#slick willie

[beefgoat]

This'll probably get me on some kind of list.

Bill "Slick Willie" Clinton

These are all genuine pictures of Mr Clinton I took myself.

Let me tell you, this guy knows how to party.

[potusburg]

Jay McWalsh

There is much to be saddened by as the US continues to spiral into a cesspool of extremism, anger, hate and violence.  However,  your shock and outrage at lack of civility in the current political discourse is not persuasive.  But we’ll get to all that.  Let’s go back thirty years.

In 1988 your semi-faithful blogger was 14 years old.  That was the year two movies came out that were hugely influential on a young life, and remain favorites to this day:  “Die Hard” and “Midnight Run”.  Die Hard’s terrorist-thwarting John McClane and Midnight Run’s mob boss tormentor Jack Walsh were in many ways the same character:  cigarette-smoking, wise-cracking, five-o’clock-shadow-bearing, firearm-wielding, haymaker-throwing, F-bomb-dropping, explosion-causing, lone-crusading assholes.  They were fighting bad guys and they were way too cool for school.

So much were they the same guy, that Bruce Willis and Robert DeNiro could have swapped roles at the last minute before filming those two movies, and neither movie would have missed a beat.  DeNiro had better comedic chemistry with his foil Charles Grodin than Willis did with Alan Rickman, but that could have been a script thing.  Essentially, John McClane and Jack Walsh were one and the same.  They were J. McWalsh.  Which we’ll morph into Jay McWalsh.  Your blogger wanted desperately to be Jay.  A knowing, wry smile while driving by a parked cop at 3 mph over the speed limit invoked an inner feeling of Jayness.  Too tough, too cool, and on way too important a mission to defer to convention and authority.

Jay McWalshes are everywhere.  They have both reflected and influenced generations of boys and men who grew up wanting to be them.  Jay McWalshes are littered across the landscape of 60s, 70s, 80s, and 90s buddy cop and spaghetti western movies.  Think Martin Riggs (”Lethal Weapon”), or Jack Cates (”48 Hours”).  Would we not hide in a bunker and prepare for Armageddon should Clint Eastwood EVER play a character that is anything but Jay McWalsh? Jays are our favorite rock stars and rap artists.  They are the athletes we admire.  And they are politicians.  But we’ll come back to that later.

The influence of this persona extends beyond, and reaches back further than, late 20th-century pop culture.  This blogger grew up going to church and remembers being exposed as a young man to a New Testament story that has (by rough memory) Jesus going into a Temple and angrily knocking over tables of commerce.   If we are, as was sometimes taught to this blogger, to model ourselves after Jesus as best we can, this particular event models a willingness to defy authority, defy convention, and to do something that is, strictly speaking, quite angry and rude, in the name of what is right.  This is not to offend Christians by comparing Jesus to movie characters, but rather to point out the subtle and similar potential influence that this kind of Biblical story can have on the psyche of an individual or culture.

Jay McWalshism has probably gathered much more steam in this blogger’s lifetime, though, in a culture that identifies more with 70s era Han Solo than 40s era Superman.  Edginess trumps Boy Scoutedness.  We like—no, love—an asshole if he’s OUR asshole.  An asshole who’s really a good guy, who is really fighting for the good guys, is justified and even appreciated if they forgo civility and manners to get the job done.  There’s even a certain charm to the hero getting it done in a way that causes some pearl-clutching along the way.  It’s a bonus.  But did you ever notice a tendency to become much more focused on how rude, inconsiderate, offensive, and just flat out lacking in common decency the discourse is when it comes from the side with which you disagree?  Sort of like how the athlete on the team you aren’t rooting for is a punk and a disgrace when they display their Jayness in the arena of competition.

This is a pretty straightforward and harmless tendency in a movie, where it’s obvious who the heroes and villains are.  The audience isn’t divided on that.  There is division in sports, but usually those divisions are harmless.  Real life, however, is very different.  And that’s where it gets dangerous.   We have the same levels of certainty in politics about who the bad guys are that we had about who the bad guys were in Die Hard.  And if you’re that certain, of course you don’t want politeness.  Of course it is easy to justify massively elevated levels of anger and meanness.  So don’t be offended when the other side acts like Jay McWalsh.  You’re looking the other way when your side does it.   About eight different kinds of cognitive bias are firing in your brain whenever you make the argument that the other side has hit a new low.  You are setting higher standards for people who disagree with you than you are setting for people who agree with you.

Signs of this are everywhere.  Fox News and conservative talk radio do an outstanding job of keeping a rapt audience apprised of the latest assaults on decency, civility, and meaningful discourse, that have come from the left.  We have ample opportunity to tune in for accounts of Ted Cruz and his wife being harassed and chased out of a restaurant, death threats received by Brett Kavanaugh and his family, and a whole range of outrageous behaviors.  CNN and late night TV will similarly oblige us when it comes to recapping the transgressions of Trump and the right.  What’s more, being the more polite side might not be anything to brag about.  If the other side is behaving without maturity or persuasion, and yet half the country agrees with them, might that be because their beliefs actually have merit?  This may be a flimsy hypothesis, but the point remains—politeness doesn’t matter much in these debates except as a way to call foul on the other side.

Twenty years ago, President Clinton, whose preferred moniker at POTUSburg is Slick Willie, was the subject of a fierce debate over his conduct, and the direction of the outrage fell rather purely along party lines, just as it does today when it comes to President Trump.  A historical re-examination of Slick Willie’s behavior (your blogger recommends Season 2 of Slate’s “Slow Burn” podcast) points us toward the same sort of pathological narcissism that we accuse Trump of today.   The politics of the two differ, as do their communication abilities and styles, therefore invoking inverse reactions in the relevant demographics and media.  Let us make no mistake, though.  It is highly implausible that a sense of goodness, decency, and morality is what stopped Slick Willie from communicating with the same words and mannerisms that Trump uses.   It comes down to what communication tools each power-hungry and charismatic populist politician has in his personal arsenal to advance his own agenda.

The inspiration for this blog is the absurdity that is our current President.  This blogger believes in a distinct separation of three lenses through which one might view the President.  

The first lens is policy and ideology.  In our country, there are honest, informed, and well-intentioned disagreements on policy, and we don’t think attempting to persuade people to the other side of the deep policy and ideological divisions of today are a worthwhile pursuit for POTUSburg.  

The second is conduct.  The view enumerated above is that the conduct and tone of the President and his supporters probably only matters to you if you disagree with them on policy.  People criticize the manner of delivery when they don’t like the message.  We’ve all experienced this.  Therefore, a debate over the President’s conduct and tone is mostly a farce, just as the debate 20 years ago over our President’s conduct was mostly a farce, and is not the purview of this blog.  Recent threats and actions of political violence and hate are horrific and may well be manifestations of an environment sowed by uncivil rhetoric. The trouble is that extremism isn’t solely the domain of one side, and we only seem to recognize the toxicity when it emanates from others.   

The third is merit.  If the tactics of this President seem childish to you, it is because he is demonstrating the intellectual capacity, attention span, and self-awareness of a child.  Even more alarming than the antics are the leadership and cognitive abilities, or more specifically the lack thereof, that lie behind them.  The President’s techniques in persuasion (however effective with many) are unsophisticated because he is unsophisticated.  That should matter to us all.  It is dangerous.  It doesn’t mean his politics are dangerous (though you may find them dangerous for separate ideological reasons)—it means his leadership is.  Recognizing that our President is mentally incapable of grasping and navigating the ins and outs of his job doesn’t have anything to do with whether conservatives or liberals are right.   But it’s a recognition that is sorely needed and lacking.  We are witnessing the void that is left where there should be some semblance of coherence, being filled instead by ignorance, anger, and fear.

This is POTUSberg.

--SKS

[augrygitforcentury]

Bill Clinton and Al Gore pioneered the basic bitch look.

[gutshotsthrift]

Sad Bill is sad... and a rubber stamp for some reason.