Mendocino County Today: Friday 11/29/2024

Cold Morning | Cape Horn Dam | Decommissioning Looms | Election Poetry | Dance Party | Hunter Legacy | Wanted Marijuana | Ed Notes | Bigfoot Thanksgiving | Ida Peterson | One Must Go | Yesterday's Catch | Richard Teichmann | Walmart Prediction | Pizza Horse | Mental Health | Teraoka Art | John Browning | Eschewing Screens | Lead Stories | Ridiculous Idea | Trump Shuffle | Maybe Hundred | Populism v Globalism | Refugee Irony | American Rough-Housers | Class of 2024 | Johnny Carson | Eating Spaghetti

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COLD WEATHER ADVISORY: Cold temperatures as low as 24 expected until 9am this morning for Southern Mendocino Interior, and Southern Lake. The coldest areas will be in the valleys with some ridges seeing temperatures as much as 10 to 20 degrees higher. Protect pipes from freezing and ensure pets and livestock are warm enough. (NWS)

STEPHEN DUNLAP (Fort Bragg): Another cold 34F under clear skies this Friday morning on the coast. If you liked yesterday's weather you'll like the forecast going well into next week. Some surf advisories start tomorrow.

COOL, dry weather will continue into the weekend. Warmer weather possible by early next week. (NWS)

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DECOMMISSIONING LOOMS: POTTER VALLEY FACES URGENT WATER CHALLENGES

by Monica Huettl

The future of water security in Potter Valley took center stage at a November 14 town hall, where experts and community leaders outlined plans to adapt to life without year-round Eel River diversions. With PG&E’s decommissioning of the Potter Valley Project looming, discussions focused on potential groundwater storage, new infrastructure, and conservation measures—all aimed at ensuring local agriculture survives a drier summer reality.…

https://mendofever.com/2024/11/29/decommissioning-looms-potter-valley-faces-urgent-water-challenges/

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CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS: WINTER IN AMERICA, AGAIN

Organizer Katie Sarah Zale writes:

In 2003, 11,000 poets responded to Sam Hamill’s request for a poem about George W. Bush’s planned attack of Iraq. In the resulting anthology titled ‘Poets Against the War,’ Sam wrote, “These are the voices of our poets; they come from every segment of society; they also celebrate our country by expounding a compassionate view of the universe. A government is a government of words, and when those words are used to mislead, to instill fear or to invite silence, it is the duty of every poet to speak fearlessly and clearly.' As a poet, and the writer of an upcoming biography of Sam Hamill, I ask you, as I believe Sam would, to write a poem 'for the conscience of our country,' in response to the 2024 USAmerican presidential election.

This is a call for poems for an anthology to be published by inauguration day, January 20, 2025. We are looking for words that come from thoughtful reflection and compassion for the loss we feel for ourselves and this country. (Please no screeds.) We plan a Zoom launch on January 20, 2025, at 1pm PST, 4pm EST. Deadline for submissions is December 15, 2024. Send up to 3 poems for consideration. Submit all poems in one document in Times New Roman 12-point font, each poem beginning on a new page. If the poem you submit has been previously published, please credit the publisher in your notes. No limitations on poem format and length.

https://paulenelson.com/2024/11/15/winter-in-america-again

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PRISCILLA HUNTER, THE DEFENSE

Priscilla Hunter's legacy is a deeply contested one, shaped by her dedication to the Coyote Valley Band of Pomo Indians and overshadowed by allegations that remain complex and unresolved. To understand her life and leadership fairly, it is important to weigh the circumstances surrounding her indictment against her broader contributions and the realities of tribal governance and federal oversight.

Tribal governance exists within a fraught legal and political framework. Tribes like the Coyote Valley Band of Pomo Indians operate semi-autonomously but are often subject to disproportionate federal scrutiny compared to non-tribal governments. Allegations of financial mismanagement frequently arise in tribal settings, not always due to intentional wrongdoing but often due to unclear or shifting regulatory standards. Priscilla Hunter, as a tribal leader, was navigating this complex terrain, where even administrative missteps could be magnified into accusations of fraud or corruption.

Federal investigations into tribal affairs often reflect broader political motives rather than clear-cut criminal activity. The charges against Ms. Hunter and others, including obstruction of justice and misuse of funds, can be seen as part of a larger pattern of aggressive federal intervention into tribal operations, which sometimes undermines tribal sovereignty. The allegations against her should be understood in this context, as efforts to comply with federal expectations are often misunderstood or mishandled under immense pressure.

It is critical to note that despite the federal indictment, Priscilla Hunter was not convicted of these crimes. Allegations are not evidence, and the legal system requires proof beyond a reasonable doubt to establish guilt. The charges against her were serious, but the absence of a conviction suggests either a lack of sufficient evidence or that the actions in question did not meet the threshold of criminality when scrutinized. Her opponents' characterization of her as guilty without a verdict ignores the principle of presumed innocence, a cornerstone of justice.

Priscilla Hunter was known for her advocacy for the Coyote Valley Band of Pomo Indians. Her efforts extended to economic development, cultural preservation, and the promotion of tribal sovereignty. It is possible that her initiatives, particularly related to the casino, were intended to benefit the tribe and misinterpreted as self-serving or improperly executed. The use of funds for political contributions, for example, could be viewed as an attempt to secure the tribe's interests in broader political contexts – a standard practice in other governance systems.

The tragic deaths of Charles and Nolan Mitchell are separate from the financial allegations and remain unsolved. Speculative links between Hunter and these crimes lack evidence and risk conflating distinct events. Drawing conclusions without substantiation undermines the integrity of the investigative process. Charles Mitchell's role as a reformer suggests tensions within the tribe, but no concrete evidence connects Hunter or other tribal leaders to the murders. Such accusations, without proof, unfairly taint her legacy.

It is true that public figures are often idealized posthumously, but this does not negate the positive impact of their contributions. Priscilla Hunter's leadership should be evaluated not only through the lens of allegations but also in terms of her achievements for her tribe. While the accusations against her warrant scrutiny, they should not overshadow the context, complexity, and lack of definitive proof that defines her story.

Priscilla Hunter's life was marked by her dedication to her people amid challenging and often adversarial conditions. While allegations and unresolved mysteries remain, they do not define her entirely. Instead, her leadership should be remembered for its efforts to uplift her community, navigate the fraught dynamics of tribal governance, and advocate for the sovereignty and welfare of the Coyote Valley Band of Pomo Indians.

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MENDOCINO COUNTY WAY BACK WHEN

Tom Jondahl anti Marijuana Poster c 1973 (Ron Parker)

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ED NOTES

INTRUDERS. When Boonville's beloved weekly was located in the Farrer Building, someone got in early one morning and placed three long distance calls to a “prayer center” in Cass Lake, Minnesota. The calls cost us $16. If the mystery intruder would have paid me the $16 I would have been happy to slip into my black cassock and take his confession, but… But further back, when we were working out of Tom Town in central Boonville, someone punched out a glass pane in the AVA office door, entered and threw stuff around, leaving a blood trail as he left. Presumably a “he” because a woman… Hoping for a recurrence, I slept in the office the next two nights. Our landlord, the redoubtable Tom Cronquist, a generous and most amusing guy, has lately been a patient at the V.A. hospital in San Francisco for some time now. Tom is a Vietnam vet, a combat vet I believe.

RECALLING Boonville's always vivid peoplescape, I wonder what happened to Dave Polini, our first street person of any duration. He appeared with a wife and a child, or a woman and a child, whatever the status of their relationship may have been. They initially lived as a family on Lambert Lane. Dave seemed to be functioning at the time, but then swerved off the rails, disappearing for a time before re-appearing in Boonville with no visible attachments to anything but an engrimed sleeping bag on which he sat in the lotus position near the door of Pik ’N Pay where I first encountered him. He hit me up for a dollar, and I forgot him, assuming he was one more lost soul forever in transit. Until I saw him the next day and the next, and every day for a couple of months. I often saw him writing, and I wondered what terrors, what crippling losses he was recording. Before he disappeared for good, not that Dave's outcome could have been good, I offered him space in the paper. “I'm not ready for that,” he said.

DAVE reminded me of another homeless guy I sort of knew in San Francisco. He, too, was always writing. When I'd ask him if I could look at his journal he'd say, “Nope. It's not ready yet.” But he got used to seeing me and we'd talk, more or less, with me trying to follow the bouncing ball of his narrative, none of which told me anything about him or how he'd come to be on the street. Finally, the guy let me look at one of his notebooks. Page after page he'd written, “The ocean comes in, and the ocean goes out.”

RUMMAGING through a box of notes, old letters, random pages of newspapers I'd clipped, there was a page from Willie Brown’s column in Sunday’s Chronicle circa Obama, significant because I'd forgotten the run-up to Joe Biden's elevation to the White House. “Biden,” Brown wrote, “brings age, experience to the table for Obama.” If age and experience were the standards, why not snag a much smarter, much less corrupt person from a rest home? Biden already seemed out of it, Chauncey-like.

BROWN went on to say he’d have preferred Sam Nunn because Nunn, Brown claimed, would nail down “the Southern vote” that the soporifically ponderous Nunn allegedly represented. Brown described Biden as “a common guy,” which Biden hadn't been for many years unless you consider U.S. senators common guys. And Brown took a smug swipe at what was the first of many smug swipes from bigwig Democrats to this day at the millions of people who know that both parties, and their dreary candidates, are wholly owned subsidiaries of the forces destroying them, “What a break for the Democrats. The whole Cindy Sheehan crowd will be out in the middle of the Nevada desert for Burning Man.” Nader got it, of course, and in the election just past, the Democrats had sicced lawyers on Jill Stein of the Green Party.

BURNING MAN is a largely apolitical constituency, I’d say, based on the Burning Man people I know, but the witless dismissal by Brown of the millions of people to the left of corporate Democrats showed how worried the Democrats were that they wouldn't be able to scare people into voting for them. Sure 'nuff, in 2024, oblivious as always, we got preposterous squared.

IN THAT SAME 2008 newspaper there was a story about then-Frisco mayor Gavin Newsom, just back in his crumbling town from a honeymoon in Hawaii after his spectacularly decadent wedding at a Montana “ranch.” The city Newsom allegedly governed remained the same wherever the mayor was —murder and mayhem on its dirty streets with Golden Gate Park an open air drug market, derelicts everywhere and the Muni, as always, running late and crazy. Across the Bay in Oakland the gun punks have begun hitting the upscale neighborhoods while what passes for Oakland's government wrings its over-compensated hands and does nothing. Whole Foods on Haight posted armed guards in anticipation of gun battles over the organic strawberries. Newsom, freshly returned to Baghdad by the Bay, immediately announced that Biden had “an extraordinary mind,” an extraordinary mind that the credit card bagman from Delaware had led him to conclude that the bipartisan war on Iraq was a swell idea. Brown said Biden would give Obama “the foreign policy experience that is necessary to govern in an unsteady world.”

AND, at the time, the always moist Scott Simon of NPR, a man who has taken audio ass kissing to pornographic levels, described Biden as “astonishingly eloquent.” WTF? The only time Biden got anywhere near eloquence was when he ripped off a saccharine speech by Neil Kinnock, a British labor politician who wrote about how he was the first person in the thousand year history of the Kinnock family to go to college. Biden riffed on Kinnock to say that he was the first person in his family to go to college in fifty million years, I think it was. Without a teleprompter Biden's virtually non-verbal, and even with a teleprompter he goes incoherently on and on like a dry drunk.

BROWN, NEWSOM, NPR, and the rest of insulated political opinion only reflects how far removed these people are from the lives of most of us.

AND TO THINK that in 1934 working people shut down San Francisco to advance the real interests of another group of working people — longshoreman. In 1934 working people understood who was who and what was what, and they knew political parties of millionaires did not represent them. Working people still know that, which is why they recently abandoned the contemptible party that claimed it represents them for… the unthinkable.

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HUMBOLDT STORY

(via Steve Heilig)

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FRIENDS TIL THE END

by Dee Stenback Lemos

Ida Mary Peterson Jaakola Peterson was the daughter of Andrew and Anna Peterson, their fourth child and the only one to live a long adulthood. She was born on September 28, 1892 in Comptche. She first married Isaac Jaakola, but he died of influenza in November of 1918 at the age of 27, leaving her with three young children: Irene, Oliver, and Sylvia. His dying wish was that his best friend, Jussi Luoto, take care of his family.

Luoto, who had changed his name to John when he came to the U.S., was born in 1885 in Nivala, Finland. He had been a tailor in his native land, but he had mined in Michigan and in the Salt Lake City area before he came to Comptche in 1911. Perhaps he made his way there because he had gotten to know members of the Little River Hervilla family in Utah.

He married his friend’s widow in September of 1919, and in 1920 they had a son of their own, Carl John. Since he had married a Peterson, and lived in a Peterson home [and had already changed his first name], Luoto changed his last name to Peterson. The old-timers, however, always referred to him as “Luoto Jussi.”

Ida’s father, Andrew Peterson, also from Finland, had a small business empire out in Comptche. On property purchased from William Kelley, he put up the Peterson Hotel and Stagestop. Across the road, he constructed a store that was connected to a blacksmith shop. He built a home/boarding house for Ida when she married Isaac. Ida and Isaac managed the store.

After her parents’ died [Andrew in 1917 and Anna in early 1918], Ida and Isaac moved back to the Peterson Hotel. They rented their boarding house (next to the current post office) to Nestor and Hulda Taskinen, who managed it. Over the years, Ida and John managed the store, ranched, raised livestock and vegetables, and brought up children. John sewed suits for his sons. He may have tailored suits for the Comptche gentlemen also, as ready-made suits were not widely available. He was also a tie maker.

Ida came to visit my grandma [Hilda Junttila] and mother [Mamie Junttila Stenback] frequently, with a little dog in tow. They would share the traditional "pulla" (sweetbread) and coffee at three o’clock. Grandma Hilda was short and round and had the sweetest laugh. She wore an apron most times and ladies' logger-style boot shoes made by Makela's in Fort Bragg. The toes were upturned in the Finnish style. [The upturned toe helps to keep a boot from sliding out of a ski binding, a much larger issue in Finland than Comptche.)

John Peterson gave me one of my first jobs. I was about twelve, and I was hired to drive his tractor (about two miles an hour) from haystack to haystack to bale hay! I got to practice driving and I felt very grown up; I earned a bit of change as well.

The Petersons were an integral part of Comptche. My thanks to my aunties in Comptche and to Carl Peterson for much of this information.

[John L. Peterson died on April 21, 1957 and was interred at Evergreen Cemetery in Mendocino, next to his old friend, Isaac Jaakola. Ida died on May 2, 1970 and was buried next to both of her husbands under one headstone that reads Peterson.]

--Reprinted and annotated from the March 11, 1993 Mendocino Beacon.

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CATCH OF THE DAY, Thursday, November 28, 2024

KEVIN BECKMAN, 53, Lucerne/Ukiah. Parole violation.

CODY CALDWELL, 25, Willits. Controlled substance, paraphernalia, probation revocation.

FLORENCIO GALLARDO, 31, Redwood Valley. Resisting.

CHRISTOPHER GONZALES, 22, Ukiah. Vandalism, paraphernalia.

CARLOS GONZALEZ, 22, Ukiah. DUI.

KAILEY KATZ, 22, Ukiah. DUI.

JEREMIAH RAY, 39, Covelo. Disorderly conduct-alcohol, probation revocation.

ADOLFO VASQUEZ, 25, Ukiah. Vandalism.

STEVEN WHITE, 47, Ukiah. Failure to appear.

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RICHARD TEICHMANN (24 December 1868 – 15 June 1925) was a German chess master and a chess composer.

He was known as "Richard the Fifth" because he often finished in fifth place in tournaments. But in 1911 he scored a convincing win in Karlsbad, crushing Akiba Rubinstein and Carl Schlechter with the same line of the Ruy Lopez. José Raúl Capablanca called him “one of the finest players in the world.” Edward Lasker recounted the witty way in which Teichmann demonstrated the Schlechter win in his book ‘Chess Secrets I learned from the Masters,’ and generally admired Teichmann's mastery.

Throughout his chess career Teichmann was handicapped by chronic eye trouble. He had only one eye, and eye trouble caused him to withdraw from the 1899 London Tournament after only four rounds.

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MONICA OLSON:

Was in Walmart doing my last minute shopping when the cashier said to me I love your Jersey (it’s my Deebo one) I live in Chiefs kingdom!! This kid looked me in the eye and said your season ain’t over! I simply said I really hope not but we have lots of injuries and things don’t look so good..

He’s wearing a dang Chiefs hoodie and I instantly thought ok he’s being sarcastic!

He politely said the Niners will come back! I’m thinking ok cool yeah maybe next season!!

He says nope as a die hard Chiefs fan you guys ain’t done yet!

I mean it might be just me clinging on to hope but he was pretty genuine

I might be nuts but I don’t think we’re done yet!!

I truly believe we can pull this off!

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HOW’S YOUR MENTAL HEALTH

by Chris Houston

Nobody would hesitate to explain that they missed hockey practice due to a broken leg. In some circles, scars are badges of honor. When I was a kid, students would gleefully sign their names in Sharpies on their friend’s orthopedic cast.

If you see a friend with a physical injury, you’ll probably ask them about it, and likely they will tell you. “How are you?” is a ubiquitous greeting, and mostly people glibly give happy one-word answers like “fine” or “great.” I like to surprise friends who ask by giving them sincere answers. My better half cringes when I give brief but honest answers to strangers who enquire.

I keep doing it though, because I think it’s important to discuss how we are really doing. My sincere answers to “how are you?” sometimes catch people off guard. A question that I sometimes ask, however, has proven to be a real eye-opener. “How’s your mental health?” never gets a glib answer. People don’t expect that one. But often the question provokes really meaningful conversations.

Still, I don’t commonly ask people about their mental health. To some, it remains a deeply private topic. But maybe it shouldn’t be. I wonder how things might be different if we were just as quick to comment on our anxiety or depression as we were our headaches. Normalizing these chats erodes the stigma.

Stigma inhibits conversation about mental health and I think we might have more comprehensive healthcare if we were all more comfortable talking about it.

I’ve spoken in public and written about my mental health. I find that after I do so, people share their stories. Such stories are widespread. Years ago, I never thought much about mental health. During my recent short stint of local newspaper reporting, housing, poverty, substance use, and mental health were the most commonly discussed topics. They sometimes don’t, but often do, overlap.

I used to think that when people spoke about problems, they were looking for solutions. I’m older and wiser now and I know that sometimes people just need to talk. Talking about mental health is therapeutic for folks. And yet, starting conversations about mental health can be difficult. We’re not used to it. Many avoid even learning about it. I like the BeThere.org website, which offers free lessons on how to support someone struggling with their mental health. The website offers golden rules on how to kick-start conversations: say what you see, show you care, and hear them out, know your role, and connect to help.

If you have a mental health issue, you are likely much less alone than you think. Regarding PTSD, a 2019 paper published in the Red Cross’s academic journal notes that an “estimated 50 percent of men and 60 percent of women experience at least one trauma during their lifetime. Around 8 percent of these men and 20 percent of these women develop PTSD. In a given year, 8 percent of the general population has a current diagnosis of PTSD.” The paper extrapolates that around 26 million people in the United States live with PTSD. The fact that women experience trauma at a rate double digits higher than men, should not go unnoticed.

According to data published by the National Institute of Mental Health 23.1 percent of U.S. adults lived with a mental illness in 2022. So, likely, you know people living with mental disorders. The sooner we all talk about it, the better it is. Practice it: “How is your mental health?” October 10 was World Mental Health Day.

Mental Health America operates a text/phone crisis line accessible via 988.

(Chris Houston is the President of the Canadian Peace Museum non-profit organization and a columnist for The Bancroft Times. CounterPunch.org)

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JONAH RASKIN

Saw art work at gallery on Utah Street. My favorite piece was not part of the exhibit, but tucked away in a corner. Seems to be an East meets West theme here; a Japanese woman eating a burger and a white woman eating Ramen.

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Carla Stone responded: Masami Teraoka. We did a big solo show of his work years ago at SSU Art Gallery.

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TODAY IN HISTORY --

On today’s date 98 years ago, Friday, November 26, 1926, noted American firearms designer & founder of the Browning Arms Company John Moses Browning (1855-1926) met his earthly demise at the age of 71 when he died from the effects of congestive heart failure at the city of Liège, Belgium.

Requiéscat in Pace, John M. Browning.

John Browning was born on January 23, 1855 at Ogden City in Utah Territory. The son of a Mormon gunsmith, John Moses worked in his father's gunsmith shop from the age of seven, where he was taught basic engineering & manufacturing principles, & was encouraged to experiment with new concepts. He developed his first rifle, a single-shot falling-block-action design, & then founded his own manufacturing operation, in partnership with his younger brother Matthew Sandifer Browning (1859-1923).

Browning is famous for developing many varieties of military & civilian firearms, cartridges, & firearms mechanisms, many of which are still in use around the world to this very day. He is probably the most important figure in the development of modern automatic & semi-automatic firearms & he is credited with 128 firearms patents.

Amongst John Browning’s most successful designs are the Model ‘94 Winchester lever-action rifle, the Colt .45 calibre M1911 semi-automatic pistol, the Browning P-35 Hi-Power 9mm caliber semi-automatic pistol, the Browning M2 .50 calibre machine gun, the Browning Automatic Rifle, & the Browning Auto-5, semi-automatic shotgun.

The undated studio photograph depicts John M. Browning with one of his namesake Browning M1917 belt-fed, water-cooled heavy machine guns.

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ON-LINE COMMENT OF THE DAY

It’s going to take more than ‘prayers' to do everything that needs to be done. Eschewing screens of all kinds in favour of simple, direct, peaceful and completely civil conversations focussed on actions that result in positive outcomes for all would be an excellent place to start.

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LEAD STORIES, FRIDAY'S NYT

How China Became the World’s Largest Car Exporter

Will the Markets Check Trump’s Power?

Kennedy’s Inheritance: How Addiction and Trauma Shaped a Turbulent Life

Trump Team’s Rejection of a Transition Deal Adds a Wrinkle to Its Transparency Pledges

Maps Pinpoint Where Democrats Lost Ground Since 2020 in 11 Big Cities

After a Cease-Fire in Lebanon, Gaza and Iran’s Nuclear Ambitions Await Trump

Trump May Find Things to Like About Biden’s ‘Horrible’ Foreign Policy

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MY BROTHER IS DOING THE TRUMP DANCE

by Maureen Dowd

I know that every year, some of you see this Thanksgiving column by my brother and think that it is actually I who am serving up this slab of red meat under the nom de plume of Kevin Dowd. I can assure you that Kevin is very real and, this year, very excited. So, caveat emptor: Here is Kevin’s column.

ROCKVILLE, Md. — My sister told me not to gloat. But Democrats are eating a giant helping of crow since voters delivered a stunning victory to Donald Trump after spending months — years, really — claiming he was a racist, a wannabe dictator, Adolf Hitler and a threat to democracy.

Somehow this racist dictator was able to assemble a new coalition of Black, Hispanic, middle-class and working-class voters. Maybe it’s because nobody wants to live in the kind of country that the Biden-Harris administration and its leftist bedfellows were creating. Voters rejected the lax border measures championed by Joe Biden and the incompetent man supposedly in charge of homeland security, Alejandro Mayorkas. Turns out even people in blue America don’t like it when their groceries cost more and they feel less safe.

I must admit I had misgivings about Trump and his election denial after Jan. 6, but Nancy Pelosi’s hijacking of the House’s special investigating committee shifted my perspective. There was no world in which Trump could have come out of that committee without being scarred. So why did she have to overreach? It didn’t seem fair. And the ensuing lawfare waged against him only strengthened my support for him, and my feeling that there was nothing the opposition wouldn’t do to get him.

The negativity spread to the mainstream media, where coverage of Trump was wildly slanted. Even the owner of The Washington Post warned that the media was losing the trust of its audience. Seniors get their news from cable and young people get it from podcasts and social media. Trump’s freewheeling three-hour interview with Joe Rogan helped him capture that vote.

Kamala Harris evaded the Rogan invitation. She was a terrible candidate, and the conga line of celebrities her campaign relied on couldn’t obscure that fact. Some of the same Democrats who tried to tell us Biden wasn’t in decline then tried to tell us Harris was an exciting, transformative force. Please.

Trump, hardened and informed by his first cabinet selections, has moved with warp speed to assemble his cabinet. Some of his most controversial picks may be intended to scare some deep state bureaucrats into resigning. Matt Gaetz did not make it even to a committee hearing. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Tulsi Gabbard will need to pass Senate scrutiny, but compared with the clown show Biden assembled, they look mainstream.

Trump is pressing for recess appointments. A bad idea. The Senate has the role of advise and consent. It can weed out some of the more troublesome picks, and Trump will be better for it. Republicans will have the Senate majority. No qualified candidate will be denied.

The federal government is like a house filled with mold that needs a good cleaning. Trump will take care of it. When Covid came, the government was sent home, where many employees remain. He could order everyone to come back to the office full time, and 20 percent of the work force would refuse and be gone. Will anyone notice? I doubt it.

Trump promises a return to common sense and has been given the tools to accomplish it with an electoral mandate and all three branches of government on his side. He cannot squander it. He must not get bogged down in petty disputes and perceived slights.

Our cities need to be safe again, our border secure and our country energy independent. Our elections need to be fair and incorruptible from foreign influence. The United States of America is the strongest and best country in the world. We demean ourselves when we are not at our full potential.

Biden and Harris have left a huge mess. Trump is the right choice to fix it. There are things he can do right away to make a difference: close the border, eliminate regulations, end the war on fossil fuels and cancel E.V. mandates.

No matter how maddening Trump can be, the country needs him. The wind is truly at his back. The election was decided not just by MAGA rallygoers but also by millions of voters who’d simply had enough. He should move forward without rancor or grievance, fueled by the joy of the Trump Shuffle, his robot-like dance that has broken out at U.F.C. fights and across the N.F.L. I’m going to have the younger members of the family teach it to Maureen on Thanksgiving.

As I ease into my twilight years, I want to thank Trump for letting me sleep safely and soundly again.

Vaya con Dios, Mister President.

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MAVERICK THINKER, THE KARL MARX OF OUR TIME

by Christopher Caldwell

Who could have seen Donald Trump’s resounding victory coming? Ask the question of an American intellectual these days and you may meet with embittered silence. Ask a European intellectual and you will likely hear the name of Wolfgang Streeck, a German sociologist and theorist of capitalism.

In recent decades, Mr. Streeck has described the complaints of populist movements with unequaled power. That is because he has a convincing theory of what has gone wrong in the complex gearworks of American-driven globalization, and he has been able to lay it out with clarity. Mr. Streeck may be best known for his essays in New Left Review, including a dazzling series on the cascade of financial crises that followed the crash of 2008. He resembles Karl Marx in his conviction that capitalism has certain internal contradictions that make it unsustainable — the more so in its present “neoliberal” form. His latest book, “Taking Back Control? States and State Systems After Globalism,” published this month, asks whether the global economy as it is now set up is compatible with democracy. He has his doubts.

Understand Mr. Streeck and you will understand a lot about the left-wing movements that share his worldview — Syriza in Greece, Podemos in Spain and the new Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance in Germany. But you will also understand Viktor Orban, Brexit and Mr. Trump.

Mr. Streeck (whose name rhymes with “cake”) argues that today’s contradictions of capitalism have been building for half a century. Between the end of World War II and the 1970s, he reminds us, working classes in Western countries won robust incomes and extensive protections. Profit margins suffered, of course, but that was in the nature of what Mr. Streeck calls the “postwar settlement.” What economies lost in dynamism, they gained in social stability.

But starting in the 1970s, things began to change. Sometime after the Arab oil embargo of 1973, investors got nervous. The economy began to stall. This placed politicians in a bind. Workers had the votes to demand more services. But that required making demands on business, and business was having none of it. States finessed the matter by permitting the money supply to expand. For a brief while, this maneuver allowed them to offer more to workers without demanding more of bosses. Essentially, governments had begun borrowing from the next generation.

That was the Rubicon, Mr. Streeck believes: “the first time after the postwar growth period that states took to introducing not-yet-existing future resources into the conflict between labor and capital.” They never broke the habit.

Very quickly their policies sparked inflation. Investors balked again. It took a painful tightening of money to stabilize prices. Ronald Reagan’s supply-side regime eased the pain a bit, but only by running record government deficits. Bill Clinton was able to eliminate these, but only by deregulating private banking and borrowing, Mr. Streeck shows. In other words, the dangerous debt exposure was shifted out of the Treasury and into the bank accounts of middle-class and working-class households. This led, eventually, to the financial crisis of 2008.

As Mr. Streeck sees it, a series of (mostly American) attempts to calm the economy after the ’70s produced the system we now call neoliberalism. “Neoliberalism,” he argues, “was, above all, a political-economic project to end the inflation state and free capital from its imprisonment in the postwar settlement.” This project has never really been reconsidered, even as one administration’s fix turns into the next generation’s crisis.

At each stage of neoliberalism’s evolution, Mr. Streeck stresses, key decisions have been made by technocrats, experts and other actors relatively insulated from democratic accountability. When the crash came in 2008, central bankers stepped in to take over the economy, devising quantitative easing and other novel methods of generating liquidity. During the Covid emergency of 2020 and 2021, Western countries turned into full-blown expertocracies, bypassing democracy outright. A minuscule class of administrators issued mandates on every aspect of national life — masks, vaccinations, travel, education, church openings — and incurred debt at levels that even the most profligate Reaganite would have considered surreal.

Mr. Streeck has a clear vision of something paradoxical about the neoliberal project: For the global economy to be “free,” it must be constrained. What the proponents of neoliberalism mean by a free market is a deregulated market. But getting to deregulation is trickier than it looks because in free societies, regulations are the result of people’s sovereign right to make their own rules. The more democratic the world’s societies are, the more idiosyncratic they will be, and the more their economic rules will diverge. But that is exactly what businesses cannot tolerate — at least not under globalization. Money and goods must be able to move frictionlessly and efficiently across borders. This requires a uniform set of laws. Somehow, democracy is going to have to give way.

A uniform set of laws also requires a single international norm. Which norm? That’s another problem, as Mr. Streeck sees it: The global regime we have is a reliable copy of the American one. This brings order and efficiency but also tilts the playing field in favor of American corporations, banks and investors.

Perhaps that is what blighted the West’s relations with Russia, where the transition to global capitalism “was tightly controlled by American government agencies, foundations and N.G.O.s,” Mr. Streeck says, and the oligarchs who emerged to run the government in the 1990s were “received with open arms by American corporations and, not least, the London real estate market.” To an Indian or a Chinese person, “free markets” established on these terms might carry the threat of imperial highhandedness and lost self-determination.

This insight gives us a context for understanding the persistent grievances of movements like Mr. Trump’s, and their equally persistent popularity. What happens on the imperial level also happens at the local level, within the United States and the Western European societies that make the rules of globalization. Non-technocrats, whether they are the resentful members of the old working class or just people wisecracking about the progressive pieties of corporate human resource managers, are not going to be permitted to tangle up the system with their demands.

As we no longer have an economic policy that is managed democratically, it should not be surprising that it produces unfair outcomes. Nor should it be surprising that in the wake of the mortgage crisis, Covid, the war in Ukraine and so-called Bidenflation, this unfairness would give rise to what Mr. Streeck calls “tendencies toward deglobalization” — such as those that emerged with a vengeance on Nov. 5.

The “global economy” is a place where common people have no leverage. Parties of the left lost sight of such problems after the 1970s, Mr. Streeck notes. They allowed their old structure, oriented around industrial workers and primarily concerned with workers’ rights and living standards, to be infiltrated and overthrown by intellectuals, who were primarily concerned with promoting systems of values, such as human rights and lately the set of principles known as wokeism.

It is in disputing the wisdom of this shift that Mr. Streeck is most likely to antagonize American Democrats and others who think of themselves (usually incorrectly) as belonging to the left. He, too, thinks that democracy is in crisis, but only because it is being thwarted by the very elites who purport to champion it. Among the people, democracy is thriving. After decades of decline in voter turnout, there has been a steep and steady rise in participation over the past 20 years — at least for parties whose candidates reflect a genuine popular sentiment. As this has happened, liberal commentators — who tend to back what Mr. Streeck calls “parties of the standard model” — have changed their definition of democracy, he writes: They see high electoral participation as a troubling expression of discontent, “endangering rather than strengthening democracy.”

This new, topsy-turvy idea of democracy comes with a new political strategy. The interests and agendas of standard-issue parties are increasingly reinforced by the media and other grandees of globalization. These actors have “fought against the new wave of politicization,” Mr. Streeck writes, “with the full arsenal of instruments at their disposal — propagandistic, cultural, legal, institutional.”

Mr. Streeck is probably referring here to the obstacles put in the way of so-called left-wing movements in Europe — Syriza, Podemos, La France Insoumise in France. But his observation applies just as well to so-called right-wing parties. At present, Marine Le Pen, whose party won the most votes in France’s national elections last summer, is standing trial for embezzlement before a court that may ban her from politics for five years. In Germany this month, more than a hundred members of the Bundestag requested a constitutional ban on the country’s fast-growing right-wing party the Alternative for Germany, ahead of national elections scheduled for February.

There are dangers, too, in the way partisan prosecutors, in the run-up to the U.S. presidential election, convicted Mr. Trump of 34 felonies involving bookkeeping, on a legal theory so novel that not one American in a thousand could explain what he had been convicted of. A majority of Americans effectively voided the conviction at the ballot box.

Mr. Streeck’s new book is not about Mr. Trump’s triumph. But his message (or his warning, however you choose to read it) is not unrelated: The left must embrace populism, which is merely the name given to the struggle over an alternative to globalism. With globalism collapsing under its own contradictions, all serious politics is now populist in one way or another.

(NY Times)

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HUNTER THOMPSON & GONZO

by Alexander Cockburn (2005)

I guess I can call myself one of the Dylan generation since, I’m the same age as him but the prose stylists that allured an Anglo-Irish lad hopelessly strapped into the corsets of Latinate gentility were always those of American rough-housers: first, in the mid-fifties Jack Kerouac, then Edward Abbey, then Hunter Thompson.

Thank God I never tried to imitate any of them. Thompson probably spawned more bad prose than anyone since Hemingway, but they all taught me that at its most rapturous, its most outraged, its most exultant, American prose can let go and teach you to let go, to embrace the vastness, the richness, the beauty and the grotesqueries of America in all its thousand landscapes.

I tried to re-read Kerouac’s ‘On The Road’ a few years ago and put it down soon enough. That’s a book for excited teenagers. Abbey at full stretch remains a great writer and he’ll stay in the pantheon for all time. Lately sitting in motels along the highway I’ve been dipping into his diaries, ‘Confessions of a Barbarian,’ and laughing every couple of pages. “Writing for the National Geographic,” Abbey grumbled, “is like trying to masturbate in ski mitts.”

Could Thompson have written that? Probably not. When it came to sex and stimulation of the synapses by agents other than drugs or booze or violent imagery, Thompson was silent, unlike Abbey who loved women. Thompson wrote for the guys, at a pitch so frenzied, so over-the-top in its hyperbolic momentum that often enough it reminded me of the squeakier variant of the same style developed by his Herald-Trib stable mate and exponent of the “New Journalism,” Tom Wolf. In their respective stylistic uniforms they always seemed hysterically frightened of normalcy, particularly in the shape of girls, so keenly appreciated by Abbey.

Thompson’s best writing was always in the form of flourishes, of pell-mell bluster wrenched of himself for the anxious editors waiting well past deadline at ‘Scanlan’s’ or ‘Rolling Stone,’ and in his later years often put together from his jottings by the writers and editors aware that a new “Fear and Loathing” on the masthead was a sure-fire multiplier of newsstand sales. Overall, Thompson’s political perceptions weren’t that interesting except for the occasional bitter flashes.

There’s nothing much to the notion of “gonzo” beyond the delighted projections of Thompson’s readers. The introduction of the reporter as roistering first-person narrator? Mark Twain surely did that, albeit sedately. Norman Mailer took it to the level of genius in ‘Advertisements for Myself,’ with political perceptions acuter and writing sharper by far than anything Thompson ever produced.

“Gonzo” was an act, defined by its beholders, the thought that here was one of Us, fried on drugs, hanging onto the cliff edge of reality only by his fingernails, doing hyperbolic battle with the pomposities and corruptions of Politics as Usual. And no man was ever a more willing captive of the Gonzo myth he created, decked out in its increasingly frayed bunting of “Fear and Loathing…” “The Strange and Terrible…”, decorated with Ralph Stedman’s graphic counterpoints.

Like Evel Knievel, Thompson’s stunts demanded that he arch higher and further with each successive sentence’s outrage to propriety, most memorably in his obit for Richard Nixon: “If the right people had been in charge of Nixon’s funeral, his casket would have been launched into one of those open-sewage canals that empty into the ocean just south of Los Angeles. He was a swine of a man and a jabbering dupe of a president. Nixon was so crooked that he needed servants to help him screw his pants on every morning. Even his funeral was illegal. He was queer in the deepest way. His body should have been burned in a trash bin.”

Kerouac ended sadly at 47. As Abbey nastily put it, “Jack Kerouac, like a sick refrigerator, worked too hard at keeping cool and died on his mama’s lap from alcohol and infantilism.” Abbey himself passed gloriously at 62, carried from the hospital by his pals to die at his own pace without tubes dripping brief reprieves into his veins, then buried in the desert without the sanction or permission of the state.

How about Thompson? His Boston lawyer George Tobia Jr. told the Globe the 67-year-old author sat in his kitchen Sunday afternoon in his home in Woody Creek, Colorado, stuck a .45-caliber handgun in his mouth, and killed himself while his wife listened on the phone and his son and daughter-in-law were in another room of his house. His wife had no idea what had happened until she returned home later.

Seems creepy to me, same way Gary Webb blowing his brains out a while back with a hand-gun was creepy. Why give the loved ones that as a souvenir? I suppose Thompson’s message was: We were together at the end. Webb was truly alone. He lifted the curtain on one little sideshow of the American Empire, and could never quite fathom that when you do that The Man doesn’t forget or forgive. Thompson engaged The Empire on his own terms and quit the battlefield on his own terms too, which I guess is what Gonzo is all about.

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JOHNNY CARSON & THE FANTASY OF AMERICA

by Jason Zinoman

The late-night host looms over the culture to this day, in part because he knew how to mix comedy and sex. But there was a darkness at the heart of his appeal.

One of the greatest magic tricks I ever saw unfolded when Johnny Carson invited the illusionist Uri Geller on “The Tonight Show” to bend a spoon with his mind.

This now notorious 1973 episode is best known for Geller’s failures. It has emerged over the years that staff members from “The Tonight Show” consulted with a magician, James Randi, who advised them on how to prepare the props to stymie him. It worked. For 20 excruciating minutes, Geller failed to astound.

The real trick here was not performed by Geller, but by Carson, who deftly played the role of generous host, making something that could easily have seemed cruel come off as kind. He confesses humbly to being a little skeptical, makes a big show of wanting Geller to do well, invites him to return and try again, and as Geller struggles, Carson listens, waits patiently, acts baffled. An amateur magician himself, Carson possessed a quick and cutting wit, but in keeping it restrained, he clarified his greatest gift.

Johnny Carson was a genius in the art of being liked, which is remarkable, considering he wasn’t, on paper, especially likable: A largely absent father, philandering husband, a sometimes mean drunk, a fiercely private figure even to many close to him. He was a talk-show host who didn’t always seem to enjoy talking to people.

At the pinnacle of his fame in the late 1970s, Carson said his best friend was possibly his lawyer, Henry Bushkin, who would later write that he was shocked by this admission, adding that he had never “met a man with less of an aptitude or interest in maintaining real relationships.”

Except the one with the vast American public. In our fragmented media landscape, it can be difficult to grasp just how large Carson loomed over the culture. At the center of late-night for 30 years — he presided from 1962 to 1992 — he is the most influential talk-show host of all time, and possibly the most popular figure in the history of television. Yet for someone so famous, it seemed as if we never really got to know him.

In the popular imagination, Carson has become the perfect avatar for a monoculture that no longer exists: calm and inoffensive, rigorously conventional and apolitical, the kind of soothing showbiz personality that helps everyone go to sleep. He reflected our country with his polite fake neutrality. But there’s always been more of a subtext and strategy to his performance, a crowd-pleasing fantasy beneath the facade that speaks to deeper and darker strains in the American psyche.

He didn’t take movie roles or otherwise try to be anything other than late-night host

It’s been three decades since he retired, which means he’s been off the air longer than he was on. But he remains relevant this year. In the middle of denouncing late-night hosts at a rally, Donald J. Trump praised Carson’s greatness, begging him to return. Carson is a figure of power and intimidation in the new movie “Saturday Night,” which portrays him as concerned that “S.N.L.” might compete with his show for bookings. And the latest season of “Feud” featured Molly Ringwald as his second wife, Joanne, a good friend of Truman Capote, who once wrote a Carson-like character described as a rageful sadist behind “that huckleberry grin.”

Many have tried to explain Carson’s success. He was an even-keeled former game show host from the Midwest who specialized in light banter and easygoing punchlines. Standing with military posture, he never appeared to be working that hard and the biggest laughs in his monologue were often in the silent pauses after a joke bombed. How could someone so robotic and bland become a late-night giant?

Now the first major reported biography since his death has arrived to try to answer that question. Its author, Bill Zehme, is a heavyweight profiler, a wonderful stylist who has written some of the best journalism about the psychology of the peculiar characters who populate late-night television. With his profile of David Letterman, for instance, he did a better job of digging into that Carson protégé’s relationship with his father than anyone else. But the original host proves to be a more challenging subject.

“Carson the Magnificent” is a fascinating if frustrating read. It often seems at war with itself, perhaps because Zehme died before finishing it. His research assistant, Mike Thomas, who completed it, tells us in the introduction that Zehme set out to write a “celebratory biography,” and I believe him. But it doesn’t read that way. When Carson gave him his blessing for the book and said he didn’t care if people took shots at him, Zehme wonders who would do that. If we are to believe this, the author had his innocence shaken.

His argument for Carson’s greatness rests considerably on what he didn’t do, the jokes he didn’t make, the restraint. In one of his better zingers, Zehme writes that Carson “understood withholding better than a tax accountant.” He keeps returning to the words of a Carson producer, Art Stark, who said he was “great by omission.”

This is an essential point. Carson understood better than anyone what he did well and made sure to do nothing more. Unlike several of his peers, he avoided acting. The many parts he turned down included the Jerry Lewis character in “The King of Comedy” and the Gene Wilder one in “Blazing Saddles.” He rarely did interviews and remained scrupulously tight-lipped about his personal life. Carson didn’t leave the four corners of the television set.

But staying out of the picture isn’t enough to explain his singular appeal and dominance. When he took over “The Tonight Show” from Jack Paar in 1962, replacing that legendary star was considered a suicide mission. Within half a year, Carson had eclipsed him in the ratings. When he staged a wedding with the eccentric musician Tiny Tim, hardly a major draw, 45 million people watched the show, making it the highest-rated broadcast of the decade after the moon landing. In the 1970s, Carson’s audience ballooned, averaging 17 million a night in 1978 and bringing in an unprecedented $40 million to $50 million annually.

But numbers alone don’t begin to measure his singular influence. He was the most powerful gatekeeper in comedy, single-handedly making stars of David Letterman and Steven Wright, among others. When he moved the show to Los Angeles from New York in 1972, it’s not an exaggeration to say the balance of cultural power shifted from one coast to another.

Carson wielded his power conservatively, careful to reflect the culture more than challenge it. As Nora Ephron put it, he “never, ever made them think.” He was criticized for avoiding politics and controversy, with some unfavorably contrasting his work with the more daring shows of Dick Cavett. When asked about his competitor, Carson told The New Yorker: “The trouble with Dick is that he’s never decided what he wants to be — whether he’s going for the sophisticated, intellectual viewer or for the wider audience. He falls between two stools.”

Carson was laser-focused on the second stool. He arrived on the scene at exactly the moment television transitioned from a luxury device to an essential one. And he retired before the culture balkanized, so his tenure took place when there were few options at 11:30 at night. But attributing his success only to impeccable timing gives him short shrift: He built an audience that was not there, and he did have competition, like turning off the television or talking to your spouse.

Viewers chose Carson because he gave them what they wanted, which was, to put it bluntly, a little bit of comedy and a little bit of sex.

Let’s start with the first.

One of the striking things about Johnny Carson biographies is how little effort they spend on the actual comedy, let alone how radically it changed from its 90-minute (and longer) freewheeling version in the 1960s and ’70s to a more slickly showbiz style in later years. It’s like writing a book on Taylor Swift without analyzing the songs. Late-night talk show hosting is rarely treated as an art though it is in fact a tightly planned, highly artificial enterprise. But otherwise discerning people consider it simply a display of personality.

The most overlooked aspect of Carson’s appeal is that he was a comedy nerd. His characters, like Aunt Blabby and Floyd R. Turbo, look corny now, but they killed in their day. Though he was known for his comic timing, it’s wasn’t off-the-cuff. It was the result of a lifetime of study. In interviews, Carson would protest that he didn’t know anything about comedy and insisted that breaking down jokes only ruined them. But at the University of Nebraska, he wrote his senior thesis on the art of comedy writing. It’s a fascinatingly technical analysis of the work of many of the most successful performers from the radio comedies of his youth like Jack Benny and Fred Allen.

He breaks down structure, character and word choice, and concludes, among other points, that all comedy characters must be sympathetic. He explores ways to do this, including playing the fool and demonstrating common flaws. He notes that Bob Hope made himself a target for insults, thus allowing him to return to attack. “Once a comedian wins their sympathies,” he says of the audience, “he’ll win their confidence and they will go along with him on a gag.”

What you see in Carson’s argument is a sensitivity to the importance of staying likable for a comedian. While this often meant caution, it did not always. In his early years, he was even a bit edgy, introducing a risqué sexual humor to the masses that is now pervasive. Later, when he let us into his personal life through jokes about his failed marriages, he did more than any celebrity to normalize discussion of divorce in America. But he was always the hapless victim of these jokes, which boiled down the dissolution of his marriages to a financial transaction: He made the money and his wives took it.

The Carson jokes that linger the longest in the culture involve innuendo. In his most famous gag, after the actor Ed Ames, promoting the TV series “Daniel Boone,” threw a tomahawk at an outline of a cowboy that landed right under the crotch, Carson quipped, “I didn’t know you were Jewish.”

Carson’s most influential tool was that caught-in-the-cookie-jar voice he would use when making a slightly dirty double-entendre. You still hear Jon Stewart break into it any time he makes a sex joke. It was bold to utter these kinds of lines on television back then, especially on daytime, where Carson hosted a morning quiz show. In one episode, a bodybuilder guest compared the body to a home. Carson retorted: “My home is pretty messy, but I have a girl come in once a week to clean it out.”

He got away with this because he looked so boyishly innocent and brought matinee-idol looks to talk shows. In his first years on late night, he smoked on a set with a shag carpet in an environment that evoked a tamer Playboy Club. Indeed, his guests skewed heavily toward men, and there was a locker room-vibe to his exchanges with Don Rickles or Frank Sinatra.

“The Tonight Show” presented its audiences with a showbiz fantasy in which the beautiful and famous dressed up and chit-chatted like old friends. But it also sold an old male fantasy in which women tended to fall into two rigid categories: sex objects or nurturing mothers.

Told that the actress Valerie Perrine had complained that he told too many jokes about women’s breasts, Carson blamed her low-cut dresses. For women with higher necklines, he asked about children. Lily Tomlin said Carson seemed surprised when she told him on-air that she didn’t want kids. “For a female to say you didn’t even want children,” she said, “it was like: What’s wrong with her?”

And while he helped the careers of Roseanne Barr, Ellen DeGeneres and Joan Rivers (until she had the temerity to start her own show, after which she was banished), Carson booked many more male comics.

In Rolling Stone, Carson suggested there was something inherently antithetical about a funny woman. “It’s much tougher for women,” he said. “You don’t see many of them around. And the ones that try, sometimes are a little aggressive for my taste. I’ll take it from a guy, but from women, sometimes, it just doesn’t fit too well.”

Coming from the most important gatekeeper in comedy, this statement did more to set back women in comedy than a million dumb comments about female comics not being funny.

This is the ugly side of Carson’s power, one that the new book doesn’t investigate or really grapple with. Zehme covers Carson’s treatment of women, then struggles to defend it in the most hackneyed ways possible, psychoanalyzing the host’s relationship with his emotionally withholding mother or trying that old standby: blaming the times.

But the book is unflinching in its reporting. When the first of his four wives, Jody, describing a circumscribed life in which she was “captive” to the star, asks him to take her to a party, Carson replies, “Why take a ham sandwich to a banquet?” His second wife, Joanne, recalled a more harrowing marriage, filled with eruptions that she would have to clean up. When he drank, she faced “a tremendous anger about women that would come out.”

This is a version of Carson that wasn’t apparent on television. But the late-night talk show is an intimate form, and over thousands of hours of hosting, you will reveal yourself.

Watch some of those jokes; he wasn’t hiding as much as we thought. How much clearer could he be than when he joked: “Half the marriages end in divorce — and then there are the unhappy ones.”

That mean streak was evident in how he treated his sidekick, Ed McMahon, whose job, as he himself described it, was to laugh at his boss’s jokes and not be too funny. Carson regularly took shots at McMahon. In their dynamic, Carson wasn’t the one who drank a lot. The host cracked, “The first time Ed saw Niagara Falls, he asked, ‘Does that come with scotch?’”

You didn’t watch the show to identify with Ed McMahon. Carson played the benevolent patriarch, but for many male viewers, the pleasure was imagining that you were Johnny, poised and in command, surrounded by flirtatious women and yes-men. Actual show business in the 1960s and ’70s was filled with activists and counterculture fervor, but “The Tonight Show” provided a break from all that, a return to “Mad Men”-era glamour. It presented a certain macho, nostalgic vision. Our recent presidential election proves that can be a surprisingly potent pleasure.

Carson’s reputation for steering clear of politics has been overstated. Many politicians sat in the guest chair, and he made frequent jokes about them. (His first bit on “The Tonight Show” included a now obscure reference to Richard M. Nixon.) Performing as master of ceremonies at a televised inaugural gala for Ronald Reagan would in today’s hothouse media environment draw massive criticism and become a culture war football. What mattered to him was keeping things sunny. In 1967, Robert F. Kennedy had to threaten to cancel his appearance on the show in order to be allowed to talk about poverty in America.

On his show, Carson kept his audience unsure of where he stood, in part because he was smart enough to suspect that if he was more transparent, some might not find him so funny.

He knew what to hold back, but also how to show just enough to play into visceral pleasure centers. Carson derided “Saturday Night Live” in its early years for being cruel, making the “kind of joke you tell at a private party,” but its pointed perspective was just closer to the surface.

Look again at his exchange with Geller. In dragging out the appearance, Carson is making the magician sweat, turning his anxiety into our amusement. This is the humor of embarrassment, a powerful staple of reality TV, prank shows and roasts. Carson even uses his characteristic pauses, not to set up a joke, but to extend the torture.

Then comes the knockout blow. Geller, defeated and flailing, desperately tries to hold onto some dignity by suggesting his mind-over-matter tricks went over better than they did. When Geller made a casual reference to the “bent spoon” in front of him, Carson did not withhold. Quietly, offhandedly, he pushes back: “A spoon that’s got a slight bend in it.”

It’s a subtle correction, delivered just gently enough to look like nothing. But it hits with the savage force of Jack Nicholson swinging an ax in “The Shining.” Looking to enjoy some old-fashioned American humiliation? Here’s Johnny!

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