Yoda Lives in Bay St. Louis
If Yoda were a human being, he’d be James Carville. They both live in swamps, they eat weird food, and they talk funny. They even look alike. The regularity of how often Carville is right doesn’t bother me nearly as much as the magnitude of how right he generally is.
In the nineties, of the three yuppie governors, Mabus, Clinton, and Edwards, Carville saw Clinton as the one who could make it into the White House. I would not have bet on that horse. I didn’t bet on his wife. She’s brilliant, but people don’t like her. I voted for her because her opponent was a clown who got run out of New York for being a clown.
Carville said that Team Trump would implode before the one-hundred-day mark because (let me check my notes) oh, here its: they’re fucking idiots. Trump has a real thing about absolute loyalty. I think that’s why he picks idiots, and lots of them. He also likes women who are unnaturally blonde. Blondes aren’t my preference, but among them, I prefer the ones who are born that way.
A smart person who agrees with you sometimes is far more valuable than a stupid person who agrees with you all the time. That’s where Trump fell down. Since he’s a clown, requiring absolute allegiance means that his team ended up being almost entirely clowns. Having just one or two smart but objectively evil guys isn’t saving him.
For a while, we were worried about Trump becoming Hitler. I think, given a choice, Trump would absolutely love to be Hitler, but unlike Mussolini, Trump can’t get the trains to run on time, giving other fascists nothing to love him for, besides the hate angle, in which he excels.
I’m not nearly so worried about Trump becoming Hitler anymore as I am terrified he might be Herbert Hoover. Crashing the world economy so he can lower the taxes on his rich friends is something Hoover would do—did do.
The hate angle succeeded in the Weimar Republic because decent people didn’t stand up for being decent. They let it happen, thinking, “What choice do we have?” The musical play Cabaret is about that.
For the sun will rise
And the moon will set
And learn how to settle
For what you get.
It will all go on if we're here or not
So who cares? So what?
All across America, people have been demonstrating just how much they care.
Part of Trump’s plan was to build strawmen, built out of hate, and defeat them. One was this idea of trans athletes being dangerous. In a hearing before the Senate, Dick Durbin asked Charlie Baker, the president of the National Collegiate Atheletic Association how many trans athletes there are competing in the NCAA. Baker said “fewer than ten,” which I suppose meant nine. We’re one player short of having an all-trans softball team in the entire country.
“Mother Fucker!” I said to my television. I knew in my heart that Trump had lied. I just didn’t know the volume of his lie. All of that hate spewed out on people who just want to live, and it was a lie, just a lie.
A lot of people I know who have been active democrats for a long time have decided they’re tired, and they’ve had enough. The last two presidential elections contributed to that. Here in Mississippi, the last two gubernatorial elections contributed a whole lot.
I say all the time that I personally like Governor Tate Reeves, and I do. I like his wife more. That’s personal though. When people ask how I could support such a person, I make sure they understand that liking somebody on a personal level and supporting them politically are not the same animal.
I don’t know how the Democrats lost the last two elections in Mississippi. Part of it very likely has to do with the different voter suppression efforts that the old Mississippi Constitution leaves the door open for.
Lyndon Johnson said, “If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you.” I’m not a huge Johnson fan, but he’s dead right on that one. Republican gubernatorial candidates can make this work for them in Mississippi. Democratic candidates used to, but they can’t anymore. Overcoming that, and electing any one of a half dozen really qualified Democratic candidates is a puzzle I don’t know how to solve. I know some absolutely brilliant guys who don’t know how to solve it either.
On the national scale, there was some concern that there were no leaders in the Democratic party, then they started popping up like prairie dogs.
Cory Booker, the senior senator from New Jersey, delivered a filibuster, breaking the record held by Strom Thurmond to prevent the passage of the 1957 Civil Rights Act.
More than that, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has been touring the country with Bernie Sanders, delivering speeches at rallies many times larger than the largest Trump Rally, or even the Trump inauguration. In Republican terms, she’s one fake assassination attempt away from being president.
In Congress, Mr. Excitement, Chuck Schumer, is being overshadowed by the tag team of Raskin and Moskowitz. Two, non-practicing jews being funny as fuck and even smarter. How about that?
They have to step down when Jasmine Crockett takes the floor, though. Black girl energy upsets so many people so much. I grew up with it. It feels very comfortable to me. Somehow, Tougaloo got Crockett to speak at the at their commencement and the peckerwoods lined up to say shit about her, and more than a few made threatening phonecalls to the campus switchboaord—like that’s never happened before at Tougaloo.
Before she died, Anne Frank said that she believed people were good at heart. That she died in a concentration camp doesn’t change my belief that she’s most likely right. Americans have been surprising me on the bad side a lot, but more on the good side.
He couldn’t pick me out of a crowd, but me and coon-ass Yoda go way back. I’m still pretty sure he’s insane, but a good kind of insane, crazy like a fox insane. He’s still who you want to listen to when it comes to the political landscape of America. He moved from New Orleans to Bay St. Louis because Mississippi has everything New Orleans has, without being below sea level. I told you he was smart.
