Last night we watched the original 1931 Frankenstein on the big screen, and with the election never far from top of mind these days, at a certain point I started picturing That Fucking Guy as the Monster. It works: He’s tall and lurchy, and even when he was young, he had the face for it. Nowadays, with the uncanny hair and the weird skin color and the general ugliness of all he represents and projects, he definitely fits the role.
So if he’s the Monster, who’s his creator? Fred Trump? Roy Cohn? Steve Bannon? Or maybe it’s all of us; maybe by paying attention to him we create him. So I’m going to stop now.
Speaking of Frankenstein, I’d like to take a moment to mourn the passing of Teri Garr, who lit up Young Frankenstein along with so many other movies. I think every man of my generation — along with the one before and possibly the one after — had a little thing for Teri. Many sexy actresses are funny some of the time; many funny ones are sexy some of the time; but she managed to be both equally and simultaneously. Here she is with Gene Wilder. What a handsome couple.
I realize that in talking about the election I’ve been mostly saying bad stuff about the mean guy, not so much good stuff about the nice lady. There are reasons for this: It was a bit of an arranged marriage, and though it seems to be working out — and I will be overjoyed to welcome Kamala as my president for 4 or 8 years — there is something of an enthusiasm gap.
But I watched her speech at the Ellipse the other night and I thought she slayed. She made the case for herself and against TFG eloquently and fluidly. She spoke in complete sentences. She kept to a narrative through-line with absolutely no mention of pet eating, fictional cannibals, or golfers’ wangs. And she kept it tight, barely going over a half-hour, which is how you communicate with the Short Attention Span Nation.
Today I am feeling good about things. I believe that we will pull together to banish the Demon of Mar-a-Lago back to the tinsel-plated limbo where he belongs. Kamala will cackle, ketchup will be thrown, and we will live relatively happily ever after. Have a good Diwali, everybody.
Today I’ve been thinking about how our current moment resonates with other times. For instance 1939, when the German American Bund held a pro-Nazi rally at Madison Square Garden.
For as long as I’ve been alive, all sensible people have considered Nazis the embodiment of evil for six million very good reasons. So we should be careful throwing the word around, and the rhetoric comparing That Fucking Guy to Adolf Hitler seemed overblown at first. TFG is not an ideologue; he is motivated entirely by self-interest. But over time that self-interest has led him to some dark places. The current scapegoating of immigrants is a calculated move, but that doesn’t mean it won’t end up having consequences for large numbers of people. And he has been crystal-clear about his intention to use the levers of government to punish his political enemies, given the chance.
If it came to a choice, I don’t doubt that TFG would sacrifice the lives of six million people to save his own pasty white ass. He wouldn’t think twice about it.
I was mostly disengaged from politics over the weekend — we drove up to Hood River, OR to see a friend’s band, who turned out to be quite good! Shout-out to Rod and co. and also to opening act the Little Hexes, who treated us to a faithful yet quirky cover of “Bela Lugosi’s Dead” to kick off the evening.
I did catch a few references online to That Fucking Guy’s rally at Madison Square Garden, which even the NYT — so careful about everything this election cycle — called “a carnival of grievances, misogyny and racism,” explaining:
A comic kicked off the rally by dismissing Puerto Rico as a “floating island of garbage,” then mocked Hispanics as failing to use birth control, Jews as cheap and Palestinians as rock-throwers, and called out a Black man in the audience with a reference to watermelon.
Buzz today indicates that there may actually be repercussions for this, for once. There are many Americans of proud Puerto Rican heritage and more of them may vote now.
Only recently did I realize how much the producers of The Apprentice (the TV show — not the movie, which I can’t decide if I want to see) are responsible for our current national nightmare. By showing the world an idealized version of That Fucking Guy who appears to be a smart, successful businessman — when in fact he is only, barely, the last of those — they created a monster.
Americans believe what we see on the Sacred Box.1Smash cut to TFG saying that of course they’re eating the dawgs — I saw it on TV!I think that a lot of TFG’s voters still see the slick boardroom shark, not the gibbering idiot who goes on at length about Arnold Palmer’s junk. (I saw an extended clip from that rant yesterday, and it stood out how the audience — who at first are delightfully scandalized by the racy subject matter — quickly get bored and by the end seem to be having existential crises. When you’re losing people with dick jokes, you’re really bombing.)
Lately when I flip on CNN or MSNBC they’re all fascist this and TFG hearts Hitler that. And I’m like, congratulations, you finally figured it out! A little late, but welcome to the party.
I do wish they’d spend a little time explaining to people exactly what “fascist” means. Americans by and large are not much for history; we know vaguely that fascism is bad but would be hard-pressed to define it. I myself feel uneasy with my grasp of the history, which is why I’ve been carting around The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich and even occasionally reading it.
As of today we’re two weeks out from Election Day, which is maybe not quite as important a date as it used to be. According to the Times — which I still pretty much trust on matters of fact, though their willfully perverse editorial slant on this campaign will hopefully be the subject of an illuminating expose someday — 17 million people have voted already. And even after November 5 the wrangling over vote totals is likely to drag on for days, weeks, or even (groan) months.
Still, Election Day is the nexus around which all this revolves, and as it approaches I am trying very hard to cultivate serenity. (Post-Seinfeld, one tends to think that serenity now leads automatically to insanity later… but I’m willing to take the risk.) That doesn’t mean not caring about the outcome, but it does mean accepting that all is unfolding as it must.
I mean, what’s the worst that could happen? That Fucking Guy gets elected, ushers in the 4th Reich, starts deporting and/or arresting anybody he doesn’t like, and when his mind finally breaks for real — which it seems about to do any minute now — holes up in the toilet with the football and launches all the nukes.
But that probably won’t happen, and even if he wins, some of his worst plans most likely will never come to pass — not because his intentions aren’t evil, but because he is a lazy oaf with a short attention span.
Assuming sanity prevails and Kamala wins, there will be a brief period of relief, and then can go back to arguing about the Middle East, climate change, and other things that matter. Which we should consider a privilege, I suppose.
In the meantime, I’m grabbing peace wherever I can find a little. Music is always an important source of course. Here’s a song I always turn to in turbulent times, and it seems to still work, maybe better than ever:
