In this brilliant column, Harold Meyerson of The American Prospect compares Trump to Nosferatu, the terrifying central figure in a silent German film of that name.
Death—meaning Trump—stalks Tulsa, bringing with him terror, disease, racism, and chaos. Hallmarks of this man.
Meyerson writes:
Tonight, the presidency of Donald Trump reaches its apotheosis with the president’s first 2020 campaign rally, a toxic mix of deadly germs and racist rage that he is inflicting on Tulsa. Even members of the coronavirus task force advised against this gathering. They were outvoted.
You might think Tulsa has suffered enough. It will soon commemorate the centenary of the white riot of 1921, when marauding bigots massacred hundreds of African Americans and all but destroyed their hitherto thriving community. It is currently enduring a spike in Covid-19 cases, which have risen by 140 percent in the past couple of weeks. Oklahoma now ranks second among the 50 states in the per capita rate of growth of coronavirus cases. Packing Tulsa’s BOK Center with 19,000 shouting Trump supporters, under no requirement to wear masks, will surely spread the virus to attendees, to the arena’s hapless employees, and to the surrounding community.
At the same time, Tulsa’s black community will be both celebrating Juneteenth and memorializing the massacre victims by protesting Trump and all his works, which could invite violence from the lumpen loonies of militias and white supremacy groups who Trump has summoned from the politically dead.
Has any notable visitor from afar ever dropped in on a city so manifestly spreading death in his wake?
Well, yes, at least in legend, and the tales spun from legend. One year after Tulsa’s white riot, in 1922, the brilliant German filmmaker F. W. Murnau made Nosferatu, the first great horror picture—for my money, still the greatest. It was the movies’ first treatment of the Dracula story, though in it, the Dracula character, embodied with terrifying aspect by Max Schreck, is named Nosferatu (derived loosely from the Romanian word Nesuferit, meaning “offensive” or “troublesome”). And, as in not the case in the subsequent Dracula films, Nosferatu neither stays in Transylvania nor confines his deadly compulsions to fatal neck-bites.
In Nosferatu, he travels on a ghostly ship to a placid 19th-century German town, bringing with him caskets full of diseased rats who spread the plague among the town’s panicked citizens. The film contains scenes that look almost predictive of what we’ve all gone through in recent weeks, as the burghers scatter to their homes when news of the plague is revealed, and as the streets grow quiet as the townspeople cower behind their doors.
Trump has reached the stage where comparisons to actual human beings no longer seem adequate. As the demagogue campaigner summons his unmasked hordes, he evokes no one so much as Murnau’s carrier of plague-bearing rats.
I’d be surprised if anyone has ever written that about a president of the United States.
There is reason for this comparison of Trump to Nosferatu.
Trump finds it perfectly natural to speak of infestations.. Here is just one discussion of his use of the infestations, with rats, and multiple examples.
https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2019/07/29/trump-baltimore-infest-tweet-cummings-racist-227485
Maybe this explains the reason for the orange makeup. It keeps him from bursting into flames during daytime hours.
Hmmm. That makes sense.
Obviously you don’t know your vampire lore. 😂 Make up don’t work. See “What We Do in the Shadows” for confirmation. I’m thinking zombie. Über zombie, that is.
My second cousin is a producer on that show.
That show is brilliant. It got so much better this year (and the first season was excellent). The Superb Owl and promotion of the emotional vampire episodes were bend over, air gasping funny. And the original movie is too good. The final episode featuring one of the vampires from the movie was a nice touch. Your cousin is doing great stuff.
For those of you who need a little escape, please consider watching the movie “Shadow of a Vampire” this weekend. It asks the question, what if the actor Max Schreck was really a vampire? One of the better movies of the past few decades. John Malkovich, Willem Dafoe, what more do you want. Better use of your time tonight than watching the Idiot in Tulsa.
Or the John Adams’ opera “Akhenaton” on live stream on The Met app on your smart tvs or devices tonight through tomorrow evening. Either way, great stuff.
I’m listening, right now, to the Trump Tulsa Covidfest 2020 on PBS, live. Trump is due on stage, and they are playing the Tom Petty song “Won’t Back Down,” which has the refrain “Stand my ground”–a dog whistle to the racist white supremacist creeps who support this president, of course. And a reminder that this is a country where a black teenager can be murdered for walking to a convenience store to buy some Skittles, and the murderer can get away with this under “Stand Your Ground” laws.
Too f’ing funny (I did not watch, had a good opera instead):
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/trump-tulsa-oklahoma-rally_n_5eee95adc5b6aac5f3a45f37
I can’t bear to watch or listen to Trump. I saw video of him speaking to a stadium in which Most of the seats in the upper deck were empty. Maybe 12,000-15,000 people were there. The outdoor rally was canceled because no one showed up. Remember that Trump claimed one million people wanted tickets? Haha haha.
What if you gave the “rally of the century,” only a handful of kooks showed up, and half of the event (the talk to the–haaaaaa–overflow crowd) had to be cancelled because there were almost no people there.
ROFLMAO!
I did not see anyone wearing masks.
At least Kayleigh McANinny did not release a statement saying that the vast numbers of empty seats and the nearly empty standing room area of the rally were part of the administration’s social distancing plan. LOL. But maybe that’s coming. Donald looked pretty unhappy at the beginning of this.
Steve Schmidt, never Trumper, says on MSNBC, that young people sabotaged Trump’s Rally by ordering tickets en masse, encouraging Trump to think he would speak to a huge crowd, but instead encountered thousands of empty seats. A debacle.
Perhaps the fake news media are ignoring all the invisibility-cloaked Trump supporters at the rally–you know, the same ones who flooded Washington for his inauguration.
I saw the same non-people filling up both venues! They were everywhere. The fake news media wouldn’t report on them either time!
I hope this is still funny on November 6.
Just read an interesting interview with German actor Jürgen Prochnow, who was the lead in Das Boot and lived until recently in the U.S. before moving back to Germany. “No one wants what’s happening in the USA. What’s happening there is disastrous. People are dying like flies. Especially now. There are protests and unrest in the entire country. Racism is everywhere. But that’s not the reason people are angry and frustrated. Nothing is changing. In so many areas.” He added, “the current president is a catastrophe.” Sounds just about right.
Did anyone read Robert Pondiscio’s recent essay in Edweek where he explains – from the perspective of a privileged white man who is apparently not very alarmed about any of Trump’s actions – that he is proudly refusing to cast a vote for president this year?
Perhaps I could understand why someone might abstain from voting if one of the candidates was not a president who has spent the last 4 years thumbing his nose at the law, spewing racist bile, locking children in cages, having a violent right wing white supremacy group fan base, and appointing sycophant after sycophant who believe their only duty is to allow Trump to commit any corrupt or dangerous action that strikes his fancy. Perhaps if Trump had not tear gassed and pepper sprayed peaceful protesters for racial justice outside a church so that after his speech about how he was the “president of law and order” he could have a photo op at a church he never attended, I could understand Pondiscio still feeling that Trump serving another 4 years was just something that didn’t matter to him.
But clearly, this is an unusual election and Pondiscio reveals a lot about himself when the idea of Joe Biden being president is just as bothersome to him as having 4 more years of Donald Trump. Pondiscio says by not voting he is taking a stand against “partisanship!”
Pondiscio’s rationale for not voting includes specifically citing the “partisanship” of the public’s view of COVID-19 and climate change, providing us with the frightening possibility that Pondiscio is teaching his civics students at Democracy Prep that the scientists who believe in climate change and are concerned with COVID-19 and all the people who are on the side of science are just “partisans” because only one party – the Democrats – happens to believe the science.
Is believing in the science of COVID-19 and climate change now “partisan” because the democrats believe in the science and Trump does not? Surely that cannot be what Pondiscio teaches his students in civics class.
Surely Pondiscio teaches his students that the truth is not partisan, even if only one of the political parties believes in facts and science and the other does not. But I am worried that Pondiscio doesn’t seem to care whether one party believes in science and the other party doesn’t believe in science. I’m worried that Pondiscio truly believes that the people who believe in the science are just as “partisan” as the people who do not!
Pondiscio’s essay is titled “I Teach Civics. And I’m Not Voting”.
One candidate for president believes it is a great idea for Americans to gather together for huge rallies — masks optional — and some of his supporters believe COVID-19 is a big fake after they hear Trump’s speeches and read his tweets. That candidate just today again called COVID-19 “Kung flu” at a Tulsa rally.
The other candidate believes in the science. The other candidate does not use the COVID-19 crisis as a chance to make ethnic slurs.
And a civics teacher believes that he is standing up against “partisanship” by not choosing between those two candidates.
I just read the Pondiscio piece to which you refer. If this man were teaching Civics or anything else in a high-school I was running, I would fire him for being so breathtakingly stupid.
One has to look to comments by Donald Trump on treating Covid19 to find this level of idiocy.
Bob,
Thanks for reading it. I read it twice to see if I was somehow missing some interesting argument Pondiscio was making to justify his actions.
The one thing I absolutely respect Pondiscio for doing is that he included the response of a former colleague at the end of his piece:
“When I described my idea for this piece, she emailed back and chided me a little, even speculating that “making a nuanced point about how to be civic-minded by not voting makes me believe you are keeping your support [of Trump] veiled. But,” she added, “I tend to assume the worst in general.”
Pondiscio’s former colleague clearly knows him very well. It is admirable that Pondiscio included her insightful take on what Pondiscio’s choice not to vote probably represents.
But I have no idea why Pondiscio ended with “And that’s the point”.
Do you think he is trying to convince readers that a colleague who cares passionately about doing good and making this country better is “too partisan” because she assumes the worst while working passionately to change things for the better?
Anyone who has paid any attention to what Trump and the Republican Party have been doing for the last 4 years would “assume the worst” — it would be the height of idiocy to say “well I am sure this time Trump is telling the truth and I will believe him over all the scientists”.
The colleague doesn’t trust those who believe that the truth is less important than getting what they want. That doesn’t mean she is “too partisan”. That means that she has looked at what Trump has been doing for the last 4 years and assumes the worst because Trump has given her reason to assume the worst.
Since Trump has given all Americans who believe in science and truth a “reason to assume the worst”, it seems hypocritical for Pondiscio to use that as his excuse for why he won’t vote for Biden to replace Trump, regardless of the level of enthusiasm he has for Biden. I certainly hope Pondiscio is teaching his civics students that they don’t have to have “enthusiasm” to vote for a boring candidate if the opposing candidate is a danger to democracy and is divisive and sows hate and lies over and over again to the American people.
Maybe Pondiscio meant something else when he wrote that last sentence. I hope Pondiscio puts aside his privilege and thinks about the message he is sending to all the students at Democracy Prep about how little concern he has about the things Trump is doing to our country because the people who believe in truth and oppose Trump — like Pondiscio’s colleague — are just too partisan.
I thought, this morning, perhaps he doesn’t actually hold an opinion this ludicrous and loathsome. Perhaps he’s one of those fellows who thinks that he has learned from Roy Cohn and Donald Trump that any publicity is good publicity and has worried of late that he isn’t getting enough press and sees this article is a way to rectify the latter. Here we are, after all, talking about him and this piece. Perhaps he thought all this quite clever.
Or perhaps he simply didn’t think. Perhaps he lives a post-truth, post-thought world, Tweedle-denial to Trump’s Tweedle-dumb.
REPORTER: So, how are you going to vote on the Enabling Act?
R.P.: Look, our politics have become so polarized, so divisive, what the inability of the pro-Hitler and anti-Hitler forces to talk to one another, that I’m just not going to vote.
REPORTER: So, you are maintaining plausible deniability about your support for Hitler.
R.P.: There, see what I mean? That’s the point.
REPORTER: You don’t agree that there are issues so important at stake that not voting is extremely irresponsible? And you don’t believe that abstentions or suppression of the vote will help Hitler.
R.P.: There you go. Godwin’s Law.
REPORTER: Godwin’s Law hasn’t been formulated yet. It won’t be for another 57 years. You can’t use that.
Aie yie yie. Typos in my response. Oh for a comment editor on WordPress!
The point, ofc, is that few elections in U.S. history have had the significance of the Presidential election coming up. Inability to see that is simply stupidity.
Mr. Pondisco doesn’t really present an argument for his not voting in the “I’m not voting” piece, and he specifically says that he’s not recommending not voting to others, so it’s perplexing. It’s especially perplexing coming from someone who is capable of writing this rationally:
“It’s long past time to acknowledge that reading tests—especially tests with stakes for individual teachers attached to them—do more harm than good. . . . [I]f your goal is to boost test scores now, you’re incentivizing bad teaching by encouraging a vacuous skills-and-strategies approach to reading, conspiring against patient investment in knowledge and vocabulary, and sacrificing vast amounts of class time for test prep.”
On those matters, he and I are in emphatic agreement.
If the “I’m not going to vote” is simply a protest against the divisiveness of our politics and our inability to talk to one another across our ideological divides, it’s not a well-thought-out one. Given what’s at stake, it seems an irresponsible position to take, just as it would have been irresponsible, in 1933, not to take a position with regard to the Enabling Act (which was the point of my mini political satire above).
Bob,
“few elections in U.S. history have had the significance of the Presidential election coming up. Inability to see that is simply stupidity.”
Yes, that is exactly it!
It is entirely possible that another 4 years of Trump will do no more damage to this country that the last 4 years have done. But why would anyone take that chance? Even if you don’t like Biden’s policies or believe he is “too corporate”, that will not interfere with the chance of continuing the battle to elect more progressive candidates in the future.
Regardless of how corporate even the most conservative Democrats are, they believe in democracy. Democrats believe in making it EASIER for people to vote, and they don’t try to limit that ease of voting to make sure that only people who are likely to vote Democrat can vote. Democrats don’t look for a way that they can strike likely Trump voters off of voting rolls.
Voting for Joe Biden this year has nothing to do with whether you support the specific policies of Joe Biden. The Republicans who are part of the Lincoln Project love Trump’s economic policies and don’t like Joe Biden’s. But this election really isn’t about ANY specific policies. It is about whether one believes in democracy and rule of law. That also would have been the case if Bernie Sanders had been the nominee. Those who believed in democracy were morally obligated to vote for Sanders to defeat Trump even if they didn’t like his policies.
I have thought about whether I could vote against a president who enacted Medicare for All and raised taxes on the rich and established a universal guaranteed income if that president was also making deals in which he directed billions in taxpayer dollars to his family’s business and all foreign policy decisions were made based on what financial benefits his family’s personal business would receive or whether that foreign country would help him win his next election. And if that president had announced that he was above the law, and fired anyone in the justice department who objected and appointed only officials who would enable him to do anything he wanted to anyone he wanted, would I say “well but he’s pushing the progressive policies in this country that I like, so that’s okay”? If that president used his crony-driven justice department to investigate anyone who disagreed with his progressive policies and if that president encouraged supporters to demonize and hate certain ethnic groups and looked the other way when his supporters act violently toward anyone peacefully protesting his actions, would I say “but he’s pushing the progressive policies I like, so that’s okay?” If that president acted only in his own best interests and lied over and over again, and demanded that those who tried to tell the truth be punished, and thus caused great harm when this country was in the middle of a pandemic, would I say “but he’s pushing the progressive policies I like, so that’s okay?”
I like to think it would be a very easy decision to vote for that president’s opponent who believed in and defended democratic principles, even if he or she supported far more conservative economic policies. But I can certainly see where it might be tempting to overlook all of those things because I thought I was getting something I wanted and the “bad” things didn’t affect me or my family very much because I lived in a place of privilege.
I’m imagining there’s a very displeased shirtless fascist dwarf riding his white stallion in Kyzyl this morning….
LOL
Barr’s selection for acting US attorney in N.Y.’s 2nd district (replacement for Berman) should raise red flags. Media reports that, in a case related to the Ft. Lee bridge scandal, Craig Carpenito protected Chris Christie’s interests.
Carpenito, Pat Ciprione who took Dan McGahn’s place in getting conservative judges on the bench, Leonard Leo at the Federalist Society,…all in very powerful positions.
Barr’s quote- Introduce religion at every opportunity
Jefferson’s quotes about religion
Racists tout their version of assimilation into the U.S. by singling out black people, using economic success as measure. The racist mindset finds home in the school privatization campaign. Racists choose to ignore the impact of events like the Tulsa massacre and the “knee on the neck” of black people for more than 100 years. By any standard, the incarceration of black people has been excessive and unwarranted. The result is an imposed impossibility to accumulate wealth.
Bill and Melinda Gates could have focused away from an existing mindset but, Bill has proven he doesn’t have an expansive mind, he is fixated on money. “Philanthropic” initiatives aimed at improving the U.S. should have turned a critical eye to assimilation of immigrants and their descendants in the U.S., those who came from Italy, Ireland, Germany,…(segments never subjected to shackles). Where is the research about percentages of each who fail to assimilate into a culture of respect for diversity and who cling to authoritarian governance, rejecting democracy? Solutions for the harm caused by the immigrants’ religions and their religious leaders would have been original area of study and stopped facilitation of the implosion of America.
A failure to value democracy, a failure to respect the work of labor and a failure to glue a society together through shared advantage dooms a nation. Wealth concentration fuels and cements the outcome.
Shout out to the school privatization “philanthropists” hawking profit-taking for billionaires
with a special animosity to AEI’s Frederick Hess and Fordham Institute’s staff.