Author Archives: glabwrites

08/18/2025
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1968 Democratic Convention, Kenny Holtzman

717 Words: Summer School

Every August, I celebrate two dates that are meaningful in my personal history.

The greatest, most exciting moment of my sports fandom life occurred on August 19, 1969. My sister and her then-husband took me and their kids to the Cubs game at Wrigley Field. I’d been staying with my sister’s family that August because Riis Park day camp was finished and my mother, who worked at the local dime store, was afraid I might burn down the house if I were left alone. The Cubs had just come back to town from a successful road trip. They were far out in front in their division, 31 games over .500. The whole city was ecstatic. Everyone knew — knew — the Cubs were headed toward their first World Series since World War II. I actually had a six-inch-diameter Cubbie pin (see a pic of me wearing it in 2016 in the gallery below):

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The gang of us were just about the last people in the ballpark that day. The place was packed. The only seats we could find were high up in the centerfield bleachers, underneath the scoreboard. Wrigley was rockin’. The sun was shining and Kenny Holtzman was on the mound. He actually lived just across the Little League diamonds from my sister in Schiller Park, near O’Hare Airport. He had a white Pontiac convertible. Every time we saw it in his apartment building parking lot, we loitered around it in hopes he’d come out and invite us to come inside and become his best friends. And, of course, Ron Santo was a fixture at third base, the best third baseman in the National league and proprietor of his eponymous pizza parlor in Park Ridge. Santo hit a first inning home run with a couple of guys on base and that’s all the Cubs needed that day as Holtzman pitched a no-hitter. After the last out, fans jumped over the bleacher walls and stormed the field. The Cubs mobbed Holtzman as if they’d just won the final game of the World Series (which we all knew — knew — they were going to do that year). I thought I’d died and gone to heaven.

The other date, actually a week of dates, was August 26-29, 1968. The Democrats came to town that week to nominate Hubert H. Humphrey as their candidate for president. He’d go up against the Republican Richard M. Nixon, whom we all knew was a punchline. Bobby Kennedy had been killed nearly three months before but, damn it, we were still gonna win the election. And we were all still mourning the death in early April of Martin Luther King, Jr. Nevertheless, the good guys would win. We knew — knew — it. Who’d be loopy enough to vote for Tricky Dick?

Only the SDS, led by Tom Hayden; the Yippies, led by Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin; the Mobe (National Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam), led by David Dellinger; and many others converged on the city to protest the godforsaken, idiotic war in Southeast Asia. Mayor Richard J. Daley was panicky. He wasn’t about to let the city be taken over by long-haired, commie, radical, beatnik, drug-taking, sex-enjoying hippie-dippie punks. His cops already had beaten the hell out of peaceful anti-war protesters one April Saturday afternoon in the Loop and they were itching to break more heads. The National Guard backed them up with fixed bayonets attached to their loaded rifles. This time, the world’s television cameras caught all the action. It would be labeled a “police riot” by the Walker Report.

Both August events in successive years when I was 12 and 13 helped form the adult me. The Cubs in ’69, immediately after Holtzman’s no-hitter, would go into a swoon and lose to the heretofore risible Mets. That taught me all joy was fleeting and disappointment was something I not only needed to prepare for, I had to learn how to accept it and move on. The convention and the protests in ’68 radicalized me. I came to detest The Man and always identify with the rebels, the outsiders, the ones who risked life and limb to raise hell against those in power. That lesson is coming in awfully handy now, in the year 2025.

August, when I was a kid, was always the last month of summer vacation. Except for me, for two formative years of my life, it was the month of my schooling.

08/06/2025
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Hiroshima

786 Words: Dumb Luck

The Bomb fell 80 years ago today.

That’s right — The Bomb. It has to be capitalized.

At the time of the Manhattan Project, the US was only one of at least five nations working on building their own Bomb. This holy land only was able to do it because it was, at the time, the richest nation on the planet. It cost $20B in 1945 dollars to build America’s first nukes. No other country could spare that kind of cash as they were busy clothing, feeding, arming, and transporting millions and millions of people here and there to kill millions and millions of other people.

The US and the UK, working together, reasoned that, since many of the world’s smartest nuclear physicists were from Germany, Hitler’s Reich probably was racing to be the first to build a Bomb. Hitler, history has shown us, didn’t think all that much of the then-theoretical weapon. Of course, we had no way of knowing that at the time so we had to beat the Nazis to it.

By the time Lt. Gen. Leslie R. Groves, physicist/administrator J. Robert Oppenheimer, and their crew finally put together a working Gadget, Germany had been crushed. In mid-July, 1945, new US President Harry S Truman was scratching his head, trying to strategize an end to the war with Japan. His advisers estimated more than a million US soldiers would be casualties and tens of millions of Japanese would be starved, bombed, bayoneted, blown up, or shot to death were we to invade the Japanese mainland. Truman’s diplomats warned him the Soviet Union was itching to get its hands on a good half of Japan once Stalin’s empire joined the war. Truman political advisors counseled him that if we didn’t use The Bomb to shorten the war and Americans learned about the cost and efficacy of the thing, they’d crucify the president. All were compelling reasons to drop The Bomb on Japan.

Let’s do it, Truman decided.

How, we wonder at this remove, could anybody do such a horrifying thing? It’s easy to condemn Truman’s decision in 2025. In 1945, officials around the world were busy counting the more than 50 million human beings already slaughtered in the war. Killing huge numbers of people was the norm.

Of all humanity’s sins, our species’s development of nuclear weapons might turn out to be the evilest. That is, of course, if there’s anybody left to rank Homo sapiens‘s sins should we again decide to fling nukes at each other.

Very few people who actually remember World War II and the dropping of The Bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki are left. In fact, Bill Clinton was the first US president who hadn’t fought in the war, and he took office more than 30 years ago.. The horrors of WWII, it can be assumed, kept the globe’s post-war leaders from getting too mouthy with each other for fear that things might spiral out of control.

Today’s leaders have no such historical guardrail.

Donald Trump and Dmitri Medvedev, Russia’s former president and prime minister, have been throwing threats at each other of late. They’ve been making references to their Bombs, implying each has the capability and will to incinerate the other. Post-World War II leaders with personal memories of that that horror never resorted to such threats. Even when the US and the USSR stood at the brink of nuclear armageddon during the Cuban Missile Crisis, neither Kennedy nor Khrushchev blabbed about nuking each other. Just uttering the words was seen as dangerous, rather like saying Candyman three times in a row. Or is it five? No matter.

Li’l Duce, who is unapologetically — even proudly — unaware of history, has no healthy fear of his country’s or his foe’s nukes. Historians tell us every time a new US president takes office, he is humbled — and petrified — as he’s apprised of our nuclear capability and the apocalyptic havoc using them would unleash. Not Li’l Duce, numerous observers have noticed. Even so theatrical a macho-man as Ronald Reagan, became convinced we — meaning all Earthlings — had to reduce our nuclear stockpiles once he was put abreast of their numbers and megatonnage. When Trump took office in 2017, he began crowing that we ought to build thousands more of the things.

Humans have only used two Bombs in anger. We have, though, exploded them thousands of times in “test shots” to remind the Other Guy that we have them. It’s been 80 years since we dropped the first nuke on a city. It’s almost beyond belief that we’ve never used them again following the Nagasaki bombing three days later. I chalk that good fortune up, mostly, to dumb luck.

Now, it’s the leaders who are dumb. Our luck might be running out.

 

08/03/2025
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Corporation for Public Broadcasting

515 Words: The Last Straw

It was the announcement Friday that the Corporation for Public Broadcasting would be closing its doors over the next few months that finally kicked me over the edge.

It cannot be argued any more; I’ve been feeling discouraged the last few months and the Trump Presidency II is the reason. No, wait, let me correct that: I’ve been depressed the last few months. In fact, all the way back to November when somehow, in some bizarre way, the American voting populace said Let’s do this shit again.

Depression. I mentioned this in my previous post: I’m not thrilled about getting up in the morning these days. I’ve been flailing around, looking for a reason or some combination of them for this despondency. Problem is, my health is good (relatively), I’m almost finished with my book-length history of WFHB, The Loved One and I are sailing along, and the Cubs are fighting for first place. There seem to be no looming griefs in my life. I’m down about Li’l Duce, sure, but can that so profoundly affect my emotional well-being?

Yes it can.

I felt so defeated when the CPB closing news hit. The goddamned Corporation for Public Broadcasting. The people who taught kids how to count.

 

 

The Corporation for Public Broadcasting. The people who gave us Carl Sagan and Cosmos.\

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Corporation for Public Broadcasting. The people who gave us Ken Burns and Baseball, the Civil War, Prohibition, Mark Twain, Jazz, and all the rest of his and his collaborators’ history documentaries.

The Corporation for Public Broadcasting. The people who gave us Ira Glass and This American Life, who gave us David Sedaris and the Santaland Diaries, who gave us All things Considered, Scott Simon and Weekend Edition, Terry Gross and Fresh Air, World Cafe, Brooke Gladstone and On the Media, Brother William in his Soul Kitchen, Richard Fish and his Firehouse Theater.

You’d be hard-pressed to find a more innocent, altruistic, creative, dedicated bunch of folks and the treasured pieces of art they created.

They’ll be gone soon. Make no mistake. The stations that carry them will be closing down, one by one. The kids just coming up who’d hoped to follow in their footsteps now will have no financial support, no network outlet, no local stations to carry whatever shows they conceive.

PBS, NPR, APM, PRX, and the rest will soldier on but, for pity’s sake, people have to get paid for their work. Networks and stations, closely tied together through syndication fees and annual CPB grants, will fall from the media tree like leaves in October.

Heather Cox Richardson tells us today on her Substack newsletter that the Trump administration, in its battle to redraw Texas’s congressional districts to more solidify the Party of God’s stranglehold on the state, sees the effort as “Maximum warfare, everywhere, all the time.”

That sums up Li’l Duce‘s assault on America. He has declared war on us. Everywhere. All the time.

What are we gonna do about it?

Perhaps that’s the real root of my discouragement, my depression. I don’t know what to do.

07/30/2025
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Owning the Libs

904 Words: Happy Now?

These days, I’m not at all thrilled about getting up in the morning.

As a rule, mornings are great times for me. The day is young and full of promise and opportunity. I leave the blinds open so that the sun wakes me up. I love the birds, calling and chirping, yelling and squawking, making sure the world knows they’re alive and this branch, this corner of the roof is Mine, Mine, Mine.

I suppose that makes me an optimist, which is good considering I’ve striven all my life to be one. It was a reaction to my very depressed Daddy-o, who could always find the dark lining in any silver cloud. Had I magical powers, I would have instantly snapped my fingers or twitched my nose to transform him into someone who, at the very least, had a nodding acquaintance with hope.

Too, I was afraid that Dad’s blues might have been congenital, that within me there existed his certainty that all was for shit. In fact, that’s one of the main reasons I never had kids, that fear that some melancholy, hidden away deep within me, would be imposed upon my heirs, just the way Dad’s was on me.

In case that was true, I was going to fight the good fight against it. As Shakespeare or the Bible advised, He who would be calm must appear calm. Or, as the 1980s saying went, If you can’t make it, fake it. Even If I had been born with the depression gene, I’d successfully conquer it through will and practice. So there, you old glum DNA strands. See, Dad? There can be hope.

Or, maybe I was just a happy-go-lucky kid and it all came natural to me. No matter. I am what I am.

Aspiring. Looking for joy. Hoping for the best. Wishing and anticipating.

Except it’s really hard to do that these days.

My terribly imperfect country has been transformed the last few months. All the good America had mustered — achieved through tooth and nail battle over the decades and centuries — seems to be slipping away. Li’l Duce‘s pitched fight against education, science, curiosity, art, whimsy, tolerance, diversity, equity, inclusion, altruism, charity, generosity, and even the ancient qualities of agape and philia and his successful eradication of those things on a federal level has made this a mean, loathsome country.

For all our sins — and there’ve been plenty since the United States came into being 250 years ago — we Americans have always held out hope that the All Men Are Created Equal slogan might one day come to fruition, that when all was said and done, we’d turn out to be an okay bunch. Or, as the great Molly Ivins wrote, It is possible to read the history of this country as one long struggle to extend the liberties established in our Constitution to everyone in America.

We might not have arrived there at any time in our history but we were en route. Or so we told ourselves.

The rest of the world, largely, saw us that way too. Even though America’s mortal sins included the Native American holocaust, slavery, Jim Crow, environmental rape, institutionalized racism, and the capability to create the most fearsome bombs ever imagined, foreigners saw all those as anomalies, treatable cancers.

Those Americans, the world told itself, they’re not such a bad gang, warts and all.

But it’s expensive to care for others. It takes time to learn. It’s hard work trying to discover things. It demands patience to be able to accept those who look different, who act different, who eat different, who love different.  Somehow, over the objections of those who fretted over their cost or supposed dangers, we set up agencies and offices — the EPA, the EEOC, the Justice Department’s Civil Rights division, Title IX, consumer protection agencies, the NEA, the NEH,  the CPB, and all the rest — institutions that codified and ensured our commitment to all those things good and humane.

As one of my idols, Mike Royko, wrote: It’s much harder to be a liberal than a conservative. Why? Because it is easier to give someone the finger than a helping hand. Nevertheless, for the last 90 or so years, we’ve moved inexorably closer to a caring, good society. We were en route even if the destination seemed a thousand miles away.

Somehow, some way, a single man, a cult leader, has worked feverishly and successfully to dismantle as much of that infrastructure as possible. It’s easier, this man told his followers, to give them the finger.

And now it’s hitting home. With Congress’s cutoff of previously promised funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, WFHB, home of my program Big Talk, finds itself in a financial crunch. Some 25 percent of our annual budget has gone poof. Now comes word that two key employees, Noelle Herhusky-Schneider, the assistant news director, and Josh Brewer, the operations manager, have been laid off. A damned shame for them. And everybody else who evaded the hangman will have all their responsibilities dumped on them.

Since January 20th — well, since the November election, really — it’s been getting harder and harder to face each day with any sense of optimism for America. Now it’s nearly impossible.

I’m not the only one unhappy about it all.

The sick thing is our unhappiness makes Li’l Duce and MAGA happy. Well, as happy as hateful, vengeful, scared people can be.

07/26/2025
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Donald Trump, Hulk Hogan

Words: Carnival Barkers

Hulk Hogan died a few days ago. He played a bit part in the first article I ever wrote for pay.

It was back in the fall of 1983. I was chomping at the bit to write for the Chicago Reader, at the time one of the two most respected alternative newsweeklies in the country along with the Village Voice.

I had an idea for a story. Professional wrestling was just about to explode onto the national scene. Prior to that time, it existed only in the nowheresville of National Guard armories, small town theaters seating a couple of hundred people at most, and sometimes even high school and junior college gyms. You could catch it on TV if your broadcast area had UHF stations. Channel 26 carried pro wrestling in Chicago, its sponsor a used car lot.

I found pro wrestling fascinating, the cartoonish characters both good and evil (the Iron Sheik, for one, called for Eye-ran to kick America’s ass). Hulk Hogan was one of the good guys.

So, I caught wind of an upcoming pro wrestling event to take place that September at the Rosemont Horizon, a second level arena that was home to the DePaul Blue Demons men’s basketball team. It’d be called the Battle Royal and every big name wrestler, including Hulk Hogan, Andre the Giant, and other luminaries would be there. The evening’s festivities would culminate in a free-for-all, 25 wrestlers all in the ring at one time, trying to brain, maim, and heft their opponents over the ropes.

To tell the truth, I forget who even won. I may not have even revealed the night’s victor in the story I wound up writing. I was far more taken by the fans who’d packed the place and the wrestlers themselves. How, I wondered, were the grapplers able to leap off the turnbuckle and land with both feet on an opponent’s chest (without a single rib cracking)? What was it like to be the recipient of a pile-driver (and not suffer quadriplegia)? As for the fans, I was fascinated by their buy-in to the theater of it all.

That braining and maiming? Any sentient human could see, even on those fuzzy UHF telecasts, that the mayhem was staged.

I could see how the wrestlers, when they slugged an opponent, pounded their feet loudly on the mat in order to produce concurrent pows. I could tell that when one wrestler smashed another over the head with a folding chair, he did it in such a way that no physical harm could result. If a guy caught a forearm to the head, his whole upper body would vibrate, the way, say, Tom’s would when the big dog conked him with a garbage can lid in the Tom and Jerry cartoons.

Watching pro wrestling on TV, I could see that the fans were totally into it. They bought every slam, every conk, every folding chair bash. They cheered for the good guys and booed the bad guys — and they meant it.

Who were these people? I wondered. That was my story and that’s what I wrote.

It indeed turned out to be my first professional writing. I was hooked. I’ve done it now for the last 42 years.

In any case, Hulk Hogan played, as I say, a bit role. After the Battle Royal concluded, I went to the Air Host Motel on Mannheim Road near O’Hare Airport, where the wrestlers were staying. The wrestlers all were drinking and relaxing together, no longer blood enemies, but really, co-workers.

Or should I say co-stars?

I remember one of the Bad Guys, in backless slippers, coming down to the tiny lobby, picking up the Sunday Chicago Tribune, and climbing back up the stairs to his room, as if he were a traveling sales rep out on a trip drumming up business in the suburbs.

Then, the magnificent Hulk Hogan entered the lobby. Already, he was hip to the notion that he should never appear in public out of character. That was a Vince McMahon commandment. McMahon, of course, was the wrestling impresario whose wife is now Secretary of Education in the Trump Administration.

McMahon crafted and manged the professional wrestling demimonde back then. He knew the growth of the sport was dependent on audience buy-in.

The 15,000 or so jammed into the Rosemont Horizon that Saturday night all believed in their hearts in the goodness or badness of the characters, in the folding chair smashing, and in the countless vibrating upper bodies after head clunks.

Again, wrestling was theater. But so is Shakespeare. Yet, when Shakespeare fans go to see “Julius Caesar,” even thought they feel a tinge of terror when Brutus plunges his dagger into Caesar’s chest, they walk away from the performance knowing that the guy who played Caesar was not really dead.

That kind of willful leaping from fantasy to reality wouldn’t do for wrestling fans. McMahon knew it. Hulk Hogan knew it. The fans really thought Hulk Hogan and the Iron Sheik hated each other.

Pro wrestling was the start. In the forty-plus years since that Battle Royal, Americans have come to believe in the most outlandish bullshit imaginable. Jonathan V. Last wrote yesterday in a post on one of The Bulwark’s newsletters: “You cannot understand the world we live in, right now, unless you understand Hulk Hogan.”

Hogan and the McMahons created an existence, a world, based on what they dubbed kayfabe — “the pretense,” Last writes, “that unreality is, in fact, real.”

Merriam-Webster defines kayfabe as “the tacit agreement between professional wrestlers and their fans to pretend that overtly staged wrestling events, stories, characters, etc. are genuine.”

The tacit agreement.

Wrestling fans know they’re buying into horseshit but they do so because they want to. The kayfabe universe is more comfortable. Good and bad are clearly defined. Heroes are on my side; villains must be defeated. Nuance? Contradiction? What the hell are those things?

Some sources say the word originated among carnival barkers. People didn’t actually eat fire. There were no bearded ladies. But the barkers’d drum up so much anticipation, so much excitement about them that their marks, the ticket-buying rubes, wanted so badly, needed so badly, to believe they were seeing what they were promised that the unreality became their reality.

Carnival barkers and pro wrestlers understand that they have to control — to own — their marks’ emotions and desires. Make their tongues hang out and they’ll eat slop.

It’s nothing at all like real life. So, to hell with real life! I’m gonna make my own reality.

Donald Trump and Vince McMahon were friends and business partners. They have a long history together.

Make no mistake: Li’l Duce was listening when Vince McMahon was speaking. The showman in the White House brought with him the lessons he’d learned from the showman in the squared circle.

When news broke that Hulk Hogan had died earlier this week, the White House issued a teary statement saying Hogan was “Strong, smart, but with the biggest heart.”

You’d have thought some ex-senator or noted philanthropist had died.

Li’l Duce knows who his people are.

Hogan, back on that Saturday night, strode through the Air Host Motel lobby, still clad in all his wrestling regalia. He spoke to no one. No one spoke to him. Except me.

“Hulk!” I called out. “Hulk! Do you have a minute?”

No response.

“Hulk, Hulk! Can I have just a short interview?”

Nothing.

He headed, regally, toward the second floor. At the top of the stairs, he spun around, stared at me, and then puffed out his chest and flexed his biceps. I stopped dead in my tracks, my mouth open.

Hogan spun around and stalked off to his room.

As my friend and podcast colleague Tristra Newyear observed, that was the most dramatic no-comment she’d ever heard of.

Kayfabe.

Vince McMahon got it. Hulk Hogan got it. And President of the United States of America Donald J. Trump gets it.

07/21/2025
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L'il Duce

483 Words: A Land of Hate

Every once in a while someone on social media will say, as a preamble to venting about Li’l Duce, “I don’t wish death or ill for anyone but….”

They are better people than I am.

When Andrew Breitbart died, I wrote Good riddance; the world is now a better place.

When Steve Bannon and Stephen Miller are called to their final address by Satan, I will write the same thing.

And when the Mad King ceases robbing the Earth’s atmosphere of precious air, I will write those words.

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As a tribute to him, I will write them in all caps.

Li’L Duce last week forced his compliant Congress, both the House and Senate, to rescind two years’ worth of funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

That means the station my show, Big Talk, is aired on is now in panic mode. The general manager, Jar Turner, and the board of directors are hustling to find expenses to cut. The development director, Brooke Turpin, will be working quadruple overtime for the next few months trying to dig up new sources of funding for WFHB.

The truth of the matter is people are going to lose their jobs and the station will have to forgo any number of syndicated programs it now airs.

All community and public radio stations around the country are in similar straits now. Some of them — maybe even a lot of them — will not survive.

That’s just the way Li’l Duce and his coterie of hateful, vengeful, lick-spittling thugs want it to be.

War on artists, journalists, dissenters, outsiders, queers, women, education, science, people with dark skin, Muslims, foreigners, immigrants…, phew, the list can go on ad infinitum, started brewing years ago. Now, Li’l Duce and his right wing, Project 2025, Heritage Foundation, John Birch Society, white supremacist, Christian nationalist confreres are in full attack mode, just as the 45th/47th president promised when he ran for office last year.

Don’t buy the bullshit that he’s interested in “efficient government,” “lower prices,” “law and order,” or any of his other platitudes, plugs, and hypes. He wants only to hurt people he sees as The Other. Their pain is his pleasure.

He’s filled with hate.

Hate is not a healthy thing. We’re better people when we hate less. We may even reach some nirvana-ish state if, somehow, we were able to eliminate all hate from our hearts. Hell, even the Roman Catholics tell us to love our neighbor. And you know that gang’s history of oppression, repression, bullying, forced conversions, the three Inquisitions, the nine Crusades, the sexual improprieties, the misogyny, the homophobia, and pretty much every other form of unholy immorality humankind can conjure up. They tell us hate is poison.

Hate breeds hate.

Now I’m filled with hate.

I’m not happy about it but it must be so. There’s no room for love in war.

 

07/01/2025
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Donald Trump, Zohran Mamdani

393 Words: Somebody Else

It appears that lots and lots of people who voted for Li’l Duce for president in last November’s election turned around and voted for Zohran Mamdani in the Democratic primary for New York City mayor last week.

Zohran Kwame Mamdani.

A kid, really, at 33 years old.

Born in Uganda.

The son of an academic and an artist.

His middle name was given him in honor of Ghanaian president Kwame Nkumah.

In college, he co-founded a chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine.

Holder of a bachelor’s degree in Africana from Bowdoin College.

A composer and producer of hip-hop music.

He has fought to prevent foreclosures and evictions of non-white homeowners.

An avowed Democratic Socialist.

The most imaginative novelist — not Ursula K. Le Guin, not Stephen King, not Lewis Carroll or Franz Kafka — could have conceived of a character more in contrast to the Mad King.

Let’s break it all down. Everything about him is the devil to 45/47 and Company. He’s a foreigner. Dark skinned. Cares about Palestinians. Is interested in Africa. His dad teaches postcolonial studies at Columbia University. His mother makes movies about immigrants to America. He enjoys music. And he’s a socialist!

He’s everything — so we think — that Li’l Duce and his MAGA followers loathe: the shit-hole countries, the darker skin, intellectual, and a socialist, which, to them, is lower than child molester.

What are we to conclude about all this? How can the same people vote for two such wholly opposite figures within seven months of each other?

Simple. People today do not base their vote on foreign affairs, on who’ll put up the better fight for rights, or on which candidate is smarter, more caring, or more thoughtful. They vote for the person who makes the most believable promise that he’ll get them lower prices.

That’s what Mamdani did.

And one more thing. Perhaps even more important today is this: they vote for somebody else.

Li’l Duce was somebody else in 2016 and 2024. In 2020, he was president. So people voted for somebody else. Then in November, he was somebody else again.

You couldn’t get a candidate more somebody else-y than Zohran Mamdani.

If he wins the general election, he’ll be a one-term mayor. In 2029, New Yorkers’ll vote for somebody else.

People don’t think about their vote. They feel it. It’s a hell of a way to run a country.

 

06/28/2025
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The F-bomb

522 Words: We’re Stuck With Him

The only thing that could ever beat Li’l Duce in this day and age of social media driven by monetized rage clicks was a pandemic that killed more than a million Americans.

That is, one of every 330 people living in this holy land had to be snuffed out for a plurality of voters (individual and Electoral) to want to throw him out of office. Mind you, they didn’t blame him for the disease. Probably, those swing voters who opted for Old Joe were teed off at the Mad King for not outlawing the use of masks and not forcing schools, workplaces, ballparks, and every other goddamned thing that was shuttered during the pandemic to stay open.

To paraphrase Monty Python, Nobody expects the global coronavirus!

The dude actually garnered some three million more voters in 2024, than he had in 2020, despite the wits, wags, and pundits chirping that America was fed up with his act.

They weren’t.

They never will be.

45/47 will remain the champion Outsider — capital O — until the day he keels over. That’s what he’s portrayed himself as since the day in June 2015 he descended the escalator at NYC’s Trump Tower and announced his candidacy for president. His base 35 percent — plus whatever percentage of folks who swing, baby — continue to see him as that Outsider, the rebel, the one who’ll drain the swamp, the ultimate disrupter, even as he amasses more power and distances himself from all the Constitutional checks and balances the Framers wrote into that wildly imperfect document back on March 4, 1789.

He’s one of a kind. He could declare himself king tomorrow and still be seen as the guy sticking his middle finger up at the Establishment.

I realized Li’l Duce is unbeatable earlier this week when he was questioned on the White House lawn by a reporter who wanted to know what was what regarding that genocidal dustup on the eastern shores of the Mediterranean. “They don’t know what the fuck they’re doing, do you understand that?” he blurted and stomped off.

There it was. He’s the first, and so far only, US President ever to drop the F-bomb in response to a reporter’s question, willingly, intentionally, brazenly.

I’d bet a certain percentage of the American electorate got tumescent when they heard him say the word.

It was the ultimate outsider utterance.

President’s don’t use that kind of language, the pearl-clutchers gasped. Yep. No other president would. This one did.

He’s different!

He says what’s on his mind!

He’s just like us!

Those were the conclusions much of America came to almost before the word had completely exited his mouth.

That’s all Li’l Duce‘s base and those swing voters who went for him in November care about — that he’ll do and/or say anything,  everything, that his predecessors or current and future rivals would never. It’s the essence of his cult of personality.

He knew exactly what he was doing when he eff-ed. It was no slip of the tongue.

The only thing that’ll ever beat him is death.

And woe to the poor Republicans who try to step into his shoes after he’s gone. They ain’t him.

 

 

06/16/2025
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2028 Presidential Election

382 Words: A Simple Truth

I just came across this neat little quote from George Carlin:

Oh, if only Democratic Party leadership could see this and really take it to heart!

Because, truth be told, not enough people care about the rights of others, anybody’s pronouns, how other countries look at us, or any of the other hammers the Dems have been hitting us over the head with for years and years. People, my party seems to have forgotten, care about only a few things: making a living, being able to pay the mortgage or rent, not going broke at the grocery store, and being able to save up enough money to leave the kids a nice pile.

That’s it. And that ain’t wrong. Somehow, the titans of the Democratic Party past — FDR, Truman, LBJ, and even Bill Clinton — got it. Today’s Democrats, with the possible exceptions of Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders (and, technically, he’s not really a Dem although he caucuses with them) do not.

I, of course, am four-square in favor of everybody’s rights, everybody living life as whatever gender they choose, maintaining this country’s reputation as a place much of the world aspires to be like, and all those other liberal, Left, progressive talking points. But campaigning on those issues doesn’t win elections.

The reason Li’l Duce won the 2016 (on a technicality) and 2024 elections was he told the American people a very simple truth. (Which is ironic because truth-telling never has been his forte.) Here’s that very simple truth:

Don’t worry about the fact that the Mad King is doing nothing to fix the situation. That’s not the point. In fact, he’s doing all he can to make the situation worse for us. The point is, he’s been one of the vanishingly few people to say it out loud. And all people want is for their president to say what they already know to be true.

Whoever runs for president in 2028 — be it Pete Buttigieg, John Fetterman, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Josh Shapiro, JB Pritzker, Gretchen Whitmer, Cory Booker. or some as-yet-unkown who comes out of the woodwork — had better tell the American people just this: That the deck has been stacked against you and we’re gonna do all we can to make it fair. We, the Dems should be saying, are on your side.

As I say, it’s a simple truth.

06/10/2025
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Resistance

811 Words: Our Losing Streak

Ever since springtime 60 years ago my people — the folks on my side of the fence, my tribe, the Left, progressives, whatever descriptor you’d care to use — have been losing the battle for America’s hearts and minds.

We’ve been so wrong in strategy, tactics, optics, and messaging that the more conspiracy-minded among us might be tempted to think we’ve been infiltrated by agents provocateurs all these years. Do Nixon’s ratfuckers and their heirs walk among us?

BTW, the spring I refer to, above, followed immediately after the events of March 7, 1965. the day voting rights marchers attempted to walk from Selma, Alabama to the state capital in Montgomery. Alabama, at the time, posed any number of roadblocks, “legal” and illegal, to block Blacks attempting to register to vote. Peaceful demonstrators on the way to their destination were viciously beaten by state troopers and local ad-hoc deputies after crossing the Edmond Pettus Bridge over the Alabama River. Now known as Bloody Sunday, that day more than 500 marchers were attacked and gassed by the white men, some mounted on horseback, with march leader and future US Congressperson John Lewis clubbed to the ground, his skull fractured. Some 67 marchers were injured with 17 requiring hospitalization.

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Bloody Sunday

The whole rotten mess was captured on film and broadcast by the major national networks that evening. So many Americans were repulsed by the televised spectacle that civil rights legislation efforts were kicked into higher gear.

That, I propose, was the last time America was moved positively by my people.

Here we are a half century plus ten years removed, still in the midst of the mother of all losing streaks, still screwing up the picture we’d like the rest of the country to see. Which brings me to Los Angeles, where the President of the Untied States has sent the Marines in to suppress the protests against ICE snatching people off the street and disappearing them.

And, yeah, the Li’l Duce regime — or, as Susan Sandberg has dubbed him, The Mad King — is clearly attempting to turn this holy land into his personal, private kingdom. He has become the single most dangerous thing to happen to the United States since Japanese-Americans were forced into concentration camps during World War II. Or since public officials and private business leaders unleashed deadly violence against labor union organizers. Or 13 states seceded and formed the Confederate States of America. Or the US gov’t waged genocidal war against the Indians. Or the Founders decided to allow white men to “own” dark-skinned human beings. Pick whichever atrocity you prefer.

But a significant percentage of the American populace continues to feel that Li’l Duce is the best thing to happen to us since the development of the internal combustion engine. A lot of that can be ascribed to echo chamber news sources, misinformation, Big Lies, AI-doctored images, fear-mongering, grievance-wallowing, and, of course, flat-out idiocy. But another lot of it has to do with my side’s awkward, clumsy, ill-conceived, shoot-ourselves-in-the-foot presentation.

While Trump has famously humped the American flag time and again, protesters in the streets of LA are waving Mexican flags. That ain’t gonna win us any more converts, I assure you.

Here’s Jonathan V. Last in The Bulwark:

There is a strain of thinking which maintains that all of these protests are beyond reproach. I’ve seen people say, for instance, that it’s perfectly fine for protesters to be waving Mexican flags. That this is their God-given right, etc.

A lot of the uncritical support of the protests is based on moral judgments about what should be true.

It should be fine for people to wave Mexican flags. But I don’t think should is a very useful frame right now. I’m much more interested in will.

Will the rest of America—rightly or wrongly—become more sympathetic to the people opposing Trump after seeing Mexican flags?

We can expand the frame of will for the entire scene—the people in the streets, the torching of cars, the throwing of bricks. Protests are a tool for leveraging public opinion. It does not really matter what the public shouldthink. It matters what it will think.

Jonathan V. Last then quotes Peter Coyote:

A protest is an invitation to a better world. It’s a ceremony. No one accepts a ceremonial invitation when they’re being screamed at. More important you have to know who the real audience of the protest is. The audience is NEVER the police, the politicians, the Board of supervisors, the Congress, etc. The audience is always the American people, who are trying to decide who they can trust; who will not embarrass them.

Last then concludes that what the LA protests, and the anti-Trump movement in general, need are leaders and discipline. And now he’s about to get his mouth washed out with soap for uttering two of the foulest expletives in the Left-ese language

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