Chrissie Hynde and the (mostly new) Pretenders were in good form last night at The State. Chrissie’s voice is still crisp and her two young guitar players have a remarkable feel for her material, while the only other surviving original, drummer Martin Chambers, looked to be having as much fun wailing on the tom-toms as the first time I saw them 40 years ago. It was a good upbeat night for geezer rock after a thoroughly disgusting day.
I didn’t take a poll, but my guess would be that more than a few of the crowd happily exchanging tales of bad rock ‘n roll behavior of yore had seen or by the cocktail hour heard of The Debacle in Helsinki. It was a truly depressing sight. The President of the United States … using phrases like “very strong and powerful” to flatter Vladimir [bleepin’] Putin, while demeaning his own military and intelligence services, the Justice Department and every adult with a high school degree who can spell “Make America Great Again” without eating their Crayons.
By now people like me, you know, characters way … waaaay … over on the fantastical fringe, have been gobsmacked by Donald Trump’s flagrant stupidity and fraudulence so many times that we can’t imagine him ever saying or doing anything that has the same effect on his Goober base.
(And yes, I know how the Tina Smiths of the world wring their hands and urge restraint at such intemperate language — for fear, you know, they might get really upset and do something, you know, bad. But screw it. If Trump’s crowd was merely ignorant, that’d be one thing, and I might give them a pass. But by now there is no question that they are mainly just seething with plain old George Wallace-style racial resentment. So, yeah. [Bleep] it. “Goobers.”)
A word gaining currency in the past couple weeks is “maximalist”. This in the context of imagining how bad this Trump crap really is, and how much worse it is going to get before he feels the weight of justice. Jonathan Chait at New York magazine wrote a long piece last week that got a lot of attention for going where our “responsible” press has generally avoided, to date.
Based largely on what is already on the record, what is known to anyone following the available facts of story and is certainly only the very tippiest of tips of the big, hulking spray-tanned iceberg in the eyes of Robert Mueller, we know Donald Trump’s business “empire” (the true size of which he keeps secret) has floated on Russian oligarch/gangster money for well over 20 years. From there common logic requires you to imagine what Trump will do to protect that empire — the essence of him — and what Vladimir Putin will continue to extract from him in exchange.
And forget “the pee tape”. At this point that would be just another … gobsmacker … that would have no effect on GooberNation. (“Fake video!”). You and I and every late night comic would turn cartwheels of delight. But it wouldn’t change a thing. Just as impeachment won’t change anything as long as more than 33 Republican senators see a poll of their voters showing ferocious approval of Trump holding above 50%.
At the risk of repeating myself, reprehensible as he is, Trump is smart enough to know his legal goose is cooked. His new attorney, Emmett Flood, would be engaging in malpractice if he hasn’t by now examined the situation — the money-laundering, the obstruction of justice vis-a-vis James Comey, etc. — and advised his client of the dire precariousness of the situation. Whether he has already used the phrase, “You are [bleeped], dude”, I can’t say. But it’d be accurate if he has, and explain Trump’s even more naked embrace lately of the only people who can save him.
They would be: Putin and The Goobers.
In their two hour-plus secret/no notes/no recordings meeting I have no problem taking the “maximalist” view that Putin assured Trump that techniques his people used to swing the 2016 election have been refined even further, thanks of course to no coordinated pushback from Trump’s government. And that all the algorithms capable of feeding individual Goobers precisely the bullshit insanity they gobble like soggy corn nuts is teed up and ready to roll on this next election. It will be, the promise goes, enough to keep the House in Republican hands and guarantee Trump a full four-year term.
And what does Putin get? Well, he’s already getting it. Trump’s senile-bull-in-the-china-shop act has Europeans thinking out loud about how to go about their business without the United States. NATO is reeling. The Brits are still trying to figure out what to do with the crowbar Putin’s hackers jammed into their Brexit vote. Mini-trumps are in power in Poland, Hungary at Italy, largely because of the refugee (immigrants!) crisis set off by Putin in Syria and North Africa.
And sure, while our Senate can vote for tougher sanctions on Putin and his mob boss money-laundering buddies, Trump’s crew has myriad ways to prevent anything of the sort from really happening.
So yeah. If I’m Trump, and I know that I’m toast every way you can spin it legally, what I do — the only thing I can do — is keep toggling back and forth between keeping the guy who got me there happy, with whatever he wants, and making sure my message to GooberNation — “Where are Hillary’s servers!” — is in tight synch with what Putin’s hackers and social media bots have greased and ready to go in November.
That’s what you call “maximalist” thinking, kids.
So I had a fleeting moment of encouragement last night as Chrissie (the pride of Akron, Ohio) and crew chugged through her classic hit, “My City Was Gone”.
Everyone in the place new the lyrics …
“Well I went back to Ohio
But my family was gone
I stood on the back porch
There was nobody home
I was stunned and amazed
My childhood memories
Slowly swirled past
Like the wind through the trees
A, o, oh way to go Ohio
I went back to Ohio
But my pretty countryside
Had been paved down the middle
By a government that had no pride … “
At that line, a roar went up among the faithful.
I can’t say how many Goobers are Pretenders fans. But if any were in The State last night they were probably even more mystified and befuddled than usual.