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As far as I can tell from common usage, a zombie is a former human being whose dead body has been reanimated. Zombies walk around in a stiff stupor and often want to kill and eat humans as their only way to survive. While not all zombies feed on humans, most of them do in popular fiction, video games and movies, which connects zombism directly to vampirism.

The vampire, and by extension the zombie, is the perfect image for an age when selfishness reigns as the underlying ideology.  I call it the Age of Reagan because it was under Ronald Reagan’s leadership that the country began its turn towards selfishness.  Reagan expressed it best with his oft-told joke with the punch line, “I don’t have to run faster than the bear, just faster than you.”  A human creature who stays alive by sucking the blood of other humans is an apt metaphor for the current epoch in which our social and economic policy creates small numbers of ultra-wealthy Americans, while everyone else gets poorer.  In a real sense, the wealthy feed off the bodies and work of the rest of the country.

Five years ago in these pages, I noted the vampire fad and predicted it would continue, because it served so well as a symbol for the zeitgeist. The spin-off these past few years into zombism is therefore not surprising. A five-minute Internet search yielded the following list of zombie or zombie-vampire television series showing on broadcast, cable, premium cable or Internet television: “The Walking Dead,” “Z Nation,” “Dead Set, Death Valley,” “In the Flesh, Raised by Zombies,” “Ash vs. Evil Dead,” “The Returned “and “Zombie Hunter: City of the Dead,” to name a few. I’ve assiduously avoided this nonsense, but sometimes see the promotions for these shows while channel surfing.

The zombie is not exactly a vampire and doesn’t hold exactly the same subtextual symbolism. Unlike the vampire, who is generally a loner or runs in small packs and usually comes from a privileged background, the zombie is a creature of groups. Whereas the vampire represents the capitalist, the horde of zombies may in fact be stand-ins for illegal immigrants, who are currently getting the blame for many of our problems by most Republicans.  Criminals, rapists, stealers of jobs from honest Americans, users of our social safety net—these zombies who live off the body politic come from the dregs of society, not the higher planes as many vampires do.  Mitt Romney was the perfect vampire, whereas Donald Trump projects himself as the ruthless superhero protecting us from the zombies.

The latest entry into zombie entertainment caught me by complete surprise: a new movie titled Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. The trailer makes the movie look like a martial-humans-versus-supernatural-monsters flick set in the late 18th century.

Not recognizing the title merely shows how out of the mainstream of pop culture I can be when it comes to adult horror and fantasy fiction, because as it turns out, the movie called “P&P&Z,” as I’m going to abbreviate it, is based on a 2009 novel by the same name. According to the Wikipedia article on the novel, about 85% of it repeats Jane Austen’s original words, which are now in public domain and therefore available for use without royalty payments. The author, Seth Grahame-Smith, interweaves several subplots about the living dead into Austen’s classic story of star-crossed lovers kept apart by their own foibles of pride and prejudice.

Not the author, but the publisher, is responsible for creating the concept of interjecting zombism into Jane Austen. Quirk Books editor Jason Rekulak developed the idea for “P&P&Z” after matching a list of popular supernatural characters with a list of books whose titles are in the public domain. Once he came up with Pride and Prejudice and zombies, he turned the project over to a writer, much as a marketing vice president would turn an industrial video, a television ad campaign or website concept over to a PR writer.

I usually don’t depend this much on the contents of a Wikipedia article, but the Wikipedia description of the opening of the novel gives a pungent sense of the odd pastiche produced by combining Jane Austen with the living dead:

“Elizabeth Bennet and her four sisters live on a countryside estate with their parents. Mr. Bennet guides his daughters in martial arts and weapons training, molding them into a fearsome zombie-fighting army; meanwhile, Mrs. Bennet endeavors to marry the girls off to wealthy suitors. When the wealthy and single Mr. Bingley purchases a nearby house, Mrs. Bennet spies an opportunity and sends the girls to the first ball where Bingley is expected to appear. The girls defend the party from a zombie attack, and attraction sparks between Mr. Bingley and the eldest daughter Jane Bennet. Elizabeth clashes with Bingley’s friend, the haughty monster-hunter Fitzwilliam Darcy.”

Elizabeth and Darcy have become superheroes, while maintaining their upper class country English breeding. As a “Saturday Night Live” skit, I would think it a hoot of a travesty. But in a full-length novel or movie, I imagine that the joke quickly becomes boring and the tongue gets a little tired firmly stuck in the cheek for hours at a time.  Plus the frequent interjections of violence must quickly overcome the humor of mixing 18th century gentry with zombies.

Those who believe that this triumph of marketing over creativity reflects the bankrupt spirit of western culture should remember that the practice of a business person giving a concept that mixes unlike elements to an artist goes back at least to Roman times, when the Emperor Augustus’ political advisor Maecenas gave the well-known poet Virgil the task of creating a Roman epic that incorporated elements of the Iliad and the Odyssey into it, but with a Roman hero. In a sense, the early Renaissance paintings which depict the family of the person who paid for the artwork adoring the Virgin Mary and the Christ Child perform the same kind of genre mixing and for the same reason: to make money. We could analyze for days what makes the Aeneid or Botticelli’s “The Adoration of the Magi” great art and ”P&P&Z” a piece of titillating dreck. The points we would discuss include artistic technique, depth and consistency of characters, avoidance of the explicit, historical significance and discussions of or allusions to great issues.

As a cultural document reflecting its time,“P&P&Z” may be more telling than the Aeneid or Renaissance art, which after all, reflected the predilections and fears of a small sliver of the population, the wealthy. “P&P&Z” incorporates the politics of selfishness in its most extreme manifestation—consuming other people to survive and killing the worthless living dead who threaten to overrun the stable society of the prosperous living. It therefore both reflects and ameliorates the fears many have of falling behind in an economic system in which 95% of the population has stagnated or lost ground over the past three decades, while elected officials have used tax and spending policies literally to take money from the poor and middle class and give it to the wealthy, and then placed the blame on the poor themselves.

It seems as if the real goal of Ammon Bundy and the other occupiers of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge is to take permanent possession of government land as an act of armed rebellion. That’s the simplest way to understand their actions and their statements.

They are playing a game of chicken with the federal government. The current frigidly right-wing winds blowing throughout the country would make an armed attempt by the police or army to dislodge this rag-tag army a probable public relations disaster for President Obama. Bill Clinton faced a lot of criticism for the Waco siege and its violent conclusion in an age much more hostile to gun rights and secession fantasies than today. Imagine if a police force killed a few of Bundy’s buddies.

But I don’t think Ammon Bundy is suicidal. He just plays a good game of poker. He figures that he can stay on the land as long as he likes, as long as he doesn’t start shooting at people.

Good poker player, yes. Good PR hack, not so much. The problem Bundy faces is that everyone has lined up against his group—the people he’s trying to help, the local authorities and even the politicians who pontificated on the rights of his father not to pay nominal fees to have his cattle feed on public lands that tax dollars maintain. Plus wacko groups from the Northwest’s thriving survivalist movement have descended on the Refuge, looking to hook up with Bundy’s group. The more people out of his control—and maybe his payroll, for all we know—the greater the possibility that someone does something stupid that gives the federal government ethical permission to charge in. I’m pretty sure that Ammon Bundy is of the “discretion is the better part of valor” school, adhering to the Falstaffian belief that being a martyr is great PR for the cause, but hazardous to your health. Come to think of it, a fictional Bundy married to a redhead with two children often expressed the same sentiment.

All irony aside, the broader issue is one of property ownership. The Bundys and their supporters, don’t believe that the federal government should own any land. What they don’t realize is that if private hands held all land, the Bundys would have to pay market-rate fees to the owners of the land that the government now allows ranchers to use at low rates subsidized by taxes. The Bundys probably figure that they’ll be the ones who own the land and charge big bucks for its use.

The concept of public ownership of land is at least as old as the concept of kingship. Governments hold land for the public good in virtually every country of the world, from the most right-wing to the most leftist. A majority of all land in the United States has been public since U.S. armies took it from the Native American tribes in the 19th century. And those tribes tended to have a kind of shared concept of ownership in which no one owned the land, but everyone could enjoy it. If you think it’s a weird custom, consider that those readers who own houses may not own the drilling rights below the land surface and those in co-op apartments own only shares in a corporation that gives them the right to occupy their domicile. Every civilization complicates the issue of private property.

As the New York Times has reported, there is an active movement to transfer public lands from federal to state hands, especially out West. As usual, Koch money is behind some of the efforts to neuter the federal government. One state legislature, Utah’s, has passed a law demanding control of the federal lands in the state. The government has ignored the state.

To understand why the ultra rightwing wants to transfer federal lands to the state level, we need only analyze what states have done on national issues over the past ten years.  Working on the state level, whose legislatures tend to be controlled by rural conservatives, has enabled Republicans to pass a large number of laws that make it harder to vote and harder to get an abortion or food stamps and easier to carry a gun. Those in favor of having states own public land must figure they can then whittle away environmental regulations and usage limits, and perhaps eventually convince states to sell the land at typical government discounts.

There are two major conceptual problems with giving the states federal lands. Keep in mind that most of the land in question is uninhabited forests, wetlands, mountains, prairies and desserts. The issues involved in wildlife management, fire control, species protection, resource use, strategic resource management as an aspect of defense policy and environmental degradation go beyond the confines of any state. Addressing these concerns involves an enormous long term investment that the states can’t afford. Without tax dollars from other states with fewer square acres of public lands, individual states would be unable to manage these large holdings.

The privatization of the government has so far mostly led to a shift in the division of the income generated by providing the privatized goods and services. Management takes home a bigger share of the pie and most employees take home a small piece. Privatization is one of several policy changes the federal government made beginning in the Reagan era that have led to the rapid increase in wealth and income inequality we have experienced. Is there any reason to think that privatization of public land would be any different?

Let’s try to imagine how privatization of public land would play out: If the government gave away a fair share plot to every citizen, that would represent a crude form of communism, and we know the Bundys, Kochs and others toying with concept of massive land privatization don’t want that. No, what they probably have in mind is an auction or sale of public land. Large corporate interest will end up buying and then benefitting from most of it.

I was previously reluctant to call Donald Trump a fascist, because he hasn’t overtly called for a dictatorship. It also seems like an ad hominem cheap shot to compare anyone to the Nazis. The Donald’s first television commercial, however, reminds me how much his campaign resembles fascist political initiatives in Italy and Germany during the 1920s and early 1930s. In the commercial, which stylistically resembles Leni Riefenstahl’s “Triumph of the Will,” he uses the fascist method of manipulating film (or nowadays video) to support a Big Lie.

That Big Lie in the spot, as most of us now know, is that hordes of people, mostly criminal or degenerate, are scurrying across our border with Mexico and that we need to build a fence to keep them out. The TV ad shows a disorganized mass border crossing while the voice talks about U.S. borders. The actual video, however, shows a Moroccan scene, as I believe Politifact was the first to uncover.

Trump and one of his campaign factotums both claim that they did it that way on purpose, to show what could happen if we don’t build a fence. But no one reads the ad as a hypothetical. The juxtaposition of sound and images explicitly communicates that it’s the Mexican-American border.

I’m now ready to call Donald Trump as fascist.

How is Trump like a fascist? Let’s count the ways.

Trump has created a cult of personality.

He has stated he would run the government in an autocratic, unilateral way, as a strong man, for example saying that he would crush ISIS, he would make Mexico pay for a wall and he would stare down Putin. His platform consists of the “great genius” toughly and courageously attacking all problems by himself. A purely fascist sentiment.

The growing unruliness at Trump’s rallies, sometimes goaded by the great man himself, conjures the spontaneous violence that broke out at fascist gatherings.

Trump has told a number of Big Lies, including about illegal immigrants, Muslims, what happened after 9/11, job creation patterns, vaccinations, the president’s birth, the ramifications of his tax policy and his own past.

Now he has substantiated his favorite Big Lie with one of the very most unethical propaganda tricks around, editing film to distort reality. Editing or mislabeling film, BTW, is now routinely used by the right-wing to make caring physicians sound like butchers and dedicated civil servants sound like racists.

When I add up all these traits of fascism, I’m reminded of the childhood joke in which someone sees, touches and tastes something in the street, determines what it is and decides he’s glad he didn’t step in it.

If it barks like a dog and has fleas…

In other words, Trump’s first crude exercise in buying time to televise overtly racial agitprop seals the deal: He is a fascist, with views similar to well-known fascists such as Mussolini and the German Nazi Party.

I’m not saying that Trump wants to destroy an ethnic group the way Hitler tried to destroy the Jews. But like Mussolini and Hitler before they assumed power, Trump has argued for racial politics, exaggerated the problems facing the country, told blatant lies about “outsiders,” war and the economy, assumed the persona of an all-knowing strong man, attacked both the government and the basic governmental structure, and used manipulative techniques of the mass media to illustrate his lies.

One poll says that 47% of voters would vote for Donald Trump against Hillary Clinton in a presidential election. He is now consistently polling around 40% among Republican candidates for the nomination. There are plenty of signs in the polls that Donald Trump’s following is much wider than that of today’s Nazi-leaning National Democratic Party of Germany. I guess that means that 70 years after we defeated Nazi Germany in World War II, there are many more devotees to fascism in the United States than in Germany.

Of course, the Trump phenomenon may not extend to the caucuses and voting booths. The country could get tired of him, the way we grow tired of a TV show in the middle of the second season or a pop star whose songs all have the same incessantly peppy beat. He may misplay his hand by going after Bill Clinton’s past affairs, since it puts his and his family’s sordid sexual past into play, which could turn off the Evangelicals in his base. He may yet say something so outrageous that it kills his support. But even if he fades from the political scene long before November, his dominance in Republican polls for such a long time says something very ugly about the land of the free and the home of the brave.

The cycle of life on Earth that repeats itself every 365 days is part of nature. The idea to count these cycles and to set a date to begin counting each new one is a human invention, as is celebration of each of these new beginnings.

The human race is not in complete agreement as to when a New Year starts: the Chinese and Jews use lunar calendars, which produce different starting days each year. The Jews confuse the matter even more, celebrating the anniversary of the birth of the world as the New Year in the fall and ignoring the first day of the Hebrew calendar year, which occurs in the spring. That most of the world has settled on what is the dead of winter for a majority of people as the beginning of the year seems counterintuitive. Don’t the early shoots and buds of spring seem more like a beginning than leafless branches or snow-covered streets?

Celebration traditions for any holiday might look strange to an anthropologist from another planet, but they make sense to us. People gather in groups and drink alcohol to mark many important occasions across cultures. No other celebration, however, can attract one million people to one spot in the middle of a small American island off the Atlantic Ocean or two million to a Brazilian beach.

Most holidays also have a religious aspect, and for the first day of the year, a secular holiday, spirituality has typically manifested itself in a pledge to be a better person or improve yourself or the world during the coming twelve months. Wikipedia’s sketchy but fact-filled article on New Year’s resolutions reports that the Babylonians and Romans made promises to their gods at the beginning of the year. Today, about 40% of all Americans make New Year’s resolutions, most of them personal in nature.

While I think it’s important for people to improve their lives, and especially their health, I’m going to propose a number of possible New Year’s resolutions that also improve the world in which we live.

Here are some OpEdge New Year resolutions to consider:

1. Don’t vote for anyone who questions human-caused global warming, evolution, the moral imperative to accept as many Syrian refugees as possible, same-sex marriage or a woman’s right to an abortion.
2. Don’t vote for anyone who thinks lowering taxes on the wealthy produces more jobs; supports charter schools, subsidies for the oil and gas industry or privatization of government functions; or wants fewer or looser gun laws and environmental regulations.
3. Write your representatives and all political candidates asking them to support lifting the cap on income assessed for Social Security taxes; strengthening gun control laws; raising taxes on incomes over $250,000; raising the gas tax and dedicating all the additional money raised to inner and inter-city mass transit; forcing all charter schools to have unionized teaching staffs; raising the minimum wage to $15.00/hour; forcing large corporations to repatriate their income; and creating an easy path to citizenship for undocumented aliens.
4. Vote in every primary and general election.
5. Attend at least one political rally in support of a progressive cause.
6. Do not watch Fox News or listen to any radio station that carries Rush Limbaugh or Sean Hannity.
7. Start composting —you can store the composted materials in a plastic bag in your freezer until it’s convenient to dispose of it.
8. Replace two car trips a week with mass transit, walking or bicycling.
9. If you don’t bicycle or walk to work, go to work only in a vehicle carrying at least four people.
10. Spend a half hour a day reading a history book that does not detail battles.
11. Contribute money or time to one organization that is helping refugees of war.
12. Speak up when someone at a social gathering starts spouting right-wing lies about the President, Hillary Clinton, minorities, crime, guns, abortion, gay marriage or any other issue.

I wish all my readers a prosperous and creative New Year!

Republicans are very clear that they intend to make Bill Clinton’s past wolfish behavior an issue in the election campaign. Donald Trump, Carly Fiorina and Ben Carson have all said that discussing Bill’s past affairs is fair game, as did the editorial boards of the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post. Both Trump and the Journal compare Bill’s actions and words to Trump’s and declare Trump to be less of a sexist than our ex-President. The Journal even talked about Clinton’s “war on women.”

There are lots of ways that Democrats could react to Republican accusations regarding Bill Clinton’s sexual past. They could point out all the strides that women made during the Clinton Administration.

They could remind people that unlike Trump, who believes he is superior to women and has insulted a number of them for their looks or their bodily functions, Bill loves women.

They could reconstruct the two incidents that reflect most poorly on Slick Willie and assert that Paula Jones was a gold-digger and Monica Lewinsky admitted she came to the White House looking to score some presidential booty.

They could explain that many spouses stray and that Bill and Hillary worked out their marital difficulties and didn’t get divorced, unlike Trump, who has been divorced twice, with at least one divorce coming after a torrid love affair with a much younger woman. Perhaps Clinton supporters could play Tammy Wynette’s “Stand by Your Man” in the background while making this point. This approach might resonate with those who don’t believe in divorce.

They could claim that the extramarital affairs are a private matter that should play no part in the political discussion.

All of these approaches to responding to the Republican’s attempts to dredge up Bill’s past sexual history would be wrong for one reason—all are irrelevant. In fact the entire discussion is irrelevant, simply because: Bill Clinton is not Hillary Clinton.

It is Hillary who is running for office, not Bill. Bill’s past should be of no concern to voters unless someone can prove that Hillary Clinton lied or participated in a cover-up, which they can’t. If Hillary had acted illegally or unethically before, during or after her husband’s several “bimbo eruptions,” the Republicans would have uncovered evidence after more than twenty years of investigating the Clintons’ past for dirt.

In this regard, Bill Clinton plays the role of embarrassing relative—similar to Billy Carter, Donald Nixon, Neil Bush or Bill’s own brother, Roger. The one difference, of course, is that Bill is not an obscure figure, but an extremely popular ex-President.

The decades-old sexual antics of Hillary Clinton’s spouse have absolutely no bearing on Hillary Clinton’s competence or her ability to lead the country, administer the laws, set foreign policy or work with Congress.

But while Bill Clinton’s sexual history is not an issue of substance, Trump’s dismissive attitudes towards women definitely should be open for discussion, again, for one reason only—because the Donald is running for office.  His old-fashioned laddie-boy sexism will make it harder for him to work with female members of Congress and foreign leaders. Imagine Trump referring to Nancy Pelosi’s menopausal behavior or disparaging Angela Merkel’s fashion sense. Finding out how Trump really stands on a woman’s right to control her own body is important—sometimes he says he favors abortion, sometimes he says he’s against it. The fact that the Donald wants to defund Planned Parenthood is an issue.  Some have characterized Trump as the archetypal “rich man who regularly trades in his wives for younger models.” Trump’s past marriages may turn out to be a character issue for many people.

In short, Trump’s attitudes towards women and women’s issues is of utmost importance in determining his suitability to serve as President of the United States. But whatever Hillary Clinton’s husband did two decades ago is nothing more than a sideshow. Of course, sideshows such as Trump, Carson and Cruz are coming to dominate the Republican nominating process.

I never thought that I would agree with Tyler Cowen, a professor of economics at George Mason University, whom the mainstream media has been trying to turn into a “public intellectual” for the past few years. Cowen, who is general director of the Koch-funded Mercatus Center, specializes in two types of illogical thinking; 1) proposing market solutions to problems created by markets; 2) Arguing about the impact on individuals instead of focusing on the impact on groups.

Among Cowen gems of fallacious reasoning was his embarrassing critique of Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the 21st Century. Cowen’s argument tended to follow the pattern of staring at the trees so you won’t see the forest, which in this case means believing that the fact individual families gain and lose wealth through generations proves that over time more wealth does not tend to accumulate into fewer hands. By focusing on the trees—individual wealthy people, Cowen ignores the forest—the class of the wealthy—who have accumulated more and more of the wealth of the world and the United States over the past 35 years.

Earlier this year, Cowen used the same trick of ignoring the group to perform another feat of corporate justification in a New York Times article asserting that some workers—those who hustle, i.e., “are willing and able to turn their spare time to productive uses,”—will do very well in the freelance economy created by sharing services such as Uber and Airbnb. He ignores the statistics to argue about opportunity for those who possess the entrepreneurial spirit, the Holy Ghost and Holy Grail of American society as conceived by big business operators and their think-tank factotums.

Here it is the season of good will and good tidings, and I find that I agree with what Cowen wrote in “How a Marriage of Equals May Promote Inequality” a New York Times Sunday Business article under the rubric “Economic View.”

Cowen states that professionals tend to marry other professionals and blue and pink collar workers tend to marry each other, creating a natural disparity in incomes. The math is easy. Two lawyers making $250,000 a year have a household income of half a million, while a cashier earning $30,000 married to a janitor making $40,000 generate a household income of $70,000.

I didn’t need to read Cowen’s documentation to know he’s right, because in 1982 I used Stanford Research Institute Research to predict in a five-part television news special that “like incomes marrying” would be one of five factors that would lead to the United States becoming a nation of rich and poor in the near future.

Yes, 1982. Professor Cowen, congratulations on catching up to the times.

Once upon a time, many women didn’t work, and those who did made far less than men, so that “like incomes marrying” was an impossibility, except among the ultra-wealthy who often arranged marriages to preserve or increase family wealth.

Cowen gives us a tired-sounding list of three potential cures, two of which are from the right-wing playbook: further experiments with charter schools and higher subsidies or tax credits for children. His third prescription is also tied to education: universal preschool. Let’s forget that there is nothing inherent in charter schools that improves educational outcomes, and focus on the common theme of education in Cowen’s suggestions, which he admits won’t do much. Both right-wing and centrist economists and social thinkers virtually all say that greater education will lead to less inequality, because the more educated worker will get a better job and make more money. It’s a load of hooey, for one reason: Someone has to take out the garbage, drive trucks, input raw data, change bedpans and perform other jobs that require little or no training. As long these jobs are misprized by society and paid extremely low wages, no amount of education will eradicate poverty and lessen inequality of wealth and income.

Cowen forgets to mention the other factors that have led to a society of rich and poor, with a shrunken, almost moribund middle class: 1) Loss of union jobs; 2) Globalization; 3) New tax policies; 4) Automation and computerization.

The real answer to reversing the trend of greater inequality of the income and wealth is to reverse the social and economic policies of the past 40 years so that those who make more money make a little less and those who make less money make a little more. A combination of raising the minimum wage, greater unionization of the work force, increasing taxes on the wealthy and a reversal of the privatization of government functions will go a long way to reversing inequality of wealth and income in the short run.

Let’s return to our hypothetical two couples and imagine that the two lawyers make only $150,000 each and that the cashier makes $70,000 and the janitor makes $80,000. The professional couple still makes twice what the blue collar couple do, but the blue collar couple isn’t doing badly at a combined income of $150,000 a year. I haven’t run the numbers, but when we compensate for inflation, that seems more in keeping with the middle class spectrum of incomes in 1950’s and 1960’s, when we had a strong middle class and a large percent of the workforce unionized; that is, before professional and executive jobs received an enormous income boost and the income from other jobs started to stagnate.

Unless we start paying everyone exactly the same and taking away everyone’s savings every five years, we will never achieve perfect equality, and no one says that we should. But the current situation has become intolerable to far too many people who used to consider themselves part of the middle class or thought they had a chance to improve their economic conditions.

The problem, then, is not inequality per se, but that inequality has led to a shrinking of the middle class. The solution is not more education, but an end to the economic policies started by the Reagan revolution that have transformed the United States from a nation of the middle class into one of rich and poor.

About 18 months ago, Frito-Lay introduced a TV ad in which animated versions of Mr. and Mrs. Potato Head eat potato chips, knowing full well that it is a form of cannibalism but reveling in the guilty sin.

In the original spot, Mr. Potato Head gets home from work and can’t find his wife anywhere. He hears a strange crackle and then another. He follows the sounds until he sees his wife hiding in a room with a bag of Lay’s potato chips, munching away. She is suitably embarrassed at what amounts to an act of cannibalism, but the commercial explains that the chips are so delicious that they are irresistible. The last shot shows Mr. & Mrs. Potato Head snacking on the chips with a look of mischievous glee on their faces—they know they are doing a naughty thing, but it just doesn’t matter.

Frito-Lay is flooding the airwaves with the Potato Head cannibal spots for the holiday season. More recent spots include one in which Mr. Potato Head dons a disguise to buy enough potato chips to satisfy everyone at Times Square on New Year’s Eve and another in which the Potato Head couple hides in the bushes.

All these spots remind me of Jean-Luc Godard’s masterpiece, “Weekend,” at the end of which the main female character sucks on a bone from a stew prepared by the revolutionary who has forcibly made her his concubine. “What is it we’re eating?” she asks, to which the punky gangster answers, “Your husband.” She has the last line of the movie: “Not bad…” and then keeps gnawing on the bone.

In all the Potato Head commercials, at one point the Mrs. slowly and erotically pulls a chip from the bag, brings it to her lips and suggestively swallows it. This simple action conveys the type of irresistible sexuality that often informs transgressive acts. Moreover, it suggests that the potato chip is an upscale product to be savored like expensive dark chocolate. The sexual overtone underscores the ad’s attempt to add value to the potato chip, since the audience is used to seeing sex sell luxury products. Note, too, that the slow, sensual approach to potato-chip eating modeled by Mrs. Potato Head does not correspond to the non-stop nibbling people usually associate with the chip.

The real transgressive act committed by avid consumers of potato chips is against their own bodies. The chips have almost no nutritional value and are loaded down with salt. The ease at which one can consume a large number of chips while watching a game, or playing one, helps to implicate chips of all sorts in the obesity crisis faced by the United States and the rest of the industrialized world.

That cannibalism would serve as the stand-in to overeating junk food says a lot about the values of current American society.  Eating another being of your own species is generally considered to be an abomination. Although the Potato Heads are not humans, they are stand-ins for humans with human emotions and aspirations, just like the various mice, ducks, rabbits, dogs, foxes, lions and other animals we have anthropomorphized since the beginning of recorded history. From Aesop and Wu Cheng’en to Orwell and Disney, authors have frequently used animals as stand-ins for humans in fairy tales, satires and children’s literature.

So when Mrs. Potato Head eats a potato, it’s an overt representation of cannibalism—humans eating other humans.

The advertiser is trying to make fun of transgression, to diminish the guilt that many on a diet or watching their weight might feel noshing on potato chips.

But behind the jokiness of a potato eating a potato chip stands more than the idea that it’s okay for humans to snack on chips. The implication in having a potato playing at human eating other potatoes is that we are allowed to do anything transgressive, even cannibalism—everything is okay, as long as it leads to our own pleasure.  The end-game of such thinking is that our sole moral compass should be our own desires.

Thus the Lay’s Potato Head commercial expresses an extreme form of the politics of selfishness, the Reaganistic dictate that everyone should be allowed to pursue his or her own best interests without the constraint of society. Like the image of the vampire living on the blood of humans or of the “Purge” series of movies in which people are allowed any violent action one night a year, the Potato Head family eating other potatoes that have first been dried, processed, bathed in chemicals, extruded and baked symbolizes and justifies what the 1% continues to do to the rest of the population.

And it’s a happy message, too!  We don’t get the sense that it’s a “dog-eat-dog world in which you have to eat or be eaten.” No, Lay’s presents the gentle Reagan version: you can do anything you like to fill your selfish desires (no matter whom it hurts).

The Mr. Potato Head cannibalism commercial offers a fable about the relationship between the haves and the have-nots, or in this case—those who eat and those who are eaten. The fabulist is interested in selling products and making consumers feel good about the process of consumption, even when it is transgressive.  Some may call it an overturning of traditional morality. I call it business as usual in a post-industrial consumer society.

What I would like to ask Donald Trump is what was so disgusting about Hillary Clinton having to go to the bathroom in the middle of the debate Saturday evening?

His statement—part of a vulgar excoriation of Hillary—marks another new low in a campaign of new lows that Republicans have hit in the 2016 race for their party’s nomination for the presidency.

Does Trump find natural functions to be disgusting? Or is it just the thought of a woman pulling down her pantyhose and squatting on a toilet seat that disgusts him?  Or maybe it makes him feel some kind of inner guilt? Or does he find the length of time she spent relieving herself to be unseemly?

Maybe Trump believes that Clinton—and by extension all candidates—should wear diapers so they can withstand the rigors of campaigning without taking a break?  Maybe that strange smile we sometimes see on Trump’s face, when he pauses, seemingly to consider his thoughts, is just a natural expression of relief, similar to the first smile we see on infants?

I have often thought that my experience interacting with megalomaniacal entrepreneurs and real estate developers gives me insight into Trump’s mind, and his potty comment convinces me of it. There exists an archetypal business bully who tries to get his (and much less frequently, her) way through intimidation. This type—let’s call it the “Trump”—often think that the world revolves around him. The Trump believes he can browbeat everyone else at the negotiating table. The Trump frequently calls three-hour meetings at 5:00 pm and provides no food and keeps the discussion moving so quickly, there’s no time to ask for a bathroom break. He’ll concede no point, hoping that hunger and an overflowing bladder will make his adversaries give in. A Trump tries to be a man’s man, loves to smoke cigars and wears beautifully styled conservative standard business attire. Even in a casual leather jacket, he retains the tie. The Trumps tend to make a lot of sexist comments and treat women in sexist ways, but always pride themselves on their extreme heterosexuality. All industries have these types, but real estate development in particular attracts the Trumps.

My own experience with Trump types includes the current chairman of the board of a generic pharmaceuticals company when he was running an independent financial planning firm that had engaged my PR agency to design and write a capabilities brochure. My designer was a whiz at creating asymmetrical symmetry, which means that the composition is in balance, but without the two halves (horizontal or vertical) being exactly the same. Asymmetrical symmetry injects movement and dynamism into a composition and has been a key strategy in the visual arts since the cave paintings. We were two hours into a 4:00 pm meeting that didn’t start until 5:00 pm in which this client and his brother detailed changes, all of which involved moving objects in the design to make it more symmetrically boring. Suddenly, he walked over to me with the same angry frown that I see on Trump’s face in virtually every televised appearance, leaned over, his hands pulling out the suspenders on his pants and got as close to me as possible, swelled out his chest and said, “I understand you’re prissy and we hired you for your prissiness.”

Notice that he wanted to get under my skin by feminizing me.

I think of that incident every single time I see Donald Trump speak on TV, and especially when he has made his frequent sexist comments, e.g., about Fiorina’s looks and Megyn Kelly’s menstruation. I smile and say to myself, “Yes, I recognize this type of sexist, bullying behavior.” No one will ever know what lurks inside anyone else’s head, but I suspect that we know more about Donald Trump’s thought processes than most, since his speeches often appear to be the unedited ramblings of his mind spouted at the moment they occur to him,  without consideration of the thought or the words used to express it. I imagine, though, the following to be how Trump’s trashy imagination produced the word “disgusting” to describe Hillary’s need to relieve herself:

1. One is supposed to hold it in at a meeting.
2. A man can hold it in longer than a woman (he thinks).
3. Not to hold it in is to behave like a woman, that is, the frail sex and not a macho man.
4. Not to behave like a man at a meeting is disgusting.

In short, I believe calling Hillary “disgusting” was another sexist remark by Trump, another instance of his revealing his inherent feelings of superiority to women. That his remark involved an intimate bodily function isn’t even a new low in vulgarity, since you can’t get any lower than speaking explicitly about menstruation. At the very least, this latest vulgarism confirmed Trump’s sexism, but a darker interpretation might conclude that he has a fetish focused on either bathrooms or one or more bodily functions.

Trump’s vulgarity is not presidential, not to be confused with the homespun good-old-boy charm cultivated by Johnson, Reagan, Carter, Bush II and Clinton. It has no place in political discourse. His grandiosity and gruff attack style will please many Americans even as it fails as a negotiating style with other nations.

Rachel Maddow reported that someone figured out that every Republican with as much of a lead in the polls as Trump has at this time in the race went on to win the nomination. Impossible to imagine, but every day the possibility increases that a major party will nominate a vulgar, blustering, know-nothing hothead who lies through his teeth and has no experience in elected office or negotiating with equals. We’ve had a number of know-nothing liars in the Oval Office, including Bush II, Reagan and Nixon, so that’s nothing new. The vulgarity will end up embarrassing the United States on a weekly basis and lead to the fraying of relationships with other leaders, here and abroad. The blustering hothead, however, is what scares me the most, because it could get us into a major war and keep us there for as long as the vain, bullying president desires.

Reading Malcolm Byrnes’ Iran-Contra reminds me that since the 1970s the United States has endured a presidential crisis in every decade. Comparing these crises reveals some disturbing trends in our government and our so-called free press.

In the 1970s, Richard Nixon resigned rather than suffer the humiliation of impeachment for ordering the break-in of an office of the Democratic Party and then trying to cover it up. Several of his staffers and hired hands served time in jail. Note that Nixon’s fall had nothing to do with his illegal secret bombing of Cambodia.

Byrnes tracks the presidential crisis of the 1980s in excruciating detail, based on his reading of an enormous range of government documents and news reports. The Reagan Administration illegally arranged for the sales of weapons to the Iranians in exchange for American hostages being held in Lebanon. Administration operatives funneled the money to the Contras, a ragtag army trying to overthrow the government of Nicaragua, in concealed defiance of American law and the expressed wishes of Congress. When rumors and evidence of this illegal activity began to emerge, the White House engaged in a cover-up, which, like Nixon’s of Watergate’s, ultimately failed. The president knew everything from the very beginning. An impeachable offense, you would assume, but people liked Ronald Reagan and didn’t want to go through the slow-motion horror of Watergate again. Many people were indicted, some convicted, but no one served any time.

BTW, Byrne is unable to prove or disprove the rumor that Reagan confidants promised Iran weapons if it held onto 52 American hostages until after the 1980 presidential election. Meetings were held; no one knows or will say what was discussed in them.

The 1990s presidential crisis seems ludicrous in retrospect. The Republicans spent years investigating Bill Clinton, trying to find some sign of illegal activity. All they could come up with was that Slick Willie liked to chase skirts. The House of Representatives impeached Clinton for no act he committed that endangered the United States or subverted the law, our democratic ideals or the will of the people. What he did was lie about one of his affairs, which is like blaming someone for touching third base after hitting a home run. Isn’t lying an essential part of the sin of infidelity and not a new, impeachable, sin?

The presidential crisis of the first decade of the 21st century revolved around the Bush II’s reaction to 9/11: manufacturing a reason to go to war against Iraq and establishing a torture gulag around the globe. The mainstream news media and our political elite seem to have given the Bush Administration a pass on the Iraq War, spinning everything away from the most likely explanation for the misstatements uttered by the President, Vice President and others on the rationale for going to war. As a nation, we prefer to blame bad information instead of out-and-out deceit.

But there is no doubt that Bush II and his henchmen conceived of, approved and implemented our shameful and illegal torture program. Instead of prosecuting these criminals, the Obama Administration chose not to investigate or indict, but to do as much as possible to ensure that no future administration resorted to such Nazi-like barbarism.

The Republicans should have thanked Obama for burying their toxic dirty laundry, but instead they created the presidential crisis of the 2010s: the calling into question of the very legitimacy of the President. The Republicans have sowed hatred and distrust of our first African-American president by stoking rumors that he wasn’t born in the United States and is a practicing Muslim. They have further delegitimized the president by attempting to conduct their own foreign policy: arranging to have a foreign head of state address Congress without paying a visit to the President and writing an open letter to Iranian leaders. No president before Obama has ever had to endure accusations of being a socialist, a traitor, anti-Christian or un-American outside the campaign trail, perhaps because campaigns now seem to last the full four years of a presidential term.  Also new are criticisms of the President without proposing alternatives. Following the lead of their constituencies, many elected officials came to oppose the war in Viet Nam vociferously. By way of contrast, for eight years the Republicans have accused Obama of projecting weakness in foreign affairs without proposing to do anything differently.

Let’s review what we’ve learned. All these presidents, except perhaps Obama, were caught lying. Sometimes it mattered and sometimes it didn’t. My conclusion—lying isn’t a presidential crime, unless it’s done to facilitate or conceal something that is considered a crime.

And what constitutes criminal or potential criminal behavior by a president?

It’s not okay to play dirty political tricks, but it is okay to sell guns to our professed enemy and use the proceeds to contravene an explicit decision by Congress.

It’s not okay to have an affair with a consenting adult, but it is okay to torture dozens of people, many of whom are innocent.

No one seems to care how many people you bomb into the Stone Age, no matter the circumstances.

And it’s still not okay to be a black male in America.

Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia expressed an odious racist sentiment the other day when he said that those admitted to elite universities based on Affirmative Action standards suffered a disservice because they struggle at the elite school instead of succeeding at a lesser institution.

The reason I know Scalia’s comments carry a racial tinge—the false notion of black intellectual abilities—is because Scalia says nothing about the struggles faced by the less qualified student who happens to be an athlete or a legacy.  Studies show that legacies get a bigger break than either African-Americans or athletes do in college admissions, that is, that legacies have the lowest grades and SAT scores on average of any studied group.  A legacy, don’t forget, is someone who gets admitted because mom and dad and maybe granddad and great-gramps went to the college in question and have been giving it a lot of money for a long time.  I imagine that many of Scalia’s bosses, their children and perhaps one or more of Scalia’s own children have benefited from the special treatment given legacies. I vividly remember my son’s friend complaining that the legacies held back the classes at Harvard because they were so unprepared. Legacies and athletes would also do better at lesser schools by Scalia’s reasoning.

Scalia also doesn’t take into account many realities of higher education. For vast numbers of programs such as engineering, hard sciences, medicine and law, there is no difference between what is taught at any university. The only difference is who teaches it. An engineering course will be just as challenging at Harvard as at Arizona State as at New Jersey Institute of Technology. Why shouldn’t someone deprived of the breaks routinely given to legacies get a chance to interact with a more prestigious and probably better connected professor at an elite school? Society will benefit from the greater diversity and equality of wealth and income that will ensue.

As to much of the rest of the university curricula—the humanities and social sciences plus the burgeoning if sometimes dubious fields that try to apply the research in those venerable disciplines such as mass communications and marketing—grade inflation over the past few decades has eroded my confidence in the meaning of the grade performance at the university level.

I also find that the easier SAT test no longer serves as a valid measure of how the very most talented students are performing in relation to each other, and so is of no value in sorting which kids should go to the very top universities and which belong in the next level down.

Universities mouth mealy justifications for admitting great athletes and the children of former grads. Their reasons for affirmative action are much more compelling: those admitted under affirmative action programs have often gone to segregated schools with fewer resources, not gone to specialty camps or taken SAT prep course, not had consultants help them write their essays. Some may have suffered food insecurity or other trauma, which research now tells us will reduce a person’s ability to perform on an intellectual level. Some suffer because of the reverberating effects of racism through the decades: There is little social mobility in the United States, and the ancestors of most affirmative action students were slaves, including those who come from middle class backgrounds.

The Wall Street Journal is carrying an opinion piece by Jason l. Riley, another of what seems to be an army of right-wing policy analysts from the Manhattan Institute, which praises Scalia’s comments. Riley argues that society suffers by allowing less qualified affirmative action applicants to attend elite schools instead of the more qualified because the school at the second tier now has to go to even less qualified applicants creating a chain of less qualified applicants attending each subsequent level of school. That reasoning doesn’t take into account that the white who is bumped from Harvard or Michigan for an affirmative action candidate—or a legacy or athlete for that matter—will now bring up the standards of the lower rated school.

Riley uses anecdotal evidence to state that affirmative action students do less well in college. I was unable to find any large study on the topic, but it seems beside the point for several reasons. First of all, we don’t ask the same question of legacies and athletes, although I suspect that since they come into schools less qualified than affirmative action students they will perform worse. Besides, the leading institutions have a value beyond the grade point average. In fact, the value of the elite diploma outweighs the grades for many—just ask Al Gore, Jack Kennedy, Teddy Kennedy or George Bush II.

Perhaps the most significant reason that the performance of affirmative action students is a moot point is that affirmative action is not about guaranteeing success, but about creating opportunity. Affirmative action gives someone from a disadvantaged background the opportunity to make it. As in the Texas case before the Supreme Court, the kids who get accepted to elite schools on an affirmative action basis are no slouches, and often the tops in their school and tops in the competitions in which they have participated. They deserve the opportunity to attend the elite school at least as much as the gifted athlete or the pampered scion of a wealthy family.