Andrew Clavin’s Ep. 63 skewers Trump as a "golden toilet," mocking his supporters’ blind loyalty while praising Marco Rubio’s immigrant success narrative over Trump’s crassness. He dismisses Making a Murderer as biased, citing DNA and police tactics to defend Stephen Avery’s guilt, then pivots to trash rock ‘n’ roll—using Peter Sellers’ Shakespearean Beatles parody—to champion the Great American Songbook’s sophistication. Clavin’s rant ends with a warning about Trump’s threat to democracy, framing his show as both predictive and culturally elitist. [Automatically generated summary]
In keeping with predictions in the New York Times that global warming had put an end to snow, a massive blizzard buried the New York Times through the weekend, causing a rampant increase in the number of facts reported throughout the country.
At the same time, the snowfall brought the federal government to a halt, causing big business to come under attack from innovative small companies who were suddenly unregulated.
Meanwhile, poor people panicked when they realized there were now no federal government entitlements to encourage them to live mediocre half-lives on the dole, and they immediately began to act responsibly and work harder in order to build better futures for themselves and their children.
Just before the snowfall began, the federal government had been doing the important business of making our problems worse so it could argue that we needed the federal government to make them better, so they could make them worse.
So they could argue they would make them better, so they could make them worse.
After the snow shut the government down, senators and congressmen no longer needed to tend to those important activities, so they had more time to spend with their families, time which they put to good use by sleeping with their mistresses and male pages, and then crying softly into their whiskey glasses.
New Jersey Governor Chris Christie said it was childish to make jokes about the blizzard, seeing as it had caused deaths and destruction.
The governor was so upset about the childishness of it that he dribbled crumbs from his cinnabon on his bib and spilled his glass of milk.
Today, the nation is digging out for some reason.
And the federal government will soon be back to work.
Pray for snow.
Trigger warning.
I'm Andrew Clavin, and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
We're back.
It's Monday.
We're back in time to save the Republic.
Just in time to save the, we thought it was going to go down another.
If the weekend had been one day longer, the Republic would be gone, but we're back and we're here to say.
I did so much over this weekend, I'm probably going to be talking about it all week long, but I do want to talk, I have a lot of, lot of stuff to talk about.
I want to talk about the fact I finished finally watching that documentary, Making a Murderer, and I want to give my impressions about that because I have a pretty solid take on it that I'm pretty sure has to do with the facts.
And what else?
Oh, I had some really nice news, which I'm sure I'll forget to tell you about, but I'm going to save it to the stuff I like thing.
When I get to stuff I like, if I forget, remind me, because I had some really nice news.
But first, we have to talk about politics.
And first, when we're talking about politics, I think we just have to reflect for just a moment on the metaphor of the football games played over the weekend when everybody knew, including me, that my New England Patriots were going to destroy the Denver Broncos.
We all knew it.
It was on paper.
It was absolutely positive.
There was nobody who had any other prediction.
It made perfect sense.
We just forgot one thing.
There was only one thing that we left out.
The game hadn't been played yet.
The game hadn't been played yet.
When you played the game, all kinds of things happened, like, you know, character and luck and strategy.
And the Denver Broncos are going to the Super Bowl to play the Carolina Panthers.
Great old quarterback against great young quarterback.
I know which team I'm on for the old guys.
I mean, those are my people.
The old ones are my people.
I'm sticking with my tribe.
So that's who I'll be.
But this brings us to the election.
If you have been listening to the Andrew Clavin Show, it is virtually as if you have been watching the news in the future.
It is like, it's got to be like three weeks, maybe four weeks ago, I said that if Hillary Clinton got into trouble, independents would start to look at making a third-party run, and that my choice for the most likely guy to do that was Michael Bloomberg, the former mayor of New York.
Right?
Didn't I say that?
And then last week, I pointed out that the Sarah Palin endorsement of Trump obscured the fact that Hillary Clinton had this terrible week in which all these leaks came out that really sounded to me as if the White House was signaling to the public that they were going to let her go down if the FBI decided to indict her.
And they weren't going to step in and there was not going to be any shenanigans or anything.
She was going down.
Suddenly, Saturday, Michael Bloomberg, who also must be listening to the show, announced that he was making an exploration for a third party run for president.
The Wall Street Journal this morning was bragging about the fact that they predicted this last week, and I thought, ha, ha, ha, sorry, I mean, come on.
If you've been watching my show, you'd have been pretty weeks and weeks ago.
So Bloomberg, I mean, Bloomberg's idea is obviously this.
If it's a Trump Bernie Sanders race or a Cruz Bernie Sanders race, that these guys are very much on the outside of what he thinks is the center and that he can come in and take that center away.
He is a liberal.
He's an independent, but as a mayor, he governed as a fiscal conservative, I would say.
He was a liberal.
He was an annoying busybody.
I mean, banning soda because he thought it was important that people eat.
Remember, he was doing that stuff?
And then his gun thing, he went across the country.
Oh, he had to stop guns and he wept.
He wept because people didn't want them building a mosque on the site of 9-11, you know, where they could dance and celebrate the destruction of America.
Why would you be so mean to the Muslims?
So he had all that stuff going on.
But as a mayor, he did dig out, he filled in potholes, and he did keep the fiscal thing going and he kept law and order, which the new mayor is not doing.
He did keep law and order going.
So he has that.
No mayor has ever, no third party candidate has won since Lincoln.
I mean, Abraham Lincoln was the last third party.
No mayor has ever gone on to higher office.
Being the mayor of New York is the hardest job in America next to the presidency, and it always ruins your career because your record stinks because you can't, it's an ungovernable city.
So I don't think that this is going to go very far.
But if he does it, I think it's good because if Cruz is the candidate, I think it's the one thing that gives Cruz a very solid chance of winning.
And I think if Hillary goes down, if Hillary goes down, or if Hillary is so burdened by indictments and scandal and all that, he might just decide to try it.
He's got his own money.
He won't need funding.
So, you know, it's definitely a development to look for, and you heard it here first, as you will continue to hear all the news that's coming here first.
So looking at the actual race, I'm watching the race, and what's happening now is we're a week away from Iowa.
And as I say, nothing has happened.
You would not know this from watching the news, and you wouldn't know it from listening to pundits, but literally nothing has happened.
The polls, you know, I just don't know how good they are.
So many people are saying they're undecided.
In New Hampshire, you can decide to vote in either party, and people don't even know which party they're going to vote for.
I don't know whether the people who are undecided are leaning to the Trumpians or they're more moderate.
I still have this kind of gut sense that Rubio is like a real player and is going to come along.
I'm watching these guys, and everybody is lumping Cruz and Trump together.
You know, everybody's saying, well, if it's Cruz and Trump, if it's Trump and Cruz, if it's Cruz and Trump.
But as the party poo-bahs, the establishment started to panic, you know, as Iowa, they started to side with Trump.
You know, the establishment, and everybody on the Trump team is like, oh, we hate the establishment.
The establishment starts to side with Trump.
And that's because they dislike Trump and they dislike Cruz for totally different reasons.
They dislike Trump because they don't control him and he's a bore and they don't know what he's going to do.
They're sort of telling themselves that since he has no policies, he'll take their policies, but they don't know that.
But they hate Cruz for a different reason.
I found this little video clip of Cruz on the Senate floor last year speaking to them.
This is why they hate Cruz.
Listen to him speaking to his fellow senators.
It's as if at a football game, the beginning of the football game, the two team captains go out to flip the coin, and one team's coach walks out and says, we forfeit.
And they do it game after game after game, right at the coin flip.
Leadership says we forfeit, we surrender.
We Republicans will fund every single big government liberal priority of the Democrats.
Now, if a team did that, if an NFL team did that over 16 games, we know what their record would be.
It would be 0 in 16.
And, you know, I'd be pretty sure that the fans who bought tickets, who went to the game, would be pretty ticked off as they watch their coach forfeit over and over and over and over again.
You want to understand the volcanic frustration with Washington?
It's that Republican leadership in both houses will not fight for a single priority that we promised the voters we would fight for when we were campaigning less than a year ago.
Okay, so that's Cruz standing up with his colleagues, right, his fellow senators in what is called the biggest club in the world, right?
The best club in the world.
These are guys, they're all supposed to be collegial.
They're all supposed to be team players.
Even the guys who oppose each other, who hate each other on the debate shows, like each other perfectly well when they're sitting in the Senate floor.
You know, they're drinking, they're kidding around.
Ted Kennedy used to go around and joke with the Republicans.
The Republicans would joke with Ted Kennedy.
You know, there's a little bit more of a fever of partisanship now.
But Cruz is standing there and saying to the Republicans, his colleagues, you betrayed everything.
You're junk.
You're garbage.
Like you said you were going to do this and you did that.
No wonder they hate him.
They hate him.
They hate Trump because of Trump.
They hate Cruz because of his principles, because he's standing up for things and representing a group of very, very dissatisfied people, including me, on the right who feel that they didn't get what they asked for.
They didn't get what they voted for.
So that may make him too extreme.
It certainly makes him anathema.
I mean, don't listen to any of the stuff about, oh, he's snakey and he's this and he's that.
It's that, it's that.
He's telling them to their faces that they suck.
Would you like him?
Would you like him if he got up and he said, you know, hey, John, you know, you just betrayed all your principles.
You said you were going to do this.
Something about that guy I don't like.
I can't quite place it, but there's something about that guy I don't like.
Now, here's why I still think Rubio has a chance.
And I want you to watch this because I want to compare it to Trump later.
Rubio is in New Hampshire over the weekend and he's campaigning.
A little girl, a beautiful 11-year-old girl, gets up and she starts her question by saying, I'm a child, as if that were her profession.
And it is an honorable profession.
As a child, I'd like to, as a fireman, as a child.
And she says, what kind of America do you want to leave to me?
It's a setup question.
And Rubio gives what is his setup response.
He starts to talk about how his parents came over to America with nothing.
So just listen to a little bit of it.
You've probably heard it before.
America changed the history of my family.
When my father was nine years old, his mom died.
And so he had to go work and never went back to school.
And he would never go back to school.
He would work the next 70 years of his life.
When they got here, they didn't know much English.
In fact, the first words my daughter, my father learned were my cousin, who had lived here a couple years, my older cousin, had written out phonetically on a piece of paper, I am looking for work.
And so he would go to places with his little sheet of paper and say that in his very broken English.
And it was hard.
They really struggled here for the first few years.
Ultimately, though, they got their way.
My dad became a bartender on a hotel on Miami Beach, and my mom ended up being a cashier, a maid, a stock clerk at Kmart.
And my parents never became rich or famous.
They never made a lot of money.
But they were able to own a home.
And they retired with dignity.
And the most important thing for them was they lived to see all four of their children better off than themselves.
There's no other place in the world where that would have happened.
If my parents had gone anywhere else on this planet, I wouldn't be standing up here today.
Okay, that's a guy who knows what he knows, right?
He knows his experience of life.
He's talking about America in a beautiful way.
He's talking about an American way we all recognize.
You know, he may have policies that I don't like.
I'm sure he will.
I'm sure he does.
But I understand his vision of America, and I understand that he has a pretty good working knowledge of how to keep the America that he loves and that he's grateful to alive.
Now, I just want you to listen for a minute to something Trump said over the weekend about his supporters, because what he said was actually true.
Let's hear this.
My people are so smart.
And you know what else they say about my people?
The polls.
They say, I have the most loyal people.
Did you ever see that?
Where I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn't lose any voters, okay?
It's like incredible.
It's incredible.
It's absolutely true.
I want to talk for a minute about something that nobody in America.
Somebody once said to me, my father-in-law, who's a very brilliant college professor, said to me that class is the one thing we're not allowed to talk about in America.
We'll talk about everything else, but we won't talk about class.
Now, American class is different than European class.
I lived in Britain for a long time, and they still, still, to this day, you are in the class you were born in to a large degree.
They do have this Oxford-Cambridge thing, and when you talk to people at a certain level of society, they all went to Oxford-Cambridge, and if they didn't, they feel really bad about it.
I mean, it's just a true thing.
Americans don't use the word class like that.
We believe in class.
We know people with class.
But we will apply it to anybody who actually has class.
So you can be like, you can come from nowhere.
Rubio was talking about his father being a bartender and his mom working at Kmart.
No one in America, and this isn't true overseas.
It really isn't.
No one in America would ever say, ha, his father was a bartender.
His mother worked at Kmart.
We're like, wow, cool, man.
You really did it.
They really did it for you, and you really did it.
And he's a guy, you know, is he a guy with class?
Well, I think he is.
You know, we may find out stuff about him that wasn't classic.
But you know, you don't need an education in America to have class.
We look at Peyton Manning.
You know, one of the reasons it didn't hurt so bad to watch my patriots lose is because there's no hate in Peyton.
You know, Peyton Manning is a man with class.
We don't talk about where he's from or what his education is or what his intelligence level is.
He's a sportsman with class.
We see the way he behaves.
As far as we know him, we don't know him personally, but as far as we know him as a public figure, he's a man with class.
Donald Trump Lacks Class00:03:44
Donald Trump has no class.
Donald Trump says things about people that are despicable and disgusting.
And because the, I mean, let me, over the weekend, I wrote this piece of PJ Media saying, you know, of course the establishment will plunk for him over Cruz because he is the establishment.
There's nothing about Trump that's anti-establishment.
You know, it's the way he talks that we think is anti-establishment.
Let me just read you.
You know, I say whatever I think.
You know, no one has ever accused me of keeping my opinions to myself.
You know, and this is true in personal life as well as political life.
I get very little hate mail.
I don't know why that is.
I do get it from the left.
I do get people saying things about it, especially at certain times when I say certain things, they go nuts.
But over time, I really don't get the kind of steady hate mail.
That has stopped being true now that I've come out against Trump.
Now I get it every day, every single day.
And I said something about how Trump was the establishment.
And here's one of the comments.
If you think Trump's deals are going to be good for the establishment, Clavin, you have no business writing about anything.
You want to find stupid look in the mirror.
Sarah Palin leaves more brain cells on our tampon than you have in your head.
Donald Trump will be a more conservative president than Reagan.
Now, why don't you go write for HuffPo and raise the IQ of both blogs?
When I read stuff like that, what I really wonder, you know, listen, this is politics.
It's not beanbag.
I have a very thick hide.
It doesn't bother me.
But I do wonder, what that was from Donald Trump, by the way.
No, no.
Joking.
You know, what I wonder is, what does that guy see when he looks in the mirror?
What do you see when you talk to people like that?
And that's what I wondered about Donald Trump, too.
When you call people loser, when you say, oh, Megan Kelly, she must have been bleeding from her, whatever.
You know, what do you see when you look in the mirror?
Do you see, I really got one in there, you know?
And I really do believe, you know, the left is really smart.
They have perfected having no class while looking like they have class.
President Obama, who always knows, and politically, he always knows exactly what he's doing, he said in an interview that was released today, he said, politics in America has become meaner.
Okay, he's speaking to Politico.
He says, John McCain was a conservative, but he was well within the mainstream of not just the Republican Party, but within our political dialogue.
The president said voters would have to judge the degree to which the Republican rhetoric and Republican vision has moved, not just to the right, but has moved to a place that is unrecognizable.
He's really good at this, Obama, making you angry, because we're all thinking the same thing.
McCain lost.
You know, McCain lost.
We're in this Trump.
Trump will win.
And then we'll have everything.
And he knows it because he would love the Democrats to run against Trump, I think.
But what the Democrats have perfected is they've perfected imitating what we would call British class style, dress, going to the right colleges, and behaving with no class whatsoever.
This is a president who compares his opponents to terrorists.
This is, you know, Hillary Clinton is a woman who says the Republicans are her enemies.
They have no class.
Being decent, speaking to people decently, did not even become an issue.
Civility did not become an issue until Rush Limbaugh came along.
Until Rush Limbaugh was like, you're a sexist, you're a racist, you're a homophobe, you stink, you're a bigot.
That was from the left, but all spoken in this very elegant way.
And then when Rush Limbaugh came along and said, well, you're a feminazi, that was like, oh, civility, where's the civility?
Donald Trump is just the left with the mask off.
Donald Trump is just what they are with the mask off.
And so now we're saying, yeah, you know, we're striking back.
We're striking back.
We're just turning into them, and we're turning into them politically because he is a leftist.
So we're turning into them politically and we're turning into them by losing our class.
Okay.
So those are just my observations on the political scene today.
Not that much going on yet.
So as the week begins, we're one week away from Iowa.
Making a Murderer: Stephen Avery00:11:48
And as I say, nothing has happened yet.
So don't believe anybody that it has.
There's still a lot of stuff to go on before the decisions come in.
The question of class, though, does bring me to this making a murderer.
And this is this huge Netflix documentary.
It's just made a tremendous splash.
And what it is, is the story of this guy, Stephen Avery.
He lives in Wisconsin, in this very small, empty county in Wisconsin.
And he's white trash.
I mean, that's what he is.
And he lives with his family, the Avery's, all these different relatives, cousins, uncles.
They all live on this used car lot.
And Avery was arrested for a sexual assault and sent to prison for 18 years.
He was found to be innocent.
DNA proved him innocent.
So after 18 years, he was released and became the poster boy for injustice.
As he was becoming the poster boy for injustice, and like, you know, the local politicians were bringing him up on stage and everybody was celebrating him and it was a big deal.
And he was going to sue the county and sue the state for the fact that he had been put away, suing them for millions and millions of dollars.
Just before that lawsuit kicked in, he was accused of murder.
He was accused of murdering a very lovely young photographer for an auto magazine who had come to his car lot.
And this 10-part Netflix series basically is fighting for his innocence, saying he's innocent again.
He was sent away for life.
He was accused of tying this woman to a bed, raping or killing her with a 16-year-old accomplice who was his nephew or cousin.
I can't remember.
His name was Brendan Dassey.
And they show all this stuff that the police do and that the prosecutor does that is very, very difficult to watch.
His accomplice, the 16-year-old Brendan Dassey, is borderline retarded.
Avery is not that bright himself.
And the cops, you know, just kind of leaned on this guy, this kid, 16-year-old.
He had no parent in the room.
He had no lawyer in the room.
His first public defender was a complete incompetent.
And it looks like this terrible injustice.
And this sense of injustice has swept the country.
And if you go online and look this up, they're now free Stephen Avery, free Brendan Dassey.
This is a terrible, terrible thing.
They're both guilty.
Let me tell you, for a brief period in my life, as a very young man, I was a newspaper reporter.
And for much of that, I was a small town newspaper reporter, and I covered courts a lot of that time.
And I covered murders, and I covered theft and arson, all kinds of little crimes.
And I was a liberal young guy, two years out of college.
And I started to think, like, wow, everybody's guilty.
They're all guilty.
You know, I could see, I was listening, because when you're in the courtroom, you're not hearing selected evidence.
You're hearing all the evidence.
And you say, like, these guys are so guilty.
And I realized the reason for this, because I knew all the cops, I knew all the lawyers.
I hung out with all of them, talked to all of them.
And I realized the thing about the cops is they're not Sherlock Holmes.
They're not CSI.
They don't have CSI equipment.
In fact, lawyers complain about the fact that they call it the CSI syndrome, where jurors think they can do more with scientific evidence than they can.
A lot of times it's because they don't have the money.
They don't have the money to do all the DNA tests.
They don't have the equipment and they don't have the labs.
And so when the lawyers come in and say, was that DNA contaminated?
Of course it was.
Of course it was contaminated.
Their labs are dirty.
They don't have a lot of dough.
They're government offices and they're not that well funded.
But people are guilty so often, not all of them, obviously.
You have to give them, if you're on the jury, you have to give them the presumption of innocence.
But just as an observer, not talking as a juror, talking as an observer, so many of them were guilty because the police only arrest them when they find them with a gun with smoke coming out and a body on their feet, you know.
And the problem with this, the problem with this documentary is that it is so tendentious.
It's so one-sided.
You know, I listened to Serial, which, if you remember, was that podcast, that wonderful podcast where this woman was following another crime, another murder, and all that.
I listened to that five minutes in.
I thought, oh, this guy's guilty.
He's obviously guilty.
But it was, you know, it was obvious he was guilty.
And there was one Republican on the podcast, one Republican on the podcast who said, you know, the narrator said, what was her name?
Sarah Koenig.
She said, you know, what do you think?
Oh, guilty, obviously guilty.
One Republican.
But the thing about that podcast was it was about her.
It was about Sarah Koenig and her obsession with the case and her following the case.
It was really entertaining.
And she was kind of delightful.
She was this liberal Jewish girl.
I grew up with this girl.
I know, not her literally, but I grew up with all these girls.
And I know them.
They're wonderful, wonderful people.
They're lovely people.
I have no idea what they're talking about when it comes to these cases.
I mean, you could just listen to this.
But the cops always make mistakes.
The cops always step over the line.
It's very upsetting to watch.
You know, let's play.
I have a little piece of the interrogation.
This was not a piece that's shown on the documentary.
This is just what the cops are saying.
Not this one, the other one.
Yeah.
This is just what the cops are saying to this 16-year-old kid with an IQ of like nothing.
He's got like no IQ.
And listen to the way the cops are questioning.
Come on, Brandon, be honest.
I told you before, that's the only thing that's going to help you here.
We already know what happened.
Okay.
We don't get honesty here.
I'm your friend right now, but I got to believe in you.
And if I don't believe in you, I can't go to bed for you.
Okay, you're nodding.
Tell us what happened.
Your mom said you'd be honest with us.
And she's behind you 100% no matter what happens here.
That's what she said.
Because she thinks you know more, too.
We're in your corner.
We already know what happened.
Now tell us exactly.
Don't lie.
We can't say it for you, Brandon, okay?
That's such textbook cop stuff.
That's what the cops do.
We're in your corner.
We already know what happened.
We just need you to tell us.
It's all right out of the cop textbook.
I mean, this is stuff.
They teach this stuff to these guys, and they use it to good effect, and they get these confessions out of him.
And he ultimately confesses.
And they have moments that they show in the documentary where it seems like they're putting words in his mouth, and he's such a dope that, you know, you kind of...
The thing about it is, though, the stuff they didn't put in, the stuff they didn't put in, he had a lot of details that he couldn't have had if he hadn't been there.
He told the cops that his accomplice, Stephen Avery, had opened the victim's car, and they found his sweat, Avery sweat DNA under the car hood, which you can't plant.
It's not like blood.
You can plant blood, but you can't plant that kind of DNA.
And the one question that they didn't even address is everybody, especially the law enforcement establishment, hates this family.
They hate them.
That's why they got it wrong the first time.
That's why they convicted him the first time because they hate him.
And they never tell you why.
They never even ask the question.
They never go to the police and say, what do you got against these guys?
And it's really, really obvious that this is a family of intense sexual dysfunction.
And at one point in the last episode, it drifts by.
Somebody mentions it, and it just drifts by kind of like maybe 10 seconds.
You hear somebody say, oh, there's only one genetic strain in this family because they're all raping each other.
And there are transcripts that didn't get in, which indicate that Stephen Avery, Stephen Avery burned a cat when he was a kid.
Now, listen, all kids do horrible, cruel things, so we can't hold that against him.
But he set a cat on fire.
His girlfriend now says, his girlfriend, who only says good things about him in the show, now says, oh, he tied her up to the bed.
He drew pictures of torture chambers that had women in them when he was in prison.
You know, it's just, it's not right.
These documentaries, there was another one called Paradise Lost, where they got some guys out of prison, although they never were found innocent.
They just got out of prison.
They were guilty too, in my opinion.
And in this, it's just not right for, it's right for a lawyer to stand up for his client.
It's right for a juror to presume him innocent.
It's not right for a documentarian to do this.
They should be bringing us both sides.
They never did.
It's a very, very one-sided documentary.
And my guess is that these guys tied a woman to a bed, raped her, killed her.
So long, pal.
Good riddance.
You know, if they never get out, I'm sleeping just fine.
So that was my take on making a murder.
So when you watch it, it's very entertaining.
It's worth watching.
I highly recommend it.
Just after you watch it, go up and look up the facts that weren't on it and watch some of the interview that's not on it, some of the interrogation that's not on it.
All right, stuff I like.
Oh, and I have to, I have to tell you the story.
I probably told this before.
I don't know whether I've told it on the show before.
When I wrote my novel Empire of Lies in 2008, 2007, something like that, I knew that it was going to offend a lot of people.
It featured a sympathetic hero who was a Christian conservative, but he was also a very flawed man with a lot of sexual problems, a lot of mental, he was drinking too much and all this stuff.
So I knew it was going to offend the left, which had never seen a sympathetic Christian conservative before.
In fact, when I read it once in Washington, D.C. at a presidential thing, somebody said, how did you feel writing about this awful character?
I thought I kind of liked him.
And I knew the right wasn't going to like it because here is this Christian, but he was thinking about pornography.
He was watching pornography on TV and why, you know, I thought he was a Christian.
Christians never do that.
And I thought like, yeah, except in reality.
In reality, they do.
So I was writing about reality.
When I finished the book, when I put the last period on the book, I walked into the bathroom, looked in the mirror, and I said to myself, you're never going to win another literary award.
Are you all right with that?
And of course, I'm not, you know, writers want to be loved.
They want you to love their work.
They want their work to be celebrated.
I'm the same as any other writer.
And I wasn't okay with that, but I knew the book was really good.
I'm to this day very proud of Empire of Lies.
I knew it was a really good book.
I thought, I'm going to publish it anyway, so it just doesn't matter.
And in fact, I've never won another literary award.
I have been nominated a couple of times.
I was nominated for an Edgar.
I was nominated by the International Thriller Writers of America for a book.
I even had a judge pull me aside once and tell me that everybody knew my work was the winning work, but they just weren't going to do it because it was so politically incorrect.
So there's a, my last book for adults was called Werewolf Cop.
And I am extraordinarily proud of this book.
I not only think it's one of my best books, along with Empire of Lies and True Crime, I also think it is a fine piece of genre writing that I will stand up for today and 10 years from today and 20 years from today as a piece of American genre writing.
There is an organization called the Horror Writers Association.
It is the premier writers organization for horror writers and they give the Brom Stoker Award, which is the top award for this.
I can tell you, I'm not going to tell you I won't win it.
I don't know whether I'll win it or not.
But I've learned now, since Empire of Lies, I've learned to be very pleased when people notice.
It's a three-stage, notice a book at all.
It's a three-stage process.
The first is a preliminary ballot.
Werewolf Cop is now on the preliminary ballot for the Brom Stoker Awards.
It's now down on a short list of 12, which includes guys like Clive Barker, who was one of the great horror writers of the day.
So I'm really proud.
I hope it makes it to the next stage and becomes a nominee, but I'm not even worrying about it because I remember what I said to myself that day.
I will always stick to that.
I'm always glad that I did what I did.
I have no regrets.
If you're not trying to get at the truth, there's no reason to live a writing life.
So that's what I have to say.
All right.
So I just want to celebrate that.
Well, I can celebrate it, right?
Because if it doesn't make the next stage, I won't be able to celebrate that.
So I'm celebrating this.
And 12 books is pretty small.
Russian Play Lyrics00:04:38
Okay.
So definitely like, I wanted to talk this week a little bit about why I don't like rock and roll.
Okay.
And I'm just going to, I want to show you, it does have to do with class, and it has to do with a little bit of snobbery on my part.
I just want to play a little bit of Peter Sellers.
When Peter Sellers was a famous British comedian, comic actor.
He was a brilliant comic actor.
And he did this when the Beatles became famous.
He dresses up as Richard III, as if he's in a Shakespeare play, and he recites a Beatles lyric.
So just listen to a little bit of this.
It has been a hot day's night.
And I have been working like a dog.
It's been a hot day's night.
I should be sleeping like a log.
But when I get home to you, I find the things that you do will make me appeal.
All right.
Stop it there.
It's great.
You should watch the whole thing.
It's on YouTube.
Peter Sellers is doing a hard day's night.
But he's telling you there's something serious.
He's telling you that the lyrics of that song are working class lyrics and that they signal a shift in popular music from music that kind of inspired the audience to feel more sophisticated to music that met the audience at this level.
When the Beatles said roll over Beethoven, they didn't say roll over Cole Porter.
They didn't say, you know, they said roll over Beethoven.
They were saying that form of upper class music, that form of high-class art is done.
And we are here and we are going to make life working class.
And I've always felt I'm always a little bit nervous when you bring the arts down to the people because an opera company will say, let's bring inner-city kids to the opera.
That's how they start.
And then they always say, let's do rap.
Like, no, wait, you were supposed to elevate the kids to the level of opera, not bring the opera down to the level of rap.
But it always works the other way around.
So I have always remained fond of what they call the Great American Songbook.
And these are songs that were written before my time.
They are not the songs of any generation I was ever a part of.
But I did used to listen to them because my father played them on the radio.
And he was very much, my father was very much into the Beatles.
He loved the Beatles.
I could never understand why you would replace lyrics like that.
You know, why you would have lyrics like that replace the old guys.
So I'm going to end with just this one thing.
I'm going to actually play it and then talk about it for one second afterwards.
Here's Judy Garland singing a little piece of a Gershwin song by George and Ira Gershwin called But Not for Me.
And she starts with the intro and then goes into the verse.
I never want to hear from any cheerful Pollyanna who tell you fate surprise a mate.
It's all bananas.
There are not for me.
A lucky stars above, but not for me.
With love to lead away, I far more skies and grey than any Russian play could guarantee.
Okay, just stop it there.
I just want to point out the internal rhymes, the simplicity of the language, but the incredible complexity of what the guy did, you know, just saying, this is hard.
A human being did this, and it's hard, which is what the arts kind of are supposed to be like.
Also, just notice the assumption that you know what a Russian play is.
You know that a Russian play is filled with death.
And, you know, Danny Kay, the comedian, used to say that in a tragedy, in a Russian play, everybody dies.
At the end of a Russian tragedy, everybody dies.
At the end of a Russian comedy, everybody dies, but they die happy.
But they're assuming that you have that much cultural knowledge.
They are kind of elevating you to their place instead of coming down to your place.
It's less democratic.
It's less democratic.
It is kind of snobby.
But I think it resulted in better lyrics and cleverer lyrics and harder work by the composers and the lyricists.
That's all I have to say.
And for today, but we'll be back to continue to save the republic tomorrow as it sinks slowly into the Trumpian Sea.