Wednesday, November 20, 2024
Morning Blow
Sunday, November 17, 2024
Roberta Collins: 1944-2008
Actress Roberta Collins, whose B-movie career you already know about thanks to my posts from this past January, would have turned eighty years old today.
Saturday, November 16, 2024
Trump's Clown Cabinet
When Trump started making appointments for his second administration, I started breathing sighs of relief. He made Susie Wiles his White House chief of staff, followed by his appointment of Marco Rubio as Secretary of State. So far, so good. More recently, there was the appointment Doug Burgum as Secretary of the Interior. Okay, that makes sense - he's the governor of North Dakota, he's dealt with land-use issues, and the Interior Department deals with resource management.
Then came the flooding of the zone.
Trump appointed Pete Hegseth - a Fox News "journalist" with no experience in administrating - Secretary of Defense.
Hegseth is a combat veteran and an a National Guard officer. Appointing Hegseth to lead the Pentagon would be like appointing the head teller of a bank branch as Secretary of the Treasury. Oh, great, I might have just given Trump an idea!
One fear is that Trump would nominate Mike Davis to be Attorney General. Davis is a combative lawyer who has verbally threatened New York State Attorney General Letitia James not go continue to investigate Trump further or the administration will "put her fat ass" in prison.
Instead, Trump named Matt Gaetz Attorney General.
Gaetz is known for credible accusations against him for having sex with minors, and he's a lawyer who never had a case. He's also never run anything larger than his own House of Representatives office.
And I'm so supposed to be happy that the Attorney General-designate is not Mike Davis?
Meanwhile, a son of a former Attorney General is on tap to be Secretary of Health and Human Services - Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. An environmental lawyer who would be more useful heading the Environmental Protection Agency, Kennedy is a vaccine skeptic and a conspiracy theorist who thinks he can make Americans healthier with home remedies involving chicken broth, honey, and a calf-liver compress or two - and he apparently believes that the best way to immunize Americans from the measles or the mumps is to have everyone catch them to develop herd immunity.
Kennedy is accused of having no experience with pharmaceuticals. Not true - he's a former heroin addict!
You're going to need a shot of smack to endure Tulsi Gabbard, who's known for talking smack about American policy in Ukraine and Vladimir Putin's good intentions, in her new role as Director of National Intelligence!
A former congresswoman from Hawaii who was once a progressive and has no experience in intelligence and espionage - except for maybe having watched a James Bond movie or two - Gabbard, who's more of a Bond girl than Bond (yes, I said that), is a woman of Asian and Pacific Islander (AAPI) heritage, suggesting that she would be Trump's token DEI pick.
Ladies and gentlemen, the Cabinet of Trump Mark Two!
Second verse, same as the first.Friday, November 15, 2024
Music Video Of the Week - November 15, 2024
Thursday, November 14, 2024
Whither Biden 2024?
You know what's depressing about the popular-vote result of the election? Although Donald Trump got as many votes as he did in 2020, millions of Democrats decide to stay home rather than vote for Kamala Harris.
But what if Joe Biden had remained at the top of the Democratic ticket?
In short, the consensus was that it was either Biden or a houseplant.
So what if Biden had resisted calls to step down and tried to persevere? We'll never know. It's all good and fine to suggest that he would have been able to eke out a victory if his own party - and George Clooney - hadn't publicly trashed him this past summer. Certainly Biden would have done his best to recover from that debate with Trump in a second debate. Obviously he would have gotten out more in front with the voters, an opportunity the pandemic denied him in 2020. Clearly he would have talked a lot about economic issues, which would have rung more true from him given his background. No doubt he would have done his darnedest to make the election about Trump - because of it was about Trump, the Democrats might have gotten an edge. But the evidence for a Biden victory had he gotten the full support of his party and not had to deal with jokers like Dean Phillips is nonexistent.
So what if Biden had decided not to stand for re-election much sooner? What if he had decided not to do so in January 2023 and had announced that he would not seek re-election in his February 2023 State of the union address? Despite the apparent lack of able contenders to succeed him, there is, to be sure, that someone will make the argument that an unlikely presidential possibility - former Maryland governor Martin O'Malley, Kentucky governor Andy Bashear, North Carolina governor Roy Cooper, or someone no one, not even I, has heard of - would have won the nomination in a fair and open primary/caucus contest and gone on to win the general election. But the case for a dark horse flies in the face of the likeliest scenario - the party would have immediately coalesced behind Vice President Harris, as Representative James Clyburn (D-SC) insisted should happen back in 2022.
But at least, if Harris had become the presumptive Democratic nominee much earlier, she might have been able to get more people to know her better and had much more time to do so that the 105 days or so she did have.
Then again, maybe the American people never really did want as President a black woman whose husband is a Jew, and no difference of circumstances would have changed that.
It is just this sort of second-guessing and pondering what might have been that is going to plague and bedevil the Democrats as they prepare for next year's gubernatorial elections in New Jersey and Virginia and the 2026 midterms . . . assuming they're still on under Trump 47.
Trump is already teasing the idea of a third term for himself, which is possible only if he terminates the Constitution.
Wednesday, November 13, 2024
Shut Up, Nancy!
Tuesday, November 12, 2024
Election 2024: The Post-Mortem, Part Four
And now, a look at the vote.
Also, 80 percent of the nation's counties (or municipalities in Alaska and parishes in Louisiana) shifted more Republican. Trump did better than Joe Biden in many jurisdictions and Harris did worse than Biden in many others. So many counties shifted to Trump that in only Massachusetts and Hawaii did Harris carry every county.
Even most of the 19 states Harris won shifted more to the GOP. New Jersey, where I live, supported Hillary Clinton over Trump by nine percentage points, and Biden carried the state by sixteen points. Harris carried it by only five. She only carried Virginia by a very slim margin.
Also, Trump carried virtually every demographic group. As noted in my previous post, he carried white male voters - not just out of the reasons I've already defined, but for lingering anger white men, including I myself, have toward the denigration of us for everything from colonialist genocide to slavery to manifest destiny to Pat Boone. I had nothing to do with any of that, and neither did a lot of other white males (who are referred to as "white guys," that phrase meant to be a pejorative), yet we continue to be denigrated for these atrocities. Many of us are not racist or sexist or have not committed acts of bigotry, yet we're guilty of that charge until we're proven innocent. If I had a higher intolerance for that sort of what James Carville calls ""jackassery," like many white men do, I might have voted for Trump myself. I didn't. But a lot of white men did, because of that anger, joining with the white men who are total jerks who were already with Trump.
But guess what? A majority of white women voted for Trump, despite warnings that he would put further restrictions on reproductive rights and might criminalize it nationally altogether. This is because many states have already codified abortion rights, and seven states voted to do the same this year, and Trump has promised not to sign a federal abortion ban. White women decided that reproductive rights in states where abortion is legal would remain safe under Trump and voted for him out of concern for the economy. So did Hispanics, whose votes Trump won 45 percent of, as well as a majority of the Hispanic male vote, and he drew more votes from black men as well.
Monday, November 11, 2024
Election 2024: The Post-Mortem, Part Three
The Democrats are already talking about a forensic study of last week's election returns to figure out how they blew it. They thought they had everyone behind them based on the formation of pro-Harris social-media groups - Black Women For Harris, Latinos For Harris, White Women For Harris - White Dudes For Harris! White Dudes For Harris, a social media group spearheaded by Jeff Bridges, one of the most esteemed and revered actors in Hollywood - more so than George Clooney. What could possibly go wrong when you had white men for Kamala Harris?
How about the fact that that the white men for Harris could have held their in-person meetings in a broom closet?
Donald Trump did better with white males than with any other demographic, which should not have surprised anyone. But he was able to improve marginally with black male voters and even more with male Hispanic voters. Despite having a running mate who loves to go hunting, despite featuring Bruce Springsteen at her rallies, and despite appealing to so-called "girl dads" who wanted to protect their daughters from extremist MAGA policies, Harris was never going to win over a large number of male voters. It wasn't just because too many men could not imagine a female President. It's because her campaign had a soft-focus approach to people who voted more out of emotion than reason. In other words, she ignored the large masculine side of the electorate - the "bro culture." The Harris campaign's rallies had an effeminate air to them, featuring celebrity surrogates like Beyoncé Knowles and Oprah Winfrey in a love-fest atmosphere that sometimes bordered on rainbows and unicorns. But none of this addressed the concerns of men - especially young men.
The economist Scott Galloway has commented on this repeatedly on cable television, noting how young men are less likely to go to college and have disconnected with society at large, while their female peers have been succeeding in academics and the workplace at a much higher rate. Young men have returned inward, spending more time online - not blogging, a constructive labor I engage in, but playing video games and communicating on right-wing chat boards. The Harris campaign addressed the concerns of many Americans, but the young men who felt left out of society felt left out of the Harris narrative.
In fact, Harris's entire approach to appealing to masculinity was all wrong. Instead of hunting, like Tim Walz, many men today go for kickboxing. Instead of Bruce Springsteen, they listen to Jason Aldean. And not every man has a daughter. Some not only don't have daughters, they also don't have sons. Not only aren't many men married, a lot of men don't even have girlfriends.
Of course, not all men are toxically masculine, but in America, a lot of men are. A lot of American men like NFL football, listen to macho country music, and drive Ford pickup trucks. I like soccer, listen to jazz, and drive a Volkswagen Golf, but while all that would be fine in France, here that makes me a pussy. In America, of course, being a pussy is tantamount to treason. And if you don't listen to Joe Rogan (below), that goes double.
There might be a way for Democrats to appeal to men going forward, assuming the Democratic Party is allowed to exist under a second Trump term. But getting Jeff Bridges and George Clooney to speak on their behalf isn't going to cut it. Those actors represent a suave, sophisticated masculinity that is completely alien to today's male culture. The fact that the Harris campaign even needed surrogates like Bridges, Clooney or Bruce Springsteen to appeal to men was actually an Achilles heel. Because Donald Trump only needed one surrogate.
His name was Donald Trump.
Stay tuned for Part Four.
Sunday, November 10, 2024
Election 2024: The Post-Mortem, Part Two
The joke going around Europe and north of the border is this: "What borders on stupidity? Canada and Mexico."
Americans are in fact quite stupid, believing that Hemingway wrote "The Grapes of Wrath" and that Hamlet wrote "Cyrano de Bergerac," and that Alexis de Tocqueville should never have divorced Blake Carrington. And Americans are so ignorant of European history that they probably think that England has never had a revolution or a civil war, supposing that kings and queens have simply died and been succeeded for a thousand years with no fuss or muss. They're so stupid that restrooms in restaurants and coffee shops have signs that say "EMPLOYEES MUST WASH HANDS BEOFRE RETURNING TO WORK," a point of fact that once went without saying. Conservatives - at least MAGA conservatives - are especially lunkheaded, believing that humans and dinosaurs co-existed and that all Frenchmen are homosexuals. Certainly, this stupidity propelled Trump back into the White House. But there's a lot of idiocy among so-called progressives - and that's another reason the Democrats lost in 2024.
Back in the 1960s and the 1970s, the last period in which the Democrats were unquestionably dominant, the party adhered to a liberalism defined not only by support for labor, civil rights legislation, and anti-poverty programs but by building infrastructure and promoting science, which is what the space program was. As the only elected Republican President between 1961 and 1981, Richard Nixon bent to the liberal ethos of American politics by nationalizing passenger rail transport, creating the Environmental Protection Agency, and expanding scholastic athletic opportunities to girls. And, as liberalism, all of this made sense.
In today's neoliberal era, the Democrats have pursued a so-called progressive agenda that John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson would hardly recognize. The Democrats have been happy to trust the free market to deliver the nice things that governments should provide while they pursue such nuts-and-bolts issues as hair anti-discrimination legislation. Instead of prioritizing economic issues that people care about, they've been busy appealing to different groups and been playing identity politics. They've even tried to police the lexicon in which to have a discourse. Non-heterosexuals were called "LGBTQ," an unpronounceable acronym (the Q is for "questioning" - my question is why so-called progressives spend time trying to come up with acronyms no one can pronounce). They decided that blacks should be called "Blacks," with a capital B - elevating a statistical population group to an nationality, after realizing that "African-American" took too long to say. "Hispanics" were then called "Latinos," because Spanish-speaking populations must be referred to in the Spanish language only, but given the gender-sensitive nouns of the Spanish language, liberal English-speaking Americans decided to call them "Latinx" - pronounced "Latin EX," not "la-TINKS." And all of these groups have been called "communities" - as in, "New Jersey's Black community," suggesting that every black person in New Jersey lives on the same block in Newark. (And how about "Jewish Americans" or "Muslim Americans" in place of "American Jews" and "American Muslims," the former terms suggesting that an American's religion is more important than his nationality?)
Even the Black Lives Matter movement, essential as it is to raise public awareness of the senseless killing of black citizens by trigger-happy police officers, has mutated into ignorance and moronism. So-called progressive activists tied the movement to an effort to "defund" the police, failing to understand that most residents of underserved minority neighborhoods want a strong police force to protect them from criminals. They stigmatized Democrats like Martin O'Malley for saying that "all lives matter" because conservatives have used that phrase to downplay racist policing and because the premise that all lives matter should go without saying but is an obvious contradiction of reality - even though Democrats like O'Malley, the most recent white mayor of black-majority Baltimore, have a proven track record of serving everyone, not just one group or another. But the stupidity persists. A meme I came across on Facebook once explained that saying "Black lives matter" does not mean that other people's lives don't matter, just as people in the movement to save the whales would never say, "Fuck the other fish."
How is that an example of stupidity? A whale is a mammal, not a fish.
Saturday, November 9, 2024
Election 2024: The Post-Mortem, Part One
Kamala Harris is innocent.
She ran a flawless presidential campaign, she was always on point, she demonstrated a command of the issues, she proved that she had earned her place at the top of the presidential ticket despite never having competed in a primary, and she offered a program that would move the country forward and guarantee freedom for all.
But in the end, 51 percent of voters did not want as President a black woman of partial South Asian descent who prefers Bootsy Collins to Phil Collins and whose husband is a Jew.
Although Harris did what she had to do to win and did her best to convey that she got what voters were going thorough economically and, wisely, did not lean into her sex - the opposite of Hillary Clinton, on both counts - there's plenty of blame to go around in the rest of the party. Jamie Harrison, the Democratic National Committee chairman, deserves blame for not reaching out to voters in the Midwestern and Southern states or committing to a fifty-state strategy like Howard Dean did. Janet Yellen didn't help matters any by calling inflation "transitory." Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, despite her best intentions, certainly made the Democrats look foolish with a Green New Deal that wasn't so much aspirational as it was fantasy. But Democrats at large deserve the lion's share of the blame because the party has largely abandoned the working class in favor of neoliberalism, that idiotic belief that social progress and positive change can come in a free market that offers a variety of goods and services coupled with economic opportunity with a government that provides minimal services beyond a strong military. The Democrats are a party of elitists who discuss policy over French wine and cheese and spend summer vacations on the Riviera while the closest a working-class bloke ever came to the Riviera was when he rode in the back seat of his dad's old Buick.
President Biden, meanwhile, is more or less the last Democrat who has not forgotten about the working class. He's the most pro-worker, pro-union, pro-blue-collar President we've had since Harry Truman. Bernie Sanders has considered Biden to be an ally. But he's been undermined by a party of neoliberals who continue to offer a retread of the Clinton and Obama policy prescriptions. And to be blunt, the President enabled Trump's win largely for deciding to quit the 2024 campaign when he did. The reason for this is twofold. First, he chose the wrong time to withdraw. If he felt that standing down from a re-election bid was the right thing to do, he should have done that in early 2023 to give the Democrats a chance to select a new presidential nominee on their own. Maybe Harris would still have been nominated. Maybe not. Second, he withdrew in July 2024, and despite endorsing Harris and giving her his full support, he bequeathed to her a campaign apparatus that was designed to re-elect an incumbent President, not elect a new one. The biggest miracle is that when the Biden campaign became the Harris campaign, she had a hundred days to eke out a victory and she almost did. But once again, the Democrats at large need to share the blame here; the party leadership, which never accepted Biden in the first place, publicly trashed him and all but forced him to withdraw when he said he was staying in the campaign and Democrats like Nancy Pelosi refused to take yes for an answer. Kudos to Pennsylvania senator John Fetterman - no one's idea of an elitist - for standing by Biden.
And after all that, I have more. But this blog post is already too long, and so I'll continue with Part Two next.
Friday, November 8, 2024
Unfinished Music Video Of the Week: November 8, 2024
Wednesday, November 6, 2024
Sunday, November 3, 2024
My Unenthusiastic Vote - Part Two
I can't wait until Election Day is over . . . and then I can go back to watching something other than the news on television. Unless, of course, Trump wins and i have to prepare to flee the country before he returns to power and turns the nation into a 3.8-million-square-mile East Berlin.
But, assuming Kamala Harris wins, which is beginning to look more likely, I am expecting the next four years to be little different from the previous four years . . . though I do expect the Heritage Foundation to reprint a version of its right-wing agenda for the next Republican President with a new title . . . Project 2029.
I'm sorry. I've been living in These States too long. When anyone talks about change coming to America, I'm like . . .
Let me explain it in the best way I can understand . . .. When Bill Clinton was elected President in 1992, I expected change for the better . . . and got Newt Gingrich and the Contract With America, followed by another Bush. When Barack Obama was elected President, I expected change for the better . . . and got the Tea Party. When Martin O'Malley ran for President, I expected change for the better . . . and got laughed at for supporting a loser of a candidate, followed by a choice between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump . . . and then "President Trump," two words I still can't put together with a straight face. And when Joe Biden was elected President, I expected change for the better . . . and got the January 6 insurrection, before President Biden was even sworn in. After that, I pretty much decided that America is what America is, and we shouldn't try to make America what it ain't.
So I think I'm going to stand back, but not stand by. The 2024 election campaign is coming to an end. Wake me when it's over.
Especially if Trump wins, because I know his administration will see to it that, thanks to what I've written about him here, I'll be sleeping permanently. Likely, with the fishes.
Saturday, November 2, 2024
Loaded For Bear
If there is any doubt remaining that Trump, if he returns to power in January, will make opposition to him a capital offense, then Trump's latest outrage should sweep away all that.
That is, execution by firing squad.
Okay . . . Christian nationalism . . . one-party rule . . . monitoring pregnancies . . . and now firing squads as a form of capital punishment . . . I'm sorry, when did the entire country suddenly become like Utah???
Trump was particularly peeved at how Liz Cheney, like her father, could possibly support sending young men to war without ever having actually served in one. If Trump wanted to highlight the fact that neither of the Cheneys never served in the military and yet were "chicken hawks" who supported endless wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, he could have done it without threatening Liz with guns in her face. Though, any criticism of the Cheneys as chicken hawks would have had much more resonance coming from a man who didn't claim to have bone spurs to avoid serving in Vietnam.
The Arizona Attorney General's office is investigating Trump's comments as a possible hate crime.
Friday, November 1, 2024
Music Video Of the Week - November 1, 2024
"I've Gotta Get Get a Message To You" by the Bee Gees (Go to the link in the upper-right-hand corner.)
Thursday, October 31, 2024
Sex and the Single Clown
Wednesday, October 30, 2024
Dr. Steinister - Part Two
Tuesday, October 29, 2024
The United States of Amazonia
The late, great comedian Robin Williams once explained why boycotts don't work. He explained how he and some of his friends wanted to boycott products made in China to protest Chinese abuses of human rights, but they ran into, shall we say, a great wall. "Damn! They make everything!"
I have had to buy most of the products I've bought in the past several months from Amazon. Among them are a mantel clock, a saucepan, a few car-care products, and the very laptop I wrote this blog post on. I have found that, in many cases, finding the exact item I want in the stores is next to impossible. Oh, I might find the right car polish or tire dressing I want in the local auto-parts store, but more often than not, I have to go to Amazon for what I want or need.
And then there are books and records. I bought a book about the history of the Volkswagen Golf through Amazon, a book published in Britain that cannot be found at the nearest Barnes & Noble. And records - specifically, compact discs? Sure I'd be happy to by my CDs at a record store - if I can find one. You almost have to go to the ends of the earth to find a record store these days . . . Amazon has made them a little hard to find!
Jeff Bezos is a genius - an almost evil genius. He created a shopping system in which you're more likely to find the product you want or need through his company than in a mom-and-pop store, a big-box store like Wal-Mart or Target, or even a chain store at the mall. And by the way, next time you go to your local mall, you may notice that that record store you used to browse in back in the 1980s is gone. You might be able to find the album you're looking for at a locally owned record store - one of the benefits of Amazon monopolizing CD sales is that such record stores that survived Sam Goody and Record World are able to stay in business - but the the time and money you spend just to get there might not be worth it.
When you dominate the consumer-retail business so thoroughly that your business is always someone's best bet to get the product they want or need, you're more than powerful. You're omnipotent. So it's ironic that Jeff Bezos can't stand up to Trump.
Monday, October 28, 2024
Der Bund
Sunday, October 27, 2024
My Unenthusiastic Vote
Saturday, October 26, 2024
Out and In
If Kamala Harris is elected President of the United States on November 5, the transition of power from President Biden will be the first transition of power from one elected Democratic President to another since Franklin Pierce transferred power to James Buchanan in 1857. (By contrast, there have been five transitions of power from one elected Republican President to another since then, the most recent one being from Ronald Reagan to George H.W. Bush in 1989.)
Oh, she may retain a few Cabinet members, just as George H.W. Bush retained Education Secretary Lauro Cavazos from Ronald Reagan and just as Herbert Hoover in 1929 retained Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon from Calvin Coolidge (who inherited Mellon when President Warren Harding died). She's likely to have an even more diverse Cabinet; after Vice President Tim Walz, the highest-ranking white male Christian in a Harris Cabinet might very well be the Secretary of Commerce. She may decide to try to get Acting Labor Secretary Julie Su confirmed after Joe Manchin leaves the Senate, as it was he who slowed Su's confirmation to be the permanent Labor Secretary . . . or she might do what I suggested and appoint Tim Ryan to that post. But most of her Cabinet officers will likely be new faces one way or the other, some of whom we may not have heard of yet.
One thing is for certain if Harris is elected: She will not retain Attorney General Merrick Garland, given his foot-dragging in prosecuting the mastermind behind the January 6 insurrection (you know whom I'm talking about; I won't mention his name). Recent reporting has revealed that making Garland the chief law enforcement officer of the nation is Biden's biggest regret.
Friday, October 25, 2024
Music Video Of the Week - October 25, 2024
"Bungle In the Jungle" by Jethro Tull (Go to the link in the upper-right-hand corner.)
Thursday, October 24, 2024
Heil Drumpf!
Wednesday, October 23, 2024
Assembly Halls
Tuesday, October 22, 2024
Secession Obsession
Donald Trump recently chastised the memory of Abraham Lincoln, the first Republican President, for not having done enough to prevent the Civil War, and he said that he should have made a deal with the slave states that had threatened to secede if Lincoln was elected President in 1860. What Trump had no idea of was that Lincoln did try to make a deal with the slave states. He said he wouldn't interfere with slavery in their jurisdictions so long as the federal government was allowed to forbid slavery in the territories, but the South insisted on the extension of "the peculiar institution" to achieve economic and political parity with the industrialized free states in the North.
First, as noted in an earlier blog entry from this month, Lincoln was a minority President, having been elected with 39 percent of the vote. The truth was that over six in ten voters considered Lincoln too dangerous and radical to be President, and Lincoln had to tread carefully to prove otherwise if he hoped to govern.
Second, the Republican platform of the 1860 presidential campaign that they had no intention of abolishing slavery where it already existed. Although Lincoln personally hated slavery, he knew there was no way he could abolish it through executive order.
Third, the Dred Scott decision of 1857, which guaranteed the rights of slave owners to take their slaves into free states and back to their home states, was the law of the land, and not even the President of the United States can reverse a Supreme Court decision.
Fourth - and this is an important point - even though the Democrats had been so divided that the nominated two presidential candidates in the 1860 campaign, they had succeeded in electing majorities in both the House and Senate, meaning that they could block any legislation or presidential legislative proposal that Southerners opposed.
Which pretty much settles it. The main cause of the Civil War wasn't slavery. It was Southern stupidity. Stupidity has long been associated with the South, of course, but it's mainly been associated with rednecks. But stupidity, it turns out, has extended to the ruling classes - all the way back to the antebellum years. The leaders of the Southern states had all of these reasons for not seceding, yet they were so intent on keeping fellow human beings in bondage for the benefit of free labor - nay, expanding the institution at a time when other countries had already abandoned it - that they went ahead and tried to form a separate country, the Confederate States of America, and they got the whupping they richly deserved.
And what Donald Trump didn't get was the moral rectitude of Lincoln's effort to contain slavery in 1861, when he took office, and his move to emancipate the slaves and grant them full citizenship in 1864 and 1865 to bring about a new birth of freedom. Freedom . . . yeah, that's something he doesn't get.
Monday, October 21, 2024
Swiss Time Has Run Out
Did you hear about how the Geneva International Motor Show went this past March? No? That's because it didn't go at all.
It was canceled again? Oh, no, it was held, all right.
The truth of the matter is that the 2024 Geneva auto show was a bigger lemon than any of the Renaults shown in the picture above. In May, its fate was sealed when the show's organizers announced that they were disbanding and that there would be no more auto shows in Geneva. No one cares anymore. Only a handful of major auto brands even participated in the show, and none of them offer cars for sale in the United States.
All auto shows were in a degree of trouble by the end of the 2010s. Then COVID hit in early 2020. When the Geneva show was canceled that February, that's when I knew that this virus from China was serious. The show was canceled for the next two years due to la pandémie de le covíde and in 2023 due to lingering COVID fears and "uncertainties in the global economy and geopolitics," though the organizers were happy to display cars in Doha, Qatar to appeal to crazy rich Arabs. This year the show was finally held again in Geneva, but a funny thing happened in the five-year interregnum - people in Switzerland and elsewhere in Europe decided to do something else with their time because they didn't really miss it.
A lot of my own personal life was forever ruined by le covíde, and so were my plans for when I finally go to Europe - this show was on my bucket list. But as I said before on an earlier post on this blog, when would I ever find myself in Switzerland in March? The organizers have since retrenched and regrouped to continue holding auto shows in Doha, but I have absolutely no plans to fly halfway around the world to a dry, sun-baked, oppressively hot city in the middle of the desert with horrible architecture when Las Vegas is so much closer.
As for European car shows, there's always the biennial Internationale Automobil-Ausstellung in Munich (formerly held in Frankfurt), and the next one is in September 2025, but whether or not I make that depends whether we have a President who believes in freedom to travel wherever we want or a President who plans to turn America into a 3.8-million-square mile East Berlin.