James Lincoln Collier, a man whose name seemed to mark him for greatness, wrote books about jazz musicians who had pulled off something nearly unthinkable today; they were enormously popular. Benny Goodman, Louis Armstrong, and Duke Ellington were men whose compositional ability (either in the old-fashioned sense of writing music down for later performance, or in the jazz sense of in-the-moment melodic improvisation) sold acres of vinyl records, required an apocalypse of deforestation to produce the books written about them, and put asses in seats all over the planet. I own the bulk of their recordings, and the music I've obsessively archived on any of the three would itself dwarf the music collections of most people. (In middle school, I once saw a schoolmate's record library in his bedroom, which tragically consisted of a lone Eagles album. I think it was "Desperado.")
Collier's books were designed not to praise these men, but rather to bury their reputations under a laundry list of deep flaws and objectionable peccadilloes. Duke Ellington was not the American Stravinsky; he was alternatively a suave weasel, stealing much of his best music from his sidemen when he wasn't stealing their wives. Louis Armstrong wasn't a lovable genius, but was in fact a crass entertainer obsessed with applause. Benny Goodman, apparently, was not the near-saint Steve Allen portrayed in the Hollywood version; he was instead a douche bag.
I didn't read the Armstrong book. After reading the other two, I didn't have the stomach for seeing Louis torn down. So naturally the one I didn't actually read is the one I'll be talking about today.
I thought of the Armstrong book as I read today about Trump's recent speech. The Trump phenomenon is complicated, I believe, in spite of the efforts of his fans and detractors to convince me otherwise. It's complicated because it reveals something about Americans that we foolishly avoid seeing, and attempting to present the complicated version is dangerous if you are trying to get people to listen to you.
Yesterday I was warned by a friend and neighbor that I should avoid politics if I want my radio show to be popular.
He felt I was making an enormous error by including politics in a show that could otherwise be entertaining and intelligent, and could bring this miraculous combination to a large audience. He's a very smart guy, I should say; I think he sees me as a nut with flashes of inspiration and wisdom, and wants to help me avoid a ruinous misstep.
He could be right, of course. He's afraid that any political content at all could literally drive people away who might otherwise like the show. I told him that many people online and in person have told me otherwise, but this didn't shift him. If I'm honest with myself, I have to admit that the signals I get from the public are mixed. My blog has over 3000 page views, but what does that mean really? It could just be the same 23 people reading and rereading my stuff. Perhaps these 23 people have no friends, or have friends that don't listen to them. Perhaps that is a typical fate of a reader and critical thinker in today's sound bite-driven society.
I aim to make the Hot Plate show intelligent, thought-provoking, and entertaining. I'd also like to make it important, a place where strong opinions about real issues don't require the banishing of civility and courtesy, and a place where self-examination is encouraged. My neighbor finds this worrisome, and his worrying is contagious.
With all of this in mind, I'm going to try to put Trump's speech in perspective.
Duke Ellington's Five Finger Discount approach to intellectual property is not an invention of Collier's, but in spite of that, his music is beautiful and perhaps profound. I don't doubt for a minute that Goodman was a tool, but his clarinet work is a prodigiously recorded testament to the endlessly combinable virtues of swinging time feel and Bachlike order. And Louis Armstrong probably did care more about making people happy than being an artist, and the plantation image he presented to the public was troubling in his time and much more so today. None of that proves he wasn't a great artist. He changed forever the way the world hears and thinks about tone, rhythm and time, and in my view his face should be on Mount Rushmore. (Don't ask me which white guy should be taken off to make room. I don't want to stir up controversy.)
These men weren't superhuman. They had human flaws to go along with their historic contributions. Donald Trump is epically flawed, by contrast, but the lesson he has to teach us is monumental for those who can perceive it. He will be the last one to see it, I'd guess, but if you're willing to make a little effort you can be smarter than Trump, and reject the stereotype my neighbor fears you will live up to.
I like Tom Alderson's observation that Trump lives in the moment. If you accept this as the central reality of his decision making brain, it's easier to dismiss theories that he's a mad genius, or crazy like a fox, or Hitlerian, or whatever. I think Trump is more like the uncharitable portrait Collier gave us of Louis Armstrong in the book I didn't read. Trump has all the money in the world (possibly he has much less than he claims, but let's say for argument's sake he has an awful lot of the stuff), and can essentially buy anything he could ever want. Like Elvis, once upon a time, Trump chooses to buy things that call attention to their expensiveness. Elvis rejected the suggestion of a decorator that he fill his house with antique furniture associated with Louis XIV, or possibly some other Roman numeral, and instructed the guy to get rid of the museum crap and buy newly minted copies. Elvis and Trump both love gold leaf. The King's predilection for this dubious crowd-pleasing material sat uncomfortably alongside his habit of firing guns at television sets whenever Robert Goulet was on the screen. More prosaically, the Donald's use of gold leaf and gold plate would appear to contrast with a heart of coal.
Collier suggested that certain great artists were in fact hollow facades, and I reject that oversimplification. It's based on the fairy tale that great accomplishments are a logical fit with thorough human greatness, a notion so widely cherished that the mere revelation of human frailty in a person who enriched the world is seen as tainting their accomplishments, and is gleefully trumpeted by people who didn't care for their music, or their prose style, or their legislative tendencies.
I'm not leading up to some case that Donald Trump is a great man. He isn't. But I am claiming that his need for public validation is the crucial element that defines his character. The public has alternately embraced and reviled him, and he's spent the last year or two running around like a headless chicken to ensure that both reactions are cemented in our minds, even treasured by us. Our reactions to Trump come close to defining us individually and collectively, and I'm reminded of my tween student from a few years back who went from unflappable Justin Bieber apologist to fist-shaking Bieber denouncer in the wake of the many news stories about the pop star egging old ladies and jerking off on maitre d's, or whatever it was he was accused of.
The American weirdness about celebrity is what drives our emotional responses to the great (Duke, Louis, Benny, Elvis) and the non-great (Bieber, Trump) alike. One thing my neighbor and I agreed on is that none of this is really about Trump at all. Trump is like the light reaching us glacially from an already-dead star. A wealthy and pampered man who craves adoration, he's manipulated America with the facility of genius, but that says more about America than it does about him. America is easily played; a glance at the TV schedule or the bestseller lists demonstrates that. It doesn't take a genius to manipulate our country's men and women. The manipulation of America is a chemical process that happens naturally, according to the cruel mathematics of natural law, for the same reasons bacteria and parasites see our Dorito-fueled host bodies as hospitable destinations.
If you've ever had a baby in your home for any length of time, you've seen up close how an organism that can neither speak, crawl, or wipe its own ass can effectively convince a sleep-deprived adult man or woman to ignore the advice of doctors and rush to comfort it 19 times per night. That doesn't make the baby smart. And Trump's ability to rouse a crowd of flyover Caucasians doesn't make him an evil genius. He needs that crowd, and they need him. And those of us who who don't love him need him too. We need him to prop up our long-held view that American conservatism is an ugly con game. In its purest William F. Buckley sense, it is nothing of the sort. But government isn't run by the Buckleys of the world; it's run sometimes by well-meaning administrators who are gradually corrupted by our system, and sometimes by truly terrible people who are corrupt to begin with. Decades of frustration at their financial situation and the indulgent judgment of city-born liberals caused many of our fellow Americans to overlook Trump's flaws and give him a job he isn't qualified to do. He made them feel good, and they rewarded him with a hero's welcome. And he made them feel good without doing any real heavy lifting; he threw them the reliable red meat that's been earning giant ratings and revenue for decades, while also tossing them some of the newish red meat that had been only more recently reliable as demonstrated by Bernie Sanders. The GOP's power has long stood on the smoke and mirrors culture war; meanwhile, the Democrats have long pretended that more upbeat rhetoric about tolerance will put food on the table. It's not clear that me that the way we feel about gay marriage, or Mexicans, or Muslims, will bring back any jobs. We shall see how Trump fans react when they don't get everything they were promised. Many of my acquaintances believe our democratically elected steward will deliver. Anything's possible, I suppose. Recent appointments and executive orders suggest to me that his oft-stated plans to fix what liberals can't fix won't materialize, but perhaps they will after all.
I suggest to my angry leftist and liberal friends and loved ones that Trump will do a better job of alienating his legions than any of us can. (A friend of mine recently went to 8 demonstrations in 7 days. She's had to cut back since then.) I know that many believe we don't have time to wait for that, because by then we'll have a Fourth Reich on our hands. Trump's awkward switch to a more mollifying and Presidential tone yesterday suggests otherwise. I'm not sure what happened to convince him to try to square the circle of hostile threats and accommodationist rhetoric; it's hard to believe he listened to advice. It's easier for me to believe that he is gradually noticing, as Bill Clinton and Obama did before him, that adoring crowds on the campaign trail are not the whole story. Trump, fixated Lenolike on ratings and their sphinxlike revelation of how many people don't love him, is trying to have it both ways. Like George Wallace before him, he got a ton of people to love him while irreversibly filling a ton of other people with righteous hatred. He's blamed the media for this, but the media (for all its faults) is pretty hard to kill. I know that despots of the past and present have managed it, with the help of weapons and epaulettes. But have Hitler, the various Kim Jongs, and the rest ever had to contend with a media like the one we have? Democracy like ours is built on money, power, and telling people what they want to hear. It often seems that what they want to hear is stupid, and it's tempting to conclude that the insipid pap of Justin Bieber and TV programming like Hillbilly Handfishing are of a piece with the horseshit our politicians traffic in, and maybe that's true, but from what I read, the Washington Post and the New York Times (both "failing" in Trump's beloved framing) are actually hiring again. Apparently, many who have avoided reading newspapers for years are now, in desperation, reading them again.
Will any of this help the Hot Plate Radio Show? Jesus, I hope so. The one or two of you still with me now after everyone else has gone home are in for a treat. It's not as good as cake, and definitely not as good as a cake with a scantily clad woman climbing out of it, but I'm here to tell you that cake is overrated. I'm offering you entertainment that will make you smarter and wiser, and I'm gambling that you'll believe me when I make this claim. Believing, after all, is what Americans do best. So while I may see myself as another Mencken, I'm asking you to see me more as a bearded and balding Tinker Bell. If you can just do that, and tell whatever friends still listen to you to do the same, we can get my neighbor off my back.
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