"You'll never get ahead if you don't take care of what you have." - Doris Waddell, RIP

The late Ralph E. Williams with "Heidi" - morris mn

The late Ralph E. Williams with "Heidi" - morris mn
Click on the image to read Williams family reflections w/ emphasis on UMM.

Thursday, January 4, 2018

Michael Wolff's "Fire and Fury" breaks through

Someday we'll all wonder why we were so passive during the Trump reign. We'll be lucky if no true disaster erupts. The fear is that the seeds are being planted now for disaster, with the Republicans' tax bill and regulations being ripped away including those enacted in the wake of Deep Water Horizon.
A crazed president seems motivated by nothing more than wanting to erase everything that Barack Obama did. In the back of all our minds, we seriously think (though might not speak it much) that Trump is motivated largely if not entirely by racism. It's quite a reveal for me as someone who attended a state college in the '70s where so many in academia seemed unhinged and wild-eyed in how they decried racism. Of course we reject racism. But this impulse should arise from our soul in the simplest of terms, organic, not having to be nurtured or cultivated by academics and their histrionics.
I sensed a danger several years ago with the movie "Gods and Generals," an odd Civil War movie that sought to find moral equivalence between the Union and Confederacy. I thought it was disturbing but heard little reaction to it. The public may have reacted (in effect) by not being entranced by this overdone and pretentious production. It was a bomb. Roger Ebert wrote that "men died like flies" in the movie.
According to convention, we're supposed to rationalize the conflict by realizing that the war was going to be liberating. Hollywood had historically given the South a break by portraying the men as products of their culture, gallant fighting men for whom history was not on their side. It is folly to support the propaganda that supported the South, propaganda asserting that the North was an invader or aggressor. "War of Northern aggression" was a term that had some currency. But all of this is usually presented in a sad light - a vestige of a checkered past in America.
We have a president now who says "good people were on both sides" of the Charlottesville incident. It's the same kind of moral equivalence.
I am writing this post on January 4 when we all awaken to hear commentary about a new bombshell in connection to the Trump presidency. I have a smile like the cat that ate the canary. It's not just that revelations are coming forward to unmask the Trump presidency as the travesty it is. I'm gleeful about the means by which this is happening.
I have previously suggested we shouldn't be too quick to draw parallels between the unraveling of Trump, and Watergate. I reasoned that was then and this is now. My late father would say "analogies are dangerous." That's why we have Godwin's Law which asserts that we should not draw analogies with the Nazis because the Nazis were so uniquely evil. It's a rule that gets broken in spite of its apparent wisdom. I'm not suggesting that the current presidency is in fact careening toward Nazism, though I'd forgive anyone for having such thoughts dance in their head. We are free to think whatever we want.
The parallel I now see with Watergate is the manner in which a clear hero is emerging. My grin widens steadily. My pride is all-consuming. That's because, in the midst of all the power brokers with their narrow little self-serving agendas, the back-biting among heavy hitters etc., it is a writer or press person that totally rises above. This individual is Michael Wolff. I have been familiar with his work for years.
Wolff committed folly when predicting that newspapers were going to meet their total doom within a tight timeline. We all knew the new electronic-based media was going to be a hydra-like specter for the old entitled print media. It was easy to sensationalize things. We oversimplified what was going on. Being a futurist is futile because if we really knew all the details of what was to come, we'd institute the model for all that immediately.
It's quaint to look back on the original Internet. It was like a collection of billboards, pretty crude, but we were fascinated.
We're quite over the basic fascination now. The digital miracles all go through a period where we're fixated, then we're bored and move on. I wanted to pinch myself to see if I was dreaming, when discovering the sea of music on YouTube. I grew up when you spent seven bucks for an "album." The miracle of YouTube doesn't have me really fixated anymore. It ought to. Let's be blunt: we have become so abundantly spoiled. We create a new normal and drift back to being the same human beings we were before. We still yearn for certain things we don't have.
The name of the Michael Wolff book is "Fire and Fury." It could attain the same status as "All the President's Men." It probes and reveals, and is drawing furious statements of rebuttal from those in the halls of power. The script is perfect. As a journalist I feel exhilaration: the idea of the primary hero being someone with no other objective than to perceive and report the truth. A purer objective you could not find.  It's the mantle I have sought to wear all my life.
So on the micro level, when I hear a story for public consumption about how a wounded black bear was allowed to simply wander out of town, after the rapid gathering of law enforcement (like the DNR), apparently just to observe, my brow becomes furrowed and I say "don't insult my intelligence." A City of Morris official suggested that the bear probably "went back to where he came from." A curious existential type of statement.
"Hooey," as my old co-worker Howard Moser would say.
Michael Wolff has stripped the pretense from the group of most influential people in America, showing the conflict, dysfunction and actual pettiness of the various players. And I'm still wondering: "Might Melania Trump have a stand-in?"
Would you believe: a Trump lawyer has sent a cease and desist letter to the "Fire and Fury" author and publisher. I'm reminded of when Mad Magazine satirized the movie "Jaws." The movie promoted itself with a warning: "May be too intense for young children." Mad noted: "That's like trying to scare ants away from a picnic by pouring sugar on the ground."
Do you think the media will have enough to talk about today?
- Brian Williams - morris mn minnesota - bwilly73@yahoo.co

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