When all that’s left is fear and hate

Since news broke a few days ago that the President’s former personal attorney had pled guilty to numerous felonies, naming the President himself as a co-conspirator, things haven’t been looking so good for the Trump administration. And Donald Trump has responded just like the organized crime boss that we know him to be, talking openly about those who turn against their criminal superiors in criminal cases as “rats,” and saying on Fox News that it should be illegal for prosecutors to encourage criminals to “flip” on one another. Today, though, things took an even darker turn, as Trump, now facing real legal jeopardy for the first time since taking office, signaled that, unlike Richard Nixon, he would not leave the White House willingly, choosing instead to push us to the brink of civil war rather than accept responsibility for his actions and step down from the presidency.

Today, in a clear signal to his white nationalist base, Donald Trump posted about the plight of white land owners in South Africa, a favorite subject of the race-obsessed far right, who love to talk of the white farmers of South Africa as the “canary in the coal mine,” in world headed hurdling toward “white genocide”. Trump, on Twitter, expressed grave concern for these white farmers, saying that he’d asked his Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, to monitor the “large scale killing” of white farmers closely.

Of course, the reality is that instances of such murders have fallen significantly over the years since apartheid was abolished in South Africa… The following comes by way of the Washington Post.

…White-nationalist groups have for years spread false claims about the murder rates, assertions that have been widely debunked. Local police data shows the number of people murdered on farms has dropped by half over the past two decades — from 140 in 2001-2002 to 74 in 2016-2017, according to the Associated Press…

White nationalists in the United States and South Africa, where a fringe group called Afriforum has advanced the conspiracy ­theory, hailed the president’s remarks. David Duke, a former Ku Klux Klan leader, thanked Trump on Twitter and tweeted an image of a white woman holding a sign reading “Stop white genocide.” Mike Peinovich, a far-right podcast host, called Trump’s endorsement “very big” and said that “this is how we slowly chip away at the all-consuming anti-white discourse.”

Critics lambasted the president for endorsing the conspiracy ­theory to his 54 million Twitter followers. Patrick Gaspard, who served as U.S. ambassador to South Africa under President Barack Obama, noted that this was the first time Trump had mentioned Africa on Twitter since he took office…

It, of course, is not a coincidence that the President chose this moment to tweet about Africa for the first time in his presidency. Fear is all that he has left, and he knows it. He knows that the best chance he has to avoid responsibility for his criminal activity is to push us toward an internal conflict along racial lines. As much as I hate to quote Omarosa Manigault Newman, I fear that she was probably right when she said yesterday that Donald Trump “wants to start a race war in this country.”

And it isn’t just that he’s started pushing this narrative of black people rising up in South Africa, and taking the lives and property of white Afrikaners. He and other Republicans, over the past two days, have also started leaning heavily on the story of Mollie Tibbetts, a white college student from Iowa who is thought to have been murdered by an illegal immigrant. While the family of the young white student has asked that her death not be politicized, the Republicans clearly think that this is a story that will serve them well during the midterms. As Trump ally Newt Gingrich is reported to have said today in a letter to the conservative news site Axios, “If Mollie Tibbetts is a household name by October, Democrats will be in deep trouble.” Requesting them to cover the story of her death, the former Speaker of the House then went on to say, “If we can be blocked by Manafort-Cohen, etc., then GOP could lose [the House] badly.” In other words, he asked them to cover the death of Mollie Tibbetts not because he felt anything for her, but because he had come to the conclusion that exploiting her death, and stoking the fires of racial animus, was the GOP’s best chance of stopping the Democrats from retaking the House in the wake of the Mueller investigation, which has already claimed half a dozen of the President’s closest associates, including his national security advisor, campaign chairman, and personal attorney.

So, as the Republicans can’t talk about their signature tax legislation, which gave $1 trillion to America’s most wealthy while doing little for anyone else, or their plans to reform health care, by gutting Medicare and Medicaid in order to pay for said tax cuts, they’re left to tell a story of fear… a ridiculous story about how Nancy Pelosi and the Democrats want MS-13 gang members to rape and murder the young, white women of America. And, so, they’re moving farther toward the right, embracing the talking points of those who discuss “the future Africanisation of the planet” on white nationalist websites like Stormfront.

Desperate people do desperate things. And Donald Trump, as probably the most desperate politician we have ever seen in our nation’s history, is now moving into new, uncharted territory, promising the American people that, without him, they will face poverty, violence and death. There is no appeal to our humanity, no invitation to work together to form a better world. There is no positive vision of the future. There is only fear.

Ignoring the fact that the economy grew significantly faster under President Obama, Donald Trump went on Fox News today to say that our families would essentially starve without him. “If I ever got impeached, I think the market would crash,” he told Fox News today. “I think everybody would be very poor.” And, meanwhile, speaking from a Trump golf resort in Scotland, our President’s new attorney, Rudy Giuliani, warned of violence in the streets if the President were removed from office. “The American people would revolt,” he said.

These threats, for what it’s worth, and I know I don’t need to tell most of you this, are not sufficient reasons to support a party that has proven to be both thoroughly corrupt and comically inept… When the continued existence of your party depends on young white women to be murdered by men of color, it is time to burn that party to the ground and build something new. And when you’re a politician that cannot articulate a vision of the future that doesn’t involve rape, murder and starvation, you should find a new profession. Oh, and when your best idea to improve schools involves shifting funds earmarked for mental health services to the purchase of firearms for teachers, you should probably just walk straight into the ocean.

I could go on, but I suspect you get the point. We need leaders with vision who can lead. We don’t need fear. We don’t need demonization. We need real solutions. We need healthcare, education and an optimism for the future that reflects the great diversity of our nation, and not just the fantasies of unemployed, under-educated, white incels who are convicted that, if not for affirmative action, and feminism, they would be heroic captains of industry. In short, we need a return to reality. And, god willing, we’ll have a chance to make that happen come election day.

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Having just been named an unindicted co-conspirator in a federal crime, Donald Trump, demonstrating that he’s not just a criminal but a moron, tells a rally in West Virginia about how his mother used to gestate poultry

Just imagine if Barack Obama’s campaign chairman, David Plouffe, had been found guilty of eight criminal counts in federal court. Now imagine that this wasn’t even the biggest story of the day, as someone else in the Obama White House had, at pretty much the exact same moment, plead guilty to a series of election-related felonies, naming Barack Obama an unindicted co-conspirator… Just imagine the uproar on the right at having an unindicted co-conspirator in a federal crime in the Oval Office… Well, all of that just happened to Donald Trump, and, as far as I can tell, not a single person in the Republican leadership has yet to say a ward.

Trump just had what might have been the worst day of his presidency so far, which, given what we’ve seen over the past two years, is saying a hell of a lot. His campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, was just found guilty of eight criminal charges, making him the sixth person convicted in the Mueller investigation, and, at pretty much the exact same time, a few hundred miles away, his personal attorney, Michael Cohen, pled guilty to eight charges, stating in court that, among other things, he’d acted at the direction of “the candidate” with the intention of influencing the election when he made arrangements to stop both adult film actress Stormy Daniels and Playboy model Karen McDougal from talking with the press about their affairs with Donald Trump. And it’s that last bit that’s the really huge deal, and the reason why the Cohen plea is getting more attention than the Manafort conviction.

While it’s certainly bad that one of the President’s closest associates (Manafort) was found guilty of five counts of tax fraud, three counts of bank fraud, and one count of failing to properly register a foreign bank account, it’s not quite as bad as being named an unindicted co-conspirator in a federal case, which is what just happened, making Trump the first president since Richard Nixon to face such a situation. And, as New York Times writer Maggie Haberman just stated on Twitter, it has people in the White House spooked. “Trump folks are worried about impeachment more than before,” Haberman said. “The thinking goes like this: this is something tangible, not a theoretical. And it didn’t come from Mueller. Does not mean it will happen, but this has moved to a different stage in their minds.”

As for what specifically Cohen said in court, he stated clearly that the payment to McDougal was made “in coordination with, and at the direction of, a candidate for federal office.” He then added that the payment was made “for the principal purpose of influencing the election.” With regard to the Daniels payment, he then said that it have also been made “in coordination with and at the direction of the same candidate,” and for the same reason… to influence the election.

So, again, Michael Cohen, the President’s fixer, not only plead guilty to tax fraud, having made several false statements to a bank, and numerous campaign finance violations, but he said that he did it on orders from Donald Trump himself. And, according to Cohen’s attorney, Lanny Davis, there may be more revelations to come. CNBC’s John Harwood is reporting this evening that Davis has “suggest(ed) strongly that his client has information for Mueller on Trump campaign collusion with Russia, and Trump’s knowledge of plans for Russian hacking before the hacking occurred.”

So, yeah, it’s kind of a shitty night for the President.

But all is not lost. Team Trump is testing the waters with a new defense. Here’s what Trump surrogate Alan Dershowitz had to say to the views of Fox News this evening, just after the news broke. “Every candidate violates the election laws when they run for president,” he said.

Oh, and lest it get lost in the shuffle, Republican Congressman Duncan Hunter has just been indicted for falsifying finance records and misusing a quarter-million dollars that were contributed to his campaign. Given this, and the fact that Republican Congressman Chris Collins was indicted last week for insider trading, we’re left with an interesting little factoid… It seems as though the first two members of Congress to endorse the Trump campaign, Hunter and Collins, are now headed to trial, facing serious corruption charges.

If you watch Fox News, I’m sure you think this is all a “rigged witch hunt,” but here are the facts as we know them at this very moment;
Donald Trump’s campaign manager, Donald Trump’s assistant campaign manager, Donald Trump’s personal attorney, Donald Trump’s National Security Advisor, and one of Donald Trump’s foreign policy advisors have all either plead guilty, or been found guilty, of felonies. And there’s no indication that things are winding down anytime soon.

Lastly, I’d just like to say that Cohen absolutely deserves everything that he’s going through right now. He’s a vile man who made his career bullying the less powerful men and women who ran afoul of Donald Trump, and it’s with great satisfaction that I’m watching all of this unfold right now. While there are any number of stories out there about people Cohen has done wrong by in his quest to protect Donald Trump, I’d like to take this opportunity to share the story of Clare O’Connor, a former Forbes writer who Cohen once threatened. Here’s what she had to say today, upon hearing news of Cohen’s guilty pleas… “Just taking a beat to remember the day three years ago when Michael Cohen told me he’d ‘ruin my life and take everything I have’ because I wrote about Macy’s dumping his then-employer’s sweatshop suit brand. You reap what you sow, you absolute monster.” Indeed.

And you can’t see this, but I’m raising a beer right now to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who once received the following from Michael Cohen. I know it’s probably little consolation, having lost the presidency to this criminal organization, but, damn, this has got to put a smile on her face… It must take all the self-control she can muster not to drop him a line, letting him know that his “room and board will be free!

One last thing… Donald “the very stable genius” Trump, while refusing to respond directly to the fact that he’d been named an unindicted co-conspirator, did have some incredibly thoughtful comments to share with his supporters in West Virginia this evening concerning the gestation of poultry.

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The Monkey Power Trio makes considerable headway despite serious challenges

I forgot to mention it, but The Ballad of Christian Wolfcock, the most recent record by my one-day-a-year pseudo band, the Monkey Power Trio, debuted on the college charts a few weeks ago, which I think might be a first for us. [While we’ve always gotten played quite a bit by the likes of WFMU and WCBN, I don’t recall ever being told before that we’d made any kind of college radio chart, so it seems like the kind of thing that I should record here on the blog for posterity.] While I don’t think we ever got higher than 189, we weren’t that far behind Childish Gambino, who placed at 156, and I guess we should be somewhat proud of that. [The Indigo Girls beat us both, coming in at 148 that week.]

[update: Apparently we were wrong about this. While we did make a college a chart, apparently, as it’s now been explained to us by an industry insider, it was a somewhat meaningless chart… The tears, they will not stop flowing.]

But, yeah, some people seem to like it… or at least appreciate what it is that we’re attempting, or maybe just our refusal to stop. Today, I got word that we’d been reviewed by a Toronto blog that appears to be mainly about kayaking. The author of the piece, a guy who says he’s been following our career for the past few decades, had some nice things to say. He called the record “amazing and wonderful,” and the band “a thing of beauty,” which was nice. Of course he also described us a being “not geniuses,” and called out our “floundering beats.” That’s his quote at the top of this post, on top of a photo he’d posed in one of his many articles about kayaking around Toronto. [I’m now thinking that, next year, we should go to Toronto, and record in kayaks. I wonder if Canada has grants for things like that. It seems like something they might be into.]

As for this most recent record, it was recorded over two sessions – our 20th day as band, which was spent in the godawful exurbs of Atlanta in 2014, and our 21st day as a band, which was spent in a nondescript neighborhood of Cleveland in 2015. As for the quality of the material, I’ll just say that it’s not bad for five people who pick up instruments only one day a year, and walk into each session with not so much as even a single idea written down. [And yet to we still managed to make it on a meaningless college chart. It kind of makes you wonder what we could do if we actually worked on our songs, knew how to play instruments, and practiced.] Here, to give you an sense of it, is a link to one of the tracks on this most recent record. The song is called Feed Your Hunger. [Make fun if you’d like, but I’d like to see you do better in one take, accompanied by drunken 50 year old versions of the assholes you sat next to in high school school math class.]

I’ve said this before, but, for those of you who might be new to the site, and don’t know this particular part of my origin story, the Monkey Power Trio formed back in 1995 with a promise between old friends one hot, summer afternoon in Brooklyn. On the spur of the moment, we’d decided to make a record. We gave ourselves just one hour. We gathered whatever instruments we could find, and we made our way into an unlocked basement storage room somewhere, where we proceeded to scream and beat on things while an old cassette recorder whirred away, suspended from a string tied to sewage pipe. The result was a 7″ record, which we decided to call The First Hour, acknowledging the fact that we’d agreed, shortly after finishing, to meet up and do the same exact thing every year until the point when only one of us was left alive. And, surprisingly, we’ve stayed true to our word for nearly 25 years now, despite the fact that, every year, it becomes exponentially more difficult for the five of us to get away from our real-world obligations, express ourselves creatively, and put up with one another.

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Rand Paul, just back from Russia, meets Donald Trump aboard Air Force One

Having just recently returned from Russia, Republican Senator Rand Paul was seen boarding Air Force One today in Morristown, New Jersey with Donald Trump. Given that, during the campaign, Trump had referred to Paul as “a spoiled brat without a properly functioning brain,” and that the Senator from Kentucky had countered by calling Trump “delusional,” and less qualified than “a speck of dirt” to be president, this, I’m sure, may be shocking to some. The truth, however, is that Paul has emerged as one of Donald Trump’s most loyal defenders since the election, especially on issues relating to Russia. [It’s funny how Russia keeps coming up, isn’t it?]

When Donald Trump traveled to Iceland a month ago to meet in private with Russian dictator Vladimir Putin, causing an uproar among leaders of both parties, Paul was one of the few in Congress to come forward to praise the President. And he’s spoken out against the Mueller investigation on several occasions, attributing it to what he calls “Trump derangement syndrome,” and saying that “special prosecutors have too much power and that we really shouldn’t have them.” And, as we now know, when he left for Russia about nine days ago, Paul carried with him a letter, written by Donald Trump, to give to Putin’s representatives upon landing.

So, just to recap, Donald Trump went to meet with Putin about four weeks ago, over the objections of the intelligence community, who are unanimous in their belief that the Kremlin not only interfered in the 2016 election, but are preparing to do so again during the midterms. And, since this private meeting between Trump and Putin, during which no other U.S. officials were allowed to be present, several Congressional Republicans have traveled to the Kremlin, for reasons that aren’t terribly clear. And the most recent elected official to do so was Rand Paul, who came back talking about how we needed to lift sanctions against some of Russia’s most powerful leaders. And, today, he traveled with Donald Trump aboard Air Force One, where they no doubt discussed Paul’s meetings with Kremlin officials.

I’m not suggesting that Rand Paul is being used as a courier between Trump and Putin, but, when you look objectively at the facts, it’s not difficult to see why people might think that something odd is going on, going so far as to wonder if, back in in 2016, when the Russians hacked the accounts of both Democrats and Republicans, the Kremlin may have found something to use against the Senator. [Some on the left, perhaps inspired by the insanity of QAnon, are even speculating that the Senator’s beating outside his home a few months ago may be related.]

Personally, I think it’s just as likely that Paul isn’t being blackmailed, but merely likes what Putin, as the global poster boy for the white, christian ethnostate, is doing, and sees an opportunity through Trump to enact cruel, racist and authoritarian policies that otherwise never would have passed through Congress.

I don’t think, in the whole scheme of things, it really matters what Paul’s motivation is… whether he’s been blackmailed into assisting the Kremlin, or whether he’s doing it of his own free will. What matters is that, as John McCain said not too long ago on the floor of the Senate, “The Senator from Kentucky is now working for Vladimir Putin.” And we need to stop it.

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Looking for the Mark III

I rarely share them here, but I’m known to go off on wild goose chases every now and then, trying my best to track down useless historical facts and obscure items that, for whatever reason, I’ve become obsessed by. A few years back, as you may recall, I decided that I needed to know what had happened to large brass bell that had figured prominently in a short, silent film that Orson Welles had made with his friends at the age of 19 in Woodstock, Illinois. [This reminds me that I still owe you a followup, telling you what I, assisted by a small army of local historians and reference librarians in Woodstock, was able to discover about said bell.] And then there was the time back in ’94, when I felt that I needed to know more about a painting of Don Knotts that showed up for a split second in the John Waters film Serial Mom. [That investigation, as I wrote about in Crimewave USA at the time, led me to Baltimore, and into an apartment once occupied by Edith Massey.] At any rate, I seem to be heading down a similar rabbit hole right now…

A few days ago, I posted an old photo here of North Washington Street in late ’74 or early ’75. Well, in that photo, on the marque of Ypsilanti’s Art 1&2 adult theater, were the names of four adult features; Frankie and Johnny were Lovers (1973), Hot Channels (1973), Pleasure Masters (1974), and Angel Above – The Devil Below (1974). And, in doing a bit of research on those four films, I found myself becoming more and more interested in Hot Channels, which, according to the online resources I could find, was about virtual reality. I began to wonder, among other things, if this might have been the first instance of virtually reality having been depicted in film.

So I started doing a little research as to what movies came out before the mid-90s when a slew of films like Virtuosity, The Lawnmower Man, and Johnny Mnemonic came out, paving the way for The Matrix at the end of the century. And, what I discovered was that most people seem to credit Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s German television serial Welt am Draht (World on a Wire) with being the first. The thing is, it came out in 1973 – the same year that Hot Channels came out. And now I’m wondering if, just maybe, Hot Channels might have come out earlier that year, thereby deserving the credit.

Last night, while the family was out, I watched Hot Channels, fast-forwarding through the grainy, poorly-lit sex scenes, looking for the depictions of the technology in use, and what I found was pretty fascinating. Here, to give you a sense of how the device, called the Mark III, worked, is a short video clip. [While the following clip does contain one expletive (“shit”), and the image of a blurry dong, I think it’s relatively safe for the home or workplace.]

Since watching Hot Channels, I’ve convinced myself that, if in fact it did come out before Fassbinder’s Welt am Draht, the Mark III should be located and put into a museum somewhere. [The fake pubic hair that surrounds the device’s controls, I’m sure, has gotten even more disgusting since 1973, but I suspect that the curators at either the Smithsonian or Henry Ford Museum could do something with it to make it a little less horrifying.] So I’ve started putting the word out to people who I know that may have an idea as to wether or not R.G. Benjamin, who produced and directed the film, or writers Alan Frybach and Paul Williams, may still be alive. [All I know for certain at this point is that Andrea True, the most famous of the actresses in Hot Channels, passed away at the age of 68 at in 2011. True, whose real name was Andrea Marie Truden, gained considerable fame in 1976, when her disco song, “More, More, More,” climbed to number four on the U.S. charts. The song’s lyrics, likely inspired by her career in adult films, included the phrase; “if you want to know how I really feel, get the camera’s rollin’, get the action going’.”]

As I said above in my Twitter post, I doubt that this social media campaign of mine will yield much in the way of tangible results, but I at least wanted to put it out there, just in case, by some strange coincidence, one of my readers may be related to someone involved in the production of Hot Channels, or, better yet, may know the whereabouts of the Mark III device, which really should be preserved somewhere. So, if what you see in this following photo looks at all familiar, or, if you watch Hot Channels, and think that one of the women looks like your mom, give me a call and let me know.

Also, I should probably note that the movie wasn’t just known as Hot Channels. Likely in an attempt to make more money at the box office, producer R.G. Benjamin appears to have edited the film a bit and rereleased it later in ’73, under the title Computer Game, in hopes of tricking a few folks into paying to see it again. Here’s the add for that iteration of the film. [If you’d like to compare, an ad for Hot Channels can be found here.]

I should add that, if I do find the Mark III, I have no intention of trying it out. My interest is not that of a pervert, but that of an historian… which, I think, is a little different.

Posted in Art and Culture, History, Pop Culture, Special Projects, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 13 Comments

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