Bad Fiction/ Good Fiction
Two million nephrons are smarter than our brains
Hello Readers,
Because I lack self-control, I turned on C-Span on Sunday and caught the latter part of Trump’s speech to the Conservative Nitwit Association (CPAC). He was droning on, into his second hour, rehearsing the same weak claims that he won the election, and then (predictably) he hinted that he’d be back to win the White House in 2024. By this time the applause sounded tepid, the act seemed tired. And then he wrapped it up and the familiar blaring sound of the Village People’s “YMCA” came on, and he shambled off the stage.
I’ll never get over the strangeness of Trump’s affection for the Village People. It could be as simple as a cherished memory of the days when he gyrated to disco music while hanging with Jeffrey Epstein—who knows? Is it possible that his Christian supporters believe they are honoring the Young Men’s Christian Association, and the gay subtext of the Village People’s act eludes them?
They have everything for you men to enjoy
You can hang out with all the boys
It’s fun to stay at the YMCA
Well, that’s neither here nor there. We’ll be picking through the garbage from the Trump years for a long time, and today the residual litter that caught my attention was about how he gets away with using other people’s music for his own purposes. He played “YMCA” at his leaving-the-White-House farewell event on January 20. The Village People had long registered their objections and were ignored by Trump. In a statement after the January 20 event, the group said, “Thankfully he’s now out of office, so it would seem his abusive use of our music has finally ended.”
How is it that the copyright owners can’t prevent “abusive use” of their music? Therein lies one of those “intellectual property” tales where there is a certain amount of fuzziness in the law. This story in Pitchfork from last summer explains it: the Trump campaign had a “political entities license” to the huge catalog of songs controlled by the music rights organization BMI. Supposedly an artist has the right to exclude their songs from being used if they object. But in practice you pretty much have to sue to stop the violation—and that’s always been one of Trump’s methods of ignoring laws and courtesies. You don’t like it? Sue me.
A Short Review
Otherwise, how was the CPAC speech?
The bafflement is the same as always. The wisdom of the ages says you cannot build a solid foundation on rotten wood. If a person’s life and political career is constructed entirely on lies—and this is a man who probably hopes to build his future on an elaborate yet transparent fiction about a stolen election—everything will eventually come tumbling down, won’t it? How do all those True Believers not remember their Bible verses about those who cultivate a spirit of deception? “He that worketh deceit shall not dwell within my house: he that telleth lies shall not tarry in my sight.” (Psalms 101:7 KJV.) Truly, one can say of Trump: “Thine habitation is in the midst of deceit.” (Jeremiah 9:6, KJV.)
The Coming Storm
Apparently the followers of QAnon have a theory that the true president will be inaugurated this week, on March 4. It’s convoluted and you don’t really want to know the details, but you can probably guess who this legitimate president will be. An excerpt from the Vox explainer:
QAnon believers claim that the US federal government secretly became a corporation under a law they believe passed in 1871 but does not actually exist, rendering every president inaugurated and every constitutional amendment passed in the years since illegitimate.
But on March 4, the narrative goes, Trump will return as the 19th president, the first legitimate president since Ulysses S. Grant, with former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo as his vice president. Why March 4? It’s the original date that presidents were inaugurated. Inauguration Day changed to January 20 with the passage of the 20th amendment in 1933 — the same year that Franklin D. Roosevelt ended the gold standard.
More Fiction
Since we are discussing fiction, I might as well report that I finished Philip Roth’s novel The Plot Against America right around the week T. finally left the White House. Roth conjures a kind of soft fascism descending on America, due to the election of Charles Lindbergh over FDR in the 1940 election. In reality, Lindbergh was a prime mover in the America First cause, and there is a lot of resonance between Roth’s fictional Lindbergh and the America Firster now hunkered down at Mar-a-Lago, even though Roth’s book was published in 2004, anticipating the Trump administration by 12 years. The story is one of fear and confusion, and the way history in real time is “the unfolding of the unforeseen,” and the way Roth’s characters are plunged into “years of never knowing whether to believe the worst.”
In this version of the loss of American democracy, almost no one in the Republican Party had the strength to stand up against a popular Republican despot. The exception was New York’s mayor Fiorello La Guardia:
“La Guardia is alone among the members of his party in displaying his contempt for Lindbergh and for the Nazi dogma of Aryan superiority that he . . . has identified as the precept at the heart of Lindbergh’s credo and of the huge American cult that worships the president.”
And More Fiction
More recently I spent an enjoyable few days with the first novel of my friend Lucie Elven, just released (and available from Bookshop here!), which is called The Weak Spot. It’s inspired by French folk tales and is told by a young woman who travels up to a mountain village to work with a pharmacist who turns out to be, um, a little shady. It surprised me how much it felt like a prose-poem. But it’s hard not to like a story spun out by someone who is dear to you. It’s like Tom Bissell wrote last November, as he tried to review the latest book by Martin Amis, while revealing himself to be a huge fan of Amis: we assess books as humans, not as authorities, because “that’s all literature is: Human A, dragging his or her mind up a mountain, so Human B can follow the trail. We soar through time at terminal velocity, toward a destination that, on the best of days, terrifies. Books like this one slow us down.”
Tweets of the Week
Here is a very good and important question about “unity.”
I am one of those persons who has never been able to drink water through the day, just because you’re supposed to “hydrate.” Maybe it’s OK to only drink when you’re thirsty? I mean, maybe 2 million nephrons are smarter than the overthinking brain?
