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October 22, 2017

What Are We Fighting For?

Virtually no politics watcher - or talker - could ignore the obvious contrast by the end of the week: the Trump and Kelly vs. Grieving Widow show from the White House up against the two previous Presidents choosing on the same day to unleash fresh critiques of the ugly scene we're in right now. When punditry is this cut and paste easy, it's worth asking... what part of this are we not getting?

That part, I think, is where it's worth considering the two appearances Barack Obama made on Thursday, in New Jersey and Virginia, to bolster the two candidates for Governor in those states. These are the marquee races of the off year season, the ones everyone will use, rightly or wrongly, to draw indications for next year and beyond (it's the one secret power Virginia possesses, that they dominate these odd year affairs. New Jersey... not so much). And Obama's quick, in and out, one and done moments can mean something big... or not.

In the case ofNew Jersey, it's hard to see where Obama makes much difference. The democrat is comfortably ahead, the Lt. Governor, Kim Guadagno is both closely tied to the worst of the Christie years, and somehow lackluster by comparison. Phil Murphy's gone on the air this weekend with a commercial meant to invoke "Bridgegate" which hits its points well. President Obama is a nice to have, and may help turnout, but ending the Christie era seems to be where this is headed, with or without him.

What could happen in Virginia seems less clear. Democrats have been generally successful statewide, and seem to have a clear formula for winning. Republicans choosing to nominate Ed Gillespie, a party insider who has never held office, looks faintly desperate, and Gillespie hasn't polled spectacularly well, though the race is in single digits, generally. But that doesn't make this a slam dunk, and Democrats have chosen Virginia as emblematic of whether the forces needed to reverse Trump-ism can succeed or not. If Gillespie wins, there will be a lot of hand wringing. And some of that will, no doubt, blow back onto the last President.

One of the reasons, Washington types say, that Obama has largely refrained from commenting on Trump's obvious yen to undo any and everything Obama did is because he's concerned that his presence is catnip to Trump's base. Republicans have drifted into deep party division since the election, but can find common ground on things they hate... like policies Obama pursued, "Obamacare" chief among them, and that slew of made up or trumped up non-scandals, like Benghazi or, lately, the "Uranium One' business that refuses to die.

For democrats, this is all dicey politics, not simply because the "scandals" have an audience (if few facts that suggest anything like what the right wants to believe), but because democrats haven't entirely decided what they want to defend, and, more ominously, just what issues they want front and center in the national debate.

When Bush and Obama made their appearances this week, it was Bush who revived the debate about how to see his presidency - liberals praised Bush for speaking out against Trump's politics, noting how they had disparaged him then... and it was Steve Bannon who served as voice for the right, slamming Bush's critique with assertions about him as a failed President. It's an assessment of Bush that's taken years to take hold within the GOP, where for years few wanted to admit how badly Bush failed, except, say, in Katrina. And it's been softened, somewhat, by liberals - me included - realizing that there was, in fact, something worse than the years of GWB. Bush was bad, but this... well...

Barack Obama, on the other hand, has faced no such reexamination, and it was telling, just in the few days since Thursday, how he remains a sacred object for the left (it's a big week for "sacred" - let's swipe it!). The literal 'amens" that accompanied his speeches, the revival of "he's the best orator on the left" encomiums, there was a lot of basking in glory going on, and not lot of hard questions. To the extent that anyone wanted to challenge the orthodoxy, it was conservatives who tried, generally rather gently, to point out that Obama's "this isn't the 18th century" and opposition to outright bigotry hadn't really stopped Trump from winning last year. And a year later, really, not much has changed.

Since the election, for her supporters, there's been a wealth of dismaying cries for Hillary Clinton to exit the public stage, even as she released a thoughtful, hugely successful memoir analyzing the politics of now and her stunning loss.In part, I think, the calls on the left to sideline Mrs. Clinton are an attempt to quarantine the feelings of loss (and, let's be honest, failure) to her and her alone. Doing that, in no small part, absolves fans of Mr. Obama - and they are legion - from facing his role in the 2016 loss, and what it means for the politics of liberalism going forward.

Avoidance, as usual, serves no purpose here. Avoiding the complexities of President Obama's role in the era of Trump - what he represents, what gets the right so riled - enables, among other things, blanket assessments of racial animus. Fear and Hatred of a Black President is no small part of this story. But it's not the only part. If it were, we'd be having a different discussion of the various rules, regulations, thoughtful policies and sensible progress being rolled over and back with every action of this Administration. It would, on the one hand, be a more thoughtful discussion. It would also, I think, be a discussion that centered more on the policies - and their actual popularity - rather than on the "if President Obama did it, I hate it" reflexology of the right, even now. Treatment of immigrants, plans for clean water, sensible approaches to urban policing - these are just a few issues where the policies being reversed by Trump not only damage the country, they don't reflect popular or even majority thinking on the topics. What they do, successfully, is remind everyone, left and right, that Trump primarily stands for smashing everything Obama stood, and stands, for.

As much as I get - and even share - the need to defend Obama on the left, I suspect that we are helping to supply the catnip. So long as the discussion of Trump and his Presidency centers on Democrats being the Defenders of Obama, we've made this debate simple not just for us, but for the hard right. And, to be gentle but firm, Obama doesn't need us to do this fight - he's perfectly capable of defending himself. What we should be defending - and what we grope around to do, these days, somewhat messily but with growing solidity - is the policies. Those are things not only worth fighting for, they are things - clean water, decent treatment of immigrant children, justice that serves minority communities as well as majority ones - that get us the majorities we need to win elections.

From special election to special election, and into this fall's first major off year contests, one constant in the coverage is that it's unclear "what Democrats have to offer to voters." It's boilerplate political language for the lack of proposals, on the left, to take matters in hand. I like both of the gubernatorial candidates, and feel good about Democratic prospects... but what are these elections fighting for? I 'll be honest... beats me. And it's easy, in the vacuum, to think Democrats are offering pretty much, well, rage: "Don't like Trump? We certainly don't. And don't you wish we still had Barack Obama? We do."

Barack Obama is not going to need to win another election for himself. Encouraging voters to turn out for him or about him - or by extension, to "fight back against Trump" - may not get the results we need, and may encourage an ugly, already emboldened opposition with an especially ugly agenda. And Democrats need to face the opposite problem of a George W Bush - that Obama, while not a terrible President, was, as Presidents are, flawed, imperfect, and occasionally wrong. In order to get to what comes next, there's a need to let go of what's past. In ways big and small, I think the left is groping towards that reality. But this past week was a reminder of what a struggle remains: figuring out what we are actually fighting for, and not naming it Barack Obama.

Posted at 02:21 PM in 2018 elections, anger, Current Affairs, Politics | Permalink | Comments (0)

October 20, 2017

Kelly's Heroes

Nothing, really, changed yesterday. Nothing changed about how awful the President is, how cruel and thoughtless he is with words, or the near sycophantic way his close aides and supporters defend the all but indefensible. Nothing about yesterday was different than the day before, different from today, or tomorrow.

Still, I have to admit I was among those who thought, somehow, that Gen. John Kelly was better than this, better than most, better than those willing to sacrifice their own reputations in service to propping up the already dismal, failed Presidency of Donald Trump. Maybe it was the way he seemed to qualify his comments in the past, or the way he "took charge" as Chief of Staff both by installing order and by clearing out some of the worst of the worst whispering in Trump's ear. Without illusions that Kelly was anything other than a creature of the far right, I still figured, somehow, we were better off with him there than not.

Nothing changed... and yet where we are, now, is different.

So long as Kelly maintained the fig leaf, the gossamer veil, of somehow standing outside of the ugly divisions in our politics, he seemed to serve as an example that we could, somehow, get through this. It wouldn't be perfect, people would disagree strongly, but we could survive this with some shred of our dignity intact.

As of today, it's the veil that has been ripped away. (Or, yes, was never there at all.)

Like many on the right - Kelly was seduced, I think, into asserting himself as arbiter. He stood in front of the White House Press - first mistake - just days after his first such curious appearance, claiming that the treatment of military deaths and outreach to grieving families should be above politics. While carefully and deliberately politicizing them. By picking sides. It's a hallmark of conservatism these days, this perfectly irony-free approach to the discourse, the mouthpiece who says no one is discussing this issue on a program where he's literally discussing it. It's the woman from Fox News saying Hollywood doesn't take sexual harassment seriously, ignoring the state of her own network.The think tanker who says we don't know what happened in Benghazi after dozens of investigations and reports.

We don't know, actually, what happened in Niger. We don't know why it's taken days for the White House to acknowledge this disaster, to even reach out in a pro-forma way to the grieving, still without an explanation or reason for their deaths. Is it really for the White House Chief of Staff to wade into this complicated, fraught set of events to climb on his high horse and assail everyone else as unworthy to even discuss or question what's going on? Probably not... but is anything sacred, really, these days?

Kelly's life as a true believer isn't hard to see: he unleashed the forces of ICE during his short tenure at DHS, took the reigns of that first laughable travel ban, and the second, also quite inept one. He seems stiff, hidebound, and, since yesterday, throughly stuck in that fantasy that the good old days were a vast improvement on where we are now. It's not a great look for a white Catholic Irish guy from Boston. Or anyone, really.

The problem here isn't that it's depressing, or surprising, to see Kelly dive into the pit of muck that constitutes the political discourse now - jump right in, hope the water's warm enough for ya. And it's not some "new low" for the Trump folks - I'm not interested in retreating into yesterday myself. Maybe it's just that, like the rush of fall into winter, every day gets a little bit darker. Kelly's decision to sacrifice even the barest suggestion of being above the hatefulness - to politicize his own son in the process, to attack a black female public official without a trace of awareness of the optics, to confirm the literal worst of people's suspicions about Trump and his staff - becomes just another example of what we're losing and how bad it's already become.

This is what we're dealing with. It's helpful, I suppose, to realize just exactly who a person is, without pretending, trying not to see. No fool like a hopeful, naive, old fool. I suspect Kelly isn't even entirely aware of just what he gave away yesterday, how revealing it was to see his portrait of Dorian Grey for what it is. Seeing who Kelly's hero really is, giving away his credibility and his reputation for a pot of mythical gold. Is nothing sacred? No, sir, it is not.

Posted at 10:08 AM in anger, Current Affairs, Politics, War and Peace, world | Permalink | Comments (0)

October 19, 2017

How Bad Do You Want It?

The singular liturgy of this presidency is about sinking to the bottom. All of these "we've crossed a new line," "This isn't normal," "He's reached a new low" (whether literally in polls or figuratively). If there's a reason so many seem so depressed and so anxious, surely it's the rampant negativity around charting just How Bad This Is and How Much Worse Can It Possibly Get.

As someone who's certainly right there as well - at best my "oh god, he's still president" thoughts have gone from every morning, to oh, about every other - I have to say, I think it's past time we think about something other than the depth of despair or the lowering of whatever bar we're using. By which I mean that it's getting to the point where we need, I think, to just accept that this is the President we have and the fact that he's terrible is just a fact to be lied with, not a constant search for how much more terrible he could possibly get.

Because, let's be honest, he's already clearly dead last.

The past couple of days - with their startling, even for him, revelations of callous indifference to the suffering of the families of soldiers killed in action - have surely defined a "new low"... but what really is new? Trump has shown no particular capacity to show empathy or understanding of the suffering of others, whether it's hurricane victims, the casualties of mass shootings, or military deaths since the start of his presidency, if not before. While I'm hesitant to get all psychological about it, It's clear Trump's main thinking is about himself and his needs and his desire to be sen as successful and well liked. The needs of other, even those closest to him, never mind strangers, have never seemed especially paramount.

Similarly, bemoaning Trump's failures to understand the policies he's dealing with, in any and every area of government, seems to miss the point. His fans elected a blowhard who's main feature was mouthing off, incoherently, about the things he didn't like without offering much in the way of actual, practical solutions. The3 comedy of errors around his "Build That Wall" promise are not just indicative of his unseriousness, they are the prime example of it. And it's why, often, hand wringing about the possible outcomes of worst case scenarios Trump could create is misplaced... he's so incompetent and ineffective, he can't even succeed at ruining things, except those of his own making.

To be sure, there's a lot of bad things happening and plenty about which to be concerned. Those concerns, I'd argue, ultimately have less to do with Trump personally, than they do with the awfulness of say, his appointees, or the broken down, ineffective nature of Congressional leadership within the GOP. DACA's demise, or CHIP expiration are really about a failure of Congress to step in. Scott Pruitt's destructive path through EPA or Jefferson Sessions' reductive approach to Justice are more a function of their agendas, more than Trump's. By taking Trump out of some of these equations, and focusing on the real threats, it's possible to figure out when and where to take action.

As it stands, this relentless focus on charting Trump as a downward spiral is a distraction with no endpoint and no real point at all. He is, simply, that bad. He is capable, it seems, of near limitless depths. But so what? Outside of impeachment (or a fanciful, if not impossible, hope for the execution of the 25th amendment), he is where he is and he is what we've got. As weary as I am of the "Trump hits new low" dynamic, my sense is the public soured on this at least over the summer. This narrative is obvious, and old. And we need to get on with figuring out how to move past it. Impeachment requires, most likely, a fundamental shift in the composition of the House. At the very least, harnessing the energy around hating Trump to wards progress in Congressional races is a practical step. And we could stand to make some of those, rather than raging, impotently, at How Bad This Has All Become.

When we get around to charting the - hopefully brief - history of this presidency, there's little doubt about how this failure will be seen, in all it's contours, horrific events, callous words, and thoughtless acts. Practicing a measure of acceptance about Trump, who he is, how he behaves, how inappropriate and unacceptable all of this is, doesn't take a near daily exploration of what depth he's sunk to now. Yup, he literally insulted the wife of a dead Army Ranger to the point of tears. That's what he's capable of. Shouldn't we figure out what we're capable of, instead?

Posted at 11:58 AM in 2018 elections, Current Affairs, Ethics, Issues, Politics | Permalink | Comments (0)

October 12, 2017

Knowing

By no means a Hollywood insider, I have to say, I am just a lover of film. Have been since I was at least 13. That's the summer - I remember it well - that I spent in the dark of the Walters Art Gallery auditorium getting my introduction to the classics of film. Fred Astaire, Ginger Rogers, Joan Crawford, Katharine Hepburn... I fell in love with Hollywood's Golden Age. It led me to The Oscars, and histories of The Academy, and to taking film seriously, and to the criticism of Pauline Kael (along with Steinem, the writer I aspire to be).

I don't care a lot about celebrity, but I like getting the "inside scoop" on Hollywood, how films are made, who's doing what, what it takes to get to the top. Over the years, I've learned about producers, and studios and the work of directors... just to keep up, to be "in the know."

The point of all of this, and why I bring it up now is that... I'm no insider, and even I can't say I had no idea what was going on with Harvey Weinstein.

In the midst of his stunning downfall, the claims of "I had no idea" or "if I had known" are spreading far and wide. And I get it. No one, really, had a handle on the specifics and the scope of Weinstein's activities until near simultaneous reporting from The New York Times and The New Yorker (I'll get to Ronan Farrow in a minute), and there's an enormity to the revelations in total that matters. But at the same time... this thing about "knowing," and what it means, sticks with me, and I suspect, it will haunt us in film and pop culture in the months to come.

My point about knowing, and saying that I knew... something, is that Harvey Weinstein's very public lifestyle and professional behavior were pretty much impossible to hide. He was proclaimed legendarily difficult, temperamental, and damned everywhere with faint praise when directors and stars of his productions were interviewed. Stories abounded of his crass acts, bad moods and public unpleasantness. They were joined - and here's what people tended to focus on - by tales of his passionate concern for the quality of the finished product, his commitment to the talent, and his hucksterish skills promoting the work he cared about.

And herein lie a number of the problems his actual behavior have revealed. First, there's the unmitigated power he held over individuals and careers. The success of Miramax, and subsequently The Weinstein Company, lay in cornering the market of "Art House" or "Classy" productions, the stuff we call "Oscar bait" and "small films" which imply both Too Good for the Mass Audience and a sort of labor of love that may never make back its cost. In fact, Weinstein was very good at turning a profit on these productions, both by keeping them relatively cheap and promoting the hell out of the ones that he thought would catch on. But outside of Weinstein, that kind of success has been increasingly rare. And because of it Weinstien had a power over one segment of the film industry (at his height) that was fairly unmatched going back perhaps as far as the days of the great moguls. That power, in turn, made it easy for him to corner aspiring starlets and other neophytes, and behave in spectacularly inappropriate ways with no fear of consequence.

Second, Weinstein benefitted from the casual ways of doing business in Hollywood, where there is a formal casting process for most roles and another, less formal approach to star parts and star making ones. This story isn't new, and the rumors have abounded, forever, that the route to stardom for many, if not most, is littered with agreeing to do things one wouldn't necessarily want to do... and the winners are the ones who did. The revelations of Weinstein, literally "go down on this and I'll make you a star," are little more than... well, the fantasy made flesh, and a reminder that the reality is way worse than any fantasy would ever imply.

Weinstein's fall, some have suggested, is actually an indication that he hasn't actually been powerful for some time, and I tend to agree. Primacy has a short shelf life in Hollywood, and we're long past the days of high Merchant Ivory and Shakespeare in Love. The Weinstein Company is important, but plenty of avenues exist to go independent, and Moonlight is merely the latest in a string of examples of how the Awards givers are aching to challenge the public to see more and better. Weinstein can be taken down now because, in part, his hand doesn't control all the levers like it used to - remember when he launched Tina Brown into Talk? And while this week's events may have hastened his breakup with Georgina Chapman, how long was that marriage going to last if Marchesa's dominance of the gown market was sliding away from lack of celebrity stylist use?

The thing about Weinstein in Hollywood is that there's always a Weinstein. Someone with too much power (hey Mike Ovitz), too much control (hey Mike Eisner), too much bad behavior (hey Simpson and Bruckheimer). The question is, do we plan to take the next woman - or man - seriously when charges of sexual misconduct come up? Is Hollywood planning to rule some behavior ethically unacceptable, no matter how powerful? Or, as we did this time, are we going to sit there and pretend, with straight faces, that we would have done something... if only we had known. Because we knew. People knew. And people did, in essence, nothing.

In the aftermath, as we do in America, there's a fervent search for someone to blame. It makes things easier, and absolves us from the harder conversations that a) lots of people have some responsibility here and b) that blaming isn't really the point. Blame Hillary Clinton for not responding fast enough. Blame NBC for not feeling that Ronan Farrow's story was strong enough last March or last August... or whenever. Blame Cyrus Vance Jr. for not prosecuting Weinstein in 2015. Blame Bob Weinstein, because surely "brother's keeper" ought to mean something. Blaming is useless (and with Clinton, among a list of politicians and other celebrities, especially ridiculous), and misses the point. If this behavior troubles you deeply - and God knows, shouldn't it? - then the problems we have are about preventing it, and taking it seriously when its reported. And I, for one, have heard precious little about fixing that.

I hate the idea that good people knew and did nothing. It saddens me to think that women who could have saved one another from predatory behavior were too scared or felt too powerless to intervene. It angers me that someone like Vance, or members of the TWC board, can sit there and make excuses for not doing enough, or anything, soon enough. Mostly I just hate knowing that as bad as I ever thought Harvey Weinstein was, he was something far, far worse. The problem is.. that's not all we know. But I think we'll pretend not to know, again, next time.

Posted at 04:37 PM in celebrities, Current Affairs, Film, Media/Mags, women | Permalink | Comments (0)

October 04, 2017

What The Heck Is Happening?

The truly off kilter thing about the politics we're experiencing these days... well, how many FB posts and Twitter stories start that way, actually? I have one friend who insists we have to make clear, always, how not normal this moment this is... yet I feel (still) the not normal part pretty much speaks for itself. Every day it seems, is a new round, of "What is this?" and "Why is this happening?"

I wondered, for a hot moment, if the arrival of John Kelly as Chief of Staff really did signal some sort of new phase - as if, somehow, 6 months of an Administration constitutes a "phase" - and while that idea seems out the window (such a short time, too!), losing Sebastian Gorka and... what was his name? Bannon? did seem like a shift, if not to us, then surely to the ardent believers of... whatever it was Steve Bannon and folks like Gorka were trying to sell.

There's nothing I find quite so ludicrous in all of the politics of the "Trump right" than the notion that Bannon serves, somehow, as the movement's "deep thinker." Trump, obviously, has no fixed ideology, no clear core of beliefs to animate him except, apparently, "mine" and "more." Bannon, it was suggested, filled that (vast, gaping) emptiness with something termed "economic nationalism" and some sort of "America First" approach to our standing in the world - even more oddly, as if the concept were somehow new and untried. As I suspected, without Bannon, much of this grand spell making has collapsed like a house of cards (no, not "House of Cards" - which seems cheerfully quaint to watch now that the madness has taken over DC).

Much of what Bannon was trying to sell - which he has taken back, incoherently, to Breitbart and plans of further electoral mischief on the right - would be interesting if he knew even a smidge of what he was talking about. Though aimed at domestic prejudices, like anti-immigrant fervor and class resentment, Bannon crafted a worldview that was disgusted, most, with a kind of global groupthink that has, admittedly, seized much of the developed world's political establishments. Corporate and "global," the Establishment view favors epic trade agreements, easy cross border "free" trade, and rationalist approaches to international conflict, preferably addressed in coalition.

And for the good it's done - isolating a number of bad actors; providing, yes, a steady stream of inexpensive goods for mass consumption across international markets; crafting several interesting and even effective diplomatic solutions to complex issues (such as the Iran nuclear deal) - it's worth pondering what it hasn't: wealth is ever more concentrated in the hands of a few; those isolated bad actors (Russia) have little choice but to fight back by any means necessary; and truly intractable international problems (such as Syria) simply won't bend to international plans. More to the point, Bannon and various European actors have identified an equally pernicious weakness: in the absence of a healthy debate between traditional Left and Right, those who feel unrepresented, or poorly treated in this scenario have little choice but to go to the edges and extremes of political discourse.

Trump, in this scenario, may serve as the international example of what can happen when a nation doesn't pay enough attention to the threat posed by extremism. Since his election, France has rejected Marine LePen, while Germany and England returned women leaders to familiar roles while serving their parties with double digit losses in seats and political support. In Germany, this has Angela Merkel struggling with a resurgent far right; In England, while nationalism has folded in on itself, a youthful far left has arisen to reject Teresa May's muddled middle, yet lacking anywhere near the support to claim a majority of its own.

In part, Europe's troubles are uniquely their own, the fallout of creating an EU superstructure over nation states whose populations don't necessarily see the utopian benefits initially promised. In that, "Brexit" is simply the abreaction of the nation least committed to the ideal in the first place. But one could point to Sweden, for instance, which has routinely rejected diving head first into the common currency, or the non-Brexit, messy, will-they-or-won't-they nailbiter elections various countries have had accepting or rejecting provisions of EU membership over its lifespan. Fundamentally, even unsurprisingly, the EU doesn't necessarily sell itself, despite what the intellectual class insists to those who Just Don't Get It.

If this sounds like I'm getting on board the Bannon crazy train, think again. Bannon's incoherent mix of rejecting trade deals, reliance on racial tensions and resentments, and vague notions of closed border bliss make no sense and serve little purpose but to pump up fear and and anger and internal conflict. Blinkered notions of "nationalism" are worse, it turns out, than no answer at all. And Bannon's extreme incoherence is yet another indication that the real rot here is within the American conservative movement, which long ago gave up intellectual arguments and policy development in favor of sloganeering, populism and finger pointing. Even "moral decency," the old tropes of the religious right, have fallen away.

By removing Bannon and Gorka and others, like Flynn, who represented a truly frightening prospect for American leadership here and abroad, Trump probably managed to take himself from genuinely dangerous to merely hopelessly ineffective. Yes, he's appointing judges, eviscerating recent regulations, and threatening so much worse. But resistance, rejection, and Trump's seemingly endless skill to mess himself up are providing something of a backstop to the ground under us completely giving way. Right now, blinkered and bruised as it is, my own sense that we can survive this and fix what he breaks remains largely intact. I don't blame anyone for rejecting me as too Pollyanna for belief... but we're gonna need something to hold onto in this turbulent, chaotic, time. I choose to believe much of this, while bad, is temporary. But that hope, in the end, rests on faith in people to find a better way out of this. And that, even I'll admit, seems especially elusive just now.

It's worth remembering that at the heart of the dissatisfaction with globalism, free trade and international economics is rage and disappointment that is real and unlikely to go away... and that's because the dissatisfied are, in ways large and small, right about the problems they see. The economic injustices are real, the mistreatment of the masses is real, the obliviousness to the suffering of those being hurt is all too real. We do need a greater sense, among the "smart set," the Establishment, those doing somewhat better than those worst off... some awareness that debate is not just an intellectual exercise, that anger left to fester is toxic, that failing to do something is not just stasis, but an actual failure.

Whatever the heck is happening, whatever it is Steve Bannon hoped to accomplish, it's no good to pretend that this is just about racist know nothings being fed a steady diet of lies and misinformation. Discontent abounds. Very real economic pain is all too visible, should one choose to look. Revolutions have been built on a whole lot less. And the damage that yet can be done letting problems fester isn't like anything we've seen so far.