Plato called it the ship of state. We are currently having a bit of a problem with determining just where we want to steer it. A hopeful thing to remember is that the bigger the boat the slower its reaction to the wheel. Think of tons of steel and cargo pushing straight ahead on a set course, moving aside equal numbers of tons of water with every ship’s length advance. Newton couldn’t ask for a better example of inertia. It takes an enormous force to change its direction. The delay can be excruciating. Ask the captain of the Exxon Valdez.

The US economy is a pretty big ship. The effect of a change in electoral politics or a new set of twitter-activated guidelines by a self-designated populist king is bound to prove a daunting task right from the start. It will be difficult to produce even a minor deflection from the steady course established by FDR and the New Deal eighty years ago — a course that has led the country gradually closer to the ideal of reciprocal social obligations between the rich and the poor — one that was also slowly being embraced by all the other the industrially and intellectually advanced nations of the world. The incoming administration does not yet seem to have appreciated just how difficult that change of course will be.

Let’s look at some numbers. (They will be approximate, since the sources vary in their degrees of up-to-dateness, and seldom agree completely with each other in any case. I will unapologetically round off — up or down — and use plausible approximations*.)

Official number of people on federal payroll	2,800,000	1% of US workforce
People in the military	1,600,000	7/10 of 1%
People on state & local tax-funded payrolls	19,500,000	8%
Subcontractors paid with taxpayer dollars	7,600,000	3%
Courts system	66,000	less than 1/10 of 1%
Total government employees	31,566,000	13%

*Some sources put these numbers as high as 17 percent. I am being conservative.

The accuracy of the numbers is not the issue here. The point is that somewhere between one in every six and one in every eight American workers works for the government and is paid from the public purse and is dependent on the government for his or her economic security, prospects for the future, and eventual retirement.

By contrast, the number of elected politicians (federal, state, and local) on the public payroll is approximately 550,000. Add on a total of 90,000 registered lobbyists and you get to 640,000, still well below 1% of the total workforce for the count of policymakers — about one quarter of one percent. Politicians make no direct contribution to the economy (they don’t produce any tangible goods like shoes, or automobiles) but make their indirect contribution by making the rules for the actual producers.

The policymakers are thus the brass up in the wheelhouse of our ship of state. The workers on the federal payroll are the crew, and their combined efforts will have to be enlisted to effect a change of course. “Hard Right!” or to continue the nautical metaphor, “Hard to starboard!”

But what if the crew members look out through their portholes (or into their pay envelopes) and notice that the new course is not having the effect they were told it would have — what if they discover that the old familiar cycle of tax cuts, deregulation, and dismantling of the safety net and economic collapse is producing just the opposite effect (as it always has before) : boom and fat profits for the rich; bust and taxpayer financed bailouts by the poor to rescue the rich and restore some equilibrium to the system — and realize that this new course is headed to the same old rocks? Is there something those 31 million on the public payroll can do about it?

To borrow a phrase from a recent would-be steerslady who didn’t have great success in her own attempt, “You betcha!”

When the orders come down through the speaking tube — “More steam!” “Rudder hard right!” — or to the galley — “More caviar up here!” “Cut the crew’s rations!” — the sailors can suddenly turn out to be deaf, or stupid, or sick, or just plain confused. They can stop oiling the gears, start short-sheeting the beds in the officers’ quarters, start tossing the garbage over the windward instead of the leeward rail, and accidentally misread the compass. They can rely on the passengers to eventually understand that the problem is with the brass; not with the crew. They can vote out (but admittedly only after two years) what they mistakenly voted in. They can set the ship back on the course it had been following for eighty years, and hope that the damage inflicted when the misguided brass had their brief turn on the bridge was not too great. Time is on the crew’s side. It takes a long time to actually change course : the bigger the ship, the longer the time : and the US economy is the biggest in the world. There’s hope.

But what about those rocks? How close might we get to them? There is no doubt they exist, and no doubt that they constitute a danger. Some of them harbor colonies of sirens, singing seductive songs about alternative rules of the road, if not outright alternative facts. We need to give the brass bigger cabins. We need to squeeze the crew into smaller hammocks. Can that agenda be delayed long enough to fend off catastrophe? Can the rocks be avoided for the length of time it will take for the new course to be recognized as self-defeating? One can only trust to luck. Or take up golf and learn to dig as many “accidental” divots in the boss’s greens as possible. (How’s that for mixing metaphors?)

Interpretation of the orders coming down the tube is up to each of us, individually. We are the Resistance. Vive la Résistance!

Maybe, please, if we could stop our endless parsing of repetitive evidence of Donald Trump’s infantilism and get to serious discussion of possible defenses? The real situation is not that complicated. It can be boiled down to a few simple observations:

• Donald Trump is a hopeless case. Forget rehab.

• Most Republican politicians are probably hopeless cases as well.

• Democratic politicians are so far just ineffectual hand-wringers.

• The United States Government is paralyzed.

• Trump’s supporters couldn’t care less about that.

Trump provides additional evidence of his cognitive disability with each new tweet; there is no need to pursue that further. Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan are willing to kiss Trump’s ass in order to retain their party perks and privileges, despite the damage to their reputations. Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi are content to stand by and fiddle while they watch Rome burn — for fear that any real action would jeopardize their own chances of retaining their positions when the pendulum eventually swings back the other way. Legislation that the country needs to function properly is being shelved in favor of dead-end Republican efforts to execute Trump’s random tweets, which, in addition to being incoherent and indecipherable, are often contradictory. Trumpists are so far still so thrilled that they have been able to show the electoral finger to the eggheads and nigger-lovers on the coasts that they will make no distinction between fact and fiction so long as it feeds their fantasy that insults and gloating can substitute for governing.

So why are we of the Resistance wasting our time with fact checking and appeals to logic? Logic and today’s politics are in separate universes. Thinking skills are not the currency of Trump’s government, which Donald thinks should operate on the basis of lemming loyalty.

There is only one sensible reaction to all this that I can see, and as unlikely as it may sound, I offer it for your consideration, as the Oscar hopefuls say in their ads.

Trump and his Republicans must be left in their swamp and Democrats must hitch up their pants or gird their loins or lock and load or whatever people in other desperate situations are metaphorically said to do, and accept that their future requires that they find a champion who can compete with Trump on his own ground — a hero with the personality and the glamour to match the Donald’s hairdo and chutzpah.

Hillary will never get to be president; we don’t like crybabies. Bernie Sanders will probably never get to be president either; he is stuck with the socialist label even though his ideas are straight from FDR’s playbook and actually mostly constitute a retreat to 1930. Of the currently visible candidates Elizabeth Warren, despite being unapologetically female and possibly a nigger-lover and probably a socialist as well, is our best shot. She has a good brain, a quick tongue, and a popular message (“Sock it to the rich”). The 2016 round unfortunately went to the fixers, but the next vote is still up for grabs if enough millennium voters can be reached. The Chuck and Nancy Show won’t do it. He’s too suspect because of his Wall Street affiliations, and she’s been on the scene too long. Her eagle beak and stiletto heels don’t remind us of Mom or our junior-high-school teacher idol any more than Hillary’s pants and flats did.

So what am I saying? It’s time for someone on a white horse. A savior like FDR himself. It’s time to make “Democrat” great again. It’s time for us to yell loud enough to drown out the Trumpettes. To chant at every opportunity. To offer detailed and sensible bills — not in the normal channels to be stymied by subcommittees of “no” but in loud and raucous and brash voices directly to the public in the media, in the papers, and on the podium and on the streets. Remember KISS? “Keep It Simple, Stupid.” Ladies, wear your pussy hats in the Capitol corridors. Gentlemen, keep your sleeves rolled up, suspenders prominently displayed, and everyone, keep your voices as loud as you can manage. Clamor for the $15 wage, for union check-off privileges, for abortion rights, for sensible sentencing, for compassionate paroling, for free education, for single-payer health care, for clamping down on Falwell’s tax exemption. (Don’t bother getting exercised about income inequality; that’s just numbers and rednecks don’t care about numbers. The rich are welcome to steal so long as they leave enough on the table for the rest of us. They got their money by stealing and it’s the only way they know. That will not change. What the rest of us want is a paycheck we can count on, a pension that will be there when we retire, and a better life for our kids than we have had.) Never mind further attempts to discredit Trump; he will take care of that himself. And never mind the nitpicking fact-checking and “gotcha”s. His people don’t care, and if our people can’t finally see through him on their own we may not be worth saving in any case. For the moment, trust Bernie. Send him some shekels to work with. He’s the only one on our side with the chutzpah and the clout to be today’s cheerleader. Who will turn out to be our eventual knight in shining armor for the main event remains to be determined by what happens between now and 2020.

And stop already with the impeachment baloney. It ain’t gonna happen; not while the GOP controls the House and the Senate and the White House and the Supreme Court — especially the Supreme Court. Constitutional clauses about emoluments or incapacity have no weight when measured against the rewards of party unity, especially when party unity is all about money. And Pence might well turn out to be worse than Donald.

That’s my advice. As any baseball manager will tell you as you go up to bat : if you are going to go down, might as well go down swinging. What have you got to lose?

 

“Eat your turnips. Think of all the little Chinese children who would be only too happy to have turnips to eat. And you’re just leaving them on your plate.”

I never quite figured out what that parental admonition was all about, but it was frequent. Whenever my mother served turnips, in fact. Or parsnips. I once sat with my mouth full of un-swallowed parsnips during a whole meal until my father whomped me on the back and I deposited them in my sister’s lap.

My sister and I wondered about it, though. One day we sought out a secluded corner of the backyard, behind the mint bed, and determined to investigate. With Mom’s gardening trowel we started digging a hole that would take us to China — which we knew was on the opposite side of the globe — so we would be able to meet these Chinese children and ask them if they liked turnips. Or parsnips.

Of course that didn’t work, and we got a scolding for trampling down some of the mint plants, but I have never fully lost the sense of guilt I feel about throwing away perfectly good (even if only in someone else’s opinion) food. I can still see those Chinese children, mouths agape like baby birds in the nest, longing for a forkful of turnips, while I am scheming to slip mine to our faithful Cocker Spaniel, waiting under the table. And the guilt has only extended as I grow older, to include other things than turnips.

What right have I to splurge on a twenty dollar admission fee to enter a museum where I can admire a small square of canvas smeared with time-dimmed daubs of paint for which the museum paid 46 million dollars, while Chinese children (better make that Somalian to keep up with the changing times) are deprived and starving? Shouldn’t I be sending those twenty dollars instead to some go-good organization that will make an honest attempt to get ten dollars’ worth of it past the black market aspirations of some dictator’s cronies and get at least some food into the hands of a desperate mother with a family to feed?

OK, that’s extreme. Not every choice is between starvation and luxury. Some things are about cultural guardianship, the cohesive traditions of established societies, and logistic impossibilities. There is not necessarily an “either-or” here. Society is a complicated thing, with interconnections that tie everything to everything. Museums constitute some of the glue (call it snobbism if you like) that holds together the philanthropic enterprises of museum lovers and enables them to contribute far more than my feeble twenty dollars to a cleft-palate repair fund for Nigerian babies. Without that paint-daubed piece of canvas to rally round they would not be able to walk the red carpet and show off their cleavages or their taste in arm candy and raise millions of dollars for all sorts of worthy humanitarian causes. We have to accept that the structure of society includes both at the same time.

Nevertheless, when I walk the aisle in my supermarket that displays hundreds of brands of dry cereal mixes, each one representing a separate hierarchy of CEOs and CFOs and managers and assistant managers and PR specialists and ad designers and crisis teams (for when a mouse foot is discovered in the box) and salesmen and distributors and stockholders and brand-loyal consumers I do think of those Chinese children. What if we all collectively agreed that there are perhaps as many as five legitimately different kinds of dry cereal and put the duplicated efforts at marketing the others into getting a few sacks of grain to Somalia where they could keep thousands of people from starving? (Don’t be shocked. “Collectively” doesn’t necessarily mean “Socialistically” or “Communistically”; it can also simply mean decisions made by people acting together in the interests of a community — in another word, “society”.

Would we be able to turn some of the money saved into something called “diplomacy”, which might have a chance of holding back the hordes of cronies supported by their crooked rulers who otherwise eat up our modest efforts at providing help for their people?

How?

It would have to be by regulations of some sort — regulations that came from some organized, authorized, recognized body (not a bad definition of “government”). And that body would have to have the support of a lot of just plain citizens. I sympathize with people who already feel hemmed in by too many regulations. Being told that you can’t plant corn because some agricultural subcommittee of some special select committee of congress sitting in plush chairs in a big white domed building a thousand miles from the nearest abandoned silo has so decreed is surely a maddening experience. (So, perhaps, is a rule that you can’t drive a car without wearing a seatbelt.) But they both have the same goal — protecting the individual by restricting his freedom in the interest of the well-being of the community.

There was a recent exchange of letters in one of my favorite magazines between on the one hand some NASA bureaucrats who wanted every particle of every item launched into space sanitized and sterilized to avoid running the risk of introducing bacterial contamination to any forms of life that may be out there picking through our trash, if there are such life forms; and one of my favorite thinkers, a Mr. Freeman Dyson, who points out that this extra burden will raise the costs and delay the arrival of private sector explorations on the basis of a highly tenuous hypothesis, and that maybe the vastness of the universe ensures a level of tolerance that a relaxed view of the value of individual enterprise is more realistic. (That’s not like allowing West Virginia bulldozers to chop off the tops of mountains and stint on mine safety in the interests of making coal company owners richer, although certain people will try to convince you that it is the same thing.)

Everything in life cannot be solved by another new regulation. People have to administer the rules, and they must be given leeway to let common sense overrule the words on the paper when that makes better sense.

Maybe that translates into more NGOs (Non-Governmental Organizations) with more freedom to act quickly and sensibly than politically hampered formal legislative bodies blinkered by party-driven competition and complicated funding arrangements. On the other hand we have a president who recently reacted to TV pictures of mangled children in a faraway country not by upping his (as yet still undocumented) charitable contribution to Doctors Without Borders but by unleashing 16 million taxpayers’ dollars’ worth of missiles to create still more mangled bodies. There ought to be a law against that. And it needs to be strictly enforced. No deviations allowed.

Why can’t life be simple?