Speaking of music journalists, the highly recommended 33 1/3 series out of London, of which I have enjoyed more than a dozen of their over two-hundred volumes based on seminal records of the rock era, has just released a very interesting compendium penned by many of the same authors to dig deep into their secret loves of overlooked classics (hence B-Sides) – some by wildly successful artists and others almost completely ignored. It is a revisit to records that for reasons broached in each essay need to be reconsidered. It’s a fantastic idea and a great read.
There is so much care and passion by the authors on each selection, it is hard to cite the most compelling. I was, of course, jazzed by selections I too think are easily dismissed as lesser works by significant artists, The Rolling Stones’ It’s Only Rock and Roll (written by David Masciotra), The Cars’ Candy O (Susan Fast) and still others that I believe are masterpieces in their own right as in Sinead O’Connor’s brilliant, I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got (Tara Murtha) Jane’s Addiction’s Nothing’s Shocking (Rolf Potts) and Songs of Love and Hate by the always evocative Leonard Cohen (Drew Daniel).
Full disclosure, back when the series was published by Continuum Publishing, also out of London, I was working with an editor there to write a volume about the 1976 KISS album Destroyer, a record (in the spirit of B-Sides) I have long argued has been discounted in the pantheon of great 1970s hard rock releases, mostly due to critical prejudice of the band’s cartoonish persona. After extensive interviews and mounds of research bloated the project that would eventually be titled Shout it Out Loud – The Story of KISS’s Destroyer and the Making of an American Icon I was to take it to my current publisher Backbeat Books for a 2015 release.
Nevertheless, the very concept of trying to reimagine its impact was an inspiration.
For someone who has spent many years writing about music and compiling quite a list of heroes along the way, a collection of the best music journalists and essayists is a true gift. And Shake It Up delivers. Having read many of these articles and essays before, it is nice to have these seminal pieces available in a single volume. There isn’t one key music writer form the past half century missing. Editors Johnathan Lethem and Keven Dettmar uncover some real gems too. The main voices from gender to race from hip hop to rockabilly are featured.
Reading some of my favorites, Paul Nelson, Lester Bangs, Greil Marcus, and the self-proclaimed dean of all rock writers, Robert Christgau is quite illuminating when they are all there back to back to back. The way the book is arranged, it provides a wonderful chronological sense of where the rock world began all the way to today through the voices of those who lived it, expressed it, turned it from a teenage fad into a serious consideration as a legitimate artform.
Stand-outs include “The Memphis Soul Sound” by Stanley Booth – I loved his book on the Stones 1969 tour and his observations on Altamont, The True Adventures of the Rolling Stones that I may or may not have reviewed here –an excerpt from acclaimed poet, Amiri Baraka’s The Changing Same (R & B and New Black Music), which I plan on reviewing here in the near future, “The Cars’ Power Steering”, chronicling the formation and incredible success of The Cars in the late-seventies by NY Times entertainment critic, Jon Pareles, a piece that I read mere days before their founder and main songwriter, Ric Ocasek died, and John Jeremiah Sullivan’s in-depth reporting on the weirdly wonderful and equally repellent lead singer of Guns N’ Roses, “The Final Comeback of Axl Rose”.
Volumes such as these are important guides to our understanding of how the music was digested during its times and how they altered the landscape of the future. These are the voices who were there to describe the view and put it into perspective.
The final days of the Beatles. Has there ever been a more overly detailed account of a breakup in the annals of print? Yet, Kennth Womak has written a wonderful new book, Solid State: The Story of Abbey Road and the End of the Beatles, which comes on the fiftieth anniversary of the classic album’s release. Womak uses the backdrop of the Beatles final musical statement to provide new insight into the events surrounding the disintegration of the world’s most popular rock and roll band and its refusal to go away quietly.
What makes Solid State stand out from previous “end of the Beatles sagas” is as the title hints, it concentrates on perhaps the most crucial instrument on Abbey Road, the then brand-new solid state mixing board introduced to the studio whose name the record bares as its title. Abbey Road was indeed recorded in the place where nearly all the band’s legendary music was realized, but in the winter of 1969 there was one major difference: The studio moved away from its trusty BTR four-track machine for a new solid state board and an eight track deck, something the Beatles and many of its contemporaries clamored for since its introduction a year earlier. The very sound of the band was altered, the smoother and deeper Paul McCartney bass runs, the crunchier John Lennon rhythm guitar riffs, the sweetly resonant slide guitar of George Harrison, and the silky groove of Ringo Starr’s drum rolls. It is as if the band of the Sixties was heralding the Seventies. This, among other pressing issues within and without is what captivated the Beatles enough to rekindle previous magic with producer George Martin to make one final brilliantly sonic profession of their mystical talents.
If you are a studio nerd or a Beatles aficionado you will love this book, but for the mildly curious, or those learning about this seminal period in the final days of an historic run of musical success, there is plenty to cull here. For me, perhaps the coolest nugget is the transcript of a meeting between three of the Beatles (taped because Ringo was absent due to tests for stomach pain) that starkly reveals the problems each of them were harboring with the music – beyond the lawsuits and backbiting, drug issues and other nagging elements that finished them off. Their personalities, the years of crushing fame and stellar artistic output coming tumbling forth to expose their truest personalities beyond the Fab Four that were soon to be no more.
Mere months before he was found dead in an elevator in his home/studio complex, Paisley Park in April of 2016, Prince Rogers Nelson, one of the most talented, celebrated and enigmatically reclusive rock stars of all time put out word with little to no fanfare around the publishing world that he was ready to write his memoir. Shockwaves and rumors and several aborted attempts to pin Prince down – a seemingly impossible task since his emergence on the music scene as a nineteen year-old phenom that convinced Warner Bros to give him complete creative control over his work. Enter writer/editor, Dan Piepenbring, who was both an advisory editor at the Paris Review and a rabid Prince fan. The story of his enchanting but furiously quick time in Prince’s presence working through pages of scribbled screed from the man himself about his childhood makes up a third of The Beautiful Ones. The other two-thirds of the book is just as intriguing.
The second part features Piepenbring’s yeoman’s work making heads or tails of Prince’s cadence, his use of weird symbols that replace words like “two” and “four” with their subsequent numerals and “I” with a drawing of an eyeball, and many other eccentricities into a readable text that is the most revealing of Prince’s private thoughts, fears and dreams. The passages about his parents and his awakening as a musician and eventually one of the great artists of the latter half of the previous century and the first sixteen years of this one is well worth the effort.
The third part is a treasure-trove of extremely rare photographs, notes, and mementos from Prince’s rise to fame all the way through the triumph of his groundbreaking smash hit Purple Rain album, film and tour. There is original artwork and designs for album covers, tour outfits, staging and insights into the magical world that Prince had figured in his head and set about infusing into the music and eventually those who helped make it a reality.
And while it is a bittersweet document of what could have been had Prince not accidentally overdosed on prescribed opioids at age fifty-seven, we nonetheless have a better grasp on the mysteries surrounding the blossoming of a superstar in his own words and with images from deep inside his life.
In the wake of this summer’s blockbuster biopic, Rocket Man reminding everyone how preternaturally brilliant, insanely famous and spectacularly screwed-up Elton John was in the 1970s and 80s, here comes his far more detailed memoir, Me. The author proves one thing straight away, the playful drama of the film doesn’t include his incredible self-awareness of his proclivities, talents and addictions, and that by imparting it in this most intimate way, he is damned funny. It is through his self-deprecating humor that Elton John becomes less cartoon superstar, something he readily admits he knew compromised his musical integrity as a part of one the great songwriting duos of the rock and roll era, and brings us closer to the man behind it all. It is in those intrepid insights into his myopic thrill-ride of a life and career where Me truly comes alive.
My complaint, as it was with Keith Richards and Pete Townshend’s memoirs, is that there just isn’t enough info into Elton’s two main contributions to the genre; his aforementioned composing with Bernie Taupin, and his instinctual ability to awe audiences from the very beginning. For the decade of the seventies when Elton John was the biggest rock star on the planet he released thirteen albums in nine years, some two or three in a single year, many of them some of the decade’s finest, and played the world over. His 1982 MSG show is still the best concert I have ever seen. So, count me as biased here, but it is clear Elton is far more interested in sharing a retrospective of having written “Your Song” in twelve minutes or the utter terror he felt starting at his idol, Leon Russell from the Troubadour stage when he blew Hollywood away and literally became an overnight sensation in the U.S. than he is with explaining how he did it.
One thing Elton does reveal much of is his truly incredible drug abuse, his search for love in almost all the wrong places, and his constant battles to expunge the sins of his parents, especially a love-hate cycle for decades with his mother. Of course, most people perusing fame with as raid ambition have some part of their past in which they are first motivated and then mortified by the results, but Elton’s is a heartfelt and triumphant journey from child abuse to a loving father and humanitarian who has conquered his demons. Me is a brave telling and in a voice that is, well, damn hilarious and brutally honest. Kind of like sitting for tea with Sir Elton.
NOT ALL REPUBLICANS ARE FOR TRUMP Mass Exodus of GOP in Congress Tell a Different Tale
I have spent weeks hammering Republicans who have contorted their broken ideologies and done mind-bending about-faces on morality and Russia and free trade and exploding deficits and a ton of other apparently flimsy tenets of what used to make up their platform to kowtow to a rabid base that props up the worst polling numbers in the history of a first-term president. Donald Trump, I’ve surmised, has crippled the party, because, really, what could they do? They have to defend this. Supreme Court judges, tax cuts, a booming stock market and low unemployment is not nothing. So what if he’s a criminal and a doofus and the laughing stock of the world and blurts out daily vulgarities as a matter of Twitter discourse? And although having done this kind of thing for decades, I understand it. I do. But it turns out that I was not entirely correct about this. A preponderance of polling and a whole lot of talking does not quite meet the one criterion that matters in this workaday world; actions.
This week, Representative Tom Graves of Georgia announced that he is retiring from congress. At present, Graves makes seventeen Republicans that have decided to quit rather than seek reelection in 2020. This is not too dissimilar to the twenty-three House Republicans who bailed prior to the November 2018 crushing the GOP took in eventually losing forty seats in the midterms. Now, not all of these are merely seasoned professional politicians seeing the writing on the proverbial wall that Trump is headed for defeat and is poised to take the party down with him in November. More than a few have been around a long time – which some may argue means that it has taken three harrowing years of a game show host stumbling his way through the executive branch to make this a sane alternative to continuing the gig. But then again it may just be time to seek quieter pastures. Still, there is something brewing beyond this.
To wit: Only two of the escaping legislators, F. James Sensenbrenner, Jr. from Wisconsin and New York’s Peter King, are north of seventy. And despite abysmal approval ratings for the president, his pending impeachment in the very same House of Representatives, and the continuing low approvals for congress in general, many of these Republican retirees come from districts (polling twenty to thirty percent higher than the nation’s average) that they will most likely win without much effort. So why not run?
Well, let’s take Greg Walden from Oregon, who has raised a shit-ton of money and is virtually unbeatable in his district. What is his reason for getting out? And, by the way, he is not alone. There are others who have raised enough funds and have superior polling numbers to show that they could keep their jobs beyond 2020, and yet they want out.
I proffer that these representatives simply can no longer bear Donald Trump or where the country is going – fiscally, morally or otherwise. Some announced they were quitting shortly after Trump’s knee-jerk shift in Syrian policy turning America’s Kurdish allies over to their Turkish enemies without notifying anyone, including the Pentagon. Some also mildly raised eyebrows about the spend-thrift lunacy signed off by a Republican president. Recently former fiscal conservative rodeo clown Rush Limbaugh answered a caller concerned about the exploding debt under Trump by saying, “There has never been fiscal conservatives, that was always a myth.” And then there is the thorny battle between phony Evangelists who claim some form of aborted Christian values and yet tossed them into the shit can for this bleating oaf of a president, who mocks, spats and pays off hookers with campaign funds and holds sway over the human tragedy that is occurring at our southern border.
A good example of someone who is quitting directly because of Trump is Florida Rep. Francis Rooney, the only House Republican to publicly say he was open to impeaching Trump. The next day he quit. Rooney put his mouth where his position is and combined anti-Trump rhetoric with leaving, but for the most part the rest of those who have decided to abandon public service in the past few months have simply given no reason or just the standard, “I’m done.”
These representatives simply can no longer bear Donald Trump or where the country is going – fiscally, morally or otherwise.
It was either Sigmund Freud, Thomas Aquinas or someone or other said that “there are no coincidences” and we know that regardless of whatever lip service people provide, their actions indeed speak louder than words. Something is up.
I choose to see this as some Republicans not being comfortable with all this and to stick around and have to deal with a pro-Trump primary opponent or to rubber stamp this mess is simply beneath them. Many of my colleagues, and still other brain damaged types, claim this is a sign that perhaps things may not go as smoothly in an upcoming senate trial for Trump. But a Republican-controlled upper chamber is not going to kick their president out of office no matter what crazy, illegal, anti-American crap he does. And, again, if that is the way they wish to play it, I cannot argue with them. And this is why although I am considered a cynic, I am a realist. I never believe when people talk about loving America or blah-blah values. This is how things work. Self-preservation wins against America and values every time.
Other commentators and insiders broach the idea that legacy and having the stain of letting these latest crimes and misdemeanors pass will forever put senators in the “wrong side of history” box and that may sway them. But a gig is a gig and if you belong to a club or a team or a company, and in this case a political party, you may have to fall on a sword or two to keep your job or at least keep the whole thing afloat.
But it ain’t all of them. Seventeen and counting members of congress are begging to differ. They won’t stick around to continue to besmirch their names with this madness. Maybe they actually care about the country, the constitution or perhaps they’re thinking of saving their own hides. The last one is probably true, because I highly doubt even in exiting they would vote against the party to impeach Trump in the House. But, nevertheless, what their quitting ultimately says is that it is better than whatever Donald Trump and his cronies are cooking up next. And I can’t say I disagree with that either.
GORDON SONDLAND – THE HUMAN CARPET BOMB Trump Supporter & EU Ambassador Buries Everyone in Key Impeachment Testimony
I know that members of this committee frequently frame these complicated issues in the form of a simple question: Was there a “quid pro quo”? As I testified previously with regard to the requested White House call and the White House meeting, the answer is yes. – EU Ambassador Gordon Sondland
The final twenty minutes of Francis Ford Coppola’s 1972 cinematic masterpiece The Godfather features the killing of everyone protagonist Michael Corleone considers enemies to his crime family. The mob boss refers to this as “taking care of all family business.” This is the best analogy to describe what EU Ambassador Gordon Sondland did this week in his testimony to congress. Those who figured this pro-Trump donor, rich guy who bought his way into his position would plead the fifth amendment and be a hostile witness to the Democratic-led impeachment hearings were way off. The man came with a story and that story is that not only did the president of the United States demand that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelinisky make a public statement that his country would be conducting investigations into former Vice President Joe Biden and his son’s involvement in a company called Burisma, but whether the investigation actually transpired mattered in no way to Donald Trump, only that it was publicly announced, so the president could use it as a political hammer to pummel who be believed was his most threatening opponent in the 2020 election.
Essentially, days after the Mueller Report made it clear a frightening number of members of the Trump 2016 campaign for president worked with Russians to dig up dirt on his then opponent Hillary Clinton, Trump was doing it again. I mean, what country makes public announcements about starting an investigation? But, shit, who can blame him? It worked the first time. Sondland, a business man with no experience being an ambassador of anything, was tasked with “making deals” with the president’s private counsel, Rudolf Giuliani in Ukraine to help the president out. Instead, he got busted and went all Michael Corleone, repeating over and over this week under oath, “We followed the president’s orders.”
During his opening statement Sondland emphatically stated, “We all understood that these pre-requisites for the White House call and White House meeting reflected President Trump’s desires and requirements. Secretary (Rick) Perry, Ambassador (Kurt) Volker and I worked with Rudy Giuliani on Ukraine matters at the express direction of the president of the United States.”
Sondland evoked the infamous “Three Amigos”, who were running a counter shadow diplomacy (shakedown) with the Ukraine president while diplomats like Dr. Fiona Hill, who testified the next day she was pissed at Sondland for undermining their work, were woefully unaware. But they were not alone. Before Sondland was done guffawing his way through his testimony he dragged half the Trump Administration into this fiasco – Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, White House Chief of Staff Mike Mulvaney, Vice President Mike Pence and all those in their employ. “I don’t remember anyone ever sounding an alarm bell,” he said under questioning. “Everyone’s hair was on fire, but no one decided to talk to us.”
Sondland testified that “everyone was in the loop” on what amounted to a half-baked plan to get Ukraine into American domestic politics because Trump has proven he cannot win an election without foreign aid. Again, this makes sense, if it ain’t broke don’t fix it, but this time he was a sitting president and according to one of the first and foremost edicts of the founders of this nation there should never be foreigners involved in any American election. And so now Trump is being impeached over it, which also makes sense to me, because if it is broke, you kind of have to try and fix it.
But what now of the secretary of state, who has already been implicated by what has appeared over the past few months to be a seriously brain damaged Rudy Giuliani, who went on every television station available to say the state department begged him to conduct this lunacy? Pompeo has also admitted to being on the July 25 call that was the smoking gun to all of this and if Sondland and Giuliani are to be believed – and who the fuck knows about that because they’re are both as guilty as sin and running wild trying to toss as much mud everywhere else – then he, and thus the state department, was more or less in charge of this operation.
Anything goes and there isn’t a fucking thing the second equal-branch of government can do about it.
Giuliani seems to be the sacrificial goat here, as his partners in crime and Republicans in the House try and make him the end-game on how this craziness went off the rails, somehow separating the private attorney for Trump who was doing something that would benefit the president as a rogue agent. For his part, Giuliani continues to claim to be some kind of lawyer yet litigates on TV shows and waves around documents corroborated by idiots and delinquents, then gets caught in several criminal operations which are currently being investigated by the state of New York.
Then it was Mike Mulvaney’s turn. You might remember the president’s chief of staff and the one responsible for the money being held up for Ukraine that alarmed the whistleblower and the parade of witnesses proving an impeachable offense this week, holding a press conference admitting weeks ago that Trump was extorting the Ukrainians and that we “should get over it.” Turns out Sondland was also reporting this nonsense back to him and that he knew all about it and this is why neither he nor Pompeo want any part of testifying in these hearings despite Republicans and Trump supporters shouting about how innocent, normal and “perfect” this behavior is by the president. Why, you may ask, do they hide from exonerating him? Sondland says they can’t speak simply because they’re guilty, like he’s guilty, which made his testimony so compelling. The guy, with a huge smile on his face like someone busted with his hands in the cookie jar, openly implicated himself in front of congress. That is bad ass.
Then Sondland turned on the vice president, making sure congress and the American people understood he was also in this nefarious “loop”. This took Republicans by surprise. They had spent all week jumping through rhetorical hoops to divest Pence from this mess just in case things went haywire in the Senate and Trump did get sent packing. To this end, smelling a possible presidency, the office for Mike Pence had to scramble in real time to send out a mass press email denying all of it. Trump followed Sondland’s show with his classic, “I barely know this guy” routine – which may soon be the case with Giuliani, Mulvaney and Pence. Can’t you see it, “Sure, Mike is the vice president, but I hardly talk to him and can’t even picture what he looks like.”
Because, of course, all of these crimes, testified Sondland, was at the behest of Donald J. Trump. This, I should point out, was after the multi-millionaire, who doesn’t need this gig, watched former Trump associate Roger Stone go to jail earlier in the week for seven counts of fraud, lying and the usual stuff people around Trump go to prison for. At first Sondland, who began his opening statement by stating proudly he was “a lifelong Republican”, couldn’t remember half of this in his initial deposition, but testimony from colleagues began to out him which duly jogged his memory.
That memory is the final nail in Trump’s coffin in the House. He will doubtless now be the fourth president stained with impeachment forevermore and by all rights should be on a helicopter out of DC by Christmas, but the Republicans will make a monumental statement by not convicting him in the Senate – all of this is fine for the next president and the one after that, whether Republican, Democrat or Russian or Ukrainian. Anything goes and there isn’t a fucking thing the second equal-branch of government can do about it.
THE BILL TAYLOR ANGLE How a Lifetime Ambassador Frames the Trump/Ukraine Scandal
I could see the armed and hostile Russian-led forces on the other side of the damaged bridge across the line of contact. Over thirteen-thousand Ukrainians had been killed in the war, one or two a week. To this day, that continues. More Ukrainians would undoubtedly die without U.S. assistance. – Ambassador to Ukraine, William Taylor’s opening statement to congress impeachment hearings, November 13, 2019
While there is clearly enough evidence to impeach the president of the United States for trying to extort a foreign nation into making public announcements on investigating a political rival and relitigating Russian interference into the 2016 election – it’s pointless trying to argue against this anymore – the testimony of Ambassador to Ukraine William Taylor this past week provided a key element missing in all of this; the congressionally allocated weapons aid to Ukraine withheld by Donald Trump from June until September of this year. The Democrats are holding Trump responsible for his reasoning. The Republicans are trying to mitigate his reasoning. However, what Mr. Taylor repeated again and again was the dangerously irresponsible measure of simply withholding funds congress passed, the president signed, and the American public funded. Period.
Taylor, who admitted in his testimony that he had considered quitting over “major concerns” that the United States was openly reneging on a deal that at the time was six-months overdue, referred to an anxious August 29 cable he sent directly to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo in which he described “the folly I saw in withholding military aid to Ukraine at a time when hostilities were still active in the east and when Russia was watching closely to gauge the level of American support for the Ukrainian government.” Taylor concluded, “The Russians, as I said at my deposition, would love to see the humiliation of President Zelensky at the hands of the Americans. I told the Secretary that I could not and would not defend such a policy. Although I received no specific response, I heard that soon thereafter, the Secretary carried the cable with him to a meeting at the White House focused on security assistance for Ukraine.”
Pompeo, acting less as secretary of state and more like Trump’s enforcer throughout this growing scandal, predictably did not answer the cable and instead proceeded to demand anyone in his employ not cooperate with congress in the ensuing investigation. But what Taylor was seriously worried about was not why Trump would play around with not releasing what amounts to war funds to protect the interests of the U.S. and its foreign policy – whether personal gain or, as Republicans are trying in vain to convey, to investigate corruption – but that he was doing it at all.
This is the ugly story Bill Taylor told that has not been refuted by even the craziest Trump zealots.
In wrapping up his opening statement, Taylor made clear: “There is another Ukraine story—a positive, bipartisan one. This one is about young people in a young nation, struggling to break free of its past, hopeful that their new government will finally usher in a new Ukraine, proud of its independence from Russia, eager to join Western institutions and enjoy a more secure and prosperous life. This story describes a nation developing an inclusive, democratic nationalism, not unlike what we in America, in our best moments, feel about our diverse country—less concerned about what language we speak, what religion if any we practice, where our parents and grandparents came from; more concerned about building a new country.”
These are not sentiments of a politician, a Trump attacker or apologist. William Taylor sounds like a professional who has given his life and work to the sovereignty of a country threatened by its enemy, an enemy that infiltrated an American election that his president has denied ever happened, to the point of trying to shift blame on the very country he works in America’s interests to protect. His passion reverberates in every word of the above statement. And, for whatever reasons, Trump fucked with all of that. No one is disputing that much. That, I argue, and I think Taylor’s tone and testimony concurred, is an abuse of power and a shirking of the constitutional duties of the presidency and therefore enough for impeachment. And that is, as Taylor asserts, a forgotten angle to all this political back and forth that has and will transpire during these historical impeachment hearings.
In the nearly nine months (Trump released the funds on September 11 after severe and vociferous bi-partisan bitching by congress and the whistleblower allegations that he was playing footsies with Ukraine’s president to toss mud on his possible 2020 opponent) Ukraine lost hundreds of lives on the battlefield and compromised its position in defending its nation against Russian aggression. This is the ugly story Bill Taylor told that has not been refuted by even the craziest Trump zealots. Nine months went by as Trump did whatever he was doing. Allied lives were at stake and as such American security was compromised.
To make clear, the Trump administration initially told Congress it was releasing the aid to Ukraine on February 28. It repeated that assertion to Congress again on May 23. Not once in this timeline had the president given a single reason for this – incoherent, weird, reasonable or otherwise. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, who has arguably been Trump’s most effective attack machine on Capitol Hill, went to the cameras by mid-summer and shrugged his shoulders as to what was going on after he had been rebuffed by the State Department and the White House as to what the hell the president was doing and why.
At best McConnell had first been told from White House Chief of Staff, Mick Mulvaney, who was doubling as director of the Office of Management and Budget, that Trump wanted the money withheld because he had “concerns” about the aid’s necessity. Not, mind you, about ferreting out Ukrainian corruption or some half-baked conspiracy theories whipped up by rightwing blogs that the 2016 DNC email hacks had come from Ukraine and not Russia. These asinine cover stories, still being peddled, were later whipped up once the shit hit the fan.
Ten days after the funds were finally released, Trump, who lies so much he actually contradicts those lies with different lies, changed his story twice. On Monday, September 21, Trump told reporters that his decision to withhold the funds was due to concerns about corruption in Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s new government. Asked again the next day, Trump said he’d withheld the aid out of frustration that European countries were not doing enough to support Ukraine. This was followed by Mulvaney hosting a self-immolating press conference that we should all “get over it” because “it’s done all the time.”
Needless to say, all of this has led to where we are; impeachment hearings that Trump calls a hoax, because he calls everything a hoax. Here’s what not a hoax; the president of the United Stated withheld $391 million of military aid to an ally in time of war, a measure considered crucial enough for both houses of congress to pass as part of the annual budget and for the president himself to sign. Evidence is mounting that he did so for personal political gain and used unelected officials, rogue elements of the state department, and known criminals to help him pull it off. This is important distinctions to why, but the mere act of doing it is enough to warrant his removal from office as an unfit commander-in-chief.
I will always remember. It was sunny. A Saturday. Crisp autumn temperatures. Three days after his eighty-first birthday. My brother called from North Carolina. The things we discussed when I was down there in and out of the ICU for a week had come to pass. It was time. We had to prepare to say goodbye. So, I excused myself from my immediate and extended family, who came to stay for the weekend, put on headphones to listen to songs from my childhood and took a walk. Had a cry. When that was done my brother called back. He kept me on the line as they took my dad off the heavy sedatives he’d been on for nearly two weeks. I took that opportunity to tell him that I would carry his name with as much dignity as can be expected from…well, you know…me, that my daughter and wife loved him as much as I did, and that I appreciated everything he did to make me the man I would become under his tutelage. They then removed all the stuff that was keeping him alive. Within the hour, as I listened to my brother describe the scene with my mom by his side, my father’s breath became shallow, his heart slowed down, and then he died. We both said we’d look to the sky and say one last so long.
My father is dead.
It is hard to explain how many times I had rolled that sentence around in my head. I had feared it for as long as I can remember. Not really sure why. Got worse when I got older and he got older and then endured a double-bleeding ulcer in the early nineties, survived prostate cancer later that decade, then had a series of small health scares that culminated during the last five years with the failing of his kidneys, followed by time on dialysis, a quadruple bypass surgery, a broken hip, femur and wrist last winter, and hip replacement surgery a month or so ago. He was languishing in a rehab center for the second time in less than a year when he contracted an infection that he fought for way longer than any doctor or nurse could fathom. He was helped by modern medicine, but man was my dad tough.
Yet, for me, there was a rare fragility to my dad. He was quiet, self-assured but never, and I mean, never a braggart. If anything, it was hard to understand his immense abilities until way after he’d accomplished the feat. He was never macho or confrontational. If anything, there was a cold, almost detached demeanor about him – all that Anglo-Saxon, Irish DNA. It always vexed me that he never talked about his childhood, his friends, crazy or brave shit he may have done in the Air Force. When he was stationed in Japan he coached a bunch of kids to a Little League baseball title; Japanese or American kids? Don’t know. And I only know this happened at all because there was a trophy sitting on a shelf. I had zero idea who the man’s parents were, when and how they died, what they did or what they meant to him. Tried to press, nothing. Tried my mom, who sent me back to my dad, and then more nothing. I thought when I had a kid of my own this would force him to say one of them was a serial killer or contracted some rare disease, so I would know what kind of lunacy may be coursing through my daughter’s veins. Nope.
So, I think, there was this sense that the mystery of my father would somehow unravel at some point, as long as we could keep him going. His life was like a precious historical artifact that I was, I guess, the result of.
I think maybe, without getting too dime-store psychological here, for most of my childhood my dad was kind of in absentia. Not the usual, “Cat’s in the Cradle” stuff, although there is always that in the old-fashioned nuclear family, of which my parents definitely were. Dad worked, and mom took care of us. Nah, if anything having a father who’d gone to college at night at Pace University in NYC while working at a Bronx department store called Newberry’s and later the Columbia Presbyterian Hospital in uptown Manhattan where I would be born, so he could get a better gig to help the family was cool. If it meant having an absent father who was exhausted on the weekends, that was okay. He took care of us. I truly understood this dynamic as a kid. Subconsciously, though, I did miss him and felt time with him was fleeting, and so I longed later in life for time I would not get back.
Good-bye, Pop. I’ll miss you…again.
The time I did have with my father as a kid and even as late as a few weeks ago was monumental. He said very few things, but they all stuck out. He imparted wisdom incrementally, but I still have not forgotten any of it. For a public service I shall share some of it with you.
I was maybe four years-old. We were climbing some giant city park rock and I insisted on doing it the hard way and pressed my father to do the same. He told me to use my brain and not my emotions to complete a task, find the most efficient way, that is the challenge, not killing yourself for some hollow man victory.
A little later, still pretty young, my pal, Stephen Ryan ditched me for some other kid. My dad hung out with me all day, referring to Ryan as a “flat-leaver”, a term I assume was all the rage when he was a kid, because I had never heard it uttered since. During the rest of the day he told me that I shouldn’t make someone else’s decision ruin my good time.
All I wanted when I was a kid was to play pro football. I was and am extremely small. I played pop warner and some pee wee football and even tried out for my Freshman High School team. After being beaten rather severely in one practice wherein a helmet a size too big for my head spun around so I was looking out its ear hole, my dad sat me down and said something to me that I have paraphrased in many cocktail parties and press events over my professional life: “Son, you need size, speed and strength to play football and you have none of those. You have to know your limitations in life and where your true talents lie. These things will reveal themselves to you and the opposite of this is true as well.”
In my second year of college, I was hired for the night shift of a radio station in Washington Crossing, NJ in this little raised hut of a building that overlooked where colonist troops crossed the Delaware with good ole George in the winter of 1776. The staff had gotten word that management was on the verge of selling the station and turning it into some other format and that everyone would be summarily sacked within the week. So, I invited friends up one evening to put on a Howard Stern type fun-loving campy show instead of running a feed for the NJ Nets basketball game, hoping to get a demo tape to pitch to other employers. Halfway through this “performance” the station manager showed up in his pajamas and fired me on the air. When I got home I regaled this story to my dad, who didn’t get mad or look disappointed. He just took a moment and said, “You know, they hired you to do a job and you did something else. Try and remember no matter what job you take, whether it’s digging a ditch or painting the Sistine Chapel, do it to the best of your ability.”
I wonder what he might have told me as he stopped being a part of this surreal thing we call life at 1:24 in the post meridian on the 26th day of October 2019. It dawned on me in his final minutes, as my brother described him as looking peaceful, no longer in distress and succumbing to the beyond, that James Vincent Campion’s heart had been beating ceaselessly since 1938. I mean, I understand this intellectually, but it is hard to even fathom such an achievement. It is even harder to realize how his body, our body, has worked and does work throughout our lifetimes, when you watch all the machines, medicines, tubes and monitors it takes to do what we take for granted every minute of every day.
I could use one of dad’s wisdoms to explain that better. But I’ll finish this by writing: Life is weird. Death is way weirder. James is gone, but the dad part I still carry. You can’t take that. But for the purposes of wrapping this up…
GOP, THE RULE OF LAW & THE WRONG SIDE OF HISTORY Trump’s Guilt is Absolute, So Who Will (or Won’t) Do Something About It?
Defenders of the president’s high crimes and misdemeanors are running out of stuff. And, man, they’ve tried all the stuff; denied it ever happened (quid pro quo on military aid to another nation unless it dug up dirt on a political opponent), mixed semantics (making it about the literal phrase “quid pro quo” and not the action depicted in a transcript and through witness accounts), turned attentions to everything but the actual crime (the Democrats, the media, the system), flipped the blame on the participants catching and reporting the crime (original whistleblower or the parade of the non-partisan deposed) and finally making it about something to do with “closed doors justice”, which ironically is a rule Republicans implemented four years ago to try and besmirch former Sectary of State Hillary Clinton before the 2016 campaign with the endless nine-million dollar Benghazi hearings that ended up revealing nothing.
It sounds more and more, and I suspect it is understood in private, that they know Trump is guilty. Every day it’s a different defense and none of it is sticking. If anything, it is making things worse.
Simultaneously, for the first time there appears to be cracks in the Republican shield on Capitol Hill. There’s been severe blowback on the president’s irresponsibly turning Syria over to all of our enemies and dooming our only allies and probably putting Israel in its greatest bind since the Six-Day War in 1967, and his brazenly announcing that he would be hosting the 2020 G7 Summit at his personal golf resort that has been hemorrhaging money for years. Trump has acknowledged this by a recent tweet calling some of his fellow Republicans “human scum.” Nevertheless, it appears, despite almost certain impeachment in a House of Representatives controlled by the Democrats, none of this may be enough to remove him from office in a GOP-controlled Senate hearing.
The decision by the Senate, if it chooses to leave Trump in office, is clearly political now. Traditional conservatism has officially descended into Trumpism. Trumpism is the end of geo-political hawks, the demise of free traders, the eradication of religious right moralists, and the silencing of fiscally conscious anti-deficit marauders or anti-socialist bail-out complainers. Trump has eviscerated heretofore core tenets of conservative principles. The Senate may have no choice but to save this president because Republicanism is in shambles. The alternative as they see it is to hand the country over to the Democrats. The party is now run by its base. It is all that is standing between self-immolation or total political oblivion. They got their judges. They got their tax cuts. Yet the party is faced with an election year with a president with a forty-percent approval rating and days from impeachment in the House of Representatives. But without Trump’s supporters, the Grand Old Party is finished as a national power.
Should Trump be impeached and removed from office by the Senate, Vice President Mike Pence would barely hold the South and part of the mid-west in 2020. I understand this reality. And I expect Senate Republicans to vote to for immediate survival and turn the future of the presidency, which has expanded to an almost monarch status in the past one-hundred and fifty years, into what appears to be an “anything goes” proposition.
How do our children’s children view the circumstances of this abuse of executive power going unchecked by an equal branch of government?
That is the consequence of this decision. And it is on them now, not the Democrats, who appear in this case to be on the right side of history. They are playing politics too. That is true. But it was not the Democrats, nor the media, nor the system that concocted and then enacted this fool plan to strongarm the new president of a desperate nation into publicly lying to assist in re-electing a sitting president. Trump did that. He is responsible for this constitutional crisis. He unleashed this rabid opposition force. He lost the congress last year and then handed them a giant hammer with which they could use to take chunks of his presidency and pass the tattered remains over to the higher chamber for trial.
And so, the question remains: What if a president commits a crime, or in this case when combined with the Mueller Report’s ten incidences of obstruction of justice, several crimes, and is given political coverage by those in his party shirking their sworn duties? If said president is given a pass, then what does history record? Forget the politics of the moment. Forget this experiment of having a game show host run the country. How do our children’s children view the circumstances of this abuse of executive power going unchecked by an equal branch of government?
I guess what I’m saying here is this is no longer on Donald Trump. He is guilty. There is more than enough evidence that he acted at the very least inappropriately with his executive powers as set forth in the U.S. Constitution. That is a given. If he gets away with it, good for him. Presidents have pushed boundaries for decades. This is an extraordinary circumstance for sure, but it needs the checks and balances we are so proud of touting on holidays and in song and story in order to pass constitutional muster. Good for him, bad for our precious rule of law.
What indeed happens to a nation where there are those who see the crime, casually ignore it, play politics with it, and then systemically allow it? In essence, rubber stamp it. Tell the world and history that it is okay to be a criminal and be president. We then come to a line crossed with no return. This will be the precedence. And soon, probably sooner than later, the other party will be in power and maybe, it is hard to imagine, but maybe there is an even crazier megalomaniac that is handed the most powerful post in the free world. What then would stop them from playing campaign strategies with America’s security and military commitments? What would keep them from using unelected personal attorneys from running a shadow foreign policy for personal gains?
The answer is nothing. Nothing will stop future presidents if this one is allowed to get away with this unscathed. They will use foreign nations to assist in effecting our elections and point to this one as they’re excuse. Unless the Republican-controlled Senate does its sworn duty and evict this president from office for these actions we have officially completed the creation of a totalitarian position in the presidency.
What the Republican-ruled Senate does with this president in this crucial moment in American history is on them.
