By John Mattingly The word trump came into common usage in the early 1500s as a derivative of triumph and trompe, Germanic and Old French respectively. Use of the word trump peaked in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, slumping in the mid-to-late 20th century, and finally enjoying a usage boost starting in the …
By Jan MacKell Collins No, no, not that Trump. His Donaldness has not made a visit to our fair state since before his election, back when he was just a paltry billionaire seeking our votes. He might come to Colorado again, but something really catastrophic needs to occur for that to happen – like a …
By Daniel Smith
After months of politics and campaigning, the decisions finally fall to the voters in the Fifth Congressional District in the Primary Election.
June 26 is the date the electorate gets its say after what arguably has been a unique election cycle this time around. And, for a first time, unaffiliated voters can participate in either political party’s choices.
By Mike Rosso
I don’t watch network or cable television. Because of this, I don’t have access to the 24/7 news cycle, but am aware that the sheer volume of information flowing from TV, newspapers, magazines and the internet may be rendering some folks numb to the rapid changes occurring all around us.
By George Sibley
I’ll say upfront that this is not just another anti-Trump screed. Like him or not – and I don’t – the real challenge today, I think, is to figure out how we are going to get back to addressing the very real problems facing the whole planet, toward which The Donald is mostly a lump of obfuscation or outright denial. And we are surely not going to get anywhere at all if we continue to let him dominate our attention, pimping us daily into paroxysms of righteous wrath or gleeful rubber-stamping. The Donald knows the magician’s art of distracting with the left hand to cover what the right hand is doing.
By Martha Quillen
Trump’s mean-spirited but wildly popular insults have come as a bit of a shock to America and the world. But it’s hard to imagine a really nice guy becoming president. The idea of a peaceful, benevolent leader seems antithetical to American enterprise. Smiling George W. gleefully pitched us into war, and coolly polite Obama launched deadly drones. Even devout Christians question the possibility of peace and forgiveness. It didn’t work in Afghanistan or Iraq, so forget it.
I know this is the music issue, but there are a lot of other things kicking around in my mind these days. So my musical focus for this column is going to be short and sweet. Last week, Netflix failed us one night, so my partner Maryo and I watched Casablanca for about the fifth or tenth time. One of the great moments of that movie is when the Nazis are singing their Horst Wessel song in Rick’s Café Américain, and the resistance hero trying to escape to America gets the band to play the French national anthem; the crowd of Free French and other hangers-on drown out the bad guys. Where’s Victor Laszlo when we need him?
That’s what music ought to do for people, it seems to me – unite them when they need uniting. I find myself dredging for inspirational music these days, or inspirational anything; but it may be that January, especially this January, is no time to expect inspiration, time to just hunker down and wait for the planet to again remember to tilt us toward the sun. A good time too to think about old movies, maybe not so old as Casablanca (1943), but old enough so it’s a little surprising to find them still current, or current again, today.
I’m not thinking about The Manchurian Candidate, although that twice-made movie (1962 and 2004) was back in the public eye in December because our new president espouses admiration for a Russian dictator whose minions allegedly interfered electronically in the presidential election. This was seen by some as a parallel to the movie story of an American hero who was brainwashed by the Chinese Communists into serving as an agent for them. That seems to me to be too far a stretch – to think that Donald Trump could be made to cleave to any ideology more complex than “Look out for Number One.”
Things may be settling out a bit by the time you read this. All the cheers and jeers over the election, the anger in “Not My President” and “Build The Wall” rallies here and there, the stock market rollercoaster, the warnings and pleas from leaders around the world, and so on. All of that now settles into a hiatus like the runup to some kind of cross between chess and poker, as Trump begins lining up his pieces for the transition and his opponents start lining up the countering pieces. We’ll see who is bluffing as we move into the first hundred days of the future.
Was Trump’s victory truly a surprise? I will say that I didn’t really believe it would happen, but I also had a creeping feeling about the election from the moment that our English cousins voted to leave the European Union – no more illusions there about “Great Britain,” I guess. It felt like a preview for the morning-after headline in the New York Times: “Donald Trump is Elected President in Stunning Repudiation of the Establishment.” I guess when confronted with really hard realities, “stunning repudiations” are the equivalent of the “denial” stage in the grieving process.
Last month I wrote here about the nature – no, the culture – of democracy in a complex, technologically advanced mass society. Such societies are run, of necessity, by elites who know how to build, operate, manage and maintain the vast systems that provide the food, water, power, fuels and everything else we need to support “civilization as we know it.” It’s a system that works in part because no single elite can do it all; the private and public management teams, the scientists, the technicians, the creatives and innovators, the financiers, the lawmakers and lawyers, the media disseminators – all depend on other elites themselves, both in their work and in their daily lives.
By Mike Rosso
Is the freedom of the press in the United States under attack?
Judging from the past year, the evidence would suggest so. First, you’ve got the Republican nominee for president insisting libel laws be changed to make it easier to sue the media. His reasons for this are obvious; the media’s reporting of his own words and deeds has led to a dramatic drop in his poll numbers. Naturally he’s going to attack the messenger. The angry minions at his rallies chant “CNN sucks,” and make vulgar gestures at the press corps as they are led in, with the blessings of their thin-skinned candidate. There is some irony in this. CNN and other outlets have provided wall to wall coverage of Donald Trump since he announced his candidacy gliding down an escalator with his fashion-model-bride. He’s received millions of dollars worth of free coverage other candidates could only dream of, but when that coverage turned negative, such as after the release of the infamous “Access Hollywood” bus tapes, he immediately began threatening the media with lawsuits.
Donald Trump claims he can “make America great again,” but when did it stop being great? The United States is the richest, mightiest nation on earth. It has the highest GDP and most powerful military. Yet the 2016 presidential races are exposing a dark, depressing aspect of American supremacy.
By Martha Quillen
It’s hard to know whether the most serious problem facing our world today is rising temperatures or rising tempers, but perhaps they’re related. Maybe tempers are rising because modern life confronts people with so much that seems out of their control, such as climate change, war, terrorism, escalating costs and changing technology.
By Mike Rosso
I’m a full-time news junkie and part-time political junkie. You’d think this election season has been manna for a person like myself.
Instead, I’m repulsed by the notion that I am even remotely associated with the formerly respected fourth estate. Not satisfied with their roles as reporters, the major media has abrogated that role to become advocates for whatever shiny object brings the most revenue. Whether it’s a reality TV star who was born with a silver spoon up his “whatever,” or a group of charlatans running for the highest office in the nation who wouldn’t know the truth if it was smacked across their faces like a dead fish, the mainstream media – especially television – is doing a tremendous disservice to its viewers.
