Tag: trump

It’s Been A Long Day

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It’s a been a long day. You’ve turned on the tube and flip to a cable news channel. Any news channel will do. MSBC. CNN. Fox.

You expect a deluge of the following:

Amarosa. Secret Tapes. Hush Money. Collusion. Russia. Manafort. Cohen. Yanking Security Clearances. Secret tapes. Rigged Witch Hunt. Michael Avenati. Stormy Daniels. Putin. Cover-ups. Tariffs. Trump Tower Meeting. Lies. Fake News.

Instead, you sit mesmerized watching the media and Sarah Huckabee Sanders at the Daily Press Briefing in a back and forth exchange:

  • Media A: “Sarah: Can you tell us about the President’s plans to improve the math, science and english scores for all of our children?”
  • Media B: “Sarah: Can you tell us what the government is doing to return the 450 migrant children who have been separated from their parents?”
  • Media C: “Sarah: Can you tell us what the Government is doing to prevent the spread of red tide and the killing of hundreds of species of sea life in Florida? And what we’re doing to prevent this from happening again?”
  • Media D: “Sarah: Can you tell us about the President’s plans on improving the state of our nation’s airports, highways, subways and railways?”
  • Media E: “Sarah: Can you tell us what we are doing to stop the spread of the California wildfires?”
  • Media F: “Sarah: Can you tell us what we are doing to protect our children from gun attacks in our schools?”
  • Media G: “Sarah: Can you tell us what we are doing to prosecute the 300 priests who molested 1000’s of children in Pennsylvania over the last 70 years?”

 

Photo: Washington Post

Walking. O say can you see by the dawn’s early light.

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Olson_4_little_boy_border_agent

Dallas, TX.

Wednesday. 4:05 am. Pre-Dawn.

It’s sticky, the air is heavy, rain showers are imminent.

I’m walking from an outbuilding to the lobby to pick up an Uber to the Dallas-Fort Worth airport. I’m on the first flight back to New York.

Two bodies are framed in their silhouettes. They stand under a street lamp filling a work cart with garden tools. They stop talking, watch me approach and offer a “Good morning Sir” with full smiles and broken English.

Of Mexican origin.

I approach the front desk. Martina is the tag on her lapel. “How was your stay Sir?” She doesn’t break eye contact. Customer Service coach whispering in her ear during orientation, be confident, you belong.

Of Haitian or DR origin. Continue reading “Walking. O say can you see by the dawn’s early light.” →

A Few Honest Words (Please)

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If you’re gonna lead my country
If your’e gonna say it’s free
I’m gonna need a little honesty

Just a few honest words
It shouldn’t be that hard
Just a few honest words is all I need

I don’t need no handshake
No firm look in the eye
Don’t tell me what you think I ought to hear…

~ Ben Sollee, from “A Few Honest Words.”

The tune was the opening track in his 2008 debut titled “Learning to Bend” which was an open letter to political leaders in the U.S. that perfectly captures what we’ve all been pleading for in a year of national turmoil: the truth. “I try to never be too specific,” Sollee says. “I’m trying to agitate the idea of what is happening. [“A Few Honest Words”] is not directed at one politician, but the culture of politics. (From Team JamBase: A Few Honest Words with Ben Sollee, November 5, 2008)

Ben Sollee, 34, is an American cellist, singer-songwriter, and composer known for his political activism. His music incorporates banjo, guitar, and mandolin along with percussion and unusual cello techniques. His songs exhibit a mix of folk, bluegrass, jazz, and R&B elements. Sollee has also composed longer instrumental pieces for dance ensembles and for film. And don’t miss the video:

Photo of the White House: by kenziemoney15

Boycott. The Embargo. It was draconian and complete.

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Right after the election, Erik Hagerman decided he’d take a break from reading about the hoopla of politics…Mr. Hagerman developed his own eccentric experiment, one that was part silent protest, part coping mechanism, part extreme self-care plan. He swore that he would avoid learning about anything that happened to America after Nov. 8, 2016.

“It was draconian and complete,” he said…It was just going to be for a few days. But he is now more than a year into knowing almost nothing about American politics. He has managed to become shockingly uninformed during one of the most eventful chapters in modern American history. He is as ignorant as a contemporary citizen could ever hope to be.

James Comey. Russia. Robert Mueller. Las Vegas. The travel ban. “Alternative facts.” Pussy hats. Scaramucci. Parkland. Big nuclear buttons. Roy Moore. He knows none of it. To Mr. Hagerman, life is a spoiler…

It takes meticulous planning to find boredom. Mr. Hagerman commits as hard as a method actor, and his self-imposed regimen — white-noise tapes at the coffee shop, awkward scolding of friends, a ban on social media — has reshaped much of his life…The fact that it’s working for him — “I’m emotionally healthier than I’ve ever felt,” he said — has made him question the very value of being fed each day by the media. Why do we bother tracking faraway political developments and distant campaign speeches? What good comes of it? Why do we read all these tweets anyway?…

“I had been paying attention to the news for decades,” Mr. Hagerman said. “And I never did anything with it.” At some point last year, he decided his experiment needed a name. He considered The Embargo, but it sounded too temporary. The Boycott? It came off a little whiny. Mr. Hagerman has created a fortress around himself. “Tiny little boats of information can be dangerous,” he said…

~ Sam Dolnick, excerpts from The Man Who Knew Too Little (NY Times, March 10, 2018)

Pro or Con the Subject. Edel Rodriguez, Artist.

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Source: Time’s President Trump ‘Year One’ Cover.  Edel Rodriguez, Artist and One of the Top 50 Creative People by Advertising Age.