Worrying, coping
A mixed bag for Halloween.
Five days until the U.S. election. Here’s some of what I’ve been reading and listening to:
I admit I knew almost nothing about Charlamagne tha God (né Lenard McKelvey) until very recently. Here’s what I know now: He’s the 46-year-old co-host of the massively popular “Breakfast Show” radio program (8 million monthly listeners), and on October 15 his guest on the show was Vice President Kamala Harris. A week later he sat down for an interview with the New Yorker’s David Remnick; the conversation goes deep and wide, and Charlamagne proves himself to be an acute observer of culture and politics. “Republicans are more sincere about their lies than Democrats are about their truth,” he told Remnick. And he has some pointed words about the choice of Tim Walz as Kamala Harris’s running mate (he was a Josh Shapiro fan). Watch/listen.
The Verge does not mince words: “A vote for Donald Trump is a vote for school shootings and measles.”
The Harris-Walz campaign is running the biggest political ad ever, on the Las Vegas Sphere.
writes: “With a total 580,000-square-foot surface, the Sphere dwarfs any other single ad the campaign has designed, and it provides a canvas like no other for showing off the campaign’s visual identity. As a point of comparison, the largest standard-size billboard is 672 square feet, according to Lamar Advertising.”
The punctuation heard ’round the world: “If the whole election comes down to an apostrophe, I’m gonna be so mad.” —
, aka The Angry Grammarian, on whether the garbage is Trump’s supporters, his supporter’s, or his supporters’.Former Trump Administration adviser Fiona Hill in Politico:
Some people want to see Trump as a champion, a kind of an avatar, who's out there doing battle for them against all kinds of opponents, or getting them various things. But Trump doesn't think of anybody else as individuals. He thinks of people in categories. I heard him talk about steel workers, coal miners or auto workers. Or he talks about people as evangelicals, or Jews, or as Blacks or as Hispanics. He puts people into categories. Vladimir Putin and other autocrats do that as well. In political systems in which you have a strong person at the top, everybody else is just a category. You’re not an individual. You have no individual rights.
That’s how an autocrat controls society, by lumping people into groups and then creating antagonism between them, us-versus-them setups. That's exactly what this is about. It's about unchecked power, unfettered power, for the strongman. It's a style of governance, and ideologically, it can be on the left or on the right. All of that doesn't really matter. It's about the person who is exerting that power.
Here’s your Halloween scare: a giant “Trumpucci” banner on the corner of Geary and Stockton streets, in the heart of San Francisco’s Union Square. Yes, that liberal hellhole. The booth was chock-full of Trump merch; the entrepreneur in charge was a long-haired 32-year-old self-described Christian called Emmanuel who told me he’d grown up homeschooled in San Francisco and thought Trump was great because he stood for freedom of religion and separation of church and state. (He was also selling a big FUCK YOUR FEELINGS banner. “Sometimes you have to risk being offensive in order to be honest,” he told me, earnestly.) Emmanuel doesn’t own the Trumpucci brand, though; it was dreamed up by a Southern Californian, David Baker. This is probably a good time to remind you that Emilio Pucci, founder of the Italian design empire, was a confidant of Benito Mussolini’s eldest daughter.
I’ve been deep into Rise and Kill First, Israeli journalist Ronen Bergman’s history of Israel’s targeted assassination program and the atrocities that have provoked it. Published in 2018, it’s about as bleak as can be, but also thoroughly researched — Bergman conducted about 1,000 interviews and had access to hundreds of once-secret documents — and compellingly written. (The excellent translation is by Ronnie Hope.) If you want a clearer understanding of the seemingly hopeless politics of the region, read this book. There are no heroes. The title comes from the Talmud: “If someone comes to kill you, rise up and kill him first.”
Because I’m not a total masochist, and I certainly don’t want you to suffer, I present
, whose “Letters from an American” was the first Substack newsletter I subscribed to, back in 2019. In her October 29 newsletter she contrasts the closing arguments of the two presidential candidate, quoting liberally from Kamala Harris’s speech at the Ellipse in Washington, D.C. — where Trump, then still president, addressed the crowd that went on to assault the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021:“One week from today, you will have the chance to make a decision that directly impacts your life, the life of your family, and the future of this country we love,” she said. “[I]t will probably be the most important vote you ever cast. And this election is more just than a choice between two parties and two different candidates. It is a choice about whether we have a country rooted in freedom for every American or ruled by chaos and division.”
Finally,
, whose newsletter is called The Experiment — get it? the Stanford . . . Experiment? — seems pretty darned confident that “Kamala’s winning, and it’s not close.”You still gotta vote, though. Next Tuesday. Or sooner.
Yo-yoing as the countdown begins, shrouded in PTSD. I so desperately want to be exhilarated by the brave new world almost within reach, but...
Out here in East Poisonspider, worrying and coping has always been a way of life. I'll be glad to have this election over, just to get new ads on TV. Next up: Was it or was it not stolen? I do have hope, because this time we know what to expect.