ELEGY: Nazis in Nashville, stabbings and Trump!

FRIDAY, AUGUST 2, 2024

Where do these tragedies start? We humans! Our imperfect brains are imperfectly wired to promote Enlightenment values.

They're imperfectly wired to let us sift information. They're imperfectly wired to deal with the types of situations we refer to as "diversity."

All our brains are imperfectly wired, some more so than others. That said:

In today's New York Times, three news reports help us track the tragedies which can occur:

A Stabbing Attack, Viral Falsehoods and Fears of a Summer of Unrest in the U.K.
A judge allowed the naming of the 17-year-old charged with murder, as Prime Minister Keir Starmer vowed a crackdown on riots fueled by far-right misinformation.

What Can a City Do When Neo-Nazis Start Marching Down Its Streets?
The brazen appearance of white supremacist groups in Nashville left the city grappling with how to confront hateful speech without violating First Amendment protections.

Trump Elevates False, Fringe Attacks on Harris to Center of His Campaign
Rivals and critics have for years accused Kamala Harris of shifting her personal identity for political advantage, with those attacks escalating dramatically online since she became the Democratic standard-bearer.

Stabbings in Southport, Nazis in Nashville! And, as always, Donald J. Trump—but also an endless supply of flyweight corporate enablers.

The report about Trump's recent conduct is discouraging to the max. Just for the record, the situation which has him baffled isn't real hard to explain.

The disordered man is baffled, upset, with respect to Kamala Harris' family background—with respect to what we now call her "identity." 

The disordered fellow can't figure it out. Allegedly, it has him angry, upset. Truth to tell, the basic facts of this puzzling matter just aren't real hard to explain. 

"That was your mother," Paul Simon once sang. This was Kamala Harris' late mother, and this is her father as well:

Shyamala Gopalan
Shyamala Gopalan (1938 – 2009) was a biomedical scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, whose work in isolating and characterizing the progesterone receptor gene has stimulated advances in breast biology and oncology. She was the mother of Vice President of the United States Kamala Harris and Maya Harris, a lawyer and political commentator.

Shyamala was born on December 7, 1938, in Madras, Madras Province, British India (present-day Chennai, Tamil Nadu, India) to P. V. Gopalan, a civil servant, and Rajam, her mother. Her parents were from two villages near the town of Mannargudi in Madras Province.

Donald J. Harris
Donald Jasper Harris, OM (born 1938) is a Jamaican-American economist and professor emeritus at Stanford University, known for applying post-Keynesian ideas to development economics.

Harris was raised in Saint Ann Parish, Jamaica, attending the University College of the West Indies before earning a Bachelor's degree from the University of London and a PhD from the University of California, Berkeley...He was the first Black scholar granted tenure in the Stanford Department of Economics.

There's much more in each report, but the basic facts aren't hard to fathom—except for those condemned to fight their way through life with disordered, suspicious minds.

It also isn't hard to explain—even perhaps to understand!—why Harris "identifies" as black, to employ the current term. 

At that selfsame New York Times, Linda Qiu conducted a fact-check of Trump's recent inane remarks. Here is the passage in question:

Fact Check
Fact-Checking Trump’s Remarks on Race
The former president falsely accused Vice President Kamala Harris of “only promoting” her Indian heritage, among other inaccurate claims. Here’s a fact check.

[...]

Ms. Harris never hid her biracial background during various campaigns. In her 2019 autobiography, “The Truths We Hold,” Ms. Harris wrote that her family instilled “pride in our South Asian roots” in her and her sister, Maya, but that “my mother understood very well that she was raising two Black daughters.”

“She knew that her adopted homeland would see Maya and me as Black girls, and she was determined to make sure we would grow into confident, proud Black women,” Ms. Harris wrote in the book.

Given the lingering tragedy of our struggling nation's brutal history, Kamala Harris' brilliant mother understood the way her daughters would be "identified" within our imperfect culture.

She knew her daughters would be seen as black. Her daughters could choose to identify any way they pleased, but they'd be identified by others that way in this imperfect land.

This week, along came Donald J. Trump—and a vastly disordered mind. He's joined by an American press corps which, for better or worse, has never been willing to consider the possibility that this disordered man may be some (severe) form of mentally ill.

For better or worse, a best-selling book containing essays by 37 medical specialists couldn't convince our major news orgs to explore some such possibility. And so we bungle along at this time, still not knowing how to react in the face of his latest onslaught.

That said, the basic facts of this pitiful matter are easily explained.

Trump is now coming on strong with his latest attempts to spread gorilla dust all around. If history has taught us anything, it has taught us that crackpot onslaughts of this type can be extremely effective.

Are we ready to send a disordered person of this type to the junkyard of history? At present, the answer isn't clear. For ourselves, we're grateful to our youthful analysts for the way they've helped us see where this disorder starts.

On our own, we would have said something crazy! We would have said it starts with people like Sandra Smith, she of the Fox News Channel.

We would have said it starts with what Smith recently did. With the contempt she showed for her Fox News viewers. With the contempt she showed for every member of the world's oldest political party.

With the contempt she showed for Enlightenment values. With the contempt she showed for the basic norms of journalism.

With the contempt she showed for Vice President Harris, who had issued a written statement in which she included the actual name of that political party. 

We would have said the nightmare starts there, with the behavior of people like Smith.  We might even have said that the time has come to stop tolerating people like Smith!

The analysts brought us up short. They helped us see that it wasn't Smith's fault—that she only did what she had to do, given her place in the world.

Let's take a look at the record:

Almost surely, Smith's salary at Fox runs to seven figures. She had to keep that fact in mind, the youthful analysts insisted.

Also, when Smith arrived at Fox, she encountered a very tough crowd. To get an idea of what we mean, just think about who's there now!

Today, her treasured colleagues include the vintage loudmouth, Judge Jeanine—but also the former professional wrestler who seems to know it all. 

Her colleagues include a disordered, 59-year-old man who actually asked this astonishing question during his primetime program last week:

Has Jill Biden started f*cking Hunter Biden yet?

Yes, he asked that question right on the air! In fairness, producers pretended to save the day by [BLEEP]ing his verb of choice.

Back to Smith! Her colleagues include Mark Levin, also known as "The Man Who Screams." Her colleagues include the robotic collection of flyweights who get dragged out, seven mornings per week, to play the fool for four solid hours on the various Fox & Friends vehicles.

("Mornings are better with friends?" Not on this gong-show program!)

Her colleagues include the pair of silly boys who constantly hijack the preplanned nonsense of The Five, thereby making the show even dumber. Her colleagues include the nightmare collection who turned out yesterday, during the noon hour, to heap instant abuse on the prisoner swap. 

As of this morning, the channel has adopted a totally different point of view concerning the prisoner swap. But that collection of flyweights from the scheduled dumbbell program, Outnumbered, showed the world how quickly these flyweight corporate tools are able to generate bombast.

Smith was only 27 when she arrived at Fox. As the analysts have helped us see, she fell in with a very tough crowd when she suddenly found herself mired in this local culture.

They helped us see that it isn't her fault that she heaped contempt on so many people with the silly/dumb thing she recently did. They helped us see that she wasn't showing contempt for the good upbringing she received from her father—the good upbringing she has described in various published profiles.

We would have thought that it started right there, with the inane refusal of people like Smith to say the name of that political party—with that decades-old artefact of idiot tribal culture. We would have thought it started right there, with the instant acquiescence of people like Smith.

The analysts were willing to help us see how very wrong we were. They helped us see that it was just a matter of local culture! Given the millions of dollars at stake, her obedience wasn't her fault!

(Even for us, Wednesday evening's Gutfeld! show was a revelation. We'll probably detail what happened that night, with the termagant on vacation, in tomorrow's report.)

Full disclosure! Within the last week, a new type of thought has begun to worm its way inside our head. Our new thought takes the form of a question:

Can we sensibly think of Fox News as a type of criminal enterprise? 

Granted, they have the First Amendment to hide behind; we're speaking metaphorically here. But could any sane person have watched Wednesday night's Gutfeld! show without thinking something like this:

Except for the First Amendment, wouldn't we consider frog-marching these corporate tools into the countryside for a good, long re-education?

Wouldn't any sane person think that?

In closing, we've long suggested that Donald J. Trump is a piteous figure. We've suggested that he had the misfortune of being born to a deeply disordered father, and that he seems to be (severely) mentally ill.

Who or what is this ludicrous person? Who is the person who's throwing gorilla dust all around as he feigns confusion about the vice president's family background?

We've long suggested that he's the person Bob Dylan described long ago. The term "immigrant" is used metaphorically here. Published in 1968, the lyrics go like this:

I Pity the Poor Immigrant
I pity the poor immigrant
Who wishes he would've stayed home
Who uses all his power to do evil
But in the end is always left so alone
That man who with his fingers cheats
Who lies with every breath
Who passionately hates his life
And likewise fears his death.

I pity the poor immigrant
Whose strength is spent in vain
Whose heaven is like ironsides
Whose tears are like rain
Who eats but is not satisfied
Who hears but does not see
Who falls in love with wealth itself
And turns his back on me.

I pity the poor immigrant
Who tramples through the mud
Who fills his mouth with laughing
And who builds his town with blood
Whose visions in the final end
Must shatter like the glass
I pity the poor immigrant
When his gladness comes to pass.

Will Donald Trump's "gladness come to pass?" That remains to be seen.

We would have thought that it's people like Smith who enable this "poor immigrant." We would have thought the time had come to stop tolerating conduct like Smith's.

We might have bowed to such crazy ideas. Luckily, a group of young analysts came along and made things a bit more clear.