Cool T, Brah

This is Tim Miller. Tim Miller has a regular gig now on MSNBC. He’s written for Rolling Stone, and Playboy, and he’s a contributor to The Bulwark and The Ringer. He was just on NPR’s Fresh Air to promote his new book, Why We Did It: A Travelogue from the Republican Road to Hell. It came out, without intentional irony in June, Pride Month, from Harper Collins. It’s already on the NYT bestsellers list. He lives in Oakland now with his husband and their kid. He was raised a Catholic, went to a Jesuit high school and graduated from George Washington University.  Smart guy.

Tim Miller was a Republican political consultant and co-founder of America Rising, an opposition research group targeting Democrats. He worked for the campaigns of John McCain, Jeb Bush, Mitt Romney. He worked for the Republican National Committee. He’s also been a loud Never Trumper who worked a little bit for Trump folk, but he wants us to know he’s really bummed about it now.

Tim Miller is part of a long history of gay white dudes who worked for the Republican Party (read James Kirchick’s Secret City: The History of Gay Washington.) Whitaker Chambers, Roy Cohn, that men’s room toe-tapper, they’ve always been there. Miller is also part of a long tradition of reformed quislings, Mel White, Andrew Sullivan, David Brock, who made their names working for conservative and neo-con causes. Some like Miller admit to promoting a specifically homophobic, misogynistic, racist, and violently anti-progressive agenda and then they saw the error of their ways, or just their mistakes, and wrote a book explaining how sorry they are now, or not. Some, like Mel White even seemed sincere.

One of the unique features of the LGBTQ+ community has always been the idea of Coming Out, and specifically that everyone does this at his, her, or their own pace and in their own way. Everybody has a past, a place we came from, an individual journey. We’re taught not to judge other people for not all getting to the same place at the same time or in the same way. It’s a good thing. (Forgiveness isn’t the same thing. That’s largely an individual choice and more of a religious concept.)

And now here’s Tim Miller. Another smug fuck who still can’t quite bring himself to denounce the conservatism that gave him his career and made him a minor celebrity in some of the creepiest, smarmiest political circles in America. Yeah, he hates Trump. Yeah, he admits to helping create the culture that resulted in Trump. His book might just as easily have been titled “My Bad.” But listening to him on the radio, it was pretty clear he still gets a little wood talking about the bad ol’ days when he was fucking over Democrats and writing copy on the sly for fascist websites. He clearly loved being considered a player, someone who “got it,” which was political consultant speak for effective chicanery and the excuse for ethical indifference. 

The thing that irritates me right now isn’t that Tim Miller is yet another gay man who’s career recklessly and genuinely hurt other gay people. It isn’t, or rather it isn’t just that he has never really come the whole way out of his conservatism (presumably because then he’d just be, I don’t know what, another anonymous Democrat?) What really puts my teeth on edge when I listen to Tim Miller is how representative he is as yet another white dude who mistakes his personal awakening for revelation. 

He’s decided, has our Tim, not to be a completely reprehensible, amoral piece of shit anymore. Good for you, Tim. I mean that. The world’s a better place for it, in a very small but very real way. But when the interviewer asks him, what should we all do now? Poor Tim. Not a clue. All this time to work something up, put something together if just for the book tour, but Tim’s got nothing. He readily admits to having been caught a bit short trying to come up with the uplift for that last chapter. Haven’t given it much thought since either, have we, Tim? Not quite the mystery you’ve made it out to be, Mr. Miller. 

Seems he thought he’d done quite enough, thank you. Look it, he kind of apologized, he talks trash now about the Orange Dumpster Fire instead of, you know, Democrats. The man wrote a book, for God’s sake! What more can he possibly do?! 

And there’s the problem, isn’t it? Tim Miller hasn’t said anything, has he? Did he really tell us anything we did not already know years ago? Do we really learn anything from his book or his interviews with his old friends, or from his new haircut? What we learn is that Tim Miller hasn’t anything much to say. What Tim Miller did for a living is still what Tim Miller does for a living. He hasn’t changed, he’s just changed his aim. And yes, at least now he’s firing at the right target, but are we meant to congratulate him for this? Are we meant to admire that the man who “got it” all those years in Washington seems to finally get that he was wrong? That’s great, but is that it? As Peggy Lee famously sang, “Is That All There Is?”

It seems he was so busy learning to drive, he never bothered to look where he was going. That grinding noise you hear is poor Tim trying to find a new gear and failing. 

Do I think he should be working in a soup kitchen instead of chatting on MSNBC? Wouldn’t do him any harm. Me either. What I think he might have done before he wrote a book and took it on tour was think. Okay, you regret this, and you decided that was wrong, and you talked to other people who hate paper straws. Maybe read a book without checking the index for your name? Maybe consider what else might be bullshit besides Trump? Any other powerful institutions besides the Republican Party that might not be good for gay people? Maybe talk to someone who doesn’t get the nails done once a week, or earn consulting fees, or go on tv, or have the option to stop cutting their hair and keep their job. Maybe explore how other people aren’t trying to reclaim conservatism but fight it? Maybe go to a Pride parade without expecting to be grand marshal that first year.  Maybe ask people who still believe in the future what they’re doing to bring it about. Maybe work on that, and then get back to us.

On the Radio

At the very flattering invitation of Mr. John O'Brien of KUOW, I've recreated my latest Holiday reading for listeners of his excellent broadcast, Speaker's Forum. Here then that version.

Daily Dose

From Not To be Missed: 54 Favorites from a Lifetime of Film, by Kenneth Turan

LES ENFANTS DU PARADIS

"When I'm asked to pick an all-time personal favorite, this is the title I most often cite."

From Children of Paradise, 1945

A Caricature

Summer Reading & The Red Wedding, etc.

So we've been watching HBO's  Game of Thrones and, yes, we watched "the red wedding" episode last Sunday, as did, it seems, more people than watched anything else on cable-television that night.  More curiously still, more people watched that episode than actually subscribe to HBO.  (A fascinating story on NPR explains how this was possible.  Not to worry now, neither I nor the radio link should spoil the show for any who haven't seen it, or seen that episode.)  And we've now watched the finale as well.  For any who haven't read the George R. R. Martin books, or seen the show, and might be wondering what all this blaze in the Twittersphere etc. is about, that penultimate episode was a specially violent one, perhaps the most violent one to date. Moreover, good people, people important to the story so far, died.  Shocking.  As for the resulting television-fan-outrage, the wave of new memes and the rest, what all that means is that frankly, too few people read history.

 I should mention that I have not read Martin's books.  It's almost an exaggeration to say that I "perused" the first volume.  I did finally pick it up though, when after a very long wait, the last sequel finally came out to great fanfare a year or so ago.  (?)  I poked around in that first book for a couple of evenings, but that was all.  I'm not being snide.  I got a taste of the novelist's style.  That was enough.  Nothing wrong with it.  There's nothing, based on my brief experience, to say Martin's work isn't a fine example of the genre.  He's enormously popular.  His readers are devoted.  I know and love a number of them.  But, I wasn't going to read what looks to be only the first brick in a still rising wall, is all.

Now that may seem strange, considering my established devotion to long books, but there we are.  I'm not one for dragons, generally, a fact equally well established.

I prefer my Fantasy on film or television, and in smaller, more digestible doses.

I don't mean to be a tease by mentioning all this popular culture and then actually writing about a very old, and no longer very popular history. There is a point yet to come, I promise, but first a word or two on my summer reading project.

Even as I contemplate further reductions in my library, I have to admit I've had my eye on these beauties for a month or more, down the street at Magus Books.  I've been setting aside my nickels.  They weren't cheap.  (They still have a second, all but identical set, if you're interested.)  I've never seen this book -- and it is one book in six volumes -- but in a distinctly unattractive, academic, paperback edition which did not appeal.  Nevertheless, this book has been on my list now for a very long time, so when I saw these handsome old things on the shelf, and though it took me some time to finally make up my mind and my budget, I did decide to have a go at last, so here we are.

Pictured then is David Hume's History of England: From the Invasion of Julius Caesar to the Abdication of James the Second.  For any that still remember the name of David Hume, or know his writing as an important philosopher, it may come as something of a shock to know that in his own time, and for a good while thereafter, he was known primarily as an historian.  It took him more than fifteen years to write this book, which contains more than a million words.  The book has gone through more than fifty editions, and one way and another, has never been out of print since it was published in it's present form, in six volumes, between 1754 and 1762.

Hume believed that the nature of humanity didn't changed all that much; that history shows us more often at our worst than our best, and that most people, left to themselves, only really concerned themselves in politics and slaughter under the influence of religious and what we would now call ethnic differences. He also believed that the history of England, after a very rocky start, at the time of his writing this book, presented perhaps "the most entire system of liberty that was ever know amongst mankind."  That, you see, was the point of telling the story, really, the struggle to that point.

This would be the common theme for most of the greatest narrative historians of the last two hundred and fifty years or so; the struggle for a stable and relatively free society, unshackled at last from the old, exclusive loyalties to tribe and conquest, and defined by a progressive establishment of the rule of law and mutually beneficial civility.  From Hume, through all his successors in both Britain and the US, from Macaulay to John Richard Green, to Henry Hallam and William Prescott, and yes, Karl Marx, whatever their differences politically, this theme predominated until nearly our own day.  (I make that list from my own reading, admittedly limited by literary reputation and my own taste in such books more than the ultimate value of these books to present historians.  I see no reason to apologize for it.)  There have always been writers who took exception to this progressive reading -- here Gibbon and Carlyle come most to mind, again, mostly from the evidence of my own shelves, but I still think it a fair description of most of the major popular historians down to at least H. G. Wells, if no further.

It's all very easy now to dismiss this kind of history as too narrowly rhetorical to be entirely true, and there has been much hay made in the academic world of "historiography" in more recent days, by denying even the underlying premise of history as any kind of progress at all.  To which I say "stuff."  I am more than willing to concede all the limitations of such great writers as these, both in terms of their access to the historical record and their prejudices.  It takes a certain intestinal fortitude in the common reader of the 21st Century to read Englishmen of the 18th and 19th on such subjects as Islam and "foreigners" in general.  I also happen to think that we are now living in what may well prove to be the first truly Golden Age of history as fact.  There are, I should think, more thoroughly researched and accurate histories published in any given year of our Century to date than might have been possible in any previous period.

Why then read old boys like David Hume?  First because history as literature, at least in the period described from the middle of the 18th through the beginning of the 20th, produced more established masterpieces of narrative, in English, than any time since, and more history of lasting literary value than any time since the last Roman historian went into the ground.  What all these boys have in common with Livy et al is not only a gift for the description of character and event, but a tempered and coolly considered belief in what Pope described as "the proper study of mankind."  That can be quite refreshing after any time spent reading what's come after.  Secondly, because there have been few enough books produced in the whole history of books, at least books running to roughly a million words or more, that are still worth reading at all.  Why not read those big books that happen to be history as well as literature, if one is of a mind to read literature anyway, and big books, at least now and then, of a season?

And so we circle back, no?  It's clear from even just watching the TV adaptation and glancing through one volume of his novel, that Mr. Martin has read a bit of history himself.  My preference is for history without dragons and magic, as I've said.  One of the pleasures of Hume is his not-so-subtle distaste for what he cannot help but call "superstition" pretty much everywhere he meets it, from the Romans on, and not excepting any of the major faiths to touch his country since.  Refreshing and sensible, if still a little -- and deliciously -- shocking in a man writing more than two hundred and fifty years ago.  I suspect Mr. Martin's preference is for exactly those historical sources my friends from the Enlightenment and after could not help but disdain for their reliance on the supernatural; all the saga-singers and the monks who preferred heroes and monsters to men and women. A perfectly respectable preference, if not one I share.  That may be all it comes done to; a preference for magic or man.

As for the shock and horror of my fellow television viewers of the bloody Game of Thrones, I can only suggest they might want to avoid reading some of the stories, say, of the reign of King Canute, or even the details of more than one treacherous Norman noble party, or even the fate of conspirators, real and imagined, against the person of that great queen, the first Elizabeth.  History is a bloody business.

But then again, no.  I would make so bold at to suggest that a chapter of Hume on the Crusades, or of Gibbon on the triumph of Christianity might immunize the more parochial readers of even the best Fantasy fiction, and fans of supernatural television shows, against credulity thereafter.   Might do them all a world of good.  Did me.  I would deny no one who wants them their dragons, or their bottle-blond emancipators of brown people, etc.  I would however suggest that history sans magic, need not be without heroes and heroines, villains and adventure, thrills and chills, elevating sentiments and moral instruction.  Moreover, some of the greatest literature in ours or any language is to be found in books written by men who disdained violence and the arbitrary exercise of power, even as they chronicled the worst of it.  They did not put much faith in Gods, or have much patience for priests, nor give much credence to stories of ghosts or  witches. They disdained superstition.  They believed in a fallible humanity and in the strength of humane institutions.  Doesn't that sound rather more like us than not?

Not that there's anything wrong with reading about or watching such stuff.  History shows, people have been doing it for ages, and where's the harm?

I'll tell you what though, history's more help when it comes to reading a newspaper and trying to make any sort of sense of current events -- I find.  People still do that too, read newspapers, don't they?