At long last, somebody has got ahold of the Orange Baboon’s tax records. Reporters for the New York Times got their hands on the documents and the paper blasted headlines about the revelations therein Saturday.
There’s not a single thing in those records that should shock anybody who’s paid the slightest bit of attention to this man since way before he decided he wanted to become King of the United States. I’d been following his exploits closely since about 1987 when both Spy and Vanity Fair magazines started becoming obsessed with him. And, yeah, he is worthy of obsession because he was, at the time, a big player in New York City’s real estate and high-rise construction rackets and, since 2015, has become — inexplicably — a demagogic hero to tens of millions of Americans. Tens of millions of Americans who, I might add, generally fear, mistrust and detest anybody from NYC, often painting said habitués with an anti-Semitic brush. Hell, Mario Cuomo was an Italian Catholic but much of this holy land viewed him as a sneaky New York Jew.
Strict definitions and subtleties are not strong points among the folks who flock to Li’l Duce like so many flies around a pile of excrement.
In any case, the Trumpists will react to the NYT reports in predictable ways. Here are a few of them:
- It’s all lies. President Gag himself took that tack within hours after the story was published online. In fact, his public relations firm, Fox News, ran this headline…
… while the rest of the civilized world’s news media ran heads saying the records show he is a grifter, a tax evader, a fraud, and hundreds of millions of dollars in hock. - Hell, I don’t want to pay taxes; if I had the smarts and the means, I’d do exactly what my president did.
- Who cares? Nobody’s perfect. Besides, Trump has more important things to worry about, like saving Western Civilization from the brown- and black-skinned, LGBTQ, feminist, marxist, bleeding heart hordes.
Those are three possible reactions. There may be more. It doesn’t matter inasmuch as that 35-40 percent who’ve gone gaga over the Miscreant-in-Chief wouldn’t be swayed if Jesus H. Christ himself came down from heaven and declared Trump to be the devil’s sibling. After all, it’s clear Trump has supplanted for them the son of god as the divinity they gleefully worship.
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Eargasms
I’ve been on a music kick of late. A few of things I’ve been playing again and again are a couple of big band ditties from the Glenn Miller Orchestra, I’ve Got a Gal in Kalamazoo and Chattanooga Choo-choo, as well as the theme from’s Larry David’s Curb Your Enthusiasm.
The Curb theme first. The song is called Frolic and it was written by an Italian named Luciano Michelini, a film composer who’s based in Rome. The story goes that David heard Frolic in a bank commercial some years ago and decided, because it was light and frivolous, that it’d be perfect for his show. “It just sort of introduces the idea that you’re in for something pretty idiotic,” David said in a panel for the Paley Center for Media in 2009.
Sometimes, when I’m feeling particularly downcast — um, pretty much every day these days — I play a repeating loop of the song that I found on YouTube to get myself to sleep at night. Here’s a snippet of the tune:
Now for the Glenn Miller tunes. Chattanooga, I’ve learned, was the very first gold record ever. It was released under an imprint of RCA Records and sold 1.2 million copies in 1942. RCA initiated the award, presenting it to Miller for the sheer number of discs sold. It wasn’t until 1958 that the Recording Industry Association of America codified the practice, awarding gold records for a million singles sold or a million dollars-worth (wholesale) of albums sold. There are now also Platinum, Multi-Platinum, and Diamond awards, given for records that sell certain bazillions of units.
Both Chattanooga and Kalamazoo were movie tunes, the former featured originally in the Sun Valley Serenade (1941), centered around a bizarre romantic mixup including Milton Berle, John Payne (not Wayne, Payne), Lynn Bari, and Olympic skating star Sonja Henie, and the latter from the 1942 film Orchestra Wives, its cast including Cesar Romero and Jackie C. Gleason (yes, that Jackie Gleason — he went with the initial the first few years of his career) as musicians in the Miller band. In both movies, the Nicholas Brothers dance. If you’ve never seen the Nicholas Brothers perform, do so forthwith and you’ll never even think of Fred Astaire again.
The Nicholas Brothers.
Here’s the thing about the Glenn Miller stuff. The tunes are performed in their respective movies by enormous orchestras. Kalamazoo, for instance, is played by four trombones, five saxophones, four trumpets and cornets, a couple of clarinets, a bassist, a guitarist, and a pianist, with vocals sung by Tex Beneke and the four Imperials. That’s 23 people. And in those days, Miller’s band, as well as those of Bennie Goodman, Fletcher Henderson, Artie Shaw, Duke Ellington, Paul Whiteman and many more made their dough primarily by touring. They’d visit every big city and small town in the nation that’d fill a hall for them. They’d travel by train. Imagine the logistics that went into planning such a tour. It’s impossible to imagine carting 23 people around the nation to perform live music these days for a ticket at even a dime less than $200. Yet folks from my parents’ and your grand- and great-grandparents’ generation were able to scrape up the dough when those big bands came to town. Economics, it must be said, have changed.
Anyway, one sour note on Chattanooga: The lyrics go, “Pardon me boy, is that the Chattanooga Choo Choo? Track 29! Boy, you can give me a shine.”
That boy, sad to report, was a black man. Grown men with dark skin were routinely called “boys” back then. And the fellows who ran shoeshine stands in train stations invariably were black men. These verbal atrocities held until well into the 1960s.
The racism in the song surely detracts, mightily, from my enjoyment of it.
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