Trump’s KKK ideology; ghost pop; and a new coffee shop.
I’m All Lost in…
the 3 things I’m obsessing about this week.
#49
1) On January 29, 2016, I posted a prediction on my blog that Donald Trump would win that year’s presidential election.
My prediction was based on a story from that day’s NYT: “Labor Leaders Fear Trump’s Appeal With Rank and File.” I was getting Reagan Democrat vibes.
This week’s Teamsters’ news— that the working class union is refusing to endorse Harris (a significant win for Trump)— is reminiscent of that portentous 2016 story, and it’s raising the hair on my neck.
I was slightly soothed, though, by this week’s Washington Post report that Teamster locals got up in Teamster Trumper union president Sean O’Brien’s face with subsequent Harris endorsements in swing states.
And it’s also nice to note that the Teamsters’ Black Caucus endorsed Harris in mid-August, praising…
the bipartisan infrastructure bill President Biden signed, as well as steps his administration has taken to lower prescription drug costs and increase wages. It also credited Ms. Harris with pushing to expand the child tax credit … and with helping to preserve union members’ pensions.
The Black Caucus’ pro-Harris endorsement was accompanied by full fledged disdain for Trump:
It said that former President Donald J. Trump’s administration “was one of the most antilabor in modern history,” citing among other things his loosening of workplace safety regulations and his opposition to raising the federal minimum wage.
This raises the question: Why are the national Teamsters default siding with Trump?
Like the Reagan Democrats (and Nixon’s “Lunch Pail” vote before that), it’s a culture war issue, and specifically, it’s Trump’s white identity politics that appeals to the non-POC Teamsters membership—and puts the Black Caucus on edge. The Teamsters’ Black Caucus Harris endorsement stated that Trumpism was “contributing to a hostile environment for Black Americans.”
As for their white Teamster comrades?
Earlier this year, when Mr. Biden was still in the race, Mr. O’Brien asked each Teamsters local to hold a straw poll. … Mr. Biden had won a plurality, 44 percent to Mr. Trump’s 36 percent. But … two other surveys … showed Mr. Trump crushing Ms. Harris, 60 percent to 34 percent…
Working-class voters, especially white men, have favored Mr. Trump, a point Ms. Harris conceded on Monday when she told Teamsters leaders that she understood the union’s rank-and-file was looking at issues beyond labor, such as immigration.
This all leads to what I’m actually obsessing over this week: The fact that Trump’s KKK ideology is now, by choice, the defining feature of his presidential campaign. Indeed, if the union story is reminiscent of Reaganism, Trump’s stump demagoguery about fictitious Haitians-eating-pets in Springfield, Ohio is reminiscent Southern lynch mob politics.
Jamelle Bouie’s NYT column this week, “Trump Knows What He’s Doing in Springfield. So Does Vance,” predicts how Trump’s bellicose race baiting will play out in a second Trump term.
The hair is standing up on the back of my neck again:
Where once Donald Trump attracted only the right-wing fringe of American politics, now he leads it. Where once he kept some distance from agitators and provocateurs like Laura Loomer, now they’re at the center of his campaign. And where once he merely inspired extremists to act, now he points them directly at the objects of his rage.
Take Springfield, Ohio, where schools, colleges and municipal buildings have been shut down and community events canceled owing to bomb threats targeting the city’s Haitian community. Those threats come as Trump — and his running mate, Senator JD Vance of Ohio — smear the Haitians of Springfield with the lie that they’re stealing and eating the pets of presumably native-born Americans.
…Today, if you were to place the rhetoric of Unite the Right side by side with that of Trump’s 2024 campaign, you would struggle to find a difference. Echoing the chants of “blood and soil” we heard in Charlottesville, the former president now tells audiences that immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country.” He calls his foes “vermin” and warns that “the threat from outside forces is far less sinister, dangerous and grave than the threat from within.”
…For the Trump campaign to descend on Springfield would be to recapitulate the dynamic that led to the events in Charlottesville. The difference, of course, is that then Trump was several places removed from the extremists who led the effort to “Unite the Right.” Now he’s the standard-bearer.
It is important to say that if presidential campaigns are a glimpse into presidential governance, then the Trump campaign’s anti-Haitian agitation is a clear glimpse into how President Trump would behave and govern in a second term. One can imagine Trump spreading Springfield-esque lies from the Oval Office directly to the American public. One can imagine a Vice President Vance touring cities with new immigrant populations, attacking them with the same smears he’s used to target the Haitian community of Springfield, spreading hate so that the public will accept the mass deportation of millions of immigrants. Trump, in fact, has already promised to start mass deportations in Springfield. “We’re going to have the largest deportation in the history of our country,” Trump said on Friday. “And we’re going to start with Springfield and Aurora.”
Republicans who are Republicans and not KKK fabulists—Springfield, Ohio’s mayor and Ohio’s governor, for example—have tried to counter Trump’s lies with the truth (as Republican officials once tried to do in Georgia in response to Trump’s “stolen” election lies). This is a lost cause for a party that’s been taken over by Trump’s authoritarian script of racist conspiracy theories.
2) Jazz Age and Great Depression pop music, the scratchy, maudlin strains that I refer to as Ghost Pop (because every pianist, violinist, and crooner on these slightly creepy late 1920s and early 1930s recordings is long dead), seems to have one foot in another dimension.
A cartoon I published in the Stranger, moons ago.
Though this soothing music uses standard Western scales and chords, there’s nonetheless something alien about it, as if it was written in an ancient Greek mode, such as Locrian, the mystery scale that has long fallen out of use because of its apparent instability.
I’m not sure why Ghost Pop—I point you to Russ Columbo, Rudy Vallée, Gene Austin, and Ruth Etting as the the form’s master performers—feels off-kilter, but listen to Columbo’s “Prisoner of Love” or Vallee’s “Deep Night” and tell me you don’t feel as if you’re suddenly flickering between Matrixes.
That’s definitely where I’ve been this week as I took up practicing Rodgers and Hart’s “Ten Cents A Dance,” perhaps my favorite Ghost Pop number (Ruth Etting’s 1930 version), on piano.
“Ten Cents A Dance”—a yearning tune sung from the lonely and bummed out POV of a taxi dancer—is in the the key of E flat major, not a particularly odd key. Elton John’s “Your Song,” Guns & Roses’ “Welcome to the Jungle,” Marvin Gaye’s “Let’s Get it On,” The Beach Boys’ “Fun, Fun, Fun” are among the parade of pop classics in E flat major.
I don’t know, though, if those rock-era tunes push chords such as E natural/B flat—a diminished fifth—which disassociates from the key by abandoning the E flat tonic in favor of an out-of-sequence sharped 1 note, E natural. In fact, in the opening 12 measures of “Ten Cents A Dance” alone, there are seven instances when the song abandons the rest of key’s vocabulary as well: There are A naturals instead of the key’s A flat, there are F sharps instead of the key’s F natural, there’s a G flat instead of the key’s G natural, and there are D flats instead of the key’s D natural.
What the hell? Was the key of E flat just the closest thing to the song’s suis generis logic. Significantly, it’s the E flat (the home base note) itself that the melody consistently kicks to the curb, such as on the lines “Customers [E natural-B flat] crush my toes [F-E natural].”
On the word “Toes,” the song also subs an A natural for the key’s important 4 tone, the A flat. Again, WTF? Why even bother pretending this song—with all its stray notes and crushed, dissonant chords—has a defining key at all?
Leaning into Rodgers and Hart’s “queer romance,” fitting words accompanied here by notes that ironically belong in the song’s key of E flat major—C and F with an A flat, and F and G with a D and C—has provided definition for me all week.
3) File this under Transit Oriented Development and/or an obvious business plan:
Open a coffee shop next to the 4th busiest light rail stop in the city (8,000 daily riders). That’s what the folks behind the quietly spiffy Seasmith did, setting up shop by the Capitol Hill station.
I worked out of Seasmith on both Thursday and Friday this week, fitting into the easy rhythm of the place—it fills up quickly right after the 7 am open; though folks come and go, so finding a seat, either at one of the many solid tables or at the roomy bar, is easy enough; as is everything here: the vegan-friendly lunch menu (there’s a blackbean, mushroom patty sandwich and a rolled oats chia seed coconut milk bowl with chopped nuts by request), the bounty of savory and sugary pastries (black sesame cookies), the standard or fancy coffee specials (Lavendar Blossom Latte), and, bonus, the plentiful carafes of water at the spic and span busing station.
Set flush against the light rail station plaza with a wall of floor-to-ceiling windows and plenty of house plants, this new spot (it opened in the Spring) opts for light industrial chic and open, bright feng shui (as opposed to cozy and bohemian).
The din of patrons busy at telework and earnest meetings, plus the sound system (they seem to play entire album sides—I noticed Massive Attack’s Blue Lines, Lorde’s Melodrama, Madonna’s Ray of Light, and The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill) mix with the active, staffed-up staff to soften the corporate L.A. contours.
I’m rooting for this place to succeed, and there does seem to be a metaphor at play in their current posted hours:
Open-ended hours
One barista said closing time was 5, but I looked up and the place was still flowing onward toward 6.