Was Valley Forge Necessary? Wednesday, May 3 2017 

History and Media and Politics victorgold 8:32 pm

I have been doing a lot of thinking about the Revolutionary War. A lot of good people got killed in it. I don’t know if anybody remembers Nathan Hale, but he was a real American patriot who got hanged in it. Sad.

Was it really necessary? I mean, it seems to me that something could have been worked out with the British about the tax on tea. All that good Lipton’s dumped into New Hampshire Harbor.

I think it was New Hampshire. Maybe Boston, but I carried New Hampshire big time and I know if they had any say in it, there wouldn’t have had to be a midnight raid by Paul what’s-his- name or good American boys freezing their asses off at Valley Forge. So unnecessary. Really horrible.

Sound bite to remember

The good thing about not knowing history is you can’t make the mistake of forgetting it.

–– VG

 

Report From Trump’s Alt-Reich (6) Sunday, Mar 5 2017 

History and Politics , victorgold 8:37 pm

Executive tweets, 6:35 a.m. – 6:49 a.m., 3/4/17

Terrible! Just found out that Obama had my “wires tapped” in Trump Tower just
before the victory. Nothing found. This is McCarthyism!

Is it legal for a sitting President to be “wire tapping” a race for president prior to anelection? Turned down by court earlier. A NEW LOW!

In the South of my political youth – the 1950s and ’60s – we took our crackpot chief executives in stride. After a vituperative rant before the Louisiana state legislature – akin to Donald Trump’s recent White House news conference – Earl Long’s wife and nephew put the governor in a straitjacket and shipped him off to a Texas sanitarium. Two states over and a decade later, when George Wallace’s campaign opponents learned that Wallace had suffered a combat fatigue breakdown during World War II, they charged that it disqualified him from holding the Alabama governor’s office.

Discharged from the sanitarium, Uncle Earl roared back to Baton Rouge, claiming, “If I’m crazy now, I’ve always been crazy.” On the stump, Wallace, pointing to a bill of health from his veterans hospital, quipped, “I’m the only candidate in this race who has a certificate proving he’s sane.”

It goes without saying that America’s 45th president has neither the candor nor the wit to match those ripostes. Or to point out that if his family and staff enablers took the minimal step of placing him in a straitjacket, it would save the nation from an endless streak of manic presidential tweets.

To the point, it has been evident for some time that Donald Trump’s mental elevator stops several floors short of the Tower, though politically correct terms like megalomaniac and narcissist have been applied to avoid the embarrassing fact that 63 million adult Americans cast their ballots last November for a man who is flat-out crazy.

Still, as George Packer reminds us in the February 27 issue of the New Yorker, Section 4 of the Twenty-Fifth Amendment to the Constitution was written and ratified to take care of just such a dilemma. All that’s required is that a majority of the White House staff or the Congress declare a President unfit for office in order to replace him with the Vice President. Given the oligarchical makeup of the Trump Cabinet and plantain-spined nature of a Republican Congress afraid of a Trumpite backlash, however, the odds against that taking place are 10 million to one.

No, what the moment obviously calls for is a will and a voice like that of my former boss Barry Goldwater. Blunt-spoken Barry, never, in his years on Capitol Hill or as a presidential candidate, afraid to call a spade a goddamn trowel.

Millennials should know that was Senator Goldwater who, in 1974, led the Republican delegation to the White House to tell Richard Nixon that it was time for him to resign the presidency. Again, it was steel-spined Barry who, ten years later, whatever the backlash from evangelical voters, told reporters that the Reverend Jerry Falwell needed “a swift kick in the ass.”

So it is that I can see the old man now, after reading the latest presidential tweets, telling his staff “We’ve got a head case in the Oval Office,” then heading for the Senate floor to call for action under Section 4 of the Twenty-Fifth Amendment. TERRIBLE! A NEW LOW!

Sound bite to remember

“If all I knew about Barry Goldwater is what I read in the papers, I’d have voted against the sonuvabitch myself.”

— Barry Goldwater, post-election appraisal / December 1964

 

Report From Trump’s Alt-Reich Friday, Feb 17 2017 

History and Politics , , victorgold 10:43 am

I have just finished reading Volker Ullrich’s recent biography of Hitler and came away with the impression that any comparison between the Fuehrer and Donald Trump is faulty because:

1. Though Hitler, like Trump, was a megalomaniacal narcissist, he sought adoration and acclaim in order to gain power, whereas Trump sought power in order to gain adoration and acclaim.

2. In his speeches before the Reichstag, Hitler did not constantly refer to the size of his election victory and Nuremberg rally crowds.

3. Asked about the rise in anti-Semitism throughout the country, Hitler did not reply that his son-in-law was Jewish and some of his best friends were Jews.

Sound bite to remember

“I don’t carry a pistol. It would slow me down if I wanted to run.”

— Louisiana Governor Earl K. Long (circa 1957)

 

Twittering Abe Lincoln Friday, Jan 20 2017 

History and Politics , , , victorgold 7:30 pm

Selected tweets from our 16th President (1860-64)

November 1860:

RailSplitter @railsplitter
Election won, BIGTIME! Whipped Steve Douglas, two other losers. Second win over Lyin’ Steve though Illinois Senate vote in ’58 was stolen

*                                  *                                  *

in rigged election. What a phony!

January 1861:

RailSplitter @railsplitter
Southern clown Jeff Davis claiming my election not legitimate. OUTRAGEOUS! Looks like war. But

*                                  *                                  *

best way to stop spread of slavery is build a wall across Mason-Dixon Line and make rebels pay for it!

November 1862:

RailSplitter @railsplitter
McClellan turns out to be low-energy general. Told him, “You’re fired.” Probably will run against me in ’64 but he’s all talk, talk, talk, no action.

February 1863:

RailSplitter @railsplitter
Stanton-Seward arguing again. Should never have hired team of rivals. Totally embarrassing.

November 1863:

RailSplitter @railsplitter
Speech in Pennsylvania. Town called Gettysburg. Lousy staff work. Would draw bigger crowd in Philadelphia.

January 1864:

RailSplitter @railsplitter
Hired new general. Grant. Said to drink a lot but captured Vicksburg, wherever that is.

September 1864:

RailSplitter @railsplitter
Sherman marching through Georgia. He and Drunkie Grant claiming credit for winning war. RIDICULOUS! If I’d taken command myself

*                                  *                                  *

it would have been over two years sooner!

November 1864:

RailSplitter @railsplitter
Re-elected! HUGE win! Staff now talking about my legacy. Suggest face on five dollar bill and naming White House bedroom after me.

*                                  *                                  *

RailSplitter @railsplitter
Better idea. Face on Thousand Dollar bill, adding two floors and renaming building LINCOLN TOWER!

 

Sound Bite to Remember 

After a century and a half in business, Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey will close down in May. They obviously decided they couldn’t compete with what’s going on in Washington the next four years.

–VG

 

PAGING JOE McCARTHY Tuesday, Dec 20 2016 

Ethics and History and Movies and Politics , , , victorgold 6:30 pm

Official GuidePost of the Alt-Center (2017-2021)

 

At last count, Hillary Clinton’s popular vote margin over Donald Trump was upward of 2.8 million votes. It would have been twice that number except for the millions of votes stolen by Russian hackers in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin that would have made Clinton president-elect instead of Vladimir Putin’s Manchurian Candidate.

The second sentence of the above paragraph is untrue, the spurious kind of “fact” we’d be getting from Trump’s early morning tweets if the outcome on November 8 had been reversed. However, anyone who wants to pass it on through the internet is free to do so. There’s no point leaving the field of social media fabrication open to Michael Flynn’s pizza-porn crackpots.

Flynn, as you know, is the retired Army general picked by Trump to be his national security adviser. Among the general’s credentials for the job: He was the honored guest, seated next to Putin himself, at a Kremlin gala sponsored by the Russian propaganda channel RT, which Flynn gratuitously compared to CNN (much like George Patton’s 1945 equivalence of the Nazi party with the Democrats and Republicans, which got Patton removed as commander of the Third Army).

Leonid Brezhnev, Putin’s Communist boss when he served as a spymaster in the KGB, has to be chortling in his grave at the prospect of a White House national security advisor who takes luxury junkets to Moscow paid for by the Kremlin. And now, if the autocrat in Trump Tower has his way, we can look forward to a Secretary of State so much in bed with the Russian dictator he’s been bemedalled as a member of the Russian Order of Friendship.

And what exactly are Rex Tillerson’s diplomatic credentials? As CEO of ExxonMobil he’s spent the better part of recent years wheeler-dealing across the globe not on behalf of American interests but those of his multinational corporation. Not that the country’s interests and ExxonMobil’s coincide. But when they diverge – as when the State Department imposed sanctions on Russia after its takeover of Crimea – Tillerson earned his Order of Friendship medal by lobbying Congress and the State Department to lift those sanctions.

So we’ve come to this. Who would have thought, in the dim, distant days of the Cold War when Joe McCarthy was warning about Communist agents in the State Department, that it wouldn’t be a liberal Democrat but a Republican president who’d open the White House doors to a Russian dictator trained by the KGB?

And what would Tailgunner Joe be saying on the Senate floor at this point? I can see him railing about General Flynn’s dining with Putin (“a disgrace to the uniform”) and Rex Tillerson’s ties to Russian oligarchs (“an enemy within”). And on hearing the latest poll that shows no fewer than four out of 10 Republicans now have a “favorable” view of the Russian dictator, labeling them (as he did the Democrats at the GOP convention in 1952) “the party of treason.”

Sound bite to remember (by those gullible “anti-globalists” who voted for Putin’s poodle):

“There are no nations. There is no democracy. There is only IBM and ITT and ATT and DuPont, Dow, Union Carbide, and Exxon.”

–from the motion picture “Network,” Arthur Jensen’s (played by Ned Beatty) corrective lecture to Howard Beale (Peter Finch)

 

 

 

Uncivil War Sunday, Nov 13 2016 

History , , victorgold 8:52 pm

As a candidate, Donald Trump said the election would be rigged and refused to say he’d accept its outcome. His followers threatened to take to the streets and start a “revolution” if he wasn’t elected. Now his campaign manager calls for national unity and complains because Clinton supporters have taken to the streets and refused to accept the outcome of an election in which their candidate won a plurality of the popular vote.

What went around in Trump’s mob-inciting anti-Muslim, anti-Hispanic, anti-Semitic, racist, misogynistic, campaign has come around in its aftermath. We are at the beginning of an Uncivil War which, like the Civil War a century and a half ago, is likely to last four years.

Don’t say we weren’t warned.

Soundbite to remember
The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.
–Edmund Burke

 

Twentieth-Century Blues Monday, Oct 3 2016 

Arts and History , , victorgold 6:45 pm

I reached my eighty-eighth birthday – or as Everett Dirksen used to call it, “natal anniversary” – last week, and what better way to celebrate than revisiting the past with a trip to New York to see a revival of the 1928 Ben Hecht-Charles MacArthur comedy “The Front Page”?

About the year 1928: Looking back at the 88 autumns since the play first appeared on Broadway, it was the last year of true American innocence. The next year brought the Great Depression, followed 10 years later by the Second World War, followed in the next half-century by the Cold War, followed by . . .

Still, all things considered, they were great years to have lived through; provided you were lucky enough to be an American. (Readers’ Advisory: Colin Kaepernick fans had best move to another blog since this one requires that you stand, if only on uncertain octogenarian legs, when the national anthem is played.)

But back to revisiting the past in New York City: My first visit to Manhattan came when, as a 23-year-old Army sergeant, I was sent to a training school at nearby Fort Slocum. It was the autumn of 1951, the memorable season when Bobby Thomson’s “shot heard round the world” sent Willie Mays’ Giants to the World Series and Jackie Robinson’s Dodgers to the doldrums.

Sixty-five years and the turn of a century brings cosmic change: The Giants and Dodgers are gone; Lindy’s, where I was given a late-night table next to Jimmy Durante, is gone; Birdland, where I stood in line to hear Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker, is gone; Jack Dempsey’s restaurant, where young Sammy Davis, Jr. sat at a nearby table while I heard Joe Louis tell an interviewer he was hanging up the gloves, is history.

Yet some happy relics of what Henry Luce called the American Century remain:

Times Square (though the Times has long since moved) is still vibrant, any hour of the day or night; New York theater is still alive and well (“The Front Page,” with Nathan Lane, John Goodman, and Robert Morse, will be around for some time to come); Sardi’s, the place to go after the show, not only survives but thrives, as does Patsy’s, the best Italian restaurant west of Milan according to Frank Sinatra.

And more: As a dogface soldier during the Korean War I had the impression that it was the khaki uniform that led the locals, from the doorkeeper at Lindy’s to the gatekeeper at the Polo Grounds, to treat me (and my fellow grunts) with special courtesy. New Yorkers, after all, were reputed to be a rude, surly lot. Not so. Six-and-a-half decades later and in no uniform other than casual civilian wear, I still found New York, from Penn Station to Broadway, the most hospitable, visitor-friendly city in America.

My birthday wish? That I could say what Joe Louis – the greatest heavyweight champion that ever was – said when asked that autumn evening at Dempsey’s how he’d sum up his career: “I did the best I could with what I had.”

Not true, I’m ashamed to say, in my case. But God and Geritol (if it’s still around) willing, I have rounds left to make up for lost time.

Sound bite to remember

“If I’d known I was gonna live this long, I’d have taken better care of myself.”
— Jazzman Eubie Blake (1887-1983)

 

Next Page »