Watergate

I Remember America: It Was a Good 248 Years

~ Randy Blazak ~ 6 Comments

July 4, 2024

There have been red flags along the way; the Civil War, Watergate, Rosanne Barr singing the national anthem at a Padres game. America has always been an idea more than a reality. “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal” referred to a small group of white men in 1776, some of whom owned slaves and none of whom (except for Thomas Paine) thought women should have a vote. America was a work in a progress. It wasn’t until the arrival of an orange-hued huxter that this grand experiment went completely off the rails.

When Trump and his mail order bride came down the golden escalator in 2015, no sane thinking person thought this malignant narcissistic game show host could become the leader to the free world. Trump was a buffoon with a string of bankruptcies. (You have to be a special kind of moron to bankrupt a casino.) But his rough justice brand of racism (“Mexicans are murderers and rapists”) spoke to the victims of globalization and, while he lost the popular vote, he managed to sneak in to the high office. Thus began the campaign to hijack the no-longer Grand Ol Party and dismantle the guard rails of democracy.

If the 2022 Dobbs decision, that ended women’s bodily sovereignty, was a sign that this was democracy’s sunset, the July first Supreme Court decision in Trump vs. United States, that gave presidents absolute immunity, was our lights-out moment. Goodnight, John Boy. The President is now officially above the law. Trump will claim that he is now immune from all indictments, past and future. If re-elected, he becomes Caesar.

The once revered Supreme Court has gone down this road before. In 2000, the court literally stopped the counting of ballots in Florida and handed the presidency to George W. Bush. But the Federalist Trump Court, stacked with his three nominees and insurrection supporters Alito and Thomas, represent the complete obliteration of the checks and balances system our Founding Fathers designed. The federal judiciary is now merely an extension of MAGA. MAGA controls the House of Representatives as well. So if Trump’s minions take the Senate and he takes back the White House, which controls the entire Executive Branch, America is completely under the control of this madman who has already proclaimed he will be a dictator on Day 1.

Since 1984, when I became a political science major at Emory University (on top of my sociology major), I have dedicated my life to understanding how fascism happens. My work has included going undercover in fascist movements to see how they recruit young people, to entering war zones in Eastern Europe to help children escape the invasion of fascists. For forty years, I have been consumed with this work in hopes that I could prevent it from happening here. That forty years of work, of expertise in this field, tells me one thing. It is happening here.

Let me put this into the most simple words I can, Donald Trump does not give a fuck about America or Americans. He would never let any of his knuckle-dragging MAGA base into his haughty Mar-a-Lago affairs where he flaunts his stolen wealth. Trump cares about power and ego and ratings. And he cares about retribution. He has made it exceedingly clear that his second term would be about revenge, including firing any and all federal workers that are not absolutely loyal to him. His (currently imprisoned) top advisor, Steve Bannon, has said Trump 2.0 will arrest, try, and imprison Biden officials and anyone viewed as not supporting Trump, including former FBI acting Director Andrew McCabe, former FBI Director James Comey, former Secretary of Defense Mark Esper, former Attorney General William Barr and former Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley.

Trump 2.0, would be modeled on the authoritarian regimes Trump has only shown admiration for. A national abortion ban, the releasing of the January 6 terrorists, and detention camps for immigrants would be the first impact. The hollowing out of voting access for minority populations and the protection of corporations from regulations comes next. Then, as Trump has publicly supported, the implementation of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, replacing every federal worker not loyal to Trump, from the highest executive office staff to the lowest park ranger, with Christian nationalists. Department of Education? Gone. Environmental regulations? Gone. Civil rights enforcements? Gone. And finally, because of the July 1 ruling, Trump can legally “take out” any perceived opponents, from Nancy Pelosi to the teenage anarchist down the street. America becomes a hellscape where the Confederacy has won the long civil war. There will be blood.

Why Americans are not out in the streets, I’ll never know. Maybe we’re the frog in the slowly boiling pot. Maybe it’s, as John Lennon sang in 1970, they “keep you doped with religion and sex and TV and you think you’re so clever and classless and free.” Or maybe we have prematurely achieved Idiocracy. Whatever reason, fascism is at our doorstep and turning the knob.

Even if you think my words alarmist, you know another four years of Trump appointments to the federal judiciary will fundamentally transform the nation for generations in a way that will make America the nineteenth century again. An immunized presidency will provide no disincentive to the wanton criminal behavior of a sociopath. A sociopath who only cares about his own power.

Yeah, Joe Biden’s performance at the recent debate was a train wreck, but I would vote for Biden in a coma if it meant keeping this very real threat to the nation from access to the levers of our democracy. Trump and his GOP cult of personality will burn it to the ground.

Make America Classic Rock Again? The Political Danger of Nostalgia

~ Randy Blazak ~ 1 Comment

March 5, 2024

I had a dream I turned on the classic rock radio station and heard a song I never heard before. I woke up thinking how boring nostalgia was. As much as I love a good Steve Miller Band single from 50 years ago, there has to be something more to life. Thanks to my 9-year old Swiftie daughter, the car radio is now locked into the Top 40 station. Z100! I know Steve Miller and his Jet Airliner are still there, but we’re in a droptop ride with SZA today.

I’ve now entered the age where I’m surrounded by peers, Baby Boomers and increasingly crotchety Gen Xers, complaining about “kids today” and how much better things were back in the day, music and values and the price of gas. It’s endlessly annoying. Just because Van Halen made “totally awesome” music in 1980, doesn’t mean there aren’t a ton of bands making great music now. (I’m writing this as I’m playing the new Bleachers record.) But I’m regularly being beaten over the head by Grumpy Old Men who don’t think any music released this century is worth a damn. They desperately want the world be like it was when they were young and you could ride in the back of a pick-up truck to the drive-in.

Let’s first deal with three important facts.

FACT 1: I love when I read old timers complain that youth today have no morals or respect or blah, blah, blah. They forget that their parents’ generation said the same thing about them. Kids have never had any goddamn respect. Socrates, over 2400 years ago said much the same thing. “The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their households. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their legs, and tyrannize their teachers.” They might be assholes half the time, but the kids are alright. 

FACT 2: Rock and roll was created in the 1950s for one specific reason, to annoy your parents. The noise of youth creates space for young people separate themselves from adult society. Adults thought Elvis was noise in the 1950s, with his gyrating hips and “negro intonations.” Every year kids have had something to push their parents back, including Hendrix (1960s), Kiss (1970s), Run DMC (1980s), Nirvana (1990s), Eminem (2000s), Beyoncé (2010s), and Doja Cat (now). I remember my father endlessly perplexed at why I preferred Led Zeppelin to Ricky Nelson. “That’s not music,” was the constant refrain. “I hope I die before I get old,” I’d reply. I remember elders thinking Van Halen was absolute garbage when they came out. (I saw them get booed when they opened for Black Sabbath in 1978.) Now grandma and grandpa are in a heated Sammy Hagar versus David Lee Roth debate.

FACT 3: The past always looks great through the rear view mirror, but the past was always a mixed bag. Yeah, it was fun to ride around in the back of a pick-up truck, but a bunch of kids fell out and died. Yeah, there were some great songs back then but there were some super shitty ones, too. Does anyone really miss “Disco Duck”? Yeah, it was fun to play in the streets with your pals, but often you were playing “Smear the Queer.” Whenever someone waxes on and on about the dreamlike good old days, I flash to me holding the TV antenna in just the right position so I could watch the Watergate hearings on one of the three channels we got, while also trying to manage the horizontal hold. I’ll take my Roku, thank you.

Nostalgia was originally defined as a sickness in the 1680s to describe Swiss mercenaries who couldn’t fight because the longed for home. During the American Civil War, nostalgia was seen as a problematic form a depression, melancholia to be cured so the soldiers could wage war. It’s root as a mental disability is not lost on the lives of those suffering from Alzheimer’s disease, endlessly caught in loops of their past, unable to engage in the present world in a meaningful way. “If I could just go back to when I was happy.” Odds are you weren’t as happy as you imagine.

There’s a dangerous political aspect to all this hyper-nostalgia, this over romanticizing of the past. It’s the impetus behind all forms of fascism, from Hitler’s mythologizing of Germany’s past or Trump’s Make America Great Again movement. For Trump’s crowd it’s the belief that America was great BEFORE all the various civil rights movements upset the “natural” authority of straight white cis-gender men. The America before pronouns, diversity trainings, and black lives mattering. Make America Jim Crow Again. It’s not surprising that Trump has leaned heavily on 20th century music artists to take his MAGA crowd back to the GOD (Good Old Days). It’s encouraging that dozens of these artists (or their estates) have petitioned Trump to stop using their music, including Aerosmith, The Beatles, Bruce Springsteen, Creedence Clearwater Revival, Eddy Grant, Elton John, the Village People (!), Everlast, Guns N Roses, Isaac Hayes, The Smiths, Leonard Cohen, Linkin Park, Neil Young, Ozzy Osbourne, Phil Collins, Prince, Queen, R.E.M., The Rolling Stones, Tom Petty, and even Nickelback. Just this week, the estate of Sinead O’Connor asked Trump to stop using her version of “Nothing Compares to You.” Fascism requires nostalgia but they are not doing it with Nickelback!

Two Important Points

Number 1: I get nostalgia. When we are young, and the world is in front us, every new experience is massively vibrant, the first kiss, the first time listening to Dark Side of the Moon. Those experiences and their soundtrack are woven into our very construction, like the iron beams that hold up the Empire State Building. Sitting in a smoke field movie theater watching The Empire Strike Back or falling to sleep to Steely Dan on the FM headphones has been fused into our DNA. As we age, and more of our life is behind us instead of in front of us, we start to lean on those iron beams. The Empire State Building, built 93 years ago, might not be here 93 years from now (2117), but it will always remind us of a specific moment in history that was both “great” and horrible.

I can get caught up in nostalgia, just like everyone else. I currently have 955 public playlists on Spotify, most mining the music of my youth. (Playlist #956 is going to be songs from albums released in March 1974, starting with Grand Funk’s “Locomotion.”) If I have any actual hobbies, it’s collecting vinyl LPs and anything related to the Beatles. And I would trade my eye teeth to get behind the wheel of my first car, a ’73 Gran Torino, again. But that brings me to Point #2.

Number 2: Nostalgia can block out our ability to be present in the present. We’re so focused on the past and making America “that” again, we miss out on the wonderful stuff right in front of us. I will never stop listening to Top 40 radio and looking for new bands to obsess over. (Currently, it’s Blood Command.) I love sharing my daughter’s love of all things Taylor Swift and discovering this music with her (Lover is our current favorite album, although I’m starting to get into folklore.) Listening to contemporary music connects me to the present moment, not when America Was Ricky Nelson. Even if for a moment, it liberates me from the endless nostalgia loop. And it’s inevitable that Taylor Swift will be on “oldies” rotation in 30 years and my kid will say, “When I was a kid, we had REAL music, like Dua Lipa. These kids today…” And so it goes.

So enjoy the past. There’s great wisdom in a Crosby, Stills, and Nash lyric and a Jimmy Carter foreign policy. Huey Lewis and Ronald Reagan don’t seem as horrid as they did 40 years ago. And some of our fond memories are shockingly marginalizing now. (If you can’t remember how racist, sexist, and homophobic we were, just watch any 80’s comedy film. Weird Science has not aged well.) But also plug into the present reality. The kids today have both the exact same issues we contended with and so much more. And their world is reflected in their culture, which should not be dismissed as our parents dismissed ours. Their soundtrack is worth a listen.

I was 5 once, too!

~ Randy Blazak ~ 2 Comments

November 27, 2019

Cozy and I were sitting at home last week, watching the impeachment hearings. I had to wait until age 9 for my first live impeachment proceedings. (I was glued to the Watergate hearings.) Cozy’s getting a jumpstart on her political awakening. She stopped and said, “I don’t like Donald Trump because he wants to cut down all the trees.” I don’t know if that’s true, but it captures the feeling that Trump is a one-man apocalypse for her generation. I wondered if she will remember any of this when she’s having a beer with her friends in college, reflecting on when America went off the rails.

Some people don’t have a lot of memories from before the age of 5. Others, perhaps due to intense psychotherapy, remember the formative years with crystal clarity. For me, age three was when my little brother came home from the hospital. I can see my mother carrying him past the birch trees in front of our house. Four was nursery school and a cubby whole of my very own. The rest is a swirl of real and imagined.  I assume Cozy might not remember her early days, but perhaps they have all been logged somewhere in her subconscious. Meeting Minnie Mouse on her third birthday may appear in dreams 30 years from now, but probably will never be a clear memory. All the experiences we’ve been giving her are meant to shape her personality, not necessarily give her fond memories. That’s why God invented Instagram. #cozyblazak

But 5 is different. These moments will last. Not all of them, but enough. She will remember many of her kindergarten friends, and being dragged to my meetings, and art projects with her mom, and trips to visit family in Mexico. I can’t find a single picture of  me at 5, but there’s a cloud full of thousands of pictures of her if she ever needs her memory jogged.

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Five was a big year for me. So much of it seems clear as day. For Halloween, I had a Secret Squirrel costume with a plastic mask that scratched my face. My best friend was a neighbor named Cheryl. I’d call her to play by doing a Tarzan yell over the back fence, and she’d climb over like soldier scaling a wall in boot camp. Our kindergarten class had an incubator and we anxiously waited for chicken eggs to hatch. My mom told me today that one of my classmates was a bully who delighted in slamming kids’ hands in the door. I’ve blocked that one out. But I do remember her buying my corrective shoes at a Stride Rite store (next to Mayfair’s) that had ducks in the window. Candy button strips and a friend with a pet turtle. A new Blue Bird school bus and realizing I could swallow Spaghetti-O’s without chewing.

I was 5 in 1969, so there were my first flirts with sixties pop culture, most memorable was the first episode of Sesame Street (November 11, 1969). I still have the album (and can sing “Rubber Duckie”). I cut out Archies records from the back of Honeycomb cereal boxes. I knew most of the words to “Spinning Wheel” by Blood, Sweat & Tears, and got a few of the jokes on Laugh-In (“Very interesting.”) And, of course, I stared at the moon, hoping to see Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong bouncing on it.

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I also processed some of the turmoil at the end of the decade. Our white middle class parents made fun of hippies and warned of the “dangerous jungle” in the city. That gave me plenty to rebel against later. But it was all lodged in my brain. The implicit bias I now hope to purge was being formed inside the mind of that kid 50 years ago.

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I don’t know what Cozy will carry with her from her vast experiences in 2019. We’ve worked hard to block messages of inequity, taking her to sold-out women’s soccer matches and exposing her to her wonderful family south of the border. She is as at home with the music of John Coltrane as she is the soundtrack of Frozen 2. She might not log every single trip to the ice cream shop or cool outfit, but hopefully she’ll remember how much she was loved in all those moments. And she can save the Trump thing for her therapist.

Coming of Age in the Watergate Era and Awaiting the Trump Impeachment

~ Randy Blazak ~ 12 Comments

February 24, 2017

I’m kinda old (I turned 53 this week), so forgive me if I appear a bit jaded by the current state of corrupt politics. You see, I came of (political) age in the Watergate era so I know exactly how this Trump mess is gonna end.

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When Richard Nixon won reelection on November 7, 1972, I was an 8-year-old third grader at Atherton Elementary in Dekalb County, Georgia. Please do not tell anyone this, but I supported Republican Nixon over Democrat George McGovern. The truth is Nixon’s nose reminded me of Bob Hope’s. That’s all it took. I was unaware that the “White House Plumbers” had already broken into the Watergate Hotel and begun their crime spree under the guidance of Tricky Dick and his funky beak. In those days Republicans couldn’t get the Russians to break into Democratic National Committee files. They had to do it themselves. (Ah, those were the days.)

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By the following spring, the Senate Watergate hearings were being broadcast live on all three networks. (That’s all we had, folks!) I was 9 and, instead of running wild through the Georgia pines, I was glued to the boob tube, fascinated at the collapse of the highest power in the land, John Dean’s cover-up-cracking testimony, the president of the United States asserting “I am not a crook,” missing minutes of secret Oval Office recordings, and the whistle blowing of black security guard Frank Willis. (John Lennon was glued too and even showed up, with Yoko, to witness the hearings on June 27, 1973.) It was as if my beloved country was breaking in half and trust in authority was evaporating. When Vice President Spiro Agnew (who hated the news media before it was fashionalbe) resigned on October 10, 1973, I was just a fourth grader, but I knew Nixon would appoint a vice president who would later pardon him. My first Latin was “Quid pro quo.”

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The following spring, hearings for the impeachment of the president began. That summer I finally made it to Washington DC and had the honor of taking a crap in Nixon’s White House. Soon after that historic dump, before congress could finalize the ugly task of impeachment, on August 8, 1974, the President of the United States of America resigned. His recently appointed VP, (now President) Gerald Ford pardoned him. I freakin’ told you so. Nixon rode off to the Orange County sunset with one last victory sign but the nation was forever broken. He was a crook. And now aren’t they all?

Much has been written about how the Baby Boom cohort lost its idealism because of Watergate. That the Woodstock generation caved in to self-serving narcissism and nostalgia paving the way for the Reagan “revolution” in 1980. If you can’t trust the President, who can you trust, Dad?  But it affected more than baby boomers. Us little Gen X kids grew up believing that absolute power corrupted absolutely. Whether it was Reagan’s Iran-Contra scandal or Congress impeaching Bill Clinton for lying about a blow job. They’re all a bunch crooks. Why bother to even vote? What’s on the TV?

That’s why the relatively scandal free eight-years of Obama was such breath of fresh air. Is it possible that our elected officials might be capable of not disappointing us on each corner of the calendar? His kids didn’t even get wasted. One time Amy Carter came in to the record store I worked at in Stone Mountain and bought two tapes, Janis Joplin and The Clash. “My dad hates this shit,” she said. The Obamas gave us a weird sense of hope.

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Then here comes Trump, probably the most corrupt president in American history. He’s still doing business deals and hiding God knows what in his tax returns, his advisors are winking at Neo-Nazis and Russian dictators, and his spokeswoman is hawking his daughter’s fake bourgeois clothes (made in China) on live TV. It’s like the White House has been turned into a giant dumpster fire. Meanwhile, Americans, desperate to hold on to their healthcare and not blow billions of taxpayer dollars on Trump’s vanity wall and a new nuclear arms race, are secretly hoping Justin Trudeau will quietly annex the Lower 48. Save us, JT!

It doesn’t seem like much of a question if Trump will get impeached but when. And will there be enough dirt to get creepy Mike Pence out, too? I think any sane American would gladly take Paul Ryan as president over this incompetent gang of shysters who are making our country less secure every day they are allowed to control the executive branch. (Is it too macabre to imagine Trump, Pence, and Steve Bannon being crushed to death in a tragic golf cart rollover?) I remember when I was a kid some conspiracy nuts thought the Soviet Union was somehow mixed up in the Watergate scandal. There’s an awful lot more evidence that Russia has its claws all over this administration. But the formerly Russian-hating right could care less. Maybe it’s because Russia is white. Now about those Mexicans and Muslims…

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For those of us who grew up in the time of Watergate, it’s easy to get jaded. Why not turn off the political noise and become whatever the 2010s version of a yuppie is? But we saw what that got us in 1980, and for millions of Americans who didn’t have stock in IBM, it was pretty ugly. So let’s stay focused and drive the rats from the people’s house before they destroy it and let’s replace them with something beautiful. How about a vegetable garden?