"The musical was closely associated with Barack Obama’s administration: Lin-Manuel Miranda... took inspiration for musicalizing George Washington’s Farewell Address from a video..."

"... in which will.i.am set Mr. Obama’s 'Yes We Can' speech to a melody. But it didn’t appeal to liberal audiences alone. Lynne and Dick Cheney praised it as much as Hillary Clinton. In the 2016 documentary 'Hamilton’s America,' Paul Ryan and George W. Bush shared their appreciation alongside Elizabeth Warren and Mr. Obama.... It was seen to represent the promise and limitations of the Obama era, a celebration of America as the land of immigrant achievement, expanding and fulfilling the founders’ imperfectly realized plan. ... Ezekiel Kweku called it 'the Hamilton consensus': a vision of 'an America whole but unfinished, waves of progress bringing it closer and closer to its founding ideals' as 'a meritocracy wrung clean of bias, whose creed is both a promise and invitation to anyone talented and hardworking enough to lay claim to it.'... Ten years on, 'Hamilton' feels less like a fantasy than a warning: This is how quickly America’s promise could curdle...."

Writes Daniel Pollack-Pelzner, in "A Decade After It Opened, ‘Hamilton’ Feels Like a Warning" (NYT).

I've never seen "Hamilton," but I've always thought will.i.am's video, "Yes We Can," was fantastic. Perhaps it still calls to mind the feeling of 17 years ago, when it expressed a wan, sad hope. Now, looking back on the Obama administration, there's no hope about what is in the past, but the wan sadness remains. What that has to do with rapping in 18th century costumes and stomping about and pointing at the ceiling, I do not know. I've never seen "Hamilton," but I hear that it used to express hope and now it's supposed to be regarded as warning us about Trump. I'm still not going to watch it. Too pushy. I'm fine with whatever subtle feeling there is in "Yes We Can," as the Obama presidency fades into the distance.

"The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion."

Wrote Albert Camus, in my favorite of the 8 responses I got when I asked Grok "List similar quotes to 'He who saves his Country does not violate any Law.'" (The quote is something Trump put up, without context, on Truth Social.)

Is that a "similar" quote? Eh. "Similar" is a weak word. What's not "similar"? And what does it mean to "save" your country?

Here are the other 7 quotes:

"Biden, always a little taller than you expect, wore a navy suit and a bright-blue tie."

"He passed a study off the Oval, where he keeps a rack of extra shirts, an array of notes sent in by the public, and a portrait of John F. Kennedy in a contemplative pose.... He continued to the Oval Office dining room, a small, elegant space where, in Biden’s eight years as Vice-President, he often visited Barack Obama for lunch. One wall is graced by 'The Peacemakers,' a famous painting of Lincoln and his military commanders, on the cusp of winning the Civil War. Another is dominated by a large television set, installed by Donald Trump."

From "Joe Biden’s Last Campaign/Trailing Trump in polls and facing doubts about his age, the President voices defiant confidence in his prospects for reëlection" by Evan Osnos (The New Yorker).

I paused over "always a little taller than you expect." It had a bit of a large-boulder-the-size-of-a-small-boulder feeling about it. It gets my favorite tag: big and small. I love these conundrums of size. Osnos is using "you" to refer to himself. He's talking about his subjective experience, and he — unlike, probably, you — has been in the vicinity of the President on multiple occasions. But what is this taller and taller effect? It must be that when he's around Biden, he's struck that Biden is a little tall, and, afterwards, Biden shrinks in Osnos's memory, setting him up to be struck once again, at the next encounter, by the slight tallness of Biden.

Biden was showing Osnos — as Biden put it — "where Trump sat and watched the revolution."

"I do not believe Donald Trump should be prevented from being president of the United States by any court. I think it’s bad for the country."

Said Chris Christie, whose campaign for the nomination is based on despising Trump.

Quoted in "Disqualifying Trump may be legally sound but fraught for democracy, scholars say/Experts say there’s a strong basis for the Colorado Supreme Court’s decision to bar Trump from the ballot, but the larger political context makes the question one of the thorniest in recent memory" (WaPo).

I'm not going to touch the bait "Experts say." You don't need to point it out. I see it.

I've already said what I want to say, but because I hear my own opinion in Christie's, I'm going to reprint what I wrote on January 26, 2021, when Democrats were impeaching the former President and defending it on the ground that a conviction would provide a basis for disqualifying him from running again. Of course, the Senate did not convict Trump, and today's disqualification effort would make a lot more sense if it had. 

At the time, I wrote:

[I]t's extremely important to remember that there is a "fundamental principle of our representative democracy . . . 'that the people should choose whom they please to govern them.'" 

I'm quoting the Supreme Court case rejecting term limits for members of Congress, which was quoting a case about Congress's power to exclude someone the people have elected. 

The internal quote — "the people should choose whom they please to govern them" — comes from Alexander Hamilton, arguing in favor of ratifying the Constitution: 

After all, sir, we must submit to this idea, that the true principle of a republic is, that the people should choose whom they please to govern them. Representation is imperfect in proportion as the current of popular favor is checked. This great source of free government, popular election, should be perfectly pure, and the most unbounded liberty allowed.

I think the presumption should always be against a constitutional interpretation that would restrict the power of the people to choose whom they please. 

The Senate would need to strain the other way to disqualify Private Citizen Trump from running for office again, and that betrays a lack of respect for the people, for the "fundamental principle of our representative democracy." 

Enough fretting that the people can't be trusted evaluating Trump as one of our options. Let the members of Congress get on with proving that they deserved the trust we the people put in them.

And, now, let the various candidates for President prove we ought to trust them and not Trump.

The people should choose whom they please to govern them.

"Some people call these ‘folk songs.' Well, all the songs that I’ve heard in my life was folk songs. I’ve never heard horses sing none of them yet!"

Said Big Bill Broonzy, in 1956, as he was performing "This Train (Bound for Glory)" alongside Pete Seeger to an audience of college students.

Quoted in "Black Folk Musicians Are Reclaiming the Genre/In returning to a songbook that is decades — if not centuries — old, a new generation of performers is expanding the definition of what their traditional art form can be" (NYT).

"Folk," meaning people in general, goes back to Old English.

The Oxford English Dictionary traces it back as far as 999: "Þa elkede man fram dæge to dæge, & swencte þæt earme folc þe on ðam scipon lagon." Chaucer used it, in Middle English, c1405, that's surprisingly readable: "Vp on thise steedes, grete and whyte Ther seten folk."

And here's Alexander Hamilton, with American terseness: "There were Folks killed in 1723." That made me think of Ilhan Omar's "Some people did something."

IN THE COMMENTS: James K said:

Incidentally, the Alexander Hamilton who said "There were Folks killed in 1723" is not the Alexander Hamilton who co-wrote the Federalist Papers. It was some other guy with the same name.

And I see at the link that the other Alexander Hamilton was not an American, but a Scot. So that must be Scottish terseness. And I am retrospectively less reminded of Ilhan Omar.

"[S]overeignty is vested in the people, and that sovereignty confers on the people the right to choose freely their representatives to the National Government."

"... 'Robert Livingston . . . endorsed this same fundamental principle: "The people are the best judges who ought to represent them. To dictate and control them, to tell them whom they shall not elect, is to abridge their natural rights."' Similarly, we observed that '[b]efore the New York convention . . . , Hamilton emphasized: "The true principle of a republic is, that the people should choose whom they please to govern them. Representation is imperfect in proportion as the current of popular favor is checked. This great source of free government, popular election, should be perfectly pure, and the most unbounded liberty allowed."' Quoting from the statement made in 1807 by the Chairman of the House Committee on Elections, we noted that 'restrictions upon the people to choose their own representatives must be limited to those "absolutely necessary for the safety of the society."' Thus... we agreed with the sentiment expressed on behalf of Wilkes' admission to Parliament: '"That the right of the electors to be represented by men of their own choice, was so essential for the preservation of all their other rights, that it ought to be considered as one of the most sacred parts of our constitution.'" .... [It is the] 'fundamental principle of our representative democracy . . . "that the people should choose whom they please to govern them."'"

So wrote Justice Stevens in the plurality opinion in U.S. Term Limits, Inc. v. Thornton (93-1456), 514 U.S. 779 (1995)(citations omitted), the case that rejected a state's power to impose term limits on its members of Congress. The opinion draws heavily on Powell v. McCormack, 395 U.S. 486, 547 (1969), a case that rejected congressional power to exclude the person the people had chosen. The elite considered the man corrupt, but the people of Harlem had reelected him. 

I've been thinking about the principle expounded in these 2 cases — "the people should choose whom they please to govern them" — in the context of the present-day effort to exercise governmental power to disqualify Donald Trump as a candidate for President. 

Teens are mocking Lin-Manuel Miranda on TikTok.

Yeah, I know, Trump is making noise about ending TikTok, so maybe the Trump hating Broadway rapper will be saved by a man he loathes, but it's interesting that the new generation — Generation Z — has a new point of view, and, for them Lin-Manuel Miranda is not a brilliant and completely hip visionary. He's a figure of fun.

New York Magazine explains:

And it’s not just one meme but a variety of them: The most prevalent is the lip-biting meme, which involves mocking the endless stream of selfies Miranda has taken wherein he gazes foppishly at the camera while chewing his lip. There’s also a bit of audio floating around of Miranda reading an erotic excerpt from The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao which has become fodder for endless derision — one teen superimposed themself cringing over a series of lip-biting selfies, nearly vomiting when Miranda accentuates the word “clit.” Another popular video is just a clip of Miranda, tousle-haired and lying in bed, telling the viewer “I’m clutching my balls because they’re warm” — no commentary needed. And, of course, there are the endless parodies of him rapping.

The last 3 links in that paragraph all go to TikTok — so click them while they still work. They're all very funny.

The New York Magazine article relies heavily on this Rolling Stone article, "Why Gen Z Turned on Lin-Manuel Miranda/Teens on TikTok have begun mercilessly mocking the Pulitzer Prize-winning Hamilton playwright."

Both articles try to figure out if the Gen Z kids are targeting Miranda because "Hamilton" is insufficiently woke, in that it doesn't deal with slavery and Native Americans and the female characters are all about wanting to have sex with the character Miranda played on stage, Alexander Hamilton. The TikTok stuff is silly, though. Laughing at “I’m clutching my balls because they’re warm” has nothing to do with a desire for more wokeness. That video is, fittingly, about going to sleep and, perhaps, a man's vanity in thinking people want to watch him get into his sleeping position.

I don't know how you read, but...

learning book guy dance from Hamilton pic.twitter.com/UvaBG2u6KM

— COLiN BURGESS (@Colinoscopy) July 5, 2020

"The Me Too movement is real. It matters. It is needed, and it is long overdue... I found [Ford's] testimony to be sincere, painful and compelling.

"I believe that she is a survivor of a sexual assault and that this trauma has upended her life. Nevertheless, the four witnesses she named could not corroborate any of the events," said Senator Susan Collins, explaining her vote for Brett Kavanaugh. "We will be ill-served in the long run if we abandon the presumption of innocence."

Reported in "Collins and Manchin Will Vote for Kavanaugh, Ensuring His Confirmation" (NYT).

Here's a comment over there (with over 1,000 up votes):

Thank you Heidi Heitkamp, and thank you Lisa Murkowski for standing up for women and against sexual predators. And how about you Susan Collins? Do you want to be the only woman in the Senate to put a man creditably accused of sexual assault against multiple women who has clearly demonstrated his intent in the very recent Jane Doe case to eviscerate, if not overturn, Roe v. Wade? It's time to stand with your sisters and vote "No!" to white male power and privilege to avoid responsibility for sexual misconduct by blaming and mocking the women.

ADDED: Here's the Susan Collins speech:



Full text (NYT):

Informed by Alexander Hamilton’s Federalist 76, I have interpreted [the Senate's advise-and-consent role] to mean that the President has broad discretion to consider a nominee’s philosophy, whereas my duty as a Senator is to focus on the nominee’s qualifications as long as that nominee’s philosophy is within the mainstream of judicial thought....

Mike Pence goes to see the musical "Hamilton" and the crowd boos him as he walks to his seat.

Here's video of that:



And when the show was over and the actors lined up on stage for the ovation, one cast member steps forward to lecture Pence. Pence is already leaving, but the actor, imploring him to stay, pulls a written speech out of his pants and reads about "the diverse America who are alarmed and anxious that your new administration will not protect us, our planet, our children, our parents."

Tonight, VP-Elect Mike Pence attended #HamiltonBway. After the show, @BrandonVDixon delivered the following statement on behalf of the show. pic.twitter.com/Jsg9Q1pMZs

— Hamilton (@HamiltonMusical) November 19, 2016

The audience had just witnessed the reenacted shooting to death of the great American, Alexander Hamilton. The actor delivering the lecture was Brandon Victor Dixon, who plays Aaron Burr, the man who killed Hamilton.



Years ago, in a theater, a President of the United States was shot by a politically overheated actor.

 

I understand hustling Mike Pence out of that place.

Gender equality: Naked statue division.

In August, we saw the naked Trump statue set up in Union Square in NYC, and today we get the naked Hillary statue at the Bowling Green subway entrance in downtown Manhattan.

Video... shows [Nancy, an employee at the nearby National Museum of the American Indian] struggling with the artist who erected the statue, who identified himself as 27-year-old Anthony Scioli, as he tried to prop the structure back up. At one point during the tussle, the woman sits down on the statue to prevent Scioli from picking it back up.

Free speech. It's got to work both ways. Either impromptu sidewalk statues are okay or they are not.

Here's what I said back in August:

"For most of the last year, we have seen endless hand-wringing in the news media about how crude Donald Trump is. But it seems obvious to me that it is Trump’s enemies, far more than Trump, who have gone into the gutter and, to a degree that may be unprecedented, coarsened our political life," writes John Hinderaker at Power Line, on the occasion of that naked Donald Trump statues that stood in 5 American cities yesterday. "When it comes to crude, beyond the pale attacks, Donald Trump is far more often the victim than the aggressor," Hinderaker concludes.

I agree that there is more crudeness in the attacks on Trump than coming from Trump himself. However:

1. Parallelism seems to demand that we compare what Trump himself says to what the another candidate says. If we want to look at what people other than candidates are saying about Trump, we should compare it not just to what Trump says, but to what his supporters say and to what everyone who hates Hillary says — including speech in the form of sculpture and drawings and paintings. There's some pretty crude stuff out there.

2. And shouldn't there be crude attacks on political candidates, in words and in graphic depictions? This is a grand tradition! I celebrate it. I'm thinking of Daumier's Gargantua...



Daumier went to prison for that. And I'm thinking of David Levine's Henry Kissinger.

3. The brutality is already there in politics, so we should have the words and pictures to express it. Here's Frank Zappa saying that on "Crossfire" in 1986:



"[Brutality] is already in politics. I think if you use the so-called strong words, you get your point across faster and you can save a lot of beating around the bush. Why are people afraid of words?" (And note that Donald Trump just yesterday was defending his style of speech as a way to save time: The important thing is to get to the truth and being too careful and polite "takes far too much time.")

And here's the inevitable Dylan quote, which I'm not quoting for the first time and not quoting just because Dylan won that prize. I'm quoting it for its enduring truth and pithy memorability:

But even the president of the United States
Sometimes must have to stand naked

ADDED: Speaking of ugly statues at Bowling Green, here's an excerpt from Ron Chernow's biography of Alexander Hamilton:

At Bowling Green, at the foot of Broadway, they mobbed a gilded equestrian statue of George III, portrayed in Roman garb, that had been erected to celebrate the repeal of the Stamp Act. John Adams had once admired this “beautiful ellipsis of land, railed in with solid iron, in the center of which is a statue of his majesty on horseback, very large, of solid lead, gilded with gold, on a pedestal of marble, very high.” Now, for reasons both symbolic and practical, the crowd pulled George III down from his pedestal, decapitating him in the process. The four thousand pounds of gilded lead was rushed off to Litchfield, Connecticut, where it was melted down to make 42,088 musket bullets. One wit predicted that the king’s soldiers “will probably have melted majesty fired at them.”

It's not Hamilton who's getting ousted. It's Jackson.

This is the progression:

The Broadway musical "Hamilton" seems to have saved the image of Hamilton on the $10 bill.

"Lin-Manuel Miranda, the creator and star of the hit Broadway musical 'Hamilton,' said on Wednesday that he had received assurances from Jacob J. Lew, secretary of the Treasury, that admirers of Alexander Hamilton would not be disappointed by a forthcoming redesign of the $10 bill. Mr. Lew has said that he wanted to add a woman’s image to that bill...."

Art works.

Cartoons I don't have time to draw: $10 bills with Alexander Hamilton depicted in a lesser position alongside some famous woman.

If I understand this correctly, the new woman-celebrating $10 bill will oust Alexander Hamilton from the front-and-center spot of honor but not from the bill entirely. How's this going to work? It's hard to picture, partly because we don't know which woman will get the front-and-center position.

It troubles me that they're bumping a specific man for a woman to be named later. They just need a woman in this spot. It's insulting to women to decide that a woman belongs on the bill before we know the actual woman who has beaten out the man whose accomplishments and importance we already know. Just the idea of a woman is supposed to be more important. It's so patronizing and propagandistic.

But I'm fascinated by the assurances that Hamilton will remain on the bill, just subordinated somehow — lurking in in the background? — smaller perhaps, in a supportive role. It's hard to picture that, because I don't know who the woman will be. It's unlikely to be a woman from Hamilton's own time — Abigail Adams? — so there's no way to envision the 2 characters together in a realistic historical scene. So I'm seeing only a surrealistic things in my head.

Let me describe the cartoons I don't have the patience to draw. Picture the woman — whoever this could turn out to be — and then Alexander Hamilton somehow worked into the scene.

For example, take this...



... and have it going on in the background behind this....



I'm sure you can think of many more ways to combine old man Hamilton with some prominent lady.

Jack Lew explains why the Treasury Department is putting a woman on the $10 bill.

I'll save you the trouble of watching that clip. The reason is that women are "important" and it's "important" for "women and men" to know that women are "important." Now, just picture a smarmy smile on a bureaucrat and you've got it.

Yeah, but why the $10 bill? I thought there was a movement to get a woman on the $20 bill... and part of it was about the nefariousness of Andrew Jackson? Why have we turned our sights on Alexander Hamilton?

No answer to that, just some weird assurance that Hamilton will remain on the $10, sharing the space with the lucky woman, who may or may not be Harriet Tubman. A woman can't get a bill of her own?!

Why pick on Hamilton? He was a black man, wasn't he? From Ron Chernow's biography "Alexander Hamilton":

Hamilton was portrayed [by George Clinton, writing as "Cato"] as the uppity “Tom S** t” (Tom Shit) and introduced as a “mustee”— the offspring of a white person and a quadroon. This was the first time that Hamilton’s opponents tried to denigrate him with charges of mixed racial ancestry. Tom Shit is mocked for his “Creolian” writing. In a soliloquy, Tom, a conceited upstart and British lackey, says, “My dear masters, I am indeed leading a very hard life in your service…. Consider the great sacrifices I have made for you. By birth a subject of his Danish Majesty, I quitted my native soil in the torrid zone and called myself a North American for your sakes.” Tom is accused of having sent his “Phocion” essays, defending persecuted Tories, straight from the king’s printer in England. After castigating Hamilton as a treacherous foreigner, the author refers to Washington as Hamilton’s “immaculate daddy,” a snide reference to Hamilton’s illegitimacy.... (Page 245.)

"I have one very specific reason I have a relationship with Bill Clinton: I admire what he does, and I want to be part of it."

"But I’ve never asked him for a damn thing," said Frank Giustra, who has given the Clinton Foundation over $100 million. He's described — in WaPo's "The Clintons, a luxury jet and their $100 million donor from Canada" — as a "Canadian mining magnate and onetime Hollywood studio owner.

Last week, the Clinton Foundation acknowledged that an affiliated Canadian charity founded in 2007 by Giustra kept its donors secret, despite a 2008 ethics agreement with the Obama administration promising to reveal the New York-based foundation’s donors.

The foundation said the arrangement conformed with Canadian law. But it also opened a way for anonymous donors, including foreign executives with business pending before the Hillary Clinton-led State Department, to direct money to the Clinton Foundation.

For Giustra, the partnership with Bill Clinton provided an introduction to the world of international philanthropy at the highest levels — a feel-good, reputation-enhancing effort that he said he finds more personally satisfying than amassing wealth.

At the same time, Giustra continued to expand his business empire, closing some of the biggest deals of his career in the same countries where he traveled with Clinton.

According to Giustra, you can believe that Bill Clinton didn't get involved in any of those business dealings, because Bill Clinton is utterly bored by that sort of thing: "He doesn’t care about that stuff. His eyes would glaze over." Even if that is to believed, Giustra could still have used the appearance of connection to the ex-President to leverage his business dealings.

As for Giustra's believability, consider that he also says that when Bill Clinton saw that that Giustra was carrying a biography of Julius Caesar, Clinton not only began talking about the book, he began "quoting whole passages of it from memory."

ADDED: By chance, there's a nice, big new essay about Julius Caesar by the great Roger Kimball in The New Criterion. Excerpt:

Alexander Hamilton once told Jefferson that Caesar was “the greatest man who ever lived.” Hamilton might have been tweaking his humorless rival. He knew that his own political opponents often compared him to Caesar, and deep down he probably shared their suspicion, not to say their loathing, of the dictator. But everyone acknowledged Caesar’s military genius. He was a master strategist whose tactics are still studied by generals. In Gaul, through the instrumentality of his legions, he killed or enslaved hundreds of thousands, maybe millions. Yet he brought stability and a semblance of the rule of law to those rude provinces. He greatly enriched himself at the expense of those he conquered. Yet he also greatly reformed provincial governance, sharply limiting the extent of “gifts” a Roman governor could (legally) help himself to.

"Everywhere the same voice, its odd Eastern accent, which in anyone else would have irritated Midwesterners."

"You could follow without missing a single word as you strolled by. You felt joined to these unknown drivers, men and women smoking their cigarettes in silence, not so much considering the president’s words as affirming the rightness of his tone and taking assurance from it."

Wrote Saul Bellow in "In the Days of Mr. Roosevelt," quoted in a Martin Amis essay about Bellow's nonfiction, collected in a new book titled "There Is Simply Too Much to Think About," which I just added to my Kindle. I can give you some more context:

"And if you’re wondering whether a multiracial musical about one of the founding fathers could possibly amount to anything more than a knee-jerk piece of progressive sermonizing..."

"... get ready for the biggest surprise of all, which is that this show is at bottom as optimistic about America as '1776.' American exceptionalism meets hip-hop: That’s 'Hamilton.'"

Says Terry Teachout, declaring "Hamilton" "the most exciting and significant musical of the past decade." Sample lyric: "Another immigrant, comin' up from the bottom/His enemies destroyed his rep, America forgot him."

"Hamilton wrote in Federalist 12 that a tax on whiskey 'should tend to diminish the consumption of it'..."

"... and that 'such an effect would be equally favorable to the agriculture, to the economy, to the morals, and to the health of the society. There is, perhaps, nothing so much a subject of national extravagance as these spirits.'"

From Clay Risen's "How America Learned to Love Whiskey, Attempts to control the fermentation and sale of alcohol are older than the republic itself."

"Control" is harsh. Isn't the right word "nudge"?

"Russell Simmons apologizes for Harriet Tubman 'sex tape.'"

"The clip features an actress portraying Tubman having sex with her white slave master as someone films it so the abolitionist can bribe her boss.... The 55-year-old Simmons, founder of Def Jam Records, writes Thursday that he 'can now understand why so many people are upset.' He said he removed the video after a call from the NAACP."

Video at the link.