heroes on a last-chance power drive, but we can only roll our eyes at the news that the well-heeled one-percenter is declining a gig in North Carolina because he doesn’t like the state’s rule that prohibits people from penises from using a women’s public restroom in the state. We’re also old enough to remember the 15 minutes of fame that someone named Byian Adams had, and to note that he’s canceling a gig in Mississippi to make sure that some Baptist baker there is coerced into catering a same-sex wedding. Even Ringo Starr, one of The Beatles, who date from our early childhood and who actually were pretty damned good, is eschewing dates in North Carolina for its refusal to force those damned Baptist bakers to bake that same-sex wedding cake.

One of our old and non-rock-star-or-theatrical friends recently had some dinner and drinks with us, and he commented that most of his homosexual friends seemed to be faring well enough and that he didn’t know any transgendered people who were having any problems with the local accommodations, and that he couldn’t understand what all the fuss was about. We also don’t know any transgendered people who are having problems with the local restroom accommodations, and although our friend has a son we know some fine people with daughters that would rather not have them encountering some guy who claims to be transgendered in the public accommodations, and it seems danged strange we have to be even considering the question.

The young and relatively young people we’ve been running into lately seem a reasonable lot, though, by and large, and we think we can reach some reasonable agreement on these matters, no matter how egregious their musical tastes might seem.

— Bud Norman

Comedic Timing in “C.P. Time.”

We’ve been somewhat preoccupied this week with rehearsals for our annual brief appearance on the amateur theatrical stage, in a satirical song-and-skit fund-raising revue put on by some of the local media, but we’ve been able to pay enough attention to the news to notice that the Democratic Party’s putative presidential front-runner has thoroughly embarrassed herself in a similar effort.

Former First Lady and Senator and Secretary of State and long presumed First Woman President of the United States Hillary Clinton volunteered for a comedy bit in the New York City’s Inner Circle show, which is apparently Gotham’s equivalent of our own Gridiron Show, albeit with bigger-name guest stars, and she wound up creating one of those racial imbroglios that inevitably result from Democrat politics. The bit involved Clinton, the more or less commie Mayor of New York City Bill DeBlasio and one of the black guys from the current Broadway hit “Hamilton,” and a joke about how DeBlasio had been slow to endorse Clinton’s candidacy because he was acting on “C.P. Time.” For those who don’t run in racist white circles or self-effacingly jocular black folk circles, “C.P. Time” stands for “Colored People’s Time,” which implies that people of color are congenitally unpunctual, but it all led up to the putative punchline that DeBlasio had been acting on “cautious politician time,” so there is a certain unsatisfying humor to the gag, but it seemed to fall flat with not only the audience but the broader Democratic primary-voting pubic.

As former professional drama critics and ambitious semi-professional satirists, we found the entire performance entirely second-rate yet rife with intriguing unintended ironies. There’s the fact of that black guy dressed as Aaron Burr from the big Broadway hit “Hamilton,” for one thing, because it’s an all-black-and-Latino cast celebrating in hip-hop fashion the life of founding father Alexander Hamilton, which is so rich by itself. Hamilton remains the most controversial of the founding fathers, and the one slated to be expelled from the currency instead of the slave-holding and Indian-slaying but Democrat-party-founding Andrew Jackson, because he was the foremost founding father of America as a capitalist country and the only one who would inarguably be a Republican today, but he was also an illegitimate sire of a Caribbean family and a New York City urbanite and ardent abolitionist who envisioned a nation of similar strivers who wound up dying in a duel over a “dis,” so he’s actually a pretty likely hero for a hip-hop Broadway hit. We don’t even mind that some reportedly talented people of color have culturally appropriated this dead white male, and we suspect that Hamilton also wouldn’t mind, but we’ll resent on Hamilton’s behalf that he was somehow involved in this awful skit.

Neither Clinton nor DeBlasio exhibit any timing, and the presumably talented “Hamilton” star’s lines are clearly thrown off, and the part where he says he’s not comfortable with the whole “C.P. Time” thing hang more portentously than the punchline can stave off, and the funniest part is that both Clinton and DeBlasio are being criticized by even their most adoring press. DeBlasio might have thought he was immune by virtue of a black wife and half-black afro-wearing and fist-raising son, and Clinton might have thought she was immune by virtue of being the oft-betrayed wife of the first First Black President and the long presumed First Woman President, but they’re both still white and stuck with the comedic limitations.

Our own ventures on the amateur stage often entail some slightly uncomfortable humor about America’s convoluted race relations, and last year we had to refuse a local celebrity guest’s interest in a role because she was uncomfortable with a gag about a Starbucks barista telling a middle-aged white guy to “check his white privilege” and him responding that he hadn’t been laid in months, and challenging her to find a brother who would do the same thing, which got a big but obviously nervous laugh from our mostly liberal audience, but then again we’re not running for president as Democrats. If we were running for president as Democrats we’d know better than to frankly acknowledge such nervous understandings, and stick with a humorless scolding of any frank acknowledgements any Republican might make.

— Bud Norman

Pompeo and Circumstance

The “anti-establishment” sentiment in the Republican Party has been simmering to a point lately that almost anyone who ever held any office is now presumed guilty of something or another, which is a healthy inclination up to a point, but at some other point it becomes necessary to be more discerning. That “anti-establishment” sentiment has been simmering for a while now, after all, at least here in the heartland, long enough for the more vigilant sorts of Republicans to have installed some pretty darned good public servants in office, and we’d hate to see any of these promising political babies thrown out with the proverbial bath water.

Here in the south-central Fourth District portion of reliably Republican Kansas our rising-through-the-ranks Rep. Mike Pompeo has twice lately attracted the attention of the national press, and on both occasions we think he acquitted himself well. First he asked the Islamic Society of Wichita to withdraw a speaking invitation to a controversial cleric with ties to the Hamas terrorist organization, then he took a leading role in a Congressional investigation into the latest problems demonstrating how awful the Obama administration’s awful nuclear deal with the terror gang running the Islamic Republic of Iran has become. On both occasions he was widely criticized by many of the national and local media, of course, but we expect he further endeared himself to the vast majority of voters he’s won the past few elections.

Pompeo’s widely publicized request to withdraw that invitation was merely a request, thoughtfully explained in terms of cultural sensitivity, and implied no threats, but even here in Wichita many of the local media were worried about the inevitable violent backlash against the city’s relatively tiny number of Muslims. Even the Islamic Society of Wichita agreed that the proposed speaker’s suspect background did make him a culturally insensitive choice right around Easter and in a city where the mosque just across the corner from one of our favorite dives was once frequented by one of the guys who made the first attempt to bring down the World Trade Center, and they threw in some unsubstantiated concerns about how the allegedly threatened armed militias showing might affect the neighboring Lutheran church, and they got some good press out of it, but the Hamas-loving cleric didn’t deliver his rant and we figure it worked out about as well as any of those drivers with the “Coexist” bumper stickers could hope for.

Those nationally-circulated criticisms of that awful Iran nuclear deal struck our south-central Kansas Republican sensibilities as ridiculous, too, given how awful that deal is becoming every day. Now it’s to the point that even the Obama administration is acting indignant about the intercontinental ballistic missile tests that Iran has been pumping up, along with all the chest-thumping they’ve been doing ever since the deal was not signed by anybody but somehow sealed, and we’re sufficiently well-attuned to and typical of the local mood to be confident that Pompeo won’t suffer any political damage from his common-sense stand. We’ve even had some Islamic controversies around here at the county level, with our favorite penny-pinching County Commissioner giving an impromptu rant against Islamism we didn’t find at all offensive but which set the local media all aflutter, and another making the obligatory visit to the mosque, which had already received much favorable media coverage for its culturally sensitive stand against Hamas-affiliated clerics, and here in the very middle of America the local consensus favors a plain understanding of the millennia-old conflict.

Pompeo’s been pretty stalwart on everything else we consider important, and our occasional disagreements have been principled enough for our tastes. He’s a steady Second Amendment man, a budget hawk enough to oppose the ethanol-like win-penergy subsidies that are very lucrative and popular in these windswept parts, and usually a reliable opponent of President Barack Obama. He and another worthy-of-doubt conservative supported Obama’s plea for Congressional authority to act in Syria, which we thought futile given that the Secretary of State John Kerry was assuring all those Democrats in the benighted regions outside Kansas that it would be mere “pinpricks,” and we’re still not sure it would have been a good idea, but given how badly it’s worked out and how vaguely plausibly future historians might be able to blame it on Republican obstruction we’ll have to again allow a measure of doubt. He also supported the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which we publicly opposed because we plausibly presumed that any deal the Obama administration could be improved upon by a subsequent Republican administration, but we don’t doubt his crack staff has actually read the thousand-plus-page monstrosity and come to more knowledgable conclusions, so we’ll again give him the benefit of the doubt, even though the current Republican front-runner’s so-loyal-he-could-shoot-someone supporters would string him up for it. In any case we agree with Pompeo’s generally free-trade philosophy, which is largely shared here even among the angry white men in the Fourth District of Kansas, where the two biggest components of the local economy are agriculture and aviation, which also happen to be the first and second biggest export industries of the country. Those portions of the country where industries more vulnerable to foreign competition are the drivers of the local economy might consider Pompeo a globalist establishment tool, but they can’t deny he’s looking out for his constituents.

Pompeo first joined Congress back in ’10, when the longstanding Republican incumbent decided to make an ill-fated run at the Senate and he wound up winning a crowded and distinguished primary field. After the ’08 elections the local Democrats were beguiled by the notion that their well-funded and Harvard-educated and Indian-American think thank veteran would have the same effect on the Fourth District here in reliably Republican Kansas that a Ivy League exotic did on the nation at large, but the backlash against Obama had already begun here and the locals weren’t buying any of it, and Pompeo was not only the top in his class at West Point and an iron-curtain commander of an actual tank and editor of the Harvard Law Review just like that Obama guy but also a hugely successful and never-once bankrupt businessman in the high-tech aviation industry, and we think he’s one of the high-quality guys we can point to that the past years of anti-establishment activism have brought to public service. We  think that that everyone-describes-as-conservative and former collegiate national champion Texas Sen. Cruz, who was also swept into office on an already-simmering “anti-establishment” mood,  is also one of those guys, and the same the south-central Kansans in this reliably Republican-all-along state have agreed with their votes on a recent windswept day, and if that makes us establishment then so be it.

— Bud Norman

Those Darned Rules

Tiger Woods didn’t compete in this past weekend’s Masters Tournament, but we were reminded of a time when he was winning almost everything in sight. Being noticeably different from past golf champions he was bringing a lot of energetic new fans to the staid old game to root him on, which was great for the Professional Golf Association’s ratings, but in most cases they were fans of Woods and not of the game. In many of our conversations with them they seemed not to appreciate or even understand the brutally humbling sport, and were invariably confused about what nefarious goings-on must have been going on when their hero inevitably didn’t win.

We were reminded of this because another intriguing round of the sport of politics also occurred over the weekend, and we notice the same thing going on in both of the major party leagues. Self-described socialist Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, arguably the Democratic front-runner, and self-described billionaire Donald J. Trump, arguably the Republican front-runner, have been winning a lot lately, and both being noticeably different from past politicians they’ve both brought a lot of energetic new fans to the staid old game of party politics, and it really is hard to explain to either of these very disparate groups of political neophytes why their heroes suffered some unusual losses. The major parties’ nominating processes are more complicated than even the infield fly rule, and they did yield some admittedly unusual results.

Sanders won a convincing 56 percent of the vote in Wyoming’s Democratic caucus, continuing a seven-of-eight streak that includes some embarrassing blow-outs over arguable front-runner and former First Lady and Senator and Secretary of State and long-presumed First Woman President Hillary Clinton, but he wound up with a mere split of the state’s delegates. Trump got pretty much wiped out in the delegate race in Colorado by the described-by-everyone-as-a-conservative Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, but that happened without either a primary or caucus, which in these newfangled times is unusual. It’s all in the rule book, though, right next to the regulation about pine tar only being allowed so far up on a bat, and those who understand the game and appreciate it more than any of the players will know the rules must be enforced.

Those disgruntled Sandernistas seem to have the better gripe. Their guy keeps racking up so many convincing wins among Democratic voters that even the wags at Saturday Night Live are making fun of Clinton, but she keeps creeping ahead in the delegate count due to some goings-on that have clearly been going on for a while now, and we can easily understand why they’d think their guy is up against one of steroid-fed behemoths in one of those fixed professional wrestling shows the Republican front-runner used to produce, and well imagine their horror upon discovering that the supposed safe space of the Democratic party is so impure, but they should have the read the rules and been in the before something noticeably different attracted their attention.

These newfound fans of Sanders weren’t paying the least attention when Clinton’s fund-raising prowess and reputation for ruthlessness was scaring off all the few remaining viable opponents and getting all these rules written just in case of something decidedly different like Sanders, and they blithely figured they’d go along with any old candidate the Democrats might come up with, just as they’d always gone along with all the rest of the party’s dealmaking and ruthlessness, so there are limits to our sympathy. If their “revolution” has to occur four years from now with a 78-year-old Sanders leading the idealistic youth off the cliff we won’t shed a tear, as we’ll need them all for the alternative of a Clinton nomination.

Trump’s so loyal-he-could-shoot-someone supporters will rightly note that Colorado’s convention is peculiar in this age of open primaries and other newfangled democratic fashions in the Republican Party’s nomination process, but we’re long-involved Kansas Republicans and keen fans of the game, damn it, and we’re not ones to tell those Colorado Republicans how to choose their delegates. The convention system they chose has a certain appeal to our old-fashioned tastes, even if there probably wasn’t any smoke in those “smoke-filled rooms,” at least not tobacco smoke, and we think there’s an argument to be made that it used to turn up candidates such as Abraham Lincoln and William Howard Taft and Warren Harding and Calvin Coolidge and Dwight Eisenhower who were on the whole better than what’s been offered up by the post-’68 moves to a more directly democratic choice. In any case the rules are chosen by the people who were chosen by the party members, and they were in place before Trump announced his candidacy, for reasons best understood by the more attentive sorts of Colorado Republicans, who surely weren’t anticipating that Trump would still be around, and Trump had every opportunity to play and win by those rules. By all accounts he barely bothered, while Cruz made every effort and every smart play, and we have no sympathy for the predictably pouting Trump.

Trump’s main argument for his candidacy is that he’s an extraordinarily competent deal-maker and manager and visionary who surrounds himself with the very best people and never gets out-played in any game, so the pouting only undermines the pitch. The professionally political Cruz was playing the Republican nominating process game back when Trump was firing Dennis Rodman on the celebrity edition of “The Apprentice,” which was played by Trump’s rules, and he’s clearly the better player. He’s also been peeling off extra delegates from states that Trump won but where the rules allow some goings-on, and with a big win in Wisconsin to add to his totals he’s pursuing a viable strategy to deny Trump the needed majority for a first ballot nomination, and carefully laying the groundwork to win on a second or even third and beyond ballot. Meanwhile Trump is shuffling his skeleton staff, speaking coyly about the the possibility of riots, allowing a surrogate to threaten to have angry supporters show up at wavering delegates’ hotel rooms, belatedly hiring someone who knows about all this stuff, and supposedly apprising himself of the rules of the game that he’s playing.

If he ever gets around to reading the rule book, Trump might be surprised to find that it was written with the intention of preventing any candidate entirely unacceptable to a broad segment of the party, such as himself, from winning the party’s nomination. A similar sense of self-preservation is the sound rationale for the even harder-to-explain Democratic rules, which are still trying to prevent a Henry Wallace or George McGovern or Bernie Sanders from winning the party’s nomination, which is admirable enough, but when the alternative is Hillary Clinton, what difference, at that point, does it make?

The current hybrid system of caucuses and primaries and conventions and unbound delegates and super delegates and whatnot seems likely to serve up the two most distrusted and disliked people in America for the office of President of the States, but it might not, in which case there will be huge numbers of Sanders or Trump fans and maybe both who will be doing some serious pouting, and no foreseeable happy outcomes for the country, but we’ll live with it for now. It’s better than what the Sandersnistas and the Trumpenproletariat would could come up on the spur of the moment with to serve their side, with no thought for the idea that just as a game is supposed to produce the best player the political process is supposed to produce the best candidate, the one most broadly acceptable to the party and most representative of its traditional ideals and most likely to win a general election, and that the people who have been involved in the party with years and sweat and tears should have some say in the matter no matter how many of those newly enthused fans who of some candidate flock to the party and openly boast of their intention to “burn it down” if their guy doesn’t win.

— Bud Norman

Over at the Other League

Every now and then we avert our eyes from the desultory Republican primaries and check in on what the Democrats are up to, just as we’ll occasionally glance at the National League standings now that major league baseball is at least underway, but what we find over on the senior circuit of politics is no more heartening.

The putative front-runner in the two-person race, former First Lady and Senator and Secretary of State and long-presumed First Woman President Hillary Clinton, is on a six-game losing streak that includes some embarrassing blow-outs, and all the kids seem to dig her pesky rival, the self-described socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders from the hippie retirement village of Vermont. That’s before the Federal Bureau of Investigation concludes its criminal investigation of Clinton’s well-worthy-of-investigating e-mailing and charity fund-raising activities, which cannot end well not matter what, but it looks as if the fix is in just like one of those phony-baloney professional wrestling matches that the putative Republican front-runner used to perform. None of this is at all heartening when you suddenly recall that this isn’t mere sports, or “sports entertainment,” as the lawyers of professional wrestling like to call their “sport,” and that one of these awful people will likely enter the general election with a realistic chance of becoming president.

The game is played differently over on the Democratic side, too, and in ways that are even more egregious than forcing pitchers to be humiliated at the plate instead of letting a more competent designated hitter take the plate. There’s an unsettling preoccupation with racial and other political identity grievances, for one thing, and it’s lately been the big story. Both campaigns have been hectored by the “Black Lives Matter” movement that is the latest rage among the outsized portion of the Democratic primary electorate that is black, but Clinton’s husband, who was once the first First Black President, and has thus far endowed his frequently betrayed wife with all the political good will of that achievement. The self-described socialists’ promises of perfect economic justice and lots of free stuff is starting to resonate in the “Black Lives Matter” movement, though, and the first First Black President’s welfare reform and tough-on-crime measures are no longer fashionable, and it does make for an interesting situation. Clinton’s husband, who still somehow looms larger than his frequently betrayed yet putatively front-running wife, decided to make a full-troated defense of his past policies, albeit with less throat than his former McDonald’s-fueled from once had, and he threw in some factual stuff about how black folks generally had fared better during his administration than during the first seven-and-a-half years of the First Black President’s administration.

Oddly enough, we found ourselves rooting for the fellow, even if the sorry old son-of-a-bitch is still everything we loathe about the senior circuit. That welfare reform bill he signed really did reduce poverty by forcing people into gainful employment, the tough-on-crime stuff really did save a lot of black lives, which truly do matter, and even though he was forced on both policies by his equally sleazy advisor Dick Morris and the almost as sleazy Republican House Speaker Newt Gingrich and a whole of Republican voters we hope aren’t so sleazy, we see no reason he should apologize for any of these less famous matters. Then again, we’re not rooting for his awful wife, who until recently had been running against her frequently betraying husband to keep those “Black Lives Matter” people on her side.

Still, we can believe that the fix is in and none of this matters, and that it will come down to whether our league can put up a worthy challenger.

— Bud Norman

The Hag, RIP

God rarely grants the gift of musical genius, but let us thank God He’s not at all a snob about it when He does. He once bestowed an extra measure of the stuff on a surly young punk from a white trash ghetto sitting in a San Quentin prison cell, and Merle Haggard gratefully returned the favor by expressing his turbulent life and even more turbulent times and something at the very heart and soul of his beloved America as well as any poet or artist or musician or statesman ever did.

Haggard died Wednesday on his 79th birthday, but not before creating a body of work that rivals anybody’s in America’s rich musical history. He wasn’t just up there with his heroes Jimmie Rodgers and Hank Williams or his formidable contemporaries Johnny Cash and George Jones in the ghettoized pantheon of the rich poor white trash vein of American music, he was toe-to-toe with the George Gershwins and Hoagy Carmichaels and Duke Ellingtons and Count Basies and Frank Sinatras and Louis Armstrongs and Bob wills and his Texas Playboys and Ray Charleses and Mahalia Jacksonses and Peggy Lees and Ella Fitzgeralds and Muddy Waterses and Chuck Berrys and Elvis Presleys and all the rest at the peak of the majestic mountain that is American music. Which is not bad for a white boy who really did turn 21 in prison.

Haggard’s parents blew in to the San Joaquin valley of California from Oklahoma on the winds of the Dust Bowl, with the appropriately Okie nomenclature of James Francis and Flossie Mae, and thus he was born in the town of Oildale, California, but soon wound up living with several siblings in a converted boxcar outside nearby Bakersfield. His father was well-regarded as a musician by his neighbors, although he was also well-known for the vices usually associated with that talent, while his mother was a strict Church of Christ woman who knew how to sing those weird shape notes in the songbooks, and for the first nine years of his life young Merle pretty much kept himself in line. Haggard’s dad died, though, and he was the sort of congenitally anti-authoritarian youth that is celebrated by Mark Twain and Walt Whitman and “Cool Hand Luke” and our own selves and all the real Americans, so after that he became a habitual truant and low-level troublemaker and frequent guest of the institutions where where he encountered even worse sorts. An hilariously botched burglary on a still-open honky-tonk in Bakersfield during a rare furlough from detention eventually landed him with some serious time as a serial-if-low-level offender in San Quentin, but a serendipitous and best-selling performance by then country-and-western superstar and repentant sinner Johnny Cash, who felt a Christian obligation to visit those in prison, suggested a way out.

In most cases the white boy would have been dreaming, but Haggard actually had the God-given goods. Upon a lucky parole he was easily able to acquire a bass-playing gig with Wynn Stewart, one of the many terrific honky-tonkers who were prospering on a fertile Bakersfield country scene that was cruising along with the all the Okies and Arkies filling the honky-tonks, who had brought their oil-patch know-how along with their glorious musical tradition, and he quickly stood out among such glorious acts as the Maddox Brothers and Sister Rose and his mentor Tommy Collins and the coast-to-coast hit-making Buck Owens and his Buckeroos. He could also play the fiddle like nobody’d ever heard, even where they’d heard the best of the Texas Playboys, and he could play that twangy heartfelt Fender guitar like nobody even in Bakersfield had ever heard, which was saying something, and damn could that white boy sing. He had a gorgeously rich clear baritone voice, with all the timing and note-making phrasing you could hope to expect from the most polished pop singer, and a wringing-every-last-teardrop-from-it thing you could expect from the best of the bluesmen, and he had the range of an operatic singer, which in poor white trash terms meant he could slide up to a blue yodel or growl down in Lefty Frizzell-esque fashion to a guttural down low, and he imbued it all with such white boy soul that even Ray Charles was in awe.

More importantly yet, he knew exactly what to do with it, and he came up with songs worthy of that voice. His first recording under his own name was an amusing account of life on “Skid Row,” which didn’t sell much but still sounds great, but Wynn Stewart offered him a chance to “Sing a Sad Song,” which became a minor hit and enduring classic, and after that Merle Haggard was a star in the rich but ghettoized world of white trash music. He had some classic drinking-to-excess hits and covered all that wild-side-of-life with perfect pitch, and tales of the hard Dust Bowl times what were still with his most rabid fans of the ’60s, but didn’t gain the attention of the broader public until he wrote and sang “Okie From Muskogee.” The runaway country hit even permeated the consciousness of the broader Vietnam war-era country, and came to epitomize the cultural divide of the era as clearly as the hippie Country Joe and the Fish’s anti-war tirade with its F-bombs and anti-establishment anger, even if it was probably all meant as a sly joke, and that’s how Haggard will probably be remembered by most of his beloved nation, but it’s a shame they weren’t paying due attention to the rest of his work.

Since then Haggard and his crack bands of Bakersfield musicians have produced an extraordinary volume of American music of the first order, addressing everything from why his Church of Christ mother wasn’t to blame for him turning 21 in prison and his brilliant interpretations of the same denomination’s Alfred E. Brumley’s classic shape-note gospel songs to that all-time classic slide into the drunken abyss of “All My Friends are Going to be Strangers” and “Swinging Doors” and “Misery and Gin,” and those great recountings of Jimmie Rodgers and Hank Williams, and he threw in everything else in the broad country-and-wester spectrum from bluegrass to countrypolitan to crying-in-the-beer honky-tonk to rockabilly, and it was jazzy enough that the jazzbo purist Downbeat Magazine featured him on its cover, and bluesy enough that the blues purists regarded him as the best white bluesman since Jimmie Rodgers, and even the snobbish critics at The New York Times were struggling to explain how his best work really was pretty damned good. Throw in the brilliantly defiant skid-row anthems such as “I Can’t Hold Myself in Line” and “Street Singer” on that “Pride In What I am” album that all the hippies aped backed in the ’60s, and the “seeds of the dustbowl” elegance of his mid-80s “Kern River,” and all the damned good stuff that somehow didn’t become a hit, and it includes an amazing range of styles and emotions and ideas as a contradictory as the man himself. He eulogized his mass-murdering San Quentin pal Carl Chessman on the classic “Sing Me Back Home,” spoke up for law and order on “The Fighting’ Side of Me,” defended miscegenation with “Irma Jackson,” proudly proclaimed that “I’m a White Boy,” perfectly sang the “Workingman’s Blues,” and even went psychedelic with the hilarious “Set My Chickens Free” during one of his occasional exiles from the major labels during the ’90s, and you really have to delve deep into the catalogue to realize that he created as much first-rate American music recordings as anything we can think of.

Back in those glorious “Okie from Muskogee” days Haggard was the bane of the hippies, who had once so adored his twangy Fender-driven and train-hopping and rule-breaking and rockabilly-infused and undeniably American authenticity that the Byrds and the Grateful Dead and the hippie-country were covering his hits, and Rolling Stone magazine was singing his praises and the hippy-dippy Big Brother and the Holding Company had a counter-cultural hit pleading for his forbearance, but he wound up with a strange rapprochement with the modern world. One of Haggard’s last masterpiece recordings was on the punk rock Anti Records label, the hauntingly regretful “If I could Only Fly” album, and in his latter days the man who was forever gratefully granted a full pardon by California Gov. Ronald Reagan was criticizing the Iraq War and happily accepting a Kennedy Center honors from President Barack Obama, who spoke glowingly from the teleprompter about the poetic workingman’s wisdom of this once-imprisoned-Okie from a white trash ghetto that he’d probably never heard of, but at least the chain-smoking and dope-toking and hard-drinking gambler and obviously heartfelt Church of Christ shape-note singer with blasphemous instrumentalists was a damned brilliantly contrarian right to very end.

As much as we’ll miss The Hag, there are hundreds of songs that will provide us solace. Merle Haggard had more than 70 number-one-of-the-week country hits, but there’s one of those every week, and most of his were all-timers, which is more than you can say for any of the pretenders on the current sorry country and western scene, and they memorably expressed what a mean old world and what a great country this is, where a surly young punk from a white trash ghetto sitting in a San Quentin prison cell can make such a contribution to our culture, and we give thanks that God isn’t a snob when passing that kind of talent around.

— Bud Norman

On Wisconsin

We just had a long and long-overdue heart-to-heart conversation with a dear old friend of ours, conducted through a series a beers on our part and the famously stiff vodka-and-tonics offered at Harry’s Uptown Bar and Grill on his part, and as much as we love the guy it was a rather dreary affair. He’s a hard-working and highly intelligent and rigidly moral yet religiously conflicted fellow with well-informed and carefully thought opinions who reliably votes for the most conservative candidates, and is so far doing an extraordinarily good job of raising a thirteen-year-old son to be the sort of man who thinks through life’s most vexing questions humbly and thoughtfully and doesn’t mock handicapped people or refer to the women in his life as “pieces of ass” or embrace the most Smoot-Hawley sort of protectionist claptrap or anthropogenic global warming alarmism or any of that Young Earth creationism, and he didn’t see how any of the current presidential possibilities seemed to work out for the boy.

The only consolation that we could offer that was maybe Wisconsin could provide some good news. As it turns out, the good people of Wisconsin delivered on both sides of the vast political divide.

Our only brief experiences of the state of Wisconsin suggest it’s not a good place to be hitch-hiking through in the winter, despite the residents’ reputation for niceness, but we’ve long admired their political pugnacity. Wisconsin was home to the Progressivism of “Fightin'” Bob La Follette during the progressive era that infiltrated both parties, was at the forefront of the union movement that soon overtook most of the nation’s the public sector, and more lately under the leadership of Republican governor and duly vanquished presidential contender Scott Walker it has been at the forefront of rejection of unionism in general and public sector unionism in particular, and the state is also the home of Republican House Speaker Paul Ryan, the only Republican left talking frankly about the looming debt and entitlement catastrophe and the go-to bogeyman of the-hated-by-all-sides Republican Establishment, so we expected good result from such a place. Sure enough, red-in-tooth-and-claw capitalist and unapologetically Judeo-Crhistian Texas Sen. Ted Cruz came out with a telling majority in the Republican primary over self-scribed billionaire and real-estate-and-gambling-and-reality-show-and-piece-of-ass mogul Donald J. Trump, who thought it a shrewd move to criticize the heroic anti-anestablishmentarian Scott Walker for not raising taxes on the days leading to a Republican primary, and the self-described socialist Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders had an equally convincing win over that horrible former First Lady and Senator and Secretary of State and once-presumed First Woman President Hillary Clinton, who is almost as hard for our feminist friends to explain to their promising young daughters. The cheeseheads on both sides of Wisconsin’s vast political divides had at least offered up a starkly ideological choice between people who at least seem to believe what they’re saying, and we’ll still take our chances on that dicey play.

The next rounds of these intriguingly close races are played in the populous northeastern states, where Clinton and Sanders are presumed to have the advantages, which confirms our stereotypical prairie assumptions about that region, but at it should be clear that at least no one is inevitable, and our friend and we agree that the names on the tickets might well be someone not named Trump or Cruz or Clinton or Sanders, and that it might even be the least worst outcome. That’s how it looks from Harry’s Uptown Bar and Grill in the heart of America, at least, and we’re holding out hope that our friend’s promising young son turns out to be a great man.

— Bud Norman

Keeping All the Cards on the Imaginary Table

It’s hard to imagine a worse foreign policy than the one America has been pursuing for the past seven and a half years or so, but then again we don’t have the imagination of Donald J. Trump.

We cannot conceive of any remotely plausible circumstances that might compel an American president to launch a nuclear missile at anywhere in Europe during the next four years or so, for instance, but Trump has told an interviewer on internationally broadcast television that he wants “keep all the cards on the table” just in case. Neither can we imagine the unimaginable tragedy that would result from North Korea and Japan engaging in a nuclear war, and although Trump insists he shares our preference that it never come to pass he then literally shrugs and waves his hands and adds that at least it would be over quickly and “if they do, they do.” Although we can well understand why pressure should be brought to bear on our North Atlantic Treaty Organization partners to shoulder their share of the alliance’s many burdens, we cannot envision a more-or-less peaceful world without it, but Trump openly muses about making demands that our allies “pay up, including for past deficiencies, and if it breaks up NATO it breaks up NATO.”

Trump’s so-loyal-he-could-shoot-someone supporters will find all this appealing, and explain what a shrewd negotiator he is, him being the best-selling author of “The Art of the Deal” and the guy who came out ahead of his sucker creditors in four bankruptcies and numerous failed businesses and all, but the rest of the world is seeing it quite differently. Pretty much everyone at every end of the political spectrum in Europe and Asia and the Middle East are alarmed about the prospect of a Trump presidency, and the entirety of the Latin American world has its own concerns, of course, and Africa should should soon join in just as soon as Trump finds some reason to insult its unfortunate people, and although sneering one’s way into the opprobrium of an entire world of damn foreigners will also appeal to Trump’s so-loyal-he-could-shoot-someone supporters it strikes us as a rather poor start to repairing the last seven and a half years or so of godawful foreign policy.

The last seven and a half years or so of godawful American foreign policy have been guided by the worst of left-wing isolationism, which holds that American is so morally corrupt that any influence it exerts on the world is bound to be harmful, and the worst of left-wing internationalism, which holds that American influence can be justifiably exerted so long as it isn’t in American interests and is approved by a bunch of damn foreigners. This is hard to beat, but the Trump response combines the worst of right-wing isolationism, which holds that America is so pure that any contact with all those damn foreigners in the outside world will be corrupting, and the most random sort of right-interventionism, which claims it was against the Iraq war even though it’s no where on record saying so and is on record saying otherwise on the Howard Stern radio show in between the nude lesbian segments, and was critical of the pull-out from Iraq but still says “Bush lied, people died,” and is one day there with boots on the ground in Syria and is the next content to “bomb the “s**t” out of them and is neutral on that whole Israel-Palestinian thing but assures us that’s just another bluff.

At least he’ll stand up to that blustery and buffoonish Putin, unlike that craven weakling Obama, but the strong man Trump has been flattered by Putin’s praise and spoken kindly of his “strength” and noted that America kills people too and suggested that the current unpleasantness in Syria is best handled by Putin and one of the crack team of top-notch men that Trump always surrounds himself with is a big investor in Russia’s state-owned natural gas company and best in known in foreign policy circles as slavish apologist for Putin, but we’re assured they’re going to make great deal. Trump’s front-running Democratic counterpart was the Secretary of State who offered that disastrous “reset button” to Russia, but at least it didn’t reset relations back  to the Ribbentrop-Molotov pact. The other options are the self-described socialist Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders on one the Democrat side, for crying out loud, and Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, who has used “neoconservative” as a slur but otherwise sounds at least reasonable on the other side, so we’re hoping the rest of the world well.

Perhaps Trump’s geo-political genius is simply beyond our imagination, and he’s playing some brilliant gambit by discomfiting everyone in the entire world except his so-loyal-he-could-shoot-someone fans, but we doubt it. In that disastrous interview with the Washington Post where he pressed on the specific of his foreign policy Trump veered from a question about the Islamic to a boast about how he’d vanquished Florida Sen. Marco Rubio in the primaries by calling him “Little Marco,” and he seemed to expect that the editorial board of the Washington Post would be convinced that he could deal with any international adversaries just as effectively, and we’re sure his so-loyal-he-could-shoot-someone fans will agree, but we aren’t reassured and neither can we imagine any foreign leaders will be.

In that same disastrous interview Trump described his foreign policy as “America First,” which has a nice ring to it unless you’ve read enough relatively recent history to recall that was the slogan of the isolationists who would have let the Axis powers rule the world outside fortress America. We don’t that Trump has read enough to know that, but former “pitchforks brigade” insurgent outsider anti-establishment Republican candidate surely did, as he wrote a book long after the fact arguing that American darned well should have allowed the rest of the world to be ruled by the Axis powers, as it as in America’s interests, and we note that he’s endorsing Trump’s variety of nationalism.

— Bud Norman

The “A” Word Emerges in the Race

Abortion doesn’t seem as prominent an issue in the current presidential election as it has been in the past, but it’s still out there enough to be tripping up the front-runners of both parties. During the past week Republican Donald J. Trump was forced to walk back some comments about punishing women who have abortions, Democrat Hillary Clinton had to apologize for uttering the words “unborn person,” and both managed to offend almost everyone in the process.

An interviewer on the National Broadcasting Company, of all places, was clumsy enough to ask about the rights of “unborn children” in an otherwise softball question to Clinton, and she was careless enough to repeat the words in her answer that under current law they have no rights have all, which is quite correct as a matter of law but satisfies no one who considers the question as a political or moral matter of what the law ought to be. Those opposed to abortion believe that humanity begins at conception, or at least at some point of potential viability as a human in a world that would afford it proper care, and those who disagree believe that the potential human life that exists in a woman’s womb is best described as a fetus or fetal tissue or or an embryo or a regrettable situation or any phraseology that doesn’t imply an actual person that simply hasn’t been born yet.

Such an old hand at social issues as Clinton should have known that wasn’t going to win over any of those anti-abortion types, and written off their support years ago and instead have tried to further endear herself to the abortion rights sisterhood by sternly rebuking that otherwise polite interviewer for his clumsy phrasing, but she’s been off her game lately. She’s on a losing streak against nebbishy self-described socialist Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, whom we presume is quite on board with no rights for the not-yet-born even though we can’t ever recall him being asked about it, and her clumsy answer to the clumsily phased question can’t help.

Trump’s clumsy response, though, might have even trumped Clinton’s. When Trump told the Cable Network Broadcasting Company’s Chris Matthews, of all people, in response to what could have been a softball question, that woman should face “some punishment” for having an abortion, he was advocating a position not only offensive to the pro-abortion public also the anti-abortion movement that had long been denying it had any such intentions. Trump’s so-loyal-he-could-shoot-someone supporters were immediately defending his extremist position, then quickly defending his more moderate walk back that of course he never meant to say that, then arguing that he’d been right all along. In any case, Trump has not likely endeared himself to whatever remains of the anti-abortion wing of Republican party, not to mention whatever’s left the pro-abortion portion, and he can’t be looking good to the still-undecided majority of the party more concerned with other matters.

Trump’s walked-backed statement indicated that he hadn’t bothered to learn what the people he was pandering to believed in, which is likely to hurt him more in the long run than Clinton’s slip-up. Nobody doubts that Clinton believes a fetus or fetal tissue or embryo or unborn person or whatever you want to call it has any rights, or holds much hope that Donald J. Trump had ever given the matter much thought, and it seems likely the election will be settled on similarly muddled issues.

— Bud Norman