On The Beach As Texas Freezes

Ted Cruz And The Ditch Trilogy

"Well, all those headlines, they just bore me now

I'm deep inside myself, but I'll get out somehow"

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The Ditch Trilogy - a trio of Neil Young albums in the mid-70s - is probably one of the weirdest artifacts of music history. After a #1 Hit with Heart Of Gold, Young went off and made a trio of weird albums, ending with 1976's On The Beach. On The Beach is, controversially, my second favourite Young album, because while it lacks the consistency of Harvest or Everyone Knows This Is Nowhere, the highs on On The Beach are some of Young's best works.

The haunting title track, and the softly beautiful Motion Pictures (For Carrie) are exquisite works, capable of moving me to tears. It's often written off as just a Ditch Trilogy oddity, which it is - the name coming from Young talking about he was staring at an open road, and he just swerved into a ditch - but it's also hauntingly beautiful.

It also seems like Ted Cruz is a Neil Young fan.

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I literally could not believe it was Cruz.

When photos came out Thursday night of Ted Cruz apparently on a plane to Cancun, I couldn't fucking believe it. I was flabbergasted that someone who's smart, like Cruz is, could be this stupid. And yes, Cruz is smart - whatever we think of the man, he's brilliant. And he's just driven his political career off the road for a single day trip to Cancun, because he got caught.

We know he tried to avoid being seen, because he called the Houston police to get help with security, which seems like a suboptimal use of police resources in a cold snap, but what do I know. I'm just the guy who thought that there was no way Ted Cruz could be as stupid as this, and he turned out to be stupider than I ever could have imagined. It was complete idiocy, because it tapped into a visceral problem for the Senator. People remember shit like this.

Policy problems are rarely huge political problems, because people are not finely tuned to the comings and going of Ways And Means. My contention on Saturday was that there was no political price for Democrats botching the "should we call witnesses'' question for the impeachment because nobody cared. Or, more accurately, there were less people in America who cared than watched Man City destroy Tottenham at the same fucking time on NBC. But this? This isn't about a thing that happened somewhere else to other people, this is about Ted Cruz getting the fuck out of dodge when his constituents are freezing to death.

Isn't Cruz's whole thing that the GOP are the party of the multiethnic working class? Isn't that his whole schtick? Because I'm pretty sure the multiethnic working class are the ones burning their fences so their kids don't freeze to death while the rich elites fly to the coasts, and if you want to represent the multiethnic working class, you don't fly to fucking Cancun. This isn't something that happened to other people, this is a Texas crisis that Ted Cruz just decided to use his wealth and privilege to skip. Sure, stay in DC, I'm not saying you need to go back and freeze yourself, but my God, if you can't do anything as a sitting Senator to help your home state in a crisis, resign already.

It's clear to me that Cruz is bored of the headlines, because if he gave a single, solitary fuck about his public reputation, he would have clocked that "Cruz In Cancun As Texans Freeze" would go down about as well as a glass of boiled piss. Either he's ignorant of the damage this has done and will continue to do, or he's too stupid to realize that this is a visceral problem for him. This is arrogance personified, elitism run amok, one rule for the rich and one for everyone else. It is Ed Miliband's two kitchens, except instead of just showing a social democrat as a posh asshat, it happened during a disaster emergency unlike any I've ever seen in Texas. How the hell did he not see this?

Maybe Cruz will manage to get out of the ditch that he has driven himself into - after all, Neil Young did so. But, he's gotta be deep inside himself right now, trying to figure out what to do and how to salvage this. The problem for him is, this can't be forgotten. Once your good reputation is gone, it can never come back, and this is a huge reputational risk for the junior Senator from Texas. Unless, of course, he thinks it's better to burn out than to fade away.