The Autocrat's Most Reliable Autopen

No Half Measures

Professional Left Podcast Episode 1026: They Won't Say The "R" Word?

"Think like a wise man but communicate in the language of the people."  --  William Butler Yeats.

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The Barbering of Memory

One of the things Republicans clearly understand much better than Democrats is that politics is not just about laws and budgets and tax rates. It's also about shaping the past. About memory. About who gets remembered and who gets forgotten. About whose names get carved into stone, bolted onto airports, and slapped across every highway exit sign in America until future generations can barely remember a time when it wasn't there, which is why Grover Norquist spent years pushing his project to put Ronald Reagan's name on damn near everything that wasn't nailed down.

His goal was to have some landmark, building, road, bridge, school, or monument named after Reagan in every one of America's 3,141 counties. Hence Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport, the Ronald Reagan Turnpike, the Ronald Reagan Federal Building, and the Ronald Reagan Memorial Whatever-The-Hell. The point wasn't commemoration. The point was colonization.

Because that's what monuments are for.

And before some tote-bag Centrist starts hyperventilating about how monuments are merely expressions of civic pride, let's remember when and why most Confederate monuments went up. Not immediately after the Civil War. Not as spontaneous expressions of grief from bereaved widows. The great boom in Confederate monument construction came decades later, during the rise of Jim Crow, and then again during the Civil Rights era. They were not messages from the dead to the living. They were messages from the living to the living. They were giant bronze and marble "Fuck You!" billboards announcing who was in charge and who was expected to stay in their place.

Which brings us to Donald Trump.

Trump's obsession with naming, renaming, branding, rebranding, gold-plating and self-memorializing isn't just some eccentric personality quirk. It's part of the same tradition. Every building renamed. Every institution bent to his will. Every historical marker rewritten. Every federal program that had his brand slapped on it without even changing the font.  The point is to create the illusion of permanence. To make his movement seem inevitable.  To not just make his fascist movement a permanent part of the American political landscape, but to turn it into landscape itself, making future generations assume that all of this was always here and always would be.

The Romans had a name for the opposite process: Damnatio Memoriae. The condemnation of memory. When a tyrant fell -- through causes natural and otherwise -- if they were unpopular or there was political hay to be made damning their memory, then their statues came down, or their names and dates were chiseled off monuments and scraped from coins. Not because people suddenly forgot who the tyrant was, but because the public square isn't neutral and it isn't eternal.  

Every monument is making an argument, and every brass plate on every bench and building is an editorial. These are votes being cast in favor of a particular version of history. So if one generation has the authority to fill the landscape with propaganda, the next generation has exactly the same authority to haul it to the dump.

So, if the Trump administration can rename, redesignate, reclassify and reinvent public spaces to flatter the Dear Leader, another administration -- a Democratic administration -- can undo it.  Hell, who's to say that, in the name of "national security", a future administration couldn't seize Mar-a-Lago, compensate whichever of Trump's shell companies owns it one dollar as a fair market estimate of the value of a toxic shithole owned by the worst president in history, then turn it into a COVID Memorial Park.

If that's the future, Democrats need to come ready to play hardball.  Not to memory hole the record of the worst president in history, but to preserve the memory forever -- in parks, and statues, and piles of roped-off rubble -- that he was the worst president in history, that his collaborators in Congress and the media did betray this country, and that, driving all of it, was a mob of MAGA bigots and imbeciles.

Burn The Lifeboats

Get Serious...

...or get off the boat.

Burn The Lifeboats

Professional Left Podcast Episode 1025: Panic At The Grift Shop

"Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered weak and weary."  --  Edgar Allan Poe

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All This Has Happened Before

By now you've all probably read about, or at least heard about, NPR's Steve Inskeep's epic sanewashing of Tucker "Mothertucker" Carlson's deservedly monstrous reputation.  

From Raw Story:

NPR faces wave of pushback for helping MAGA star 'rebrand': 'Stop sane-washing fascists'

NPR's Steve Inskeep faced thunderous criticism for interviewing a seemingly contrite Tucker Carlson, who's been trying to distance himself from President Donald Trump.

However, critics were not interested in hearing Carlson attempt to rehabilitate his image.

"Apology not accepted," declared attorney Bradley P. Moss...

"Earlier this year, Tucker Carlson said that 'the defining fact of our lives is that whites around the world are being eliminated,'" reminded Media Matters' Matthew Gertz. "Journos who don’t watch his show are helping his effort to rebrand so he isn’t a liability for his protege JD Vance’s 2028 run."...

"The long awaited antiwar left-right coalition is gonna happen this time I can feel it," groaned author Eoin Higgins, posting a photo of Charlie Brown charging toward a football...

"NPR is the latest to rush in & give white supremacist Tucker Carlson a mainstream media boost, helping to normalize him as he floats creating a third party and running for president," observed podcaster Brittany Page. "I listened to the whole thing. Not one single question about his constant promotion of racist conspiracy theories."...

And the most striking thing about the tone of the critics is what it wasn't.  It wasn't shock.  It wasn't confusion or bafflement.  It was a kind of battle-weary "Here we fucking go again" cynicism inflected disgust that of course the legacy media is going to jump on any opportunity to rehabilitate the reputation of any conservative blackguard who dangles a faintly contrition-scented scrap of sucker-bait in the water.

For the sake of fairness, don'tcha know.  And balance.  And feeding the tote-bag Centrist the narcotic they crave.    

And the reason for the collective eye-roll from us independent outsiders is that we've seen this kabuki before.  Over and over  and over again.  

One of the earliest Trump-era examples was the media's determination to mistake Glenn Beck's tactical disagreement with Donald Trump for a moral awakening.  They rushed to embrace the then-newly "repentant" Glenn Beck during that brief interlude when he was cosplaying as a Never Trumper -- a blindingly obvious con about which I a wrote a great deal back in the day.

For example, in this here post -- Glenn Beck: Canary in the Never Trump Mineshaft -- which you are free to read or not as you please. The gist is that in 2016 he got the full treatment -- the door jamb wiping, triple foam wax and the aromatherapy air fresheners -- from everyone from The New York Times to NPR because he and Trump, swear to God, were never ever getting back together.

Until Trump won.  And then...

From The Washington Examiner:

Glenn Beck dons MAGA hat: I will 'gladly' vote for Trump in 2020

Conservative firebrand Glenn Beck appeared to have a change of heart about President Trump on Friday, vowing to vote for him in the 2020 presidential election.

“I will vote for him in 2020! Gladly!” Beck said on his radio show. The longtime NeverTrump pundit donned Trump’s signature red “Make America Great Again” hat. Beck pointed to the media's negative coverage of Trump for spurring his decision.

Beck directed a message to the president: “I will tell you — the things that you have done as the president are remarkable! Remarkable!”..

And from the heart of Beck's own dying media empire:

Glenn Beck: Here’s the real reason the left is coming unhinged, ‘You are winning’

The same thing happened with Bill Barr. The minute Barr decided to cash in by pretending that his objections to Trump's January 6th conduct somehow erased four years of service as Trump's chief legal enabler, the prestige press was there with a warm towel and a mint on the pillow.

And the same Steve Inskeep jumped right on the Bill Barr Reputation Rehab bandwagon back in 2022 when Barr was making the rounds, pimping his shitty book, "Fuck You All, I Got Away With It" "One Damn Thing After Another."

About which I also wrote a thing at the time.

 

No Fair Remembering Stuff

Professional Left Podcast Episode 1024: The Magic Word

"Quote me as saying I was mis-quoted."  --  Groucho Marx

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History Never Sent a Thank-You Card

 

I knew the believers in disruption.

I watched the message-senders, the duopoly breakers,

the wandering tribes of electoral purists

moving through decades of campaigns

with pamphlets in their hands and destiny in their teeth.

The Nader people.

The Steiniacs.

The West volk.

The Forwardians.

Countless others.

The people who hurled ballots into the machinery: 

Angry notes stuffed into bottles and cast into the sea.

They wanted to shake the pillars.

Smite the consultants.

They demanded that History stop, turn around, and listen.

And History never listened.  History just kept right on walking.  

Crushing their bottles full of message

back into sand.

History never sent a thank-you card, never signed for the package.

Everything returned, broken and COD.

Finally the same pilgrims, sifting the sand, invent a new revelation.

And it's so simple!

One sentence,

one offense,

one stain,

one moment,

one unacceptable utterance

annihilates all history 

and all ambiguity.

Now the choice is obvious and the logic is perfect.

Now the conclusion arrives with the force of scripture.

Never mind the past, the ledgers, the decades of evidence

stacked to the ceiling, smelling of damp, old libraries.

One offense outweighs everything.

And therefore the righteous must march, with banners flying,

Into the camp of the Others.  The rivals.  The tyrants.

Whose crimes are taller,  whose follies are deeper,

And whose diabolical record stretches back and back and back.

Because arithmetic has been revoked

and symbolism runs the show.

The years of disruption are over.  The message-sending has ceased.

The rebels have discovered obedience.

The only way forward is backwards.  

The only way to stop History is to speed it along.

As the grinding sand
shreds the gears of yesterday's allies 

The sound of it feel like a hymn

To some invisible power

Crouching just over the horizon.

And the prodigal iconoclasts have found their peace

As foot soldiers in the army 

Of everything they despise.  

No Fair Remembering Stuff