Still more miscellany: War will ever be with us; Hostile takeover of a grand old party; Epitaph for a campaign; The woman question; On Coltranian verticularity

War will ever be with us

"Peace" in the English-speaking world amounts to those periods when the wars are smaller and more neglectable by the society at large, left to the professional, standing forces who dirty their hands and risk their limbs and lives so the great majority may pursue our happiness. Leadership inclined to war-making will carry on wars, and leadership inclined against war-making will be compelled to carry on wars despite themselves, by the realities which until they held power they were at liberty to reject, and not infrequently the war-skeptics and pacifists will bring war by their very aversion to it. It is not given to the English-speaking world to know "peace"; that is for lesser and less-honorable nations, nations without the will or the way to fight, which know peace as a gift of the English-speaking world or else as defeat and surrender. Anglo-Saxon Civilization is too great and too honorable to know "peace"; there are wars to be fought, we're the ones to fight them, and 'twas ever thus.

Hostile takeover of a grand old party

It may be that the Trump ascendancy does not rise to the order of the supplanting of one of the Big Two parties by what amounts to a third party, but to my way of thinking for whatever little that's worth, the election of Donald Trump as Republican nominee for president of the United States is at the least the hostile takeover of the old-line Republican Party by an "alt-Right" alternative conservative third-party movement; the triumph, albeit undeclared, of the Tea Party.

The name "Republican" is intact and the personnel are not much changed, and only time will tell if this hostile takeover is thoroughgoing and enduring, but that it is a hostile takeover is I think indisputable: the Republican establishment were about as unanimous as they were strenuous in their contempt for Trump, and Trump won the nomination of the Republican Party by running against the Republican Party about as much as he ran against the other side.

And I'd go one further and venture that this hostile takeover is more likely than not to be thoroughgoing and enduring: even if the most Donald Trump may manage is eight years in the White House, he is today half of the alternatives for next president of the United States because he won more votes than any single candidate in a Republican presidential primary since there's been such a thing, and if Trump were to drop dead of a coronary tomorrow, those masses who voted Trump would be there still, and their principles unaltered.

It was a century and a half ago that a Big Two national political party was last supplanted by a third party, when it was the Republican Party that played third-party usurper. The Whig Party had ceased to represent the people who voted for it, on the question of the abolition of slavery particularly, and by the election of 1860 the erstwhile Whigs had migrated to the novel Republicans and elected a Republican president, a Whig-turned-Republican called Abraham Lincoln. 

1860 is not a very precise parallel to 2016, but the conditions for the partisan reordering are near enough, namely a Big Two party's ceasing to represent the people who vote for it, the Republican Party as constituted before the Trump ascendancy having ceased to represent their people on such questions as the invasion and colonization of the United States by the Latin American Third World and the ancillary question of the immigration to the United States of adherents to a certain world religion who want us all dead and burning in hell.

Now to fill out the parallel will take a Trump presidency, and among the earlier steps to that end Donald Trump and we Trumpians must make nice and make peace with the old-line Republicans and as much of the R establishment as can be brought onside, because they're necessary and because they are after all not on the other side in this war; those people are countrymen of ours, and there's a war to be fought.

Epitaph for a campaign

But before the aforesaid nice-making, a little leftover sport-making. It says something about John "No Hoper" Kasich that on that day in May after Donald Trump had won Indiana in a romp, Kasich didn't quit the race 'til after the first runner-up Ted Cruz had conceded to the Trump ascendancy. Kasich's carrying on in the Republican race so long after he'd been statistically eliminated necessitates that he imagined the party muckety-mucks at the convention might well hand him the nomination that the people in the primaries hadn't voted him. Kasich would point to polling showing him beating Clinton in a general election, but that says more about Hillary Clinton than John Kasich: the average American outside Ohio doesn't know John Kasich from Adam's off-ox, so when they were polled on Hillary Clinton versus John Kasich, they'd hear "Hillary Clinton or John-so-and-so" and shrug and vote John-so-and-so, or so I suppose. But if the voters of the Republican primaries who did know Kasich weren't buying what he was selling, then surely he'd never have sold with the average American once he was known to them.

If some magic wand were waved elevating John Kasich to president of the United States, he wouldn't see what's broken never mind fix it, and as a campaigner he couldn't place second in a three-man race in his own party. Come to that, Kasich placed fourth in the three-man race, after Marco Rubio who had quit the race months before. There's a line Trump ought to have flogged, and an epitaph for the Kasich campaign: In a three-man race, John Kasich placed fourth.

The woman question

From a badly mismatched ad in my e-mail, per my memory of it: "Stand with Hillary and get your official Woman Card." I take it that's meant to be amusing, what the kids call "ironic", and certainly it's a joke, albeit not in the way the Clinton campaign had in mind. Setting aside the inadvisability of official campaign humor, is that not effectively exclusionary, and exclusionary of something over half the population; does it not translate to "Would-be boosters of the Clinton campaign who happen to belong to the larger part of the population which is male need not apply"? The line on Hillary Clinton is that she's not a natural campaigner, but I wonder if whatever professional campaigners she's hired are very much less ham-fisted.

The vote in November and its exit polling will vindicate or repudiate me on this score, but my thinking as of now is that any woman whose vote is decided along the lines of, "I'm a woman and Hillary Clinton is a woman so I must vote Clinton," is not a woman whose vote was Donald Trump's to lose. And I'd go one further and offer that any woman ought to be insulted by the presumption that women will vote Clinton for the reason that Hillary Clinton is biologically female.

Bill Clinton and I both are male WASPs, tribal Baptists and tenor saxophonists, even blue-eyed and pasty-thighed, and yet I have scarcely a good word for the man, precisely because I'm a man and a WASP and all the rest and thus my vote is not decided by the DNAs or denominations etc. of the candidates on offer, but by their ideas and capabilities. And I refuse to believe that the women of America will decide their votes on so base a reasoning as "I'm a woman and Hillary Clinton is a woman so I must vote Clinton," and if Hillary Clinton and her campaign and the Democrat Party and Left and the press and popular culture presume that women voters are so unthinking, then that's still more reason to vote Trump.  

On Coltranian verticularity 

There are in jazz improvisation two principal approaches, called "lyrical" which is to say melodic, and "vertical" which is to say harmonic, "vertical" making an apt description for the ascending and descending of scales or occasionally modes and arpeggios, which is what a more harmonic improvisation very often amounts to. John Coltrane was a vertical sort, but only lately and long since my retirement from saxophony have I got what I suppose to be a handle on Coltranian verticularity.

Coltrane would ascend and descend the scales in keeping with the "changes" or chord progression, which was and is common enough, but beyond his being especially virtuosic and inventive in that way, he added a trick: Coltrane would interrupt his ascending and descending something like the climbing of many flights of stairs will be interrupted by the landings, plateaus among the up and down. He'd linger over those sort-of landings with melodic riffs like a more lyrical soloist, which also is not so uncommon, but what is less common, Coltrane would not infrequently punctuate his ascents and descents with honking assertions, something like a train blasting its horn at a crossing: "Too-toooot! Too-to-toooooot!!" He did after all play a horn, and "trane" was after all half his surname.