Walking Is Transportation

MASHA GESSEN: REQUIRED READING

According to Wikipedia, "Masha Gessen is a Russian and American journalist, author, and activist noted for her opposition to Russian President Vladimir Putin.  . . .  [She] writes primarily in English but also in her native Russian, and  . . .  has been a prolific contributor to such publications as The New York Times, The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, The New Republic, New Statesman, Granta, Slate, Vanity Fair, Harper's Magazine, and U.S. News & World Report."

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When journalist Masha Gessen's piece, "Autocracy: Rules for Survival," appeared on November 10 in NYR Daily, the online publication of The New York Review of Books, it was both an announcement and a reflection of the fact that neither outrage nor satire was a sufficient response to Donald Trump's election victory --- though it was a victory that fell well short of the landslide he subsequently proclaimed and was a victory only in the Electoral College, an anachronism that no longer seemed like a quaint formality of our republican origins and more like a dangerous holdover from the nation's slaveholding past that now certified a new and frightening turn in our politics and self-governance.

"Rule #1," Gessen wrote, "Believe the autocrat. He means what he says. Whenever you find yourself thinking, or hear others claiming, that he is exaggerating, that is our innate tendency to reach for rationalization. This will happen often," she continued, writing from her own experience as a journalist who actually worked under Putin as the editor of an official state publication. "[H]umans seem to have evolved to practice denial when confronted publicly with the unacceptable."

Two weeks later, NYR Daily published Gessen's "Trump: The Choice We Face," an argument for making political choices and decisions based not on realism --- whose flaws she illustrates with the tragic story of her Ashkenazic Jewish grandfather's cooperation with the Nazis in the Polish Bialystock ghetto, in the belief that he was lessening suffering and saving lives, when in fact his agonized choice made no difference to the outcome --- but on the moral principles that underlie our politics and, we hope, our daily lives.

These pieces were circulated widely and were followed by a thematically similar front-page article in The New York Times as well as an interview on "All In," Chris Hayes's weekday evening cable news show on MSNBC. Aside from amplifying her voice and solidifying her reputation, Masha Gessen seems to have been influential in turning the discussion, at least on the left, from why Clinton lost/How Trump won, to What is the current state of the nation under Trump, and where do we go next and on what basis?

To this reader, Gessen's chief contribution to our understanding of these times is her insistence on separating truth from facts. Facts are impotent weapons to use in combatting Trump's unabashed lying, Gessen observes, because the function of Trump's lying has nothing to do with truth. The purpose of the lies --- and Trump's oft-repeated claim that ultimately, the truth is unknowable --- is to establish his own reality and reinforce it with the power of the state, which he now controls.

 

 

BEFORE NOVEMBER 8 AND AFTER

What a difference a day makes.

On November 9, when the unimaginable became actual, the fact of Trump, like the fact of Bush in 2000, was enough, more than enough, too much more than enough, to absorb.

The vileness; the oily manipulation some mistake for or confuse with charm; the in-your-face hypocrisy; the shape-shifting of fact --- in which the liar challenges you to prove that his lie is not the truth and overcomes you not with facts but with an audacity that leaves you tongue-tied and scratching your head --- should all have assured his loss to a dull, shopworn-but-competent candidate who would have made the status a little more quo. (Illustration credit: Paxonbothhouses)

NOT HOW IT WENT DOWN

But that's not how it went down. And my reaction, and my wife's, to how it did go down have been surprising. As if we were observing how two other individuals responded, or held those responses in check.

Before November 8, MSNBC was our shared narcotic. Along with the hosts, guests and commentators, we examined what might be the game-changing minutiae of every news-cycle, most seeming to confirm, or at least not challenge, our world-view and our expectations about the reality that would obtain, the day after we cast our vote.

When we turned off MSNBC and went to bed at 3 a.m., only a few hours before dawn on November 9, the outcome had become clear. When we awoke several hours later, the TV in general, and MSNBC in particular, were off and stayed off for several days afterward during which we tried to understand the how and the why, with little input from media and that little mostly from print. (Clip credit: MSNBC)

OUR MEDIA DEFAULTS

When we turned the TV on again several days later, it was with a kind of timidity, as if we were afraid of what we might encounter. How odd that the left-of-center perspective and analysis we'd come to revel in and depend on from MSNBC commentators like Rachel Maddow, Chris Hayes, Joy-Ann Reid and Ari Melber (and others I'm forgetting, I'm sure) had come to seem too dark, too risky to our equilibrium to indulge.

We retreated to what seemed like the safer, more measured news (and broader programming) of PBS and the safer print equivalents --- The New York Times and The New York Review of Books as well as news and podcasts from NPR and The New Yorker. Not that we discussed, strategized or planned it. It was more a matter of recourse to the comfort of the known, to our media defaults, to centrist outlets where we could perch as we found our place and our positions, moorings that I hope will make us braver in this new world we never knew we'd inhabit.

When I began this post on December 10, the world and the way of Donald Trump seemed triumphant. Tweet by tweet, he was ushering in a new reality in which the only certainties, for as long as he chose to uphold and promote them --- several hours? overnight? a day? a week? --- were his characterizations of people and events. 

 

Joy-Ann Reid (Photo credit: wicki-picky.com)

 COUNTER VERSIONS OF REALITY

But now, two days later, counter versions of reality appear to be asserting themselves. The ever-reptilian leader of the Senate, Mitch McConnell, has not endorsed the President-elect's skepticism about Russian hacking of the 2016 elections, preferring the expert research-based judgment of the CIA to the off-the-wall whisperings of Trump's chosen National Security Advisor, Lieutenant General Michael T. Flynn.

And CNN's Jake Tapper has publicly declared his intention to hold politicians' feet to the fire, as is, he says, his job. In a recent interview, the Vice-President elect's feet were the first to feel the heat when he obfuscated and dodged Tapper's question about the transition team's attempts to get a security clearance for the son of Lieutenant General Flynn --- a guy who'd been promoting a fake news story that prompted a right-winger with a rifle to "investigate" the fake story on his own. Flynn's son was shown the door. (Composite photo credit: CNN.com)

If the Trump show is getting a little old even before it really starts . . . if people on the transition team and in government are starting, finally, to play down their association with this guy and to set some limits , , , then there may be hope. Not for a change in policy positions but for a landmark outburst that fans the flames of buyer's remorse and begins to chip away at his seeming invincibility.  ###

 

 

KRUGMAN'S RESPONSE TO TRUMP: 'RADICAL NON-COOPERATION'

In a talk live-streamed from the main branch of the New York Public Library last night, Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman, a New York Times columnist who teaches at the City University of New York, had few action-steps to recommend to his audience whom, he seemed to assume, were, like him, academics (or, at least, readers of The New York Review of Books).

Krugman seemed to be pondering his own role as a public intellectual in the time of Trump, echoing the point of view expressed by journalist Masha Gessen (formerly a journalist in Putin’s Russia), writing in NY Review of Books about strategies for living under the thumb of an autocracy.

Chief among these was the importance of resisting the reassurance of how much remains the same, downplaying or denying the impact of corruption, intimidation, self-censorship and the loss of freedoms, most significantly of speech. Most memorably, to me, Krugman called for “radical non-cooperation” with policies and initiatives (such as, currently, the proposal to grant an exception that would compromise civilian control of the military by naming as Secretary of Defense a general who has not been out of the military the seven years required by law).

Don’t give up and hide, he added, and don’t accommodate actions or policies that compromise your principles.

I think the path forward for those on the left will become clearer as events unfold. The emerging story, for example, that Washington lobbyists like former Senator Bob Dole are shaping foreign policy — specifically, sidestepping U.S. policy re China and cozying up to Taiwan before Trump is even officially installed as president. ###

You can stream Krugman's talk here:  https://livestream.com/theNYPL/events/6484656

(Photo credit not provided.)

 

ALL RIGHT, ALL RIGHT, IT'S TRUMP, NOT DRUMPF

As a copy supervisor once informed me (though I think he thought he was reminding me), if wordplay is to have any effect, it's best used sparingly. So I won't, as I promised in an earlier post, refer to the President-elect as Drumpf. Mostly.

In fairness, the man with the flax-woven pate should have the same right to reinvention via a change of name that my mother claimed when, unable to find a job during the Great Depression, she tried on a succession of names, going from Krawetzsky to Kravitz to Kravitt to the French-sounding Cravet, the name under which she became a naturalized American citizen, explaining the name change on her application papers as one she'd decided on because it sounded "less foreign."

So, as The Donald's first campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, decided --- did he really have a choice? --- WIT will let Drumpf be Trump. ###  (No photo credit provided.)

DANKE, HERR DRUMPF

(Credit: LMIII (@artiste643)

[NOTE: 'Drumpf' is the real family name of the President-elect and the name I'll use to refer to this loutish know-nothing henceforth. After Drumpf's congressional lackeys do his bidding, as seems likely even now, and try to revise the libel laws to his liking --- part of the constitutional revision process he'll undertake, like so much else he's promised, "on my first day in office" --- I may come to regret this post. But for now, perhaps naively, I'll assume my First Amendment rights are strong enough to survive even him.]

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I stopped smoking. I started drinking tea. Tea --- me! I even bought a teapot. And now, as we near the first monthly anniversary of Drumpf's President-electedness, after a two-month sciatic flare-up and nearly two and a half years of silence, I and my now nearly decade-old blog, WALKING IS TRANSPORTATION, are finding our voice again, prompted by the ascent to national leadership of our own home-grown autocrat --- a millionaire's son from Jamaica Estates, Queens --- whom the multitudes, including the majority of voters in my own New York City borough of Staten Island, claim as one of their own.

Though its antecedents in history are clear enough, the Drumpf phenomenon has defied the attempts of journalists, Washington insiders, academics and others considered experts to chart its course or predict its outcome. What I think is at least possible, perhaps likely, is a flowering of the arts and of political organizing and protest, as the truth about who Drumpf is, what he represents and what he wants become clear --- one hopes, especially to those who bought his lies. ###

 

WELCOME TO WIT.

WIT isn't about walking and it isn't about transportation.

It used to be about those things, but there was only so much I, then a recently retired editor and business writer, could find to say about them. Or, indeed, about historic preservation or community affairs or the quirkiness of the New York City borough, Staten Island, where I and my wife, Manhattan natives both, have lived most of our lives, mostly in the house pictured above near the docking-place of the Staten Island Ferry, in St. George.

Of the 200-plus posts recorded here since 2007, the bulk were written between that year and 2009, followed by restart attempts in 2009, 2010, 2012 and 2014 --- failures all. So what makes me think this restart, in early December, 2016, won't meet the same fate? I'm prompted to try again by the prospect of living with a national leader lacking any of the traditional qualifications associated with the office he's about to occupy or the duties he's about to assume.

Like many, perhaps most people who do what I've done for a living most of my life, I write to discover what I feel and think. Considering what we're up against, being in touch with what I feel and think doesn't seem like an option; more like a duty.

As it has for much of its history, WIT will appear irregularly. To read newer posts, please click on the title to the right of the word 'Main' at the top of this page; to read older ones, please click on the title to the left. To follow WIT, please click on the 'Subscribe to this blog's feed' link in the column to the left of the center text.

Welcome to WIT.