-
For Springsteen Fans Now Angry with Bruce
Stephen Colbert is off the air. I waited to write this to make sure that our democracy, despite what Colbert and his regular guest Bruce Springteen are saying, remains intact. It does.
Colbert and the old Springsteen are mourned because the two saw a chance to make a very large amount of money telling people already pre-positioned to believe the sky has fallen. They are living embodiments of the blurring among entertainment, righteous protest, and partisan affirmation. Their audiences increasingly want just confirmation. Springsteen in particular sounds like he’s reciting some AI-scrubbed version of outtakes from the Declaration of Independence; the poetry that reached a hand across barriers seems lost.
They are men of their times. We live in a world of constant media stimulation, with every day being the day the doctor calls with the test results. Americans have convinced themselves they are living through a uniquely apocalyptic moment for freedom in general and the First Amendment in the particular. Every unpleasant event becomes evidence of democracy dying. Social media posts become the Reichstag Fire. A conservative commencement speaker becomes the death of free inquiry. A television cancellation becomes political persecution. It’s all about as shallow as a puddle.
Nothing can simply happen anymore. Not sure? One of the seemingly most critical issues facing our government today is whether to build a ballroom next to the White House. If every Trump-driven event is an existential threat, then every minor programming change must also be existential. Something as transient through our pop culture as a TV show can’t just have become old or irrelevant like “I Love Lucy” and “Father Knows Best”. Every era produces another so-called permanent cultural fixture that instead still ends up disappearing so completely younger people assume it was a local fast-food chain. Vaudeville disappeared. Radio drama disappeared. Video rental stores disappeared. And television shows end. They always end. That is literally the business model.
Instead, fascist, anti-democratic forces must be silencing truth-tellers. We’ll soon, it all suggests, be passing video loops of Colbert hand-to-hand like Soviet-era dissidents shuffling mimeographed manifestos around smoky coffee shops.
It’s funny the resistance chose as its spokesman Colbert, hardly a rebel broadcasting via pirate radio. He hosted one of the most expensive network television programs in the country. He operated with corporate backing and fawning celebrity access. This is a wealthy comic employed by a multibillion-dollar corporation. Springsteen is reputed to be a billionaire himself, and plays to audiences who can swing thousands of dollars for a ticket. But this isn’t an argument that only poor artists can discover truth, but instead a reminder that Colbert and his supporting acts are part of a system of money and influence and corporate greed as big or bigger than MAGA. Their comedy/commentary is no longer sharp or clever. It is simply mocking and humiliating, as crude as when Colbert called Trump “Putin’s c*ckholster” and Springsteen claimed (on Colbert’s show) that those who supported Trump were “small-minded people who got no idea what the freedoms of this beautiful country are supposed to be about.” It is likely Colbert could stand in front of an audience and just say “Trump sucks” over and over to applause. That takes no courage. Our American political culture is exhausted, and the progressive electorate is now dependent on such one-sided narration to tell it what to believe. That cheapens us.
Despite being a Springsteen fan since I was 17, and Bruce was not much older, I’ve never met him. But I suspect today if we met, he would not be interested in talking with a guy like me. Bruce at his angriest in songs like Born in the USA or The Ghost of Tom Joad, was an inclusive populist, talking about the hardships we all shared in one form or another as Americans no matter how we voted. In the blistering song about the death of industrialization in the Midwest, Youngstown, Springsteen does not ask if the forgotten steel workers are Republicans or Democrats. What if in the aftermath of 9/11 Springsteen wrote a song condemning half of all Muslims instead of the prayer that became The Rising?
In his very best music, like his own hero, Woody Guthrie, before him, Springsteen retains hope — at the end of every hard earned day people find some reason to believe, everything that dies someday comes back, I believe there’s a promised land. Artists who once, like Guthrie, translated shared American pain into art now too often exploit partisan identity into dollars. Bruce once not too long ago allowed for sincere beliefs that differed between honest men and women without condemning those who disagreed, because what we shared mattered more than how we differed. He professed we need a conscience, not a party affiliation, to make America great. I am mourning here something larger than just celebrity political disagreement. I mourn the loss of a shared American vocabulary. Bruuuuce!!! Bruce?
Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
What the Hell is Trump Doing in Court?
It was a busy day in court for Donald Trump.
In Washington on October 25 Special Counsel Jack Smith asked the court to reinstate a temporary gag order, this time with jail as the penalty, after Donald Trump called former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows (and by extension former allies who have cut deals in his election interference case elsewhere in Georgia) a weakling and coward if he agreed to testify in exchange for immunity. Trump had been under a earlier gag order which barred him from disparaging prosecutors, court staff, and potential witnesses in a pattern that the court filing called “targeting.” The fear was that Trump was calling out those he wanted MAGA supporters to go after. Smith urged Judge Chutkan to “modify the defendant’s conditions of release by making compliance with the Order a condition.”
On the same day, in response to his violation of a separate New York court gag order Judge Engoron ordered the former president to testify over an insult Trump threw at the judge’s law clerk. The judge found Trump guilty of violating his gag order and ordered Trump to pay a $10,000 fine on top of an earlier $5000. Trump stormed out of the courtroom, his somewhat bewildered Secret Service in tow. Trump technically remains free only on bail.
Pundits asked if Trump is actually trying to antagonize judges and lose both cases. Or could there be some other reason for Trump’s on-the-face-of-it non-self serving actions?
— Trump may be breaking up under the strain. One hates to even go near the “Trump is insane” 25th Amendment crowd, who think they can judge someone’s mental state long distance but one has to allow for the possibility that the stress of having his very existence and ego challenged (the NY trial after all concerns Trump’s actual net worth and status as a real estate kingpin) by small-time mooks like a judge and his clerk may have gotten to Trump. We’re seeing it play out as he strives to control his temper (hence the storming out of the courtroom.) If this is even in part an explanation for Trump’s counter-productive behavior in court it is a dangerous one, adding too much unpredictability into already tense situations. Perhaps Trump simply can’t stop himself. He’s “spent a lifetime attacking those who don’t accommodate him,” and he’s not able to quit now.
— Trump could easily believe none of this matters, certain he will be elected president in November 2024 and be in a position to pardon himself and any others convicted along the way. In Trump’s mind this is all or nothing and the little details, such as the outcome of a specific trial, matter not.
— It’s all about the appeal, part I. Trump knows he will lose the case in front of Judge Engoron, who has already substantively ruled Trump guilty and is holding the current trial sessions primarily to establish the penalty. By egging the judge on to make statements such as finding a Trump response he did not like a “lie,” ruling “as a trier of fact, I find that the witness is not credible… hollow and untrue” Trump is setting up an appeal claiming the judge is biased against him (otherwise, you generally as a defendant do not do things to encourage the judge to throw the book at you.) It is unclear if this is productive or even needed; there is already plenty to work with in the guise of former Trump attorney Michael Cohen, a star prosecution witness who is also a sworn enemy of Trump, a convicted felon, and serial liar singing for his supper. Cohen’s testimony is weak, claiming the former president never directly asked him to over-value Trump Organization assets, but instead implied somehow mind-reading style that he do so.
— It’s all about the appeal, part II. The judges’ gag orders against Trump rub rough against the First Amendment, which will form the basis of appeals independent of the trial content themselves. The ACLU, no friend of Donald Trump, argues the gag order imposed by U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan in Washington barring Trump from making public statements about special counsel Jack Smith, the defense counsel or members of the court violates the Constitution’s 1A. “No modern-day president did more damage to civil liberties and civil rights than President Trump,” the group wrote in a press release. “But if we allow his free speech rights to be abridged, we know that other unpopular voices — even ones we agree with — will also be silenced.”
Specifically, the ACLU argued Chutkan’s order is too vague, too broad, and not sufficiently justified. Trump made many “patently false” statements which have “caused great harm to countless individuals,” the group wrote. But he nevertheless “retains a First Amendment right to speak, and the rest of us retain a right to hear what he has to say.” Prior restraint on Trump’s speech must be “precisely defined and narrowly tailored,” the ACLU wrote, arguing that Chutkan’s order “fails that test.” For example, the prohibition on making public statements that “target” certain individuals is “unconstitutionally vague.” Trump “cannot possibly know what he is permitted to say, and what he is not.”
— It’s all about the appeal, part III. The substance of an appeal is irrelevant, as long as the appeal can be dragged out past the November 2024 election. It is easy to imagine a “throw it all against the wall and see what sticks” approach to buy time. An appeals court could just as easily applaud the two judges for showing restraint when they might have thrown Trump in jail for contempt. No matter, as long as it all chews up the space until the election.
Trump looks like a man who simply does not care what happens with the current trials, or any of the upcoming others. He is both convinced the system is fully unfair and equally aware that the more trouble he seems to get into the faster his poll numbers rise. Each courtroom defeat, small and procedural or a full-on guilty verdict, simply fans the flames for rally crowds. The cash penalties levied by Judges Engoron and Chutkan for violating gag orders have little meaning.
But Trump actually being jailed for violating a gag order would grant him official martyr status. Within a week of his release Trump will be comparing himself to the jailed Martin Luther King and Nelson Mandela, freedom fighters all. He could then literally test an earlier boast by shooting someone in the middle of Fifth Avenue and not lose any supporters, or perhaps with MAGA cheers in the background simply flipping off one of the judges who dare seek to decide his fate.
Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
What if a #MAGA Guy Ate Twitter’s Face?
More than a few people have cited the exchange above as justification for my forever trip down the Memory Hole, my ban from Twitter. I used to be there as @wemeantwell.My bad zombie joke about #MAGA, or anything else I wrote that was flippant, is not writing I’m proud of. But ask yourself if indeed what I was doing, in the words of Twitter’s auto-response to me, “harasses, intimidates, or uses fear to silence someone else’s voice,” or if I was just being rude and childish. Ask yourself if whatever I did means you can never read anything I’ve written on Twitter over the past seven years, if it means I should never be allowed to write there again.
Does it justify censorship?
Before you say yes, keep in mind that Twitter allows you to block me, mute me, never see me again. That’s your decision, and good for you, and good riddance to me. But censorship takes that decision out of your hands, and allows Twitter to make it on behalf of literally the entire planet.
Though the “he called me human garbage first” excuse is pretty weak, it is useful to show the context of my allegedly game-changing Tweet. I think anyone who has dipped into the sticky waters of Twitter, or lived as an adult on earth, has heard much worse. I think also my line about a MAGA guy eating someone’s face can be seen by reasonable people as a rhetorical slap, not a literal invitation to zombie attack.
Think of it like people saying “Go kiss my ass!,” or “F*ck yourself.” I don’t think in those instances anyone expects you to contort and smooch the buttocks or to perform a unilateral sex act. There’s a difference between saying “Go jump in a lake” to end an argument and an invitation to go swimming.
But corporate censorship needs only the finest of hooks. Twitter is happy to allow calls for white genocide by New York Times editorial board member @SarahJeong, “understanding” they are not literal, while being shocked — Shocked! — to see me invoke a scene from Fear the Walking Dead.
And anyone who thinks I was banned for simply being rude on Twitter does not understand much about the point of censorship.
Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Buy Peter’s Books on Amazon!
