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Gavin Newsom's Electric Kool Aid Recall Test

One of Gavin Newsom's biggest flaws - which, I suspect, will turn out to be key to this California recall vote - is that he has been, up to now, one of the more generically forgettable politicians of his time. Vaguely handsome, absolutely unmemorable, Newsom has casually coasted through success on the Left Coast by being less visibly flaky than Jerry Brown while catering to the needs of the deeply progressive base of California's Democrats... and somehow, leaving next to no trace of mostly being there at all.

Quick - quote me a memorable Newsom speech.

Newsom works best, as politicians do, by never being too risky, and it largely paid off. Even when he had to get tough during the pandemic, for much of it he was acting in the shadow of Andrew Cuomo and Jay Inslee - Inslee because Washington state got hit first, and Cuomo as New York got hit harder. Newsom probably needed to respond sooner and more forcefully, but his failures on that score were subsumed by the ultimate scale of the pandemic, and more than most, he was able to have the kind of success you can only have when every level of government in the state largely falls in line and works for the same goals.

But one fancy dinner at French Laundry, and a restive population that has long equated their state with breezy openness, and Newsom looked a bit, well, cavalier. Decisions about reopening were bound to be complex, but Newsom embodied the "Do as I say, not as I do" hypocrisy that, frankly, has become a struggle for almost all of us who care about public health. When to unmask, when to go back to restaurants... our choices have been a confused mix of Listening to Science and Deciding to Do It Anyway.  It's worth noting, for instance, no one involved in the French Laundry episode got sick. But that just kind of underscores the "well, why do we have to isolate so much" aspect of all our conversations, these days.

Recalling Newsom took on a life of its own once national conservatives and Fox News decided Newsom was weak enough to be beatable... whether that ultimately pans out is still a tossup of sorts, but so far, that choice looks ham handed, at best. Newsom has run a generally low key, below the radar effort to lock down a no vote on recall (from choosing an obscure September date to do it to quietly enlisting the known liberal universe to stump for him). So far, that seems to be working: polls have "no" consistently beating "yes" on recall, and while turnout is as low as expected, it's not clear that Republicans in CA have overcome their built in disadvantages to get anywhere near where they would need to be to succeed.

Partly, that's because the California GOP remains in tatters: lack of statewide leadership, indeed, any clear leadership of any kind, has been the hallmark of this effort. Driven by faceless pressure group interests, the Recall zombie walked right up to its signature deadline not knowing if they'd hit it. Once they did, no one emerged as a real potential hopeful to replace Newsom. The largely hilarious failure of Caitlyn Jenner to work up more than a vanity driven, reality show style of a campaign hurt considerably. And at this point, the GOP hopes rest on Larry Elder, a fringe-y outsider with loads of bad baggage and no real sense of what it would take to govern the largest state.

Yes, the prospect of Elder should scare people... but that, too, just plays effectively to Newsom's shambling "oh no, I'm in danger" approach to the whole thing. Everyone's worried, democrats are terrified... and yet, Newsom still has spent much of this recall campaign largely low key, barely in public, trying less to draw attention than to avoid it. That's probably, from a political strategy standpoint, the smart play: Elder flails especially for lack of a true foil, and conservative news outlet struggle to give the whole recall enterprise a sense of real urgency. Still, as I said from the start, Newsom's generic blandness has been his secret weapon all along, as well as his Achilles' heel. He will likely survive a recall... but it's hardly the most inspiring effort anyone has ever seen... and that's partly why he struggles to be seen positively at all.

A smarter, saner Republican party - or a less crazy conservative movement, at least - would probably have seen the Recall for the fool's errand it's turning out to be. Newsom isn't a political superstar... but he's also no abject failure a la Grey Davis, either. And again, frankly, Republicans have no secret Arnold Schwarzeneggar this time to swallow up the celebrity oxygen, either. No, this is just another flaky, only-in-California moment that underscores both the fecklessness of the public and the confused panda notions of what passes for state government in the Golden State. Tightening the recall process, really facing up to the state's internal issues... these are probably the real lessons of what is, and isn't happening with this Recall, and why. But seeing that would require seeing past the electric circus mentality of national conservatives, flailing through the initial moments of post Trump existence with no real sense of who they are, what they want, or how even to start. Gavin Newsom, even in their equation, is a handsome, generic detail. One widely disseminated dinner party does not a revolution make.

And sure, there may be more recalls (though most states have much higher barriers to them) and more falderal from the far right now that desperation has long since taken over good sense. But failing to oust Newsom is, well, failure. If conservatives can't turn their fanciful, ginned up narratives into political success - and so far, it's not looking great on most fronts - that's just another proof that their marginalization is more real, and less scary than as has been over advertised since the failed "insurrection" of January sixth. The foolishness is not pointing out how absurd, wasteful and dangerous conservatism has become... but how we imbue it with more power than it actually has, more triple A batteries in a flashlight than full on electric klieg lights. And if you can't beat Gavin Newsom with a flashlight... just how badass are you, really?

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.

 

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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.

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A Price Above Rubies

In America's mix of egalitarian and elitism, it's not hard to find oneself living or socializing in close proximity to great wealth. It's one of the oldest staples of Hollywood - the good (or bad) kid from a modest upbringing getting exposed to the ways of the upper class. The scholarship kid at boarding school. The everyday worker who marries the boss' daughter. That time you went to dinner in a fancy New York restaurant, surrounded by the obvious displays of people with far more money, if not taste, than yourself.

In some ways, I feel bad for Tom Price. It's not easy to be in close proximity to extravagance, natural, even, to feel somehow you should get to do and have the same things. I was a scholarship kid at a fairly elite private college where other kids drove the spare family BMW, amongst other luxuries large and small. I lived in Manhattan. I've had the privilege of a private showing of the Chanel Couture collection. As much as you think you know about wealth, there's always a level more.

Sadly, the lesson of the last few days is that these are the moments that really do show one's moral compass, and in that, Tom Price failed. Excessive use of private jets on the government dime is a ridiculous, petty excess that flies in the face of claims to cost consciousness and an interest in cutting the size of government. And it's not as though Price's fall was recent. His history of questionable stock deals in health companies while Chairing the House Committee overseeing their affairs was, it's clear, just an indication of Price's sense that he wanted in on the gravy train rolling nearby.

It's gotta sting when you're so very close to it, and reminded constantly of just how far away that life actually is.

Donald Trump may not be as wealthy as he claims, but he is, of course, the very essence of the eighties era "Lifestyles of the Rich & Famous" that he came to embody, and take as his "brand." (Trump, in fact, doesn't have the usual Gulfstream size PJ as his main plane - he has a 737 gaudily painted with his logo that hangs out, visibly, near the runways at LaGuardia.) And he has, naturally, stacked his Administration with like minded, and similarly well-heeled, millionaires and billionaires. In the midst of revelations this week involving a number of Trump officials... there sits Betsy DeVos, who doesn't spend government money on a jet, because she owns one.

Of course, as the adage goes, money can't buy taste, and the kind of wealth Trump and his friends bring to DC is a kind of ostentatious, showy display of wealth that rubs many, rich or not, the wrong way. Trump's gilded, golden everything decor in his homes and Country Clubs is designed to impress the easily awed, not demonstrate classic, sublime taste associated with older, quieter money (even DeVos, in that regard, seems more understated and private). Trump's is the conspicuous, elaborate consumption of someone who cares more about showing off, and the appearance of class than anything actually classy. Even Trump's much lampooned language about "the best" and "big league" in regards to what he owns betrays that endless need to show off, to preen and self aggrandize. What's sad, ultimately, about Price isn't just the small, petty nature of his fall - it's the way he let Trump's especially tasteless approach to extravagance further warp his own sense of entitlement. Surely, there are better ways to aspire to being upper class.

Trump's extravagant obviousness, too, is why losing Price is neither the end of this story, nor even likely it's worst example (and we do, after all, still have the oblivious displays of Steve Mnuchin and his recent bride, who may be hiding for now, but seem likely to reappear at any moment). The ridiculous trips, the family with no sense of propriety, combined with dozens of hangers-on, some rich and wasteful, some poor and aspiring... the stories can, and will, write themselves (the world waits, Scott Pruitt - don't stop now). And then of course, there's the even more familiar territory of say, Ryan Zinke, and the casual selling of favors to vested interests, like the oil and gas industry.

Still, at the heart of this Dynasty-like resurgence (I, for one, am not so sure that the CW's revival/reboot isn't a stroke of genius) is that sad, small tale of Tom Price. Covetousness and greed are embarrassing; it's almost painful to watch anyone's flaws laid out in such public, shaming display. American culture markets conspicuous consumption like it's, literally, going out of style. You will never have enough. You will never be rich enough, or thin enough, well dressed enough, or live luxuriously enough. The penthouse apartment, the private jet, the furs, the cars... the list is, truly, endless. And yet, how we punish those who succumb most to the siren's call.  It is vengeful, bordering on cruel.

The trick of course, is to learn what it means to have enough. To see luxuries as just that - the occasional extra, a little bit more, a nice perk. When I get to fly in the front of the plane, dine in the 5 star restaurant, buy the Tom Ford fragrance at Saks... I try to remember to be grateful. And to enjoy it without asking for more. At the very least, it gives one the luxury of giving Tom Price something worse than scorn... and that's pity.

Stone Temple Pilots

My favorite line of the past week is "how can we erase our history by taking down these statues." It's a hilarious line, primarily, because it's said most often by people who have no understanding of the history of the statues, never mind the history they are meant to theoretically (at least) commemorate.

Each state in the US is invited to contribute 2 statues to the US Capitol in Washington. Mississippi chose as one of theirs Jefferson Davis, the President of the Confederate States of America, who led the secessionist states during the Civil War. Georgia is represented in part by the CSA Vice President. Ponder that, for a moment. Yet the problem, we're told, rests with Nancy Pelosi, who stated - again - this week that it's long past time for Congress and the states to act to reconsider just which statues belong in the center of our national government's greatest hall.

These are not accidents. This didn't "just happen." And anger and outrage over the presence of a vast swath of Confederate celebrating statuary didn't appear overnight. Mississippi added the confederate stars and bars to its state flag in the mid sixties, at the height of the Civil Rights movement. Yet to bring up the modest observation that it's probably time to remove them provokes outrage and cries of manhandling important history.

When Dylann Roof shot parishioners in Charleston's oldest black church - a deliberate act meant, in his words, to start a "race war" - the horrified response revived, in part, a decades old conversation across the South about the hate movements, the KKK, and the racist symbolism of the white south. Even in that aftermath, it was unclear for days if the will even existed to finally pull down the confederate flag on the state house grounds, a flag that, by statute, couldn't be lowered ever, for any reason.

And since then, in the aftermath of Charleston, the conversation about statues and symbols of an unrepentant south - a pointed display of confederate symbolism meant most to remind those who would defy it of just who holds what power and why - has continued on and led, most directly, to Charlottesville. The decisions to remove Robert E Lee from the town's main park, to rename the park "Emancipation Park" were painful ones that revived a hard discussion, long held grievances, and confronted difficult, rarely mentioned realities about race that are understood across the south and by black people pretty much all over the nation.

This is the reality and the history many unknowingly stepped into this past week, a week defined by the arrival of angry white supremacists in Charlottesville, determined to stop the statue's removal and to revive one side's insistence on making sure divisions by race remain intact. Race itself is an artificial, social construct. "Black' and "white" are terms we have made up ourselves, invested with meanings that often make no sense (the "one drop" rule, the "paper bag test") and that we perpetuate, on and on with no end in sight. To argue that removing statues erases an important piece of our history is, naturally, to erase history itself - it is to pretend we don't know how we got here, how this all started, what really drives this conversation.

There were those well meaning souls who, faced with yet more polling that an unaware public opposes something it largely doesn't understand, said "this isn't about the statues, this is about neo nazis and white supremacists" was also an attempt to both whitewash (literally) the whole conversation and to yet again tell blacks that long sought justice should be put off for the convenience of others and popular sentiment. It says something about the changes that Civil Rights and, yes, affirmative action have wrought that the attempts to silence were nipped and pushed back almost within hours of being brought up - a TV show with a host of color, and a panel of diverse representation, it turns out, brings forward voices with different ideas. And the conversation we're having now, it turns out, can be productive, thoughtful, and even difficult, and confrontational.

Knowing how we got here is half the battle - it turns out, in fact, to be an important half, but there's still more to do. It was heartening, this week, to see the progress made in cities across the north and south. Boston stood up to white supremacists. Baltimore took down its Confederate statues. Lexington, Kentucky made moves to do the same. Charlottesville refused to surrender its progress, its dignity, or its soul. And a nation refused, calmly and quietly, to simply accept the thoughtlessness of its accidental President.

The statues are important. The statues are the heart of this conversation, just as every sign and symbol of white power and oppression meant to further our racial divide is an important part of a conversation meant to figure out how, one day, we can be a better nation that moves beyond racial divisions. Ending those divisions isn't pretending we don't have them, or never had them, or don't have a history that enshrines enforcing them. It is hard, it is painful, it doesn't need to be violent, but we cannot surrender just because violence happens. Learn the history. Take them down. Erase nothing, change everything. For goodness sake, haven't we waited long enough?

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Do The Wrong Thing

Unlike many critics (and liberals), I've always felt that Do The Right Thing, Spike Lee's seminal film, isn't really all that it's made out to be. A musing on the ugly racial divides in outerborough New York, the film does accurately catch the tensions, misunderstandings and prejudices that made up urban life at the time. What I've always disagreed with, really is the title: no one in it is especially doing the "right thing." And without that, without some sense that there is a "right thing," Lee's film is a muddle - a film that never quite gets where it's meaning to go, no one to really feel good about, nothing in the situation that offers hope or possibility.

Still, watching last weekend's events in Charlottesville unfold, and watching Trump flail away in the days since, I come back to that notion of the "right thing" because Trump has been, at the very least, an object lesson in that in any bad situation, it's possible to make things worse. Do the right thing? Why not just do the wrong thing, and stand around, waiting for the applause.

The self-congratulatory, self righteous aspects of Trump - the boundless need for mass love, the urge he has to insist what he knows and has figured out is all there is to know - were, I always figured, the deal breakers for his run for high office. And, even with last year's outcome, it's possible to still feel right about this. Trump overcame his self made obstacles from a mix of people convincing themselves he couldn't possibly be as bad as all that, and another group hoping, more or less, that he was. That he was badass. That he was going to stick it to the people oh so deserving of having it stuck.

Those illusions are falling away - some times quickly (the "he can't be that bad" crowd has largely awoken to the fact that he is) and slowly (the growing unease beginning to show up in his friendly circles that He's Getting Distracted or Off Message... hint: he is the message). And with Charlottesville, Trump has more or less (mostly less) given away what he needs most: the good will of the doubtful. Now, at this point, he's not getting that back.

Charlottesville happened for a couple of reasons: a growing sense of confrontation and acknowledgement of the racial tensions, especially out of the traditional south, that drive the continued presence of Confederate symbols and the "Lost Cause" narrative of the Civil War. The other is the reawakening of the forces that ride that narrative to push their brand of racist hate: the Klan, other white supremacy groups, Neo-Nazis and on and on. "Standing Up For Our Rights" as the march was dubbed, was a construct of these racist groups, and from Friday night's procession of torch wavers to Saturday's messy confrontations, Charlottesville was driven by the hate of the racists. 

There are these questions of "what does Trump know" or "what does he think" about the "Alt Right" (casual dress hatred for the young slacker) and the Klan/Neo Nazi world behind it... but this kind of misses the point. Trump doesn't have an ideology, a purpose, a philosophy to guide him. He has himself, and the prejudices and preconceived notions he came with, some he clearly got from his father (who seems to have had a more active, unpleasant notion of race relations in life and business), some he seems to have come up with on his own (his Central Park five antics, birtherism, etc). I don't know what he actually believes, I doubt he does, either. That, ultimately, is what makes him, and his actions, so sad and dangerous. He could know better... but why would he even try?

Trump's emphasis on opposition to violence, his revived use of Nixon era tropes about "law and order" and crime somehow rampant in the streets - a remnant, after all, of his New York youth - blurs, for him, the things that need to be addressed - out of Charlottesville, but more generally, around race in this country. He says the words about "condemning" Neo-Nazis and finding them "repugnant"... but it's a child's dutiful attempt to sound sincere.No one, it seems, can ask him the question he at least needs to think about for himself - not whether it's bad, but why. His answer seems to be "violence." For most of us, it would be, "the hateful racism." 

As a nation, our use of language is sinking - and Trump is, in many ways, emblematic of that downturn as well. We use "racism" too often and too broadly to rope in a multitude of attitudes, actions and beliefs. This is racist. That's racist. He's racist. We need more words. I don't know if, Trump is racist, or how much. I suspect he's someone who carries a long list of prejudices and notions about race and groups that he's never particularly examined or thought deeply about their accuracy or usefulness. It's those preconceived notions he brings to this conversation - a painful, and probably necessary one - around race and how we treat one another, that lead him to choose to say and do the things that make this moment worse. And in that sense, Spike Lee was right - scratch the surface, and most people will show how they identify with their own tribe first. And not try very hard to understand the others. Do the right thing? We don't even know what that would be.

I think we do know some of the right things, and the wrong ones. In this new national conversation, perhaps the best approach is realizing that our President is not some all knowing, wise teacher - an approach of the last two Presidents, neither of whom quite deserved that spot, either - but someone who, like the rest of us, maybe needs to hear some things he hasn't heard before, consider the opinions of people who don't always agree with him, and think about changing his mind. For this conversation, discussion, dialogue to happen... that's a big part of what needs to happen (bless you Heather Heyer, and your amazing Mom). Just because Trump chooses, so actively and so throughly, to do the wrong things, doesn't mean we all have to go along. Indeed, saving ourselves - and any semblance of our decency - requires that we absolutely don't. And maybe that's a start on doing the right thing.

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Rich Man's Fugue (The K-Harris Remix)

Newly elected to the Senate, Kamala Harris has, not surprisingly, garnered outsize attention as a potential presidential hopeful. She is a high profile presence at Senate hearings. She frequently uses social media to highlight her positions and concerns.

It's not surprising that there's been some negative feedback as well as positive.

What is surprising is both how Harris has shot to the top of these - generally premature - discussions, and how much her presence has ignited rage within the smoldering remains of Bernie Sanders failed campaign for the nomination. In these dog days of the disastrous Trump presidency, Twitter has become the angry outlet for many to rage post their political (and other cultural) hot takes. Stories and memes take off and reverberate at a speed so rapid, the descent into ugliness can be head spinning, outrageous... and yes, frightening. What may well have been intended as a casual effort to pump up Harris' name recognition and presence, has morphed into both a debate how candidates of color are seen and how the left can find consensus at a moment when ending this Trump farce is so paramount.

And all of that is kind of secondary to what prompted me to write this.

I fell into the maelstrom of this partly as contrarian, partly in my own naivete; a somewhat blithe tweet from Harris about economic inequality for black women struck me as a reminder that many Democratic leaders, Harris included, have a challenge in presenting their concerns about an inequality that they themselves don't really live in or experience. Harris has, in fact, enjoyed a fairly comfortable existence since her youth, as the child of two successful university professors, her own largely upbeat political trajectory, and the wealth of her husband, also an attorney.

I've discussed before the tension we're currently under culturally and politically in discussing the lived experience of ourselves and others. It's of a piece with a larger issue around "expertise" and use of statistics that's complicating all sorts of political discussions, especially in this democratized age of discussions via media like Facebook and Twitter. It's not a simple matter, and there aren't a lot of easy answers, though many would like to approach these dilemmas simplistically, and with broad brushed generalizations.

Historically, Americans aren't necessarily excited by wealthy people speaking as if they are one with the common man. The most obvious example against this - Franklin Delano Roosevelt - achieved his levels of support by representing himself as standing up to, and against, members of his own upper crust social class. He was seen, in turn, by other bankers and business leaders, as suspect and untrustworthy because of his stances for workers and people in poverty. And his success as President was likely because he could thread the needle of helping those in need because of his patrician education and political savvy.

There's a long - much longer - list of millionaires and billionaires who have failed as candidates because their wealth left them seen as out of touch with ordinary folks. Mitt Romney is easily a recent failure, but you could include Ross Perot, John Kerry, and others. Americans are leery of the patrician class, those born to great wealth, handed every opportunity, who assert confidently that they know what it is to work an hourly job, struggle to meet expenses, trying to get by on barely enough. In this age of high income inequality - the worst since the Gilded Age - the problem has become more pronounced, the dissonance shrill, and the tension high.

It's also the case that getting elected to statewide office - like Governor or Senator - hasn't had the same hurdles. The Senate has long been (indeed since the founders) an enclave of inherited wealth and privilege. And it's part of why, though many Senators have tried, few have actually jumped the hurdle into the White House. Those who have achieved the goal - Kennedy, Lincoln, Obama - are men who have paired their privileged aspects with emphasis on their points of commonality with the masses. Lincoln as a hard knock success story, Kennedy as the triumph of Irish Catholic immigration, Obama as a mixed race champion for the Rest of Us.

Still, the Obama example is noteworthy given the decimation and hangover of the Housing Crisis he walked into as President. Everything from Occupy Wall Street to that campaign Sanders ran in 2016 stems from feelings, deeply held on the left, that our last President wasn't in fact in tune with the economic problems of the have nots. It is an internal tension driven in part by the strange, bifurcated coalitions both political parties have within - Business owners and less educated white voters on the right, and coalitions of minority groups combined with the educated professional class that make up the left. The "privileged few" live in both parties. And the resentment simmers all around.

It can seem unfair to question Harris, especially this early, for the sense of her personal privilege. But it seems myopic to pretend that examination won't, or shouldn't, occur... as it should occur generally in the conversations about candidates in upcoming elections. It matters because the issues of economic inequality ought to be the one we put paramount in our election choices: affordable housing, quality education for all, decent healthcare, ways out of poverty, and on and on. It matters because Donald Trump skillfully deployed class resentment and rage as his tools to achieve a slim electoral college majority. And it matters because we ought to ask, reasonably, if the long held bias of American voters isn't correct - do members of the educated, patrician class really understand the needs of those who have less?

That questions like this get lumped into the shrill, unpleasant shoutfest around questioning or challenging Harris and candidates of color more generally is understandable, but a shame. There's plenty of unpleasant aspects to the denigration of Harris in recent days - around race, around gender, and the still ugly tactics employed by the Sanders supporting left - but it's not wrong to ask if she's ready for the big leagues, for prime time, for the role as head of our national party. There are fair questions to be asked of her, or anyone else. Those who want to defend Harris (myself included) from unwarranted ugliness, have to leave room for what our politics require, a healthy, sometimes difficult, debate.

"Do something about income inequality" is, and should be, a rallying cry for the organized left. It's fair to ask who is best positioned to do something, anything - but more importantly, the right things - to address inequality and to right what is a devastating set of wrongs currently at play in American life. I'm sure Kamala Harris has a tremendous role to play in this, as do others who come from similarly successful, privileged upbringing and backgrounds. That said, I think this conversation is hopeless if those without wealth and privilege are kept from having their voices heard. These are important questions. Surely some of the most important. The challenge, it seems, is finding the balance, as it ever was. And the music plays on...

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The Christian Thing To Do

For years, Conservatives have held religious faith and their own sense of religiosity over the heads of liberals; calling it "holier than thou" would be an understatement. From the rise of the Moral Majority to the attempts at political advocacy run out of evangelical churches to the Christian Coalition, the conservative right grew over the past fifty years in part by appeals to religious fundamentalism. And with it came notions that no one knew religion, morality and decency better than they did.

Much of this legendary religious certainty came in the face of internal tensions, never fully reconciled: the most stridently antiabortion rhetoric defined as "pro-life" came from people just as likely to turn around and express a near bloodthirsty interest in the death penalty, and after 9/11, acceptance of even the most casual justifications for the use of life endangering methods of torture. We were treated to lectures on immorality and marital fidelity from folks eager to elect much married, often multiply divorced leaders with scandalous histories of adultery. The most stunning revelations of closeted men seeking men, often much younger men or even boys, for gay sex have come from a cadre of religious leaders closely associated with conservative causes, or members of the GOP in Congress.

And yet, in the face of this, conservatives have continued to wield their mighty sword of piety and religiosity at every turn, unencumbered by a sense of humility or certainly even a modicum of irony. To this day, the notion of liberals as shameless, godless hedonists, angry antireligious extremists bent on taking God out of schools and all aspects of modern life wherever possible, persists.The arguments around these issues are intense, extreme, and most certainly, endless. 

If liberalism could be defined as "a belief system" - something I heard much of growing up - what's been in remarkable over the past 25 years is watching liberalism move away from articles of faith to expressions of defensible public policy. Sociology, urban planning, education theory, economics, healthcare and energy policy... the list of areas where research and analysis has reached into thinking about government policy and actions is wide and deep. Policies that liberals advocate - from early childhood education, to nutrition, to environmental concerns, to energy policy and more - are built not on feel good pronouncements but the actual evidence of studying what works and what doesn't. That such policies and ideas often help to achieve desirable, compassionate ends is often not just a goal, but an added benefit.

Indeed, what;s been fascinating in the push/pull of political debate over my lifetime is the way what used to be a debate over emotional vs. rational in terms of left vs. right in this country, has reversed. It is now the left, more often, approaching debates from the position of thoughtful, rational approaches to policy and political action, while the right retreats ever more into orthodoxy, and rigid expressions of belief unmoored from fact. Emotion - particularly anger and hatred (and distrust) - rule the day. It is often impossible to even have rational debate across our deep divide because what we often call "not agreeing to the same facts" is one side simply refusing to deal in facts at all. Feelings are what matter - be it fear, suspicion, anger, righteousness or anything else. And often, it's so impossible to take seriously, the right has a growing internal reliance on a host of writers and commentators whose careers are built, entirely, on an abject rejection of seriousness altogether.

In the roughly 36 hours since the Trump Administration's budget has been made public, one organization in particular has come to the forefront of the debate over its absurd priorities and bad choices: Meals on Wheels. Meals on Wheels is funded, in part, in many communities out of Community Development Block Grants, grants that are made to organizations providing services meant to help communities in need. As Seth Meyers said in his witty takedown, no one, really, opposes delivering food to old people. Because that's all there is to Meals on Wheels: a healthy meal delivered to senior citizens in need of care at home.

In zeroing out the funding for Community Development Block Grants, Trump's Director of OMB, Mick Mulvaney justified that choice saying there's no proof the grants made under the program go to programs with any proven results or demonstrated need. What, he was asked about Meals on Wheels. Mulvaney largely sidestepped describing Meals on Wheels directly as ineffective, but maintained his broader point - these things may sound good, but they don't really do much.

Since then, there's been a wide ranging debate online about Meals on Wheels as the "Christian Thing To Do." That debate, of course, isn't actually simple: there are a variety ways to look at, and define, Christianity. What's striking, to me, is that the debate in many ways simply misses the point: it doesn't matter if one thinks Meals on Wheels is Christian or decent or otherwise morally good. The main thing is, it does an important, useful service, and the effectiveness and need for that service is well documented, and easily proved.

Liberals, in some sense, need to get over the tired right wing boilerplate of religiosity and moral certainty - we are well past the point of the Religious Right owning, or earning, their spot as the moral high ground. The election of a twice divorced, serial adulterer as their champion speaks volumes to the myriad ways that so called "evangelical voters" (Usually self described, and often less overtly religious than the wider public) have simply given up on expressing moral decency in politics. The right has nothing more than a belief system at this point to justify their views, and, more often than not, that belief system is confused, deeply flawed, and morally inconsistent.

The left has done admirable work, in my lifetime, to move away from a cadre of True Believers more interested in orthodoxy than then effectiveness. The right, on the other hand, seems to have simply given up on fighting the regression further into extreme beliefs unmoored from the real world and how it actually operates. And it's well past time that liberals need to let go of the pointless exercise of engaging with conservatives on Who Is More Morally Decent. Not because we can win the argument - and endorsing food for old people, surely, puts us there - but because the argument really isn't the point. Governing sensibly, thoughtfully and appropriately isn't just The Christian Thing To Do. It's the intelligent defensible thing we've been right about all along.

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The Know Nothing Party

From the beginning, the cries of "repeal Obamacare" - cries that started before the thing was even passed - made no sense. "Repeal Obamacare" has always had an air of exactitude that betrays how little its opponents understand about the bill, or for that matter healthcare policy, at all. Which is why the expanded "repeal and replace" mantra, never mind the farce now playing out in Congress, is both stupid, and dangerous.

You can't replace something with nothing, the saying goes, and yet that is, very much, how Republicans are approaching health policy. The ACA is a flawed, messy piece of legislation that no one can, or should, entirely love. But those real, practical problems within the ACA are nothing like the visceral antipathy of opponents who long ago gave up on trying to respond thoughtfully to the issues raised in healthcare reform.

If Republicans succeed - and on some level that's always a distinct possibility - the current bill is obviously disastrous: millions losing health insurance, problems around delivery of care will increase, costs will once again spiral out of control (to say nothing of the pointless windfall of tax cuts for the very very wealthy). Conservatives have no answer to these concerns because, as I've tried to point out for years to anyone who'd listen, the right has little or no serious expertise in healthcare policy, or for that matter, policy more generally. They have continuously thrown buzzwords and catch phrases where a policy should be: "free market solutions," "patient choice," ""bottom up, not top down." These terms are meaningless. And the nonsensical bill they threw together, in desperation, shows just how thin their thinking on the topic really is.

For one thing, this isn't repeal. The bill literally amends the Affordable Care Act, which alone may be a deal killer that even a majority in the House can't accept. Second, as long expected, the bill hedges on dealing with "popular" provisions of the ACA: the "stay on your parents plan til 26" option for children, the protection for preexisting conditions (though weakened), even, interestingly, a refusal to flat out kill the expansion of Medicaid, which for anti-poverty conservatives should have been an easy lift. 

More importantly, conservatives betray their failures by wilting at every turn when hard choices come up - the ACA, as it turns out, is a complicated fabric of interlocked pieces where pulling on one thread causes the whole thing to unravel. I'm not sure even many of its supporters realized how intricate the construction has turned out to be. Pretty much any and every move conservatives have made has revealed a simmering mess just waiting to blow up in their faces - from trying to kill its financing to removing the insurance mandates to "bending the cost curve"... Conservatives have been forced back to the ACA because its basic premise - retaining the guarantee of employer based health insurance - underpins even their disjointed approach to a solution.

Once again here's the real point: if you use employment as the basis for insuring people, you have to provide solutions for people who don't fall under the defining criterion. That is, you have to deal with retirees (Medicare). You have to deal with people self employed or freelance or otherwise outside conventional employer-employee models of work (the exchanges or the individual market). And you have to deal with people who are unemployable or unable to be employed, such as the poorest and least educated (Medicaid and disability). This is the problem, and there really aren't a lot of great answers. There never were. The only solution is to spend the additional money to provide the options to the people who otherwise can't afford access to care. And fundamentally, the debate we're having isn't about the buzzwords about markets, and freedom and mythical choice: it's the basic, practical fact that the right simply wants to do less and have it cost less and damn the people who get hurt in the process. That's not a policy - it's the abdication of policy for nothing more than the monetary gain of a select few.

I've resisted wading into the weeds of what we're calling a "healthcare debate" partly because no one should be giving the right the cover of taking these proposals seriously as policy. They're not, and they shouldn't be. Until the conservative right can own up to its realities and face the problems they're trying to avoid by any means necessary, this isn't any kind of a healthy, productive conversation. Getting lost in their sea of silly tax credits, cuts to Medicaid (never mind their long desired death blow to the program entirely, a/k/a "block grants"), and reverse engineered regulatory changes is a fool's errand.  The choice is much more simple, the terms especially stark - we can wreck the progress we've made increasing access to insurance and care, or we can deal with the problems we actually have. The rest is nonsense.

The sad fact is that the real failure of the ACA, still, is the failure to educate the public, the media and the political class about the realities of healthcare in the US. Conservatives get away with their falsehoods and fabrications and fantasies of free markets because few people arrive at the discussion armed with the information needed to confront them with facts and knowledge to refute their claims (this, sadly, applies to a number of other discussions, like education). Absent that information and awareness, it's easy as conservatives do, to claim a "death spiral" in insurance, to make hay out of the meaningless "choose your doctor" arguments, and on and on. The Know Nothings triumphed in November, and "repeal and replace" is the triumph of their crazed ambitions. Party on. If we're lucky, the best we can hope for is their complete failure.

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Bad Milo. Bad, Naughty Milo.

Even his name - "Milo Yiannopolous" - is something of an alternative fact: he changed it from "Hanrahan" which was the name of his father, who left when he was six.Yiannopoplous comes from his maternal grandmother, who raised him.

There was never much reason to pay attention to Milo, a bratty British schoolboy eager to spread his opinions, calling it "journalism," in that way conservatives do, repeating twice told tales to justify their negative views of others. Being British, and snide, was about all that differentiated Yiannopolous from the other far right voices - slap a dress and a blonde wig on it and you've got Ann Coulter. Or Monica Crowley. Or Kellyanne Conway. Or...

He'd made himself something of an internet star, mouthing off about "Gamergate" - which boils down to teenage boys trying to put a "No girls allowed" sign on video game playing, with just the sort of especially ugly, hateful results one would expect. For no particular reason, he decided to turn his negative energy - and that of his teenboy fans - on Leslie Jones, resulting in that much more negative attention and a lifetime ban on Twitter.

As Andrew Sullivan noted, the kind of bratty conservatism espoused by Milo (and Sullivan, from much the same background) thrives and grows on the negative response. It's political theory as reaction formation, why I've been clear on what Coulter and Malkin et al actually are since college - what was "Dartmouth Review" but the "politically incorrect" screed of kids eager to express opposition to feel good slogans of liberal activism? And 30 years on that's what conservatives have to offer: not ideas, but something outrageous, designed to oppose perfectly reasonable proposals meant to help others. It's not what you're for, but what they're against.

Since the Jones imbroglio, Milo enjoyed a rapid rise to that curious kind of American stardom that only happens in the fevered circles of the angry right - he got a book deal, and speaking gigs... and last week, he popped up on Real Time with Bill Maher, and got announced for a speaker role at CPAC, where the show always needs the fresh ziz of the latest hateful thing.

If I'm surprised by the fall Milo has had in only 4 days, it's only that I figured he'd at least get to give that CPAC speech. As it was, the only thing that could embarrass CPAC (and it's leader, the smooth talking Trump supporter and Fox "contributor" Matt Schlapp) was new exposure to old interviews Milo had done, applying his bratty British humor to gay sexuality and the priest sex scandal. That was enough(!) to lose Milo the book deal, the speaking gigs, and his job as Associate Editor at Breitbart.com. Because, naturally, where else would Milo  be working, but Breitbart?

It's easy to get hung up on Milo's outrageous comments around sex - and it's not as if that particular element hadn't been swirling around him all along. Part of Milo's shtick was wearing his status as a young gay man on his sleeve, touting his (reductive, racially insensitive) love of black men and hinting at his own sexual prowess. (It's especially amusing, given CPAC's checkered past with gay conservatives, that they blustered into booking Milo anyway.) And it was, in fact, the cavalier way Yiannopolous described his own experiences of priest sex abuse that drove much of his downfall, given that, as even he admitted in his Tuesday press conference, that abuse goes a long way to explaining his bratty public persona since.

But let's not get too lost in focusing hard on Milo: the real lesson here is about conservatives, their role in propping up and pushing hateful rhetoric like Milo's, and the endless need to find fresh flavors of the month expressing all that hate. Let's remember CPAC played that role in launching Ann Coulter, and Michelle Malkin, and numerous others (hey, Ben Carson!) as well. Let's point out, as well, that this flameout illuminated yet more clearly all of what's wrong with "news outlets" like Breitbart, which never called Yiannopolous to account for many outlandish things he wrote and said - and indeed, never raised a peep about those sex comments at the time they were made, nor in context of his overall persona. One can only marvel out how dysfunctional a work environment could be that a "half dozen" staffers at Breitbart threatened to quit this week if Milo were allowed to stay on. This week!

Conservatives would like, of course, to isolate Milo now, now that the cat's out of the bag, that he's "gone too far" despite the reality that "too far" was an interview he gave last year, and ignores years (and years) of examples of Milo's excessive, hateful words and actions. It was too much for Twitter... but conservatives still clung to him (and arguably, too, Twitter's actions were years past due as well). Simon and Schuster lost authors over holding onto Milo's book... but still they held on. Until this week. Conservatism didn't become "like this" yesterday. And Milo is a symptom, not the disease. Removing him addresses neither cause, nor cure.

So CPAC will offer up "President Trump" and plenty of other familiar lines of conservative anger and hate... and pretend Milo was a bad dream that maybe never even happened. That's what they do, over and over, as these once hot flavors "go too far" or the lies catch up to them. And suddenly, there's no speaking space for Ann Coulter. Or Sarah Palin. What a shame Milo couldn't hold it together long enough to provide another Outrage Du Jour...

Because, of course, what passes for conservatism these days is so utterly bankrupt and bereft of intellectual heft and interesting ideas that it is simply beyond embarrassing.  Literally. Everything about Milo's rise, his career, his galloping leaps toward greater fame... all of it was an embarrassment, a waste, a pointless exercise in watching a bratty child act out for others' amusement. Watching Milo's smirky, childish appearance on Maher - what little I could take - I figured it was a matter of time before something would wipe that smirk off his face. Two days later, no smirk. And a month from now, or a year... it's just another chance for another flavor of the month to rise.

If any good can come of this, I'd like to hope it comes from Milo reckoning with his own demons, working out his issues, finding some measure of personal grace. I wouldn't even necessarily mind the "I was a bratty jerk, but now I've changed" book he'll be pushing in a year, or two, or five... if he comes about it honestly, and expressively. That would at least show that someone is capable of growth and change. Because Lord knows, growth and change isn't going to come to the Conservative movement. Just another naughty bad boy, or girl, looking for attention. And getting it.

Doubleplus Ungood

Aside from the clear demarcation of "before" and "after" - of which there have been more in my lifetime then I ever thought there would be - the six days of Trumpery have certainly been everything promised, and then some. And nowhere more vividly than the glorious, contentious relationship between the new Administration and a thoroughly stupefied, if somewhat reenergized, press.

Given the lack of press conferences, or even general availabilities to the press made during the transition, it's not surprising that things got off to a sudden and rocky start. It's a reminder that people don't hold press conferences because they like to, but because being more communicative is generally helpful to getting one's point of view across. When Trump finally gave his first - fairly disastrous - press conference in New York, it was his first time taking questions in 6 months. Similarly, until the Saturday announcement in the briefing room - a room the new Administration had threatened to move out of the White House - Sean Spicer, nor any other spokesperson, had not held any kind of formal press availability as well.

Much has been made of that initial, tetchy moment when Spicer offered a blustery attack on "the media" for "false stories" related to the Inauguration... only to provide a series of factually inaccurate and false statements as rebuttal (lines about traffic on the WMATA Metro and the use of white flooring on The National Mall most prominently). It's surely a moment of infamy that already defines that bright line from old to new, and sets a tone that even Spicer has been spending the days (mere days!) since trying to undo - often to little avail.

It's clear that we have entered - suddenly and sharply - a new era where words like "fact" and "truth" will be in short supply. The lies, exaggerations, and yes "alternative facts" of the new Administration are breathtaking to behold, somehow, more gasp inducing than even the near daily (to be generous; I can't account for every single day) string of misrepresentations of the campaign. Spicer's job, after all, as a campaign spokesman is a job historically marked by telling the version of events most favorable to your guy (or Hillary Clinton). White House Press Secretary is usually thought of as a more fact-based exercise, using word choice, diplomatic phrasing, and the well timed silence to make your political points. 

Still, history isn't so clean that Spicer being both pugnacious and even fact challenged isn't a first; many old hands are recalling the golden age of Ron Ziegler, press secretary to Richard Nixon, who had the thankless task of standing in front of the press field during the unfolding of Watergate, who had, even prior to the worst of it, been renowned for slippery phrasing and poor press relations. If anything, Spicer has yet to show Ziegler's elan - or for that matter, Mr. Trump's - in looking less nervous, or sounding more authoritative, in his prevarications. Even just in the room, he's upstaged by Hope Hicks, Trump's longtime spokesperson at the Trump Organization, who seems eminently more comfortable saying absolutely anything and punishing the press who dare to challenge her.

Even Hicks, though, probably isn't read for the centrality of the stage of the White House - all eyes are watching, and the press that stood by and watched Trump as a campaign (and surely should have stepped in sooner and more aggressively) is in something of a different place watching the White House - more eyes are watching, more staff is investigating, more statements are held to the kind of scrutiny there should have been all along. To say, "they're getting away with it" is to redefine what "getting away" means - Kellyanne Conway's blithe assertion of "alternative facts" to Chuck Todd didn't withstand a day of scrutiny, howls of absurdity and refusal to stand down (even Fox simply pretended the whole weekend of disastrous press relations largely Never Happened, ignoring the bulk of it). Within a day, Trump's egregiously false claim of millions of "illegal" votes was exposed as false, forcing Spicer to reduce it to "it's what he believes" rather than an objective truth, and the press pushed Trump, probably foolishly, into setting up an "investigation" into something no one actually thinks happened.

I'm not trying to minimize the fears of perfectly reasonable, and extremely thoughtful people, who see nefariousness in the Trump team's every move against the mass media. I've read Masha Gessen in the New York Review of Books and I get it, too: there are moves here reminiscent of totalitarian regimes, past and present, in terms of creating "false realities," and trying to delegitimize any question or challenge from outside. But, by that measure, the Trump folks are working haphazardly, making significant mistakes, and not showing an especially effective or unified approach. There's too many stories of inside fighting and score settling, too many obvious missteps, and too much freedom and openness in our culture, for them to really succeed, even if (and I don't entirely buy it) that was their goal.

For all the hand wringing and references to George Orwell, its worth pointing out that we've never seen a "1984" like moment in a Western Democracy. That Russia under Putin has returned to an era very similar culturally to the world of the old Soviet Union is less a lesson for us as it is a reminder of history: old habits die hard, especially in the hands of an ex-KGB officer turned "President" whose life experience favors mass media controlled and heavily edited by The State. As Americans, we know less than nothing about this; it is outside of every aspect of our culture, our way of life, indeed, in how our media is structured. Even as we've bemoaned the concentration of corporate control of mass media, the point is there: our mass media is in private hands. It would be all but physically impossible to reverse that. All the Trump people can do, on the margins, is denigrate and attempt to humiliate the free press, while using a collectively smaller partisan group of sympathetic outlets to push narratives more favorable to their worldview. Yes, the world of Fox and Drudge and Breitbart and talk radio trades on the Trump narrative and leads significant numbers of Americans to believe the lies. But we remain worlds away from the "War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery" perversion of our every act of public communication.

The distinction matters because, at the most basic level, we give Trump and his cronies too much credence and too much power imbuing them with the ability to warp the very act of public communication and the reporting of journalists; journalism will survive. By all means, we need to question everything, challenge every falsehood, expose every lie. This is a battle over something most of us didn't think needed fighting, and in some ways, yes, we are ill-prepared. But we are not defenseless, and we are not fighting the Ministry of Truth. And keeping things in perspective is as much an act of honesty as forcing Spicer, Conway, et al to own their lies. Without it, I'm not sure what we're actually trying to save.

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