Boots on the ground

Posted on July 1, 2025 by geoff lemon

This was always the intention. US soldiers on US streets, military force against US civilians – that has been the hard-on dream of the weird boys of the second Trump administration since the promise of it arrived last November, a pants-twitching fantasy of unleashing the most explicit symbol and the bluntest reality of force against whatever types of people they don’t like. At least that’s where it starts, targeting the “right” kind of civilians, the ones designated as deserving such treatment based on geography or appearance or perceived behaviour, before the categories widen as rapidly as the deployments.

The month of June saw Marines on the streets of Los Angeles, and even more National Guard reservists, a sinister layer of military force on top of the extant army of LA cops out there throwing flashbangs and shooting rubber bullets at whoever they felt like fucking up. It was the result of deliberate provocation: start by sending ICE agents on a trail of indiscriminate violence through America’s most famously Latino city, terrorising people in their homes and workplaces, have that prompt an outcry, then use that protest as the excuse to pull a big red lever. In this case Trump’s move was comically dishonest, claiming a nascent national emergency on the basis of a few hundred people in a Home Depot car park, a favourite haunt for ICE agents hunting day-rate workers. The overbearing military and police presence itself was what prompted protests to grow, a rejection of that intimidation, until the crowds got big enough for the cops to enjoy their favourite pastime of wading in to crack some skulls. 

That pretext was so flimsy it would dissolve in a light mist, but it could have been a dispute between shoppers at Toys R Us: sending in troops was on the summer planner, looking for a date to drop. Two months ago, the 28th of April, Trump’s office issued a pair of executive orders. One said that “sanctuary cities”, the jurisdictions that limit cooperation with ICE, were engaged in “a lawless insurrection against the supremacy of Federal law and the Federal Government’s obligation to defend the territorial sovereignty of the United States”. It said that state or local officials in these places would face individual criminal charges, while their jurisdictions would lose every possible stream of federal funding. As with everything in this administration, it was government by mafia, a threat of violence for the crime of protecting vulnerable people.

The second order promised to promote more aggressive policing and to indemnify cops for their crimes, a bold ambition in a nation already batting .999 on both measures. Then came its most ominous clause. By the end of July, it said “the Attorney General and the Secretary of Defense, in consultation with the Secretary of Homeland Security and the heads of agencies as appropriate, shall increase the provision of excess military and national security assets in local jurisdictions to assist State and local law enforcement”, and that the same officials “shall determine how military and national security assets, training, non-lethal capabilities, and personnel can most effectively be utilized to prevent crime.”

That is to say, in the guise of ‘assisting’ local policing, the Feds were gearing up to take it over, sending in troops wherever they could invent a justification based on vilifying social services. They could extort cooperation by threatening to jail local authorities, and once on the ground, would probably get little resistance at street level: no matter how blue a city, its cops probably still vote red. Next carriage on the irony train that whistles all night in modern America would be these freaks loudly justifying their moves as they did in the EO document by citing “violations of law”, while continuing to violate any law that got in their way. 

Back in April, I assumed that this was about anticipating trouble with tariffs. Trump had recently announced his mad slew of rates, Chinese imports were vanishing, and America was weeks away from a long hot summer peaking with empty shelves nationwide, and unemployment for millions of transport workers. Mass discontent spilling into mass protest seemed inevitable. In the end the tariffs were backtracked, the time-bomb defused. 

But the plan had to go ahead. Any imaginary threat would do, the same old playbook as the Reichstag fire. The first bit of oppression would encourage resistance, creating the conditions for other forces to smash down harder. “The president will not tolerate rioting and violence,” fluted JD Vance on his social media wasteland, months after Trump had pardoned 1500 violent rioters from the Capitol incursion. Last week had a momentary distraction by bombing Iran, as will happen to guys with too many buttons on their desk, but the domestic plan will soon be back in focus. Today, Trump sued the state of California for “discrimination” against federal ICE agents for refusing to assist them with local resources.

The aim of all this is to antagonise and lord power over the bluest states, particularly the cities that Republicans most resent. Trump’s entire second presidency has been a disoriented revenge tour, an old man high on paint fumes shambling through the wedding of somebody he vaguely remembers hating, trying to smear cake on any guest in reach. Varying by the day, it has been about destroying universities, the sciences, national parks, healthcare, the space program, cyclone monitoring, vaccination, environmental protections – basically anybody who ever told him that he can’t do something. Top of the revenge list, though, anthropomorphised into sentient enemies blinking out there in the night, are entire cities that have been so rude as to vote the wrong way for a few elections in a row. Trump only cares about the last three, even if the rest of his ghouls vaguely remember back to Reagan. 

In a system where statewide headcounts decide electoral college votes, cities have defined the last few decades of US politics. Urban centres skew progressive, with more residents invested in workers’ rights or creative and intellectual pursuits. That creates critical mass, drawing in similar people from places where this is less the case, intensifying the disparity. Meanwhile, country areas keep voting right wing, despite the lack of any care, consideration, or benefit delivered by their ultra-rich representatives. Find anyone in the world who Trump, with his dry-cleaned suit and germaphobic handshake avoidance, despises more than country folk, farm workers, guys with pickup trucks and dirty overalls. Those atop the Republican party undoubtedly view their own voters as redneck marks, and one double Tom Collins at an RNC party would be enough to hear them say it. But the base is promised that blame for its ills will be visited on some other group of poor people, so the votes keep rolling in, because those city elites with their collapsing rental houses and hospitality wages think they’re better than you.

A city big enough can flip a state. California has the mega duo of Los Angeles and the Bay, plus the salt-rim cities along the coast. New York City holds off New York State, which turns deep red as soon as you cross Brooklyn into Long Island. The vastness of Chicago rules Illinois. Minneapolis is big enough and Minnesota small enough. Seattle and Spokane decide Washington. Portland and Salem decide Oregon. Atlanta stirred enough in 2020 to turn over Georgia, then turned over and went back to sleep. The last three elections have pretty much hinged on whether Philadelphia turned out enough of a vote to outweigh rural Pennsylvania, while Democrats kept hoping that Dallas, Houston, Austin would become powerful enough to take Texas. These are the cities that Republicans hate. Now, with Trump unchecked, they want to take out years of frustration with those election-night maps, years especially of cursing the immutability of California and its tranche of EC votes.

For a minute I thought that the transparency of this, of the party that has endlessly warbled about “state’s rights” immediately sending the army into states that don’t bend to federal rule, would be so clear that even major media outlets would have to acknowledge it in LA. But no, they talked about foliage being set on fire (by police munitions), or public furniture in disarray (used as shields from being shot). They talked about “less lethal munitions”, but not the many people who’ve had an eye blown out by rubber bullets, for the crime of standing in the street. Except for the occasional overthrow of a disendorsed foreign dictator, Western networks slant their coverage of protest towards the righteousness of state power and the illegitimacy of objection. In their own countries, there is no such thing as police excess, only ‘concerns’. Even in extremis, habits held.

My introduction to this was in Melbourne on the 11th of September, 2000, a year before that date became known for other reasons. Before the shorthand of 9/11, the branding was S11, a protest against a World Economic Forum meeting at Crown Casino. A year before the clarifying focus of the warmongering cash bonanza of George Bush’s War on Terror, with John Howard and Tony Blair grinning in the sidecar, there was still plenty of discontent about neoliberal money-worship and the worldwide appetite of capital ruining the world, a decade after Reagan-Thatcher wound up, and less than a year after their local symptomatic outbreak, Jeff Kennett, finally met the right antivirals. 

Disrupting the richest people in the world while they discussed how to spend everyone else’s money seemed a good idea, but I also just wanted to see what happened. Australia’s Vietnam protests were as close in time then as S11 is now. It felt like part of a cultural tradition. I gave myself the day off high school to witness it. One thing I noticed immediately was how friendly the protesters were, cooperating, offering encouragement and support. The other was how fragile the cops were. On the way over the bridge I passed a long row of them, standing staunch and serious with hands clasped in front of their crotches, staring dead ahead like Beefeater guards. I went and stood at the end of the row and assumed the pose. The last cop immediately turned and gave me a double-handed shove in the side, snarling “Fuck off!” I wasn’t intimidated, it made me laugh, that these heavyset guys packing deadly armaments could be so easily upset by a skinny teenage kid. 

It was less funny but equally instructive later, when the frontage of Crown was blocked by protestors, with WA premier Richard Court’s car marooned in the crush. I watched the cops mutter to each other in preparation, one by one tearing off their velcro name badges and hiding them in pockets. Then came the baton charge, holding the weapons in two hands, ramming the handle into ribcages with a stabbing motion tailored for close confines. It was brutal, and anyone trying to protect themselves could be arrested on an inflated charge of assaulting an officer. The struggle swirled through the day, people using cyclone fence barricades to hold police back, pushing to make space so slowly as to be almost passive, while anonymised cops sporadically took chances to lay into people. A woman was run over, dragged by the cop car and breaking her leg. After an upbringing sheltered from experiencing this, something was laid clear: this institution that demanded respect showed itself to be completely undeserving.

I was still naive enough to think that another institution, one still trustworthy, was news. Truth, evidence, reporting. Coming home that night, having seen those things in broad daylight with cameras rolling, I turned on the TV news to see them reported. Instead, whether the commercial bulletins at 6 o’clock or the ABC at 7, all the coverage claimed that violent protestors cause chaos. The lines I’ve since heard so many times all got a run: that police were pelted with projectiles, had bottled piss poured on them, horses were attacked, this many officers were treated for injury. The distortion of what I had been in the middle of was so extreme, presented by Ian Henderson’s trusted face. I still remember a feeling of betrayal.

But this is the norm for cops, of any stripe: always framed as victims, always covered for by institutions, always covering for each other. Long after this protest an ombudsman’s enquiry detailed the accusations, then cops were left to judge cops. In a grand surprise, the cops thought the cops did nothing wrong. Not a charge was laid, not an officer punished, no badgeless offender named. As the writer Melissa Gira Grant frames it, “police are already a near-total black box into which public information disappears and that’s just routine”.

Hence the need to invert the story, to claim violence is done to the instigators of violence. To an authoritarian mindset, violence is protestors breaking the window of a Starbucks, but not cops breaking a human being’s head. Violence is someone flailing an arm as six officers pile them into the ground. Violence is throwing back the spent tear gas canister that a cop just fired at you. Violence is any resistance, any “failure to comply”, however egregious the demand, and when that imagined violence is identified it can be justifiably met with the real thing. And after a long day of bashing heads, cops get sympathetic coverage for having RSI.

It’s precisely because their shitbaggery is so blatant that ICE tries to create radio interference by crying about how everyone is so very mean to them. One line that the administration loves firing out is that “assaults” on agents have risen 500% – a purely fantasy number that one of the few remaining credible reporters at the Washington Post has debunked in detail, even in a world where vastly increased ICE operations mean the number of fake assault charges they file after beating someone up has probably increased.

Those claims exist to invent some counter given that right now, the victims are obvious. When I was walking around LA last summer, in a season so different that it feels imaginary, so much of the place was about the street life, the food vendors and the car park attendants, the warm nights and the flat wide boulevards, chatting to people on corners. The other day I saw a video of an abandoned taco stand, cans of drink still on ice, ingredients still in their tubs, nobody in sight. Everyone working there had been picked up or had run away. Thousands of dollars’ worth of equipment – their grille and gas bottles, marquees, coolers, furniture – abandoned in the street for pillage. Even if its people escaped deportation, someone’s livelihood had been kicked in. 

Another Angeleno, Matt O’Brien, wrote about a similar sight, finding all the local spots closed down: “These are my friends, my neighbors, the people I see everyday, whom I adore, hiding because of this racist bullshit. It’s antithetical to my heart, my religious beliefs and everything I was taught this country was supposed to be… I hear and barely passably speak like five languages a day, and we are all smiles every time, that’s humanity. Tagalog, Spanish, Portuguese, Basque, French, & that’s just this street!… Everyday, [an elderly friend] stops, and yells to me ‘Jefe’ and waves with his cane. He bums smokes and I refuse his quarters because, he’s me someday, he’s mi hermano. That’s the whole bit, whole people, whole lives, in community. It’s a wave, it’s a laugh it’s a hug. Fuck these facists”.

There are plenty of stories about the qualities of targeted migrants – people at the core of communities, following the assigned path to legal residency – but you shouldn’t need to be a model citizen-in-waiting to deserve protection from angry posses of good ole boys wearing neck gaiters. And for the round-up squads, the sadder the story, the more they relish it, relish demonstrating that they don’t care, because you still fit the category of what they have decided is the wrong kind of person. They get to decide, that is the message, the only message, now and forever. It’s the same emptiness reflected by the fact that the MAGA visual signature is bad generative AI, that instantly recognisable soulless ‘art’ for the shitposts that fill government social media feeds. Why? Fuck you, that’s why. 

Another signature of the hard right is the right to complain, hence their victim narrative always to the fore. They get to imperil anyone while quailing about their own safety: rank cowards, always moving in force, walking suburban streets kitted up like they’re going into Fallujah. They bear two great symbols of this age. One is the mask, the same thing they raged against it during covid when it implied social accountability, but now embrace with the claim that they’re “not safe” without it. The central thesis of their movement is that they will never be held accountable, in which case protecting their identity shouldn’t be necessary, but they know that the old rules required cops to be identifiable, so anything that defies that orthodoxy is welcome, with a side serve of intimidation as being faceless to those they target. 

The other symbol is that these ICE guys are stunted half-children, always in the baggy clothes of an overweight eight-year-old, sloppy polos, cargo shorts, caps turned backwards, the Gen-X-to-millennial uniform of middle-aged men who were frozen in time when Fred Durst was king and have never grown up, shifting through marginal changes from Ed Hardy to Joe Rogan via the teenage son from Family Guy. They were aimlessly jellyfishing through life until the worst guy they’ve ever seen, the one whose grotesqueness they find so exciting, gave them something to do. They have the tastes of children, the outlook of children, the aimless anger of children. On the way home from a hard day’s domestic terrorism, you’d better believe they’re stopping for burgers, stocking up on Twinkies and flavourless beer, probably looking forward to cranking up their widescreen TV for a buffet of Latina porn.

It’s strange to be simultaneously pathetic and threatening, but there is some intention to it, something like proving that they don’t even have to try. What is more dispiriting than finding that even the most mismatched group of slouching nondescripts can get the blessing of government to come and ruin your life? For those MAGA guys, it’s all about acting out resentment, a middle finger to the fear that some other people think they’re better than you. But their resulting behaviour guarantees that other people are. People who build lives around care for others, not dispensing punishment. And yet, the latter are the ones talking about their sacrifice, the risks they face. It is a particular American perversion that someone volunteering to destroy families for no social gain gets to pre-emptively demand sympathy for the chance that damage might find its way back to theirs.

That’s the line. So, when Kristi Noem or Tom Homan or Pam Bondi pop up on the rictus carousel, they frame cries for resistance against violence as cries for violence in itself. Violence is the language of these people, the formula that they have chosen, happy to induce some to justify their use of more. Minds better than mine at political theory might see a bloodless way around this, but if so, the theorem is yet to be applied. What is most surprising is that a country with half a billion firearms floating around hasn’t in fact seen more of it directed the other way. 

By castle doctrine, sacred to the NRA, anyone in their home or business has a right to take out an approaching threat. Imagine an action movie where a bunch of armed, masked, unidentified guys roll up to the neighbour’s house and start forcing their kids into a van. The gritty American tough guy would waste eight of them with precision pistol shots, run the magazine empty, then take down the last two with a garden hose and a corflute stake. In the real world, seeing an arrest without legitimate process or identification, resistance should be the duty of anyone armed and community minded. But of course, true gun rights have always been applied selectively, and ICE raids are as selective as they come. Anyone in that context producing arms while outnumbered would get shot on the spot, and any group big enough to disarm multiple agents would end up with a tac squad descending on their street to pump thousands of rounds through anything in sight. This is the thing with secret police: when anyone might be one, resisting anybody risks being hammered flat by the outsized retaliation of the state. 

Really, now should be the time for the Second Amendment types. They have spent decades saying they need arms to tamp down the threat of government tyranny, or to overthrow it should it come. Your time has come, fellers, government tyranny is walking your streets, and a silent presence as deterrence might make all the difference . But, as luck would have it, the 2A guys mostly happen to be the same guys who would love to sign up for ICE shifts. It doesn’t feel like tyranny if they’re happy with who tyranny is pointed at. 

So they will be nowhere to be seen, when the next provocations and the next deployments come. As something kicks off, in the most down-tempo Home Depot way, Trump’s guys will be standing by, waiting to order in troops to whichever place they want to use for their next performance. Chicago seems a certainty, the codeword for a Black city, always the name quivering on Republican lips when they want to deflect from the latest white guy to blow away 30 people in a Denny’s. New York, no doubt, with Zohran Mamdani’s likely term as mayor providing the ultimate bait for Trump to storm in: a Muslim who dared to use the word ‘socialist’, to suggest that Israel should stop committing mass murder, to suggest that rich people should pay a bit more tax to fund amenities for the city they enjoy.

All that remains to be seen is to what extent the military will do Trump’s bidding; whether there is any demand they will flinch at. There was a lack of enthusiasm in that embarrassing parade, the literally creaking machinery of state shuffling by its bored self-coronated emperor. It offers the scant consolation that, whenever it finally comes, his funeral will be this poorly attended, some threadbare procession of losers straggling through the rain to fantasise about a despised power that they once felt the thrill of standing near. But for now he has command, and a heavy wedge of support within the ranks. He has a Supreme Court willing to wave through any outrage with an occasional for-show whisper of dissent. As the summer lengthens, and fears widen, and tempers fray, we will see more soldiers on more streets. Where mayors and governors try to resist, we will see them threatened, charged, arrested. There is no ploy that won’t be used. This is a takeover, and it has already begun.

(originally at patreon.com/geofflemon)

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The Australian election makes me so fucking tired

Posted on May 2, 2025 by geoff lemon

In context, Anthony Albanese was always going to be a disappointment. For decades, at least until this year’s American fascist spasm, Anglosphere democracies had the disillusionment cycle as their calling card. It goes like this: the local Tory variant holds power for years, advancing their usual project of consolidating wealth and degrading social compacts, fuelled by directing fear or grievance at whatever group is currently convenient. Eventually, their time comes to an end, replaced by a notionally more progressive force. There is a moment of relief, a feeling of liberation.

Then, in weeks, months, a year, the new government gets scared. Billionaire media brands any social policy as communism, the new opposition gets attacks amplified, and those in power get cautious. They contract, playing small target. Centre-left drifts to centre-right, then past centre altogether. They shoot for populism, an imaginary swathe of mid-electorate voters who like to choose conservatives but will reward someone else for impersonating one. They back down from issues, they trade principles. Fearing that taking any stand is an exposure, they spend terms achieving nothing, all in the hope of dodging their way to a subsequent term achieving nothing. When successful, it means nothing at all.

I didn’t get to see this as an adult until my 20s, so many years of waiting before getting to experience life without John Howard hanging over it like some air-dried moralistic poltergeist. That night felt beautiful: my house party boiled over as Howard lost his seat in Bennelong, and I remember standing on the back of our battered couch howling a farewell to the old regime. The Herd’s song The King is Dead caught the elation, but now bittersweetly given how utterly Labor blew it all up. Kevin Rudd was popular publicly but not with colleagues, and after they knocked him off, Julia Gillard froze. She spent three years speaking at quarter-speed through a rictus, tried to play safe on so many issues, and only succeeded in handing the country to the malign onion-chewer Tony Abbott. It was all such a waste.

Get hopeful, get disappointed. You can argue about specifics, or signature policy, but in my lifetime the cycle is broadly true. Clinton in 1992 to Blair in 1997, Rudd 2007 and Obama 2008, Biden in 2020, Starmer in 2024, each temporary rejection of conservatism in Australia, America, or the UK has been followed by a comparable fizzling out of purpose. Albanese is another brick in a pointless wall.

None of which is to say that any living being should do a single thing to aid the election of Peter Dutton, a haunted paper lantern of a man both spiritually and in terms of a head that could scare an infant back into the womb. Dutton has proved over his long abomination of a political career that he can and will do absolutely anything for power, with the only saving grace being that he doesn’t do most of those things very well.

He has all the grace and tact of the Queensland Police Force that spawned him: the man who claims concern for Australian children is the same one who walked out of Rudd’s apology to the Stolen Generations, and who shared a 1990s professional milieu with the Pinkenba Six. He spasms between personas that he thinks might sell, thundering about hallucinated street thugs, then trying his umpteenth sell of soft, sensitive Peter. There he is on the front of a friendly Murdoch tabloid, attempting to smile with the natural ease of Montgomery Burns, less a greeting than a warning that he might, out of bewilderment more than hunger, bury those big square teeth into the fleshy junction between your shoulder and neck. 

Most of all, Dutton has aped Trump’s last campaign, promising to sack 40,000 government workers for no apparent reason, and stealing the tagline “Are you better off than you were x years ago?” He praised Trump’s win, though he’s got quieter on that front as global loathing for America’s president swells. Hopefully, Dutton is looking at the recent Canadian election with trepidation. And hopefully, that rejection of Trump politics extends to Australia, with Albanese remaining prime minister. But the only reason to say so is that we’re locked in the time-honoured system of hoping for the least worst option from a paltry field of two. Because fuck me, what a letdown that man has been. 

A dozen or so years ago, there was buzz about the Member for Grayndler. Early Twitter had the Hot Albo period when his young scruffy student photo used to circulate, and he burnished that indie cred by going to see live bands and buy vinyl records. He spoke plainly and seemed approachable. He was proved right by history in standing against the Rudd spill, and it was Rudd’s salvage operation in 2013 that prompted Albo’s signature line: “I like fighting Tories. That’s what I do.” Voicing some clarity and ferocity in a world of retail politics stood out, and there was a sense that Labor’s caucus missed a trick in choosing the more bland Bill Shorten as leader after losing government in 2013. 

When Albanese got the job six years later, that didn’t mean anyone expected a full-charisma charge to power, shredding a guitar solo in the house of Reps. But you had a right to expect some willingness to brawl. As it turns out, Shorten’s 2019 campaign was the more ambitious and principled, seeking to reduce handouts to the rich in the form of real-estate negative gearing and shareholder franking credits. Shorten lost, Albo took over, and jettisoned those financial reforms, never to return. He came into power with a big promise, one that was cheered wildly in his election night speech: a constitutional amendment for the Indigenous Voice to Parliament.

Albanese probably thought the referendum would be a formality. Fair, it should have been. An advisory body offering feedback to legislators, with no power, in a format changeable as required? No downsides. But Dutton decided to strategically oppose it, the lead-up time was too long and gave him that chance, and Albanese floundered in leading the case the other way. Australian racism against Indigenous people is never far from the surface, and Dutton is a divining rod. The loss was a defining blow, and spooked Albanese so badly that he apparently resolved not to try anything else for the rest of his term. 

So he retreated, greying out in policy and personality until Shorten looked Technicolor. As PM, Albanese channels the same halting speech as Gillard, pausing between each word like he’s decrypting Morse code on the fly. There is no charisma, no warmth, like that might be deemed too flashy for the job. His Howard-lite makeover, sober suits and new glasses and trimmed waistline, might have meant nothing had his actions been different, but the change in appearance matched something else, a spiritual caving to political conformity. 

Above all, Labor’s capitulation has been environmental, a monumental waste of opportunity. The teal rush of the 2022 election offered a mandate. Labor scraped a tiny majority, but the Tories were really beaten up by climate independents, raiding a swathe of their affluent urban seats. These highly qualified professionals-turned-candidates were the type who reassured rich voters that they too probably owned a holiday house and a wine cellar, but were prepared to treat climate breakdown as a non-partisan issue. People who would never vote Labor could now express dissatisfaction with the Coalition. Labor could have ridden that momentum to be the reforming party, with a hint of aisle-crossing, and enough Senate friendliness on the issue to get meaningful legislation negotiated through. 

Instead, Albanese has spent his term ordering environment minister Tanya Plibersek to sign approvals for new coal mines and new gas fields, locking in decades more emissions while corporations take the profit. Resources royalties going to the Commonwealth remain pitifully low, with mining companies keeping almost all of the proceeds from digging up and selling our stuff. While Australia keeps exporting the means to choke the world we live in, we don’t even keep a decent chunk of the earnings to serve that troubled future. In fact, we mostly pay for the pleasure, still shelling out billions in rorts like diesel rebates. Domestic aviation emissions are at their highest in history, while rail infrastructure to mitigate that is dismissed as fantasy. Emissions reductions are slower under Albanese than under his two conservative predecessors. 

It’s the same with social reform: nothing to rock the boat, nothing to annoy the influential. Tory tax cuts were reshaped towards lower earners, but still handed cash back to the richest. A raft of other tax loopholes remain open for the biggest companies to pay proportionally less than an average worker. Whole generations have been abandoned to negative gearing purgatory in cities where house prices start in the millions, unable to afford to buy a home or the rent set by somebody who does. A few people having a property portfolio matters more than everyone else having somewhere to live. Unemployment payments remain Titanically submerged below the poverty line. Last year Albanese pitched reducing student debt – but only if he wins the election. Why do the right thing when you can save it for leverage?

Belatedly, in this year’s budget, Labor found a bit of their traditional punch via Medicare, with the funding to reanimate bulk billing. Bulk billing had died a strangely quiet death, with none of the deserved coverage that attended the Coalition pitch of Medicare co-payments some years earlier. Instead, the gap between a clinic’s expenses and the government rebate kept growing until it was untenable, but it happened gradually enough that it didn’t make news. My clinic was one of the last few bulk-billing general patients, so when that ended last year, I was curious. On a long search, I couldn’t find a single other clinic in Melbourne offering bulk billing to anyone without a concession card. Renewing system funding is welcome, but having made the switch to charging extra, surely a lot of doctors won’t go back.

All of Albanese’s caution looks like a way to avoid giving hooks to a hostile Murdoch press. You might call that tactical brilliance. Two days out, with a lot of early voting already done, polling has become more bullish about a Labor win. Maybe Albo takes a majority. Maybe he hangs on via minority government. But there still remains, at the present moment, a chance that he loses to the worst candidate since the Apparition of 2013, becoming a one-term PM in the process. And if he does, that loss will have been for…? For what, exactly? For weak centrism achieving three-fifths of fuck-all? 

Or if he wins, what then? More of the same nothing? Conservative politics is not conservative, it’s radical. It’s angry and destructive, a wrestle with the national id. A functioning democracy can hold out the vandals for a time, but they always get back, and they get back with fervour. Minimising their damage requires enough construction work to have been done in the meantime. But in the societies we’re talking about, change is too small. The Overton window has a familiar view, onto a graveyard of meaningful reform.

The greatest failing of supposedly progressive politics at the executive level has been passing up the opportunity to progress, to dynamically reshape society while the chance is there. Regressive causes take their chance, opponents don’t. Gough Whitlam is the outlier, instituting drastic change that had its failures, but also successes that Tories still can’t undo. Howard’s change was in making housing the nation’s investment vehicle, a profound shift in politics by enriching but entrapping a chunk of the electorate who then couldn’t afford to diverge from his view. These days most Labor politicians have property portfolios too. That’s the impact of a big move. Big moves carry risk, but it’s better to make meaningful change in three years and lose, than to do nothing in six years, or nine, or twelve.

There’s frustration up to the eyeballs. Biden and Obama’s elections felt like relief after Trump and Bush, but the replacements kept dropping bombs, and kids kept getting shot, and people kept going to jail for shoplifting while nobody did for the Global Financial Crisis. Republicans kept gerrymandering districts and suppressing votes. Obama declined to fight for a Supreme Court seat whose surrender has since done untold damage. Biden declined to fight to bring Trump to justice, leaving the field open for his return. Both ran the line that they couldn’t overreach the authority of their office for fear of Republicans doing the same, only to empower a Republican who now wields it for whatever vengeance he chooses, and plans to hold it forever. Today’s Democrats do nothing, arguing that doing something might be seen as doing too much.

Clinton ended a dozen years of Reaganite rule, but ended his own term with bursting prisons and corporate supremacy. Tony Blair chummed up with Clinton’s successor to invade Iraq, dismissing millions of Britons marching against it. Later in the UK, after Labour’s 14 years out of office, Keir Starmer finally cut off the last head of the clown-show hydra that passed for a series of Tory prime ministers, and celebrated by promptly turning himself into a Tory prime minister. These days he targets immigrants, benefit recipients, and transgender people, patting himself on the back for his tactical nous while his favourability polling hovers somewhere near the anticipated return of polio. They’re calling the phenomenon Blue Labour: even when Tories lose, they win. And whenever Kemi Badenoch or the next grifter gets through, they’ll find the seat nicely warmed and the furniture set to their liking. 

We don’t take our chances. They do. 

Tomorrow, I will go to vote at the Australian embassy in Lisbon. I will fill out the seven-metre Senate paper and work out tactical ordering for the House of Reps. I will know that whatever I do, there are only two possible prime ministers at the end of the night, leading two possible governments, whether in majority or minority, whether with full power or restrictions from other parliamentarians. I know the result that I primarily don’t want, based on the individual involved telling me repeatedly that he’s a terrible person who wants to do terrible things. The question that never gets answered is, how am I supposed to feel about the one who doesn’t tell me anything at all?

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Election Day – The Last Trump

Posted on November 6, 2024 by geoff lemon

3pm, from the train to DC.

It never seemed controversial to me to think that Donald Trump is a real piece of shit. I mean the phrase in its most vernacular sense, someone you dismiss out of hand. Initially, that was pure cultural positioning. Like so many Americans, he broke the first Australian commandment that you never talk yourself up. He did nothing but talk himself up. He was a loudmouth, a braggart, with a career built on being mean to chumps on TV. He was tacky and tasteless, fake tans, gold toilets. A property magnate who repeatedly bankrupted his own companies and ruined other people’s companies in the process, stiffing workers, trashing invoices, while cultivating an image of success that kept suckers taking on the next job. Banks and insurers played ball. He had an empire built on paper and shadows, living high off debt and imaginary wealth.

Seeing the guy as a conman was a matter of basic observation. Meaning that when he ran for president, expressing that did not get near the realm of political bias. Bias might be the most damagingly misunderstood and misrepresented concept in political discourse. Any criticism of any politician or policy is now rejected by supporters as as biased view. But conclusions are not where bias is indicated; the process of reaching conclusions is. Being unbiased is about whether you fairly assessed the evidence to reach a conclusion, not about what conclusion you reached. Bias is about deciding the conclusion irrespective of the evidence. So if somebody demonstrates unfitness for office by, for example, spending months violently rejecting the results of an election, then a vote to impeach them is not biased. It is just admitting reality.

The January 6 riot and the years of denial were extensions of the ego trip that got a rocket boost with Trump’s election in 2016. The vainglory, the self-obsession reached new heights of orbit. Everything he did and said was the best, the biggest, the greatest we’ve ever seen. So many people are saying it. A very important man telephoned me, he said they’ve never seen anything like it. A big strong man came up to me, crying, tears streaming down his face. Big strong guy, you know? He said thank you Mr President, you saved our country. 

The counterpoint was the whining when things went against him. They’ve treated me very badly, very unfairly. All those nasty women, that fake news, you have a very nasty tone in this interview. Imagine if I ever got good coverage. I could take off this shirt, I’ve had more wounds than any president ever (that last one especially rich considering the two who got shot in the fucking head.)

So he was embarrassing, sloppy, sure. But the kind of people whose politics agreed with his, or with the politics that he had found most convenient to adopt, saw he was starting to get things done. He had won, after all. He got them tax cuts, ruined the EPA, derailed public education and the postal service. As his vandalism success rate rose, their qualms about method and manner fell. In team sports you get those piece-of-shit players, whatever-it-takes guys. Nastiness, niggle, cheap shots, dirty play, conning officials. Luis Suarez for Uruguay, Ryan Crowley for Fremantle. And people hate them, of course. But when one of them pops up in your team, after a teething period, a lot of those fans will kind of start loving them. They’re your piece of shit now. 

So with Trump. No matter how routinely he destroyed political legitimacy, he remained in contention. Every time he remained in contention, enough Republicans would gather around him and assert his continued legitimacy. Anybody objecting to any of the hundreds of instances that were evidently objectionable was accused of bias against a rival. However much he outraged norms, those norms would be pulled into a defensive formation around him, a years-long gaslighting project that his behaviour was within the realm.

But where those Republicans have spent eight years slipstreaming Trump, using his unique crowd-winning ability to get themselves positions of influence, he doesn’t seem like the prow of the operation anymore. He’s 78 years old, still with the vitality to get around the immense campaign tour that finished at nearly 2am in Wisconsin on the morning of election, but often wandering off mentally and physically during his appearances with a mind fatigued. Going into a possible second presidential term that would end at 82 years old, Trump is not going to be the person in control anymore. 

For Trump, the entire point of the exercise was always being on television. This is a dude whose mind is stuck several decades ago, like a Black Mirror episode about a marooned consciousness. He wants to be in a simulation of Wall Street having lunch with Gordon Gecko, back when he felt young and strong and on the rise, bossing New York City. There’s a Twitter post I can’t find that says when Trump talks about cars from 40 years ago, he means the 1950s. His personal time has stood still since then. 

And in that era, television was king. Being mentioned on the news, getting a spot on current affairs, being made fun of on one of the many late shows – that was the shit. That was crack cocaine for an ego. When the era shifted and Trump joined Twitter in 2009, everything he posted was still about television. Who had said what on which program, whose ratings were down, whose show was failing, who looked ugly and fat and what awards show. 

But even when The Apprentice was a big deal, TV was already fading as a cultural force. The reality TV world had always been low-rent, without the glamour of the television heyday when being on any screen, on any station, for any reason, was the coolest fucking thing you could do in the American consciousness. Trump wants more, he wants people paying attention to him, he is a Very Important Man with Very Important Things to Say. 

So he starts doing the Obama birther routine, then he gets slapped down at the White House dinner. That embarrassment goes on television a lot, and that matters to Trump. So eventually he says he’ll run for president, and surely, surely, he runs not expecting it to go anywhere. He runs expecting it to be a little jolly for a few weeks, to have a few laughs and put his name back up in the headlines under his control. Good for business and all that. 

But he mouths off about Mexicans and gets fired from The Apprentice, which he still brings up in speeches claiming that he wasn’t fired, he actually quit, he wasn’t mad, don’t say on the television that he was mad. And when he mouths off about Mexicans, the Republican primary goes well. He’s got nothing else to do so he stays in a little longer, and then a little longer, and then other contenders start dropping away. There is interest in this novelty. 

Going deeper into the race is even better, right? More attention, more publicity, more potential revenue, although surely he still thinking of his other businesses as the beneficiary. Rick Perry is gone, Bobby Jindal, Lindsey Graham. Rick Santorum goes, Chris Christie, Mike Huckabee. Then Rand Paul and Jeb Bush drop out, and it might happen. The base like something different. Ben Carson, Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz give up and endorse him. Suddenly, he’s it, the nominee, and the jape gets even better. 

Now he’s on television all the time! They talk about him on the news every night. They say his name. Pages in the failing New York Times. Doing it live, and everybody is watching. This is fun. And also potentially very lucrative, what with all the profile raising, fundraising, reflected credibility.

The only thing Trump doesn’t like is that being the candidate means he has to run, and running means he’ll probably lose. He doesn’t like people seeing him lose. But there is enough potential payoff that it’s worth riding to the end. At that incongruous election night party in Manhattan, booking the Hilton ballroom as though this was a stationery conference, there was no area for supporters to gather outside. No screens, no stages, no way to address a crowd. All press accreditation got cancelled that morning. This was not the event of a campaign expecting to win, it was an event to avoid embarrassment. When the Blue Wall fell, when he did have to get up and speak to his own small in-crowd, he looked queasy.

Once the surprise settled, he enjoyed it for a while. Enjoyed some of it. Not the briefings or the listening or the actual work, even when his aides got into the habit of crunching everything into one-page documents in Sharpie. But the attention, prominence, meeting important people and getting to talk about deals. Nice aeroplanes and hospitality. The many opportunities to give money to people he liked, or direct government funding to his hotels at crazy rates. Nice golf courses, celebrity greetings, and a lot of being talked about on television. 

Sometimes people tried to ruin his day with happenings in the House or Senate, with nasty things said about him on the various shows that blared at all hours from the televisions in the presidential suite, yelling at Morning Joe while straining to release a shit. Then Covid came, and then things became very not fun indeed, everyone was being very mean to him, and a lot of people were dying, and frankly it was very unkind, very inconvenient, if they didn’t count all those cases then there wouldn’t be so many cases to blame him for, when it was definitely not his fault. Why didn’t somebody just introduce a very bright light inside the body to sort this problem out?

So being president ended, with the cruel theft of 2020, the injustice of a plot that managed to steal five states even though his opponents were, by his assessment, totally incompetent. And for Trump, ultimately a gutless conman from the soles of his shoes up, he might have drifted away. But by this point, so many people around him had cottoned onto the fact that while he was a colossal idiot, he was a very useful idiot. He still had command, charisma, and a supporter base that could be used to go around again. 

They have flocked in, like Steve Bannon and company did the first time. The Project 2025 authors circulate in the background. Stephen Miller, with his years of white nationalist links and language, still prominent and promising “America for Americans”. Three Supreme Court justices in the first term was beyond these people’s hopes, but there is a lot more they didn’t get done, perhaps because they weren’t expecting the opportunity, perhaps because of complications along the way. Now, with a four year run-up to the approaching term, they have everything in place ready to launch.

And Trump will let it happen. He doesn’t really care about any of this stuff, in the same way that he doesn’t really care about anything that isn’t him. Other people are theoretical, except in as far as they’ve wronged him or fallen in line. He will have personal obsessions that his circle will let him pursue, and they will do their best to make sure he feels like he’s in charge, but for all his bluster and talk of strength he is still an elderly man with the attention span of a strobe light show, likely to sign whatever comes his way if it makes somebody stop bothering him and let him finish his second scoop of ice cream. 

This is why this next four years could be much more dangerous than the first. As he stops being useful, when he becomes an 80-year-old wandering around getting in the way, there will be a whole apparatus in place to keep pushing that Project 2025 agenda as hard as possible, to work on manipulating and suppressing votes for 2028, and to slot in whoever is set to do the job next, with the frontrunner another useful idiot – JD Vance, an empty vessel waiting to be filled. 

It is impossible not to be cynical about the US process when this campaign has been fought in post-fact Bizarro Land. Postmodernists got their way, truth is dead. Even before the Harris rally in Washington, Republicans were texting me to complain that the crowd that hadn’t arrived yet would be fake when it did. Any post about any Harris event got the same deluge. There is the constant invoking of threat to life and limb from imaginary assailants. It started as the Fox News playbook as David Roth described it: “a network whose business model is increasingly leveraged on an ambitious gambit to replace the outside world with a substitute reality that is far worse.” Now you don’t have to stay home to imagine that world. You can stand outside and paint it over the top of reality in real time.

Literally on the day of that DC rally, in between Trump and his many allies repeating their lines about a dying economy gasping its last breath, the US stock market closed at an all-time high. Unemployment remains at barely 4 percent, and the main problem of inflation is easing. Remembering that Biden took power at the height of the pandemic and its attendant economic destruction, it is genuinely insane to hear Trump’s claim that he is required to “fix” anything, let alone that he would be qualified to do so when his only idea is the same one about tax cuts that he already completed last time. Trying to function in an environment where truth has been obliterated is exhausting, constantly arguing a case even for the thing that is happening in front of your eyes. It is a large part of how Trump stifles dissent. Everyone is just too fucking tired.

And yes, one could make an argument about distortion of the risk posed by Trump, on certain bases. Some lines do get misrepresented: the warned “bloodbath” if he wasn’t elected was clearly enough a metaphor about Michigan industry; the line about terminating the Constitution could equally mean that (fictional) voter fraud was the thing doing the terminating; saying “in four years, you won’t have to vote” meant that his second term would be done, not that he would be installed for life. Reports amplifying these as evidence of an incoming coups can come across as hysteria, and make people less likely to hear real concerns. There’s a risk in going too hard. 

But for every one of these exaggerated responses, there are dozens of lines that are genuine threats, even delivered in his glib manner. And beyond the limits of rhetoric, no matter how much he tries to destroy the concept, there is still the reality of deeds. This is a man whose speech could as easily bring violence on groups of migrants in coming days as it did on the Capitol in 2021. A person who will let Stephen Miller and dozens of similarly unhinged minds draft legislation as they please. He will let Elon Musk, who as election day ticked over was posting midnight memes from the very literal Nazi group National Revival, control the nation’s finances. He will shut down the Department of Education. He will hand health policy to Robert Kennedy, who could kill untold people with his pledge to ban all vaccines.

There is no need to exaggerate with Trump. He has written who he is on the side of buildings, he has told you down the barrel of a thousand cameras, and all you have to do is believe him. Today could be the day when his power is broken, or the moment when he takes power again. Right now, the votes are going in, and in a few more hours the counts will begin. For this moment, briefly, Trump exists on the edge. The only question if whether he goes down alone, or whether he takes the rest of us with him.

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Day 16 – Madison Square Garden

Posted on October 29, 2024 by geoff lemon
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For Donald Trump, it has always been about New York City. Just like in Donald Trump’s mind, we are always living in a magical timewarp somewhere between 1988 and 1991. New York is where he used family wealth to become next-level rich, where he became celebrated for it, where he got to feel like he was on the top rung of the most significant city in the world. It’s where he filmed his TV show, where he announced his first presidential bid. When he said that he could shoot someone without losing votes, he imagined that scenario on Fifth Avenue, not Pennsylvania Avenue. His 2016 election night party was in midtown Manhattan, not in any of the safe Southern states or the Rust Belt that gave him that unexpected win.

So he has always been sore at having no federal political clout in that celebrated place, a hometown that routinely votes in a landslide against him, sweeping away Republican strength in other parts of the state and locking in the fourth-biggest bag of electoral college votes for his opponents. It has been an even sorer point that New York is where most of his legal challenges have derived, for the many proven and alleged crimes committed by him and his organisations. 

Before Madison Square Garden, coverage kept asking why he would waste the second-last weekend of campaigning on a lost cause. But that’s the point. It’s about turning a weakness into a strength. Trump’s thing has always been publicity, and the Garden does that better than anywhere. Ali, Elvis, Led Zeppelin, Grateful Dead, Steph Curry’s record-breaking game, Chuck Norris’ karate championships, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush’s conventions: a hall of fame and history that let his supporters place him in that pantheon. It built anticipation like nothing else in the campaign. People flew in or drove hours from states with no shortage of Trump events themselves, like my 500 miles from North Carolina. Because this one felt different. It was staged in New York but watched all over the country. Symbolically, it was Trump refusing to concede a thing, revving up his supporters with the idea that they could take anywhere. That energy won’t take New York but it might take somewhere else.

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The Trump campaign has outdone its rival on this front. Their website has a simple list of events well in advance, letting interest build. Harris events often announce a city one day ahead, and suppress venues until the day of. Go to her campaign website and there is no master list, no headline. You can only search for events “near you”, meaning you have to Google a bunch of zip codes and then cycle through states to see if anything is happening at all. Google her events and you’ll find ones that have just happened without you knowing. On web design alone it’s a fail.

So the Garden rally is advertised over a week ahead, and they go all out with the speakers: a MAGA catwalk. Trump and Vance both, a rare double when the trail is about spreading resources. Most of the family: Melania, Donald Jr, Eric, Lana. The famous: Elon Musk, Rudy Giuliani, Tucker Carlson, UFC boss Dana White. The converts, Robert Kennedy Jr and Tulsi Gabbard. Mike Johnson, house speaker. Vivek Ramaswamy, staffers Dan Scavino and the ever ominous Stephen Miller, over a dozen others. Yes, it is exhausting.

What we get is a rolling festival of grievance, over six hours end to end of exhortation and chanted response, of anger and fear and anger about the fear. From high above, Madison Square Garden is a cavern. Walls of people rise in the distance to the back rows, barely visible in the half darkness, all attention funnelled down to the centre where the red-carpeted walkways and stage pulse under red and white lights like a swollen larynx. It delivers raw-throated raucousness, fists pumping and fingers raised. It’s a sensory inundation: the PA pumps out volume, walk-on music for each speaker as though they’re all wrestlers rather than just Hulk Hogan. When they take a break, the the huge screens hanging from the ceiling blast campaign trailers about Latino gangs. 

Across the dozens of speakers, the themes are few but clear. Life in the USA is bordering on apocalyptic. The cost of living is hurting people (this is true). The culprits are illegal migrants (this isn’t). Crime is at an all-time high (it’s not). Donald Trump selflessly set aside his own interests to fix all this as president, which he did briefly, and was hated by opponents. Who tried to ruin him with investigations, then impeachments, then criminal charges, then assassination. They stole the last election and ruined the country within one term just as he had fixed it in one. Through it all, here he still is, fighting for your last ever chance ever to take back control. 

From speaker to speaker, the word “they” is doing a lot of work. “They” could mean the Democrats, the establishment, the CIA and/or FBI, the courts, some arrangement of all of the above as the Deep State, other shadowy forces, George Soros or Bill Gates, the World Economic Forum, Jews, anti-Semites. It is impressively paranoid for a movement backed by many of the richest people on the planet. Deliberately, nobody makes a distinction between the mechanisms of government that impeached Trump for misusing office, the mechanisms of courts that prosecuted financial and sexual crimes, and the oddball 20-year-old registered Republican who shot a rifle at him. 

And look, you can’t deny that bit: the optics of the assassination attempt are epic, a dropped candidate getting up bleeding and yelling to the crowd. If that was an Obama photo, the other half of the voting country would also have it on posters. There is mileage to be had about his willingness to soldier on. But it becomes awful when conflated with every obstacle, the insistence that political opponents are to blame. Nobody seems to have thought that if the frightening power of a nebulous Deep State were to knock off a candidate, they would presumably have the resources to pick a method other than a kid who’s a bad shot. 

In a strange way, the day is upbeat, turning negatives to affirmation: can you believe this? No! Are we going to take this? No! There’s a high that comes from scorn and derision, from an assertion of superiority. The morning after will have a lot of coverage of ugly quotes, picked from the morass, but watching those is disjointed and doesn’t factor in the audience. The experience overall has flow, a building cascade from one complainant to the next, and the people in the room love every fucking minute of it. 

It starts with a long, strange prayer, thanking God because “we all watched you spare President Trump” although God was too distracted to help the guy who wore a bullet instead. God was apparently also elsewhere in 2020, so is now asked to watch over loyal civil servants and election officials and bring a big victory margin. The anthem is hyperactive, staggered with heavy pauses, breaking off between versus to scream “America, the greatest country in the world!” 

Tony Hinchliffe starts, the comedian who will make headlines for his Puerto Rico bit, but his whole set is race gags. Watch out for Latino birth rates – “They come inside, just like they did with our country” – or settle Israel-Palestine by rochambeau – “You know the Palestinians are gonna throw rock every time, but you know the Jews don’t like to throw that paper!” It’s fair to note that these jokes don’t land with most of the audience, there’s not much response, but they’ll warm into heavier stuff as the day goes on.

Scott Labaido is a painter angry with “the art world” because they don’t appreciate painting big American flags on things. He does a live version of this timed to America the Beautiful with a peel-off section revealing Trump hugging a skyscraper. Art. A radio guy called Sid Rosenberg boasts about having just had dinner with Netanyahu, and is furious with Hillary Clinton for referencing the 1939 Nazi rally at the same venue. “Sick son of a bitch. The whole fucken party, a bunch of degenerates.” He’s also furious with everything else. “You can’t walk outside here. You get a punch across the face just for walking down the street… The fuckin’ illegals will get whatever they want. Five star hotels, cash, probably World Series tickets tomorrow night.”

Trump’s lawyer Alina Habba sashays out, an exercise in Fox-News-coded glamour, red dress and sparkly MAGA jacket. She wins for the most sustained scorn of the night, her tone could sand timber. Giuliani, last seen with boot polish dripping down his head outside Four Seasons Total Landscaping, is welcomed like a hero. He says “they” told Trump he shouldn’t come here, so he came here, and “they” won’t let people pray anymore either. He’s screaming by the halfway mark. “The Palestians are taught to kill us at two years old!” is one offering, and the Democrats “are on the side of the terrorists!” 

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A guy called David Rem, billed as Trump’s childhood friend, is even less coherent, crying as he recalls Fred Trump paying for his school fees, then waving around a crucifix and saying that Harris is both the Devil in general and the Antichrist specifically. That does mean that at some point she has to claim to be Christ, which to date has not been part of her campaign, and someone else needs to actually be Christ, which Trump hasn’t specifically claimed yet. It’s all getting a bit Revivalist by now, people jumping up to cheer, chants of “USA!” breaking out like coldsores at a music festival. 

A mournful country song called I’m A Fighter plays over a black and white montage of Trump looking weary and burdened. “Close the fuckin’ bordah!” a guy screams out. Stephen Miller, connected to Project 2025 and its plans for banning abortion, wants to know “who’s going to stand up for the women and girls”. Elise Stefanik beams pure glee as she talks about university heads who have recently resigned and looks forward to firing namechecked prosecutors who dared to file cases against Trump.

Vivek Ramaswamy gets the most electric response, something instinctive that suggests he’s the most likely next-gen candidate. He almost skips to the podium, holding a pose there that projects purring confidence, and speaks with the same. They lap him up, as he twists Martin Luther King’s words to reject advancing diversity, and bizarrely conflates sexuality with gender identity. “Our message to gay Americans tonight is this. You’re free to marry who you want, if you want, without the government standing in your way. But that doesn’t mean that boys get to compete with girls in girls’ sports, or that you get to do genital mutilation or chemical castration on our children.”

On and on it goes. Speaker Johnson, through Gabbard, through Kennedy, who talks about chronic health problems and is doomed to disappointment if he expects a Trump administration to restrict anyone making bank from pharmaceuticals or agriculture or chemical production. Through Tucker Carlson with his blazer and tie, mocking Harris as “the first Malaysian Samoan low IQ former California prosecutor” candidate, leaving out the Daddy weirdness today but citing the deeply extremist conspiracy about Democrats replacing Americans with pliant migrants. 

Dana White cements the link to the Joe Rogan audience, Hulk Hogan comes in and dances with the stiff joints of an old man. I am losing my mind, sense of self dissolving in this festival of aggrievement, endless talk about a country of law and order from people incensed that those laws were brought to bear on their candidate. 

Dr Phil adds to the list of complaints that people are being bullied out of being Republican. ”When you attack civilians, when you attack a citizen, and you use the power of the internet, you use mob mentality, you incite people to gang up, and cause boycotts, then it’s beyond ugly,” he says, which could easily be a description of the last MAGA decade online.

Vance has rehearsed his speech and gives it more punch than usual. The Trump offspring go heavy on the line that “Donald Trump built New York City.” Howard Lutnick, a massive donor, says that “we must crush jihad” then idealises the 1890s and tariffs, before announcing Musk as “the greatest capitalist in the history of the United States”. Musk says that he and Howard will form a government efficiency department and cut spending by two trillion dollars a year, which bodes well for social services. Melania does her Nutcracker doll impression, all the warmth of the surface of Mars, before her loving* husband comes out to delirium. Mine, anyway, as I’m about to pass out.

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There are a few things I’m trying to reconcile at once. One, this an overwhelming, troubling spectacle. Two, it is uplifting and energising for everyone around me. Three, the ways the 1939 comparison doesn’t line up: we’ll come to an ideological distinction, but the practical one is that Nazi enthusiasm was still marginal in America at the time. The link therefore suggests this is the same, a dark niche within society revealing itself. Except this agenda is not niche. It’s broad enough to be running neck and neck nationwide, to be within a wafer in the Democrats’ most critical swing states of Michigan and Pennsylvania, to swallow up half of the voting public. Observing that began with the crowd of very ordinary people standing around outside. 

Getting off the train at Penn, a Black and a Latino guy each decked out in Trump merch see each other and do a double-take, stopping for mutual selfies in front of the staircase while the crowd clogs up behind them. But once we hit the rally line, there are lots of Latinos and a fair number of Black men. Most of the crowd is male, most between about 20 and 45, most white, but none of those majorities are huge anymore. 

There’s a big Asian contingent, including an odd demonstration party of elderly Japanese waving the flags of both countries. There are Orthodox Jews with caps and curls. There are quite a few young women, Trump’s worst demographic. Quite a few Latinas. Regrettably a couple of Australians whose political pronouncements create a personal level of embarrassment. Even somebody smoking weed, as the smell drifts across – who blazes up for a political rally?

What is evident is that project has scope, much as so many wish it didn’t. This swell of people don’t care about Trump’s disqualifications, they believe he’s been hard done by, they think he will sort everything out because he’s a business guy. They like that he says what he wants. They like that he gets criticised for it. “He’s got to be the smartest guy on our planet. He’s got to be,” says a man near me. Or another, “If he was such a bad guy, why would the banks give him a loan?”

There’s no intensity to this crowd, even when a hype man tries screaming into a bullhorn, demanding that people wave their red hats. Mostly I hear conversations preempting the Dr Phil stuff, a persecution complex. “It’s so nice to actually be able to say what we want,” says a woman who complains that her home state of Maryland is the bluest in the country. “All Trump people. This is great. Every day should be like this,” says another dude.

It ramps up as they jostle for the doors, and there’s a belly-of-the-beast moment being in this red-cap sea as we surge in.Then some small humour in everyone having to take off those hats to go through security. They descend like seagulls on a stall giving away red shirts, thinking it’s Trump merch, but the shirts are from some America something PAC. Up eight flights of escalators, the urinals are heaving with pent-up release. “There better not be any trannies in this bathroom!” screams a Black guy in a nylon ski hood. “Kamala is one!” yells back a Mexican dude with his dick in his hand. Next to me are two Chinese guys speaking Cantonese.

Clearly there’s some sensitivity about the fascist thing, because they screen George C. Scott’s monologue as General Patton to start of the event. “We’re going to cut out their living guts and use them to grease the treads of our tanks,” he tells us. “The Nazis are the enemy. Wade into them. Spill their blood. Shoot them in the belly.” The people here don’t think they’re Nazis, they think they’re defending America. 

And of course they argue for it in Nazi tones, with Trump’s lines about poisoned blood and enemies within. The complication, the reason this approach is holding ground in a multicultural country, is that it’s not as simple as conventional racism. This isn’t whites against the rest. It’s nativist, but in a modern adaptation. It’s not only about people with a long lineage in the country, it has flexibility for recent arrivals as long as they sign on with the home team. 

At that point it uses targeted racism against much more specific groups. It corrals formalised migrants against would-be migrants. We’ve seen in Australia too how willing some arrivals are to pull up the ladder. Whether in the hope of acceptance or wanting to feel a sense of value in themselves, they see a distinction between them (orderly, law-abiding, civilised, welcome) and the perception of an unwanted mass coming next. 

So it’s still blood-and-soil, it’s still in-group and out-group, but along lines of a more nebulous belonging. Something rooted in obedience and legality, forming identity from that rather than family or skin. Haitians in Ohio are treated as illegitimate even with visas, because that status is temporary and recent and came from Democrats. As a group they’re sufficiently identifiable to discount legal status. If elected, this aggression will expand to other groups, to people who’ve been here longer, but it will be based on proving a level of assimilation, of Americanisation. And it will be assisted by groups of migrants who believe they themselves have. 

Ramaswamy is the foremost example: a guy who looks Indian, couldn’t have a more Indian name, but hasn’t had to rebadge to Chad Rama. He is instead accepted and celebrated in a xenophobic context by sounding American in tone and accent, and more importantly sounding American in gesturing to a bunch of people who don’t and telling them to fuck off.

More than any speaker on the night, he railed against DEI and specifically split good and bad foreigners. “Our message to every legal immigrant in this country is this: you’re like my parents. If you came legally you get the same American dream that everybody else does: work hard, get ahead, make contributions to our country, love the nation, and that’s our message to legal immigrants. But our message to every illegal immigrant is this: we will return you to your country of origin.” His pick-me way of proving himself.

Here’s Trump at last, two and a quarter hours after his advertised time. Eight hours driving, two hours sleep, an hour on the train from Jersey, two hours waiting outside, one hour waiting inside, five hours of everyone else. I have reached hummingbird stage. “Are you better off than four years ago?” is his calling card, to open. Four years ago was the peak of the covid pandemic, economies were in disarray, America was on its way to over a million dead, and Trump was egging on the anti-vaccination madness that has mutated into one of the most damaging cults in human history. But as is the way with his adherents, memory is temporary.

Seeing Trump live is different. Close-up on television, with the partially applied fake tan and the millefeuille hair, he looks ludicrous. In person, he has presence. He’s tall, shoulders accentuated by the jacket. His silly hand movements have the context of space. The voice that can be querulous on tape has command. He’s easy to listen to. I don’t know how to explain how this happens, but I’ve seen him speak enough times to say that it’s real. There is something there that convinces people, an steady expression of surety, something reassuring for those who want it, even listening to a person with decades of history of fraud and lies.

There have been times during the campaign when he has been fatigued, voice weak, phrasing unsure. Especially appearances where he doesn’t control the mat, like the National Association of Black Journalists conference or the Economic Club of Chicago, he retreats into shoulder-hunched defensiveness. But whether it’s more rest or the energy of playing to a home crowd, the voice is there today, the assurance. The cognitive decline reading is wishful thinking. Trump speeches repeat sections word for word, then take meandering paths between them, but it’s always been how he enjoys speaking. There is an understanding of comic timing, whether or not you like the humour. His story about watching Musk’s rocket capture, for instance, was tagged as incoherent in the Guardian, but he had practised that verbatim with Joe Rogan a day earlier, as a story he thinks is fun to tell while pumping up his new biggest supporter.

Tonight he’s playing the hits. Just like 2016, if you accept the first principles of whatever Trump says, his solutions make sense. Only problem being the first principles are deception. The terrible scourge of migrants, blamed en masse for a few cherry-picked horrors. The cynically inflated figures about those with criminal records. “There has never been anything like it anywhere in the world for any country,” he says with typical understatement.

He can make up anything at all and have it well received. There are cheers of response to the patently false, like saying there has been no hurricane response in North Carolina even as FEMA and military agents are weeks into deployment. Like saying FEMA couldn’t help because they had spent all their money flying migrants around on “beautiful planes”. Like the insensitivity of saying that October 7 victims would still be alive if he had been President. Saying that Harris is a Marxist, or a socialist, or started the campaign to defund police forces. Saying, as stock markets near all-time highs, and his backers get richer than ever, the economy is ruined and America is on the brink.

These made-up problems get a magical thinking response, dream promises, simplistic beyond measure. America will have a new golden age, he says. Everything is broken, but also he can fix it immediately. He will end all wars, prevent future wars, rebuild the destroyed country, balance the budget while getting rid of taxes. It’s fantasy land, blank-cheque campaigning. “If Kamala Harris gets four more years, our economy will never recover. If I win, we will quickly build the best economy in the history of our country.”

And they clap. It’s childish. Eliminating the meaning of truth. Like projecting a huge drawing of a shadowy figure waiting for a woman in a dark alley, promoting the election of a man who has been accused of dozens of sexual assaults. Like the way so many speakers on this day praise Trump without flinching as “our greatest president ever”, in a country where George Washington led the armies that won independence, Franklin Roosevelt stewarded victory in World War II, Abraham Lincoln ended slavery and got killed for so doing.

“We stand on the verge of the four greatest years in the history of the USA,” says Trump, and they believe it, as he thunders to a close with an extended remix of the 2016 slogan. A singer comes out and does New York, New York. The playlist cues YMCA, that most incongruous anthem, as he stands with Melania, waving to the believers with patrician beneficence. As far as visits to Madison Square Garden go, I preferred Billy Joel.

There is one new strand to the rhetoric tonight, one I haven’t heard before but one reflecting the experience. The troubling sense that this thing is building. “So tonight,” he said a few moments before the close, “whether you are a Republican, Democrat, or independent, conservative or liberal, I’m inviting you to join the greatest political movement in the history of our country.”

The extent will only be clearer come election day, but to some extent it is working. There are union workers who like the promise of no tax on overtime, servers who like the promise of no tax on tips. Things like the unhappy response to the Puerto Rico joke make a swell of other people upset that somebody got upset. They feel oppressed by the idea of courtesy, of disapproval of speech, tangling up that idea with the First Amendment. So there is a specific effort with the Republican campaign to offer a permission structure to feel that way, like the Dr Phil speech. To activate a section of potential support. There is Ramaswamy: “You want to be a rebel? Eighteen years old? Stand up on your college campus and call yourself a conservative.”

To be honest, I feel beaten down by it after this long, like it must be true. That hammered repetition, the food stands closing after the first couple of hours so that hungry and tired people are locked onto the message, it’s hard to hold reality. I’ve also been trying to understand their perspective, but it’s the standing ovation when Trump promises the death penalty that snaps back into focus that this is savage. The promise is that undocumented migrants who commit murder will be killed, and Christ, anyone who knows a thing about America’s parody of a justice system knows the travesties that sort of ruling will readily create. But here it brings on a USA chant, the enthusiasm for death, people who want blood in payment for wounds they’ve never suffered, people who want blood that most of them would never have the courage to shed themselves, and that a few of them would love to. I don’t know who is more unsettling.

The Jersey train is full of them, red caps and shirts, though lapsing back into quiet. The public restraint resumes after hours of venting. I don’t want to be tricked into thinking that today means Trump is going to win, but the way so many Americans see the world make it a genuine chance. Plus out here beyond the rally are the non-adherents, but the ones who for one reason or another might still break his way. There is a wait before departure, enough for one of the MSG cleaners to get off work and take a seat opposite me, still dressed in her brown tunic. She leans back with tiredness. We chat about her night, 11 hours in a women’s bathroom with fifteen minutes break. She gets overtime, at least, and there’s that Trump promise again. She is in a bad demographic for him, a working urban middle-aged Black woman. But, “I’m voting for him,” she shrugs. “Whatshername isn’t gonna do nothing.”

You can support Geoff’s trip here.

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Day 10 – Kalamazoo & Grand Rapids, Michigan

Posted on October 29, 2024 by geoff lemon
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I’m going to be honest – before the last few days I had never heard of Kalamazoo. It sounds like a place that got invented to jam into the rhyme scheme of a Dean Martin song. It’s a small city not far north of the Michigan border with Indiana. The following adjective is too compromised to be very useful, but to give a general area-of-effect description: there’s a bit of a hipster feel. I’m surprised to discover that on driving into town towards Bell’s Eccentric Cafe, a pioneering microbrewer that started in 1985 and predated the craft surge. The crowd streaming in are dressed in a familiar jumble of bright colours, flowing fabrics, sassy t-shirts, or overalls that have never seen a day of harvest, the kind I know from a lifetime in the inner suburbs of various big cities.

It’s easy in the USA to forget the smaller ones. Looking at the country from the outside, politics gets divided with basic Sharpie line. Progressive: California and the Pacific Northwest, the west bookend, New York and New England the east. The rest, conservative with a few bright dots here and there for the big cities of the interior. The impression is not helped by those electoral maps that colour every geographically large but sparsely populated county red, met by the inevitable rejoinder that land doesn’t vote. But the national population density is something to remark on.

From an Australian perspective, almost half of our population is jammed into Melbourne and Sydney. Three quarters in the eight capital cities. America, with 14 times the population, has one city bigger than our main two: New York with eight million. Los Angeles has four, Chicago and Houston two, and five others have over a million. Some numbers might be misleading by counting municipal limits rather than a greater sprawl – people saying “from the Bay Area” always confuse me because to my brain that’s all San Francisco. But still. Nine US cities with over a million people, but 325 others between one million and one hundred thousand. (Australia has sixteen of those.) It’s the spread for me, folks. And those numbers are borne out by the travel experience: except in a few desert areas, you’re never more than a few hours’ drive from a substantial town.

Those cities vary in character. Especially those with decent sized universities, like Kalamazoo, can be substantially progressive. It’s not as simple as country-red, city-blue, as illustrated by the Bly farm outside Madison a few posts ago. There are independent thinkers all over the place, and some take themselves off into the farthest flung places. But trends do go that way, even where the country-city divide is so physically small. It’s only a few minutes drive from Bell’s in the centre of town to open farmland where Gene the Pumpkin Man is stacking up his crop for Halloween and the rural markets are selling hot apple cider against the chill fall nights.

There’s no chill on this sunny afternoon. Bell’s is amazing, a high-ceilinged wooden hall with slate floors and stained-glass windows that feels more like a church than a bar. Porque no los dos?

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The beers are top rate, the food is simple but fresh and doesn’t taste like it just got cranked off a conveyor belt, and best of all it’s bring your dog day The huge back garden is full of wagging tails, some of them even in costume for a contest. For my money, dressing up dogs is an affront to the majestic lineage of the wolf, but Pennywise the husky with a jaunty yellow raincoat and a red balloon attached would get my vote. The winner is dressed as the dog car from Dumb & Dumber.

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I’m talking to Teresa, who teaches at the college and has a lot of family in town, about how shifts in politics may be reflected in the behaviour of student bodies. I’ve been hearing from various people about the tranche of young men keen to link themselves explicitly with that breed of online influencers who promote misogyny and talk up a weird hyper-masculine ideal.

It’s making me recall something that I haven’t linked before. In my early uni days 20 years ago, I’d forgotten how much shock humour was the big thing for young men. The more taboo, the better. We all tried our hand at it. It fed into and was fed by the peak saturation of South Park, for instance, which I got a reminder of two weeks ago in New York when I went to The Book of Mormon, by the same writers. Some of the satire and most of the songwriting is sharp, but the Uganda scenes lean so heavily on this other style: jokes about AIDS, warlords, genital mutilation. Based on reality but also becoming the most potent Western cliches of that time, shorthand for a concept of Africa as a wreck. So the things deemed most serious gave provocative comedy writers the maximum mileage. But fifteen years on, tied to an era as those references are, the jokes now feel as stale as one might expect.

So, the want to shock isn’t new. The want to go against perceived propriety. But the young men of my generation didn’t cohere as a political force. The impulse was innately counter-cultural, it withdrew into corners to snicker at society. A lot of my generation went on to learn about discrimination and cruelty and how not to indulge in either, gradually becoming better people as years went by. I assumed that this would build on itself, that subsequent generations of men would start armed with better knowledge from a younger age, so we would keep on improving. But for some the ideals of fairness and decency, especially to women, became regarded as an orthodoxy in themselves, therefore oppressive, therefore something to be pushed against. The Trump movement with all its meanness gives this impulse a flag to rally around, a path to move from the fringe to the centre.

On other matters, Kalamazoo is a place with more social support services than you would imagine typical in a US city, though often it’s left to citizens to do this of their own volition. Teresa tells me of an uncle who was a social worker but decided to become a chocolate maker, then using his store to hire staff with a felony record who couldn’t get work elsewhere. Another uncle is now the mayor of the city, who years earlier decided to do his part about a housing shortage by renovating dilapidated buildings himself and renting them at low-income rates. So much of the conversation in this election campaign has been about housing, as it is in Australia, with dramatically rising costs and rents, and people wanting to blame this on migration rather than a predatory housing market where owners expect constantly rising returns from a social need.

I stay in a grand house that night, full of nooks and rooms for different meals and moods, after a kind Kalamazoo citizen offers me a roof. The inside of that roof is decorated by angels and prophets floating through the air in communion, painted in Renaissance style on the curved plaster ceiling above a library on a sweeping staircase landing. Apparently the people who bought the place in the 70s were mad stoned all the time and decided to Sistine Chapel the joint. They moved on within the year but everybody since has let the painting be.

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On Monday I drive fifty miles north to Grand Rapids, a classic Michigan town by name. Tonight there is a debate between the two frontrunners for mayor, held – I kid you not – at the Wealthy Theatre on Wealthy Street. Nobody is wearing a monocle. I go with Amy, who volunteers as an abortion access activist, and Nate, a teacher who used to be a staffer for a Republican congressman. We go to eat at Uncle Cheetah’s soup shop across the street, with a rambling back garden full of statues, before heading in. They’re both invested in local politics, though apparently not too many others feel the same – there are maybe 60 people attending. The drop in engagement from national to local is not unexpected, given levels of prominence, but doesn’t make that much sense given a mayor is much more likely to affect day-to-day life in someone’s city. Still, it’s nice to be at something low key, sitting in a movie theatre and eating popcorn while engaging in civic life, as David LaGrand and Senita Lenear square off.

Again, so much of it is about housing. The shortage, the expense, the eternal need to provide more. Land banks and development caps and parking congestion all feed into it. LaGrand is the big ideas guy, proposing sweeping technological solutions. Lenear talks about community and a Black population that is still largely excluded from home and business ownership. But the candidates are broadly on the same page in terms of aims. They have a social responsibility slant, wanting reforms to policing, justice systems, access to services. There is no intense Republican candidate wanting to melt down miscreants into protein shakes. But both give the impression of being religiously or socially conservative, in one way or another.

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The further down the levels I get, the more complicated the US becomes. Grand Rapids has the two progressive frontrunners but also has a reputation as the US city with the most churches. There are no clear stats to back that up, but there are a lot of steeples. Kent County, the local electoral area, went Biden in 2020, Trump in 2016, Romney in 2012 and Obama in 2008. There’s a lot of local influence from the Meijer family, who made billions with their supermarket chain, and the Van Andel and DeVos families who made billions founding Amway. Peter Meijer became a Republican congressman and Betsy DeVos was Trump’s disastrous education secretary, though after the January 6 riot DeVos tried to distance herself at the last minute by resigning, and Meijer was one of the ten Republicans in the House who voted to impeach Trump.

You can interpret something of the overlap in that there is a major Planned Parenthood clinic on Cherry Street, and that it gets staked out full-time by Christian fundamentalists. One of those organisations “exists to declare the good news of the Kingdom at abortion mills until Jesus ends abortion”, says their website, next to a video telling women that a pregnancy following sexual assault is “a gift” from God. Nor is it the picketing all just random whackos waving a sign. There are churches or ministries that now have people on payroll to do those jobs, using tithes to fund it. Some of them go on tour, staking out clinics in other states for a change of scene. There’s a whole industry for evangelical podcasting and social media to promote this stuff.

At times the description for it is “confrontational evangelism”. This isn’t just holding signs, or preaching, although there is some of that. At other times it’s using amplifiers to harangue people walking into the centres, repeatedly telling them at such a vulnerable moment that they are about to be murderers. A lot of the volunteering to counter this stuff is just about providing escorts into the centres, giving that layer of moral support. If only more places could adopt Victoria’s recent state legislation for exclusion zones around clinics. That would probably get shot down by conservative courts in five minutes on First Amendment grounds. In the meantime, in the streets, the conflict between these layers of American life go on. Late that night, after the debate is done, I get in the driver’s seat and set the map for Springfield, Ohio.

You can support Geoff’s trip here.

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Day 9 – Muskratfuckery

Posted on October 29, 2024 by geoff lemon

Sunday, one day before voter registrations close in Pennsylvania, and Elon Musk is at it again. Always inclined to go all in on a new idea, he has done the same equations as most of us that Democrats can’t win without the state, and has made it his singular political objective to get in the way. Hundreds of millions of dollars into PAC funds, assembling teams of trusted offsiders to run the spending, lobbying other White Walkers like Rupert Murdoch and Peter Thiel to fund and promote, showing up in person to jump around on stage with Donald Trump. 

That appearance in Butler, Pennsylvania was a painful sucking up effort, fellatio with all teeth, as Musk talked about how big and strong and brave the other guy was while Trump stood two metres to the side, nodding sagely at the wisdom and truth of him being praised. Musk is a threadbare public presence, stumbling over words, nervous fluting giggles, voice cracking, head jerking in little nods as he shakes the master’s hand, a performance with the charm and charisma of a sunstruck bucket of chum.

But cash has its own charisma. Late in the Pennsylvania game he throws in two attention-grabbers: $100 to everyone who registers to vote, along with daily lottery prizes of $1million. Media outlets of course are lapping up this puke, reporting on the cash “winners” like it’s a fun news story instead of a transparent tactic by an individual with a grossly outsized ability to influence a notionally free and fair election. 

The Musk PAC has wormed its fingers in to widen a loophole by saying that they’re not technically paying people to vote, or to register, which are both banned, but they’re offering cash to people who are already registered and who give contact details. The effect though is to drive people to register in order to get paid. Then they’re on the mailing list, happy with their cash, and reading to be hammered with reminders to turn in that paper slip. Perhaps a few cluey Harris voters will take the cash and ignore the rest, but among Musk’s slavish yet often apathetic audience, it is likely to drive some new registrations in a contest close enough that they might prove decisive. 

The current month is, even in Musk terms, batshit. October 13 saw his space agency stage another rocket launch and send technologists wild by catching the big metal tube at the bottom, which is important because recycling or something. October 10 was the public launch of Tesla’s robotaxi, which according to him is supposed to be one of the most important moments in the car manufacturer’s history. It seems a crowded time to also be heading a national effort to buy out a presidential election for unclear motives, but needs must when the devil drives.

Becky Peterson is the dedicated Tesla reporter for the Wall Street Journal, a beat that probably seemed simpler a couple of years ago when its figurehead was just a guy who occasionally threw a cannonball through the window of a demonstration car. She tells me that he has always been doing a lot of things at once, but it was around the buyout of Twitter when Tesla investors were most inclined to push back about his outside activity. Some players spoke up about him not being focused as a CEO, but the panic in that conversation has subsided, even as he has grown increasingly erratic in his pantomime MAGA performance.

It probably helps that the board at Tesla is mostly his brother or his allies. There are other challenges at Tesla, like that 2024 sales are trending to be lower than 2023. But there’s also apparently a dispute between those who argue that his futuristic vision has always been a unique asset, so he’s running that line of argument. The upshot is that he’s not being challenged on political involvement at all right now at a high level after the Twitter objectors burned out. 

People like to cast Musk as either a genius or a weapons-grade moron. Neither is that helpful. His ventures have their moments of great success, like the rocket thing, offset by their series of fails: slaughtering apes with brain implants, spending billions to invent wild concepts like the bus or the tunnel, making cars that either trap you inside and catch fire or chop your fingers off in the auto-closing doors. His history is over-promise and under-delivery, probably because he’s excited about the possibilities, and probably because it gets attention.

The people who do the engineering to make Musk projects possible are the ones who deserve the genius tag, while the dud ideas like the multi-stage breaking of Twitter appear to come directly from the boss. Rather than a moron, I’d see a person with a frantic churn of ideas who got rich enough young enough to try them all out. Mostly they fail and blow a lot of money, and once in a while, the scattergun effect means that one of them is a hit. But after all of this, the things that worked, the things that didn’t, the mystery is why the current obsession is to get neck-deep in American party politics, to the point of attempting to bribe an entire state. 

Truly, just what in the pristine fuck is with this dude? Why is he like this? People love going back over all of the times he used to insult Trump and Trump used to insult him, and marvel that they’re now a unit. It’s no stretch for Trump, who pretends to like Musk because Trump likes anyone who gives him free money. That’s what he sees as the right and proper way of the world. And it’s no surprise that Musk would flatter a politician for his benefit. But the scale of campaign support is more confounding, from a guy who not long ago was slating Republicans for their lack of environmental policy, and who rose to real prominence by backing invention in sustainability. 

It’s easy to confuse that with being progressive, where more likely Musk is a deep social conservative who didn’t bring ideology into an environmental position, figuring correctly that growth markets of the future would be technology beyond fossil fuels. Getting in early was sound business, not altruism. Generalisations are frowned upon, but white South Africans with mineral interests are probably not broadly at the top of the Right-On Index. Certainly he has never been progressive in how he treats employees. Then there are the wives, and the children. Now, I don’t understand people’s urge to have children, but I understand that they have it. And with that want, it makes sense to have one, or two. Maybe three. God forbid, four, if that’s your thing. Because you want that family, that connection, you want to exist within that unit. 

Beyond all understanding is the guys like Musk who do this process with one woman, then the next, then the next, going along popping embryos into wives like they’re potting basil plants in a backyard herb bed. Six in this one, get rid of her, three in the next, three in the next. Most confounding is how someone second or third down the line deludes herself that she is a person who matters to this guy. For someone who burns through interests so quickly, wives are just another category. Meanwhile, having barely had time to spend with his first batch of children, he now has a quantity in double figures, with access complicated by estranged relationships. There’s nothing about genuine connection with family here, more a compulsion to have women as a breeding repository, from someone who recently promoted a thesis that “a Republic of high status males is best for decision making”.

So people wonder about Musk’s political moves based on ramifications for Tesla about the effect of different presidencies. On the negative side, Trump is openly talking about policies that would hurt the company, specifically tariffs on cars manufactured in Mexico, where Tesla is planning to build one of its huge factories. Aptly for a crotchety old dude, Trump has also fired off at autonomous computing and AI, which is the future that Musk thinks of sensually when alone in the shower, but then most of Trump’s opinions are involuntary expressions with the object permanence of a dog whimpering after rabbits in its sleep. 

In terms of what might benefit Tesla, the USA has federal regulations on autonomous vehicles, so a federal ruling allowing Musk’s proposed fleet to run would avoid the complex expense and delay of trying to negotiate the same thing in 50 individual states. A cowboy Trump admin might have fewer controls on AI medical experimentation, whatever the figurehead thinks. Musk has also spoken against subsidies for electric vehicle makers, which suits him because Tesla is the market leader, so subsidies are more useful to his competitors. Given EV subsidies are a Biden initiative, and given that they’re EV subsidies, Trump would be a high chance to kill them off. 

But then, the Musk shift kind of seems bigger than business? Starting from a position of such wealth, surely you can make great money under any regime. It’s just tailoring your methods. Finances don’t feel like enough of a driver to get the guy so personally involved, and devolved. It has to be personal, and it does seems emotional, uncontrolled. His Twitter feed that gets forced onto any user of the platform now has the quality of a 2009 YouTube comment feed, immersed in conspiracy nonsense about millions of secret voters, Great Replacement theory, and Jewish cabals, and doing so with hack gags and AI meme slop and cerebrum-curdling videos introduced with incisive quote-tweets like “Interesting” and “Yeah”. From someone praised for intelligence it is the stupidest shit imaginable.

Maybe his years-long and billions-blown meltdown over Twitter was a symptom of something already happening – people have pointed to the potential turning point of learning that one of his older kids is transgender. But from here the Twitter thing seems to have a causative aspect too. Like JD Vance hating progressives because he felt excluded at Yale, so much of Musk on Twitter over the past decade or more felt like seeing somebody wanting to be part of something, then growing to hate the thing when they’re not. 

Musk, in the mind of Musk ten years ago, is a super cool guy doing innovative cool future shit that deserves to impress everybody. He is changing Earth and going to Mars. Then he goes onto Twitter and intelligent funny people give him shit. They are funny, and he is a billionaire with an open channel to be made fun of. It’s how power works.

But he wants to be cool. I get that. Twitter at this time is a series of in-groups, circles of accounts that know each other all being funny and seemingly having a great time with their large audience. It’s the online equivalent of seeing the band on stage. You’d love to be doing that! Then you’re online long enough and you start to meet people for real, and mostly they’re depressed and snarky and broke and trying to get by on one creative gig or another. They don’t think they’re anything special, they’re shitposters. The whole point is that it’s not serious.

But he keeps trying to get in, with his memes and his message-board humour, entirely dude-coded. And it never works. He is never marked as cool. Sure, he has a mass of sycophant accounts with crypto links in their bios saying things like “Good job Elon you are leading innovation once again, follow me for tips.” But he knows that they’re fucking losers. He knows they’re contemptible. They embarrass him, because he wants the approval of shiny pretty people (the online edition). But he can’t get it, despite all the money, all the companies, all the notional success. 

He fucking flips his lid, factoring in the thing with his kid as well, and starts down this path that everything is the fault of the “woke radical left”. Never mind that that this does not exist, per se. The idea is there. He can identify a vague group who, regardless of how much he has, have somehow taken things from him. So he doubles down. If all he can get is the affection of his army of crypto losers and LinkedIn Bros, he will fully embrace the crypto losers and LinkedIn Bros. He will multiply them. He will build them into a digital army, so then he can trample whatever he wants. Then he decides to be in charge.

I’m not sure who came up with the house party analogy, but it works. A dude comes in, thinking it’s a cool place, trying to impress people but acting like a douche. He only impresses a few people who he despises. So eventually he goes away and buys the house. Comes back with hundreds of guys like him, who swarm into every room, saying, “Debate me! Debate me!” They insert themselves into every conversation, interrupt every group, spraying Mountain Dew on the walls and playing novelty metal on the stereo. The vibe sucks. A few people chat in a few corners, but as their friends leave it’s not much fun anymore. So they trickle out. Someone might host a smaller kick-on somewhere else, but only with a fraction attending. 

The party is over, Elon rules the house. But now the house is filled with the kind of followers he didn’t want to impress in the first place, because they were already impressed. The party he wanted to be part of has disappeared. He will never reach it. He will keep staggering towards the lights in Mirkwood, only for the feast to disappear. Though let’s be honest: by some stage he knows he can’t have this thing, so he wanted to at least destroy it for the people who did. 

What this guy will never know is what it’s like to be in a group of fun and admirable people. You can spend all your time around wealth, influence, ego, but when you spend time around people who genuinely care for others, who are genuinely good as opposed to just people who get lists of things done, I can tell you that it hits different. Nothing in my life ever feels better than being accepted by people who are admirable for who they are, not just what they do. For all my failings, it gives me the encouragement to keep on trying to be more like them. 

Well. That’s one option. The Musk option is to give up. It’s the thing billionaires can never buy: true acceptance, true friendship, real love, from the truly good. Those who trail around after him will always have another set of motives. It’s sad that he’s lonely, but it fucking sucks that he has the potential power to trash the place for everybody else because of it. This time the party he can trash is much bigger: a national scale, a global scale. This time, he’s supporting a party that can trash you.

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Day 8 – Chicago, Illinois

Posted on October 24, 2024 by geoff lemon

It all starts with the cops rolling up. I pretty much knew it would happen. Late on night seven, before leaving Minneapolis, I have writing to finish and I’m too tired to concentrate in a bar. Parked on a noisy road, I move up looking for a side street. Up a huge hill, switchbacking the other way, and suddenly the houses became mansions, the side streets promenades with retro spherical street lamps hanging from iron arches. So, this is Rich St Paul. 

Park up in a nice street in America for any length of time, and somebody will dime-drop. The vibe is palpable. Which I kind of want to dare them to. I figure it will take thirty minutes; I get two hours. And while it turns out fine, it is still stupid. I can bluff my way past most cops by being white, big, and male. They’re people, they’re often pleasant. But there is always the risk that if they are moved to become unpleasant, they can take that to any extreme without repercussion. Draw one guy’s impulsive dislike, and your best case is sitting on the curb for an hour while he tears the car apart. But I’m impatient and stubborn and annoyed at the prospect in advance, so I roll the dice.

It’s only on visiting the US that you realise there are cops everywhere. We’re used to them being wall-to-wall on American TV, but they’re as prominent in real life. Most of them are in cars, most of them with nothing to do, some of them looking for something to do. The most modest towns have squadrons cruising the streets. They park up at train stations, strip malls, beaches, they camp along the highway, they have spots reserved for them with a pulsing blue light at the front of Walmart lots. They don’t drive Blues Brothers squad cars anymore, either, they’re all in steroid-pumped beast trucks, with chin-high grilles and mounted spotlights so ruthless they cause involuntary dysentery. 

So I know what’s up when an engine hums up behind me and it’s like the MCG lights just turned on. I take a moment to stay calm, then keep typing. They always take ages to get out of their seat, and my window is open. It’s best not to look like you’re changing anything. “How you doing?” he says, eventually sauntering up. Muscled sandy young guy, cheery. “Good, just doing some work.”.

“We had a couple of calls from people who I guess didn’t recognise you. You from around here?”

“Actually, I’m from Australia.”

And that was that. He’s delighted, the questions came. Whoa, Australia? What are you doing here? Great! Where have you been to so far? 

If there was any doubt I was harmless, that is solved by admitting that I’ve spent the day in the library archives. So we chat travel tips, and the best spots to see next, and he says he’ll call those anxious residents back and tell them to relax. “Welcome to Minnesota!” is his farewell.

His main recommendation is Winona, a town along a valley down the river a couple of hours southeast. Why not say yes? I take my time to finish writing, making sure not to let the residents think I’ve been chased off, then drive out of town and sleep until dawn to time my drive. It’s a spectacle. Soundtrack: Lorde, Pure Heroine. Sunlight: gradual. The Mississippi at this point is the scale of a normal river, not the one-way ocean that it becomes down south. But it still bucks back and forth, fattening into almost lakes before returning to its river ways. Squirrels dart across the road (“Squirle!” my brain keeps saying, unable to shake Travis Kelce’s spelling.) Rock bluffs kick up on our side, banks crest and fall on the other. There is that indefinable calm of being near a body of water. 

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It’s a good way to start a few hundred miles to Chicago. It waits over the horizon, a city that as a symbol has such potency, before you ever get to its reality. Chicago is music, civil rights, the Grand Central Station of the Underground Railroad. It’s the DNC, Obama, the Bulls. It’s also the most popular shibboleth for Republican race-baiting. Talk about gun control and they’ll talk about Chicago shootings. Talk about crime or urban decay and they’ll talk about gangs in Chicago suburbs. You hear a lot less about the disparity with its great wealth: picture the suburbs that Ferris Bueller goes running across. Ferris and the Blues Brothers: two of my Hall of Valhalla favourites are Chicago movies. I monitor the GPS until I’m 106 miles away. Hit it.

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One interesting note is that through rural Minnesota, Wisconsin, now Illinois, I see very few Trump signs. In 2016, on the roads through the Deep South all the way up to Virginia, the countryside was thick with them. Even in 2022 out of cycle, across Idaho and Montana, there were more than there are here. 

The city rises up to meet me. The day has become glorious and warm. Sarah heads an organisation called Win Without War, lobbying against military intervention and armament spread. A daunting goal at a time with an entrenched land war in Europe and another spiralling in the Middle East. And a bold calling in the United States of America, that has been at war one way or another for a century. Does that make it the best country in the world for this work, or the worst? 

She’s illuminating in terms of understanding by scale. Right now most of everybody’s focus is on a presidential campaign that is largely being run as a personality contest. But you have to remember the scale of the apparatus that they’re vying to be in charge of, and the impossibility of taking charge of it all in a meaningful way. US government programs are collectively so vast that nobody elected to that job can possibly have a detailed understanding of everything under their notional power. Plenty of departments and programs they’ll probably never hear of at all.

Take the military budget alone. Expanding every year, in recent years coming in at somewhere over $800billion, which Congress then likes topping up with further tens of billions for particular extras. But with so much money going out, nobody really knows what is spent on what. The procurement process is entirely haphazard, hosing away rivers of cash without account, and after decades of never really trying, the Pentagon has still never passed an audit.

Various people have used various methods – mostly involving rice, for some reason – to demonstrate how human brains can’t functionally process the size of the difference between one million of something and one billion. Our heads basically short out after imagining it times ten. So multiply that degree of difficulty again for a number approaching one trillion, and perhaps it’s no wonder that the department itself doesn’t know what it gets spent on. The one silver lining is that within that excess, there are marginal wins to be had.

A week from now, former Senator Bob Menendez was due to be sentenced for taking gold bars from the Egyptian government in exchange for getting them free weapons through his Senate committee. The sentencing has been postponed three months but he’s already been found guilty. That corruption allowed Win Without War to apply enough pressure to have hundreds of millions of dollars in arms withheld from Egypt’s regime. It’s a tiny percentage of US spending, but an objectively huge amount of money and weaponry. To anyone who now won’t be harmed by those armaments, the difference is their world.

Or take a much smaller example in Evanston, the suburb we’re talking in. Since cannabis got legalised in Illinois, local authorities used their city tax on sales to fund reparations. Black residents who had been subject to housing discrimination during the Jim Crow era, or their current descendants who still lived in the city, were entitled to payments. It started as a small program in 2020 but has been gradually growing, and naturally a bunch of Republicans are now suing to destroy it. But it’s remarkable to see it happening at all, in a corner of the larger city that is constantly traduced as a place of hopelessness.

There is an invocation here against despair. Some years ago in Melbourne, Ta-Nehisi Coates explained this in a way that stayed with me. In the framing of injustice against Black people in America, if I can paraphrase, he said that American slavery began 400 years ago. Generation after generation of his ancestors lived whole lives under it. So, he asked, what right did he have to expect to be there at the end of the struggle? To expect it to be solved in his lifetime? We only have the right to contribute to the struggle. And if that struggle does one day reach resolution, whichever generation is present, there will always be the next struggle for equality and decency, in a world where humans always find conflict. I ask Sarah about that framing.

“I think we underestimate the amount of change that can happen in our lifetimes,” she says. “There were people in this country whose family were slaves who then got to see the first Black president. Or, my great grandma was married at nine years old, and I got to meet her. The idea that I can do what I do, and that happening in three generations, is kind of wild. Are we over the hump? No. Do we have a lot of work to do? Yes. Does everything always seem impossible until it’s not? Also yes.”

It’s getting dark, so it’s time to crawl the van down the shore of Lake Michigan towards the city for tunes. Chicago is physically huge, such a bulk of buildings downtown, one of the few cities that feels on a tier with LA and New York. The House of Blues seems to be a victim of its own success, booked half the nights of the week for private events. So I head to another blues bar, which still feels halfway like a tourist trap, but as the tunes play and the night wears on a true atmosphere breaks out.

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The various players have their style down. Sharp suits and flat brims, mountain man felt hats and long beards. The names: Studebaker John, Doctor Duke Tumatoe [sic]. One word of suggestion on the matter of legal cannabis: when vaporiser pens are being passed around haphazardly, you have no idea what’s coming at you, and the tiniest foray might just greet you like a full-handed slap upside the head. Some also suggest that there is a point at which you may start a detailed internal thesis about whether you in fact exist inside a giant gummy, given that all your joints feel warm and encased in jelly, and the light filtering through in a burnished orange makes the world look gelatinous. Music thuds through your body like longbow arrows with LED feathers. You may not be coherent but you can still make friends with everyone.

Austin and Jackie are Americans who live in Sydney, currently dividing their attention between the band and a phone showing the Yankees make the World Series for the first time in 15 years. There is a lot of jumping around for both. Rodrice and Scheherazade have a long chat based on the familiar insistence that I’m the guy from Home Alone. (Another Chicago cinema classic.) Amber wants to ditch her job and be a freelance journalist, proving that tendency by giving me a grilling about the profession that I am not at that moment best placed to adequately answer. But she can talk for both of us. Her election analysis, pithy and hard to entirely refute: “People are way dumber than people give them credit for.”

As a group of random people fold together into dance, you could say an authentic music has been commercialised, or you could say this is breadth of communion. Keeping up the spirit to stay in the fight. I had planned to do some more driving after the bar, but that is no longer a viable option, so it’s a matter of taking my chances on a Chicago side street, listening to the wind, watching the shifting pattern of leaves cast in street-lit shadow through the window. Some part of the world is still bopping, and on this trip, that same theme of togetherness keeps coming up. Headphones on, Elwood at the House of Blues. “Please remember that no matter who you are, and what you do to live, thrive, and survive, there are still some things that make us all the same. You, me, them, everybody. Everybody.”

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Day 7 – Minneapolis & St Paul

Posted on October 24, 2024 by geoff lemon

The point of a trip like this is to invite the unexpected. The first plan is a dirt map, made to be scuffed out. Not knowing what will happen is what allows the real happening to take place. Going to Minnesota, my first idea was to find out more about Tim Walz’s time as governor in a state has managed a surprisingly progressive set of legislative results. The various political feelers I’d sent out looked promising but went quiet late in the piece. But by that time I had been sidetracked by Rochester and poetry – see the previous piece – and ended up parked under a tree reading online about James Wright.

That’s what led to the following discovery: “[James Wright correspondence to Robert Bly], File — Box: 11 (Mixed Materials). Creation: 1961-1979. From the Collection: Bly, Robert (Person). Contact: The Upper Midwest Literary Archives Collecting Area.”

I love walking through universities. They’re a favourite target from all sorts of angles: reactionaries disparage them as brainwashing, so nearly but never quite grasping the nub of the matter when asking a version of, “Why does tertiary education tend to develop people’s tendency to empathy and progressive ideas?” But a stauncher left-wing position sees universities as conservative bulwarks against real progress, which can have some substance when for instance Columbia’s administrators are siccing riot cops on student protestors. Joints like Yale still turn out chumps like JD Vance.

But whatever the limitations, universities are fundamentally good things, institutions with the central premise of expanding the sum of human knowledge. A huge campus, with pleasant grounds and shaded courtyards, trees and lawns, pockets of activity, is all there for this basic purpose, however mercantile its managers might have become. There is a sense of energy and optimism that another rising generation has all this exploration ahead.

I wasn’t expecting any luck at the archive. I was expecting some version of what most institutions would throw up: you must be enrolled to enter, you must submit a records request three weeks in advance, that portion is stored off site, whatever. Instead I walked past precisely zero desks or gates, up a broad circular staircase, followed some signs and found myself inside the Literary Archives office. “Oh yeah, Erin just did a presentation on James Wright. She’ll be back soon,” said the very helpful five academics floating about. And she was, immediately taking me to an underground storage centre to produce several boxes on a trolley, which was whisked into a reading room to send me on my way. Thanks Erin.

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Within 12 hours of discovering that this trove existed, there I was, opening folder after folder of letters: Bly’s a decoding exercise from looped handwriting, Wright’s thankfully typewritten. There was a lot of correspondence about poetics, ranging from the broad – the problems of the age – to the narrow – which line might need reconsidering in the other’s latest work. The collection starts in August 1958, which must have been only two or three months after meeting the horses given they were munching “spring tufts”, but they don’t get a further mention. 

Bly stays with Wright in Minneapolis that December, then moves to New York. They start an ambitious poetry mag called The Fifties, all about publishing new and young poets, as well as translating from other languages. They’re doing Rilke from German, and both learning Spanish to do a series starting with Juan Ramon Jimenez. “Then I thought the next two should be Neruda and Vallejo – so you see! We will have use for these Vallejo translations sooner than we think!” Bly writes.

It’s remarkable to read some of Wright’s poems in progress: there are lines with his familiar polish, before the thing loses its way and stumbles into confusion. “Too many thoughts,” Bly pencils more than once in the margins. “Too many thoughts.” Some of it is so familiar: the letters about the New York apartment in squalor, about James staying over on the Poet’s Mattress, the anxiety of trying to get the magazine paid for or distributed, the back and forth about trying to wring travel expenses from one institution or another to jag a reading tour. The same old shit from when I found that world decades later.

The star of the show, emerging through this correspondence, is Carol Bly. Where the men are earnest around their odd moments of lightness, she is steadfastly fucking hilarious. Her letters are works of joy. I will give you one example, in the form of a letter to her doctor: a highlight that had me ruining etiquette in the reading room by cackling aloud. 

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If you can’t read that image, message me and I’ll transcribe it. Once this trip is over, I need to do an entire post dedicated to Carol’s highlights. Also, that doctor is wrong about the breastfeeding thing – if that were true I wouldn’t be here writing this.

Carol is a complete badass. Across these few years it emerges that she already knows German, learns Norwegian, then learns Russian so she can read Soviet poetry. She pastes her New Yorker rejection slips into her calendar, like a boss. Back in Wisconsin after New York, she has to handle everything: run the farm, raise the children, be the organising force behind the magazine, chasing everyone’s subscription arrears while the men argue about one word in a Georg Trakl translation, and still call on her to cheer and encourage them on. Occasionally, in the corners, she finds moments to continue being a writer herself, sending out work and dealing with the spare successes and plentiful polite refusals that make up a writer’s lot. 

It’s an emotional thing, holding in my hand these letters that once were held in theirs. The ink marks and the pencilled addenda and the one where Carol stamps her dog’s paw print on the paper in farewell. A fragile little square of lightweight paper where Wright has typed a shyly drunken note to Carol about upcoming work and wonderings, looking for some reassurance that they want him around. And her notes to him, looking to lift him out of sadness. “I know you don’t think of yourself as someone who’s a help to other people; you think of yourself as someone receiving,” she says in a perfect encapsulation of how that depressive mindset works. Well, you’re more blessed than you think.”

Or later in another letter, “I am old aunt Carol now… but anyway, I know this: that worrying about what you can’t fix up is a way of not working on what you can, slowly, fix up. I mean worrying and fretting about Laos is a way of not standing up to the local American Legion, or fretting about a gamut of feelings between you and Lib is a way of not working on you, in some way.”

After the excitement of discovery, I am overwhelmed that these things exist, and that we can access them. The library is named for Elmer Anderson, a member of the legislature in the same era as those letters were being written, and at one time Minnesota governer. He thought the state university was “only recognising three central missions: teaching, research, and community service. They overlook a fourth a fourth mission: an archival one. It falls to the universities in our culture, and specifically to university libraries, to preserve the sources of information, knowledge, and culture, so they can be found and passed on.”

So after politics he spent 20 years on the university board or leading fundraising, and eventually the modern library was built by excavating massive vaults deep down into the rock. The construction means that the vaults control temperature, humidity, have low risk from fire or geological mishap, and basically form the safest place to store paper materials in the state. It’s hard to explain what a big deal that is. For almost every institution, the main issue is storage. So many libraries have important collections but face constant pressure to keep whittling them down, or have failures in storage that damage the irreplaceable. This guy got it, and pulled off an extraordinary achievement.

Andersen was a Republican. It seems so incongruous in the modern era, though he lived to see George W. Bush’s reelection and was critical of what the party had become. His time in politics was marked by forming state parks and a huge national park, passing civil rights law, establishing education programs. He was obsessed with collecting books and eventually donated thousands of editions to the university. He was hugely successful in business but didn’t see profit as the only point of the exercise. Later in life, when asked how it made sense that he had described himself in office as a liberal Republican, he had quite the answer. 

“I define liberal as one who is reaching out for new truth, willing to change, willing to be open-minded, willing to consider what the demand is, and a certain pragmatic [aspect] to it…I think freedom of the individual is very a liberal idea. And then I think of the freedom of the mind. Liber in liberal comes from really book as the root word. And so I think of books and learning and liberal and change and open-mindedness. That’s my idea of what a liberal is. That’s what I like to be.”

In the light of the Andersen legacy, the Walz era makes a little more sense. It’s still achieved on tiny margins, like the governor’s vote that Andersen lost by 91 votes out 1.3 million when recontesting in 1962. At the most recent state vote in 2022, progressives held the state house and governorship but not the senate. They won three Senate seats to take a majority of one, claiming the closest of them by 161 votes. 

But that was enough. Walz has been able to sign in extensive legislation, the most significant in the national climate being a zero emissions target for 2040, and widely protecting abortion access while enacting shield laws for women who travel from states that do have restrictions. Other progressive achievements include legalising weed while wiping non-violent weed convictions, allowing former felons to vote, increasing entitlements to paid leave, capping some prescription drug costs, free meals and menstrual products in schools, free tuition at two state universities for low-income students, and banning book bans and conversion therapy.

It’s an impressive run in Minnesota, a state that like most of them last tie around voted heavily Republican in rural counties. There were 13 Democrat counties last time: four around the twin cities, two containing Rochester and Winona, two around Nicollet and Mankato, Moorhead out on the western border next to Fargo in North Dakota, and the four big counties up northeast on the lake. The other 70-odd went Trump, some with numbers over 75 percent. But out of a state turnout of 3.2 million, the biggest booth in Minneapolis alone brought in 738,000, going heavily to Biden, so the county preponderance doesn’t turn in enough numbers to outweigh the cities.

That political through-line is there in the letters between the poets. During the midterms in 1958, Robert begins with “This is election day, a wonderfully dark, cloudy and ominous day, like the beginning of Snowbound.” Two years later, when Kennedy is elected, this is Carol:

“I voted today, Robert will this afternoon. Our township votes up some wooden stairs behind the Town Hall, past a tree to which someone had suspended cobs of corn, for the birds. Each cob was part-eaten and birds were darting around them still, and there was a huge, bitten American flag hanging, blowing, on the rickety bannister of the wooden stair. I went bounding up there and singing Columbia, the Gem of the Ocean and came in hot and excited to find old friends acting as Election Judges, their funny informal Norwegian-American faces looking special, half-military and shy; that was wonderful, for everything from the corn hung for the birds to these shy men who handed me the ballot reminded you of exercising your prerogative, as they say, as a free citizen. The best times of life are when you are reminded most intensely of the very thing you’re doing at that moment.”

It’s a very different energy after Kennedy is shot in 1963. Still on the farm in Wisconsin, Carol to her father. “One serious reason I wish we were there, quite apart from being with you all, is that I’d feel we were in the land where the President’s death was felt hard and long. National catastrophes don’t really strike home out here, – the local newspaper owner ran an editorial last week saying the country shouldn’t have grieved so long for Kennedy, it hurt stock quotations. Robert told him off in the hardware store… Anyway, the lack of feeling makes a person lonelier somehow.”

So, naturally, American tension between ways of thinking is not new. But what a treasure to be able to find such descriptions, even those in sadness. After the archives, I have one night in a new city. Plan A is hang out with someone local, perhaps stay with them, almost better if the connection is random. The website Couchsurfing used to be great for that. Two, if that’s not an option, pick an event from what’s happening in the city, ideally something I wouldn’t normally go to. Tonight in St Paul, it turns out Pink is playing at the massive hockey arena. So I go behind the hockey arena it to see the St Paul Chamber Orchestra.

I wouldn’t call myself chamber orchestra guy. But it’s adorable: theatre is another remnant from the past, with grand wooden doors, and ushers wearing little bow ties and tailcoats. I had paid no attention to the program when buying a $17 ticket, the same price as a shower at Love’s Travel Stop or a day’s parking at the university. So I don’t know they have a guest cellist named Abel Selaocoe from South Africa, who remarkably manages to play the lead from a podium, conduct the orchestra, sing using a Britney mic, and at times wander around the stage to play somewhere else. He uses the instrument as percussion as well as melody, dropping the bow on the strings to draw a low grind, singing barely perceptibly as the edge of hearing before rushing back with full voice. He uses the orchestra to hum, sing, clap, pluck, many things besides what one would expect with their violins and violas. The music mixes from African traditional into Irish-sounding reels, through Polish folk and string concertos. It’s magical. “Today speaks of a way of coming together,” he says. “We do this all the time because we need it in different ways.” 

This is not big-city life. Minutes after the show, the musicians are hoisting bags and cases in the foyer, the mostly elderly audience already cleared out. The fountain across the way makes its own music, the night is strangely warm. The audience for Pink has not yet let out. Two gaggles of violinists head off down different streets, a solitary figure wheeling a vast double bass in another direction. I’d like to hear what Carol Bly would have thought.

You can support Geoff’s trip here.

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Day 6 – Rochester, Minnesota

Posted on October 24, 2024 by geoff lemon

Just off the highway to Rochester, Minnesota, twilight bounds softly forth on the grass. 

That’s not my line, it’s one I’ve carried it in my head for 20 years. Three times as many years since James Wright put it on a page. It’s funny how certain places exist entirely as concepts, part of a song or a book title or an airport announcement, while you never imagine their reality. Even seeing it on a map only shifts its abstraction from text or speech to visual art. Until one day it’s on a map of a place you’re actually going, and the word that was invocation becomes real.

Rochester, Minnesota is how James Wright anchored a poem. I’ve never liked the concept of all-time favourites. For me there’s a top level that can accommodate as many things as are good enough. Ranking different kinds of perfect is meaningless. Instead you can have a Valhalla for creative work, a hall of heroes, where you can love every piece that does exactly what it’s trying to do. They make you feel different things, but each the best version of that thing.

‘A Blessing’ is in the God tier. My uni lecturer, Philip Salom, brought it in, and I remember feeling time slow down. Afterwards I wrote my first good poem. To that point I’d done more performance pieces, entertaining aloud but a jumble in layout. This was the first time that the writing as text felt right, as well as sound. It wasn’t a copy or a pastiche, but it used a spin-off from the title and took something from the spare, precise tone. That limitation felt like freedom.

It’s an unexpected impact for a poem that for its first three quarters seems to be about geography and a horse. But even those lines are gorgeously laid out, structured, timed, then he whirls into the finale. I won’t call something the best poem, but James Wright may be the best writer of a closing line. (William Duffy’s Farm is his other famous showstopper.)

We’d better read the one we’re talking about.

A Blessing

Just off the highway to Rochester, Minnesota,
Twilight bounds softly forth on the grass.
And the eyes of those two Indian ponies
Darken with kindness.
They have come gladly out of the willows
To welcome my friend and me.
We step over the barbed wire into the pasture
Where they have been grazing all day, alone.
They ripple tensely, they can hardly contain their happiness
That we have come.
They bow shyly as wet swans. They love each other.
There is no loneliness like theirs.
At home once more,
They begin munching the young tufts of spring in the darkness.
I would like to hold the slenderer one in my arms,
For she has walked over to me
And nuzzled my left hand.
She is black and white,
Her mane falls wild on her forehead,
And the light breeze moves me to caress her long ear
That is delicate as the skin over a girl’s wrist.
Suddenly I realize
That if I stepped out of my body I would break
Into blossom.

(From Above the River: The Complete Poems and Selected Prose. Copyright 1990 by James Wright; Wesleyan University Press.)

Goddamn. 

So, Rochester. Sitting there on the map, 90 minutes south of Minneapolis. And despite all the recent hours in the car, I had to drive that highway. 

I wasn’t deluded about finding pastoral idylls. James Wright did that drive in 1958. It’s a different world now. I wasn’t looking for the spot where this meeting happened, either because who would know? James Wright died in 1980, all of 52. Imagine losing decades of such a writer to nothing more than cigarettes. 

He might have told Garrison Keilor, one-time godfather of Minnesota literature, who valued the poem enough to get it installed on a sign on Route 90. But there’s no way that’s the right place. I suppose they had to put it at a rest stop, despite being a humdrum place for poetry, because they didn’t want random literary enthusiasts plunging off the road at some random point. But this one makes no sense at all: it’s on the eastbound side, to the west of Rochester. Where’s James supposed to be coming from? Sioux Falls, North Dakota? Come on. 

James Wright taught in the Twin Cities to the north. He’s in the car with Robert Bly, the poet who kept him writing when Wright wanted to give up. Wright used to spend a lot of time with Robert and Carol Bly on their farm in Madison, Wisconsin, a couple of hours east. So the highway “to Rochester” only makes sense for a homebound trip from Madison, coming west before swinging north to Minneapolis and St Paul. And “just off the highway” might not mean the roadside, it might mean early on Route 52, the road that leaves the interstate for Rochester. 

It doesn’t matter, right? The drive is the location. I take 94 southeast, not as far as Madison but far enough to swing back westward with plenty of 90 to enjoy. It isn’t twilight, but the sun is sliding away faster than I can catch it. A clear day, the air outside bordering on cold, but through a closed window the sunlight still has that delicious crackle of heat. The world outside sparkles. Minnesota’s trees are less red and gold, more green and gold. The highway is a modest two-laner, quiet by American standards. Soon I’m driving a bridge across… the mighty Mississippi? Forgive the ignorance but I did not realise it came through here. Up over a range, onto a plain where more distant hills shuffle away, and now we’re really into the bucolic shit: red barns, concrete silos, neat coils of hay, stands of trees between gently sloping fields. The wind picks up immediately.

I’ve read a few analyses describing the poem, especially that ending, as an expression of joy. To me, it still reads like a poem of depression. James Wright is melancholy as fuck, both in biography and in output. And yes, this poem is epiphany, but also elegy, a combination that every melancholic knows. 

Sunk in the currents of depression, there are unexpected moments when you surface for air. A gasp that you didn’t anticipate. A rush of feeling, a quickening of the pulse in a deadened world. It doesn’t mean you’ve escaped submersion – you’re all the more aware of it for the reprieve. But the reprieve exists, it lasts for as many heartbeats as it lasts. You know both the moment and its passing. 

This is where those final lines go, especially the placing of that final enjambment. Even in this sweetness there is sadness. Even in our happiness we are breaking. At the times in my life when I have most wanted to die, I have sometimes thought of it like James Wright’s line: smashing the vessel to free what’s within. A flowering of sorts. You can lean your reading on the blossoming, but he is breaking first and foremost. The next line is a codicil.

It doesn’t matter where his moment happened. Our world is different. Highways more relentless, agriculture more industrial. It doesn’t matter where he was, or where I am. Route 90, Route 52, past the turnoff or miles from it. Rochester, Minnesota is a pin through a stack of papers. Still, in that hour and more of road, there is a moment. A small internal rhyme. By the roadside is a pen, and in it is a sturdy solitary bay. The horse grazes. I stop the car.

You can support Geoff’s trip here.

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Day 5 – The long drive

Posted on October 24, 2024 by geoff lemon

There are long drives and there are long drives. As a kid, anything from two hours up was as long as one could imagine. Two hours is still where long drives start. But how you see it depends where you grew up. Three hours in England can take you half the way across the country, somewhere that feels distant. Six hours from Melbourne and you’ll hit Mildura. You’re still in the same state. And it’s not even one of the big ones. 

Plus it depends on the roads. In countries where they’re unsealed or mountainous, a few hours means little distance, hard won. A few hours in Australia or the US, and you most likely have hours of clear highway cruising, full throttle.

On all of my American road trips, the psychology adapts again. When you’re measuring miles in thousands and trips in months , the numbers get different. So many American cities are not that far apart. You gobble up the five or six hour drives without note; you can leave one place after a late breakfast and still arrive at the next before close of business. The drive doesn’t take out the day. 

But now and then the big ones come around. You have to get somewhere to somewhere, and there’s no relevant stop in between. There’s nothing for it but to make the hit. Eight hours, ten hours, will wipe out a day. Twelve hours, fourteen, sixteen, they take something different again. 

Pittsburgh to Minneapolis is a 15-hour shot. I’d first planned to take a few days up through Michigan to the lake crossing at Mackinaw City, then around to Minnesota through the north. But that was budgeted on smashing through Pennsylvania on day one, and instead I’ve spent four days tangled up in Penn politics. I have to go directly if I want time to reach the Walz state, smashing straight by Chicago and though southern Wisconsin.

There’s a certain psychology to doing these. You have to brace yourself for the effort. You lay in supplies: snacks, hydration, medicines. If you’re doing it with company, then setting off has a hyperactive celebratory energy, the call of adventure, and while that peak is too high to be sustained, there will keep being burbles of entertainment along the way. It’s a considerate experience, too, everyone having to factor in multiple sets of needs, and most of us are likely to be kinder to one another than ourselves. So you take things easier, cushion the effort. With the shared objective, the conversation, the building of stories, almost any road trip is a bonding experience.

When you do it solo, there’s none of this. Fifteen hours on your own is an experience of stripping everything away. Interaction, then personality, then thought. It’s a meditation, in its way, because as the hours stretch it will be just be you and the road. But it’s scouring, lonely, intimidating even, knowing that the work is all on you and your concentration. 

Solo, there’s not much incentive to be gentle. You just want to burn it through. You have to be strategic with entertainment, to keep that concentration. Say you put on an upbeat playlist to get some enthusiasm. Funk classics, 80s new wave, whatever gets you peppy. That’s fine for an hour or two, but eventually your brain runs out of juice. It’s like cranking the engine with a flat battery. So then you need to switch it up, keep that brain interested. Go to something mellow, listen to an album maybe. Cool, that wipes off another 50 minutes. Now what? Podcasts need the same rationing, a few hours but change them up. In between times, I find myself doing long spans of silence. Turning over ideas. A lot of what you’ve been reading comes from these gaps on the drive, occasionally mumbling voice notes into the recorder as a phrase or a concept comes up.

That all sounds dour, but there are still pings of excitement. Especially for new places, a thrill at even reading the names of somewhere I’ve never been. Soon after setting off, there’s a tingle in my stomach at seeing the road sign to Youngstown, Ohio that very few people who have been to Youngstown, Ohio will ever feel. Crossing that state line offers the entertainment of the bleakest business name or concept I have never encountered: Highway View Drive Self Storage. For when you need a place to keep all of your wife’s things in the hope that she may day come back to you, make sure you do it with a scenic view of the highway. Where the two of you met. Highway View Drive Self Storage! Come on down.

I’ve chosen the older route through the centre of the state, rather than the mega highway to the north. It adds an hour but it’s more interesting to see some afternoon hours of the plains instead of only concrete. Coming out of Akron there is a gold foil sunset, the sort that strikes you right in the eyes. The road creeps out from under a massive bank of cloud that has been covering the eastern states, and out into clear skies in the true Midwest. 

There is an exit for Dart Street, which should be the name for the road behind every high-school bike shed. There are towns, houses corners. I’ve never successfully cemented the mental connection that US election season is Halloween season. When you’re travelling with an eye out for signs, rickety wooden houses festooned in cobwebs can seem like they mean something. Then you remember it’s just fancy dress. Not every Halloween has an election, but every election has Halloween. The skeletons and the campaign bunting will come down at the same time. I consider and abandon a laboured connection about the ghouls involved. 

Playlist. Silence. Playlist. Night falls, surprisingly late so deep in the year. Nothing more to see, only miles to cover. A good chance to nail 13 episodes back to back of The Final Word from the World Cup that I’m not covering, Norcross and Ponsonby soaking up four hours. It’s getting really cold now, the van’s external thermometer dropping to the 40s, then the 30s, in the wrong kind of degrees. It’s daunting to know I’m not even in Fargo country yet. Petrol stops, frosted breath, straight back on the road. In the rhythm now, keep going. I travel all the way across Indiana in the dark, thus finding out what it’s like to be Mike Pence.

Early hours of the morning, in a dotted-white-line reverie, and suddenly I’m spat out on the monster that is the road to Chicago. The highway expanding like one of those foam dinosaurs in the bath. Lanes uncountable. Ramps everywhere, looping up and overhead. Huge industrial lots by the side that have apparently been lit by people trying to stop POW escapes. Glare and sound, torrents of trucks, cars screaming among them at twice the limit. On and on it goes, as Chicago’s skyline gradually passes to the right. Aside from startlement, the main feeling is relief that I didn’t hit this in daytime. 

It passes, as all things must. Ten hours in, maybe. This stage of a drive is a fugue state. Fatigue would take over for some, but other brain types find it strangely not tiring. Tiredness passes, then you settle into an absurd focus, just the road and scanning for hazards, tracking traffic, monitoring speed, reacting to changes, a perpetual motion machine more than a person. Close to Milwaukee, the road has shrunk back to itself, modest enough that I can see silver fields in the moonlight. Stopping for a few hours’ sleep is because of logic more than need.

The last push is always the hardest. Going from 14 hours to 13 to 12, you barely notice them ticking by. From 3 to 2 to 1, the remainder feels so small that you can’t believe you’re not already there. Impatience builds. Impatience doesn’t stop you needing fuel. Macho truckers inside at the counter, nodding to Queen. The end of the drive is always the same. The highway complicates, nearing a city. You follow it, then escape from that rush, shifting mental gears down, picking a point at random, finally pulling up in a quiet street in a town you don’t know. You are still a vagrant sleeping in a van. You have to manage cops and parking inspectors and a suspicious public, while figuring out a new place from the kerb up. And you’re not sure what comes next. It’ll probably involve driving.

You can support Geoff’s trip here.

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