About Those Gold Medal Hockey Teams...

The image Curmie prefers to remember

On February 22, 1980, Curmie sat in front of his TV, watching the “Miracle on Ice” hockey game, in which a bunch of American college kids defeated the mighty, seemingly invincible, USSR team by the score of 4-3.  There weren’t a lot of other people in the small Kentucky town where he lived at the time who knew a blue line from a cross-check; even fewer had ever watched a game live.  But within minutes after the conclusion of that telecast, there were dozens of people, mostly but not exclusively teen-agers, driving around town blowing their horns and hanging out of car windows, chanting “U-S-A!  U-S-A!  U-S-A!” with enough gusto that they weren’t just audible, but loud, in Curmie’s second-floor apartment.

It was a moment that those who watched that game (and its aftermath) will never forget.  It was a time of malaise, to coin a phrase.  The nation was still recovering from the energy crisis, the “misery index” (unemployment rate plus inflation rate) was over 20%, and the Iran Hostage Crisis was well into its fourth month.  We, collectively, needed some good news.

Not only that, but this was not merely Good vs. Evil, but also David vs. Goliath.  And a couple of guys named Jim Craig and Mike Eruzione brought their slingshots.  There has never been, before or since, a sporting event that so galvanized the nation.  (Curmie mentioned some other contenders a little over a year ago, but none of them can really compare.)

46 years to the day after the Miracle on Ice, the US men’s hockey team finally won another gold medal.  The circumstances were different.  The opponents, though probably a slight favorite even though playing without their injured captain, were hardly regarded as unbeatable, and the country they represented was our rival in sports but (at least prior to the reign of the Mad King of Trumpistan) our ally in everything else.  The US team was no longer a ragtag collection of college kids, but an all-star team of extremely highly-paid professionals (more on this in a moment).  So this was hardly a reprise of 1980; it was just another gold medal for the US… sorta like the one the US women’s hockey team had won a few nights earlier.

Indeed, the men’s and women’s tournaments were strikingly similar: the US defeated Canada 2-1 in overtime in the gold medal game behind stellar goaltending by Connor Hellebuyck and Aerin Frankel.  There were some differences, too.  The US women were clear favorites in their game, having dominated the tournament, outscoring their opponents 31-1 prior to the final, including a 5-0 rout of Canada in a round-robin game.  The men escaped their quarter-final game with an overtime win against Sweden.  But the women neared the end of regulation in the final behind because of a short-handed goal by Canada early in the 2nd period.  The US pulled their goalie to have a 6-5 skaters advantage, leaving an empty net, with about two and a half minutes left.  It worked, as Hilary Knight tipped in a shot from Laila Edwards to secure overtime with barely two minutes remaining.  Megan Keller took it from there to win the gold.

Both the men and women succeeded in making that commercial about how “for two weeks, we’re all on the same team” pretty much true.  Then, Kash Patel and Donald Trump went out of their way to break those bonds, and, alas, a number of players on the men’s team seem to have colluded with them.

The US women, who have won a medal—3 gold, 4 silver, and a bronze—at every Olympics since their sport was first included in Nagano in 1998, celebrated, accepted their gold medals, posed briefly for a photo, and that was it, except for a few interviews.  Curmie’s only regret was that in watching the awards ceremony, he missed seeing Alysa Liu’s free skate live.  He’ll survive.

The men, of course, had a different path.  Part of this was their own choosing; part was at least partially out of their control.  Their post-game celebration included parading the jersey of Johnny Gaudreau around the ice.  Gaudreau would have been their teammate had he not been killed in a car/bicycle accident a little under two years ago.  The team had hung his jersey in the locker room throughout the tournament as a commemoration/inspiration.

But then things got weird.  A couple of players skated over to the stands and collected Gaudreau’s young children, who were included in a couple of team photos, along with their dad’s jersey.  Curmie thought this was a bridge too far, and he wondered what Gaudreau’s widow really (as opposed to publicly) thought about seeing her kids used as props for a maudlin display of virtue signaling. 

Infomercial time: But wait!  That’s not all!  The scene now shifts to the locker room.  (Hats off to whoever took the video and sent it to ProPublica.)  There’s Kash Patel, who, rather than doing his job (although the country may be better off when he’s otherwise engaged) is partying with the team, apparently on the public’s dime.  And he calls Dear Leader, who offers to send “a military plane or something” to bring the team back to attend the State of the Union address.  He then, in what might be an attempt at humor from one of the most humorless people in history, says, jokingly (?), “And we have to—I must tell you—we’re going to have to bring the women’s team, you do know that.”  

Perhaps actually believing Trump had said something funny, perhaps just picking up his tone, perhaps just trying to humor him, the players laughed.  One guy tried to get a “Two for two!” chant going, but it went nowhere.  Then Trump added, “I do believe I probably would be impeached [if I didn’t].”  Big yucks all around.  Sigh.

There are no surprises here.  We already knew that Patel is a grifter and that Trump, who congratulated precisely zero other US gold medalists, is a sexist asshole incapable of even attempting a joke that isn’t intended to be insulting, or of uttering a complete paragraph without ultimately making it about himself.  We knew, too, although we might not have been thinking about it, that if we were looking for an audience likely to respond favorably to the Mad King of Trumpistan, we couldn’t do a lot better than a gaggle of exclusively white male multi-millionaires who attended college primarily for reasons completely independent of intellectual pursuits. 

By way of comparison: the average salary in the NHL is just a little under $3.5 million a year, not counting additional income from personal appearances, promotional work, and so on.  If Curmie had made his final salary, as a tenured full professor with a PhD and decades of teaching experience, for his entire 45 year career, he wouldn’t have made that much.  And the players on the national team, of course, are stars, so their salaries are commensurately higher.  A number of the members of the women’s team, by contrast, are still in college, reminiscent of those 1980 men’s gold medalists.  The rest play in the Professional Women’s Hockey League, where the salary cap for an entire team is $1.3 million.  Curmie is not going to get involved in a debate about whether that discrepancy is appropriate or not (see his commentary about that phenomenon in soccer for some of the variables involved), but he does note its existence.

Anyway, the women’s team promptly declined the invitation, and they fool no one with their “other obligations” shtick.  They were offended by POTUS’s glib put-down, and they responded with a polite but transparent monodigital salute.  Trump proclaimed in the SOTU that they’ll be visiting the White House soon.  Yeah, maybe.  We shall see.  Anyway, was the women’s response appropriate?  Absolutely.  A lot of the commentary from other sources, especially the stuff strongly critical of the men’s team as opposed to POTUS, may have been a little overblown, but it was at least understandable.

What about the men’s team?  Curmie can’t get too upset with anyone who gets to attend the SOTU and get a White House tour.  He’d probably have turned down an invitation from Dear Leader, but almost certainly would have accepted one from literally any other POTUS, including those he voted against.  (They’re a lot less likely to have dissed my friends, for one thing.)  We know that many if not all of the men’s players were cheering on the women in their gold medal game and indeed in some before that.  It’s hard to muster a lot of anger at someone celebrating a big victory and not choosing to spoil the moment by making a scene.  And, of course, five members of the men’s team—coincidentally (?) four of them are from Minnesota—also declined the invitation.  But, to quote The Athletic’s headline, “The U.S. men’s Olympic hockey team won gold — and then lost the room.”

Curmie will still pump his fist and shout “Yes!” when the men’s team scores in future contests, but this year’s gold medal in men’s hockey is relegated to maybe tenth place in the list of personal favorite Olympic moments: well behind the victories of a host of American women, including but not limited to Alysa Liu, Mikaela Shiffrin, Elana Meyers Taylor, and (of course) the hockey team.  Not just the Americans, though.  Johannes Høsflot Klæbo is unquestionably the greatest of all time at his sport, for example.  And, of course, there was Nazgul.

Alas, there’s one more thing.  Again, we have long since known that narcissism and boorishness continue their death struggle to be Dear Leader’s defining characteristic.  So now there’s a new video.  Watch it at your own risk, Gentle Reader, but Curmie strongly advises that you not do so shortly after eating.

Well, One of Them Is Excusable

<Sigh.>

Curmie, as you might well imagine, Gentle Reader, sees a lot of political cartoons, memes, and brief commentary from (generally) like-minded folks.  Every once in a while, he sees something so absurd on its face that it couldn’t possibly be true.  Alas, it turns out to be true more often the not.  Curmie, however, is skeptical by nature, and he really does try to avoid re-posting stuff that isn’t true. 

This week, there were two stories that caught Curmie’s eye in this regard: an alleged quotation from Ted Cruz and a video supposedly posted to Donald Trump’s Truth Social account.  Both were in the “this couldn’t be true… could it?” category.  Well, they were both true.  Sort of. 

Let’s start there, with Senator Cruz’s line that we should “stop attacking pedophiles.”  Did he really say that?  Yes, he did.  But it’s clear that, unlike the host of politicians who get busted for saying something outrageous or an outright lie, the “he misspoke” follow-up really is true.  His spokesperson is absolutely justified in saying that Cruz was “rattling off a series of crimes we should unite in opposing, started a sentence about opposing pedophilia, and added a stray word while talking it out.”

This is the kind of thing that happens when speaking off the cuff.  Anyone who spends a lot of time talking is going to screw up, and might not even be aware of it.  Curmie is pretty certain he did that several times over the course of his career; it’s just that his students and colleagues were kind enough to know what he meant and to let it go at that.  And Barack Obama doesn’t really think there are 57 states. 

Even when there’s enough time to think, these mistakes can happen.  There’s a Modelo beer commercial that assures listeners that they are “not to be reckoned with.”  They mean “not to be trifled with,” but that’s the opposite of what they say.  A few years ago, Curmie’s hometown didn’t get any appreciable rain for several weeks.  The city (or the county, or whoever) posted a bunch of signs about “drought protection.”  One suspects they weren’t actually trying to protect the drought.  See?  This stuff happens.

Look, Curmie is no fan of Ted Cruz.  The guy is a liar, a coward, and possessed of less integrity than even a run-of-the-mill partisan hack like his fellow Texas Senator, John Cornyn.  But that’s really sort of the point: give him a day or two, and he’ll say or do something that really is worth of derision, and “our side” can be a little less disingenuous.  Things get complicated by the fact that in one sense Cruz is indeed protecting pedophiles, but it’s by more by craven inaction than by clear intentionality.  He’ll never not be an asshole, but he’s pretty much innocent this time, and we need to respond accordingly.

On the other hand, there’s that video posted to Dear Leader’s Truth Social page that includes an image of Barack and Michelle Obama’s faces superimposed onto the bodies of apes.  Needless to say, the cries of “racism” were prompt and loud.  And they came from virtually everywhere.  Sure, Democrats were at the forefront and the criticism.  Chuck Schumer, Nancy Pelosi, and Hakeem Jeffries all weighed in.  But, unsurprisingly, it was firebrand Jasmine Crockett who pretty much led the charge: “Most of us already know who Donald Trump is. We already know there are no bounds to how low he’s willing to go. We know that he has no moral compass. We know that he is a disgrace. So while his behavior is not shocking, it is certainly disgusting and disturbing.”  That is not a subtle commentary.

That said, a lot of GOP pols weren’t far behind.  Representative Mike Turner (OH) wrote that “the release of racist images of former President Barack and First Lady Michelle Obama is offensive, heart breaking, and unacceptable. President Trump should apologize.”  Expressing similar sentiments were Senators Susan Collins (ME), John Curtis (UT), Pete Ricketts (NE), Tim Scott (SC), and Roger Wicker (MS), and Representative Mike Lawler (NY), among others, no doubt.

And it’s only fair to mention: last time out Curmie lamented Ethics Alarms’ Jack Marshall’s started allowing “excuses for inexcusable conduct by Dear Leader and his minions [to become] a significant part of the mix.”  But he writes “I regard that as about a half-step, maybe less, from the President calling the former First Couple ‘niggers,’ and subsequently adds that “this ugly episode fairly earns shame and criticism for the President, regardless of how it came about.” 

That last part is relevant.  The White House initially tried to pass the incident off as unworthy of consideration, and the response as “fake outrage.”  That strategy backfired, although J.D. Vance is still trying.  Their focus then shifted to placing the blame on… wait for it… an anonymous “staffer.”  Sigh.  Dear Leader sees no reason to apologize because, you see, he did nothing wrong.

Unfortunately, even if we believe what has now become the official line, things look bad.  First off, the best that can be said is that someone so stupid that they didn’t realize the racist overtones to the post was granted permission to post in POTUS’s name.  You know, that guy who hires only the best people.  The alternative is that the racism was intentional.  That’s certainly a possibility, especially given the comments by Lara Trump, who is trying to be as vile a creature as her father-in-law: “It's kinda like any good joke is rooted in truth.”  Ew.

Someone made that video, and, best case scenario, thought it relevant to… well… anything.  The full video shows Dear Leader as a lion, the king of the jungle, to whom a gaggle of leading Democrats as other animals ultimately bow down.  Frankly, it’s a stupid shtick, but its sycophancy is no doubt celebrated throughout Trumpistan.  But if it’s indeed supposed to be based on The Lion King, then it’s worth noting that there are no simians in that play or film.  The choice of apes for the Obamas, then, adds credence to the allegations of intentional racism.

The beginning of the reel is a standard whine about “stolen elections,” Trumpistan’s term for “it was completely fair, but our guy didn’t win.”  It then auto-advanced into the Lion King nonsense.  Curmie doesn’t know how that could happen accidentally, but he’s enough of a technological troglodyte that his ignorance doesn’t necessarily mean anything.  Perhaps there really is a perfectly innocent explanation.

But what if the worst we can say about the video is that it’s kinda dumb?  Now it becomes a variation on the familiar trope of the cover-up being worse than the crime.  All that needed to happen was a prompt removal, and a statement that the offending staffer has been fired.  People might still be suspicious, but the situation is reduced to the proverbial tempest in a teapot.  Of course, both transparency and admitting anything are verboten in Trumpistan.  So we get disingenuous commentary from the Usual Suspects.  They’re almost as incompetent as they are dishonest.  Alas.

Trump’s Birthday Parade and Stopping the End Run

Yes, this is photoshopped.
But it wouldn’t be funny if it weren’t close to the truth.

Curmie’s father played football in high school.  One of his favorite stories of that time nearly a century ago was about the end of the big rivalry game.  His team was down by four points as time was running out.  They did get the ball back, though, so they weren’t out of the game yet, even if they needed a touchdown and had 80 yards or so to get to the endzone.

That’s when the coach told them to run an end run, with Curmie’s dad and his cousin as the lead blockers, on literally every play until the other team stopped them for less than four yards.  A dozen or so plays later, they scored what turned out to be the winning touchdown with about a minute left on the clock.  If a play works, use it again.

Almost exactly five years ago, on Juneteenth, 2020—we’re talking peak COVID time—President Trump held a rally in Tulsa.  As usual, he crowed about the huge number of ticket requests… but the actual turnout left two thirds of the seats empty.  How did that happen?  Well, it was a combination: utter incompetence by whatever staffers were assigned front-of-house duties, and a bit of fun from Tik-Tok Teens and K-Pop Stans, who apparently ordered hundreds of thousands of free tickets they never had any intention of using. 

Curmie wrote about the story at the time.  Of course, having actually done some house management, Curmie also enumerated several different ways of preventing embarrassing situations like this.  Always the educator, is Curmie.  But Curmie had always been blessed by students who could out-think a kumquat.  Not so, this time.

By now, Gentle Reader, you’ve figured out what this essay is about—the paltry turnout for Trump’s most recent vanity project, that absurd parade—and what those first two paragraphs were about: the TikTok-ers are baaaaaaack, using precisely the same scheme as they’d used in Tulsa.

Curmie doesn’t approve of the subterfuge, but he does chuckle at the apparent inability of Trump to hire anyone whose name isn’t Stormy Daniels who is even remotely competent at their job.  Folks who say they’re from Canada or Australia or wherever claim to have gone online and ordered multiple tickets, some of them under crude or ironic names.  Oops, they couldn’t go.  Some of the confessions may be fake, and one might suspect that inclement weather may have affected turnout to some degree, but there is no question that the parade was not merely costly and boring, but also under-attended. 

Exact numbers for the turnout are impossible, of course, but Barbara Comstock posted that Newsmax, which makes Fox News look like leftist propaganda (that’s Curmie’s description, not hers), estimated about 10,000 attendees; she then added that the parade was “a huge waste of our military $$$ when the world is on fire…”  Curmie tried but failed to confirm Newsmax’s reporting, but Comstock is a former Republican Congresscritter, so she’d be unlikely to misrepresent the right-wing press. 

The place was damned near empty.  Asmodeus Naggoob posted on X that “AOC and Bernie would draw more people with thumb wrestling alone, lol.”  Part of that is, no doubt, attributable to… erm… running the same play until the other guys stop it.

But apparently the organizers’ incompetence stretched well beyond their amply demonstrated inability to learn anything from the Tulsa debacle.  Amanda Moore posted, “The marketing material said the entrance was on 14, but in reality it was on 12 St and you had to go through this pen for two blocks. Everyone who was around to answer questions was an asshole, too. Probably part of the issue!”  There are a host of other comments about poor planning and lack of crowd management.  Starting early to avoid thunderstorms also complicated things: it’s understandable and indeed appropriate in terms of safety, but problematic logistically because apparently some people didn’t make it through the barricades until the parade was over. 

That may have worked out OK for the prospective parade-goers, as the event itself was apparently a world-class snoozefest.  Numerous photos and videos show Trump and most of the people around him nodding off or nearly doing so. 

But let’s get one thing straight about that parade.  No one objects to recognizing the manifold contributions the Army and the other branches of the military have made to this country’s welfare, and having a celebration on the 250^th anniversary of the founding of the Continental Army seems an entirely appropriate time to do so.  We might not approve of everything the military has done, but that is almost never the fault of the troops themselves.  And there are still some vets out there who were on the front lines against actual Nazis: anyone who disrespects them will have Curmie to deal with. 

The ceremonies planned by the Biden administration were pretty much what the occasion called for, but, being pathologically incapable of doing otherwise, Trump turned the event into a vulgar, expensive (estimates just to repair damage to the streets from running tanks over them run to $12,000,000), narcissistic display that was one part cheap theme park and two parts North Korea.  This wasn’t a celebration of the anniversary that happened to fall on Trump’s birthday; it was a birthday celebration of Trump that used a coincidence to pretend it wasn’t really a tacky glorification of Dear Leader.  

It was in recognition of what was about to happen in DC that the day was chosen for the nation-wide “No Kings” protests, which organizers say attracted over 13 million participants.  Curmie is not so naïve that he believes that number without a raised eyebrow, but even the most conservative estimates put the turnout at or near eight figures.  The ratio of protesters to parade-goers is probably somewhere around 1000:1.

Part of that is because the Trump administration couldn’t stop the end run.  In either sense of the term.

Checking in with Anatoly Lunacharsky

Anatoly Lunacharsky
(1875-1933)

Curmie often told his theatre history students that Anatoly Lunacharsky had the coolest job title in history: the Kommisssar of Education and Enlightment.  Alas, it accompanied a contender for the worst job in history: the liaison between the leaders of the Communist Party (especially Josef Stalin) and the Russian arts community.

At the beginning of his service, there was actually a period of considerable freedom of expression, and whereas there weren’t a lot of great plays written in Russia after the death of Anton Chekhov, there were certainly some good ones, and thanks to the likes of directors like Konstantin Stanislavky, Vsevelod Meyerhold, Alexandr Tairov, Fyodor Kommissarzhevky, Mikhail Chekhov, and Yevgeny Vakhtangov the Russian theatre was universally regarded as the best in the world.

But then the restrictions came.  Beginning about 1918, Socialist Realism, the idea that aesthetic concerns should be secondary to political ones, gradually became the de facto policy.  (One of Curmie’s mentors in Russian theatre, a woman who was born in what was then called Leningrad, called these “boy meets tractor plays.”)  Chekhov and Kommissarzhevky left the country; Stanislavsky, whose worldwide acclaim made him a little more impervious to governmental threats, did what he could to protect his friends and fellow artists, but his efforts, though significant, were rather like Cú Chulainn fighting the waves. 

Socialist Realism wasn’t the official policy until 1934 (a year after Lunacharsky’s death), but it wasn’t a good idea to be even apolitical after the ascension of Stalin in 1924.  Tairov found that out the hard way, getting into and out of trouble repeatedly, not for being counter-revolutionary, but for not being revolutionary enough.  

Even having been a champion of the cause wasn’t enough to save you.  Just as Leon Trotsky was exiled by Stalin, organizations like Proletkult and the Russian Association of Proletarian Writers, once advocates for precisely the kind of censorship Stalin wanted, were also suppressed.  Meyerhold, once the most outspoken Communist of the leading Russian theatre artists, was arrested in 1939 and executed a few months later.

Let me repeat: it wasn’t enough not to do something the powers-that-be didn’t like.  If you didn’t want to end up in Siberia (or worse), you had to be an active supporter of whatever Papa Joe happened to be thinking at a given moment in time.

So why is Curmie writing about all this?  Well, because he thought you might like a brief theatre history lesson, of course.  After all, he has said that he’s not going to write about the Manchurian Cantaloupe and the Muskrats.  If you start thinking about the Russian connection, the purges of career civil servants, that whole business at the Treasury Department, the perfect storm of narcissism and incompetence at the upper levels of government and the sloth and cowardice of the people who could put a stop do this nonsense… well, that’s entirely on you, Gentle Reader.  😉

It's January 20, and...

 

By unfortunate coincidence, January 20 falls on a Monday this year, meaning that Inauguration Day and MLK Day happen on the same day.  It would be difficult to find two men more diametrically opposed than Dr. King and Don the Con.

True, there are some similarities—neither is a shining example of marital fidelity, for example—but the differences are extraordinary.  The snarky comparison on the McSweeney’s site serves pretty well to clarify the issue.  Gee, which one of the two said, “An individual has not started living until he can rise above the narrow confines of his individualistic concerns to the broader concerns of all humanity”?  And which said “Nobody knew health care could be so complicated”?

Dr. King imagined—dreamed of, if you will—a nation and a world in which people will be judged not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.  Mr. Trump, if he had the imagination to dream, would envision a paradise in which those with inherited wealth and an utter absence of morality would have carte blanche (to be fair, it’s doubtful he’d know that term) to exploit literally everyone else at whim.

This goes beyond mere political disagreement.  There’s a case for some of Trump’s stated policies.  Curmie doubts he has any intention of implementing any of them, but that’s a different matter.  So is the nomination of a host of particularly unqualified folks—mostly male, overwhelmingly white, all rich—for high-ranking government positions, although that heads a little closer to the point.

Curmie is not so naïve as to believe that any politician of any political stripe will always adhere to high moral and ethical standards when pushing or even exceeding the limits of appropriate behavior is more likely to get them what they want.  Trump is worse than most if not all, but that’s somewhat beside the point.  Significantly, when Biden or Obama or Bush or whoever did that kind of thing, it was to achieve a goal for like-minded individuals.  The rationale was political efficacy, for the good of a philosophy or an approach.

For Trump, it’s purely narcissistic.  He’s interest only in himself and perhaps a few family members and cronies.  The latter will, of course, be cast aside when they are no longer useful.  Curmie isn’t sure whether the best example is from history (say, Danton or Trotsky) or from Trump’s own past (e.g., Mike Pence).  Those nominees mentioned above share one one attribute, and it sure as hell isn’t competence.  Rather, it’s an apparent willingness to yield all authority to the “stable genius” who doesn’t come close to fulfilling either word in that description.

The three headline-making stories from this week—moving the inauguration ceremony indoors, the whole TikTok brouhaha, and whatever the hell was going on with that meme coin business, all underscore the same conclusion: Donald Trump is an egocentric, mendacious, grifter.  We all knew that, course… or at least the overwhelming majority of the people reading these words did.

A fair number of erstwhile Trump supporters who had spent thousands of dollars to attend the inaugural ceremony only to be left literally out in the cold are beginning to learn how expendable they are.  These are folks to whom the few thousand dollars it cost them to fly to DC, get a hotel room, etc., actually means something.  But too bad, so sad, you can’t actually see it live, because there aren’t enough of you I’m all about manliness until I have to demonstrate it it’s almost as cold as it’s been for several other inaugurations in recent memory.

The result, of course, is that Trump surrounds himself with his cabal of billionaires and a few obeisant lawmakers and no one else.  If he were smart enough to understand symbolism or irony, there’d be a different look.  Or perhaps he just doesn’t care.  Our only hope is that he truly is as incompetent as he appears to be… or that his base realizes that they’ve been played.

The TikTok debacle may also serve to accomplish this potential outcome.  Shutting down that platform was Trump’s idea, of course; he even tried to do so by executive order.  Now he’s positioning himself as the hero of the 1^st Amendment by reversing course and proclaiming that he won’t enforce the law.  Gentle Reader, Curmie has no idea the extent to which TikTok poses a threat.  He suspects that yes, there’s a lot of data mining being provided to the Chinese government, but it’s probably no more intrusive than what Trump minions like Zuckerberg and Musk are doing for our own government’s surveillance.

Here’s the thing: if TikTok posed a threat back when Trump was in office before, it poses a greater threat now that its popularity has expanded significantly.  More users: more intrusions into citizens’ privacy.  Yet the principal argument other than the 1^st Amendment to restoring TikTok is that a lot of people use it. 

Anyone who believes that Donald Trump reversed course out of principle probably believes they’ll soon be getting a huge check from that Nigerian prince, that tariffs are paid by the exporting country, and that the price of eggs is about to plummet. 

Martin Luther King, Jr. sought to raise up those who were treated unfairly, those who were poor, those who had little but hope.  Donald Trump seeks to raise up his fellow plutocrats.  MLK advocated non-violence; DJT told supporters he’d pay their legal bills if they roughed up anyone who didn’t drink the proverbial Kool-Aid (though why anyone would believe that when he’s notorious for not paying his own bills, let alone anyone else’s, is a bit of a mystery).  King sought a world in which no one has to struggle to survive; Trump wants to cut Medicare and Social Security to provide further tax cuts for the already obscenely wealthy.

Today is a day to commemorate a King, not a would-be king.