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Bye Bye Biden
Some highlights and thoughts from Yesterday’s Man: The Case Against Joe Biden by Branko Marcetic đ
Against Biden’s best efforts, disaster had been averted. (p. 127)
This seems to sum up his career neatly. Far from the popular public image that he has cultivated and that the media have happily gone along with for the most part.
Foreign policy
âIâm not going to start World War Three for you!â
Not Biden, but British army General Mike Jackson refusing to follow Bidenâs friend General Wesley Clark’s orders to confront Russia in Kosovo. (p. 172)
The book was written before Russia invaded Ukraine. It seems that Biden wants to go out with a bang, despite his previous utterances.
âThere is no such thing as a winnable nuclear war.â (p. 152)
Biden saying one thing and doing another is characteristic of his entire political career. Heâs not unique in that respect, of course, and perhaps heâs actually better at it than most. He did get elected president after all.
Israel
Biden was the ultimate Friend of Israel. He helped provide Israel with huge amounts of US aid money, and Israel lobbyists on his campaign staff returned the favour helping Biden raise huge amounts of money to run his various election campaigns.
Biden spent his entire career giving unqualified support to Israel, and claimed that Americans “couldn’t afford” to criticise Israel in public.
Yugoslavia
Toward the end of Bush’s term, the ex-communist Eastern European country of Yugoslavia began disintegrating in a miasma of nationalism and ethnic and religious sectarianism, forces unleashed by a Western-imposed program of economic “shock therapy” that in essence exported Western neoliberal policies to the once prosperous country, running its living standards into the ground. War soon broke out. (p. 156)
Later, Biden agitated for Clintonâs military intervention in Serbia, which lay the foundations for future âhumanitarianâ bombing campaigns elsewhere.
If you cared about political survival, it was safer to err on the side of war. (p. 158)
Iraq
Despite [or because of?] his role in starting the war, Biden was still considered one of the party’s wisest heads on foreign policy. (p. 173)
George W. Bush apparently followed Biden’s instructions on selling the war on Iraq to the American people and the United Nations.
Biden proposed an ethno-nationalist âthree state solutionâ for Iraq similar to Israel’s proposals to came up Arab states into weaker sectarian units.
He proposed to Balkanise Iraq into smaller ethnic and religious sectarian states with limited freedom of movement and borders controlled by foreign troops.
A bit like Gaza and the rest of the illegally Occupied Palestinian Territories now.
Flawed as it was, the plan burnished Biden’s credentials as a foreign policy expert. (p. 179)
Iraq duped Biden forcing withdrawal of US troops. In response, ISIS âemerged’ from an oppressed religious minority.
War on Terror
Biden’s ‘counter-terrorism plus’ policy saw the US bomb seven Muslim countries without declaring war, much like Israel is now doing with more American bombs.
That helped to fuel anti-Americanism and an immigration and prisons crisis.
Instead of providing homes for the poor, he would spend the following decades housing them in jails. (p. 85)
Domestic policy
Race relations
Racist Clinton doubled the American prison population and achieved the world’s highest rate of incarceration. Mostly with black people.
This policy usefully helped to reduce official unemployment figures and paint Clinton’s neoliberalism as an economic miracle.
Another lesson Biden had first wrongly internalised from American apartheid: that people of different backgrounds simply couldn’t live together in harmony. (p. 177)
Instead Biden backed segregation (busing) and individual states’ rights over a united federal states of America.
Womenâs rights
âI don’t think that a woman has the sole right to say what should happen to her body.â (p. 184)
Biden on the Roe v. Wade decision in 1974
Bidenâs neoliberalism
Biden presented as a progressive liberal on the side of the working class. But he spent his career siding with Republicans and moving the Democrats ever further to the right.
At one time even a former Klan recruiter thought Biden had gone too far. Another Klan leader praised Biden’s election platform claiming it was as if it had been written by a Klansman.
Supporting spending cuts
Biden said Jimmy Carter was nothing special, and welcomed Reaganomics as a step in the right direction. Although in typical Biden fashion he also claimed Reagan’s first budget would be an economic disaster before voting for it (along with 29 other Democrats).
Reagan’s cuts cost 270,000 jobs and reduced access to financial support for millions of Americans. Rather than reducing the deficit, it increased it, and made the rich richer, and the poor poorer.
Like Thatcher in Britain, Reagan’s greatest achievement was in transforming his opposition into his mirror image. You still get a choice at the polls, but there’s very little, if any, substantive policy difference between the two.
âBiden isn’t a liberal anymore.â
Ayn Rand acolyte Paul Ryan, who lost to Biden in the 2012 vice-presidential election, but declared a more important victory.
Biden’s support for tax cuts for the rich wasn’t a one-off. This was a repeated pattern of voting indicating where his true loyalties lay. Indeed, later he proposed his own tax cuts that were more severe than Reagan’s, and âright out of the Tea Party playbookâ.
Where once the tyranny of “special interests” meant the control of government by big business and the super-rich, it now referred to the ordinary Americans the New Deal had sought to protect from those same powerful entities. (p. 68)
No longer aligned with the working class, Biden now focused on the middle class, solidly Conservative, tax-and-government fearing supporters of the super-rich.
âIt’s the middle class, stupid.â (p.147)
Much like the South where Biden always pivoted for support of anti-union, pro-slavery and white supremacist votes. Biden could have tried to bring Southern voters to the Democrats, but instead chose to lead the Democrats to align with the politics of the South.
Biden had successfully facilitated the decades-long wholesale robbery of working- class Americans by law enforcement. (p. 91)
Enter Bill Clinton, who with Biden’s full support, carried on Reagan’s economic policies leading to ever more cuts in government spending and hardship for millions more Americans.
Biden again offered trillions of dollars of cuts to retirement funds, Medicare, Medicaid and food stamps, giving Mitch McConnell everything he asked for.
As president, much of Obama’s job involved cleaning up messes that Biden had helped create. (p. 191)
The major legislative accomplishments that Biden had racked up in prior decades had succeeded because they had been in pursuit of Republican goals. (p. 199)
Biden did what he always did: plead fealty to working class voters in public speeches filled with references to his Scranton roots while privately appealing for the support of big-money interests. (p. 214)
By 2020, Biden had shifted (and shifted the Democrats) so far to the right, he was finally electable and the safest establishment option to defeat Trump as president.
Dua Lipa's Tiny Desk concerts
Dua Lipa’s Tiny Desk concert at home in between covid lockdowns in 2020 is the most watched Tiny Desk concert ever.
Which doesn’t surprise me at all as we must have watched it literally hundreds, if not thousands, of times.
My little boy absolutely loved it, and even me and big kid secretly liked it, too.
Love Again is my favourite.
She’s just performed a new concert at Tiny Desk HQ, and it’s also very watchable and listenable, with These Walls the standout track.
On Journaling
I wrote this a week ago.
My last journal was over a week ago, last Saturday.
I’ve had a week off work with a really bad cough, wheezing, shortness of breath. Generally feeling better these last couple of days, but also still coughing. Last two days I had coughing fits in the afternoons leaving me dizzy, and exhausted. I haven’t slept well some nights either, due to coughing, wheezing and breathlessness.
But sitting here right now, I feel as good as I have done in two weeks or more.
Time off from work has allowed me to go through 90 days of journal entries to categorise and summarise them, and then outline or tease out the key themes or ideas in each area of interest. Why? Well, 1) what are all these journal entries for? I mean, I get the process, but am I missing out on something greater? 2) Lots of people publish weekly summaries and some people like reading them. But why?
I think I get it now. Doing this work has made sense of a lot of daily, weekly and monthly events, habits, routines, scenarios, relationships, that otherwise would have remained loosely connected, strung together like the Christmas lights every year when you take them out of the box you left them in in January. In a mess, tangled up, half working. Better than nothing, but a lot of stress.
And another surprising fact. While I started - and soon stopped - journaling in March, then restarted in August, I had wondered if spending the time to write in a private journal would take away from writing for my blog? Actually (and unsurprisingly, really) the opposite has occurred. I have written more than ever, privately and publicly.
I’ve also generally felt better in myself, although I’ve still had my usual ups and downs, and I’m still quite easily uplifted and dragged down.
It’s also made me realise I do a lot more things than I imagined, and do them OK.
It’s helped me to better understand some of my relationships, particularly with family.
I’m reading more, and listening to music more.
It would be useful (although perhaps less fun)to do the same exercise with my work journal. (41 pages, 46 days).
244 pages over 90 days for my personal journal.
Unfortunately, I haven’t journaled since.
Jon Batiste's Tiny Desk concert
Jon Batiste, like Alicia Keys, is a supremely talented musician and performer. This is another must watch Tiny Desk concert from 2019.
This is another video my little kid enjoyed watching, singing along to (before he could talk), and dancing to with his big brother (before falling asleep).
Don’t it make your soul shake?
Alicia Keys' Tiny Desk concert
If you haven’t seen and listened to Alicia Keys’ Tiny Desk concert (Feb 2020) then I highly recommend that you do, even if - or especially if - you think she’s not your thing.
This is a video my little kid loved to sing along to before falling asleep for a mid-day or afternoon nap.
We all just wanna be shown some love
Living and breathing
I have vague memories of seeing Florence + The Machine on the BBC at Glastonbury, possibly in 2009. She was the big new thing, breathlessly jumping around all over the place, climbing up the gantry, as she showcased her debut album Lungs.
Lungs album cover photoshoot stills - Tom Beard 2009
Or maybe it was 2015. Ship To Wreck sounds so familiar and like it would have caught my ear.
All very dramatic, elemental, and possibly not quite my thing more generally at those particular times. I didn’t pay much attention then or since.
By then, I’d fallen out of love with life, not just music. In recent years, I’ve rediscovered music, and life, and this week Florence + The Machine.
My little kid is 4 ½ years old. He’s obsessed with space at the moment. When he was younger, and still napping in the day, we found that he enjoyed falling asleep to a variety of music videos on YouTube. Mostly videos of music I liked. I don’t know how that happened!
At one time he really enjoyed some of the NPR Tiny Desk concerts - bands playing stripped down acoustic or semi-acoustic fifteen minute sets on a tiny office stage in front of a small audience.
Two he really liked were Alicia Keys and Jon Batiste - which weren’t my choices (well, they were my choices, but now I had permission to choose them), but I grew to love them, too. It’s hard not love such amazing musicianship, singing and songs, all performed with unconfined joy in the moment. My son got it. So did I.
One he wasn’t so keen on, but I enjoyed, was Florence + The Machine’s Tiny Desk performance. Usually so full of bombast, almost over-produced, and perfect for rocking out stadium tours, this was vulnerable and exposed. Two voices, a harp, acoustic guitar and keyboard. Three perfect songs.
I really tried to listen to more, the album versions, but I still couldn’t get into them.
This week, with my focus on my own personal breathlessness and lung history, and still thinking about another Machine entirely, I tried again. I still couldn’t do it, not fully. I now liked the album versions of the Tiny Desk songs, but the rest washed over me. I read more about the band, the albums, reviews, trying to understand why people like them so much.
Then last night, I finally got it. I cant explain why, exactly. Maybe it’s just familiarity. Probably it’s paying attention. As with many things in life, you sometimes have to make an effort to learn to appreciate things and develop a taste (or ear) for them.
Each breath screaming / ‘We are all too young to die,’â Welch sings in the chorus of âBetween Two Lungs"
I do wonder also, though, if sometimes songs speak to me even when I’m not actively listening? I’ve always been useless at remembering lyrics. Not great for singing songs in a band. But the songs I love for the music, the energy, the tunes… When I do pay attention to the words, sometimes years later, they do carry meaning for me (even if that’s not necessarily what the song is actually about). They just needed to be heard. That’s the beauty of it.
No more gasping for a breath
The air has filled me head-to-toe
And I can see the ground far below
I have this breath and I hold it tight
And I keep it in my chest with all my might
I pray to god this breath will last
Sausages
Lincolnshire sausages are the finest sausages you can get.
I remember as a boy, fifty years ago, my grandmother making sausages at home for the local butcher. Sometimes, she would let me feed the sausage meat into the machine and then turn the handle to push it through into the skins.
A special treat then was boiled sausages for breakfast. The skins would fall off, and we ate them with white bread soaked in the soup or broth they created in the pan along with a dash of English mustard.
In later years, my Mum would travel to Boston in south Lincolnshire from her home in north Lincolnshire specially to buy sausages from the butcher who made the best Lincolnshire sausages.
She would freeze them and pack me off with ten or twelve wrapped in old newspaper whenever I came back to visit from university or when I first moved to Manchester and then London.
I haven’t had a proper Lincolnshire sausage for many years now. The ones we get now are made in Hampshire. They’re nice enough, better than any other variety of supermarket sausage I’ve tried, but you wouldn’t want to boil them.
They’re pretty versatile. They’re great with mashed potatoes and gravy, in a special Valentine’s casserole, in a Yorkshire pudding, with xmas dinner wrapped in bacon, in a bread finger roll with (or without) onions and ketchup, in a sandwich or, as my kids like to eat them, cold on their own in the bath after school.
Got Carter
I started watching Person of Interest almost three months ago thanks to a recommendation from Hippy Steve. Obviously I’m about thirteen years after everyone else, as it first aired in 2011. At that time, I was busy singing songs about one J Carter….
Person of Interest is a post 9/11 surveillance thriller, although I still think my initial impression of the first episode - Minority Report meets Police Squad! wasn’t far off. After watching two and a half seasons, I’d add a good old dollop of Reservoir Dogs into the mix.
Luckily for me, the whole five seasons was free to watch on Amazon Prime, with just a thirty second ad break halfway through each episode.
The basic premise for the show is that we are surrounded by cameras recording our every move. The US government wanted to create an automatic means of harnessing all this information for the greater good - preventing terror attacks on its territory.
The creator of this artificial intelligence - known as The Machine - now has sole access to it. And he is using it to prevent not just terror attacks, but also everyday attacks on ordinary people. People who the government were never interested in because they were irrelevant to national security.
Finch, who is obviously the brains of the operation, hires some brawn - Reese - to do the dangerous work of physically intervening to prevent daily murders. In fact, Finch rescues Reese from whisky-fuelled vagrancy after his former life as a CIA special agent has fallen apart, and offers him redemption. He’s still a hired hitman, but he doesn’t have to kill anyone anymore, just save them from murder.
Luckily there’s only one murder a day, and Reese is just as capable sloshed, slashed, shot, and tied up. He’s the human embodiment of The Machine - Superman, infallible, with all the (ir)relevant information fed to him by Finch via an earpiece and every conceivable weapon, perfect timing and lucky escape available to him, along with miraculous recovery from injury.
Between them, they are all-seeing, all-knowing, and omnipresent, and the recipient of mysterious cryptic phone calls revealing the social security number of the next murder victim or perpetrator.
Soon we start meeting new regular characters. The would-be mob boss working undercover as a shy, socially conscious high school teacher in the toughest area in town. The police homicide detective (one J Carter) looking for “The man in the suit” - Reese - who keeps being seen at the scene of the incredible deaths of various villains. The corrupt police officers (dirty cops known collectively as HR) who protect and serve themselves and their criminal and mob friends. Including Fusco, who is assigned to work with Carter, and recruited by Reese as an inside source and dirty worker.
You can’t run from the past forever, but love is real
Season Two is definitely a cut above Season One. The characters are more rounded, there are more of them, their interactions and back stories are playing out and getting entangled. Finch and Fusco have, or had, love lives. Reese is looking out for Carter even though she’s still officially hunting him. Reese acquires a killer Dutch dog called Bear and keeps him as a pet to protect Finch from the mysterious and powerful root who has been watching everything he does and who wants access to The Machine.
Then, out of the blue, halfway through S2, I can’t watch it anymore! Not without parting with ÂŁ17.99! But by now I’m hooked, watching an episode almost every evening. ÂŁ17.99 gets me the information that it was Finch who ordered Reese and his duplicitous CIA partner to be killed in China, and sociopath Shaw joins the team after her old boss Control tried to kill her. My old boss’s doppelganger turns up in one episode as a serial killer identity thief in a good old-fashioned Columbo episode where everyone is stuck on an island in the middle of a hurricane, and everyone except the killer is a suspect until it’s (almost) too late. Fusco killed his old dirty cop partner Stills and buried him in the woods.
Carter and Bear dig up Stills’ body to save Fusco’s ass
Finch gets captured by root. She wants to set The Machine free. It turns out Finch programmed The Machine to forget everything at the end of every day in an act of self-deletion. root seems to have some kind of connection with The Machine and sees it as a living organism.
In Season Three, Carter brings down HR, including HR’s chief henchman and all round bad guy Simmons. Or does she? No, she doesn’t. He’s somehow still alive. It’s getting silly.
Reese’s number is up. By now, he’s in love with Carter, and she’s in love with him. She dies in his arms, shot in the chest by the evil Simmons, who escapes yet again. Simmons brutally tortures the now extremely likeable Fusco, breaking three of his fingers before sentencing both Fusco and his young son to death. Shaw manages to save Fusco’s son, but she can’t be in two places at once….
Dirty cop turned hero
Somehow, Fusco manages to free his ties and garrote his executioner before he can pull the trigger. Then he finds a strangely unarmed Simmons before he can fly to safety. But instead of shooting him, or even arresting him, he first decides to fist fight him with three broken fingers. Bear in mind that Simmons is hard as nails, and Fusco is short, fat, and a bit of a softie at heart.
Against all the odds, Fusco wins and takes cop-killer Simmons in.
After Carter’s death, Reese goes AWOL and back on the bottle. Fusco finds him out west and they end up in a slapstick brawl in the rain. Meanwhile, Finch and Shaw are captured by the evil Control and her evil Odd Bod henchman Hersh, but miraculously saved by root (who by now had been captured and caged by Finch).
I got bored
Halfway through S3 I gave up. Reese and Fusco miraculously saved Finch and Shaw, who were themselves captured by Vigilance (a violent pro-privacy campaign group), then Hersh. root was captured by Control and brutally tortured, but somehow managed to escape, turn the tables and then save everyone.
I haven’t mentioned the mysterious, sinister and extremely evil elderly Englishman who seemed to be running the whole show (actually the show’s creator’s grandfather in real life), who managed to look like death and worse than Michael Gambon in The Singing Detective.
If you like guns, shooting people, torture, (mock) executions, (child) kidnapping, (attempted) murder, blackmail, gambling, Russian Roulette, cyber-stalking, identity theft, mob rule and police corruption, you’ll probably like Person of Interest. I was into it for around fifty or so episodes, but it became too much, too repetitive, too cliched. They killed off the only J Carter, and I can’t have that, even if J Bezos has another ÂŁ17.99 from me.
People Don't Change
People don’t change, but they can make good decisions.
This is a quote, or the gist of a quote, from an episode of Person of Interest, a TV show I watched avidly for two and a half seasons before rapidly losing interest after the scriptwriters killed off one of the only characters with a fully functioning sense of empathy (who happened to be a black woman) and which therewith descended into a cliched, repetitive, and all-too predictable (yet surprising) slapstick parody of itself.
If I wanted to watch a bunch of psychopaths endlessly escalate a brutal war on humanity I could just look at the news. Americans sure like their guns and shooting people for entertainment. Personally, I prefer a nice cup of tea and a good book, and a bit of peace and quiet.
Anyway, people don’t change, but they can make good decisions. Especially when they have enough guns pointed at their head. That’s the takeaway, or the moral of this story. But they always escape, and then they’re back to making bad decisions all over again, usually involving pointing guns at other people’s heads.
And maybe that’s right. People don’t change. Not until there’s a compelling reason to. We carry on mindlessly making the same old bad decisions over and over again like in Einstein’s theory of insanity, repeating the same mistakes and expecting a different outcome.
It’s a horrible take. But it’s true to some extent. Getting better (it can’t get much worse) can be a bit of a song (and a dance). Recovery is a long and winding road. They tried to make me go to rehab, but I said “No, no, no!” There’s a lot of resistance to change, and even to making good decisions.
But is much of this also a result of the world we live in, and who we are? We live in a world consumed by neoliberal orthodoxy. We are in thrall to the ideas of freedom of the market, the decimation of government and public services, and the freedom of individuals (and individual responsibility, even while what’s left of the state bails out the greed and mistakes of unaccountable banks and corporations).
There’s no such thing as society, Thatcher told us. There is no alternative.
Trump was right, Americans will never vote for a black woman. Hell, they wouldn’t even vote for a warmongering white woman. The white supremacist patriarchy is strong. Yes, they voted for a black man, but he turned out to be the most murderous president in history.
Is there an alternative? There’s always an alternative. It’s just that usually the alternative is more of the same, or worse. Take it or leave it. And even when there is a different option, one which might slightly rein in the excesses of this neoliberal onslaught, it’s demonised as a Stalinist coup that will murder Jews. “Nothing. Has. Changed.” implored Theresa May, quite rightly, as she continued as Prime Minister despite losing her massive parliamentary majority and failing to obtain a mandate to deliver Brexit, or anything other than her own resignation. Calling that election was the most audacious thing she ever did, aside from running through a field of wheat as a child.
Despite the people obviously voting for change, and genuine hope, it was clear that what we really needed instead was a lying, racist killer clown to run the country into the ground.
At least he had a plan. An oven-ready plan to deliver Brexit on a plate just in time for the New Year. It would be served cold, and thoroughly unappetising to everyone, toxic even. But it was the will of the people. It’s what we wanted. We voted for it! We wanted to sever our economic ties to our nearest and biggest trading partner and experience the freedom of going it alone in the big wide world, unleashed!
But that wasn’t enough! The killer clown told too many lies, and hosted too many parties in covid lockdown. He had to go. A tiny minority of elderly rich right wingers then voted for a new leader for us. One who would be more honest, less racist, less murderous, and not as stupid. Liz “Pork Markets” Truss.
Oh, fuck. She might not have been a liar, or a racist, or a murderer, but boy was she stupid. She killed the Queen, trashed the UK economy, and blew up Russia’s Nordstream pipeline, all in less than a month. Talk about a whirlwind. And some bad decisions. She now has a very nice pension. You reap what you sow.
People don’t change, but they can make good decisions. Neoliberalism doesn’t change, and the more that the people are subjected to its bad decisions, its lust for war, for death, for oil, for money, for making the rich richer and the poor poorer, the harder it gets for people to change, and the fewer good decisions are made.