terencehawkins

[terencehawkins]

JACKIE AND ME: WHO THEY WERE BEFORE THEY BECAME WHO THEY WERE

With this novel, Louis Bayard cements his reputation as America's premier historical novelist. In it, he traces the young JFK's desultory and seemingly ambivalent courtship of the even younger Jackie as seen through the eyes of his Choate roommate, Lem Billings. Jack needs a wife to advance his political career but wants to stay as much a bachelor as possible; Jackie wants to be married, but not to become a housewife. Lem, a closeted gay man, would seem the ideal go-between, keeping Jackie occupied with gallery openings or swanky cocktail bars while young Jack pursues a Senate seat and any woman who falls into his line of sight.

But of course things don’t quite work out that way. Lem’s relationship with Jackie deepens into a friendship so profound that he begins to fantasize about their getting married instead, to flee to Europe for lives of artsy sophistication while occupying themselves with lovers of the appropriate genders. We know, of course, that’s not to be. But before the happy couple rides off to its honeymoon, Lem is forced into a choice that may represent multiple betrayals.

In the background, pulling—or at least trying to pull—the strings are Jack and Jackie’s parents. Jackie’s mother, Janet Auchincloss, is a monster of snobbery. Joe Kennedy is just a monster. In the course of an attempted seduction during her debut at the Hyannisport compound, he tells Jackie that Gloria Swanson had “the tastiest rosebud and tightest pussy God ever gave a female.” I will never watch Sunset Boulevard again. And Jackie’s reception by the boisterous, ruthlessly competitive Kennedy children made me think of what it must be like to walk into a kennel full of Airedales.

Bayard’s lyric gift is very much on display. When Jackie first appears in New York she is “a terrapin without its shell, oozing doubt from every pore in a city that makes you doubt ten times harder.” And his portrayal of upper class life in fifties America is striking as well. Jackie’s first fiance is angling for a marriage in which she “would have the cushions waiting in his armchair and the whiskey-and-soda on the side table, along with the evening ration of five cigarettes, laid out like caterpillars.”

but by far the best part of the book is the picture of the Kennedys before they became celebrities, then icons, and finally martyrs. This Jack and Jackie are just kids unsure of next steps. Don’t miss this.

[terencehawkins]

WISHFUL THINKING or EERIE PRESCIENCE: IMAGINING THE END of THE TRUMP PRESIDENCY in 2018

This originally appeared in 2018, when we all thought Robert Mueller would save us. At the time I thought it was satire so broad as to verge on caricature. Uhh . . .nope!

 He is alone in the Oval.  

He hung up on Hizzoner a few minutes ago.  He tried to get out ahead of the story but it was too late.  No way to come back from this one.  Sorry, but he had to think of himself too.  Hey, but it's been a hell of a ride, right?  So he'll be  on Sean tonight.  He just wanted to know how he wanted him to break it.

The blood rushes to his face when he thinks about Vladimir.  Never trust a Russki, they told him.  But he made it sound so easy.  Just go be you and it all stays in the safe.  But now there was armor in East Ukraine and the pot had to be stirred.  Big league.

The phone buzzes.  He's pretty sure he knows who it is.  "Send her in."

She's not alone.  Her husband is with her.  He didn't think he could get angrier but he does.  The blood is singing in his ears.

“Daddy,” she says. “It’s time to go. Before it gets too bad.” She pauses. “For all of us.”

He drops his head and clutches the edge of the desk. This wasn’t supposed to happen. It can’t happen. He is the most important person in the world. He’s always been the most important person in the world.

His son-in-law steps forward. He puts his hand on the President’s shoulder and leans forward and whispers.

Suddenly too much is more than too much. “I told you never to call me that,” he says, his voice at first his normal conversational rasp. But it rises to a hillbilly rally howl. “I fucking told you never to fucking call me that!”

Daughter and son-in-law back up a step, but too late. He is on his feet, a paperweight clutched from the Resolute desk in his hand. His daughter grabs his arm but he shakes her away and she stumbles against the desk and falls onto the carpet, striking her head against the embroidered Great Seal of the United States.

His son-in-law, always slow to react, stands staring at him blankly. The President swings the paperweight three times. “DON’T” thwack “CALL” thwack “ME” thwack “DAD.”

His son-in-law is crumpled near the ornamental bookcase. He whimpers in that whispery way he has always hated. His daughter is trying to get to her feet.

He is breathing very hard and his heart is racing and his chest hurts and for an instant he wonders whether he should have made the doctors say what they said about his perfect health but then he realizes that doesn’t matter any more, that nothing does, that he has always gotten what he wants and now it’s time to do the things he really wanted, that even he knew were bad, before he calls the Army or Navy guy with the briefcase handcuffed to his wrist and takes out the decoder ring or whatever it is and takes everyone in the whole world with him.

But first things first. His son-in-law is still whisper-whimpering against the wall. His cheekbones are shattered and blood is running from his nose. The President pulls a pair of scissors out of the Resolute. He kicks the boy’s legs apart and bends over him. He cups his chin and tilts his head towards him. “See what you get, you little shit?” He yanks down his son in law’s zipper and reaches in. “See what you get for fucking what’s mine?”

The scissors have done half their work when his daughter grabs his arm. “Daddy, what is the matter with you?” Blood sprays over both as he turns to her. She pummels his head and tries to get nails in his eyes.

“Oh you want some, do you?” He cuffs her head. She staggers but remains standing. Another and she sags against the desk. “Don’t worry, I’ll give you some.”

He ignores the pounding on the Oval door and the screeching of the phone to turn her limp body over against the Resolute. He hikes up her dress and pulls down her thong.

At last. At last. What he’s wanted all these years, the only thing ever denied him. He drops his pants.

Yet he’s stubbornly flaccid. He howls like a baboon. The pills! The fucking pills! He left them upstairs!

The pounding on the door has turned from a rattle to a steady rhythmic thump. “You wait, you fucking wait,” he says, baby-walking through his fallen pants towards the door and the pills.

The door bursts open. There are half a dozen men: the Secretary of Defense, the Vice President, and a couple of Secret Service.

The Secretary is in front. That was the plan. He sees the President with his pants around his ankles and his comically overlong tie providentially covering his genitals. Behind him are his daughter restoring her modesty and his son in law weeping in a corner with his hands pressed to his bleeding crotch.

He knew his duty before, and he is sure of it now. The pistol in his hand is not the eurotrash Glock officers get now but the Model 1911 forty-five he’d had since he commanded his first platoon. His arm comes up and the gun barely bucks.

The President falls backwards. The big bullet hit him in the center of his chest. Blood is spilling fast through his back all over the Seal in the carpet.

The Secretary steps forward. The President is still alive. His mouth is moving and his piggish blue eyes are full of terror. Though he knows the President deserves no mercy he ends the suffering with a round to the head.

The room is silent except for the son-in-law’s whimpering and the gurgling of the late President. The daughter stands upright beside the Resolute. Her eyes meet the Secretary’s. They are as hard as bayonet points.

The Secretary grasps his pistol by its warm barrel and offers it, butt-first, to the daughter. He cocks an eyebrow.

At first she hesitates. But not for long. She takes the gun and pulls back the slide with a practiced ease. Her eyes close and she takes a deep breath. They open and she pivots towards her husband.

The Secretary cannot blame her for the quivering arm and the pause that lets her husband know what’s coming so he screams before she lets two go, one in the chest and the other in the head. Soon he’s as much a twitching mess as his late father-in-law.

The daughter turns from her late husband and looks the Secretary in the eye. She brings the big gun to just behind her chin, angled towards the top of her head. With her free hand she grasps her wrist. Her eyes do not leave the Secretary’s as she takes three deep slow breaths. Then they close.

A spray of brains and blood hit the drapes and a bullet flattens itself against bulletproof glass.

The new President, behind him, puts his hand on the Secretary’s shoulder. “You’ve done the Lord’s work today,” he says in his oily midwestern AM radio voice. “And you will be richly rewarded.”

“In Heaven, of course,” the new President adds.

Behind him the Secretary hears rounds being chambered.

[terencehawkins]

WISHFUL THINKING or EERY PRESCIENCE: TRUMP'S PRESIDENCY ENDS BADLY

This originally appeared in 2018, when we all thought Robert Mueller would save us. At the time I thought it was satire so broad as to verge on caricature. Uhh . . .nope!

 He is alone in the Oval.  

He hung up on Hizzoner a few minutes ago.  He tried to get out ahead of the story but it was too late.  No way to come back from this one.  Sorry, but he had to think of himself too.  Hey, but it's been a hell of a ride, right?  So he'll be  on Sean tonight.  He just wanted to know how he wanted him to break it.

The blood rushes to his face when he thinks about Vladimir.  Never trust a Russki, they told him.  But he made it sound so easy.  Just go be you and it all stays in the safe.  But now there was armor in East Ukraine and the pot had to be stirred.  Big league.

The phone buzzes.  He's pretty sure he knows who it is.  "Send her in."

She's not alone.  Her husband is with her.  He didn't think he could get angrier but he does.  The blood is singing in his ears.

“Daddy,” she says. “It’s time to go. Before it gets too bad.” She pauses. “For all of us.”

He drops his head and clutches the edge of the desk. This wasn’t supposed to happen. It can’t happen. He is the most important person in the world. He’s always been the most important person in the world.

His son-in-law steps forward. He puts his hand on the President’s shoulder and leans forward and whispers.

Suddenly too much is more than too much. “I told you never to call me that,” he says, his voice at first his normal conversational rasp. But it rises to a hillbilly rally howl. “I fucking told you never to fucking call me that!”

Daughter and son-in-law back up a step, but too late. He is on his feet, a paperweight clutched from the Resolute desk in his hand. His daughter grabs his arm but he shakes her away and she stumbles against the desk and falls onto the carpet, striking her head against the embroidered Great Seal of the United States.

His son-in-law, always slow to react, stands staring at him blankly. The President swings the paperweight three times. “DON’T” thwack “CALL” thwack “ME” thwack “DAD.”

His son-in-law is crumpled near the ornamental bookcase. He whimpers in that whispery way he has always hated. His daughter is trying to get to her feet.

He is breathing very hard and his heart is racing and his chest hurts and for an instant he wonders whether he should have made the doctors say what they said about his perfect health but then he realizes that doesn’t matter any more, that nothing does, that he has always gotten what he wants and now it’s time to do the things he really wanted, that even he knew were bad, before he calls the Army or Navy guy with the briefcase handcuffed to his wrist and takes out the decoder ring or whatever it is and takes everyone in the whole world with him.

But first things first. His son-in-law is still whisper-whimpering against the wall. His cheekbones are shattered and blood is running from his nose. The President pulls a pair of scissors out of the Resolute. He kicks the boy’s legs apart and bends over him. He cups his chin and tilts his head towards him. “See what you get, you little shit?” He yanks down his son in law’s zipper and reaches in. “See what you get for fucking what’s mine?”

The scissors have done half their work when his daughter grabs his arm. “Daddy, what is the matter with you?” Blood sprays over both as he turns to her. She pummels his head and tries to get nails in his eyes.

“Oh you want some, do you?” He cuffs her head. She staggers but remains standing. Another and she sags against the desk. “Don’t worry, I’ll give you some.”

He ignores the pounding on the Oval door and the screeching of the phone to turn her limp body over against the Resolute. He hikes up her dress and pulls down her thong.

At last. At last. What he’s wanted all these years, the only thing ever denied him. He drops his pants.

Yet he’s stubbornly flaccid. He howls like a baboon. The pills! The fucking pills! He left them upstairs!

The pounding on the door has turned from a rattle to a steady rhythmic thump. “You wait, you fucking wait,” he says, baby-walking through his fallen pants towards the door and the pills.

The door bursts open. There are half a dozen men: the Secretary of Defense, the Vice President, and a couple of Secret Service.

The Secretary is in front. That was the plan. He sees the President with his pants around his ankles and his comically overlong tie providentially covering his genitals. Behind him are his daughter restoring her modesty and his son in law weeping in a corner with his hands pressed to his bleeding crotch.

He knew his duty before, and he is sure of it now. The pistol in his hand is not the eurotrash Glock officers get now but the Model 1911 forty-five he’d had since he commanded his first platoon. His arm comes up and the gun barely bucks.

The President falls backwards. The big bullet hit him in the center of his chest. Blood is spilling fast through his back all over the Seal in the carpet.

The Secretary steps forward. The President is still alive. His mouth is moving and his piggish blue eyes are full of terror. Though he knows the President deserves no mercy he ends the suffering with a round to the head.

The room is silent except for the son-in-law’s whimpering and the gurgling of the late President. The daughter stands upright beside the Resolute. Her eyes meet the Secretary’s. They are as hard as bayonet points.

The Secretary grasps his pistol by its warm barrel and offers it, butt-first, to the daughter. He cocks an eyebrow.

At first she hesitates. But not for long. She takes the gun and pulls back the slide with a practiced ease. Her eyes close and she takes a deep breath. They open and she pivots towards her husband.

The Secretary cannot blame her for the quivering arm and the pause that lets her husband know what’s coming so he screams before she lets two go, one in the chest and the other in the head. Soon he’s as much a twitching mess as his late father-in-law.

The daughter turns from her late husband and looks the Secretary in the eye. She brings the big gun to just behind her chin, angled towards the top of her head. With her free hand she grasps her wrist. Her eyes do not leave the Secretary’s as she takes three deep slow breaths. Then they close.

A spray of brains and blood hit the drapes and a bullet flattens itself against bulletproof glass.

The new President, behind him, puts his hand on the Secretary’s shoulder. “You’ve done the Lord’s work today,” he says in his oily midwestern AM radio voice. “And you will be richly rewarded.”

“In Heaven, of course,” the new President adds.

Behind him the Secretary hears rounds being chambered.

[terencehawkins]

ALL THINGS TUDOR MAGAZINE LAUNCHES!

Yes, sometimes you can judge a book by its cover.

On March 15, All Things Tudor—the M,agazine will be available on Amazon. Conceived by Deb Hunter, our premier issue showcases Renaissance Man John Crowley’s forthcoming novel, Flint and Mirror, set amid Queen Elizabeth’s Irish wars and infused with more than a trace of the occult. Also prominent is Tudor scholar Norman Jones’ eerily well-timed account of the Elizabethan response to a furious plague. And bringing up the rear is my own review of H.F.M. Prescott’s The Man on a Donkey, a classic work of historical fiction exploring the violent social turmoil of the English Reformation.

All for $7.99—the price of a pint.

[terencehawkins]

EERILY PRESCIENT: TRUMP'S POST-PRESIDENCY

In June 2020 I published the following. While I’m shocked by how much I got right, I’m ashamed by my failure of imagination. It never occurred to me that the Fat Franco de Mar-a-Lago and his railerpark traitors would have the audacity to actually attempt a violent overthrow of the constitutional order. My bad!

If history and the polls are any gauge, 2021 will begin with Donald Trump pulled from the Oval Office like a blood-gorged tick from a cat’s ear—gently, so his head doesn’t break off and cause infection. That assumes, of course, that he hasn’t mobilized the Boogaloo Bois to disrupt the election. Or that his accelerating dementia hasn’t prompted other members of the Oberkommand to invoke the 25th Amendment to allow Pence to run as an incumbent and bring America back to Jesus.

I know. A lot going on there.

Let’s just assume that Trump will leave office voluntarily, if not quietly or with dignity—neither is possible, even his most ardent brownshirts would agree—in January. Let’s further assume that the self-pardon he will surely grant is legally effective federally, and that it will take eighteen months or so for ongoing state investigations to crank up to the indictment stage. What will his post-presidency look like?

Past presidents, after leaving office, have devoted themselves to good works, like Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, and GHW Bush. Others have retired to modest lives in heartland America, like Truman. And all have observed the tradition that the former occupant stay out of the limelight and refrain from comment on the current incumbent.

Not gonna happen.

TRUMP TV: MY STOLEN PRESIDENCY

In the few months in which he retains the ability to make word-like sounds, Trump will never admit defeat. He will, rather, protest that he was deprived of victory by “very unfair” means, like votes being counted. In doing so, he will further incite trailerpark magahats, never students of civics, into believing that their man got done in by a coup and that the new administration is illegitimate. Proving that Putin got the deal of a lifetime when he invested in Donnie Ratpaws.

There is little doubt that during the transition, rather than cooperate with the incoming administration in the peaceful transfer of power, Trump will challenge the outcome with the frivolous lawsuits that have long been his weapon of choice. But worse, he with nothing to lose, there is no batshittery he will not tweet—Biden’s Pizzagate pedophilia, QAnon gibberish about Clinton’s cannibalism.

And worst of all, he will unquestionably use the time before he leaves to fire up his own media empire—the ultimate goal behind the stunt candidacy that to his own shock succeeded.

Briefly, he’ll just be a regular guest host on Tucker’s White Power Hour or Frau Ingraham’s Sturm und Drang. But by the time the vans have pulled away from 1600 Pennsylvania with everything that hasn’t been nailed down, Trump will have his own network. Expect his primetime shitshow to feature to feature a crawl showing the day and hour of his stolen second term as he parades a procession of alt.right conspiracists and Aryan wingnuts to discredit and defame the new administration and Congress.

But that won’t be enough. Networks survive on advertising. And no normal corporate PR flacks will want their brand associated with Trump. Oh sure, My Pillow will be there for him. And Depends. But he needs real money, and a lot of it.

TRUMP CONSULTING: GOP POLITICAL BLACKMAIL

It’s widely known that the reason for Trump’s reticence about his taxes is that he is broke. And the reason didn’t divest his holdings is that they’re basically worthless—overleveraged and overvalued. In order to live the elegant understated life of a West Virginia lottery winner, with gilded faucets and silk asswipe, he needs about a million dollars a month, cash money. Where to get it?

He certainly can’t get it from his adoring hardscrabble horde. Or can he?

Trump’s always demonstrated a feral understanding of the power of his base. He’s used it to club the few remaining principled Republicans into terrified submission. So why not monetize it?

It’s pretty simple. All he has to do is sign onto a campaign as a consultant for all the money the candidate can get. In return the candidate gets “advice” and an endorsement. If the incumbent won’t pay, then the primary challenger will. End of story.

Of course the “consulting” won’t stop at the water’s edge. There’s nothing to prevent Trump from selling state secrets in the guise of “advising” foreign governments. As in, “I wouldn’t put your missiles there.” Or, “You know I really wouldn’t make Kirilenko Foreign Secretary—loose lips.” And even though our allies as well as our enemies know Trump’s an Adderall-addled idiot with the attention span of an autistic terrier, there’s always the chance that he may have inadvertently learned something of value in four years in the White House.

That’s worth a lot of money.

But there’s something even worse. This would be the time for a drink.

TRUMP: THE CANDIDATE

He can run again.

The Constitution prohibits and President from serving more than two full terms. But there’s nothing requiring those two terms to be consecutive. It’s only happened once, in the case of Grover Cleveland. But it can happen. Trump can run again.

Not can—will. He has to. His malignant narcissism has been validated for four years in which he actually has been the most important man in the world. He can no more do without that than he can bronzer and whores. Witness his Tulsa escapade, in which he gladly will sacrifice dozens if not hundreds of toothless goobers to Covid for for a couple of hours of the adrenaline rush he lives for.

Oh, there’s no chance he’ll get to that second term. None. The only question is whether dementia or New York tax fraud charges get him first. But he can do a lot of damage before then.

And rest assured, he will.

[terencehawkins]

LETTERS. FROM THE AFTERLIFE

For Halloween, I thought I’d share this ghost story. It originally appeared in Calliope Crashes in 2016.

After my father died in January I had his mail forwarded to me. There wasn’t much. He was a long-retired mailman and an increasingly hermetic widower of seven years. By August it had become a trickle of fundraising pleas from the Disabled American Vets and his local Catholic church.

Yesterday his mail contained a personal letter. Unprecedented. The few people who’d attended his funeral all said they hadn’t seen him in years or spoken in months. Correspondence was out of the question.

I showed it to my wife. I had immediately recognized the handwriting on the envelope as my brother’s. So did she. The forwarding label said that it had been sent to me on August 11. It had originally been mailed on August 2, my brother’s fifty-eighth birthday. There was no return address.

I slit the envelope. It contained only a Topps football card for Pittsburgh Steeler Heath Miller. Signed by the player.

It made a degree of sense. My father and brother were both Pittsburgh fans to the marrow. And both were former mailmen with time on their hands. Less logical was my brother sending the card to a man eight months dead.

And less logical still, my brother himself had died in 2014.

I didn’t break into the cold sweat of a ghost story. Nor did I scoff like Holmes and pluck reason from a cesspool of superstition. Instead I sat stunned by the evidence that two dead mailmen were sending letters in the next world.

While the explanation I learned today wasn’t supernatural, neither was it entirely rational. After he became disabled, my brother had whiled away his days expanding his imperial sports memorabilia collection. It was a campaign as well planned and executed as any of Caesar’s. He had bought a guidebook with the address of every player in the NFL and NBA. He sent each a packet containing the appropriate sports trading card, a letter requesting an autograph, and a stamped self-addressed envelope.

The address books made it clear that autographed cards were strictly one to a customer. To circumvent this rule, and to build up a trading surplus, my brother had sent out requests in not only his own name but his wife’s, my mother’s, and evidently my father’s. Athletes notoriously got to them when they got to them; Heath Miller had just retired from the team, Google advised, which explained why he now found himself with the time to respond.

I don’t know what it means that I wasn’t on my brother’s mailing list of straw men. I do know that I wish there had been no explanation, at all, that my brother had somehow reached out to my father knowing that he would be there to respond.

I had never said goodbye to my brother. The last time I saw him was on a trip to our hometown for a family visit. I saw him in the hospital, where he spent more time than at home. He was so ravaged by the diabetes he refused to treat that the nurses asked whether he—two years younger—was my father. It was the first time I had seen him without his legs. The prostheses, absurdly shod in black Keds high tops, stood in the corner, and without them he looked like a human caterpillar. His teeth were mostly gone; when they loosened, he told me, he simply yanked them out with his fingers. But when he smiled he still had the eyes of a happy child. So much so that when I got the call that he had died, a few weeks later, I kept repeating, “He was just a little boy.”

To impose meaning on coincidence is to believe that there really are faces in the clouds, that the universe sends us private messages by driving school buses over Mexican cliffs. Yet my brother, sitting in his kitchen years ago, had set in motion a chain of events that would include a professional athlete mailing a letter on a birthday my brother would never see to a father already dead to be intercepted by a brother long absent. Had I received it during a fat, languid time of achievement and safety it would have remained an anecdote for the second beer.

But I hadn’t. Instead it slid through a mail slot into a house whose contents were evaporating into consignment stores and storage units and Goodwills. To inform a future whose only certainty seemed to lay in its bleakness.

Yet it was at that moment, from the other side of an abyss even deeper than my own, that he managed to say hello.

[terencehawkins]

TURING'S GRAVEYARD AVAILABLE AGAIN!

I’m delighted to announce that Turing’s Graveyard is available through the Calliope Group, which now publishes all my books. Booklist compared the stories in this collection to The Twilight Zone and called it “a beautiful reading experience; Kirkus Reviews named it a Year’s Best. Order direct from Calliope and receive not only a twenty per cent discount but a signed bookplate!

[terencehawkins]

ACHILLES LIVE in MYSTIC!

Achilles and I will be at Bank Square Books in Mystic Saturday—and you should be, too!

[terencehawkins]

ACHILLES LIVE IN GLASTONBURY!

At 3.00 PM September 11 I’ll be onstage at this wonderful event. And of course I’ll have a stack of copies of The Rage of Achilles with me. Though my left arm will be in a sling, my book-signing arm will still work. Be there! Thanks to River Bend Bookshop for making this happen!

[terencehawkins]

KIND WORDS for ACHILLES from a MASTER of MILITARY FICTION

Phil Klay is a Marine vet whose debut collection, Redeployment, won the National Book Award. His first novel, Missionaries, was one of President Obama’s favorite books of 2020. He had these generous words: “The Rage of Achilles is a fresh, disorienting, modern spin on the Iliad, a tale of warfare that takes the force of myth and introduces the complexity of reality.”

[terencehawkins]

KIND WORDS for ACHILLES from a MASTER of MILITARY FICTION

Phil Klay is a Marine vet whose debut collection, Redeployment, won the National Book Award. His first novel, Missionaries, was one of President Obama’s favorite books of 2020. He had these generous words: “The Rage of Achilles is a fresh, disorienting, modern spin on the Iliad, a tale of warfare that takes the force of myth and introduces the complexity of reality.”

[terencehawkins]

PREORDER AT THE CALLIOPE GROUP

[terencehawkins]

OPAL'S GREENWOOD OASIS NOW AVAILABLE!

Congratulations to my friends and colleagues Shawn Crawford, Najah-Amatullah Hylton. and Quraysh Ali Lansana of Calliope Group for today’s release of this amazing book, set immediately before the Greenwood Massacre. For those who haven’t heard of it, Greenwood was the Black Wall Street of Tulsa—an area of prosperous African-American professionals and businessmen. Well, that couldn’t be allowed to go on, could it? When a black man was accused of assaulting a young white woman, and his friends refused to stand by for his lynching, white vigilantes, deputized by the authorities, ran wild in Greenwood, looting, burning, and killing. Ordnance deployed eventually included a biplane that dropped crude incendiary bombs. The death toll originally was pegged at somewhere around 350, but recent discovery of mass graves suggests that it was much higher.

But that’s not what this book is about. Instead, it depicts the idyllic life of a young girl in in a safe space where “everybody looks like her.” Trey Ellis, the Emmy and Peabody Award-winning producer of King in the Wilderness, called it “a beautiful and poignant reminder of the industry, joy and resilience of Black people in America.”

Get it here!

[terencehawkins]

STONE COMMUTATION, PORTLAND: THINGS ARE GOING WEIMAR

The recent commutation of Roger Stones’ s sentence triggered the usual fruitless speculation about the “strategy” behind it. Generally, the current incumbent of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue is no more capable of thinking beyond today than an Adderall-crazed lab rat desperate for another food pellet. But there is something behind this, and it’s not what the commentariat generally thinks.

LOYALTY? HA!

The immediate, and most obvious, explanation for this politically risky move was that Trump was paying back his loyal consigliere for years of service and, more importantly, keeping his pie-hole shut. Nonsense. On the first point, Trump is famously incapable of loyalty, gratitude, or any other emotion that doesn’t result in cash or an erection. As to the second, Paul Manafort was similarly laconic, yet remains in Federal custody, albeit now on home release.

Hmm. Why the distiction?

THE DIRTY TRICKSTER

Roger Stone has built his latter-day career as a self-professed “dirty trickster.” One stops for a moment to ask why he says so out loud—do spies put “spy” on their business cards?

But leave that aside. Let’s turn for a moment to Stone’s arc. He started out in politics as a Nixon campaign intern—he famously has Tricky Dick tattooed on his back, which no doubt would have proven a point of interest, if not a spooge target, in the showers had he actually begun his sentence—where he carried out some amusing low-grade antics in Nixon’s service. He parlayed that into a career as a K Street lobbyist in the 80’s, where his partner was—what? Paul Manafort. Despite the appeal of these nesting Ukrainian dolls, let’s take a look at the irrelevant, albeit extremely entertaining, interruption in his political career.

in 1996, Stone was a consultant with GOP Senator Robert Dole’s Presidential campaign. That hit a tabloid wall when it was discovered that Stone and his second wife had taken out space in a swingers’ magazine looking for an “exceptional well hung in shape men” for threesomes.

To be clear, Stone was advertising for men to fuck his wife while he watched. While Trump’s GOP may be cool with that, Dole’s wasn’t. Despite frantic deployment of the Trumpian tactic of blame-shifting—Stone claimed that the usual “disgruntled employee” with a “drug problem” had somehow coopered all this up—-his conservative political career appeared to be done. (He finally admitted the truth in 2008.)

Despite his ouster from mainstream politics, Stone’s public malice continued unabated. For example, he organized the celebrated Brooks Brothers Riot that disprupted the 2000 Florida recounts; has been accused of forging the 2004 Killian Memos that called into question W’s military service but, when proved fake, ended Dan Rather’s career; and was involved in the prostitution scandal that ended the political life of New York Governor Elliot Spitzer. And all the while cultivating a public persona as Best Dressed Man of 1939.

GET ME ROGER STONE

Stone’s bizarre and squalid career was famously documented in a 2016 Netflix film, “Get Me Roger Stone.” The burden of the title was, in part, that Stone wanted to be the guy you called when things were totally sideways and the only way out was to stick some dead male escorts in your opponent’s bed. A man’s reach should exceed his grasp, or what’s a heaven for, right?

And that—in part, maybe—is what the commutation signifies. Or so argued GMRS producer Dylan Blank in a recent NYT op-ed.

See, even though he rages and kicks at his campaign staff like Henry VIII in a neurosyphilis seizure, whatever rational part is left of Trump’s brain recognizes that he is in very deep electoral shit. Which shit exposes him not only to the ultimate narcissistic injury of a landslide loss, but worse, the existential threat of post-Presidential prosecution for himself and his family. He just can’t afford to lose. Thus he reasons that in order to prevail in this battle of all against all, he needs the help of the dirtiest dirty trickster he can get—Roger Stone.

Hence the commutation. Trump needs Stone’s help.

But is that all?

BUT WAIT, THERE’S MORE: THE PROUD BOYS

Trump’s reliance on this Homburged freak may be based on something else as well. Since 2016 Stone has cultivated an association with the Proud Boys, a ”Western Chauvinist”—i.e, white nationalist Islamophobe fascist—network of street fighters founded by Gavin McInnes, who in a move whose reasons defy inquiry, sought to refute claims of homophobia by sticking a dildo up his ass in a TV interview. (Click here for images you will not be able to unsee.) The Boys’ initiation includes getting the shit beaten out of them while reciting pop culture trivia and taking a pledge to limit masturbation to once a month—particularly burdensome in view of the rudimentary social lives of most alt.right bros. In addition to these entertainments, the Proud Boys have engaged in a lengthy campaign of public violence and intimidation, including an appearance with their fellow very fine people at Charlottesville in 2017.

Stone’s engagement with the Boys is not merely casual. He is, in fact, an affiliate member, having sworn the Boys’ oath not to apologize for creating modern civilization. (I am not making this up.) In return for the sheen of “respectability” Stone has lent them, the Boys have served as bodyguards, escorting him to and from his frequent judicial hearings and proclaiming his innocence from the courthouse steps. In chorus.

Is it a coincidence that Trump sprang a right wing thug with a following of street-fighting fascists? Incidentally, note the fellow on Stone’s left, in the buttoned-up polo? That black-and-gold shirt is the PB’s unofficial uniform.

CONNECTING THE DOTS

So let’s see. We’ve ruled out gratitude or loyalty as motives for the commutation. What does Trump need from Roger Stone that he can’t get someplace else? His expertise in the political black arts doesn’t pass muster—he’s not the only asshole in Washington, or these days, nor even the biggest. And let’s not forget that Trump is more than willing to recruit aid from shithole countries happy to remake America in their own image. So no, there’s nothing about Stone’s skill set that makes him indispensable. So what does he bring to the table that Trump wants?

Just this weekend, Trump tipped his hand. Deploying masked, anonymous federal troops in unmarked vans to Portland, with the blessing of his lovable roly-poly Interior Minister Barr—who’d previously okayed the use of tear gas against peaceful protesters so Trump could waddle across the street for a photo op— was the warmup for his election day ace in the hole: full on street violence. Weimar style.

Voter suppression has been the centerpiece of GOP election strategy for decades. It’s unavoidable—as "The Wire’s Baltimore mayoral candidate Tommy Carcetti noted, his hopes were slim because “I wake up white in a city that ain’t.” A party of old white men in an increasingly brown country faces an obvious, existential challenge. One it will ultimately lose, of course, but until then, it can eke out a few more good cycles, with their resultant Federalist Society judges, regulatory rollbacks, and hedge funder tax cuts. But only by making damn sure that minorities don’t vote. Especially in swing states.

Previously, the GOP had played what now seems like softball—gerrymandering, closing polling stations in minority districts, sowing confusion as to the election date. But that won’t work this time. Trump’s response to plague and racial crisis and his plummeting polls has thus far been to flounder and howl like a manatee chopped up in the prop. But in the clutch, unconstrained by any respect for norms, terrified by the prospect of post-presidential prosecution, he’s going to toss the GOP playbook and move with the Nazi.

The Brownshirts, or SA, were Hitler’s paramilitary before his 1933 seizure of power. They were beerhall bullies whose job was “security,” ostensibly protected the Nazi leadership at their public events, in reality intimidating its leftist opponents. It played a critical role in the elections of 1928, 1930, and 1932, showing up at the polls to fight Communist supporters and blocking access to voters in left-leaning districts. And of course, after Hitler was securely Fuhrer, they were the principal executors of the Kristallnacht pogrom.

So here’s what’s going to happen. On Election Day, in urban polling places in swing states, Proud Boys are going to show up as “pollwatchers.” And as soon as black and brown people start showing up in numbers, they’re going to start kicking ass. It doesn’t have to happen a lot. It doesn’t have to happen everywhere. But it will do a lot of damage to turnout. And the thing about Election Day is that it’s just one day, and no do-overs, full stop. So whatever damage is done can’t be undone, ever. So a second term secured by street violence can be reversed only by impeachment. And we know how that went.

Think it can’t happen? See below. Especially the last line: “You still think you can control them?”

[terencehawkins]

TRUMP'S POST-PRESIDENCY: YES, IT CAN GET WORSE

If history and the polls are any gauge, 2021 will begin with Donald Trump pulled from the Oval Office like a blood-gorged tick from a cat’s ear—gently, so his head doesn’t break off and cause infection. That assumes, of course, that he hasn’t mobilized the Boogaloo Bois to disrupt the election. Or that his accelerating dementia hasn’t prompted other members of the Oberkommand to invoke the 25th Amendment to allow Pence to run as an incumbent and bring America back to Jesus.

I know. A lot going on there.

Let’s just assume that Trump will leave office voluntarily, if not quietly or with dignity—neither is possible, even his most ardent brownshirts would agree—in January. Let’s further assume that the self-pardon he will surely igrant is legally effective federally, and that it will take eighteen months or so for ongoing state investigations to crank up to the indictment stage. What will his post-presidency look like?

Past presidents, after leaving office, have devoted themselves to good works, like Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, and GHW Bush. Others have retired to modest lives in heartland America, like Truman. And all have observed the tradition that the former occupant stay out of the limelight and refrain from comment on the current incumbent.

Not gonna happen.

TRUMP TV: MY STOLEN PRESIDENCY

In the few months in which he retains the ability to make word-like sounds, Trump will never admit defeat. He will, rather, protest that he was deprived of victory by “very unfair” means, like votes being counted. In doing so, he will further incite trailerpark magahats, never students of civics, into believing that their man got done in by a coup and that the new administration is illegitimate. Proving that Putin got the deal of a lifetime when he invested in Donnie Ratpaws.

There is little doubt that during the transition, rather than cooperate with the incoming administration in the peaceful transfer of power, Trump will challenge the outcome with the frivolous lawsuits that have long been his weapon of choice. But worse, he with nothing to lose, there is no batshittery he will not tweet—Biden’s Pizzagate pedophilia, QAnon gibberish about Clinton’s cannibalism.

And worst of all, he will unquestionably use the time before he leaves to fire up his own media empire—the ultimate goal behind the stunt candidacy that to his own shock succeeded.

Briefly, he’ll just be a regular guest host on Tucker’s White Power Hour or Frau Ingraham’s Sturm und Drang. But by the time the vans have pulled away from 1600 Pennsylvania with everything that hasn’t been nailed down, Trump will have his own network. Expect his primetime shitshow to feature to feature a crawl showing the day and hour of his stolen second term as he parades a procession of alt.right conspiracists and Aryan wingnuts to discredit and defame the new administration and Congress.

But that won’t be enough. Networks survive on advertising. And no normal corporate PR flacks will want their brand associated with Trump. Oh sure, My Pillow will be there for him. And Depends. But he needs real money, and a lot of it.

TRUMP CONSULTING: GOP POLITICAL BLACKMAIL

It’s widely known that the reason for Trump’s reticence about his taxes is that he is broke. And the reason didn’t divest his holdings is that they’re basically worthless—overleveraged and overvalued. In order to live the elegant understated life of a West Virginia lottery winner, with gilded faucets and silk asswipe, he needs about a million dollars a month, cash money. Where to get it?

He certainly can’t get it from his adoring hardscrabble horde. Or can he?

Trump’s always demonstrated a feral understanding of the power of his base. He’s used it to club the few remaining principled Republicans into terrified submission. So why not monetize it?

It’s pretty simple. All he has to do is sign onto a campaign as a consultant for all the money the candidate can get. In return the candidate gets “advice” and an endorsement. If the incumbent won’t pay, then the primary challenger will. End of story.

Of course the “consulting” won’t stop at the water’s edge. There’s nothing to stop Trump from selling state secrets in the guise of “advising” foreign governments. As in, “I wouldn’t put your missiles there.” Or, “You know I really wouldn’t make Kirilenko Foreign Secretary—loose lips.” And even though our allies as well as our enemies know Trump’s an Adderall-addled idiot with the attention span of an autistic terrier, there’s always the chance that he may have inadvertently learned something of value in four years in the White House.

That’s worth a lot of money.

But there’s something even worse. This would be the time for a drink.

TRUMP: THE CANDIDATE

He can run again.

The Constitution prohibits serving more than two full terms. But there’s nothing requiring those two terms to be consecutive. It’s only happened once, in the case of Grover Cleveland. But it can happen. Trump can run again.

Not can—will. He has to. His malignant narcissism has been validated for four years in which he actually has been the most important man in the world. He can no more do without that than he can bronzer and whores. Witness his Tulsa escapade, in which he gladly will sacrifice dozens if not hundreds of toothless goobers to Covid for for a couple of hours of the adrenaline rush he lives for.

Oh, there’s no chance he’ll get to that second term. None. The only question is whether dementia or New York tax fraud charges get him first. But he can do a lot of damage before then.

And rest assured, he will.

[terencehawkins]

TRUMP ADMIN: ARREST COMIC BOOK CHARACTER

WASHINGTON (AP)

Following up on its decision to designate a non-existent organization a terrorist group, the Trump Justice Department has said it will issue an international warrant through Interpol for anarchist mastermind Viktor von Doom.

Lovable butterball Attorney General William Barr announced the decision today. “Naming Antifa a terrorist organization was only the first step,” he wheezed. “We did so fully cognizant of the jurisdictional difficulties involved in indicting a highly complicated and well-organized structure that has no existence outside the imaginations of chronic masturbators. Today’s bold and decisive action strikes directly at its leader, Dr. Doom, who directs his imaginary minions from his unreal castle in the fictitious kingdom of Latveria.”

Dr. Doom could not be reached for comment.

[terencehawkins]

TRUMP and MASKS, EXPLAINED

The fat inhumanly-hued man in the White House—not pictured above—says that he won’t wear a mask because it’s inconsistent with the dignity of this office, symbolized by the Resolute Desk, to greet foreign heads of state while wearing one.

Okay, he didn’t actually say that. He couldn’t get that out if he were reading it off a stripper’s ass. But he did gabble and rave his way through something similar.

This is not the truth.

No, really.

The reason he’s given privately is that he thinks a mask would make him look ridiculous. Note that he did not say, “more ridiculous.” Which one might expect given that he spends an hour every morning styling and lacquering his hundred remaining hairs into what looks like the pelt of a roadkill raccoon in the latter stages of decomposition. Before knotting his comically-overlong cheap made-in-Turkey tie and waddling downstairs to wave his hilarious little ratpaws at the cameras.

But even that is not true. Or specifically true. Trump’s aversion to a simple life-saving precaution is based not on general fear of his own absurdity, but an appreciation of the particular perils of his presentation.

As is widely known, Trump doesn’t leave the Residence without slathering himself in bronzer. He does so not just to bring some color to his pasty wattles, but to conceal the ravages of rosacea, the disease that gives his skin that bumpy golfball texture.

Presumably, the bronzer must evaporate or wear off in the course of the day. Thus, as shown in the illustration above, removal of the mask to slam down hamberders and fries in the evening would expose a pie-hole area a visibly darker orange than the surrounding face, leaving the President with a Homer Simpson muzzle.

You’re welcome, America!