Kevin Dowd

Dear Commons Community,

Those of us who regularly read Maureen Dowd’s column in The New York Times know that once a year, she lets her brother, Kevin, write her column.  He generally presents a moderate Republican perspective.  Below is his review of the national political landscape.

Tony

————————————————————————

The New York Times

Maureen Dowd

Trigger Warning: It’s My Brother’s Turn Again

Jan. 1, 2022

I have gotten emails asking me not to run my brother Kevin’s annual column this past year. And I have gotten emails asking me to please run Kevin’s column. I prefer to let people know what Republicans like Kevin are thinking. So here he is:

I begin with a personal note, a quick apology for missing the Thanksgiving column.

I was recovering from a heavyweight bout with Covid. Despite two vaccinations last spring, I got very ill at the end of October, including the dreaded Covid fog, where you cannot formulate your thoughts — putting me on a par with a lot of politicians in D.C.

It took a full month, including physical therapy, to recover. Now I’m back.

The Republicans are watching the political scene these days with a mixture of glee and trepidation.

President Biden is underwater in the polls but Donald Trump is a potential problem. No one is sure of Trump’s intentions at this point.

There is no doubt that the Trump presidency ended on a sour note. His claims of a stolen election and his badgering of state officials to overturn the results probably cost the Republicans the Senate.

David Perdue led the first round of the Georgia Senate election by about 88,000 votes but lost the runoff due in part to the confusion Trump was causing in the state. The rally on the Mall and the subsequent attack on the Capitol are also on Trump’s tab.

That day was awful to watch because protecting the Capitol was our family business. My father was in charge of security for the United States Senate. He got summer jobs for me and all my four siblings at the Capitol when we were teenagers.

I worked for four years in the Senate and House, folding lawmakers’ newsletters. One of the perks was access to the dining room, where I ate side by side with congressmen and senators.

I hope Trump does not run. He can do a lot more for the party as an advocate than a candidate. Like him or not, some of his policies were working: accords between Arab countries and Israel, Iran on its heels, China chastened, the border fence going up, low unemployment, a strong economy and best of all, low energy prices and higher wages.

Biden swept into the presidency on a wave of hope, a friendly press and a highly disliked opponent. He had run as a moderate, a creature of the Senate and a unifier, promising a return to normalcy.

Donald Trump’s bungled effort to overturn the election and the ill-advised rally that ended with an attack on the Capitol further raised Biden’s standing.

Once he became president, everything changed. Like one of the residents of Santa Mira, the fictional town in Don Siegel’s 1956 masterpiece, “Invasion of the Body Snatchers,” Biden looked the same but his actions revealed a startling transformation.

The moderate Joe Biden was gone. The sweeping changes he proposed in the first few months sounded more like Bernie Sanders. Many of them backfired, severely damaging his early support.

The White House strategy should have been simple. Leave the policies that are working alone and take credit for them as yours (an old trick of Bill Clinton’s). Instead, Biden (or his handlers) seemed intent on more drastic action.

In the first hours, he canceled the Keystone XL pipeline and the many jobs it would bring. He quickly recommitted to the Paris climate agreement and looked overeager trying to restart the failed Iran nuclear deal.

Biden proposed trillions of dollars in spending on new social programs promising to outdo the New Deal and the Great Society and move the country more fully into a big government-dependent state. (Congratulations to Joe Manchin for putting country over party, and shame on the Democrats for not knowing the difference.)

The president may have mistimed his alliance with the far left. The American people are growing tired of the role of government in their lives. They are sick of lockdowns and masks for Covid. They are sick of the government at every level interfering in our schools and telling us what our children are taught. And they are sick of government programs that have hobbled our country and increased our massive debt.

The Democrats have messaging problems as well. Nancy Pelosi’s unfortunate position that members of Congress should be able to continue owning individual stocks jars with the image the party is trying to project and is at odds with the forces that drove the country to elect Trump. (And many Republicans have been no better on this issue.)

Saying that members of Congress should be able to trade or hold individual stocks because the United States is “a free-market economy” blissfully ignores that all sorts of lower-level employees in the federal bureaucracy give up their right to buy individual stocks in certain companies when they take various jobs because of the appearance of conflicts of interest.

The president says he’s running again. But he would be 86 at the end of a second term. Kamala Harris has had a horrible first year as vice president. And the Democrats have no bench, unless you count Beto, Bernie, Secretary Pete, Stacey, de Blasio and Gavin.

The day the Capitol was under attack, I felt nostalgic for the days when things were a lot more collegial, and when the two parties mixed and laughed together. Now we’re even further apart.

Maybe if we try to find a middle ground, collegiality doesn’t have to be a relic of the past. It does not hurt to think of it as we ring in a new year.

Dear Commons Community,

Eric Adams is New York City’s new mayor, and was sworn into office in a Times Square ceremony shortly after midnight  on New Year’s Eve (see video above).

Adams, 61, faces the huge challenge of pulling the city out of the pandemic, taking office as the city is grappling with record numbers of COVID-19 cases driven by the omicron variant.

As confetti continued to drift across Times Square, Adams recited his oath of office. Associate Justice Sylvia O. Hinds-Radix of the state Supreme Court’s appellate division swore Adams in as he placed one hand on a family Bible and his other held a photograph of his mother, Dorothy, who died in 2020.

He made no remarks nor took questions from reporters, but appeared on “Dick Clark’s New Year’s Rockin’ Eve with Ryan Seacrest” shortly after being sworn in.

He told Seacrest he had a few parties to attend but that he would “be up early in the morning, working for the city of New York.”

He had earlier appeared briefly on the main stage to affirm the city’s resiliency.

“Even in the midst of COVID, in the midst of everything that we’re going through, this is a country where hope and opportunities is always, ever present,” he said earlier in the night.

“It’s just great when New York shows the entire country of how we come back,” he said. “We showed the entire globe what we’re made of. We’re unbelievable. This is an unbelievable city and, trust me, we’re ready for a major comeback because this is New York.”

Adams is a former New York City police captain and Brooklyn borough president who has struck a more business-friendly, moderate stance than his predecessor but describes himself as a practical and progressive mayor who will “get stuff done.” He’s the city’s second Black mayor, after David Dinkins who served from 1990 to 1993, and the 110th mayor of New York City. 

Adams said this week that he plans to keep in place many of the policies of outgoing Mayor Bill de Blasio, including vaccine mandates that are among the strictest in the nation. 

The city’s municipal workforce is required to be vaccinated, as is anyone trying to dine indoors, see a show, workout at a gym or attend a conference. But New York City has also newly required employees in the private sector to get their shots, the most sweeping mandate of any state or big city and a policy Adams said he will preserve.

He’s also committed to keeping schools open and avoiding any further shutdowns in the city of 8.8 million.

Even without a mandated shutdown, the city is grappling with de facto closures because of widespread COVID-19 infections. 

Several subway lines were suspended because positive test results among transit workers left too few staffers to run regular trains. 

The Rockettes Christmas show was canceled for the season, and the New York City Ballet canceled remaining performances of “The Nutcracker.” Several Broadway shows closed because of COVID-19 cases, and restaurants and bars around the city temporarily closed because their workers tested positive. 

Adams said he and a team of advisers are studying whether to expand the city’s vaccine mandates, plan to distribute face masks and rapid tests and introduce a color-coded system alerting New Yorkers to the current threat level posed by the virus.

As a mayoral candidate, Adams described growing up poor in Brooklyn and Queens and spoke about issues of crime, policing and racial injustice that blended his experiences as a former police captain, an officer who was critical of his own department and a teenager who experienced brutality at the hands of police officers.

While promising to be a man of action in the mayor’s office, Adams is at times an unconventional politician who is expected to put his own stamp on the role. 

He’s a vegan who wrote a book in 2020 about how a plant-based diet helped him with diabetes and has shown off his favorite smoothie recipe on social media. He’s been known to frequent some of the city’s nightclubs, saying during an appearance on Stephen Colbert’s late-night show that, “This is a city of nightlife. I must test the product. I have to be out.”

We wish Mayor Adams well!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

On New Year’s Eve after dinner, my wife and I decided to watch Don’t Look Up, a new film directed by Adam McKay that includes a star-studded cast including Leonardo DeCaprio, Meryl Streep, Jennifer Lawrence, Kate Blanchette, and Mark Rylance.  We did not know what we were getting ourselves into.  It is a “slap in your face” satire of the inability and ignorance of our governmental leaders to take climate change seriously.  I think that viewers will either hate it or love it, probably more the former.  However, I think it is worth seeing for its commentary on our governmental and societal dysfunction when it comes to big issues such as climate change.  Above is a brief video in which Leonardo DeCaprio explains its messaging.  Below is a review written by Ezra Brain for Left Voice.

It is currently on Netflix.

Tony

———————————————————————————————————————

Against Subtlety: ‘Don’t Look Up’ Is the Movie for Our Moment

Don’t Look Up is The Movie about what it feels like to be alive right now. It’s a masterpiece of 21st-century climate anxiety and, more importantly, class rage.

Ezra Brain

December 30, 2021

I work in live entertainment in New York City — a city that, as you almost certainly know, is experiencing quite the Covid surge currently. For weeks — if not months — my coworkers and I have had the same basic conversation every shift: “How the hell are we still open? Surely it’s just a matter of time till we close, right?” This leads to a complex combination of fear, disbelief, and hope-beyond-all-reason in those who have shown, time and time again, that they can’t be trusted. This is a deeply disorienting, aggravating, and depressing feeling. This feeling is increasingly common as workers realize that those with power truly don’t care whether we live or die.

It is in this context, this rage, fear, and despair, that I sat down to watch the new film from Adam McKay: Don’t Look Up (out on Netflix now). Don’t Look Up is written by McKay (who has gone on record calling noted Hollywood liberal Aaron Sorkin “the right-wing version of me”) from a story by McKay and Jacobin editor David Sirota. This writing team — combined with McKay’s typical in-yer-face directorial style — find a way to capture the current feeling of rage, gallows humor, and resignation.

The basic plot of the film hinges on an (intentionally) unsubtle metaphor about climate change — represented in the film by a comet that is about to crash into earth and eradicate all life. This comet is discovered by a graduate student (played by Jennifer Lawrence in her triumphant return to motion pictures) who then embarks with her professor (played against type by Leonardo DiCaprio) to Washington to convince the uncaring president (Meryl Streep). Other cast members include Jonah Hill as the White House chief of staff, Cate Blanchett and Tyler Perry as media hosts more interested in ratings than the news, Timothée Chalamet as a Gen Z skater, and Mark Rylance as an amalgamation of Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos.

As the film goes on, McKay almost gleefully withholds hope from us. We know immediately that Streep and Hill aren’t going to take Lawrence and DiCaprio seriously — . after all, the researchers are from a state school, not an Ivy, a plot detail that hits particularly hard as a critique of technocratic governance. And we know that even once the politicians do take the warnings seriously, it won’t come of anything — it’s just political theater. When Lawrence and DiCaprio go on Blanchett and Perry’s news show, we know that won’t matter either. McKay never lets us have any hope throughout the film — and the one time he does, it is painstakingly taken away in perhaps the most enraging scene of the film, when Rylance’s capitalist character intervenes to literally turn the plan to save the planet around.

This could easily be read as nihilistic. But, to me, it never did. Rather, it seems as if McKay was reminding us (and then re-reminding us) that we can’t have any faith that the same people who are killing the earth are going to save it. More than anything, Don’t Look Up is a critique of liberalism, of the idea that the system will correct itself. Much of this critique is seen through the arc of the DiCaprio character — a professor who decides to be the “adult in the room” for Streep and Rylance. Through DiCaprio we see the folly of working within the system and trusting the state and big business to set or follow any rules to protect the planet. McKay is forcing us to watch the liberal strategy play out and see how it ends.

Much criticism has been leveled at this film. People find the film unfunny, poorly written, and ham-fisted. While the first two are subjective complaints — I am not going to attempt to tell anyone what they should find funny — the critique of the film as unsubtle or on-the-nose bears further exploration.

To put it bluntly: we are living through a devastating and unprecedented environmental crisis. Fires swept across the world this year, thousands lost their lives, refugees are drowning in oceans, and power grids are failing under the weight of snow. In NYC, multiple people drowned to death in their basement apartments due to flooding. Nina DeMeo compared the scenes of New York earlier this year to The Day after Tomorrow. None of this is subtle.

To bring the pandemic into it, the CDC just changed quarantine guidelines because the CEO of Delta Air Lines asked it to. Schools are staying open in urban centers facing record-breaking infection numbers. The president of the United States — a man who was elected explicitly to better handle the pandemic — basically told the unvaccinated that it was their fault that Covid was still going on — even as he continues to refuse to lift vaccine patents, enact shutdowns, or any number of other structural changes that would help protect workers. These are not subtle times.

Increasingly, I worry that we have fallen into a petty bourgeois model of artistic criticism, according to which loudly talking about problems is somehow less profound than talking about them quietly. German playwright Bertolt Brecht, in his writings, made very, very loose metaphors for the political questions of his time as ways to make them more accessible — for example, rather than discussing Hitler’s invasion of Germany explicitly, Brecht wrote Mother Courage and Her Children, which grapples with the capitalist nature of war but is set in the 17th century. But, in all of his writing, he is just as blunt and unsubtle as McKay — in Mother Courage, he has a character say, “I won’t let you spoil my war for me. Destroys the weak, does it? Well, what does peace do for ’em, huh? War feeds its people better.” Certainly not a subtle line.

The problems facing us aren’t subtle. Capitalist exploitation and environmental crises aren’t subtle. So why should our art be?

Perhaps selfishly, perhaps as a reaction to the times we’re living in, I yearn for the death of subtlety in art. I yearn for art — but specifically political art — that will just show up and start talking about the problems. And, like it or not, Don’t Look Up does that: it shows up and starts talking about the problems.

Many — including several members of Left Voice — find Don’t Look Up depressing and lacking a plan for liberation. And, to a certain extent, I agree. I agree that Don’t Look Up doesn’t talk enough about revolution or the working class or organizing. Would I have liked the movie better if the final act was Lawrence and Chalamet organizing a working-class uprising? Probably. But, to me, that isn’t what this film is about. What Don’t Look Up is about, to me, is that feeling — the feeling I described at the beginning of this piece — of knowing that we’re barreling toward disaster and that no one with power will do anything to stop it.

At work and in life, I feel like I am constantly looking up — that I and my coworkers see the comet barreling toward us — but all the bosses and politicians and scientific bureaucracy are on the news telling us that everything is fine. “Don’t look up, we’re fine, just keep on working, isn’t this so much better?” And, with each passing day, the comet grows closer.

To me, Don’t Look Up is a film about looking up, seeing the disaster, and then realizing that the system can’t address the disaster — so it tries to convince you that everything is fine. And, more than anything, Don’t Look Up is about the Utah Phillips quote I opened this review with. It’s about how we need to realize that this isn’t a natural disaster; it’s the disaster created by a handful of people with immense wealth and power. And we know who they are — or, at least, we have the ability to know who they are — and we know that they are happy to continue business as usual until we all die — another enraging moment in McKay’s film is when, as disaster finally becomes inevitable, the ruling class uses a secret rocket to escape while everyone else burns. The people killing the earth have names and addresses. And there are many, many, many more of us than there are of them, which means we have immense power — after all, as we at Left Voice often repeat, the working class makes literally everything run and can shut it all down if we choose to. And I’m tired of risking my life for their profits. I’ve looked up. I’ve seen the comet. I’ve looked up.

Dear Commons Community,

Peace, Health and Happiness for 2022!

Tony