The historic second impeachment of Donald Trump got under way this week. I have to say that it was more engaging than the first impeachment in some respects. The House impeachment managers seem a bit sharper to me, though they are working what seems like an open and shut case. At some level this is all performative, as it seems unlikely that a sufficient number of Senators whose constituencies are made up of rabid Trump supporters will vote to convict the man. Still, anything that reminds people of the shit show that led up to this last election and the rabid, racist attack that followed it can’t be bad. Trump himself said something like “never forget this day” to his supporters. I embrace that entirely: we should never let Republicans forget January 6, 2021 for as long as they live. That should be one of our political obsessions moving forward.
If the jury (i.e. the United States Senate) in this proceeding were inclined towards acting in good faith rather than in their own narrow political self-interest, it might be relevant to emphasize the fact that, despite the similarities, an impeachment is not the same as a criminal trial. The standard of guilt is quite different, as are the stakes. I realize that barring someone from high office isn’t a small thing, but it’s certainly not what most people would consider a severe punishment. It’s not like a conviction in the Senate would send Trump’s ass to prison; no, it would simply keep him from holding office again. It’s not taking away your rights, because no one has a right to the presidency – it’s an office that must be earned. In that way, impeachment is kind of like a reverse job interview. I think people have a tendency to forget that, sometimes kind of conveniently.
I don’t know if you’ve ever perused one, but on the web there are a number of rankings of presidents from best to worst that get updated every year or so, as per historians’ assessment of the various chief executives and their impact, good and bad. I believe all of these polls put James Buchanan at the very bottom, though he is sometimes challenged in this honorific by Andrew Johnson, who most often appears second to last in the rankings. (Of course, these two putrid presidents flank Abraham Lincoln on either side, Lincoln being ranked number one almost universally.) Now that Trump is an ex-president, he will be included in these surveys. If I were a gambling man (which I’m not), I would put my money on him landing on the bad side of Buchanan. Trump likes to call himself “The 45th President of the United States” as a way of avoiding being referred to as a former president and, therefore, admitting failure, defeat, etc. Actually, the nomenclature might fit the next time these historians render their judgment. My guess is that he will, indeed, be named the forty-fifth president in the line up from best to worst.
We shall see what judgment the Senate hands down on Trump, but I think history’s judgment has already landed and it’s not pretty.
luv u,
jp
Of course, it’s not like it was in the old days. Way back then, we would write songs the old-fashioned way: by knocking branches against rocks for a few hours, then scratching the changes out in the dirt floor of our primitive caves. A little later on, the trombone was invented, though that was of little utility since none of us actually plays the trombone. (True story: Every time Matt tries to play trombone, he loses a tooth … which is just another way of saying that he only has a limited number of plays in him.) No, it wasn’t until the discovery of the Lowery Organ that we began to move forward expeditiously into an era of serious songwriting. Then we got silly. Super silly.
There were songs before Big Green, of course, and I’ve been digging through those as well. Matt started recording pretty much as soon as he could tell one end of a guitar from the other. Both he and I were always fascinated by tape recorders and other gear. We had a shrimpy little portable monaural reel-to-reel machine when we were kids, about the size of a steno pad, which we would use to record hastily contrived audio plays, jokes, and other bullshit. Matt recorded his first songs on an old SONY stereo reel-to-reel that kind of half worked. I remember working out a method for overdubbing, using a digital delay – you could arm one of the two channels for recording, run the playback of the other channel through the delay, and it would line up pretty closely. Then came the four-track cassette portastudio.
Well, many of those cassette collections were made up of Christmas songs – not carols, but songs Matt wrote on the theme of Christmas. (He typically recorded these collections himself to retain the element of surprise.) The one Matt put together in 1989 was entitled “PT 109” and the sleeve featured a slightly modified version of the heroic cartoon-like cover of Kennedy’s war memoir by the same name. The song PT 109 was actually a country number ripping on George H.W. Bush, who had just become president and who had a heroic WWII story about how he had rescued a future president of the United States – himself – from a plane crash in the Pacific. The lyric was written in the posthumous voice of one of Bush’s crewmates, lamenting that he hadn’t served under another commander:
This time out we have, let’s see …. six new songs, maybe? I’ve lost count. It’s become this blur of recording parts onto different projects, a piano here, a horn section there, a beery-sounding horse voice on this one, some fucked-up swabbies on that one. That’s the only way I know how to work – just keep chipping away at the mammoth rock until it looks a hell of a lot more like Lincoln. That’s how Mount Rushmore was made. That and driving native people off the land (we don’t include that in our creative process).
Rolled out of bed a little tardy today. Who can blame me? After a gut-full of grub, a man’s thoughts turn to hibernation. Big Green doesn’t ordinarily celebrate major holidays, but we did relent this year and enjoy a modest Thanksgiving feast, prepared by the steady hand of our confidant Anti-Lincoln, who has elected to stay at the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill while he considers his next steps. (I think he’s contemplating some brand of global domination, but no details yet. Can’t rush a genius!)
Christ on a bike. Sloth has reached a new level of intensity here at the hammer mill, and it’s no surprise. We have been cooped up in the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill for the better part of three years (the worse part, too … I remember those awful days…), not a hand’s turn of work. Sure, we produced and released an album,