openpolitics.com

I love America. America is not my mother. Canada is my mother. But America is an unbelievably gorgeous, surprisingly sweet rich lady who lives next door and appears to be falling apart. I cannot help myself from loving it.

For people who love to dwell in contradictions, the US is the greatest country in the world: the land of the free built on slavery, the country of law and order where everyone is entitled to a gun, a place of unimpeded progress where they cling to backwardness out of sheer stubbornness. And into this glorious morass, a new contradiction has recently announced itself: the white people, the privileged Americans, the ones who had the least to fear from the powers that be, the ones with the surest paths to brighter futures, the ones who are by every metric one of the most fortunate groups in the history of the world, were starting to die off in shocking numbers.

“So if guns kills people, I guess pencils miss spell words [sic], cars drive drunk and spoons make people fat.”

..  The Republican style for 2016 is angry aphoristic humor. Behind comedy, absurd rage

..  She promoted the idea which is at the core of every last thing that Trump does, that simple contact with the man brings prosperity. “When you’re in the Trump train you’re going places!”

.. Clovis compared Trump’s recent speeches to Reagan’s A Time for Choosing at the Goldwater convention in 1964, which must have been, to his way of thinking anyway, roughly like comparing it to the Sermon on the Mount.

.. When he finally took the stage, the crowd surged; their phones surged. It was an orgy of phones. The men behind Trump scanned the crowd with their phones. The cameras in the back were recording everyone recording each other. Trump was the only person not holding a screen, the absence that brought desire.

..  He read the polls, poll after poll. He paused only to ask the crowd how great the polls were. “Beating Hillary nationwide do you love that?” The crowd approved of his approval numbers.

.. First and foremost, there is the comb-over, although it can be called a comb-over only in the sense that the mall in Dubai with a ski hill inside it can be called a building. It is hair as state-of-the-art engineering feat

.. Though he regularly brings up the physical appearances of his opponent, none of the other candidates even mention the fact that he looks ridiculous. Trump’s hair is an act of defiant social pre-emption: call me a phony. I dare you. I fucking dare you.

.. To me, the best question ever asked about race in America has always been the one that James Baldwin asked, when an interviewer wanted to know if he was optimistic or pessimistic about the future of America. “What white people have to do is try and find out in their own hearts why it was necessary to have a nigger in the first place,” he said. “If you invented him, you, the white people invented him, then you’ve got to find out why. And the future of the country depends on that.”

.. The same specter of angry white people haunts Saunders’s rally, the same sense of longing for a country that was, the country that has been taken away.

.. The fundamental difference between the Trump and Sanders crowd was that the Sanders crowd has more money, the natural consequence of the American contradiction machinery: rich white people can afford to think about socialism, the poor can only afford their anger.

.. An old The Clash song, Jail Guitar Doors, was sung by the subject of the first verse, Wayne Kramer. And it was all, so obviously, a nostalgia act, the indulgence for a longing of a time when music encouraged politics, when activism possessed an artistic face, and vice versa.

.. Sanders’s exasperation was the principal fact to be communicated, more than any political content. Trump was about winning again. Sanders was about having lost.

.. The vagueness of American politics is what astonished the outsider. It’s all about feelings and God and bullshit. Sanders actually uttered the following sentence out loud: “What we’re saying is when millions of people come together to restore their government we can do extraordinary things.” Nobody asked what he meant. Nobody asked for numbers. They applauded. Better to take it in the spirit in which it’s given

.. Bernie Sanders’s hair is as much a statement as Trump’s. It looks like the hair of a tenured professor whose wife has stopped nagging him to get a haircut because the nagging doesn’t work.

.. Her compassion is admirable, glorious even, but also inaccurate. No one is more emotional than a piece-of-shit white man. They are sentimentality personified. How else can so many be moved to rage over the absence of a Christmas tree on a Starbucks cup?

..  either to be proud to be white, which is a form of insanity, or to fantasize a post-racial cosmopolis, which is a kind of make-believe, or to be ashamed.

.. Bernie Sanders wants a revolution to overthrow casino capitalism but the problem, or maybe just the first problem, is that the American people love casinos. They can’t build them fast enough.

.. The highways of Illinois are a unique vision of the workings of human desire – a nearly limitless marketplace for addiction and its cure. Strip clubs or fried chicken or gambling or church or rehab or cancer treatment. The I-94 spoke right to the unwounded body – the promise of processed sugar and pussy, or salvation from them.

.. In the United States, 240-year-old writings can be recited by heart by people who cannot be described as educated.

.. Thomas Jefferson believed that the constitution should expire after 19 years, so that the dead would not have dominion over the living. That fate seems to have arrived. The Americans are in constant debates with ghosts and their conversations with dead people are most powerful, most ferocious, at exactly the points where they are most nonsensical. They state defiantly that all men are created equal when any casual observer of life knows they aren’t.