Don't Feed the Trolls

I’m watching footage of the anti-Milo Yiannopoulos protest at Berkeley and wondering what the demonstrators hope to accomplish. Yiannopoulos is a troll; his words and ideas offend me. But even more offensive is the notion that some people would try to shut him down from speaking - in the birthplace of the 60s-era Free Speech Movement.

Some folks will surely disagree with me, perhaps retorting that “hate speech” is not protected speech. Yet I recall an even more odious demonstration of hate in 1977 when members of the Nazi Party of America planned to march through Skokie, a predominantly Jewish neighborhood north of Chicago. People in that community had every right to be outraged at this intrusion. But as the ACLU argued before the Supreme Court, even the most patently offensive speech is protected by the 1st Amendment.

There are, of course, reasonable limitations to free speech. Child pornography is not free speech. Libel is not free speech. Yelling fire in a crowded theater is not free speech. There are other entirely sound exceptions. But surely one should have the right to speak one’s piece in a public place - even as one must be willing to consider the words of others with whom one disagrees. This, not Donald Trump, is what makes America “great.”

Our institutions are threatened enough by Trump’s occupation of the presidency. Let’s not join him and his minions in efforts to tear down our cherished liberties. We must resist bad speech, yes, but not with coercion. We must fight Trump, Yiannopoulos, and other trolls with better ideas.

Resisting Trump: Are You Ready?

Today the sun glows behind a gray shroud, its shadows are anemic, shrinking, and more rain is forecast. With foreboding and growing fear, we watch our government take on an equally dismal expression, as its executive branch - with the exception of some of its bravest resisters - works to dismantle our constitutional principles.

How shall we respond to these gathering forces that are seemingly as bland and quotidian as the weather but equally able to wreck our foundations? What shall we do? Amidst a rising regime that seeks a shameless, naked, and determined acquisition of power, we are rightly reminded to reflect carefully before leaping into senseless action. But ultimately, we must act.

In his Over-Soul essay, Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote, “Man is a stream whose source is hidden. Always our being is descending into us from we know not whence.” In other words, despite our individual limitations, we are bound together into something greater than a single life.

Inspired by this Emersonian Transcendentalism, John Steinbeck filled Jim Casy, the fallen prophet and itinerate preacher of the Grapes of Wrath, with an ecumenical passion: “There ain’t no sin and there ain’t no virtue. There’s just stuff people do. It’s all part of the same thing… Maybe all men got one big soul ever’body’s a part of.”

This tolerance should not be confused with passivity. It is a call to involve ourselves in the world around us, to depart our cloisters and engage with the pains and pleasures of others. It is also a reminder that all laws, no matter how well-intended, are human creations, equally subject to human error and deserving of conscious oversight.

Henry David Thoreau helped shape this vision. A solitary idealist who would much rather tramp the quiet green spaces of nature than join the hurly-burly of city life, Thoreau called us to act when the pains of shared suffering demand it. To be sure, he emphasized that human machines eventually grind themselves to a halt if we’re willing to wait long enough. But, he added, “when oppression and robbery are organized… let your life be a counter friction to stop the machine.”

20th-century America saw a necessary rise of resistance against the oppressive machines of racial hatred, economic injustice, and gender inequality, a time that called for a nation’s citizens, woven from the same cloth that helped thwart aristocracy in one era and smash fascism in the next, to forgo its patience and muster on battlefields of land and soul.

Writing, marching, and ultimately dying for his beliefs, Martin Luther King understood this demand all too well. In his Letter from a Birmingham Jail, King called for us to become rebels with a cause, gadflies in the Socratic sense who would not only preach our values but practice them. The creative tension of that practice is not simply a matter of philosophy or rhetoric; it is a call to disobey.

We must be willing to break unjust laws - not for anarchistic pleasure but instead from a fundamental belief in American values. After all, as King wrote from his jail cell, “an individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust, and who willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the highest respect for law.”

We look upon King, Gandhi, Anthony, Stanton, Thoreau, Emerson, and further back to Jefferson and other resisters, and we say, “Well, of course.” History has taught us the rightness of their actions. We re-read their words as if they were somehow always hewn in stone. But those brave men and women were not monuments; they were frail and fallible human beings with all of the fears that we share.

They were dismissed as agitators. They were mocked as fools. They were marked as criminals against law, decorum, and common sense. The tyrannies they faced were overwhelming, and the prices they paid were high. They could not imagine that school children (and sometimes overwrought professors) would one day recite their words as the scripture of America’s civic religion. They acted without the sure promise of success. They saw no other choice but to resist.

As Americans facing the new clouds of a Trump administration hell-bent on transforming our country into something that would horrify its founders, we must do nothing less.

Images by Andrew Wood

Professing in the Age of Trump

How should a professor respond to the Age of Trump?

Many of us are understandably frustrated by the bad ideas coming out of Washington D.C. these days, in the form of unqualified cabinet selections, impulsive policy statements, and unhinged late-night tweets. We recognize the danger of our current national mood and feel duty-bound to respond with every tool at our disposal. And, no doubt, to be a professor, whether during these troubled times or in more halcyon days, one must first and foremost profess. It is an obligation woven into the title. Yet, now more than ever, we must attempt a difficult balance.

On the one hand, the act of being a professor, hardly a passive privilege but rather an active responsibility, emerges from the Latin reference to working in the world: to “lay claim to, declare openly." It is a declaration of one’s expertise, measured against public standards; it is a statement that one knows. Yet there is another meaning, public, yes, but also much more personal: the “profession” that one believes.

Socrates, pious citizen and iconoclastic gadfly, understood the difficulties of straddling both positions when he was called before the Athenian assembly to answer charges that, among other crimes, he had confounded the youth of his city with his rhetorical wiles. To be fair, Socrates would retort that he was no sophist, that he was a philosopher, a lover of wisdom. Putting aside this argument for a moment, we may still yet recall that when he was threatened with fines, imprisonment, and ultimately death, Socrates knew that he could not rely on mere dialectic to save him. He knew that he could not be “saved” at all if he were to honor what he professed. He would speak, publicly and dangerously, to profess both what he knew and what he believed.

This ancient convergence of knowledge and belief calls to mind a contemporary conundrum facing the university professor. In our classrooms, we call upon our disciplinary knowledge to convey what is known in our fields. Of course, knowledge is fraught with debate. Fact-claims reside within and emerge from ongoing questions that remain to be settled, they are shaped by epistemological and paradigmatic filters, and, most importantly, they are subject to violent repudiation - though not by “alternative facts,” that absurdly flippant excuse offered by Trump Counselor Kellyanne Conway for administration hacks’ willingness to confuse fact with conjecture. No, facts are rightly repudiated by our merciless efforts to test them and reveal, not with passion but by method, that what is fact today may be falsehood tomorrow. Our willingness to submit our claims to peer review is a necessary standard that demonstrates the degree of our professionalism.

At the same time, abstract facts are used for concrete purposes, to build things, to formulate policy, to impact human lives. It is one thing, after all, to know the effect of carbon emissions on the planet; it is another thing entirely to advocate for their reduction because that kind of professing - that kind of advocacy - resides less in fact than in value (the comparative value of human life over corporate greed, for example). And values are not facts. Values emerge from that other manner of belief that called for Socrates to speak against the prevailing wisdom of the assembly, even at the risk of his life. And this is where the question becomes particularly thorny. Because values in a democracy (which is itself both a manner of government and an aspiration for human affairs) are not tested as facts; they are tested by our ability to persuade, to profess our beliefs not as facts but as ideal possibilities.

The professor’s dilemma, then, is the struggle between one’s identification of facts and one’s advocacy for beliefs. There are few other jobs where those terms blur so easily. Certainly, few of our students would confuse us with priests extolling holy writ from our lecterns. But our power to measure their educational outcomes through the act of grading makes for a grave responsibility. How we meet that responsibility - indeed, how we define it - can hardly be resolved to universal satisfaction. But we must try our best to define our terms and defend our stances, publicly, if only that we may benefit from hearing the perspectives of others.

Speaking therefore as one professor, I hold that the classroom, certainly one located in the humanities and social sciences, should as much as possible be treated as a microcosm of public life where each student is encouraged to craft meaningful articulations of the facts and beliefs as they understand them. As professors, we are called to introduce students to many of those facts, along with some of their more useful frameworks. But we should not abuse that power by encouraging students to confuse beliefs (neither ours nor theirs) with facts. No doubt we should share our beliefs, profess them without shame. But our students require first that we demonstrate a democratic tolerance for debate and an open-minded appreciation for contrasting opinion.

Some might say that this perspective demonstrates intellectual cowardice, that this day demands that we transform our classrooms into tools that may dismantle the creeping (and sometimes nakedly obvious) crisis of the Trump Age. I sympathize with that position. Indeed, I believe that Trump is not only ill-informed but that his occupation of the presidency is illegitimate. And I recognize that resistance to that which one both knows and believes to be wrong may take many forms. But for now I can imagine no better response to the anti-democratic impulses of his administration than a bravely democratic stance, to teach my students to listen to the opinions of others, to parse those opinions for the validity of stated facts and the utility of stated beliefs, and to debate them, publicly and with confidence. The story of our country, after all, is one of bad ideas holding sway for a while before ultimately being won over by good ones.

In response to an illegitimate president who mocks our values and fears our democracy, this is one professor who will speak out and push back. I will support allies in all sorts of public action to resist Trump and return our country to a positive, humane course. At the same time, I will attempt to live that difficult balance in my classroom, to encourage students to practice the principles that Trump repudiates. We will listen to each other, learn from each other, and inspire each other to speak authentically and honestly about what we believe, even at the risk of encountering opinions that strike us as wrong. We will practice that virtuous profession that counters falsity with fact while respecting the fundamental humanity of our interlocutors. No matter how wrong our opponents may be, as we define that term, we will engage them in the marketplace of ideas, not with force but with persuasion, not with hate but with love. And then, not easily, not without pain, but eventually, we will win.

Lectern image from Amazon

Mr. Unelected President, I resist

Today marks the inauguration of our 45th president, Donald J. Trump. Where I live, northern California, the weather has been dark and rainy, a suitable pall for a dismal day.

I’ve admitted it before: I was stunned by the election result. Trump lost the popular vote by a wide margin, 2.8 million, and yet his ability to game the electoral college wrested victory from a vastly more qualified (though politically tone-deaf) opponent. And now Donald Trump, a man who has boasted about sexually assaulting women, a man who flirts with racists and tyrants, a man who has selected a cabinet composed of people hell-bent on trashing the departments they will lead, this man is now President of the United States.

On this dreary day, I think back to a conversation I had with a colleague who shares my shock and concern. Responding to her understandable horror at the election results, I attempted a conciliatory stance, saying, “Well, I didn’t vote for him, but I want him to succeed as my president.” She didn’t need to pause. “So you hope he succeeds in turning back LGBT rights? You hope he succeeds in pushing back on workers rights? You hope he succeeds in his plans?”

My tongue-twisted reply surely belied the confusion that many of us face. I was raised to associate the presidency with the hopes, wishes, and identity of our country, to support the office even if I could not praise the officer. Such a position always struck me as fundamentally democratic. My side plays fair, the other side plays fair, may the best person win.

But the best person did not win, not only because Donald Trump is so manifestly unfit for the office but more obviously because he didn’t win. He occupies the office but has not earned it. 2.8 million Americans prove that point. And while I admire the Constitution, have actually read, studied, and taught the document, I will not forget that its framers once marked slaves as being worth three-fifths of a person, that its framers enshrined an aristocracy with appointed senators, that its framers failed to ensure the voting rights of women. These mistakes, and other ones, needed to be rectified through the process of constitutional amendment. And the electoral college remains an error in need of remedy.

Until then, I find myself adrift, wondering how to respond to an election that is equal parts failure and farce. For all its faults, I still support the Constitution, and I continue to love my country. I remain a proud veteran, loyal citizen, and respectful participant in public life. But I will not again make the error of confusing Donald J. Trump with the office of the presidency. He is its occupier, not by popular vote, not by divine right, not by common sense.

Just this morning, before my bus began its climb over the hill from Scotts Valley to San Jose where I work, we visited a final stop. There in the rain stood two bedraggled protesters holding signs that read “Not my president” and “Save the ACA.” Under dark skies and stormy weather, they announced their positions, quietly and with dignity. They did not shout, and they may have wondered when our bus passed by, spraying rainwater from the tires, whether anyone noticed or cared. I noticed, and I took heart in their silent protest. I was reminded.

Donald J. Trump is a fraud and a failure. He is a liar and a con. He is undeserving of the office and unprepared for its obligations. He is not my president. Some folks voted for him, knowing his sins and somehow not caring. They will now watch what they have wrought, straining their eyes for some way to blame the opposition. They are hoping that we will be bullied, silenced, stunned into submission. Some will be, I suppose, fearful that they may lose their jobs, their privileges, their safety. But most of us who said no to Trumpism are ready to push back. Starting today.

“Mister Unelected President,” you are not my president, and I am proud to stand with those who will resist you from the beginning.

Image by Andrew Fyfe 

President Trump

The United States of America - the nation that helped lead the world in the war against fascism, the nation that landed a man on the moon and brought him safely home, the nation claimed by Democrats and Republicans as the fabled shining City Upon a Hill - is now the nation that elected Donald J. Trump as our 45th president. We did it, and we can hardly be surprised that the rest of the world is staring at us with shock and disbelief.

There's no point is counting down the litany of unhinged things Trump said throughout the campaign (though one comes to mind: "I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn't lose any voters"). No honest observer of this national trainwreck can say that we were fooled in this election. Ignoring precedent, the pundits, and his own advisors, Trump - President-elect Trump, I mean - promised to bring the whole system down. And I am confident that he can deliver.

And yet I'm still horrified. I remember sometime last night, when Stephen Colbert's comedic coverage of the election became a national dirge, I nearly spit out a mouthful of scotch while exclaiming, "Oh my God, the Supreme Court!" Yep, this guy will select the next two or three (or more!) justices who will shape the law of the land for generations to come. He's also the guy who pledged to deport 11 million immigrants, build a wall on our southern border, prosecute Hillary Clinton, dismantle Obamacare, and defeat whoever's winning the "War on Christmas." This is the same guy who after being caught on tape bragging about his ability to grope women dismissed the ensuing furor as "just words."

Well, he said those words, loud and clear. We listened and we elected him anyway.

I imagine that political junkies around the country are looking up that alleged Pauline Kael quotation: "None of my friends voted for him!". She didn't actually utter those words, but never mind. I can honestly say, I don't have a close friend who will admit to voting for Trump, which says a lot about me and a lot about the country. In my benumbed sadness, I'm tempted to put David Bowie's This is Not America on repeat for the rest of the day, for the rest of the year maybe. But doing so would merely demonstrate the provincialism of that apocryphal Kael quotation and my own failure to see what has been in front of my face for the past two years.

This is America. We elected Donald J. Trump as our next president. And now we face the consequences.

Trump image from Wonkette • "I am going to eat you" (by Paul Noth) from The New Yorker • Electorial map from The New York Times.

Scotland: Trumpageddon

While I didn’t write a formal blog post for my Summer 2016 European adventures, I thought it’d be fun to share some memories I initially stored on Facebook.

Second to the last full day in Edinburgh, packed with three shows so far - and one more this evening. The afternoon started with Trumpageddon, Simon Jay's satirical take on The Donald, complete with orange makeup, loopy answers to audience queries, and occasional efforts to unpack the psychology of the would-be Tweeter-in-Chief. Afterward I joined Matt's crew to check out Scorched, a moving, complex, and somewhat bewildering one-person show most notable for its remarkable staging (most especially with the sight of images dancing on pouring sand drained from the protagonist's fingers). Then I headed off to Nuclear Family, an audience participation performance that called for us to vote on how workers in a nuclear plant disaster should react to the unfolding crisis. It was... not great. But it was fun to compare notes with audience members, reviewing files and tape recordings to make sense of, and deliberate about, the actors' decisions and outcomes. I'm resting now but will take off later to see Shit-Faced Shakespeare a show whose title should be taken literally. The actor supposedly drinks for four hours prior to the show. Who knows what will happen?

Trainwreck Trump

Miami Herald

For many Americans yesterday began with an increasing din of anger and frustration that a North Miami police officer named Jonathan Aledda shot an unarmed black man earlier this week, despite the fact that he was on his back with his hands in the air, begging with remarkable calmness not to be executed. Turns out the man, Charles Kinsey, was working as a caregiver for a person with autism who also sat in the street, rocking and anxious, holding a toy truck. We are told that officers feared that the truck was a weapon being used in a threatening manner, despite Kinsey’s vehement protests that he was safe, that cops were safe, and that nobody needed to shoot anyone. We are also told that when Kinsey asked an officer after being shot, “Sir, why did you shoot me?” The reply was singularly chilling: “I don’t know.”

While North Miami cops shot Kinsey on Monday, many Americans were still struggling to make sense out of this incredible breach of judgment yesterday. Yet I saw no rowdy protests, no political leaders racing to Kinsey’s bed for photo-ops. I suppose the fact that police had merely shot the man in his leg but somehow failed to kill him reduced the horror of the moment. Yet I also suspect that we are growing increasingly used to many (though hardly all) police officers, sworn to protect and serve, occupying the streets as an army, shooting first and asking questions later. We are becoming far too familiar with these surreal scenes, coming to accept that a significant portion of our nation has lost its moorings.

Nick Stern, AP

I can be forgiven, I hope, in finding a strange parallel to the fact that Republicans officially nominated Donald Trump as their standard-bearer the day after Kinsey was nearly murdered in the streets. And of course his party rallied for a fire and brimstone oration last night that featured the sorts of dog whistle rhetoric that unites the contemporary GOP. Mockery of “political correctness,” castigation of immigrants, and a Nixonian pledge for “law and order” repeated four times in 76 minutes. Trump envisioned an America that is plunging over an abyss, shouting for more than an hour and promising that, “I am your voice.” What’s most disturbing about the speech is that he’s not entirely wrong; he’s just diagnosing the wrong problem. Too many Americans have adopted Trump’s sort of authoritarian, know-nothing nativism. Too many Americans are willing to look upon the world as being filled only with threats to shoot rather than problems to solve. And too many Americans are willing to tolerate the nominee of a major political party whose lies and distortions are putting a generation of fact-checkers’ children through college.

Brooks Kraft for Politico

Hell, I was too. Last night I watched Trump’s speech with a sort of detached amazement, but also an acceptance that is frightening in retrospect. I anticipated the extent of his self-aggrandizement, I recognized the implications of his scapegoating, and I marveled at the shamelessness of his demagoguery. Yet, as was the case when I first saw the footage of Charles Kinsey begging police not to shoot him before being shot, I found myself less shocked and angry than battered and bemused. Only this morning when some of my friends took to Facebook to say, “Can you believe that Republicans chose this guy?” - only then did I remember: Oh yeah, this isn’t some televised spectacle; this is happening in my country. And so far I haven’t done much to stop it. Certainly Jenny and I gave to the Sanders campaign, we planted our Sanders yard sign and festooned our Prius with a Sanders bumper sticker. And, yes, we will support the Clinton campaign, despite that candidate’s many, many flaws. In what passes for democracy, we can make these humble contributions.

New York Daily News

Still, I remember one more surreal moment amid a circus of shocking images: Talk show host Laura Ingraham wrapping up her screed against GOP holdouts who haven’t yet committed to Trump (and against wearers of skinny jeans and man buns, for some reason) with a stiff-armed salute that evoked Nazism. Certainly Ingraham had the good sense to recognize her error as she awkwardly rotated through a series of other nonverbal tributes, as if a Nazi salute, even a mistaken one, is just one more of those things we’ve come to accept in today’s America. And she’s been rightly mocked for her cluelessness. But the larger point remains: This country isn’t auditioning for some odious reality show, some fast food pleasure to be passively consumed and excreted in guilty solitude. A large number of our people are waving signs, hoisting placards, and pledging their commitment, not to a clown but to a genuine threat to our country. Those of us who must stop him must not stoop to his tactics, or the vile bullying employed by some of the thugs who support him. But we must also no longer watch this trainwreck as detached observers.

Peacefully but persistently we must stop this locomotive before it takes us all over the cliff.

Mexican Journey

Instituto Tecnológico y de Estudios Superiores de Monterrey
Campus San Luis Potosi

Last week Jenny and I traveled to Mexico (our first time!), having accepted an invitation to participate in the Global Faculty Program at Monterrey Institute of Technology and Higher Education. The gig emerged from a dinner conversation with Claudia Ugalde in St. Petersburg, Russia of all places. We’d both completed three weeks of a study abroad program in Finland and were enjoying a meal with other friends and colleagues when Claudia recommended the Mexico program. Since I’d enjoyed working with her students so much, she figured I’d have a swell time on one of their home campuses. So after submitting an application I received to word: I’d be heading to San Luis Potosí.

Pozole in SLP Old Town

I had no idea of what to expect. Her colleagues and I discussed plenty of logistics: flights, lodging, that sort of thing. But my actual duties remained flexible until a few days before departure. That’s when I received word of their request that I’d teach ten lectures on a broad range of topics. They’d read my vita and found topics that fit with my skills and interests, and in fact I really only needed to prep a handful of presentations. They were happy for me to repeat lectures for several class sections.

Searching for Street Art

Still, there are few things that are both as exhilarating and terrifying for an educator as flying into another country, arriving late at night, waking up super early to prep, catching a ride to campus, being shown around various spaces, finding my assigned classroom, figuring out the tech, getting to know the professor hosting this lecture, sizing up the students as they walk in, and then hearing a silent voice in my head that goes, ".... and nowwwwww... teach!" 

Campus San Luis Potosí 

Thus I especially appreciated the pleasure (and relief) in knowing that the old tricks and half-forgotten techniques, the familiar dance and untrodden path, managed to connect. On my first day I presented two versions of "Gamification: Disrupting Business and Higher Education,” smiling to find that this topic is just as relevant in Mexico as it is in Belarus, in Finland, and in California. Pretty soon I got into a pleasant groove, presenting lectures on "Silicon Valley Startup Culture," "Intercultural Communication: Crossing Borders and Dismantling Walls" (with some snippy Trump references, of course), and "China: The Once and Future Superpower.”

Nighttime in Jardín Guerrero, Querétaro

Somewhat embarrassingly, I also prepped a lecture called "Mediated Communication: Rethinking Engagement in the Age of Ubiquity” but accidentally fired up the wrong Prezi one day and ran the “Intercultural Presentation” talk instead. Neither the professor nor the students seemed to mind, though, and we ended up having a rollicking visit. The conversations that ensued gave me much to contemplate about life in Mexico, and about local perceptions of U.S. culture. That evening Jenny and I joined other visiting faculty and a wonderful campus host for late-night dinner in a restaurant themed after Frida Kahlo. The food and chat were delightful.

El México de Frida

After finishing my tenth lecture and saying goodbye to our new friends in San Luis Potosí, we joined a Monterrey Tech tour of Teotihuacán, which included an opportunity to learn about indigenous astronomy, agriculture, and spirituality - and to climb the Pyramid of the Sun. I can still hear the whistling wind and see the clouds roll over the valley, and I can still smell the burning sage we used for a ceremony that gave us permission to ascend those sacred steps.

Pyramid of the Moon, Teotihuacán

Afterward our group sampled some local tequilas (Jenny passed on that part, of course) and then cruised back to SLP. With all the driving back and forth, we ended up getting three hours of sleep before our return flights. But we’re wide awake in our love and affection for Mexico. My new pals there have encouraged me to return one day, and I hope I can. Indeed, I can't believe it's taken me this long to begin exploring this amazing place!

Atop the Pyramid of the Sun, Teotihuacán

Check out my Facebook album for more pix.

Iowa 2016

Jeff Darcy

OK. Joke’s over.

Recently while having coffee with a colleague, the topic of Donald Trump came up. My pal had noticed a number of political posters in our hallways, some comparing Trump’s rhetoric with the vile history of Nazism. She was glad to see that many of our students are politically involved. I replied that I appreciated their sentiments, even as I bemoan their excesses. “Comparing Trump to Hitler,” I said, “just seems silly.”

I affirmed my belief that Trump is a circus sideshow of blustery soundbites and shameless hucksterism. Yet a vibrant democracy must allow for his voice, I said, grating as it is. Splashing a swastika Trump’s over goofy hairdo kills the potential for serious debate. What’s worse, the attack mutes the meaning of real Nazis and the real terror they spread. Sure, Trump projects a cult of personality. His reckless militarism is scary. And his “take back our country” pablum begs the question, “take it back, from whom?” Trump’s a fool. But he’s no fascist. An opportunist? A bully? A chickenhawk? Oh, yeah. But let’s not hyperventilate just yet.

My pal rebuked me. Hitler was mocked and ridiculed, too. And then he took power.

I thought about this for a few days… until Sarah Palin entered the fray to throw her support behind Trump. “OK, that’s it,” I said to myself. “The 2016 campaign has officially become a conceptual art exhibit.” And sure enough, there was Tina Fey once again delivering a ruthless satire on SNL, rendering Palin somehow more of a laughing stock than she was in ’08. Best of all, Fey merely had to repeat Palin’s bizarro-land stream-of-consciousness almost word for word. I began to relax. Of course Palin would stand beside Trump in the political cloud-cuckoo-land of 2016! These gags write themselves.

To this point I’ve believed that Iowa Republicans would eventually get the joke. But enough Hawkeye State Republicans caucused for Donald Trump to put the New York billionaire officially in the number two spot, sending The Donald off to New Hampshire where he holds a commanding lead. This is the guy who joked that Megyn Kelly’s tough questioning could be explained by “blood coming out of her wherever,” the guy who ridiculed John McCain by saying, “'I like people who weren't captured,” the guy claimed he could "could stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot somebody" and not lose any voters… This guy almost won the GOP Iowa primary.

I still think that Trump is a national embarrassment, and I continue to believe that the democratic process is resilient enough to endure his shameful rhetoric. And I remain adamant that efforts to denigrate political hacks as “Nazis” insults both history and our potential to disagree in a constructive manner. At the same time, I will no longer dismiss Donald Trump as a national joke. He nearly took Iowa, losing to the slightly less loathsome Ted Cruz; he’s running for President of the United States, and he can still win.

If we let him.

Vegas All Night

While attending the National Communication Association’s annual conference in Las Vegas, I learned that, yes, it is possible to do an all-nighter without gambling or clubbing. Nothing against those activities, of course, but Jenny and I wanted to explore some of Sin City’s other nocturnal delights. Here’s the itinerary:

6:30 p.m., Neon Boneyard: Joined by our pal Chip Hall, we wandered an outdoor museum dedicated to some of Vegas’s glittering, twinkling, glowing marquees that have drawn gamblers and gangsters to the desert for decades. The fee is a bit steep, and entrance requires a reservation, but the trip is essential for anyone who loves classic neon. Though many of the signs no longer function, strategically placed lights produce delightfully eerie shadows on these icons of the past.

8:30 p.m., Zombie Burlesque: Jenny and I had never seen a Vegas show, and I’m a bit amazed that Jenny OK’d this one as our first. The good news is that the “burlesque” was pretty much PG-13. A little skin, some naughty humor, but nothing too raunchy. Best of all, the theme was a goofy send-up of 50s and 60s atomic-age pop culture, a hidden history of America’s hidden zombies next door, and a genuinely sweet message about diversity that rings especially true in an Age of Trump. Oh, and free jello-shots.

10:30 p.m., El Cortez and Fremont Street: Jenny, Chip, and I grabbed a meal at Siegel's 1941, a comfy old school restaurant at El Cortez, one of Vegas’s original mob haunts. Their off-menu prime rib dinner is delectable [well, it's palatable], but this time I went for a wedge salad and some caffeine. Afterward we surveyed the enclosed zaniness of Fremont Street, where you can snap photos with a Tony Montana lookalike, rock out to competing 80s cover bands, and pay dearly to drink from a replica of the Christmas Story leg-lampshade.

1:30 a.m., Fremont Street and Vegas Boulevard: Jenny and I continued our adventures north of the Strip, driving around some of the city’s funkier environs in search of neon signage for a video I've long wanted to produce. At this point, we were both getting sleepy, but neither of us would discuss quitting. We both remember pooping out around this time in an ill-fated Santa Cruz all-nighter we attempted a few years back. Every time I proposed a retry, Jenny’d say, “Nope. This time we’ll wait for a place like Vegas or Paris.” Now that we were here, there was no way we’d give up.


2:30 a.m., Flamingo Wildlife Habitat: We returned to the Strip, racing south on an interstate that had been a traffic-jammed parking lot just a few hours ago. Inside the Flamingo, the “Vegas, Baby!” vibe had begun to sour for a few folks: Woo Girls crying in the bathroom, Bro Boys itching for a fight, couples arguing next to taxi cabs ("But you said you loved me!"), that sort of thing. Jenny and I made our way to the habitat, searching for flamingos and koi. I was a little annoyed that the lights had been switched off, but the sight of fish sleeping in their shadowy pools delighted us nonetheless.

3:30 a.m., Bellagio Conservatory and Botanical Gardens: While hard core late-night gamblers (Sorry, I mean “gamers”) plugged away, hoping for their big break, Jenny and I visited one of the Bellagio’s lesser-known destinations. The hotel’s high-end shopping mall offerings were closed, but the gardens remained available - and free! At the Conservatory, we wandered quiet walkways amid gorgeous arrangements of autumn blooms, stared upward at an indoor waterwheel, snapped pictures and - Hey! Did that tree just wink at us? Yeah, the Bellagio’s got an animatronic tree - because, of course it does.

4:30 a.m., Caesars Palace and LINQ: Getting our Third Wind, we toured Caesars Palace, which famously doesn’t include an apostrophe because, “Everyone’s a Caesar here.” Well, OK, but you could put the apostrophe after the second ’s,’ right? Never mind. Anyway we gazed upward at replicas of Italian statues, including a version of Michelangelo’s “David.” At LINQ we found an all-night breakfast at Hash House A Go Go. Jenny ordered Froot Loops, and I got a BLT Bloody Mary - because who doesn’t enjoy cheap vodka, soggy bacon, wilted lettuce, and a side of toast?

5:30 a.m., Luxor and Excalibur: I’d always wanted to visit the inside of the Luxor pyramid, so we drove about a half-mile south to our last stops of the night. The Luxor is suitably mammoth, a vast atrium filled with shops and restaurants and leering advertisements of Criss Angel and Carrot Top. Jenny was hankering to check out Excalibur, so we boarded a moving walkway through the omnitopian continuum and found ourselves in a Dungeons and Dragons fantasy domain that also offers 24-hour Krispy Kreme donuts. I figured my Bloody Mary needed some company, and the price was right.

6:30 a.m., Exit: Riding the travelator back to the Luxor and our parking garage, we noticed that the sun rise had begun to color the clouds in delicate wisps of pink. We wandered past creepy video gaming devices - the ones featuring life-sized and blandly sexy dealers who appear to look around before beckoning you from across the floor (“There’s a seat over here!”) - and exited into the cool morning air. Driving north and then east, the sun now glowed fully fat orange and round, celebrating the new day.

Next All-Nighter? But of course: Paris!

The Party's Over (Thank God)

The 2012 election was an endless dinner party whose guests showed up drunk, puked on the pets, and set the rug on fire. Now it's morning in America, and the house is trashed. There's a big screen TV on the lawn, there's a copy of Atlas Shrugged in the toilet, and there's pudding in the blender [Who the hell put pudding in the blender?]. I'm trying to coax the cats back into the living room. I'm saying, "It's over, kitties. Those awful people are gone." The felines know better though; the guests are still here. Some are sleeping, snoring, drooling. Yet a few are pre-gaming for the next big bash, God love 'em. They are, after all, us.

We voted (some of us, at least) on November 6th, but we also expressed our every thought on this grand debate, extolling our opinions all over Facebook, Twitter, and, for all I know, Instagram. We posted and we tweeted and we exclaimed, loudly, that these two candidates somehow reflect the Manichean cosmos of America, blithely ignoring our quiet doubts that the candidates never really debated, not in a meaningful way. Somehow we know that this election cycle was a war between pundits and handlers and flaks who battle only for their own aggrandizement. Party politics as reality television. Here Comes Honey Boo Boo in '16.

Yes, Barack Obama and Mitt Romney offered distinct agendas. And I preferred one to the other. I still do. Yet I know - and you know it too - that the parties who sustain them represent nothing more than a singular culture industry, a machine that produces little more than sound and fury, bread and circuses. At times it felt like we were watching a Coke-vs.-Pepsi Taste Test and actually caring about which sugar water quenches our thirst. It's a game of dissemination, not dialogue, and we're rotting with every corn syrup swig.

A few folks eschewed the vitriolic attacks and bumper sticker discourse that marked this sad, silly season. Jenny, to great credit, attempted a sane and responsible conversation over the past few months, even as some of her Facebook friends became increasingly unhinged. She explored the issues, read broadly, and struggled to make the right call. She tried to vote for both faith and facts. All too frequently, though, many of us abandoned our better angels. I certainly did.

More than once I said to some pals how much I hated Mitt Romney. Hated him. Not just for his policies (whatever they were that particular week) but for his pandering, his cynicism, and that sanctimonious half-smile that invariably preceded a lie. I hated him for the day, years ago, when he supposedly led a pack of prep school bullies to beat up a kid and cut his hair. I hated him for that dismissal of 47 percent of Americans as too lazy and too weak to be born a millionaire. And I hated his cowardly genuflection to the likes of Rush Limbaugh and Donald Trump. I admit it, I sometimes enjoyed how much I hated Mitt Romney, the clarity of it all.

And now the party's over and we're stuck with the mess. Mitt Romney will probably find a way to make a few more millions. But he'll still hang around too, if only because those Americans who voted for him aren't going anywhere. His partisans are no less sure of their votes now than before election night, and I can't blame them. We could take a walk of shame, but we'd wind up together, right (and left) where we started. It's our house, after all. Honestly I'm not sure how to start cleaning up the mess we've made. The cats are still freaked out, a stench is beginning to rise, and that gunk in the blender? I'm not sure it's pudding. At least I can take some solace in a few wise words I heard on Tuesday night:

"This is a time of great challenges for America, and I pray that the president will be successful in guiding our nation… The nation, as you know, is at a critical point. At a time like this, we can’t risk partisan bickering and political posturing. Our leaders have to reach across the aisle to do the people’s work… This election is over, but our principles endure."

Those are good words, decent words. They remind us of our obligation to be a little kinder to each other, a bit more tolerant of our different beliefs, and a lot more humble. We Americans are a contentious bunch. Always have been, always had to be. We've faced imperial constraint, civil war, economic collapse, and totalitarian advance - and somehow we've stuck together. Better yet, somehow we've managed to expand the sphere of public life, slowly, to include more and more of us. We've been better than this past four years, and we can be better again.

"This election is over, but our principles endure."

Well spoken, Governor Romney.