Careful What You Wish For

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Justice Anthony Kennedy announced his retirement and Democrats were plunged into the Slough of Despond. Republicans all but sang the Ode to Joy, but will Trump’s voters live to regret this turn of events?

Trump was able to add Neil Gorsuch to the court a year ago when Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, in an unprecedented display of partisan lese-majeste, denied Merrick Garland, Barack Obama’s nominee, a vote, leaving a Supreme Court seat vacant for many months.

Stealing the seat from Obama guaranteed that, if a Republican won in 2016, the Scalia seat would remain committed to the orthodoxy of the right, under the nom de guerre of originalism or textualism. This is conservative code for finding justification for whatever reactionary beliefs the justice holds by means of a selective and self-serving reading of history.

Seating Gorsuch assured a 5-4 majority, or at worst a 4-5 minority, as long as the variable Kennedy served. Adding a more reliably right zealot will solidify 5-4 as far as the eye can see. And since Ruth Bader Ginsburg is 85, among the oldest justices ever, a permanent 6-3 advantage is far from implausible.

The next oldest justice, Stephen Breyer, will turn 80 in August. His retirement would give the Trumpist Republican Party a 7-2 majority until the relatively young originalists begin to expire, say in 2035, but even then only if a Democratic majority controls the Senate at the same time.

No wonder the hair of Democrats is afire at the prospect. They worry that Roe v. Wade will be reversed as Trump promised when campaigning. Same sex marriage would likely be equally threatened. Civil Rights might follow. Immigrants would become persona non-grata. The vote would be restricted to the approved demographics groups. And in this telling there would nothing to prevent the evangelical caucus from enacting “The Handmaid’s Tale” into law.

This may seem a little wild-eyed to more sober, or less ideological, citizens, but it is certainly true that Democrats have no way of stopping Trump and the his handmaids from ramming though another justice or two or three. Before the filibuster was eliminated by McConnell in 2017, to get Gorsuch his seat, sixty voters were needed to bring nominees to a vote. Now a simple majority suffices.

The court already has three justices aboard who won by the narrowest margins ever — Gorsuch 54-45, Alito 58-42 and Thomas 52-48. By contrast, Sotomayor and Kagan got 63 ayes, Roberts 78, Breyer 87 and Ginsburg 96, but Congress was less poisonously partisan then. A certain civility and dignity were observed in regard to Supreme Court nominees.

No more. McConnell and Trump have showm they will do anything to win. Democratic partisans are urging their representatives to sink to the same level. But they have little ammo since they do not control any of the the branches of government. The Democrats have 49 of 100 seats and not all of them are sure to vote against Trump’s next nominee. Thus, a Trump fait accompli seems imminent.

This is good news for him. It seems very likely, given the president’s legal and ethical troubles, that the Supremes will be called upon to rule on whether a sitting president can be compelled to testify, indicted, tried, convicted, in either state or federal courts, of bribe-taking, collaboration with enemy powers, profiting from his office, destroying evidence, obstructing justice. Make your own list. But why bother, if the highest court in the land is in his pocket?

This may be too dark. Surely the Justices wouldn’t let partisan ideology prevent them from doing their duty. But duty is in the eye of the ideologue. So, we may be stuck with a Trump free of any check, balance or jeopardy for as long as he chooses to serve, or as long as Putin is willing to keep tilting elections in Trump’s favor.

That being the case, will Trump’s base find an unchecked Freedom Caucus Court to their liking? Perhaps not so much. Trump ran on the promise of taking care of the forgotten man, the coal miner, the working family squeezed by costly healthcare, college debt and global competition, and surrounded by ungodliness.

Well, the Trump Court may be vicious to immigrants and gays and willing to ban Muslims, but will the coal miner’s daughter or wife be happy to let the court dictate their reproductive choices? To permit laws that steal from the schools and hospitals they rely on to give tax cuts to the rich? Will they be surprised to discover their votes don’t count when the Court permits partisan and racial gerrymander so the party in power can rig the game in their favor?

Will these middle and working class people really like a Court that constantly rules in favor of the state when it wants to take the property of people or search them or pry into their private lives?

Do Trump’s voters all work for themselves, or do they have employers and bosses? If so, what happens when the Court rules overwhelmingly to look out for the interests of big corporations and to dismiss the rights of employees?

Will the Trump voters really like a Court that serves as the tool of the same Wall Street, multinational corporations, and global banking powers that the president ran against? A Court that thinks the State is more trustworthy that the people. The tendency of the originalists, with their veneration of 18th century elitist mores, has often been to see the people as the rabble or the mob.

So, surprise Trump voters! The Trump Court isn’t going to rule in your favor. It’s going to side with the State, what you call “the swamp,” and the money power, what you call “the man.” Their idea of MAGA is not be the same as yours. Good luck.

Summer Matinees: The Walking Dead

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From an early age, l loved going to the movies, and summer was the prime movie season with plenty of films aimed at kids. Where I grew up, air conditioning was a luxury not worth purchasing for six sultry weeks a year. So, the chance to sit in a cool, dark theater on a hot afternoon was an added inducement.

Recently, however, the movie going experience has become increasingly annoying, and living below the Mason-Dixon line means I have an air-conditioned home with pay-per-view and streaming video on a big screen with sound I can control.

In an apparent bid to entice viewers like me from the comforts of home, theaters have begun adding bigger reclining seats. But they are so bulky that the theater can accommodate fewer customers, so the prices have risen to compensate, and concession prices have also skyrocketed. Has Trump imposed a tariff on popcorn and Coke syrup?

It is now perfectly possible for two moviegoers to drop $30 to $40 on a pair of tickets, a bag of popcorn and a drink. That might be tolerable if the stuff on the screen was masterworks of comedy and drama too fabulous to wait for on the home screen, but that’s not the case. The major studios no longer bother to provide original content. Instead, they are in the recycling business

The schedule, especially in the summer, is dominated by one weary franchise or threadbare remake after another. For this I should leave home, sit in discomfort, pay through the nose, and subject myself to half an hour of ads for crummy coming attractions, an equally crummy knock-off of previous films, and a pyrotechnic soundtrack so deafening it drowns out quieter films in the theaters next door? I don’t think so.

Already this year, the kind of franchise kiddie movies based on comic books or YA novels once reserved for July have been in the theaters for months – “Black Panther,” another “Pacific Rim,” “Ready, Player One,” another Avenger epic, “Deadpool 2,” “Solo,” a Star Wars prequel, and now “Incredibles 2” and “Jurassic Park 5 or 6.”

But a tremor or two has shaken Hollywood’s complacency, and the fault in not in the San Andreas but in their business plan. There’s been talk of Star Wars fatigue since the box office receipts flor “Solo” were anemic, as were those for the latest Jurassic iteration. The audiences have apparently decided the fatigue is on the part of the film makers. Too timid to mess with a sure thing, they end up producing an enervating rehash that entertains no one, not even the most addicted fanboys.

Case in point, “Solo,” the origin story of Han Solo, was originally entrusted to a couple of young, daring filmmakers with hopes they’d reenergize the franchise, but halfway through filming, the studio flinched and brought in geriatric Ron Howard to save the film from adventurous departures from familiar tedium.

By all account “Jurassic Park 9” is an even more rote, paint-by-numbers effort, though it is loud. And what do we have to look forward to for the rest of the summer and 2018? The usual suspects, of course. No creativity required. I’m not making this up, except the numbers and subtitles of a few of the sequels.

“Sicario 2,” “Ant Man and the Wasp,” on the theory that two superbugs are better than one.” Hotel Transylvania 3,” “Equalizer 2”, “Mamma Mia: Superfluous,” “Mission Impossible: Retirement Village,” “Creed 2” (which is really “Rocky” 10 or 11), “Fantastic Beasts 2”, “Girl with the Dragon Tattoo: Post Mortem,” “Halloween 12,” the fourth remake of “A Star is Born,” “Aqua Man,” “Spiderman: Infestation” and “Mary Poppins: Resurrection.”

I’m so excited! I’ll take out a second mortgage, so I don’t miss one. Is it too early to reserve tickets for the Christmas showings? Or should we all just admit our mainstream pop culture is exhausted? Same old genre tropes. Same old ads to sell the same old remakes. Same old chase, crash, explosion, beating, shoot out, robot, superhero, supervillain, alien, hitman.

At least that’s the case from the giant corporations who manufacture “entertainment” as if it was sausage. And incidentally, also true of our political parties with the same pols, lies, ads, panders, scapegoats, enemies, exhausted ideological cant.

It’s true that Hollywood in its prime made a lot of genre pictures — Westerns, Weepies, Noir thrillers, War stories — but except for serials and stuff like the Road pictures, most of their product was bespoke. Would we regard the best of them with such abiding affection if there had been a “Gone with the Wind 2,” “Casablanca 3,” “Lawrence of Arabia 5?” Not bloody likely.

Today, however, almost every big budget film is predicated on a continuing stream of revenue from sequels, spin-offs, merchandise. It is only the oddballs — indie, out of the way moviemakers whose films never play the multiplex, the independent cable channels and streaming services, the small presses, the insurrectionist pols — who show signs of life, who understand that, if you hope to produce something that’s one of a kind, there’s a box you need to think outside of. The rest is reruns from the assembly line, the walking dead.

Seeking A Non-Fiction Alternative to Trumpism

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We can guess what the 2018 and 2020 elections are going to be about. Trump, and his obsessions. Dark people trying to infest America. Freeloading allies, or former allies. Unfair trade imbalances. Coal miners versus elites and the Dark State. Good guys and bad guys, us and them, winners and losers.

We also know what they ought to be about. Fixing what’s wrong with this country. Improving our education system and reforming immigration laws to produce and attract the workers we will need to compete in a global economy that we can’t wall ourselves off from.

Shoring up alliances that protect us from enemies, not going it alone. Rebuilding our crumbling infrastructure, again the better to compete. Protecting ourselves and our institutions against cyber war, cyber crime and intellectual property theft, another competitive issue.

It also ought to be obvious that we need to ameliorate the extreme imbalance between haves and have-nots. They undermine belief in our democracy, capitalist economy and a just society. That includes, but is not confined to, a tax system that robs from the poor and gives to the rich while piling debt ever higher which makes sensible investment in the future impossible.

And yes, saving the earth from a climate catastrophe that will make existing problems — economic and political conflicts, waves of migration — look trivial by comparison.

Much of the Trump agenda is designed to deny these problems exist, while his policies tend to make them worse. His tax cut didn’t just enrich shareholders at the expense of workers, but is adding megatons to a debt bomb waiting to explode. It was good for Trump’s family and his donors, but not for the country’s survival.

If he and his enablers got their news anywhere besides Fox, Breitbart and kindred fantasists, they would have been unable to ignore the alarms being sounded about these issues in studies like “An Extraordinary Time,” “The Rise and Fall of American Growth,” “Tailspin,” “Squeezed,” and “The Birth of a New Aristocracy” in a recent issue of “The Atlantic.”

In it, Matthew Stewart shows that the top 0.1 percent of the people had 10 percent of the nation’s wealth in 1963, but by 2012 those 160,000 families accounted for 22 percent. His New Aristocracy is the next 9.9 percent who control 58% of the nation’s wealth. That leaves a scant 20% for the bottom 90 percent of the population.

The New Aristocrats are the professional and managerial class — bankers, doctors, lawyers, executives. And as they have consolidated wealth, they have also entrenched it. With rising inequality comes diminishing social mobility.

Stewart show how a slanted tax code, a weakened social safety net, and demographic sorting by Zip Code leads not just to access to better schools, healthcare, and opportunities for the haves but barriers to entry to wealth-producing profession for the have-nots.

The result is a top 10 percent ensconced in safe havens and the bottom 90 percent in a an economic trap. In Stephen Brill’s “Tailspin,” he defines these classes as the protected and the unprotected.

Trump was right, the fix is in. Yet his policies have only made it worse. Not everyone was conned. The counties that voted for Clinton in 2012 accounted for 64 percent of GDP, those who voted for Trump for 36 percent. But, if the New Aristocrats don’t want to live in Trump’s populist paradise, they need to encourage the Democrats to pursue policies that promote a better deal for the 80 percent.

Our future also depends not just on addressing inequality, but on thriving in an era of technical and scientific innovation. While Trump purges his government of science-based policy, China and other competitors are forging ahead.

The nascent field of quantum computing is expected to be world-changing. The United States is investing $300 million in its pursuit, but China has allocated $1.2 billion to wining the race. This is eerily reminiscent of the Space Race of the 1950s except we are playing the part of the lagging USSR.

China is also emulating our behavior after WWII when we made alliances and investments round the world. Now Trump is turning his back on that legacy while China is investing in its Belt and Road project — buying and modernizing ports around the world, investing in huge agriculture projects in Africa, connecting itself to markets in Europe and Asia with a network of high speed rail, the better to compete for markets.

A recent article about a European bioscientist who has been doing research in the United States is telling. His government supported grant money dried up and he sought backing elsewhere. It came from China where he has relocated his lab. Multiply that by ten, a hundred, a thousand and you have what used to be called a brain drain. In addition to quantum computing, China has prioritized huge investments in neuroscience, AI, genetics, cybersecurity, robotics, big data.

While Trump undermines our environmental protections with an EPA that has banned the use of the words “climate change,” our competitors are armoring themselves against rising seas, shifting crop habitats, invasive species, epidemic diseases and their carriers. It is easy, and necessary, to blame Trump for his misguided policies, but are any Republican candidates pushing back, and are any Democratic candidates doing more than blaming. Are they offering an alternative vision of the future.

When the Republicans have chosen to be the party of fiction, with their cries of fake news and fake science, it in the responsibility of the opposition to be the party of reality, to educate voters about the real issues we face, the stakes for our future and the measures the government needs to enact if we are to survive and prosper in the future. Where are the Non-Fiction candidates?