NOVEMBER 2023: “THIS IS A TIME, THIS IS A PLACE”

11.30 Matt Bai in Washington Post: “Whether you like Biden or not (I do), the Democratic Party right now is taking a shockingly reckless gamble with the country’s future. The oldest president in history is about to become an even older nominee, backstopped by a vice president whom barely a third of the country likes. For the next year, we will all be one major health issue, or one small slip on the stairs, from inviting a lying autocrat back to the White House. The Democratic answer to all of this has been some version of: “Don’t worry, we’ve got this.” Which might sound familiar to you, since it’s precisely what Hillary Clinton’s strategists told everyone in 2016, when they tried, mostly with success, to shut down support for anyone who dared to run against her. That worked out great.”

11.30 Shane MacGowan dies at 65.

11.29 Henry Kissinger dies at 100. George Will in the Washington Post: “No one wielded the office [of Secretary of State] with more brio and flair than the first immigrant to occupy it. Although Henry Kissinger ranks, with John Quincy Adams, John Hay and Dean Acheson, among America’s most intellectually sophisticated and culturally cosmopolitan secretaries of state, even in his 10th decade his love of this country had an almost childlike purity. This was fitting for one who had seen Hitler’s Germany through a child’s eyes. Kissinger. . .made it his vocation to make America less American by inoculating it with a European sense of life’s irremediable tragic dimension. Nevertheless, he was, as immigrants often are, a romantic about the nation that took him in and allowed him to flourish. Kissinger leavened his romanticism with cynicism as he tutored this nation in realism. What critics called his elegant immorality, he considered the granite foundation of true morality — the facing of facts that are disagreeable and intractable. One such is the permanence of impermanence in the international system.”

11.29 Frances Sternhagen dies at 93.

11.28 Charlie Munger dies at 99. “I think life is a whole series of opportunity costs. You know, you got to marry the best person who is convenient to find who will have you. Investment is much the same sort of a process.”

11.26 Jamelle Bouie in the Times:  “Roughly half of Americans, some 169 million people, live in the nine most populous states. Together, those states get 18 of the 100 seats in the United States Senate. To pass anything under simple majority rules, assuming support from the sitting vice president, those 18 senators would have to attract an additional 32 votes: the equivalent, in electoral terms, of a supermajority. On the flip side, it is possible to pass an item out of the Senate with a coalition of members who represent a small fraction of the total population — around 18 percent — but hold a majority of the seats. And this is before we get to the filibuster, which imposes a more explicit supermajority requirement on top of this implicit one. . . .Today, the Senate is a distinctly undemocratic institution that has worked, over the past decade, to block policies favored by a large majority of Americans and even a solid majority of senators. And while there’s no immediate hope of changing it, a cleareyed analysis of the chamber’s structural faults can help answer one of the key questions of American democracy: Who, or what, is this system supposed to represent?”

11.26 Yippie Ki Yay at Proctor’s with Ginny.

11.23 A Thanksgiving visit from Cara, Ivy and Connor.

11.22 Sam Altman is reinstated as OpenAI’s CEO.

11.20 Tom Brady on The Stephen A. Smith Show: “I think there’s a lot of mediocrity in today’s NFL. I don’t see the excellence I saw in the past. I think the coaching isn’t as good as it was, I don’t think the development is as good as it was. The rules have allowed a lot of bad habits to get into the actual performance of the game. . . . .I look at a lot of players like Ray Lewis and Rodney Harrison and Ronnie Lott… every hit they made would’ve been a penalty. You hear coaches complaining about their own player being tackled… Why don’t they talk to their player about how to protect themself? We used to work on the fundamentals of those things all the time, now they’re trying to regulated all the time. Offensive players need to protect themselves. It’s not up to a defensive player to protect the offensive player.”

11.19 Roslyn Carter dies at 96.

11.19 Days after the artificial-intelligence juggernaut OpenAI dumps CEO Sam Altman because, according to a statement, “he was not consistently candid in his communications with the board,” he is hired by Microsoft.

11.19 Giants defeat Commanders 31-19. The Giants forced six turnovers and QB Tommy DeVito threw three touchdowns.

11.16 Washington Post: “Grace Linn [is] a 100-year-old woman who spoke out against book banning at the Martin County (Fla.) School Board meeting earlier this year. Her husband was a soldier killed during World War II. “One of the freedoms that the Nazis crushed was the freedom to read the books they banned,” Linn tells the assembled crowd. “Banning books and burning books are the same. Both are done for the same reason: Fear of knowledge. Fear is not freedom. Fear is not liberty. Fear is control.”

11.15 Gerrit Cole wins the Cy Young Award. Over the Yankees’ dismal season, he went 15-4, with a 2.63 ERA over 33 starts and 209 innings. Along with pitching a league-leading two complete game shutouts, he was at or near the top of numerous pitching stat categories, including bWAR for pitchers (7.4, first place), WHIP (0.981, first place), hits per nine innings (6.8, third place), innings pitched (209, third place) and strikeouts (222, fifth place).

11.14 At a Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee hearing, Republican Sen. Markwayne Mullin of Oklahoma challenged Sean O’Brien, the president of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters who was appearing as a witness, to “stand your butt up” and settle longstanding differences right there in the room. Earlier this year, O’Brien posted repeatedly about Mullin on X, formerly known as Twitter, calling him a “moron” and “full of shit” after Mullin criticized O’Brien at a hearing for what Mullin said were intimidation tactics. In another social media post, which Mullin read aloud at Tuesday’s hearing, O’Brien appeared to challenge Mullin to a fight. “You know where to find me. Anyplace, Anytime cowboy,” O’Brien had posted.  “So this is a time, this is a place,” said Mullin, who has a mixed martial arts background, to O’Brien, seated at a witness table in front of him. “You want to run your mouth, we can be two consenting adults. We can finish it here.” “OK, that’s fine,” O’Brien said. “Perfect.” “You want to do it now?” Mullin asked. “I’d love to do it right now,” O’Brien said. “Well, stand your butt up, then,” Mullin said. “You stand your butt up,” O’Brien said. Both men rose to their feet. Committee Chairman Bernie Sanders intervened, and called for them to sit down. “You’re a United States senator,” Sanders told Mullin. “This is a hearing. God knows the American people have enough contempt for Congress, let’s not make it worse.”

11.13 Axios: “Hundreds of people are spending tens of millions of dollars to install a pre-vetted, pro-Trump army of up to 54,000 loyalists across government to rip off the restraints imposed on the previous 46 presidents. The screening for ready-to-serve loyalists has already begun, driven in part by artificial intelligence from tech giant Oracle, contracted for the project. Social media histories are already being plumbed. . . . If Trump were to win, thousands of Trump-first loyalists would be ready for legal, judicial, defense, regulatory and domestic policy jobs. His inner circle plans to purge anyone viewed as hostile to the hard-edged, authoritarian-sounding plans he calls “Agenda 47.” The people leading these efforts aren’t figures like Rudy Giuliani. They’re smart, experienced people, many with very unconventional and elastic views of presidential power and traditional rule of law. Behind the scenes: The government-in-waiting is being orchestrated by the Heritage Foundation’s well-funded Project 2025, which already has published a 920-page policy book from 400+ contributors. Think of it as a transition team set in motion years in advance. Heritage president Kevin Roberts tells us his apparatus is “orders of magnitude” bigger than anything ever assembled for a party out of power. The policy series, “Mandate for Leadership,” dates back to the 1980s. But Paul Dans, director of Project 2025, told us: “Never before has the entire movement … banded together to construct a comprehensive plan to deconstruct the out-of-touch and weaponized administrative state.”

11.11 Trump: “In honor of our great Veterans on Veteran’s Day [sic], we pledge to you that we will root out the Communists, Marxists, Fascists, and Radical Left Thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our Country, lie, steal, and cheat on Elections, and will do anything possible, whether legally or illegally, to destroy America, and the American Dream. The threat from outside forces is far less sinister, dangerous, and grave, than the threat from within.”

11.10 Barbra Streisand, in My Name is Barbra: “Apparently no one brings a dog to the White House, but I didn’t know that.”

11.9 During an interview on Univision, journalist Enrique Acevedo asked Trump if he would weaponize the FBI and Justice Department on his opponents in the same way he claims federal law enforcement agencies have been weaponized against him. “Yeah. If they do this, and they’ve already done it, but if they follow through on this, yeah, it could certainly happen in reverse,” Trump replied.  “What they’ve done is they’ve released the genie out of the box. You know, when you’re president and you’ve done a good job and you’re popular, you don’t go after them so you can win an election. They have done something that allows the next party … if I happen to be president and I see somebody who’s doing well and beating me very badly, I say, ‘Go down and indict them.’ They’d be out of business. They’d be out of the election.”

11.9 Frank Borman dies at 95.

11.8 Ron Brownstein in The Atlantic: “ Democrats yesterday continued to perform better at the polls than in the polls. Even as many Democrats have been driven to a near panic by a succession of recent polls showing President Biden’s extreme vulnerability, the party in yesterday’s elections swept almost all the most closely watched contests. Democrats won the Kentucky governorship by a comfortable margin, romped to a lopsided victory in an Ohio ballot initiative ensuring abortion rights, and easily captured an open Pennsylvania Supreme Court seat. Most impressive, Democrats held the Virginia state Senate and were projected to regain control of the Virginia state House, despite an all-out campaign from Republican Governor Glenn Youngkin to win both chambers. Among the major contests, Democrats fell short only in the governor’s race in Mississippi. The results extended the most striking pattern from the 2022 midterm election, when Republicans failed to match the usual gains for the party out of the White House at a time of widespread public dissatisfaction with the president. Democrats, just as they did last November, generated yesterday’s unexpectedly strong results primarily by amassing decisive margins in urban centers and the large inner suburbs around them. The outcomes suggested that, as in 2022, an unusually broad group of voters who believe that Democrats have not delivered for their interests voted for the party’s candidates anyway because they apparently considered the Republican alternatives a threat to their rights and values on abortion and other cultural issues. “The driving force of our politics since 2018 has been fear and opposition to MAGA,” the Democratic strategist Simon Rosenberg told me. “It was the driving force in 2022 and 2023, and it will be in 2024. The truth is, what we’re facing in our domestic politics is unprecedented. Voters understand it, they are voting against it, and they are fighting very hard to prevent our democracy from slipping away.”

11.8 At the Republican presidential debate, Vivek Ramaswamy said he wanted to laugh at Nikki Haley’s pledge to ban TikTok over national security concerns. “She made fun of me for actually joining TikTok while her own daughter was actually using the app for a long time,” Mr. Ramaswamy said. “So you might want to take care of your family first before preaching to anyone else.” “Leave my daughter out of your voice,” Ms. Haley snapped back. A smattering of boos erupted as Mr. Ramaswamy referenced her daughter. “You have her supporters propping her up — that’s fine,” Mr. Ramaswamy said.  “You’re just scum,” Haley replied.

11.7 WeWork, once valued at $50 billion,  has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection.

11.4 Killers of the Flower Moon

11.1 Bob Mack dies in Los Angeles at 60. Paul Simms: “In a move that one of us here aptly — and affectionately — called “pure Bob,” he was hit by car while riding his bicycle by LAX at 8:30 at night. Whatever urgent mission Bob was on at the time, only he knows, but I’m sure he was pursuing it with his usual gusto. I know everyone I’m copying here helped Bob out at one time or another, and I know he appreciated it, even though he often found a way to — as he would say — “totally blow it” and then be very embarrassed by letting us down.

I could only get him to actually answer his phone about once a year these days, but he texted frequently —  a combination of YouTube links to blurry 70s concert footage with commentary  (under a  link to a 1976 live Boston show, he noted, “Why are Boston’s videos so few and far between? They are so dark and poorly lit, which makes Sib sightings even more rare”) and long anti-this-or-that screeds (jam-packed with internal rhymes, hip-hop references, and inside jokes from 1989) which were actually very funny (but would have benefited from him hitting RETURN and starting a new paragraph every few thousand words).

I hope neither of my kids grow up to be fuck-ups as bad as Bob, but at the same time, I hope they both end up having at least one friend who’s a fuck-up like Bob. There was nothing funnier than hearing him recount — as if it had happened to someone else — his most recent misadventures in… almost being finished with an assignment that was due ten years earlier,  bonding with chollo roommates in a sober-living facility, being in Washington DC on January 6th (but opting out of storming the Capitol because the “vibe felt off” and instead going to the FDR Memorial and giving some Chinese tourists an extemporaneous lecture about why FDR — though flawed — was a great man), being pursued by LA police — first on a bicycle, then on foot — and eluding them by running into a random family’s house and pressing his finger to his lips in a silent “shh” gesture, which they all understood and abided by, pissing off Ted Nugent, pissing off Meat Loaf by asking the innocent question, ’So how would you describe the sound of the new album?” (to which Meat Load responded by giving Bob a withering, baffled glare as if he were the world’s biggest idiot and replying, “It’s rock and roll”), and… well… his stories could fill a book that he’d never be satisfied enough with to actually turn in the first draft of.

So in closing, here’s a little taste of Bob’s voice, from one of the eleven texts he sent me around 5am LA time last June (along with — of course — a YouTube link to an obscure Trevor Horn-produced Buggles song): “What shocks me, said long time acquaintance and amateur factotum, b. Mack, is “that all along Simms could have silenced my blathering with but a few measly videoclips.” Whilst Simms concedes that Scholz does in fact give in to rock and roll convention when his similarity in appearance to David Frick(en) and Tom Verlaine is acknowledged, it is really Scholz’$ carefully worn homespun cape is donned when he sits at the out of context church pipe organ on stage that “is really when the notoriously tour shy but album selling quintet truly separated themselves from the competition,” says Mack, an absurd Jethro Tull centric part time 2K critic and full time crankcase operator insisted to post reporters upon his breakthrough headline press conference held at Buffas diner on Lafayette St.”