And even though it all went wrong...

What a week.

On Monday we lost the man who wrote that democracy is coming to the USA, though we didn't learn about it until Thursday, the day he was quietly buried in his native Montreal. On Tuesday we learned that democracy may be leaving the USA.

And on Saturday, on the cold open for Saturday Night Live, the truly lovely and talented Kate McKinnon paid a poignant tribute to both events by singing a few verses from Leonard Cohen's most-covered song, "Hallelujah."

I'm far from the only person to be grieving over both the election loss and the loss of Cohen, and certainly far from the only writer to see the interwoven themes they present.

In The Guardian Jonathan Freedland wrote:

...Cohen's songs often told of gloom and defeat and darkness, but his voice was one of consolation – of sharing the loss by finding another who felt it too, of discovering the glimmer of love or light that might get you through.

My word, do we need that now. Cohen died on Monday, slipping out before he had to glimpse the news that has convulsed the world. He saw a lot in his 82 years, but he never had to see the words President-elect Trump. With his impeccable timing, Cohen spared himself that ordeal. But his songs anticipated how the rest of us would feel. Looked through the paper. Makes you wanna cry.

The Trumpists and their sycophants outside the US taunt those of us who are fearful. Boris Johnson says we need to get over our collective “whinge-orama” and embrace the new reality. Iain Duncan Smith says Barack Obama was a cold fish anyway, and he’s glad to see the back of him. Nigel Farage chooses to describe America’s first black president as a “creature”. Why, Trump’s arrival could even be a good thing, they say: he might offer the UK a decent post-Brexit trade deal.

This is not only pathetic in its cravenness, grovelling to a bigot when the moment demanded some of the moral steel shown by Angela Merkel – who extended her hand to Trump, but only on condition that he accept basic human values including respect for the minorities he had so copiously insulted – it is also unforgivably myopic. It fails to see there is a much larger picture here...

A much larger picture indeed, which is why I find it both sad and intensely annoying to read sneering comments on social media -- even from people whom I'd considered to be friends or at least allies -- calling the anti-Trump contingent spoiled crybabies who are merely "butt-hurt" because "their" team didn't win. "Get over it," we're scolded, and some of the scolds aren't even US residents and will not have to reside in Trump's America.
 
And here's Andrew O'Hehir on Salon.com:

I don’t know how much attention the great Canadian troubadour paid to current events during his final days in this vale of tears. I can only imagine he was both horrified and mordantly amused by the rise of Donald Trump, a cartoonish would-be despot who seemed to have been conjured out of Cohen’s darker visions. (I have no particular objection to Bob Dylan’s Nobel Prize, except one: Leonard Cohen deserved it more.) All those disgruntled and downtrodden white people we’ve heard so much about apparently felt that everybody besides them had gotten a box of chocolates and a long-stemmed rose. So they ordered their own — and boy howdy, did they ever get them! Now, it’s true that the chocolates have a funny smell, almost as if they were made of something else that’s about the same color as chocolate. And the delivery guy bears a distinct resemblance to Freddy Krueger. As Cohen observed, that’s how it goes.

In the title song of Cohen’s now-classic 1992 album “The Future,” he outlined a litany of terror-nostalgia that captures our present era even better than it did that one: “Give me back the Berlin Wall/ Give me Stalin and St. Paul/ Give me Christ or give me Hiroshima.” I think he really was a Jewish prophet (turned Buddhist monk) who could see the future. That human yearning for moral certainty and clarity, even at the risk of extinguishment or fiery damnation, runs through Cohen’s lyrics. There is a great deal of that spirit behind the unlikely election of a real estate tycoon and TV star, who possesses no understanding of policy or governance and no aptitude for public discourse, as president of the United States.

The "box of chocolates" bit was a reference to lyrics in a song I've often quoted myself (here and here, f'rinstance): "Everybody Knows," which appeared on Cohen's 1988 release I'm Your Man.

Years ago I read an article that I can't seem to find online, in which the writer described Cohen as "the hoarse man of the Apocalypse." And indeed he was, having earned that title by virtue of both his "golden voice" and songs such as the aforementioned "The Future."



Back in the early 1990s, when "The Future" was still a work in progress, I read a Cohen interview that mentioned the song, which at the time was titled, "If You Could See What's Coming Next." This October 2015 post on the wonderful Cohencentric blog quotes the original opening lines:

If you could see what's coming next
If you could see the hidden text
You'd say, Give me love or give me Adolf Hitler
And you'd say, Give me back the
Berlin Wall
Give me Stalin and St. Paul
You'd say, Give me Christ or give me Hiroshima
Just get me out of this mirror.

Cohen was clearly inspired by the heady events that had been unfolding throughout the late 1980s and early 1990s: the fall of the Berlin Wall, the unraveling of the Soviet Union, the deaths of tyrants. So many of us who were alive and aware back then were downright giddy, and some observers even suggested that we had for all practical purposes reached "the end of history" and that it was, by and large, a happy ending, because the good guys were triumphing at last.

Clearly, Cohen knew better, and while some might have merely found his message in "The Future" congruent with his own long history of being a brooding poet/novelist/troubadour, he framed it in a compelling way that cut into my own giddiness. I've long since accepted that in history and politics, as in Scamworld, there are no neat and tidy endings.

Yet on the very same album on which "The Future" appeared, Cohen also sang about democracy coming to the USA, and he offered another anthem of hope, titled, appropriately enough,"Anthem."

Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack, there is a crack in everything
That's how the light gets in

Well, yes, there is that. And as Kate-as-HRC said at the end of her song on SNL, "I'm not giving up and neither should you." For sure, Kate, I'm not giving up.

I'm stubborn as those garbage bags that time cannot decay
I'm junk but I'm still holding up this little wild bouquet
Democracy is coming to the USA.

And I'm thinking that if we can survive and even push back on the autocracy, there may be hope yet for democracy.

Addendum 15 November 2016: A.J. Goldman penned a thoughtful and lovely tribute to Cohen's work and why it matters now more than ever: Why We Mourn Leonard Cohen in the Age of Trump.

WTF 2016: Staving off the apocalypse

Today's the day that America gets one last chance not to elect Donald J. Trump for the position of leader of the free world. Even if Trump loses, we're not home free. My pal Salty nailed it as usual. Even if Clinton wins...

...we accomplished the bare minimum.

But Donald J. Trump :: a know-nothing conman misogynist racist … still got more than fucking zero percent of the vote for President of the United States of America.

How is that possible? How is it possible that one of our two major parties put forth a candidate who was so demonstrably unqualified … and whose only appeal was unsheathed hate rage?

There are no take-backs :: this thing totally happened … some of us just voted for a race baiting women hating lunatic. Instead of killing baby-Hitler :: we raised him up on the plastic pedestal of tabloids and reality television … then did nothing to stop his ascent to demagogue in chief.

I've been repeatedly scolded during this election cycle, even by folks whom I had considered friends, for worshiping Clinton or being willfully blind or ignorant to her "evil." But...

None of Ms. Clinton’s faults :: real or contrived … are even worthy of mention in the shadow of Donald J. Trump’s towering horror.

This isn’t a political website … this will never be a political website. Voting for Hillary Clinton today isn’t about politics :: it’s about self preservation … it’s about rudimentary decency.

Yep. What Salty said.

And, as mentioned here the other day, John Oliver nailed it too.

Don't blow it, America. If you do, all of the whiskey in the world ain't gonna help.

But I would like to end this on a positive note, so here we go:


And if you still consider yourself to be my friend after all of this is over, know that I love you and will continue to love you, even if you don't vote for "my" candidate. We're all in this together.

Back into the black hole of politix...

We are well into October, and as the shadow of the U.S. presidential election looms ever larger and darker, I once again feel the possibly irrational urge to inject some politix into this normally non-political blog. For those of you who are sick of my lame punditry because you prefer pure Scamworld topics (or even because you have a long memory and are nostalgic for the carefree snark-fests that were once the foundation of this Whirled), I apologize. For those of you who are sick of the politicking because you are Trump supporters and don't like what I have written about him... well, goodness, it seems that I'm all out of apologies.

The Faux-hio voter fraud scandal
Several factors have drawn me back into this black hole of off-my-normal-beat bloggery, and some of them are related to my normal beat after all. For instance, the stupidest and most evil man in Scamworld, Leonard Coldwell, used his social media soapbox the other day to share a hoax story from the fake news site, Christian Times. And he wasn't the only one who shared it in all apparent seriousness. The phony story describes "hundreds of thousands" of fraudulent sealed ballots for presidential candidate Hillary Clinton that were supposedly found by a Columbus, Ohio electrical worker. On October 1 the Franklin County Board of Elections issued a press release stating that the story was fake and even providing a link to the UK web site from which the Christian Times stole the photo used in the fake story.

Snopes debunked it as well. So did The Columbus Dispatch. Even Ohio Secretary of State Jon Husted (a Republican) slammed it.

But the story has continued to spread via social media and it is still up, with no retractions or corrections, on some clickbait sites that try to look legitimate, as well as overtly nutcake ones. Coldwell may be the dimmest and most loathsome entity to share the meme, but as I noted he's far from the only one. And the reason is obvious: it fits in with the wingnutty, Trumped-up "Crooked Hillary" narrative. By extension it validates Trump's own claims (and those of his most passionate fans) that the election is "rigged" against him.

It also feeds into the persistent myth of voter fraud committed by minority or liberal-leaning voters, a myth that has given rise to stringent voter I.D. laws which seem to have served mainly as a tool to disenfranchise those very minority and liberal-leaning voters. Though there have been investigations into possible voter fraud in states such as Indiana (some have called the investigations "partisan harassment"), it is for the most part not really a thing. And those who are throwing hysterical fits about suspected fraud might do well to keep in mind that some apparent fraud is simply human error. (More on that below.)

Most of the folks I've seen sharing the fake Ohio voter-fraud story are Donald Trump supporters, Hillary haters, chronic conspiracy addicts, or a combination thereof. And most are also -- and not by coincidence -- dedicated Snopesophobes, smugly claiming that anyone who cites Snopes is lazy, gullible, a "Libtard," a mainstream sheeple, or a combination thereof. To these folks, the mere mention of Snopes in a positive light during a conversation is a signal for automatic and immediate dismissal and derision of the person who brought it up. They won't even bother to follow the link and actually read the article. Mention Snopes on a certain type of thread, and prepare to be met with a string of rote accusations against Snopes and oneself that some of us can practically recite in our sleep.

As you may know if you've been reading this blog for any length of time, my opinion about Snopes is considerably more positive, and my opinion about some of the robotic Snopes-haters... um, not so positive. But I have also learned that it does no good to try to argue folks out of their "Snopes-is-a-liberal-tool" dogma. You can try, but don't be surprised if you get nowhere. As Jef Rouner wrote in 2014:

The first thing to do with a Snopes denier is... nothing. Do not continue the initial conversation. You have already lost your stand, and can do nothing more here. Ultimately, you are having a different interaction from the one you think you are. You thought you were helpfully informing, but they think you're part of a misled general populace that just can't see the monsters in the shadows.

But I never learn. I continue to engage 'em.

The fact is that Snopes has also been accused of having a conservative/right-wing bias, though I don't believe that accusation any more than I believe the site has a deep liberal bias. And particularly during this contentious U.S. presidential election cycle, Snopes writers have also been busily debunking leftist memes, such as this one about Donald Trump and his remarks about military veterans with PTSD... or this one about his running mate Mike Pence and his supposed remarks about abortion and rape... or this one about the Libertarian VP supposedly giving up the ghost and becoming a Hillary supporter. Snopes has also soundly condemned the clickbait site that spread the loathsome fake news of Trump's death from a heart attack.

But it simply does not matter to some folks.

Some of the Snopes-haters and anti-Hillary meme sharers with whom I have conversed about Trump are good people who were burned in some way by serial scammer Kevin Trudeau in his mega-scam the Global Information Network, or GIN, which were, of course, hot topics on this blog even back in the day when some of them were still partying it up on GIN cruises, hoping to get rich or change the world. Maybe it's obnoxious of me to keep bringing that up. But I will keep bringing it up anyway.

The Scamworld angle
It appears to me that these good ex-GINfolk simply cannot see that Donald J. Trump is an even worse -- and potentially more dangerous -- scammer than Trudeau ever could be (although granted, Trump and Trudeau have a few things in common). Though a few people have acknowledged that Trump is far from an ideal candidate, they insist that all of his shortcomings, wrongdoings, and deep character flaws pale in comparison to Clinton's alleged "life of crime."

This is not just about Snopes, of course. There is a deeper problem here, and it has to do with both Scamworld and with politics. The Scamworld angle centers on the fact that some of the Snopes-hating people who were burned by GIN, and insist that they have learned their lesson about scams and scammers, continue to embrace pretty much any conspiracy story that pops up on social media. I would suggest that this enthusiasm for conspiracies indicates they have not really taken their hard-learned lessons to heart after all, and possibly retain a core gullibility that is only thinly disguised by their oft-expressed distrust of the mainstream media and other institutions.

(It isn't that I am always enamored of the mainstream media myself. And believe it or not I am skeptical about government, and am no big fan of big business, and so on. I just don't take an extreme position of automatically rejecting everything simply because it is "mainstream.")

While the nouveau anti-establishmentarians imperiously point fingers at anyone who cites Snopes or other popular fact-checking/debunking sites -- and insist that their contempt for Snopes et al. demonstrates that they are the ones who are awake and aware, and the rest of us are either impaired thinkers or are crooked ourselves -- many are in fact advertising their own credulity to the world. They are showing that while they are willing to automatically reject "mainstream" narratives, they are all too willing to believe any wild-eyed tale spewed out by the "alternative" media.

More to the point here: these conspiracy fans are painting targets on themselves for any potential huckster with a knack for packaging "information" that "They" (i.e. the corrupt establishment/New World Order/Illuminutty etc.) "don't want you to know about."

The forbidden-information, faux-rebel-against-the-establishment shtick worked well for Kevin Trudeau for many years, and arguably still continues to work for him even though he is currently locked up in a minimum security prison. It has worked well for Trudeau's buddy "Mark Hamilton" (or Mark Scamilton as he is known on this blog), and before that for Scamilton's late daddy "Frank Wallace," and that whole Neo-stink scampire. And it is working very well indeed for career conspiracy mongers such as Alex Jones and Mike "the Health Ranger" Adams, as well as a number of other hucksters and scammers who are also exploiting the secret-info-that-the-lamestream-media-won't-tell-you motif.

None of this is really surprising, though. As my pal Salty Droid has both documented on his blog and has mentioned in private correspondence, quitting one manipulative scam or scammer doesn't cure one of the thinking pattern errors that got them sucked in in the first place. "Manipulation causes susceptibility to manipulation as a side effect," sez Salty. I know he's right, but I am still capable of being surprised by the phenomenon, especially when it occurs among folks whom I'd thought were friends, or at least allies.
 
The greater danger
If this were just a matter of personal Facebook battles it would be no big deal, even though, to my deep disappointment, I have seen what I thought were solid friendships collapsing in the face of increasingly heated political conversations. And if it were simply an indication of job security for scammers and hucksters that would be bad, but still not necessarily a catastrophe-in-waiting. But it seems pretty clear that the essential political battle is going to continue all the way to the ballots. Though some of Clinton's most virulent haters are not in fact eligible to vote in the U.S., there are many who are. And they could very well be responsible for propelling a dangerously volatile blowhard into the most powerful position in the world.

But it may be that America is screwed either way, as more than one non-U.S. citizen recently told me. For even if the Trumpians are unable to elect their candidate, it is very likely that millions of them will not accept the results of the election. How they will express that lack of acceptance is a matter of legitimate concern.

Accordingly the growing penchant for conspiracy tall tales -- of which Donald Trump is the current "theorist in chief" -- is more than just snarkworthy blog fodder, though I certainly have been snarking about conspiracies for years. While the Clinton campaign and Clinton herself have made references to various right-wing conspiracies, the conspiracy meme is simply not an integral part of that campaign, and that is in marked contrast to her opponent. Clinton has not been playing the "rigged election" card nearly to the extent that Trump has. (Her concerns about possible Russian involvement in hacking and leaking her emails, in order to influence the election, may be valid, but the jury is still out on that.)

In contrast to Clinton, Trump and his supporters appear to be full-on advocates of the conspiracy scenario. And I don't think Politico was exaggerating when they called the rigged-election narrative "the most dangerous conspiracy theory of 2016." It is a narrative driven by an almost rabid irrationality, the likes of which we've never really seen in a presidential election in the U.S. From the Politico article:

Recent surveys show Trump is in lock step with his supporters when he raises doubts that he’ll get a fair and square election. A Washington Post/ABC News poll released earlier this month found nearly half of Trump’s supporters aren’t confident the votes will be counted accurately, compared with just 18 percent of Clinton’s backers who think the totals will be illegitimate. In August, Public Policy Polling found 69 percent of Trump voters in North Carolina think Clinton would only win if the election was rigged: 40 percent actually blamed ACORN, which officially disbanded in 2010, as the reason they expected mischief.

And...

... many of the moves that federal and state officials make to secure the country’s voting system are being met with skepticism and backlash, and more conspiracy theories. Alex Jones’ program, for one, has done multiple segments questioning whether Obama intends to federalize or even cancel the presidential election. Last month, Georgia Secretary of State Brian Kemp told the Nextgov news service in an email that he worried “the federal government will subvert the Constitution to achieve the goal of federalizing elections under the guise of security.”

The notion of widespread election fraud has been widely debunked both through media investigations and government watchdog reports, but there's no stopping the conspiracy-crazed Trumpsters. Wendy Weiser, director of the Democracy Program at the Brennan Center for Justice, said that insinuations of rigged outcomes are...

...completely unfounded. That heated rhetoric just undermines faith in American democracy, which works because people have confidence in its legitimacy. That confidence is something that should not be casually and baselessly tossed aside.

But it seems that many folks are tossing it aside, and all for the sake of an over-eagerness to embrace the false narratives and ridiculous tall tales that validate their own self-images as the most moral, the most patriotic, the most truly awakened ones.

In the end, though, and I hope you will pardon the cliche, we're all in this together. If enough people lose confidence in the legitimacy of American democracy, there's little evidence that this will lead us to a new enlightened era of transparency and fairness and liberty and justice for all. To the contrary, we risk turning the corner to chronic instability, transforming our political process into a Third-Worldish scenario of endless coups, revolutions, overt corruption, dictatorship, or any combination of the above. And that will have a devastating effect not only on the U.S. but on the rest of the world as well.

Check out this recent blog post from my husband Ron Kaye: "How Did We Come To This?"

As we near the day of the election, I cannot help but wonder what lies beyond. I sense that a cataclysmic sequence of events is all too possible, no matter which way the election goes. If a tyrant is elected, we will almost certainly lose most of our allies around the world, and will definitely lose their trust. At the same time, our enemies will be emboldened, knowing that they no longer face a united front consisting of all rational nations and their leaders. Actions once considered unthinkable are now very much a part of the debate. Torture, genocide, and nuclear holocaust are considered by the worst among us to be viable tools for achieving our goals, and the kind of rhetoric we as a country and a world rejected over 80 years ago has become mainstream and deemed worthy of consideration.

I think we all need to listen to our own words, and ask ourselves, Is this the kind of country and world we want to leave our children and their children? Are the lessons we are teaching them really consistent with our proclaimed values as Americans?

What Ron said. It's all pretty scary. So much is at stake. Please get out and vote.

Addendum, 26 November 2016: Well, the election has come and gone, with deeply unfortunate results. Drumpf got the electoral votes necessary to win, but Clinton won the popular vote (by at least 2 million and counting, it appears), and it looks like it's full speed ahead for the Drumpf regime. But the media are all abuzz with accusations of funny business in at least some states, and a call for a recount in those states. Green Party candidate Jill Stein has already raised millions of dollars, some of which are presumably going to pay for recounts in some states.

So does this mean that American elections might be rigged after all and that voter fraud is indeed a thing, contrary to all of the stuff I wrote above? And if I believe that, does it make me hypocritical? Does it mean I've flip-flopped just because "my" candidate lost? In truth... I don't know what to think. And I'm not sure how much good a recount will do, even though so far it appears that there were some dodgy things going on in some precincts in Wisconsin (and possibly Pennsylvania and Michigan) in order to shuffle things in Trump's favor. (Nate Silver, however, said the accusations about Wisconsin are probably B.S.) I simply don't know. In any case, here's a Q&A on Quartz, published November 24, which attempts to clear up some of the puzzlement about the legitimacy of the election results.

And from the Washington Post today, here's a rundown on what the Clinton campaign thinks about the issue.