Tag: books
Spreading From Texas, A Plague Of Would-Be Book Burners

Spreading From Texas, A Plague Of Would-Be Book Burners

Not so long ago, book burnings were considered a festive group activity by assorted right-wing zealots. Today, though, burning seems so old-fashioned and, well... crude.

Yet, the concept is burning hotter than ever among a gaggle of testosterone-driven Republican leaders eager to show voters that they will go to extremes to incinerate progressive ideas and people's personal liberties. Rather than lighting bonfires, though, the new fad for GOP politicians is simply to use government power to ban the offending books (thus saving the expense of matches and lighter fluid).

It might not surprise you to learn that our Lone Star State's extremist political operatives are leading today's book-banning frenzy. One Jonathan Mitchell, for example, is going from town to town pushing Texas Republican officeholders to pass local ordinances he labels "Safe Library Patron Protection." Yes, patrons, censoring what you can read is necessary to "protect" you. The GOP ban prohibits libraries from having books, videos, etc. that contain "immoral content," which he defines as depictions of nudity, sexual behavior, mentions of masturbation, LGBTQ+ life, etc. It's also autocratically homophobic, making it illegal for librarians to display LGBTQ flags or even mention "LGBTQ Pride Month."

This repressive monomania stabs even deeper into our freedom of expression by concocting a "right" of right-wing vigilantes to enforce the ordinances. Yes, self-appointed bands of bounty hunters would be authorized to roam the countryside suing local libraries (and individual librarians) for having "banned" books on the shelves. To spur this political malice, Mitchell's scheme provides a $10,000 reward for every violation a vigilante finds (or fabricates).

Well, you say, thank God I don't live in Texas! But — Hello! — repression doesn't recognize state borders, so the pernicious idea of paid library marauders is spreading across the country. To help defend your freedom from them, go to the American Library Association: ala.org.

How Despicable Are Big Pharma's Price Gougers?

Profiteering is always bad, but there are degrees of profiteer. Level 1 includes your everyday price gougers, like banks and airlines. At Level 2, you'll find the more demonic outfits like loan sharks and for-profit college hucksters. Then, top of the heap at Level 3, you'll find Eli Lilly.

This $288 billion drug-making colossus is America's primary peddler of insulin, the diabetes drug that some seven million Americans must constantly take literally to stay alive. By having both monopoly power over the market and such a huge base of captive customers, Lilly has gleefully jacked up its prices again and again over three decades, with insulin now costing each sufferer as much as $1,000 a month! Finally, under intense political pressure to stop its extreme, life-threatening gouging, the giant recently announced it would soon cut its insulin price by a whopping 70 percent! In full-page ads, Lilly hailed its corporate generosity, magnanimously declaring that "everyone deserves affordable options."

But — Hello! — it has intentionally charged unaffordable rip-off prices for 30 years, wallowing in monopoly profits. And — Hello! again — if Lilly says it can keep profiting on its insulin product despite slashing the price by 70%, that means it has been overcharging patients by 70 percent all this time! Yet, its rich executives want us to thank them? No thank you.

Even with the price cut, they're still charging $66 for a single vial of insulin. Guess what? It costs Lilly less than $7 to produce that vial, and it could be sold profitably for under $9.

Meanwhile, note that the ballyhooed price cut is voluntary, meaning Lilly can raise the price again at any time. Indeed, David Ricks (who personally pockets $19 million a year from the profiteering) has refused to pledge that he'll keep the medicine affordable.

To find out more about Jim Hightower and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators webpage at www.creators.com.

Reprinted with permission from Creators.

The Party Of Fear Is Becoming The Party Of Losers

The Party Of Fear Is Becoming The Party Of Losers

Here’s a fun fact: Years ago, in the early 70’s as I recall, the Village Voice hired some kind of polling firm to determine what were the best-read parts of the paper. I’m sure it wasn’t done because the editors were thinking of covering more of the stuff that the most people read. If that was why they ran the survey, they would have probably quickly dropped the classical music criticism of the wonderful Leighton Kerner, the Voice’s critic in that area, who wrote of classical music as if he were conducting an orchestra of words in his head. No, I think the survey of readers was probably done at the behest of the display advertising department, who could then take the figures from the survey and adjust advertising prices based on how many people read the rock and roll or theater sections, for example.

Well, can you guess what turned out to be the best-read page in the paper? The letters to the editor column. The letters ran on page four, with Jules Feiffer’s cartoons across the bottom. There wasn’t any advertising on page four, but there was on page five, so they must have boosted the rates for the ads on the facing page. The letters page, of course, was the comments section of the era, when readers got their opportunity to vent, telling Voice authors what they thought of them, complaining that their favorite political issue, or their favorite entertainment venue, or their favorite playwright or artist or dance company wasn’t getting the attention it deserved.

I realize I’ve written about this before, but I got my start as a writer in the letters to the editor column of the Voice, writing cranky, rather conservative critiques of the stories I read. My first one drew counter-criticism the following week from an array of New York intellectuals that included Dwight MacDonald, Paul Goodman, and Aryeh Neier, who at the time headed up the New York office of the ACLU and went on to become a founder of Human Rights Watch. Each of them gave the upstart cadet from West Point a good political spanking, which I replied to the following week in the letters column, of course.

People turned to the letters column in the Voice first, it seemed to me, because that was where the action was – writers complaining about other writers, pissed-off old lefties lecturing new lefties who they found ignorant about the origins of this, that, or the other thing…you get the picture. The letter writers were uniformly smart, informed, and some were quite funny as they took on the established writers in the Voice.

You may recognize in the ferment of the Voice letters column a familiar ferment in our own comments section of my Substack newsletter. Although I don’t often reach into the comments and post replies, I read them with great interest. When I was on the staff of the Voice, I made it my policy not to reply to letters to the editor that criticized my pieces. I figured that I had the privilege of being in the Voice as a staff writer, and my pieces spoke for themselves. The letters column was for readers, not Village Voice writers. By and large, I treat the comments section the same way.

But for the first time the other day I posted a column opening a thread for readers, inviting them to comment generally about what was on their minds, and I also invited them to suggest areas they thought would deserve my attention. To put it mildly, I was stunned by the response. I jumped in and left replies here and there as I filled a couple of pages of a reporter’s notebook sitting next to me with a long list of suggestions for stories. Some just aren’t in my wheelhouse, as they say, and would be fine for another columnist to write about. Others, such as the one in the title of this piece, fit me like a well-made suit.

Ralph T. suggested that I consider writing about “the layers and layers of fears driving a majority of Republican voters.” Helpfully, he provided a list, which I will quote from selectively here:

Afraid of vaccines.

Afraid of voters.

Afraid of drop boxes.

So afraid of Democrats that they’re willing to believe they’re killing abducted babies in the basements of pizza joints.

Afraid to go out in public without an arsenal strapped to their flak jackets.

Afraid of LGBTQ folks.

Afraid of Black folks.

Afraid of Latin folks, especially the ones across our southern border who we desperately need in our workforce.

Terrified of Jewish folks.

Afraid of immigrants, although that’s what 98% of us are, having pretty much killed off the local natives when we got here.

Afraid of women, especially smart women.

Afraid of respectfully facing our past.

Afraid of the future.

Afraid of change.

Afraid of books, which I suppose comes from being afraid of reading, or simply not being able to read.

Ralph T. went on to list more fears many Republicans share, but that one stopped me in my tracks, and not because I’ve written books, write a column, and for more than 50 years have depended on readers in order to make a living.

Have you been in a house that has no books? No magazines, no reading material of any kind, with the possible exception of a cookbook or two? I have.

I’ve been in houses of people who were poor, perhaps too poor to afford books and magazines, but I’ve also been in houses of middle-class people who just did not read. Out in L.A., I was even in a beach house in Malibu owned by a very wealthy person in the movie business that contained no books at all. There were some very nice, and very expensive, pieces of art on the wall, but no books, not a one, not even a cookbook, and the owner was not a Republican. People in the movie business like the person from Malibu had what they called “readers,” assistants whose job it was to read books and screenplays that were being considered to be bought to make movies. I didn’t understand why these executives wouldn’t, or couldn’t, read the material they spent so much money on until I realized it was the prospect of failure that made them afraid. They needed to be told what they were supposed to have read was “hot,” that other executives in the business were after the same property so they could contend with their fear that they would spend all that money and the project would end up as a failure.

What all of the people who lived in those houses shared, including the person from Malibu, was fear. They were afraid of different things. In the deep South, I found people afraid of the future, of change, of outsiders, of people of other races and creeds, people who were simply unlike themselves. The phrase “ignorance is bliss” comes to mind, but not as a truism. Ignorance on that level is anything but blissful, bringing with it a closed off-ness that causes such a vacuum of knowledge and surrounding darkness that it’s impossible to deal with on any level whatsoever. To be without accurate and learned information is to be alone with yourself – alone with your fears, as it were.

When I lived in the deep South, I once asked a man who was overtly, openly racist why he was that way. I probed, and not very gently. Did something happen to him as he was growing up? Had he been mugged or beaten up by a Black person or Black people? Did he even know anyone who was Black in a way beyond thanking a server in a restaurant for a refill of his coffee? The answer to every one of my questions was no. It was revealed that there was no reason behind his racism. It just was. He had been raised in what you would call a culture of racism, and so it infected him in the way a virus gets into you. It was in the air he breathed. It was all around him in the lives of his friends and family members and the people he worked with and hunted with and spent holidays with. They were racist, so he was racist. There was a kind of comfort in their community of racism and the fears they shared. The rest of them were afraid to breach the barrier they had built around themselves, and so was he.

Their fears encompassed other things on Ralph T.’s excellent list. Another person in the deep South I spoke to came right out and told me he thought Black people should not have the right to vote. He was afraid of their votes, because they weren’t his votes or the votes of his white friends and neighbors. It didn’t take but a moment or two to see that he was afraid not just of Black people themselves, and Black people voting, but of living in a world in which he felt surrounded by things he did not understand, people he didn’t trust, ideas he was afraid of because to start with, he was unfamiliar with them. He didn’t want to acknowledge the legacy of slavery that was all around him where he lived in the South – the Black side of town had unpaved streets, no sidewalks, no streetlights, shack-like houses – hell, the town didn’t even run its sewage system into the Black section.

The only public thing the Black people in his town had, really, was the right to attend the public schools, and that right, in his opinion, was forced on the town and its people, its white people, by a Supreme Court and a Congress that he felt did not represent people like him, people whom the laws and the culture and the rest of the nation, in fact, had left behind. He was afraid of people who were unlike him; their ideas were unlike his, and crucially, there was nothing he could do about it, at least in part because Black people could vote.

Republicans have come up with a new catchphrase to appeal to voters like this man, and to the people in whose houses I had been who did not have books. Critical race theory. They didn’t even have to define it, to tell anyone what it meant. It didn’t need a meaning, because everyone it was intended to appeal to knew exactly what it meant. The phrase, critical race theory, has a meaning as an academic discipline, but that’s not the way Republicans are using it. In a political sense, from the politicians who conceived of the phrase as a scare tactic, they’re saying we are on your side. We acknowledge your fears. In fact, your fears are our fears, so vote for us, and we will do whatever we can to assuage them. We will put Black people, and liberals, and everyone else you’re scared of in their place.

It's beyond us against them. It’s beyond playing on their fears. It’s taking fear and turning it into a weapon.

Armies use fear as a weapon on the battlefield in wars. That’s what artillery and rockets are all about – suddenly, without warning, out of the sky comes something that will blow you up and kill you. But it didn’t work when the Germans rained down bombs and V-1 rockets on London during World War II, and it’s not working as the Russians do everything in their power to break the will of the Ukrainian people with rockets and drones and artillery shells.

Fear in politics is beginning to exhibit its shortcomings as well. “Owning the libs” was fun for Republicans while it was being driven by Donald Trump and his machinery of hate and fear, but he lost. The Republican Party, which was supposed to sweep the midterms in a red wave, even while they will control the House of Representatives with a very slim majority, is wounded.

Sure, fear works as political weapon for Republicans and they’re not going to let go of it any time soon. But the thing about fear is that it’s not fun to be afraid all the time. That’s why horror movies work: you watch them and you can be afraid for a time, but you know that the movie is going to end, and you won’t have to be afraid anymore.

The kinds of fears Ralph T. was good enough to list for us are not fun. They’re stultifying, they’re dark, and there is no way out of them except embracing at least a few of the things you’re afraid of, like reading and seeking knowledge and allowing yourself to look at what is around you with open eyes and a least a tiny crack in your closed heart.

So fear not. A corner is beginning to be turned. Donald Trump, if he is the nominee of the Republican Party in 2024, will lose again. Republicans, unless they find a way to appeal to folks who are not congenitally fearful, will see their power as a political party wane.

There is, in fact, an end result of the fears we have discussed here at the behest of our friend, Ralph T. It’s called losing.

Lucian K. Truscott IV, a graduate of West Point, has had a 50-year career as a journalist, novelist, and screenwriter. He has covered Watergate, the Stonewall riots, and wars in Lebanon, Iraq, and Afghanistan. He is also the author of five bestselling novels. You can subscribe to his daily columns at luciantruscott.substack.com and follow him on Twitter @LucianKTruscott and on Facebook at Lucian K. Truscott IV.

Please consider subscribing to Lucian Truscott Newsletter, from which this column is reprinted with permission.

From ‘A Very Stable Genius,’ Five Crazy Trump Tales

From ‘A Very Stable Genius,’ Five Crazy Trump Tales

Reprinted with permission from Alternet

Two of the most prominent reporters covering President Donald Trump, Philip Rucker and Carol Leonnig of the Washington Post, are set to release a new book this month called “A Very Stable Genius” — delving into the details of the inner workings of the current administration.

And on Wednesday, the paper published a new article detailing some of the explosive episodes discussed in the book.

Here are 5 of the wild details the book reports:

1. Trump was eager to meet with Putin.

According to Leonnig and Rucker, Trump was “eager” to meet Russian President Vladimir Putin even before he was officially in office.

“When can I meet Putin?” he reportedly asked on of the candidates for the Secretary of State position. “Can I meet with him before the inaugural ceremony?”

2. Trump wanted to get rid of a law he may have violated.

The report explained:

In spring of 2017, Trump also clashed with Tillerson when he told him he wanted his help getting rid of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, a 1977 law that prevents U.S. firms and individuals from bribing foreign officials for business deals.

“It’s just so unfair that American companies aren’t allowed to pay bribes to get business overseas,” Trump says, according to the book. “We’re going to change that.”

The president, they go on to explain, was frustrated with the law “ostensibly because it restricted his industry buddies or his own company’s executives from paying off foreign governments in faraway lands.”

Trump’s own conduct as a businessman before becoming president may have violated FCPA, and as Quartz reported in 2017, many legal experts and activists worried when he first became president that his administration could weaken its enforcement. Some have even argued that Trump’s Ukraine scheme that led to his impeachment may have violated the law.

3. There were “fire drills” at the Justice Department in case Trump started firing people left and right.

During Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation, officials at the Justice Department ran “fire drills” to game out scenarios they could follow if the president started trying to conduct his own “Saturday Night Massacre,” the reporters found.

The report explained:

The officials have reason to be concerned, according to the authors, who report that Trump muses about using a memo by Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) as the justification for firing Rosenstein and reigning in Mueller’s investigation. He also rails against his own Justice Department, furious that the agency isn’t being sufficiently loyal to him personally.

4. Trump said the Constitution is “like a foreign language.”

One detail that the Post calls harmless, but it’s still striking nonetheless, involves Trump literally struggling to read the Constitution. If this were a work of fiction, the metaphor would have been laughed at for being far too heavyhanded:

Early in his presidency, Trump agrees to participate in an HBO documentary that features judges and lawmakers — as well as all the living presidents — reading aloud from the Constitution. But Trump struggles and stumbles over the text, blaming others in the room for his mistakes and griping, “It’s like a foreign language.”

5. Mueller “looked as if he’d been slapped” after Bill Barr released his letter on the report.

The book also provides new insight into a particularly curious episode surrounding the release of the Mueller report. Attorney General Bill Barr first released his own letter about the report, ostensibly summarizing its conclusions, and Mueller’s team responded by writing a letter to Barr critiquing his characterization of the findings.

The authors suggest that Barr’s summary personally offended Mueller, writing: “Members of the special counsel team would later describe Mueller’s reaction: He looked as if he’d been slapped.”

But it also said that, when Barr later called Mueller to discuss the dispute, the conversation ended on an “uplifting note.”

What Donald Trump Jr’s Book Tells Us About Him — And His Family

What Donald Trump Jr’s Book Tells Us About Him — And His Family

Reprinted with permission from DCReport

Donald Trump Junior’s Triggered is quite a book, rich with insights, all of them unintended.

The subtitle of Triggered is “How the Left Thrives on Hate and Wants to Silence Us.”

What the text shows is that it is Junior who spews hate, mixed with an unhealthy dose of made-up facts to justify his anger. That’s just the kind of hypocrisy the Trumps spin inside their fantasy bubble, where anyone who questions what they do is unworthy of being heard.

The words put down for Junior by a host of Hachette editors, identified only by first name, show that he lives in a black-and-white world with never a hint of gray.

Just the kind of hypocrisy the Trumps spin inside their fantasy bubble, where anyone who questions what they do is unworthy of being heard.

“The whole world was against us” in the early days of the 2016 campaign, Junior asserts.

“All the experts” agree with him. Anyone who wants universal health care is a socialist.

The Trumps are the champion of union members, the Democrats their enemy.

The Democrats are all lazy while Junior “worked night and day” for five years on his father’s Chicago hotel, which based on falling occupancy could reasonably be described as his father’s failing Chicago hotel.

There’s no evidence of popular demand for Triggered. It is only thanks to bulk purchases by the Republican National Committee and others that Junior’s book briefly made the top of The New York Times bestseller list.

It’s since been succeeded at the top. A Warning by Anonymous, which I wrote about last month, made No. 1 because actual readers bought it one copy at a time.

Flattering Himself

Throughout, Junior flatters himself relentlessly even as he inflates minor incidents and fabricates or, as Kellyanne Conway famously said, proffers “alternative facts.”

Despite evidence to the contrary—like indictments and convictions of others—Junior says that he was “probably number two” on special counsel Robert Mueller’s “kill list.” Similarly, he wants us to believe that he is a subject of public fascination exceeded only by his father.

The love of money permeates Junior’s book. Reverence for money runs strong in that family, patriotism not so much.

Getting Choked Up

As he watched his father place a wreath at the tomb of the unknown soldier at Arlington National Cemetery, Junior writes that he got all choked up. But it wasn’t the sacrifices of the more than 400,000 Americans buried at Arlington that stirred his emotions.

“In that moment,” he wrote, “I also thought of all the attacks we’d already suffered as a family, and about all the sacrifices we’d have to make to help my father succeed—voluntarily giving up a huge chunk of our business and all international deals to avoid the appearance that we were ‘profiting off the office’.”

He writes that his 1977 birth was accompanied by fireworks, though they had nothing to do with him. He writes of traveling to Czechoslovakia at age five to spend a few months with his maternal grandparents, where he recalls a border officer objected to his coat. “I remember looking around the room and seeing how afraid all the Czech citizens were on my behalf,” he says, because of course a little boy in a room of strangers coming off an airplane would be the center of everyone’s attention.

Rewriting History

Junior doesn’t limit himself to rewriting personal history. His cartoon version of the Sixties had me laughing out loud.

At page 112 Junior writes that “JFK would be considered alt-right today.”

He describes President Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society programs as an attempt to “appease the New Left by ushering through a socialist agenda” with food stamps, universal medical care for older Americans and minimal gun controls. Never mind that Johnson had been engaged in how to address poverty since 1928 when he taught poor Mexican-American children in a Texas border town.

Junior then asserts that “the hippies of the New Left had traded their peace signs for raised fists and terrorist organizations.” Ah, to live inside such a simplistic, ahistorical bubble of Trumpian nonsense.

Promoting Bad Manners

Junior complains about “political correctness.” And just what does that term mean? To Junior, it is an epithet that reveals how those he detests are weak-minded, oppressive and liberal.

Without saying so directly, Junior establishes his dislike of good manners and civility, which is what political correctness is about, flaws and all. Junior offers a dog whistle to those white Americans who believe they are oppressed because in decent society one can’t use racial and religious slurs without consequences.

“The Democrat Party,” Junior writes, “has tilted so far to the left that it threatens to collapse any day.”

He wrote that, or agreed to what others wrote for him, months after the Democratic Party (its correct name) won the House in 2018 by garnering nine million more votes than Republicans. That supposedly failing political party has a growing roster of registered voters and a growing list of wins in elections, some of them in deep red states like Alabama.

A Pre-Birth Miracle

But wait, Junior gets even crazier in making stuff up.

He describes President Franklin D. Roosevelt as “the man who practically invented the labor union.” Never mind that the first recorded union strike in America took place in 1768, more than a century before the patrician FDR’s birth in 1882.

There are bits of fact and truth in the book. Junior says his father has “almost completely reconfigured” the Republican Party in just three years. That’s true.

But then Junior undoes this by asserting that the pre-Trump GOP existed as “a political entity, frankly, was headed toward extinction.”

Never mind that Republicans controlled the House, Senate and White House during the first half of Trump’s presidency and yet failed to accomplish anything but a huge increase in future taxes by going on a military spending binge and borrowing cast sums to create the appearance of income tax cuts.

Since 2016 the GOP has been shrinking, down now to only 29 percent of voters. That’s almost identical to the 28 percent of voters who declare themselves independent of both major parties.

Chased Off Stage

Books have been important sources of unvarnished Trumpian facts. The father, for example, spent pages in his book Think Big denouncing Christians as “fools,” “idiots” and “schmucks” while declaring his life philosophy is a single word, “revenge.” He details the pleasure he says he gets from ruining the lives of those who don’t do what he wants. All of that, of course, is decidedly anti-Christian.

The elder Trump brags about cheating his partners in his first casino deal, and cheating at golf, in his bestseller The Art of the Deal. That, too, is incompatible with his claim to be a Christian. And so is his statement that he has never sought forgiveness from God because he has never done anything that would require forgiveness. There’s that fantasy Trumpian bubble again.

Junior complains that “the Left” wants to silence him and others who fashion themselves as conservatives. “Fashion” is the right word here because Donald Trump is anything but a conservative, as many conservative writers, theorists and publications have documented.

Still, when it comes to Junior’s claim that there are people who want to silence him, he has a point. It’s just not the point he intends.

On his book tour an angry audience forced Trump and his girlfriend to flee a stage in that center of liberal thinking, Berkeley, Calif.

The audience that the couple triggered was not composed of Democrats, socialists, leftists or even Republicans. The anger mob was composed of Americans so far on the right that they think Junior and his dad are softies on immigration.

Irony, Donald Trump Jr., is thy champion.

Photo Credit: Gage Skidmore