John Adams: An elitist who believed elites were overrated and must be chained like the monsters they are...

This review by California State San Bernardino historian, Richard Samuelson, in the latest Claremont Review of Books is an awesome review. It is not that I agree with Professor Samuelson's criticism of the two books he is reviewing, for I think his gripe with the two books is that they were not about the separation of powers doctrine as much as the aristocratic vs. democratic tensions within the Constitution. But the topic of the books was the latter, not the former.  I know Professor Samuelson is being more subtle in his language, but its effect is what he is ultimately concluding.  Professor Samuelson, however, is a superior mind and I highly recommend reading every word of his review.

What struck me as I read the review was that I completely missed the release of the two books under discussion, but when I went to Amazon.com, my God! they were expensive. And frankly, I lack the extra money to purchase them considering other family priorities.  Oh well. For those interested and who have a bit of cash to spend, the two books are: Richard Alan Ryerson's "John Adam's Republic: The One, The Few, and The Many" (John Hopkins University Press, 2016) and Luke Mayville's "John Adams and the Fear of American Oligarchy" (Princeton University Press, 2016).* 

I am so glad the two books have been written because they confirm my long-held view of Adams' political philosophy, and some of what I have said as to how it plays into his economic thought.  Contrary to too many historians and political observers from his time down to ours, Adams stood for the creation of a government which elevated the rights of individual and regular people, and yet he stood for highly intelligent people to be leaders and to lead in a broad minded and fair manner.  One sees it in his almost sole writing of the Massachusetts Constitution, the oldest continuing Constitution in the United States.  What Adams recognized, however, was that aristocracy and elites in general are necessary evils for civilization to grow and thrive, but they needed regulation. 

The historian Professor Samuelson is also to be commended for recognizing that Adams' desire for  traditional, feudalistic sounding titles, the source of most of the criticism then and now of Adams from most historians and political writers, was at least partly inspired from Adams' reading of the then- and perhaps still radical French writer, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, on the subject. It is not enough to exonerate Adams for what was a tone-deaf idea (as James Grant recognized, too often, Adams' objective, and arguably eccentric, view of governing led Adams to be a "party of one." ).  However, to judge Adams on the one idea of titles for president or other offices in the then-newly formed federal government is to misjudge the man and misrepresent his wide ranging and thoughtful ideas.

I am not, however, saying that John Adams would have been a Bernie Sanders supporter, though one is fairly confident he would have opposed the very idea of Donald Trump as president.  The time we live in is, unfortunately, too much beyond John Adams' thinking in his own personal lifetime, which, though a long time--1732 to 1826--was not one in which I find much expansive thinking on his part in terms of political-economy once we hit the Madison administration. But one thing is certain: Adams was very wary of and quite hostile to the idea of open-ended corporate charters being granted by State governments, which wide-open grants began just as Adams reached his ninth decade.  Unfortunately, again, Adams was only slightly aware of what Charles Sellers writes about in Sellers' master world, "The Market Revolution." Jefferson, however, was even more out of it, mouthing reactionary nostalgia about small farmers and preaching against city business, and almost oblivious about corporations. Still, as Henry Adams recognized, Jefferson in power governed more like an Adams and eventually Hamilton (for those of us without the time to wade through the two volume history of the Jefferson and Madison administrations, Garry Wills' book on Henry Adams' work is still a marvelous read). Hamilton had the best eyes toward the future, but he did not foresee how industry and factories would make at least one of his ideas far more cruel than anything else, i.e., when Hamilton spoke favorably about child labor. Hamilton, though brilliantly recognizing how to think in terms of economic development and nation-building based upon economic development, was thinking of something far more humane, and remembering how he felt that he could have better helped his mother had he been able to work even earlier than he did.  And of course, let's quote Madison from Federalist Paper no. 10, where he is, however briefly, on Hamilton's side about the purpose of the federal government under the Constitution:

Those who are creditors, and those who are debtors, fall under a like discrimination. A landed interest, a manufacturing interest, a mercantile interest, a moneyed interest, with many lesser interests, grow up of necessity in civilized nations, and divide them into different classes, actuated by different sentiments and views. The regulation of these various and interfering interests forms the principal task of modern legislation, and involves the spirit of party and faction in the necessary and ordinary operations of the government. (Bold in the language added)

Again, maybe one day I will get hold of the two books, or at least the Ryerson book....:). But I am glad to have read the review from Professor Samuleson. 

"Justice League" review

I saw "Justice League" with The Wife and The Daughter last night ($10 a ticket in Rio Rancho, yay!). I thought it was much better than I thought it may be, particularly with the replacement of Zach Snyder with Joss Weedon. I like Weedon, but I have grown to love Synder's work.

Let's start with one negative: Aquaman's dialogue was unfortunately akin to modern Disney films such that he might as well have said, "No way!/Way!" or "Dyno-mite!" It demeaned him in a way that was harmful, as he is a truly heroic character for the people in the villages he serves, and he has so much grace in his movements.

And now the positives: I liked the storyline as it gave a great backstory for the Cyborg character (and I am so glad he did not suffer the fate of some minority background superheroes). I thought the villain was a marked improvement over previous villains in recent Marvel films and even "Suicide Squad." This guy had more depth and seemed more emotional and self-aware even as he was bent onto his path of world destruction.

The story continues the modern DC film philosophical storyline about gods and men, and continues to say the old gods before monotheism are real, while strongly implying that the god of Jews, Christians and Muslims is well, the myth. I keep waiting for the Christian Right and Muslim fundamentalists to go nuts against these films. Funny they don't...

The film's storyline also deals well with Bruce Wayne's remorse over his trying to kill Superman, and gives us a strong, mature Wonder Woman as the adult in the room of superheroes. The film's funniest scenes almost always included or were led by Flash, and yes, it is funny that two of the six Justice Leaguers are...Jewish. They can call Diana Prince an Amazon all they want. She is a tough Israeli warrior! Anyway, the Flash's comeback line to Bruce Wayne when shown his photo when the Flash had long hair had all three of us with what was called in "A Thousand Clowns," "outright prolonged laughter." And having the Flash be on the spectrum is a brilliant touch.

The Chernobyl touch as a place of evil where broken people live, and that an evil villain would want to go, was pretty clear to me, but shocked The Wife in later recognition.

Overall, forget the haters who act like they are paid to troll for Marvel. The attacks on Synder and the DC films he has produced, directed and co-written seem like the filmgoers' equivalent to "Yah! Red Team! Yay, Blue Team!"

Me? I love Marvel and I have come to love the DC films of these past four years. This latest DC film is a solid film, above either of the Marvel Film's "Avengers." I found in this one, that the heroes dealt more openly about their emotions, and pretty much everyone likes everyone else on the team--even as they know Bruce Wayne can be a jerk, and whose anger led indirectly to Superman's death. They still feel badly for Wayne as he is now in his Bojack "I'm a piece of s**t" Horseman phase, and does not really care about his own life. The film shows it is important to take responsibility for yourself, and Bruce Wayne becomes less angry at himself and the world by the end of the film.

Again, count me relieved more than in awe about Justice League. It was ultimately a solid film, and there is definitely room for a great sequel--with one challenge: How to make the next villain something beyond the usual tropes of superhero villainy that have become a cliche.

I wonder, too, what the Zach Snyder version of Justice League looks like, and hope we will see that on the DVD/Blu-Ray. So far, I think the "BvS" director's cut was far superior to the theater release, and helps people understand the transition from "Man of Steel" to "BvS," and why Bruce Wayne is so damned angry at Superman for the collateral damage he caused for what appeared to be a personal fight between Superman and Zod (remember in "Man of Steel," Superman does not go public with Zod's real plan for humans). And the director's cut for Suicide Squad also filled in important dialogue that helped give more context and depth to the story.

I still say it: In 15 to 20 years, these DC films will be studied in their director's versions by film historians, and Zach Snyder will finally get his due as a great director and co-writer for what are outstanding theologically-based films within the superhero genre.  And I will say we have lived through the Superhero era in films that rivals the Western era in films.  We are, we should also note, at the late stage, akin to the 1950s in Westerns.  The best superhero films that come out in the next five or ten years will be those which play with the genre like "The Searchers," "Johnny Guitar," or "Who Shot Liberty Valance."  And perhaps we may even see one day a film that treats us human Earthlings as the enemy and the invading aliens as the heroes come to save the planet from us--meaning "Avatar" meets "War of the Worlds." Whoa!

The Brontes and Jane Austen are important guides for understanding modern Western culture

I adored this freewheeling essay review from Alice Spawls in the London Review of Books and it got me thinking early this morning about Jane Austen, Charlotte Bronte and my own life experiences reading their works.  

I re-read "Jane Eyre" as an adult when my son was in high school because he so dreaded the English AP course assignment.  I said, "Let's read it together."  And re-reading it, I found it a very enjoyable and quite moving book.  I found her prose very smooth to read in the 21st Century, which made me very happy as a reader.  My son was okay with the book in the end, as I recall, and I know we had some discussion of it, but not as much as with my daughter about Jane Austen novels.  I also recall I finished "Jane Eyre" first.  My son, of course, had 3 other AP courses he was going through and was having at least 4 hours or more of homework after a day of school literally every weekday, and more hours of homework on the weekends, even as he was busy with being a Boy Scout working toward the Eagle status. 

But back briefly to Alice Spawls' essay-review.  I adore biographies, while Alice Spawls makes a case against biographies to a great extent.  I think her points are valid and I am happy she recognizes she is not completely correct in her personal dismissal of biographies.  I agree with her that too often, with biographies of literary people, we get caught up in their personal lives, and increasingly relegate their writings to the background.  This was Gore Vidal's point in his brilliant essay-review of the first biography of F. Scott Fitzgerald that appeared in the 1950s.  It is reprinted in his massive volume of essays, "United States," and is well worth reading. 

What Spawls' essay-review reminds me of, however, is this: A person who reads Jane Austen and Charlotte Bronte receives an enhanced understanding of modern Western culture.  I believe Jane Austen's novels, and some of the Bronte works, starting with "Jane Eyre," help us understand what is known as the Regency Era of British history, and form a basis for us to see clearly what is in the background beyond their wonderfully still modern prose.  The novels often take for granted their professional worker fathers who provide them with homes with servants (though "Jane Eyre" is radical in its perspective of someone who is a servant).  The novels' narrators, and characters, also acutely aware that the characters' upper middle-class status still leaves them vulnerable to impoverishment if something goes wrong, unlike the aristocrats who still had major power over the politics, economics and culture in British society at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution in the early 19th Century.  

Reading novels of Austen and, to a lesser extent, Bronte make one a more serious observer of life and political-economic history. For example, after reading Austen or Bronte novels, one reads with more depth of understanding Edward Said's "Culture and Imperialism."  E.P. Thompson's magisterial, though unfortunately rarely read through, "The Making of the English Working Class" becomes a more illuminating and riveting experience.  And they even help us understand that technology is not a static, independent phenomenon, and that how technology is used or developed depends much on culture and socio-economics.  See, for example, Harry Braverman's "Labor and Monopoly Capital."

It is a shame when Austen's and Bronte's novels are reduced to their white skin, genitalia, or ethnic backgrounds. For each tells important universal human stories, as feudalism and the dawn of capitalism are what defines the last eight hundred years around the globe, and their stories appeared at a time when revolution against both trends had begun to occur, and when women had become more conscious of their second class status in both politics and culture.  Their narrations re-affirm the belief that people are complex, affected by circumstances, and should be treated with more respect and dignity, which, for all the hypocrisies of Western imperialist culture, is a hallmark of Western culture that will eventually, well beyond our time, hopefully unite the world from a philosophical and political-economic perspective.  For both socialism and capitalism arise from Western culture as guiding thoughts for organizing socieites, and what the Western European nations learned after fighting two ridiculously horrible wars on their turf (that spilled elsewhere due to imperialism to be called World Wars), is that a mixed economy, and policies geared toward human and environmental needs, work best for people.  It is what Daniel Bell was getting at in his final thoughts of his book, 'The End of Ideology." The Austen/Bronte narrators reveal unfairness in how men and women are treated in traditional societies.  Austen and Bronte narrators stand for free love, and express ridicule and contempt for inheritance laws that go through males, not females, and attack the way in which maintaining virginity in women is a means of control over women.  Each of these positions may be seen as very radical, even today for many parts of our planet, and our own nation.

I end with a brief discussion of my relationship with Austen having been illuminated by having a daughter who I introduced Austen to in eighth grade, and who became so enamored that she read, on her own, the entire set of Austen novels. She and I often find Austen a touchstone to so many things, including political and economic oriented events and especially cultural events through today.  It has been a wonderful experience for me, and I think for her, to be able to speak with passionate intellectual engagement about Jane Austen and even from time to time, "Jane Eyre."  It has illuminated our parental child relationship as she reaches adulthood and has now to go her own way of working through and dealing with the rest of the world.  

I have, in closing, to quote the opening of "Pride and Prejudice" because it is so wonderful and speaks so well of our own reactionary time. Austen opens her novel saying: "It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife."  Yes, yes, it is hetero- and even cis-centric (the latter in that amusing transgender community nomenclature), but it speaks to political-economy in a way that helps us begin to understand she is not going to tell us a fantasy/romance sort of novel where we escape into dream regions.  It is a romance novel for certain, but of a far more powerful nature.  We are glad Jane Austen and Charlotte Bronte existed, and we are wiser for it.

A politics based upon our best, shared values should lead with economic justice

I hope people do not misread this article in The Nation as saying do not speak to white racists about economic injustice in universal terms.  It is an excellent article because it is saying, do not worry about being for sanctuary cities as it is not necessarily political suicide, for example.  

The perhaps ironic key take from this article is that too often in the 1980s through somewhat recently, it was the Clintonian type of candidates who were the ones who tacked right on race.  The article pointedly does not mention the following examples, but let's remind ourselves: Who should forget Bill Clinton's gratuitous attack on a woman rap star during the primary, and his eagerly supporting the electrocution state murder of Ricky Ray Rector during the lead up to his running for president in 1992?  Who should forget it was Hillary Clinton publicly using racist code language during the debate over the 1994 Crime Bill or the 1996 Welfare Bill her husband eagerly and cynically signed?

What I am concerned about is these above examples are not in the article and so, a Hillarybot like Amanda Marcotte or her ilk are likely to say, "See?  Bernie should not talk economic injustice because it is pandering to white racists."  It is not.  What we need is a politics that embraces our best, shared values regarding overcoming economic injustice with specific policies that in fact help people across racial and ethnic and even religious lines.  And along the way, but very firmly and forcefully, we speak about the racist injustice inherent in the current institutions that comprise our so-called Criminal Justice system or the immoral deportations that break up families or put people in jail who are otherwise wonderful people who have something to add to the mosaic that is American culture.  That is the language we need to develop, foster and support.  

Again, the irony of this article is that it shows how it was often corporate Democrats who were tacking away from anti-racism policies for which the modern Democratic Party should be most proud.  

And it is vital to remember that it was Bernie Sanders who voted against the misnamed "Defense of Marriage Act" in 1996.  It was Bernie Sanders who voted against the Welfare Bill in 1996. And Bernie stood with many in the Congressional Black Caucus, stating loudly they were reluctant to join the Clintons and conservative Dems and the screaming Republican banshees in supporting the Crime Bill of 1994. 

As my wife said to me last night as she saw there is a new documentary about Dolores Huerta playing in the local theater here in Albuquerque, New Mexico, "Before the primary campaign last year, I would say, let's go to this.  But I have not forgiven Dolores Huerta for the way she treated Bernie and Bernie's supporters."  Yes, I replied. I understand.  It is how I feel about John Lewis and his lies against Bernie as a civil rights activist, and Gloria Steinem's ridiculous attack on young women who were early and ardent Bernie Sanders supporters.  But, I said, too, I recall how beautifully Rosario Dawson wrote in her open letter to Huerta, which really is the way to go.  As we are tight economically ourselves right now, we will end up watching that documentary on Netflix, Amazon or Hulu, I think...

"Oh, don't relive the 2016 primary, Mitch!" I hear people cry.  I am not reliving it.  I am wanting us to make damn sure we learn the lesson from it, which is that we must no longer belittle, disrespect or attack economic populism. It is not 1992 or 1996 or even 2008 anymore.  We need to recognize that. especially with the deep inequality in our society, and with it, the rise of social media, we are in an economic populist moment.  And economic populism is the basis for a successful politics that promotes our best values and best public interests, and allows the space to continue to move forward to ensure we are promoting policies that respect people regardless of their race, ethnic heritage or religion.  It is a politics that demands we recognize racism in institutions even when finding individual racism may not be as easy as it was in the days of George Wallace and Bull Connor.   

Michael Harrington often wrote about the fact that the Civil Rights movement succeeded with the laws that began to break down racist attitudes and institutions across the land at a time when the white majority felt most economically comfortable.  For fear, he understood and wrote, is a powerful motivator for racist feelings and actions.  Harrington's insight should guide us in how we promote racial, ethnic and religious justice across our land.  And we have new evidence for his insight with this study from a Yale psychologist about conservative attitudes changing if they are told they are superheroes who cannot be shot or killed.  Corporate Human Resources Department liberalism is not the winning political formula right now for the national party, though the DNC remains in the throes of corporate donor influence.  What we need is Labor Union liberalism, where, a not so by-the-way, many public employee unions consist of minority leadership--something the wine and cheese donor class of the Democratic Party seems to forget.

Larry David stealing my material from eighth grade in 1970...

So Larry David was on Saturday Night Live last night and offended people with his Holocaust humor.

Here is a personal story people may find perhaps amusing and perhaps move the debate forward a bit: When I was in the eighth grade, in 1970,  the Jewish teacher in the English public school class I was attending was considered a "radical" because she thought Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen and Paul Simon were poets--unlike a lot of English teachers elsewhere at the time. Also, because she was so "radical," she liked to say to the class that they should feel free to say what they wanted, and she would accept anything from a student with the only proviso that it was to be well-spoken and well-written. She therefore properly agreed that decorum was important in a public school class, but she wanted us to free our minds and explore the  outer reaches of creative and critical thinking.  

Anyway, sometime during the school year, she assigned the class "The Diary of Anne Frank."  By that time, I had been force fed the diary (of course it was, we later learned, the misleading expurgated version, which also had some changes designed to turn Anne into Franz Werfel's "Bernadette" character) since I was seven years old in Hebrew school and into my bar mitzvah that year.  And starting in 1969, I became acquainted with Lenny Bruce and Mort Sahl, and by 1970, a young comic named Richard Pryor.  So, for my paper on the book, I was told we could be "creative."  And I decided I had enough with what the late Peter Novick called the sacralization of the Holocaust that was underway (I of course did not know about him or his later book on the subject), and wrote a parody based upon what happened to Anne Frank once she and her family were caught and placed into separate death camps.  I wrote it as a play, as I was fond of doing at the time.  In the story, I included the brutality of the camps, but I then took a sharp turn into Lenny Bruce-land and had the women's side raided by the guys' side because they got tired of not hanging more with the women. My folks went nuts when they saw it the night before it was due, and even my closest friend at the time, Barry Haberman, who agreed with me in most things at the time (Barry still loves "Harold & Maude" as my wife does, while I find myself more recently sympathetic to Harold's mother's pain), said, Oh boy, this may be too much, Mitch....

We were supposed to read our reports or plays to the class, and I did so.  It turned out everyone was shocked, especially as I was of course Jewish. What I realized is that the world is a bigger place than my own life, and one has to recognize that what had become trite and old hat to me was new to these non-Jewish students in 1970.  They were crying when they read the Diary and learned about the Holocaust, and I was like, what the hell do you mean that you don't know this already?  I also learned that comedy can be really scary sometimes.  I scared the teacher that day, as she had to confront the limits of her own sense of radicalism (she was a Lenny Bruce fan, as I recall, too).  

And what I learned is maybe keep certain levels of humor inside the room, so to speak--something the Wayans Brothers made a lot of money not following, I should say.  Yes, I considered the Wayans Brothers' humor in their show, "In Living Color," to be a send up of minstrel humor directed at African-Americans that I felt much of the white audience ended up going to themselves, "See?  Even they admit that blacks are lazy and shiftless."  So, yeah, I am calling out the Wayans Brothers though I know their defense is they were being "ironic."

I will also say the following:  Larry David's "Curb Your Enthusiasm" is not a favorite at all of mine as I grew tired in the past 25 years of the "Seinfeldian" style of mean humor of "You fell in the mud, ha-ha," which is a different humor form than, "I fell in the mud, and I am laughing too, because at some point we all fall in the mud."  It is a difference between Nelson Muntz going "Ha-ha" and us recognizing shared experiences together.  It is also the difference between Howard Stern's humor attacking women, homeless and minorities and Lenny Bruce's humor going after those in power, as Paul Krassner recognized early in the Howard Stern mania years of the 1980s.  I also grew tired of the whiny Jewish guy, who makes these sort of tasteless jokes, and get the "shiksa" (non-Jewish blond or otherwise beautiful woman) in the end.  I realized it was becoming tiresome, as whines do, and the indirect attack on Jewish women became more and more abhorrent to me.  So, don't get me started on "Meet the Fockers," either.  At some point, in the late 1980s, Woody Allen's films became laborious and tired, and frankly unwatchable.  And as a I said, I dissented from revering Larry David's "Seinfeld" shows and David's subsequent career, though I find myself laughing at some points when I see an interview with him, and I know, if we knew each other, I would enjoy his company.  

I must also say here I got a kick out of David's Weinstein joke on SNL last night as I have felt the same way he has from the start.  Bad publicity about Jews is not a good thing (the old saying "Is it Good for the Jews?", something this novel played with, had some solid insight and was a good read, too)...so thank you, goyish Kevin Spacey!  Time for the gay-goys to get defensive too!...

At some point, though, maybe we can decide, once and for all, it is not the ethnicity or sexual orientation that accounts for the bad behavior. It may be though that it is about giving men, in particular, power and money over others without the protection of sexual harassment laws, and overcoming a culture where the "casting couch" continued to exist despite those laws. The last time I checked, Nero and Caligula were not Jews--nor gay in the way we think of today.  At the end of the day, it is about money, power and testosterone.  

But let's also say something else here: The outrage here is just one more example of the manner in which social media has become oppressive itself.  I frankly don't care that someone on Twitter is outraged by something.  It is just humor and yes, I know it re-enforces stereotypes.  But really, enough with the outage machine already.  If Lenny Bruce was alive today, he would be literarily crucified by the outrage machine.  At some point, the outraged are too often people who are oversensitive and ultimately can't laugh at a joke.  My only exception to that anti-political correctness line of thinking concerns humor or speech referencing and promoting stereotypes regarding African-Americans.  For me, the history of the United States is deeply grounded with the oppression, repression of, and injustice against, African-Americans that resembles in many ways the history of European Christian treatment of Jews.  And after the Holocaust and World War II, many European nations, trying to come to grips with the cruelty and hate that fueled the Holocaust, appear to have been wise to limit speech preaching hatred of Jews or denying the genocide now known as the Holocaust.  There should be some cultural suppression of the mores that led to the degrading and eventual killing of Jews.  It goes against my principles for free speech, but I also recognize that when one is attacking groups within a national history that deeply oppresses that group, maybe it is not the wisest thing to allow speech that re-enforces what the nation needs to learn from and avoid.  I think it has worked fairly well in Germany without doing damage to the commonweal and its freedom of speech in all other matters.  As for the humor here, I would say it is appropriate for us Jews to keep in our own rooms their own style of humor that David uttered on television about Jews last night.  It works better around the kitchen table among one's own "tribe," perhaps.  It's kind of the way I felt about much of (but not all of) the Wayans' humor back in the 1980s when they literally used blackface tropes where the irony was so far buried most could not even see it.

So, yes, if you want to say how offended you were at Larry David, I am good with that.  I myself winced a bit at David's bit, but in the end, it's comedy.  Comedy is sometimes not pretty, and the outrage is more petty than anything else.  My not humble advice is this: There are lots of other things in matters of public policy with which we should be concerned. So turn off the outrage machine already.

How prog rock bands nearly always get me thinking....

A week from tomorrow is November 12. It is the 46th anniversary of the release of "Nursery Cryme," the third Genesis album.

This song from the album, the last track, is called "The Fountain of Salmacis." The first time I heard Genesis was on WNEW-FM 102.7 (NYC). It was this song, and I will always remember it was on the Jonathan Schwartz show, shortly after the album's release. I remember just being mesmerized, amazed listening all the way through. And I still get a similar reaction inside me whenever I listen to early Genesis albums. 

November became Genesis month for US fans for several years, with "Foxtrot" being released in the US in November 1972, "Selling England by the Pound" in November 1973, and then "Lamb Lies Down on Broadway," a double album, in November 1974.

Of course, the more relatively famous of the songs on the "Nursery Cryme" album, which became staples for many a Genesis concert for years later, is the opening song, "The Musical Box."  Here is Genesis playing it in 1971 or early 1972 for a Belgian television show.  And here too is a 1973 live recording, where Gabriel wears the mask that was so freaky and scary to see in real time.  My regret in life was not fighting my folks more when I wanted to shave the middle of the top of my head to be like Peter Gabriel.  Yeah, man!

There was a time in the early 1970s when those of us who loved progressive rock felt that there was a progression of great albums one after another. And then of course, the progression stopped. It hit the proverbial wall, as Stephen Jay Gould wrote about in his brilliant evolutionary science book, "Full House" (1996). Fortuitously, for me, in 1976, as the premier British prog bands were running out of steam and some starting to search for more commercial success, I came across J.S. Bury's "The Idea of Progress: An Inquiry into its Origin and Growth" (1920). I loved that book and wish I had not sold it after a semester at Rutgers. It captures the essence of a time when historians were still seeking to prove History was a hard science, like physics.  However, there was already an understanding of how much of what we want to think about culturally is itself a social construct subject to ebb and flow in ways that are as much fortuitous as intended by men (mostly men) of means and power.

See, this is what happens to me after I listen to Genesis' "Nursery Cryme." Maybe that is why I had so few dates in the 1970s when everyone else in the white suburbs seemed to be having such a grand time...:).

I lose the medical expense deduction so rich people can have even more money....

Considering I had two surgeries and other related medical costs this year, it looks like I will be completely losing the medical tax deduction so that Trump and Mnuchin can have no alternative minimum tax, the financiers get to keep the carried interest deduction, and rich corporations can lower their cooperate taxes from 35% at the top (too many of the largest corporations pay zero due to loss carry forwards and other tax loopholes) to 20% at the top, the complete repeal of the estate tax (which is already not applying to any estate less than $5 million or so), and other goodies for the super rich.

Yes, draining the swamp, and making America great again.

It was already bad enough that a person such as myself could not deduct medical expenses until it reached 10% of my income (It was one of the tax increases for the ACA that it went from 7% to 10%). But I lived with that because I knew that the ACA was providing insurance subsidies for those who were previously unable to procure insurance at all. But this change of a complete repeal is simply malicious to those already vulnerable with high medical costs each year. And, again, this year was a particularly expensive year where we are expecting over $25,000 and possibly as much as $30,000 in medical expenses, and my income is down from being off work and taking a lower salary to move to New Mexico. I created a lot of jobs for doctors, nurses, physicians' assistants, hospital staff and insurance company staff, didn't I? :)

Yes, draining the swamp, and making America great again. Thank you President Trump. Thank you Treasury Secretary Mnuchin. And thank you Speaker of the House Ryan, with your lies about the typical family to cover up the giveaways to people already rolling in money galore.

The Mueller indictments cannot come soon enough, I suppose...and we will live with President Ryan so that the natural Democratic Party constituencies who do not vote in mid-terms will finally see that none of this happens without a Republican dominated Congress, and it would then be more exciting to vote in a mid-term election. Yes, we are governed by greedy, venal fools, but it just gets worse and worse, and now, truly cynically worse.