Reflections on Kamala

1. That was the best political speech I’ve heard since…anyone. Barack, maybe. But there was really no one else. I was for her to begin with, after her take-down of Biden; then dropped her when she dropped out. Since then I’ve paid no attention to all those news clips about how she didn’t know what she was doing. They’ve been sneering at her for her entire career; we can only guess why. Probably they will keep doing it on CNN and in WaPo and The Wall Street Journal.

They owe us an explanation, that will probably not be forthcoming as to why they keep putting her down. But the main thing is this: Their worthlessness as news sources remains as long as they keep comparing her to Trump, and his views on this or that. He’s a career criminal, a rapist, a rip-off artist, an exploiter, a treasonous boot-licker of autocrats; he has no more business being a candidate for President than…anybody else alive. She has made that 100% clear. Thank god.

2. Who Are We?

“Time and the bell have buried the day
The black cloud carries the sun away.
Will the sunflower turn to us; will the clematis
Stray down, bend to us, will the clematis
Clutch and cling
Chill
Fingers of yew be curled
Down to us? After the kingfisher’s wing
Has answered light to light, and is silent, the light is still
At the still point of the turning world.

”T.S. Eliot, Burnt Norton

Is that where we are: at the still point of the turning world. An inflection point, everyone is calling it. But no one has said it out loud, so I will: what was truly astonishing, what we had no need of Kerry Washington and Eva Longoria to call it to our attention, was what we saw on our TV screen, what the TV saw: a sea, a veritable sea, of thrilled and thrilling black and brown and simply non-white faces: a mostly female world like thousands never seen in one place before, full of screaming and shouting and cheering and crying joy. A joy so contagious, too bad we had only a television set to scream at.

And what were they seeing, if they are watching, the killers of the dream, the veterans of January 6; the wielders of the weaponized American flags? What were they seeing? In what nation, may Heaven helps us, are they living?

2. The Prosecutor: “For the People”

What is most striking about the campaign is how Harris and her handlers have utterly turned the impact around. The simple fact is that there has never been a prosecuting attorney as President or even Vice-President.

This is a factoid I’ve always liked to throw around–especially as it coincides with my own ancestral prejudices about prosecutors –boo!–and defense attorneys–yay! Thomas Dewey, who took on the mob in New York, was the closest: the Chicago Tribune even had him defeating Harry Truman on Election Night 1948–until the late returns from California started pouring in: So: why? Or why not?

The intuitive explanation is pretty obvious: ordinary people–non-mobsters as we might call ourselves–do not trust people whose main business, their choice of profession, is putting other people in jail. They may boast about how they’re preserving freedom, but if you measure “freedom” by the odds of staying out of jail, of not being a victim of “big government,” of “the state,” or whatever you want to call it, you’re much more likely to be the hero of a Hollywood movie by keeping some innocent person out of jail, or off of the electric chair, than putting one in there.

Absence of Malice, Gideon’s Trumpet, Dead Man Walking–we could go on and on. Everywhere you look, a D.A. is judged by the percentage of accused felons that he, or she, has succeeded in locking up. All those successful counselors we see on MSNBC, explaining to us the iniquities of Donald Trump and the rightness of his convictions–are or have been prosecutors. Every one. If there’s a defense attorney to be seen among them, it’s likely to be some Trumpian shyster trying to cheat Fanni Willis out of her rightful triumphs. As indeed they would be. So what’s going on with Kamala Harris: my favorite (ex-) D.A.? And probably yours.

If you’re a narratologist (I happen to know one quite well), the answer is simple and straightforward. If you were running a department store, you’d say that the store has turned a loss leader into runaway best seller. They, we, Kamala herself above all, have changed a Minus sign into a runaway Plus. Yes, she’s put away the usual gangs–like Tom Dewey–and doesn’t shy away from that: but then there are human sex trafficers, abusers of women, price-gouging corporations, exploitative banks, colleges issuing fake diplomas (sound familiar?): “I’ve met your type, Mr. Trump.”

3. But perhaps above all, the sex abuser and abortion denier Bret Kavanagh: “Can you think of any laws that give government the power to make decisions about the male body?” No one has ever looked so unable to answer a simple question. “I’m not thinking of any right now, Senator.” That’s the Senator as Prosecutor: for the people. Never, in my memory, has any political actor so totally turned a question mark so completely around.

4. Finally, to keep myself from going on in this vein forever: in the documentary “When They See Us,” ex-DA Linda Fairstein turns away from the camera with the bitter glare of a self-righteous, thwarted …prosecutor, who has lost her chance to put five black boys in the electric chair. We have waited years for the moment, the electric moment, in Thursday night’s Democratic Convention: when one of those boys, now men, Yusuf Salaam, a New York City Councilman, walks onto the stage, accompanied by three of his long-ago companions on that fateful night, to make a brief statement, and my eyes teared up, and surely not the only ones…and why was this happening? Because every single person who’s ever heard of the Central Park Five knows that it was Donald Trump, the most horrendous scumbag who ever ran for any office anywhere, who took out a full-page ad in The New York Post, calling for their execution.

This is the murderous monster the Republican Party, that collection of cowards, traitors and deserters, has nominated to be President? A victory for them would leave the world as if Eisenhower had surrendered to Hitler at Compiègne in 1945.

So it’s not a contest between contenders, as the media keep pretending; it’s a sick joke on the rest of us. I wish–we all wish–we knew for certain what rectification might occur on November 5th. And we should all remember, among so many other revelations, that this is the woman, the Prosecutor, who brought Yusuf Salaam to his long deserved moment under the lights. Kamala.