Exceptionally Sucky

Introduction

“If you speak the truth, have a foot in the stirrup.” — Opening quotation

KMOHello, and welcome to another installment of the C-Realm Podcast. I’m your host, KMO, and this is episode number 563, “Exceptionally Sucky,” with guest Donald J. Putin, prepared for release onto the World Wide Web on — what is today? — Thursday, July 9th, 2020.

In the next hour, you will hear the first half of my conversation with Donald J. Putin — that is, @donald_j_putin, all lowercase, on Twitter — where he has about 10 times as many followers as I do: 14.6 thousand followers. Granted, he tweets a heck of a lot more than I do, and he’s very consistent in his theme. In terms of appealing to the various algorithms which deliver content to you and everybody else, that has been my consistent failing: to have a readily identifiable theme that I can easily encapsulate and explain to somebody in just a few seconds. But Donald J. Putin is a longtime C-Realm listener, and he is also the author of the book Donald J. Putin on American Exceptionalism: It’s Not You, It’s Just America Being America, by Donald J. Putin.

You know, I heard on the news today the voice of George W. Bush, a voice I hadn’t heard in quite some time. And the author of the story mentioned that Vladimir Putin had been president of Russia for a couple of years when George W. Bush took office back in the year 2001. Putin has been there a long time, and there is no danger whatsoever that we will have to endure Donald Trump for an equal length of time.

So let me say early on here that for the first part of the conversation, we are talking about whether or not the United States is an empire. Donald J. Putin’s position is that yes, it is most certainly an empire. Now, I’ve taken his role in this argument before. I’ve been the one saying yes, the U.S. is an empire. But for the sake of conversation, and other reasons, I take the opposite side in this particular iteration of this conversation, which has taken place many times, and I call for some moderation in considering the United States an empire.

Have you ever split a bag of weed with somebody, or sold some weed to a friend of yours because he was out and you had some? That makes you a drug dealer. Technically, you qualify. You have exchanged drugs for money in the past. But you probably don’t adhere to the stereotype of the drug dealer. For somebody to describe you as a drug dealer would probably be misleading, because that phrase evokes an image and a lot of associations which probably just don’t apply, even though technically you are a drug dealer. And I would say that the same applies to the word empire. In some respects, the United States clearly is an empire, and as Donald J. Putin will point out, we have soldiers stationed on all seven continents.

But a lot of the C-Realm listenership is outside the United States, mostly in English-speaking countries: Canada, the U.K., Ireland, Australia and New Zealand. Let me ask you: do you consider yourself to be a subject of the American empire? And that’s not a rhetorical question. That is an open question. In fact, I invite you to contact me and let me know: are you an imperial subject?

And before I start to play the conversation, I just want to point out that Donald J. Putin is going to mention the name Martin Gugino and reference an event that happened in Buffalo, New York. You certainly have seen video of this incident. Martin Gugino is a 75-year-old Catholic peace activist, and he got pushed to the ground, to the concrete, by police in Buffalo, New York, and he was hospitalized for that. And subsequently, Donald Trump tweeted that Martin Gugino was probably associated with Antifa, which, as far as I know, he is not.

Aside from the tussle over the applicability of the title “empire” at the beginning of the conversation, this conversation is mostly about the idea of American exceptionalism. So here’s my conversation — the first part of it, anyway — with Donald J. Putin.

Program identification: “You’re listening to the C-Realm Podcast. C stands for consciousness.”

Who is Donald J. Putin?

KMOSo you are Donald J. Putin.

Donald J. PutinThat’s me.

KMOWhat can you say about yourself, Donald J. Putin, to explain your perspective on the world?

Donald J. PutinWell, my book says that Donald J. Putin lives in Brooklyn, New York; his interests include vodka, global domination and chronicling the end stages of the American Empire. My longer bio on my blog suggests that I’m a proud graduate of Columbia College, its last all-male class — although the blog doesn’t say so, that includes a minor figure named Barack Obama — and then three years later I graduated law school, and I have actually been plying that trade for about 34 years or so.

My view on the world — I would say you and your guests over the years have certainly been influential on my view of the world — is basically that the grand edifice I grew up with, and that I was always led to believe was built by decades or centuries of our energetic American forebears, has seemingly spent my adult life largely crumbling. Which troubles me, just as I’m about to hand that off to my daughter. But there you go. We try to make the best of it with a sense of humor.

Somewhere in 2019, probably inspired by meeting with a group of friends who actively protest Guantánamo — including one fellow from England who comes to visit us every year — I was inspired with the question: is the United States an empire? Following up, in some sense, on John Michael Greer’s discussions on the subject. And the answer is, well, heck yeah, we’re an empire. But we’re the only empire in the history of empires that refuses to say it’s actually an empire.

Is the United States an empire?

KMOIs that the only difference, though?

Donald J. PutinWell, we’re also the most ginormous empire. No other empire has actually encompassed the entire globe. All seven continents now have an American military presence, for example. Nothing like that has ever happened before. But in terms of the standard wealth-pump function of an empire, yeah, we’re pretty much there. My example in the book is: we’re taught that empires involve colonial officers stationed overseas, and the colonies issue postage stamps that usually have a picture of the queen in the corner and that recognize an imperial sovereign. We’re not that. We’re a softer, kinder, gentler empire that only goes in for military occupation and, of course, favorable trade and financial terms.

KMOWell, if you’ve been listening to recent episodes of the C-Realm Podcast, you’ve probably heard me summarize some of Peter Zeihan’s view of the world.

Donald J. PutinAbsolutely.

KMOSo just for the sake of folks who might be coming into this cold, as briefly as I can: Peter Zeihan’s narrative is that at the end of World War II, the U.S. really wanted to oppose the Soviet Union, and they bribed the rest of the world by saying: look, we’re going to create a stable free-trade zone that covers the entire globe. We’re going to guarantee high-seas security, so you can buy your stuff wherever you want and ship it wherever you want, and we’re going to make sure you can do that safely. All we ask in return is that you allow us to coordinate your defense, so that we can present a unified global front against the Soviet Union.

Which gives us the whole First World, Second World, Third World model. The First World is the U.S. and its allies; the Second World is the Soviet Union and its satellites; and the Third World is the countries that nobody used to care about. And “Third World” became a synonym for poor, but that’s not really the case anymore. Some people are fond of saying that the U.S. has become a Third World country, and that’s simply impossible by definition. It doesn’t matter how poor it gets and how shitty life gets here; it’s still the United States.

But the difference between the U.S. after World War II and, say, the British before World War II is that the British gleefully identified themselves as an empire. They made Victoria — the queen of all Africa —

Donald J. PutinYeah. Empress of India.

KMOWe didn’t go in for that. And for the most part, we didn’t care a whole lot about other people’s forms of government, as long as it wasn’t communist — as long as they weren’t taking money from the Soviet Union or doing all those lefty things inhibiting capitalism. We didn’t care too much. But if they did flirt with that stuff — say, Chile — we came down hard on them, or we gave a blank check to the right-wing forces in that country. But other than that, not the typical empire.

In terms of Zeihan’s narrative, one of his contentions is that the whole providing global security for trade and creating a global environment for commerce wouldn’t really have been a bribe if the U.S. had used its power to enrich itself via that system — that it has less interaction with global trade than one would expect, given how many resources the U.S. expends on creating a global environment which is conducive to international trade.

Donald J. PutinRight. I mean, I obviously agree with the temporality. Actually, I would argue we became a global empire before the war — at some point; I forget whether it was 1940 or 1941 — when Messrs. Churchill and Roosevelt met on the deck of the HMS Prince of Wales somewhere off Newfoundland and basically [wording unclear; heard “called”] the Atlantic Charter, or something of that nature. Basically around the time of the Lend-Lease arrangement, when various principles about opening up the rest of the world, decolonization, et cetera, took place. I would argue that at that moment, the keys to the British Empire were handed over to the American Empire, for all practical purposes. I would disagree that there was any sort of selfless act on the part of the United States in that end. We simply took over a turnkey empire, and wealth that previously was extracted and went to the British Empire went to us — whether it was physically grabbed by gunboats or simply by favorable pricing and currency exchange. The mechanism is the same.

My argument is that we had previously operated a Western Hemispheric empire — certainly aspirationally since it was set forth by the Monroe Doctrine — and we were certainly not averse to deploying U.S. military power in the Western Hemisphere for at least 100 years before 1940. [wording unclear; heard “1840”], the Spanish-American War. We did much the same thing across the Pacific starting at the beginning of the 20th century. And we’ve certainly been unhesitant to use military force to acquire the North American continental part of the empire.

So I would argue we’re actually a pretty conventional empire, although parts of the empire we call our sovereign territory; parts of it we actually call colonies, like Puerto Rico, Guam, Samoa, the District of Columbia; and other parts of it we call our military allies. But it’s documented that we maintain military bases of one kind or another in excess of 100 other countries. And again, what makes us greater than any other empire is that some of those countries include Germany, Japan, Great Britain — all of the world’s greatest economies, basically, except for China and Russia. Russia, I guess, is roughly the economy of New York State. It’s still a great power, but not a great economic power.

KMOAnd a few oddities. I could spend a whole lot of time in contention over this issue, but I just want to point out things like: one of Mahatma Gandhi’s first public acts in organizing resistance to the British Empire was to walk to the beach and pick up a handful of salt and hold it up above his head, because it was illegal for Indians to collect salt. They had to buy it from British merchants. It was illegal for people in India to weave cloth, or to make finished goods from their cloth. They had to send it to Britain and then buy the finished products from Britain. The British had a much heavier hand on their colonies than the U.S. does. And the British were pretty benevolent imperial powers compared to, say, the Dutch, who were absolutely brutal, or the French in Africa.

Donald J. PutinNo, I totally agree with that. I’m not questioning the degree. That’s a quantity issue. As a quality, we’re an empire. Maybe we’re a very soft empire. Donald Trump would argue that we’re too soft an empire — we’re not getting nearly a decent enough deal from the people we’re occupying. Maybe that’s true.

KMOFor the past four years, I’ve liked to put off any talk of Donald J. Trump to the end of the discussions.

Donald J. PutinFair point. I think the very first line of my book is that it’s not about Donald Trump.

Exceptionally bad

KMORight. So yes, your book. Let’s go back to your book. What’s the title?

Donald J. PutinThe title is Donald J. Putin on American Exceptionalism: It’s Not You, It’s Just America Being America.

KMOSo, exceptionalism. For some, it is a snarl word. For others, it is an emblem of greatness. And for you, it has a more prosaic and literal meaning. What is that meaning?

Donald J. PutinI literally mean: how is America different? To paraphrase the Jewish Passover service, how is America different from all other countries? And so I literally discuss how America is different in many ways — statistical categories: what we provide and don’t provide for workers, standard of living, health care, mass incarceration, percent of GDP spent on our legal system, that sort of thing. So I go through a series of statistics that in some cases people had compiled, and in other cases people hadn’t compiled, and I put them in one place. And in fact, the United States of America is indeed exceptional. What most people don’t seem to understand is that from an objective standpoint, that would be exceptionally bad.

KMOExceptionally bad from the perspective of the quality of life of the people who live here and who are not millionaires or billionaires.

Donald J. PutinCorrect. That’s correct. For the non-oligarch population — the 99%, if you will, or whether that be 98.5% or 99.5%; we’ll accept that approximation — for all but the very rich, even the pretty well-off are actually not pretty well-off when compared with the suite and package of stuff they would get for being a citizen of what we’ll call another First World country.

“You can leave”

KMOI want to read something from early on in your book — and I can only read something from early on in your book, because I’ve only gotten a few pages in. But you write:

At least as I write this in 2019, the United States will still give out passports to almost anyone capable of sitting still for a photograph, finding a birth certificate, filling out a form and paying a fee. This is a good thing, because it means that you can do the one thing that makes sense when dealing with an untenable situation: you can leave.

KMOWell, I want to point out one large exception to that. If you owe back child support, you cannot leave. You are not eligible for a passport.

Donald J. PutinRight. Well, unless you already have it. But yes, that’s right.

KMOWell, if you already have it, it will be taken away. At least in Maryland, the very first letter I got from whatever department it is that handles that was: your driver’s license is now suspended. You can’t go to work, because you owe back child support — which to me makes zero sense. But the idea just seems to be: you can’t leave. Somebody has a claim on your earning power. You may not leave. Now, it’s also difficult to go to work without transportation, but tough luck. Fortunately, the American empire is not that unified. When I was living in Maryland, I had an Arkansas driver’s license, and there is no reciprocal agreement between Maryland and Arkansas on that score. But it is very easy for somebody to put a claim on a man’s potential earning power.

Donald J. PutinRight. Well, all you’ve said, KMO, is that it’s worse than I thought and worse than I suggested. But I keep waiting for them to expand it to anybody who owes back taxes as well: you can’t leave the country. Who knows? Well, it’s not yet the case, but —

KMORight. Another interesting thing: if you go to apply for a passport, there’s a question, have you ever had a passport before? If you click yes, then they ask you what’s your passport number, or send us a copy of your passport. But suppose you haven’t had it in 20 years and you have no clue as to where it is. What do you do? It’s not as easy to get out of here as you might think.

Donald J. PutinRight. Well, and again, I should note, by the way, that I was writing in 2019. As of 2020, thanks to the coronavirus, there are a fairly large number of countries that will not accept entrance from the United States — and with good reason. I don’t blame them at all.

As I said, I don’t know what to make of it, but our daughter was doing a study abroad in Spain for the spring semester — because the secret of comedy is timing. And we went to visit her, with great trepidation as to whether we were insane to be traveling as of March of 2020. And I cannot tell you what a lovely time we had on the 9th, 10th and 11th of March, in a Madrid that was largely empty for various reasons. You can spend as much time with your favorite artwork at the Prado as you like. Reservations that would ordinarily take six months in advance you can make for that evening. And then, of course, I think somewhere on the evening of March 12th, we got frantic texts from all of our friends saying that there was an announcement that the United States border was about to close and that you should get back here as fast as possible — which we pretty much did that day.

In retrospect, the thought of possibly being locked away from one’s house, pets, job struck us as terrifying. But we came back. But at that moment, of course, it was announced that we were doing it to the EU, to keep them from coming here and infecting us with their high infection rate. And now, of course, they have managed to control their pandemic, and we have not managed to control ours. And so now they have turned around and done it to us. So I don’t know what to make of that. But I think, as we’ve both just discussed, the U.S. passport ain’t all it’s cracked up to be.

KMOWell, yeah. I mean, once you have it, you can travel — current-year exceptional circumstances notwithstanding. I want to read a little bit more from the early part of your book here.

Donald J. PutinSure.

KMOYou mentioned: leave if you can. But it’s kind of hard if you have attachments here — family members who are not willing or ready to leave, children who have lives that they expect to live here. But you write:

You may be trapped by loved ones who do not wish to leave themselves, or your loved ones may simply not be up for travel, let alone immigration. I find myself in this situation. To you and to myself, I say: dip your toes in the water. Get out of the U.S. as often as you can, even if it’s only to Canada or Mexico. Walk around, breathe the air, and talk to people. If you can learn the languages of places you visit, all the better. Most people are delighted that you took the trouble to learn, even a little. Look at other people’s faces and observe that they usually appear more relaxed than most Americans. They probably have not deferred health issues for years out of fear of personal financial destruction. They probably move around relatively freely without being sued or arbitrarily arrested or shaken down. They probably get mandatory vacation time from their jobs, which in turn probably pay them a living wage for their community. And they probably have a community.

KMOAnd I’ve traveled outside the United States, and yeah, that’s definitely true. Now, if you travel in poor places, you are likely to be shaken down by police.

Donald J. PutinSure.

KMOAnd in places like Thailand, they have two police forces. They have the regular police force, and then they have the tourist police, and the tourist police’s job is to protect tourists from the regular police.

Donald J. PutinWell, they want the tourists to keep coming back. So there you go.

Civil forfeiture and junk fees

Speaker uncertain[wording unclear; heard “Likely to do”] — if you get robbed by police —

Donald J. PutinOh, absolutely. For sure. There’s a grand discussion. We had a friend from a Middle Eastern country who pointed out that the police there will pull you over for something or other and shake you down for, I don’t know, $10, $15, and if you give them that, they go away. Here, of course, we have civil forfeiture. So you’re never quite sure if they might take everything in your possession, including your car, for some offense, real or imagined.

KMOAnd leave you standing by the side of the road, because they haven’t charged you with a crime. They’ve accused your car of being a criminal.

Donald J. PutinThat’s right. And if you want to get it back, all you need to do is hire a lawyer and bring suit, and in the usual course, probably in a matter of a few months, you may get your car back.

KMOYes — maybe almost its entire value, in legal fighting for it.

Donald J. PutinRight. No, absolutely. That’s, again, something exceptional for the United States. I’m not aware of too many other countries that have that particular practice — although that particular practice is not particularly discussed in the book. But a number of large elements of our mass incarceration and legal system are discussed, including, for example, that many people in our carceral system are there for their inability to pay what we’ll politely call junk fees of the legal system — such as your probation costs, or late fees on your probation costs, or late fees on your late fees on your probation costs, or whatever.

Which right now we’re sort of seeing played out in the Florida voter disenfranchisement scheme. You have all these hundreds of thousands or more former felons who have been — I should say they’ve been re-enfranchised by a referendum under Florida law. But the Florida legislature and governor, in their infinite wisdom, are looking to say: well, no, you can’t get your voting rights back unless you pay all sums due to the state of Florida. So in that case, some of them, by failing to pay, may find themselves in jail — as some states do for back child support, for example. One wonders how you’re going to generate an income to pay child support if you’re jailed. You might have a job in jail that pays 15 cents an hour.

KMORight. Well, a dollar a day adds up, I guess, after a few millennia.

Donald J. PutinYeah. But nonetheless — we laugh about these things, but my point in this book is they are exceptional to this country. Other countries do not do business —

KMOWell, it is [wording unclear; heard “Calhoun’s humor”], to be sure.

Donald J. PutinYeah. Well, other countries have police that shake you down. And right now we’re, of course, undergoing what we’ll politely call civil unrest in this country, because our police do other things to the citizenry of this country. So, to be fair, it’s baked in the cake. They’ve always done it.

And I should add, I watched with peculiar horror the event in Buffalo with Martin Gugino. Because, as I said earlier about my friend who visits every year so we can go protest Guantánamo — I know Martin from protesting Guantánamo. Usually I see him in an orange jumpsuit. So it was particularly horrible to see him being pushed to the ground. What can I say? I haven’t communicated with him, but I’m sure he was smiling to know that the president of the United States has promoted him to president of Antifa. But anyway, there’s lots of police overreach all over the world, to be sure. But the American variant is, as I say, exceptional to us.

The chapters, and school

KMOSo I can’t really reference much more from your book, so I’ve scrolled back to the table of contents. Let me just read the titles of a few chapters here: “And So It Begins.” “I Am Born, or Am I?” “School Is In.” “The Sporting Life.” “That’s Entertainment.” “Working Nine to Five, or at All.” “Death and/or Taxes.” “The Non-Empire Empire That Dare Not Speak Its Imperial Name.” “The Unfair Sex.” “Nervous Nellies.” “Guns Blazing.” “Jailhouse Rock.” I could go on.

Donald J. PutinSure. Well, there are 21 chapters. You’ve got up through 11, 12.

KMOYeah, there you go. So I can infer some subjects from there. School?

Donald J. PutinYes, I discuss the American education system.

KMOSo please say a little something about that.

Donald J. PutinSure. I have a quote here that sort of sums it up. I do note the history: the oldest public school in this country is actually a little older than Harvard — Boston Latin, up in, of course, Boston, dates from 1635. I won’t query if they’re going all online and charging $50,000 tuition. I do discuss the various models of education we have, from high-end private school to low-end urban ghetto school, complete with resource officers. And so, I’m quoting:

The irony is that regardless of which school is chosen — or not chosen, in the case of those who select homeschooling — the mission of the American school is remarkably similar. That mission, of course, is to train young people to prepare for a life respecting the social standing of their parents.

Donald J. PutinAnd to continue the quote a couple of pages later:

What American students in all but the elite or elite technocratic cohorts will not get is any kind of objective or particularly useful knowledge about pretty much anything, which is why Americans’ knowledge of the rest of the world, or even their own country, is a well-established joke. We will certainly not discuss the typical American’s poor proficiency with languages other than their own, given that they seem to have enough problems with their mother tongue. Thus, American teachers fight a battle that they are preordained to lose before they start. Teachers attempt to impart knowledge and skills to their students so that they might actually improve their lot in life, when of course the system is designed to ensure that they only maintain their lot in life — which, for most American students, is not to go anywhere, and so should not be so hard.

Donald J. PutinSo that is my thesis on the American education system: it is a status quo machine. And I should add, a very good one.

Speaker uncertainYou know, in high school I took a typing class, which did teach me to touch-type. I took a grammar and usage class, which taught me to diagram sentences. And I attribute my above-average — for Americans, anyway — English-language proficiency largely to that class, and to my interest in extracurricular reading, mostly science fiction novels.

Donald J. PutinWell, there are teachers who don’t understand the mission and keep trying, and God bless them.

KMOBut also, when I was in high school, everybody took driver’s ed. It was part of the curriculum. And it was standard practice that on your 16th birthday, your mother or father would call the school and say, little Johnny’s not coming to school today; he’s turning 16; he’s going to get his driver’s license. And you’d go and you’d take your test, and then you would go to school later in the afternoon just to show off that you had your driver’s license. And now my son is about to turn 20, and he’s been working for a couple of years now towards getting his Maryland driver’s license. And it is a multi-step process, with many hands out to collect fees along the way. And he still doesn’t have a driver’s license.

Donald J. PutinMy 20-year-old does not have a driver’s license either — although arguably in New York City it’s less of an issue. Although she goes to college in a place where a driver’s license would be much more useful. But again, the other thing is, of course, trying to teach her to drive in New York City — it would be appropriate for me to take a shot of something, although that would be entirely inappropriate, as it might be necessary for me to take over and drive. But yeah, driving is unique to New York. That is something I will say: if you can make it here, you can make it anywhere, as far as driving. This is a very difficult place to drive.

Speaker uncertain[wording unclear; heard “But there are future of my life”] in New York City, and I don’t think I’ve done it more than twice since I moved out of New York almost five years ago. It is an amazing challenge, and I’m always amazed at the spots people can get into.

Donald J. PutinAnd then, of course, I realize the modern vehicle has these backup cameras and these guides and all, and my car, which is the same vintage as my daughter, doesn’t, so I have to do this manually — which is not so much fun. But there you go.

No, I’m not suggesting that our education system does not teach us anything useful. Far from it. I’m merely saying that at the end of the day — it was once, in a different era, a social mobility machine, and it is now a status quo machine. If you like the status quo, that’s great. Otherwise, that’s too bad. And so the irony of the failing teacher, or the bad teacher, is sort of: well, what do you mean? They can’t possibly succeed.

And so we saw last year these sort of spontaneous teacher revolts — West Virginia and Oklahoma come to mind. You have a remarkable, heavily female, highly educated, professional, motivated workforce that is treated, honestly, the way many health care facilities are treating doctors and nurses in this pandemic: you’re just an input in our machine. The fact that you’ve spent many years becoming professionally proficient, and you’re really good at your jobs — well, we don’t care. We don’t care that you’re good at your job. And so it led to revolts by the teachers in various states, and they got, hopefully, some significant improvements, at least to their standards of living. But anyway, yes, this is again exceptionally American: that we would so value something like education in that way.

The sporting life

KMOLet’s move on to the sporting life.

Donald J. PutinAbsolutely.

KMOI grew up in Kansas City, Missouri, and the Kansas City Chiefs won the most recent Super Bowl, so I did watch that whole game. I watched all four quarters of it from beginning to end. I watched the halftime show with Jennifer Lopez and Shakira. But I am not a regular watcher of team sports. I can get into it, though. As I was watching the game, I didn’t have to force myself to watch it. Once into it, I was into it. But I don’t crave it. And some people absolutely crave it. Some people crave heroin; some people crave the experience of watching a sporting event. How does that play into our national character? How does that make us exceptional? I mean, Europeans love their soccer, as we call it. They love their football.

Donald J. PutinNo, so, yeah. So the sporting life is actually my entrée into: why do we Americans obsess over sport? Obviously, pro football is our go-to sport. And honestly, in some sense, I think we all caught a break that this pandemic hit during football’s off-season. It’s like: well, baseball deferred — well, yawn. But football is as much the national religion as it is the national sport.

My angle on this is: the reason we obsess over sports in the United States is because this is actually the only aspect of our lives that’s actually fair. It’s adjudicated on the field quite promptly, and if the adjudication is questionable, you get an immediate appeal in the form of a replay. And if that’s not satisfactory, it will be discussed endlessly on the Monday-morning talk shows for the following week, and perhaps then the commissioner and the politicians will weigh in on it. My point being that the average American faces arbitrariness in virtually every other aspect of their life, and so we demand that our sport be pure and fair. We get that there are bad calls, and sometimes the bad calls will cost us the game, but nonetheless we want integrity.

Hence: should Pete Rose or Bobby Bonds¹ or Alex Rodriguez, or the baseball figure of your choice, be admitted to the Hall of Fame? Why is this taken so seriously? I don’t care. I consider myself a fan. Pete Rose had more hits than anybody else. You’re not going to take that away from him. You’re not putting an asterisk on that record. You don’t want him in the Hall of Fame because you don’t like him? Okay. As a fan of teams that he opposed, I’m like: well, I recognize we considered him a dirty player, but so what?

But anyway, the point being the singular obsession with the fairness of our sport. And, I add, to some extent there’s another area of our lives where we also demand that, and that, of course, is our game shows. Hence the quiz show scandals of the 1950s were such scandals because we expect integrity from our entertainment programs.

That’s entertainment

KMOWell, I think that’s a nice segue into the next chapter, “That’s Entertainment.” And this will be our last exchange here in the big room of the free C-Realm Podcast. So in this last exchange, feel free to mention Donald Trump.

Donald J. PutinOkay. “That’s Entertainment.” Yeah. I basically do a historical survey, starting with our film. I discuss the unique origin of the TV commercial, which started with our old friend Edward Bernays, father of public relations — aka propaganda, aka Madison Avenue, whatever you want to call it. But basically a uniquely American arrangement: that commercials pay for everything. And so now we come to the point where you watch, like, Geico commercials, and with very few exceptions, the current insurance commercials are more entertaining than just about any programming that you’re not paying a fee to watch.

KMOThat’s correct.

Donald J. PutinRight. If you want to go on Netflix — or HBO at least only has ads for other HBO shows. At least you’re not subjected to ED products and reverse mortgages. But yeah, the model of being entirely dependent on paid commercials has led to basically low-quality, chopped-up programming. In the typical hour, you might see 42 or 43 minutes of programming, constantly interrupted by 16 or 17 minutes of commercials. Most other countries don’t do that.

It’s not in this chapter, but I should add: I consider the period around the year 2000, when Survivor came on and we became infested with reality TV, to be whatever the opposite of the golden age of television is — so perhaps the golden-shower age of television, I don’t know. Obviously, this is the genre that gave us Donald Trump: a local real estate huckster and failed casino operator who suddenly rebranded as a master businessman in need of an apprentice. And so that’s what comes out of it. And of course people ate it up — at least to the point where, for no other reason than that he was on TV every week, suddenly this man who can’t seem to pronounce “Constitution” is raised to the United States presidency, when obviously so many others who tried so much harder didn’t get there.

So I’ll read the final paragraph of my entertainment chapter, which may or may not offend some of the C-Realm audience:

Another staple of American entertainment is the video game. This is another of the most successful genres of entertainment. It gives people who have no job prospects whatsoever — whether because of a pointlessly expensive and time-consuming but still useless education, or simply because they have had their self-esteem and possibly their physical health destroyed by the American system — something to do with their waking hours, especially when their favorite television shows are not on. While there are an almost infinite variety of such games, popular entries include Doom, Grand Theft Auto, Mortal Kombat, or an otherwise infinite number of opportunities to engage in virtual violence. Of course, once one is tired of television or video games, the internet has also provided wonderful opportunities for entertainment. The two most profitable services offered on the internet, of course, remain pornography and gambling. Ever thus.

KMOYeah. I think you probably mark yourself as an oldster with your choice of examples of video games to cite.

Donald J. PutinYou know, I’m trapped. I’m trapped in this 57-year-old psyche. There’s nothing I can do about it.

KMOMy 15-year-old — he’s in the bedroom right now playing Counter-Strike.

Donald J. PutinOkay. So that sounds much better.

KMOLast time he was here, he was obsessed with Fortnite.

Donald J. PutinOkay. Yeah, no, I am so far out of it. We used to have a GameStop in the neighborhood, and I forget whether they moved it or it’s just gone. The RadioShack went out at the same time. I think GameStop may have just moved on me. But I confess to being trapped in the ’80s and ’90s video games myself. But there you go. Anyway, as a metaphor for American exceptionalism.

Before the paywall: Biden and Trump

KMOWell, before we move behind the paywall, let’s talk a little bit more about Donald Trump. Back when there was a very, very large field of potential Democratic candidates, there was only one guy who was gung-ho for mass incarceration and the drug war, and he’s the one guy who’s left. And he’s also the one guy out of all of them who can’t really put together a coherent sentence in real time — who can’t seem to withstand any pushback at all, from anybody, on any topic, without getting both indignant and incoherent. And yet he’s the blue tribe’s guy now. And for me, opposition to the drug war is my singular, lifelong political compass point, and he was the one guy on offer who’s all for it. Hillary Clinton apologized for her support of the ’94 crime bill, and Joe Biden is like: nope, that was the right thing. People in prison — that’s a good thing. It’s like you couldn’t find a more right-wing candidate. He’s way to the right of Donald Trump on so many issues. It just boggles me.

Donald J. PutinWell, I think Donald Trump and left-right is sort of an oddity. I don’t know that it is. But part of the reason why Donald Trump won is that it was very easy for him to get to the left of Hillary Clinton on a variety of issues. And he seems to be far less enthusiastic for the imperial project than any of his recent predecessors, and than almost any of the people who were vying for the Democratic nomination.

KMORight, with the possible exception of Sanders.

Donald J. PutinWell, Sanders, Gabbard, Yang — there were a few holdouts there.

KMORight, right. Although Gabbard is most famous for her support of Bernie, so that would be consistent.

Donald J. PutinSure. I mean, that’s where we find ourselves in 2020. And I admire the backroom chicanery that moved the sixth-place guy into the nomination in about 72 hours. I admire it from a craft perspective, obviously — having to live in the country.

I think it’s fair to say that if you liked the Obama administration, you’ll probably be okay with the Biden administration. For one thing, as we learned in some sense from the eight-year gap between Clinton and Obama, to some extent some of the personnel are going to be recycled. There’s the cadre of professional Democrats that these guys and gals draw from for their team. So if you liked Team Obama, you’ll probably be okay with Biden. If you’re looking for a major [wording unclear; heard “retroshmole”] of American policy, you’re probably not going to get it. It’s not clear that you would have gotten it anyway, given our constitutional structure. The president only has so much power to steer the aircraft carrier of state off of the course it’s already on — although Donald Trump has made it clear that if you want to go full steam ahead at the rocks, apparently, as long as the Senate is your own party, they’re probably not going to stop you.

But yeah, it is interesting. You noticed one feature of the Obama administration was sort of one-upping Bush’s take on the war on terror by introducing the drone war. So we not only blow away someone like Anwar al-Awlaki over in Yemen, because he pissed us off, but we blow away his 16-year-old son. So real overreach is bipartisan, to be sure. I was certainly, in my blog persona, very critical of Obama at the time. But this is how it goes. As I discuss in the book, the Republicans are just the more right-wing of the two right-wing parties in our political monopoly. And you have to hand it to them for creating the culture war, so that at no point are any politicians actually discussing, in any meaningful way, a real distribution of wealth and power. We’re discussing culture wars.

KMONot that the Democrats are eager to discuss those topics.

Donald J. PutinWell, I mean, they were certainly discussed in the Democratic debates, for example. And obviously only an insane person believes that citizens are entitled to publicly paid health care — even though, I think, of the other 33 or 34 OECD nations, 33 or 34 less one, the one we happen to be in, provide that. And they provide it, I should add, at less than half the cost of what we are providing, now with a gap of, I don’t know, 15 or 20% of the people in this country having no health care at all. I haven’t looked at the stats since — well, whatever the Trump administration did to Obamacare.

And of course, the current pandemic: since your health insurance is overwhelmingly tied to your job, I couldn’t tell you at this moment how many Americans have to face a potentially devastating pandemic without an income or health insurance. We all saw the heroic guy in Seattle coming out of the hospital to be handed his 140-page, $1.2 million bill, or whatever it was — which is the essence of what does not happen in any other country. Medical bankruptcy, of which we have hundreds of thousands a year, is unheard of in the rest of the world. But that’s where we are.

Will Joe Biden be the great champion to end that? Well, there’s nothing in his 40-plus-year public life to indicate that he would. Certainly, he was a big proponent of bankruptcy reform in the past that made it harder for ordinary consumers to get rid of their debts in bankruptcy — because, of course, of the big banks in Delaware.

At this point, though, I’ll go back to what you noted about how he seems to be not aging particularly well. I don’t know. I assume he’s healthy. I assume he’s not senile. I’ll make the same assumption of Donald Trump, who’s more or less pretty close to the same age. I think we’re just seeing Joe being Joe. This is a guy who’s notorious as a gaffe guy. It’s what he does. You take it or you don’t.

My most optimistic sense says personnel is destiny. He’ll probably reassemble the Obama team. And the Obama team, by and large, were pretty competent administrators of the empire, and of making sure we have a system where 1% of the population has 35 or 40% of the wealth, and all that. And they were competent at it. And Barack was a smart, very articulate guy, and that makes us look good in the rest of the world — makes them less likely to slam doors on us when a little pandemic strikes. But there you go.

But, as I say, personnel is destiny. And with Donald Trump, you have vast, vast numbers of offices that are entirely unfilled, and are operated either by acting people loyal to Donald Trump or by career people who’ve somehow been thrust into that. Who knows? So again, we could certainly suggest that the pandemic is a classic case of something handled badly, and perhaps if we had a government that handled it better, we wouldn’t have quite the casualty count, quite the economic catastrophe. But there you go. So, point taken. Point taken. As I say, my optimism and enthusiasm for Joe Biden is duly tempered.

Program identification: “You’re listening to the C-Realm Podcast with your host, KMO.”

Closing: patriotism

KMOThat was Donald J. Putin, and his book is available on Amazon, either as a Kindle or as a paperback. And if I can bring myself to carve out the time, it will soon be available as an audiobook, with yours truly doing the narration. I’ll keep you posted on that.

Now, as is my practice, I never use these closing remarks to contradict, or to score the final point, when I’ve had a contentious conversation with somebody. But keeping with the topic of the United States and how you should feel about it — whether you are a citizen, a resident or a far-flung subject of the empire — I want to share a pair of tweets. These are from Bo Winegard [spelling unverified; heard “Beau Weingard”]. He’s somebody I follow on Twitter. And the first tweet reads:

Here’s a hypothesis: Educated elites often turn against their own country because disgust with it signals a kind of sophistication and cosmopolitanism that distinguishes them from ordinary rubes who think flags and patriotism and country are pretty cool.

KMOAnd he follows this up with a caveat. He writes:

This doesn’t mean there aren’t legitimate concerns about patriotism, or that this is always bad. I generally don’t like it, but that’s a separate point.

KMOAnd I took a screenshot of that and posted it to the C-Realm Podcast discussion group on MeWe.com, and Marc C., whose voice is familiar to C-Realm Vault subscribers, wrote:

Totally allergic to patriotism and nationalism of any sort. Just seems ludicrous to me, and almost always seems to end up being racist as well. There’s some truth to the first comment, though —

KMOThat is, the first comment, from Bo Winegard, about how cosmopolitan folk use their disdain for patriotism as a social signaling device.

There’s some truth to the first comment, though. I mean, it’s harder for a really cool cosmo guy to get excited about patriotism, because at its core, patriotism is a sort of hollow thing. No there there. Might be an exception for some small nationalities, places where patriotism is essentially the equivalent of loving your immediate community or your ethnic heritage, but even there it’s a squishy thing. Patriotism is also naturally about limits: I love my country, which is not your country, etc. Cosmopolitanism is about fusion and the bringing together, or at least living with differences, and beyond borders. It can become decadent, but it isn’t parochial or reductionist.

KMOSo when I think about patriotism, and people really identifying with where they live — and most particularly with their flag — I think of Puerto Rico. Man, if you go to Puerto Rico, you’re going to see that Puerto Rican flag everywhere. I mean everywhere. They really love it. And if you don’t know what it looks like, it is clearly a variation on the American flag, with stars and stripes and red, white and blue, but in a simplified shape, with a triangle on it instead of a square blue field. And the Puerto Ricans just love that flag. I’ve never been in any U.S. state where residents of that state revered the state flag the way Puerto Ricans revere the Puerto Rican flag.

What does that say about the Puerto Rican mentality? I don’t know. Puerto Rico is a territory of the United States. It was acquired as part of the settlement at the end of the Spanish-American War. And people who live in Puerto Rico are American citizens. They can move anywhere in the United States that they want to, and if they move to Florida or New Jersey or Texas, then they get to vote in national elections there — though they don’t get to vote in national elections when their place of residence is the island of Puerto Rico. But whereas second- and third-generation immigrants from Mexico and other Central American countries pretty much just identify as Americans after that first generation, Puerto Ricans are really, really attached to their identity as Puerto Ricans, even if they’ve never been there. And I can understand that. I’ve never been to Ireland, but I definitely consider myself to be an Irish American.

But considering whether it is intellectually respectable to have any level of patriotism whatsoever, I’m reminded of a quote by Bertrand Russell. And rather than look it up and give you the exact quote, I’ll just paraphrase. I think it’s something to the tune of: patriotism is the willingness to die and kill for trivial reasons. Do you agree? Disagree? Send me an email, comment on this episode at c-realm.com, or come on over to MeWe.com and join the C-Realm Podcast discussion group there. It is a small group of people who participate. It is a low-volume community. It won’t suck up all your time, but what you find there will be pretty high-quality stuff. So come on over.

Sign-off

KMOThere will be no rant at the end of this podcast. If you want to hear me ranting, check out my YouTube channel. And I used to say that the best way to find my YouTube channel is just to go to YouTube and do a search for “human suck.” That would bring me up pretty easily. That’s not as true as it used to be, and I’m kind of glad for that. That’s not anything I want to be known for. Really, the best way to find my YouTube channel is from my Patreon page, patreon.com/kmo. And I put up a lot of publicly available posts there. You don’t have to support me on Patreon in order to access those posts — but of course, I wouldn’t turn down the support.

All right. The conversation with Donald J. Putin continues for another solid hour in the next episode of the C-Realm Vault Podcast. Thank you to the C-Realm Vault Podcast subscribers. They make my putting out of the free podcasts a viable activity for me. All right, I’m out. I will talk to you again soon. Stay well.

Editorial notes

1. As spoken. The Hall of Fame controversy concerns Barry Bonds; Bobby Bonds was his father. ↩