This Is the Season 4 Catching the Vapors
You getting overly excited about the possibility of Trump's exit from centerstage? Well, don't.
“Let’s not start sucking each others dicks quite yet.”
The speaker, a one Mr. Winston Wolf from Pulp Fiction, on the occasion of an almost successfully completed clean up of an untimely killing. The idea, generally, is neither pro or anti fellatio, but more a caution against premature celebration.
Like the time I challenged Ravi Coltrane to a game of ping pong. For those fans of jazz, a familiarity with his father John, is like basic Jazz 101. Jazz 102? Extra points for digging on his mom Alice, a wonder in her own right.
But it was backstage at The Moers Festival, an annual international music festival whose focus has been free jazz, world and pop music. OXBOW was playing with Peter Brötzmann (a pairing that would later resolve itself in An Eternal Reminder of Not Today: Live at Moers). During an interview I spied Coltrane across the backstage arena. Cautiously eying the ping pong table.
So I wandered over, the piece starting to frame itself in my head. What piece? THIS piece. Well, sort of.
“You want to play?”
Innocent enough but you know no such thing between adult males is ever innocent. This was a challenge and it was as life and death as if had it been for life or death.
“Sure.”
It seems, at some point, death will come calling and even the most valiant and well-intentioned hero (which Trump is not by any stretch), dies against odds someone will inevitably describe as insurmountable.
I hadn’t played really since I was 12, but it’s like riding a bike right? Right. Because I was blasting Coltrane to bits. I could swing it like he could play it and I was one point away from winning. The headlines were writing themselves: Running a Train On Coltrane, Training Coltrane, Playing the Blame Game With Coltrane.
I’m not saying any of the headlines were good. I am saying I was fugue stating it all over the place.
But I whiffed the win shot. And the one after that. And the one after that. In fact I did so until the score was tied. I was no stranger to these nailbiters though. And so I took a deep breath, served and drove the ball right off of the table.
Game over.
Fighting everything in my power to ask for a rematch, because who wants it revealed that they are a total maniac? Besides which Coltrane knew what I had known: this was a one-shot deal and I had shot my shot and been found wanting. There’s a lesson to be learned there.
Did I learn it? Absolutely not.
I know this because for the last few months I’ve been chortling like chortling was going out of style. About? About the “mounting” challenges facing Donald Trump in regards to the 2024 presidential election. The multiple court cases, the summary judgments, the fines, the sheer weight of one man tilting against the jurisprudential heft of an entire nation, seemed to me to be a cause for celebration for those who desired the man’s public demise.
More than this it might have marked the breaking of the fever that settled around the American head since he ran in 2016. Markers of which would be the death of the Republican Party as it had ever been known, replaced instead by Trumpism, a sort of Calvin Ball-esque policy free-for-all. That is, a realpolitik where the only thing that can be counted on is the whim of the man calling the shots, in this instance Trump.
Other febrile markers include a generalized knee jerk (and often baseless) hostility, along with a mean-spiritedness (and also, it should be noted, the comedic flipside of such), and most damning would be the refusal to believe anything not said by the man himself. And sometimes not even then.
But this is America and with a long enough view and a good enough memory you know there’s very little in American life that is insurmountable. IF the money is right.
It takes a real skill to say something, get criticized for having said something and then immediately say that you had not said that thing that drew the critique in the first place. Kids have done this to me since I’ve been in a custodial position and dealing with kids, and it’s always bamboozled me. Making it, by my lights, philosophically genius.
“Stop breaking those windows!” I shouted at a kid who had rocks cradled in his outstretched t-shirt, with one more in his closed fist.
“I’m not breaking any windows,” he said and I discovered that I had no counter to this. Because, if truth be told, and it was, he was not breaking windows in the moment of the accusation. Circumstantially one might find themselves led to this conclusion—the broken glass, the previously heard sound of breaking glass—but circumstance is for shit in a court of law.
Besides how many fights can be engaged in before a protagonist was subsumed under the sheer weight of multiple attackers with multiple attacks? And how many have entertained notions of what would have happened if Hitler had never attacked the Soviets? It seems, at some point, death will come calling and even the most valiant and well-intentioned hero (which Trump is not by any stretch), dies against odds someone will inevitably describe as insurmountable.
But this is America and with a long enough view and a good enough memory you know there’s very little in American life that is insurmountable. IF the money is right.
President Richard M. Nixon was caught dead to rights during a time when this carried some weight. Dead to rights and in a relationship with Joseph McCarthy’s hitman, lawyer Roy Cohn. Cohn, later advising Trump and as much as anyone, excepting possibly Trump’s father Fred, an influence on the man, was not called on to “help” Nixon who later resigned pre-a possible impeachment.
Not even “possible”, highly probable, Nixon quit before he could be fired. Toward the end of his life you could sense maybe he had talked to Cohn and this was something he deeply regretted. But he wasn’t just facing impeachment. He also was facing criminal prosecution on both the federal and state level.
The portion of the world that hated the 5-o’clock shadow man that was Nixon cheered his dismasting right up until September 8, 1974 when President Gerald Ford pardoned him. And that portion of the world, which also included me, was shocked, and not even a little dismayed. To see the ruling class skate by high crimes and misdemeanors just reminded us that all of America is Chinatown and the sooner we got around to realizing it was this way, the happier we’d be.
So, right before November and the potential sucking of dicks, those that wish for Trump’s political/professional demise might be good to remember that the “system” works best for those for whom the system was created.
Trump, in the end, might be undone but as long as he has a voice to speak his Descartesian non-epitaph will inevitably read “no, I’m not.” And he’d probably be right too.
So, yeah. No dick sucking for us tonight. Thanks anyway.
OK…So you have ordered the memoir A Walk Across Dirty Water and Straight Into Murderer's Row, from Amazon…Or the Bookshop.Org dealie: Here?
Might you consider giving it a review in either of those places?
I’ve been told it matters, somehow. So please: review away! Unless you think it sucks. Then, maybe, just keep that part to yourself. At last count there were 54 reviews…so yeah…GET AT IT!!! Every one helps. Or so they tell me.
While I'm hoping for his defeat come November 5, I think of myself as enough of a realist to recognize that he will likely take that defeat the same way he did his 2020 defeat: he'll behave just like that kid with the rock in hand, and say he wasn't. And he's got some important allies to back him up on that: Amy, Clarence, Sam, Brett, John, and Neil.