I Called My Congresswoman This Morning

Movie Queue: "Singin' In The Rain"

Three thoughts about "Singin' in the Rain" just as soon as I dry off....

1. I've seen this movie countless times over the years — for awhile, when he was a toddler, it was my son's favorite — but today was the first time I'd ever seen it on the big screen. Even in this era of gigantic home entertainment systems, there's STILL nothing like seeing a movie on the big screen.

2. A lot of the songs in this movie were used previously in the 1928 Best Picture-winning "Broadway Melody" which ... doesn't hold up well. A lot of the jokes about the rise of the the "talkie" era of movies probably came from the earlier production, I'm guessing — Arthur Freed was involved in both flicks.

3. Gene Kelly stomping through the water is as pure an expression of joy as has ever been put on film.

I don't know how to deal with the paradoxes of Donald Trump. (Part 1)

I believe that ever-hardening polarization between the parties in America helped Donald Trump ascend to the presidency, yet his ascension to the presidency seems to mean that now is precisely the wrong moment to try to make nice.

Watching the Best Picture WInners

The last RedBlueAmerica column

Why John Brascia is the secret hero of Bing Crosby's "White Christmas."

Just finished the annual family viewing of "White Christmas." So good. And the movie's secret weapon? John Brascia.

Who's that? This guy dancing with Vera-Ellen:

Here's my theory: John Brascia's role in this movie makes no sense at all. Danny Kaye is Vera-Ellen's love interest in the movie. He should be, by the usual logic of Hollywood storytelling, her duet partner in all her big dances. Indeed, Kaye and Vera-Ellen have a lovely dance early in the movie:

After that, though, it's Brascia — who utters no lines in the movie (see the comments below) — who is the main dance partner. It's aided by the show-within-a-show conceit of the movie: They're practicing for an upcoming musical, you see. But again, this doesn't make a whole lotta sense...

...unless you consider this possibility: Brascia, and not Kaye, was the only dancer on set who could keep up with Vera-Ellen.

Yes, Kaye was enormously gifted as a dancer. But he was already in his early 40s when "White Christmas" was made. Brascia is a good 21 years younger. And Vera-Ellen is a hell of a dancer.

Watch this. Watch Brascia's feet, especially.

Love me some Danny Kaye. But he's not keeping up with Vera-Ellen there. John Brascia is.

It's OK! That's not a knock on Kaye. Vera-Ellen's vocals were reputedly dubbed by Rosemary Clooney. This movie knew what its performers strengths and weaknesses were and adjusted accordingly. More than 60 years later, it's still a hell of a watch. And John Brascia, whose name I bet you didn't know, is one big reason why.

More evidence that Trump's support didn't come from the "white working class."

National Review detects something interesting in the exit polls:

The 2016 CNN Exit Poll found, for instance, that Trump won among married voters, winning 52 percent, but lost decisively among the unmarried (see table below). The 26-point marriage gap in the 2016 electorate is large. (The marriage gap is calculated by taking the difference between the two candidates for the married and adding it to the difference between the two candidates for the unmarried.) In fact, it surpasses the 24-point gender gap also found in the CNN Exit Poll of the 2016 electorate.

Who is married? It isn't the white working class — at least, not as much as it used to be.

WaPo:

Over the last few decades, members of the white working class have also become less likely to be married. As this chart from economists Shelly Lundberg and Robert A. Pollak shows, marriage rates have fallen for whites without a college degree. About 55 percent of white men and 60 percent of women with no more than a high school diploma are married, compared to about 70 percent of men and women with four-year college degrees.

More about the "marriage gap" here. What's interesting is that divorce rates for college graduates has fallen back to about where they were in the 1960s, before the rise of no-fault divorce. It's the working class that's increasingly full of broken and never-been marriages.

And the point here is not to sneer at that. But given the overlap between elites and marriage, National Review's discovery suggests maybe that "white working class" narrative about Trump's victory has some holes in it.

Remember when Republicans complained Obama's policies created uncertainty?

WaPo:

That style, including his opaque personal financial dealings and his sudden shots at certain companies, has helped unnerve a corporate America that traditionally craves stability. Some business leaders and economists have worried whether executives can speak their minds about the president-elect or his policies without fear of facing Trump’s rage.

Why does Barack Obama think he's black?

An article at Carolina Journal suggests Barack Obama could've offered more racial healing to the U.S. if he'd identified as bi-racial instead of black:

Much of the Left imposes racial conformity — especially on those it considers its own. You need solid attachment to a demographic group, and not consider yourself different, an individual or, perhaps even worse, part of America’s old-fashioned melting pot. To lead that group there are expectations about what you should think, the language you should use, and how you should characterize others. It’s hardly the stuff of national unity.

Oh how I hate this piece. For a very simple reason.

It decries "the left's" tendency to force people to attach themselves to an ethnic group, rather than America,without mentioning or grappling with the historic reality and cultural (nevermind legal) power of the "one-drop rule."

Obama's decision to present himself as anything but a black man probably wasn't, for much and I'd say most of his life, a decision that really was his to make. Many Americans would've seen him as "black" no matter how complicated the reality of his genetics and upbringing.

Is this still salient? Yes:

The centuries-old “one-drop rule” assigning minority status to mixed-race individuals appears to live on in our modern-day perception and categorization of people like Barack Obama, Tiger Woods, and Halle Berry. 

So say Harvard University psychologists, who’ve found that we still tend to see biracials not as equal members of both parent groups, but as belonging more to their minority parent group. The research appears in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

People forget how recent the worst of our history was. Obama was born before the Civil Rights Act was passed. He was born before the Voting Rights Act was passed. He was born well before Loving v. Virginia was decided. And as the Harvard piece mentions, it was as recently as 1985 "when a Louisiana court ruled that a woman with a black great-great-great-great-grandmother could not identify herself as “white” on her passport."

And, not to throw anybody under the bus: I was told growing up — by people who encouraged me to see Martin Luther King Jr. as a hero — that marrying a black woman would be wrong. Because to make biracial babies would be a disservice to those children.

The past is never dead. It's not even the past.

Our societal effort to celebrate biracial children — to acknowledge the fullness of their histories instead of stamping them with the "minority" label — is both welcome and a relatively new thing. It still gets pushback. I don't know how widespread it really is.

Given that, and given all the history, it's not really remarkable that Obama thinks of himself as black. It's also true that he's never, ever hidden his white ancestry — in fact, has spoken of it prominently and proudly but also sometimes too honestly for white critics to forgive. 

So Obama thinks of himself as black? Sure. Most Americans would've thought of him that way, too, even if he'd self-conciously tried to identify otherwise. To pin any blame for America's racial problems on a decision that was compelled by America's racial culture is ... silly.
 

One last comment about Obama's "apology tour."

Rebecca Heinrichs writes that President Trump is poised to up-end Obama's "apology tour."

While certainly more a realist than idealist, more than anything, President-elect Trump has shown a desire to return prudence to the forefront of American national security and foreign policy, with an unapologetic commitment to American sovereignty and a recognition of American exceptionalism. He ran a campaign promoting the idea that America is unlike other nations. It is better. Unlike his predecessor, he will not highlight or apologize for her imperfections, because her imperfections still pale in comparison to what she is and the standards she holds herself to.

This is a standard for acceptable behavior that applies in almost no other realm of living that I'm aware of. "He has high ideals, so his failure to live up to those ideals means he shouldn't apologize for that failure." It's a standard that eliminates entirely the consequences of actual actions.

It's not a tenable standard. It's not one that Rebecca (who I think I can call a friend) would apply otherwise.

A nation isn't a person, though, so maybe there's an excuse in international relations for unremitting pride, but I can't think of it. Yes, the country has largely been a force for good in the world. Whole portions of the globe are free in large part due to America's actions. But the country has done ugly, wrong, nasty things along the way — both domestically and internationally. There's nothing wrong with pride as long as it's tempered with realism and, yes, the occasional apology.

Maybe you have to be, as President Obama has been, a black man in America to have a mature sense of both pride in one's country and a visceral understanding of its sins — and an understanding of why "we're awesome" isn't really the right response to those sins being acknowledged. Obama's about to leave the presidency, so maybe we won't have to have this argument for awhile. In any case, Rebecca's right: President Trump is unlikely to apologize, ever, for any American action taken on his watch. I wonder what the payoff to that attitude will be.

Reader email: The Electoral College

A reader:

seems to me a popular vote for president elect would never give your state a say in who it would be. No city in your state has enough population to sway the popular vote.

Me:

As it stands, no candidate ever comes to entice the votes of Kansans during the general election anyway: Everybody knows the state's electoral votes are in the bag. So we are ignored entirely, our wants and needs never pandered to.

That might change in a popular vote situation: States would cease to matter, but individual votes would be more meaningful. All those hundreds of thousands of Kansans who vote, fruitlessly, for Democrats, every four years would suddenly find their votes meaningful. Given the closeness of so many of our recent elections, a smart candidate might then be inclined to mine votes where he or she previously hadn't: An extra thousand votes in Western Kansas might suddenly make a difference they never had before.

Popular vote has its weaknesses, no doubt. But the Electoral College isn't exactly providing Kansas with a bounty of presidential attention.

What is empathy anyway? And do we need it in an age of Trump?

NYT's Amanda Hess doesn't seem to have much use for it.

Empathy, after all, is not sympathy. Sympathy encourages a close affinity with other people: You feel their pain. Empathy suggests something more technical — a dispassionate approach to understanding the emotions of others. And these days, it often seems to mean understanding their pain just enough to get something out of it — to manipulate political, technological and consumerist outcomes in our own favor.

I don't know if I think empathy, properly understood, is "dispassionate" or necessarily as manipulative as Hess suggests it is. My own take is that empathy is an attempt to walk (in one's imagination, at least) a mile in the proverbial shoes of somebody whose life and experiences are unlike one's own. That requires not just to dispassionately understand another's emotions, but to attempt to understand what it feels like to be that other person — to take seriously their fears, their joys, etc. That requires some emotional spadework, and a bit of humility. And that, in turn, raises the possibility you'll be changed by the act of empathy.

Since the election, I've argued against liberals writing off Trump voters. Some of my friends have mocked that approach — they understand everything they need to know about Trump voters because they voted for Trump, and, well, screw them. No need to try and get in touch with a Trumpista's feelings. And I get that: One's intentions rarely matter as much as one's actions when you're on the receiving end of those actions. If you're a person of color who — reasonably — believes that Trump's policies are going to make your life more difficult, painful, and scary, then I don't entirely blame you for consigning Trump voters to the "racist" bin.

Intent isn't meaningless either. And if every single person reading this manages to always match their good intentions with good actions — and has never accidentally hurt somebody along the way to doing something meant well — well, you're a much better person, morally, than I am.

What's more: In examining intent — using, yes, empathy — perhaps we can find what we need to change actions.

Here's where the humility part comes in. Why am I — privileged white guy that I am — so sure that I'd never be the kind of person who votes for Trump? What makes me different from that person? The answers I see from my liberal friends: We're smarter. We're better. We're more moral.*

*(Maybe that's a stereotype, too. Maybe I need to be more empathetic to my liberal friends.)

That's too easy. That's self-congratulatory. If the answer to your moral question is "I'm awesome," stop and ask yourself the question again, because you almost certainly arrived at the wrong answer. Empathy, as Hess suggests, might be an act of self-understanding ... but at its best, that self-understanding shaped by empathy is something like: I'm not the center of the universe. I can make wrong decisions. I can make decisions that, in other context, I'd find abhorrent. Because these things are possible, I should lean toward treating people with respect even when I disagree vehemently with them, because who's to say what I might do were I in their shoes?

So you look at the Trump voter and ask: What motivated them? Are they, say, terrified of people of color or terrified of terrorism? The latter is more understandable, and it might even look like the former. That's where a lot of us will want to wash our hands and retreat to our circle of Facebook friends.

But: If it is the latter, then liberals can look at the issue, devise solutions, and see if those solutions appeal to that voter. That's not unreasonable. That's what our politics is for.

If it is the former, well, there are limits to empathy. We're not required to endlessly try to understand simple wrongness.

Here's the thing, though: I keep coming back to Martin Luther King Jr. in all of this. If racist people are racist people and never shall their minds be changed — if we should write them off entirely — then it's unlikely the United States ever advances beyond the dark ages of Jim Crow. The non-violent Civil Rights movement was, in large part, an appeal to the empathy of many whites who otherwise might've been on the fence, or worse, regarding the rights of black folks. Empathy is not something merely to give, but also to receive and to elicit in others, in creating a better world .

All of this suggests that empathy is merely a political tool, something used to make other people conform to our standards. As Hess also suggests: That's kind of icky. Empathy is good and useful because it involves humility, because it involves an attempt at true understanding, because it involves (at its foundation) kind intent.

At its root, empathy requires humans to recognize that other people are also humans — with the same complicated mix of motivations, emotions, and obstacles we experience in our own lives.

Those elements are good in and of themselves. If it also means we get a better president, awesome.

Keep generals out of the State Department

Some of the names being bandied about for Secretary of State: Mitt Romney. John Bolton. David Petraeus. John F. Kelly.

The last two? Former generals — Petraeus from the Army, Kelly from the Marines. And maybe it's worth asking: Why do we keep putting military men in charge of our diplomacy?

Since World War II — and, roughly, the advent of the modern Department of Defense — former generals have served as the nation's top diplomat several times: George C. Marshall, Alexander Haig, Colin Powell. The latter two, it's fair to say, didn't exactly have distinguished tenures.

That's not necessarily due to their military backgrounds. On the other hand — correct me if I'm wrong — nobody from America's diplomatic ranks has been named to run the Defense Department.

It's a sign of American militarization that we have a tendency to think the skills of warfighting should be transferrable to conducting America's non-warfighting business abroad. More likely: It means the president's foreign policy is being run by somebody who already has a militarized outlook — something he can already get from, you know, the military.

I don't expect Donald Trump to build a team of rivals, believe me. But it's an ongoing issue. If you put warfighters in charge of warfighting and diplomacy, I suspect what you get is more war.

How Columbia Journalism Review gave government an excuse to crack down on reporters

Ari Fleischer makes the case that Trump is justified in treating the White House press corps like an unruly child:

The press hasn’t been kind to Donald Trump—and that isn’t its job. That job is to cover the news in a fair manner. But as the Columbia Journalism Review reported in October, campaign-finance disclosures show that those who work in journalism gave $396,000 to the presidential campaigns of Hillary Clinton and Mr. Trump, with more than 96% going to Mrs. Clinton.

I hated the CJR report when it came out and still do. First, $396,000 is barely a drop in the campaign finance bucket. On its own, it sounds like a big number. Relative to the actual number of journalists, it's microscopic. So CJR's headline on the original piece — "Journalists shower Hillary Clinton with campaign cash" — is the kind of clickbaity sensationalism CJR might well criticize in other circumstances.

But let's take a closer look at the report itself.

NEW YORKER TELEVISION CRITIC EMILY NUSSBAUM, a Pulitzer Prize winner, spent the Republican National Convention pen-pricking presidential nominee Donald Trump as a misogynist shyster running an “ugly and xenophobic campaign.”

What Nussbaum didn’t disclose: she contributed $250 to Democrat Hillary Clinton in April.

Oh no! A television critic donated to the campaign!

Nussbaum should've disclosed her donation when writing about Trump (and did in a later column for the New Yorker) but holding TV critics to the conflict-of-interest ethical standards that apply to political reporters is silly and pointless.

Other examples from the CJR report:

• Orange County Register restaurant critic Brad Johnson in California this year made dozens of small-dollar contributions to Clinton’s campaign totaling more than $750. 

• Fox Sports spokesman Erik Arneson, responding to questions about three current and former employees who gave Clinton money, said the network “supports employees’ personal involvement in the political process as long as it is compliant with applicable laws.” 

• At ESPN, baseball news editor Claire Smith has made numerous small-dollar contributions to Clinton’s campaign that add up to almost $600. Smith, who in a tweet last week described Trump as a “would-be dictator & sexual predator,” did not return requests for comment, and ESPN spokesman Ben Cafardo declined to comment. 

• Lauren Goode, editor of tech and culture news outlet The Verge, explained that her $500 contribution in February to the Clinton campaign wasn’t about supporting Clinton’s candidacy—Goode just wanted, for reporting purposes, to get inside a fundraising event in Silicon Valley.

So. Lots of people whose jobs have nothing remotely to do with covering federal government — or even local government — are swept into this CJR database. That's ... obtuse.

What doesn't seem to be included in the database: People who actually covered the White House, or the Trump or Clinton campaigns, for a living.

That doesn't stop Fleischer from marshaling CJR's report as evidence of a biased White House press corps, though. CJR's standards for the database didn't reflect good sense or sensible distinctions, but it's made a handy cudgel for those who reflexively like to bash the press.

Tweet of the day

Adam Serwer:

What print does that digital doesn't

This isn't entirely a new observation, but....

Three thoughts about the death of Fidel Castro

1. If anything should encourage modesty in U.S. foreign relations, the ability of Fidel Castro to survive nearly six decades as the ruler of Cuba should be it. We tried killing him, we supported a (brief) insurgency, we tried starving him. Nothing worked, except old age. This is a tiny island nation 90 miles from our shores. If we couldn't force our will there, we should be realistic about our ability to assert our will in, say, the Middle East.

2. Likewise, if anything should encourage modesty about U.S. intentions in the world, it's this: Fidel Castro was a rotten dictator who replaced ... a rotten dictator. Fulgencio Batista took power through a coup, remember, and presided over rampant corruption and exploitation of his country's economy by outside powers and corporations. America wasn't angry that the country was ruled by a strongman. America was angry that he wasn't our strongman.

3. That said, two wrongs don't make a right. Fidel really was a strongman. Lots of people fled the country or died trying to flee the country. He imprisoned gay people and journalists and dissenters of all sorts. The fact that he provided good medical care isn't really a counterbalance to that. American policy toward Cuba over the last century or more has been cynical, short-sighted, and often foolish. But that doesn't make Fidel Castro a hero. It just makes Cuba's story a bit of a tragedy.

Let's hope Castro's passing will help end that tragedy.

Filmstruck Queue: "Le Samourai"

Three thoughts about "Le Samourai" just as soon as I create a fantastic alibi:

1. I'd never heard of this movie until today, when I saw it as a Filmstruck offering. When I saw the ingredients — a sharp-dressed French assassin living by the samurai code — I was helpless. Play! And it's rare that I say this: This movie was everything I could've hoped it would be. Smart. Funny. Stylish. Sexy. With a fantastically tragic ending that, yeah, you kind of see coming, but they sell the hell out of it. I hadn't heard of this movie 12 hours ago. I think it's one of my favorite movies ever, now.

2. Just non-stop with the beautiful people. I mean...

Guys, I'm straight, but even I know Alain Delon circa 1967 is about as pretty as it gets.

I mean....

I'm blinded by all the beauty.

I know I know. Movies have beautiful people. What can I say? Even the extras were knockouts in this flick.

3. There's a scene when our protagonist takes his stolen car to a mechanic to make "legit" on the streets. I thought to myself: "Seems like Brian Cranston's character in 'Drive.'"

Wikipedia informs me that Walter Hill's 1978 thriller "The Driver" was "heavily influenced" by "Le Samourai." And, of course, "The Driver" was a huge influence on Ryan Gosling's "Drive."

Knowing your movie history can be tremendous fun, kids.

Bonus note: Other movies that owe a debt include John Woo's "The Killer" and (of course) Jim Jarmusch's "Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai" featuring Forest Whitaker as the Japanese-influenced hitman. Again: Knowing your movie history can be tremendous fun.

#NeverTrump Republicans fall in line

Matthew Continetti, June 17

This is not a good man. This is not a stable man. It is in the self-interest of no rational person to have him near the situation room.

Matthew Continetti, November 19

While hardly anyone — including the campaign of President-elect Trump — expected this outcome to the 2016 election, the Republicans I’ve spoken to over the last week are unified, enthusiastic, and eager to pursue Trump’s agenda. Giddiness is the attitude toward the prospect of GOP control of the White House, the Congress, and the courts.

Church

I continue to attend church, even though the old Mark Twain observation that "you can't pray a lie" remains true, at least for me, and I don't have faith to match the hymns or sermons. But community is a nice thing.

Here's my favorite part: The sharing of joys and concerns.

I don't know if your church does it. Certainly, it's not been practiced in all the churches I've ever attended. But at Peace Mennonite, a young child takes a microphone around the sanctuary, and members of the congregation share important news from the week.

My cousin discovered she has cancer.

The mother of a little boy in my son's class died suddenly.

And joys:

I found a place to live.

The disease in remission.

He's coming home. 

It's the difference between church and, I guess, Facebook for me. News gets shared on social media all the time. And that can be very helpful.  But in real time, face-to-face, I get a more palpable sense of community — of the act of "bearing one another's burdens" that community can be about.

I'm not a good bearer of the burdens of others. Not even my wife, all the time, and she's borne mine so wonderfully. So. Even though I feel a bit strange in the church, unable to sing most of the hymns, I persist. I am learning.