Going back at least as far as Alexander the Great, who left Macedonia in search of “adventure” the great political changes in history have all essentially been Big Man pissing contests — that is, they have been initiated by macho leaders wanting to test their powers, not their powers to do either good or evil but just their powers : to piss farther than their competitors. Alexander didn’t set off the rule the world because he thought the Greek Way would improve men’s lives; he wanted to outdo his father, Philip. That was a pissing contest in the family. We don’t know much about the motives of Genghis Khan and some other famous conquerors, because there was no Twitter in those days — no #History. Donald Trump is so far the first to put it in fully unmistakable terms. He has openly bragged about the size of his penis, which is about as obvious as it can get.

Pissing is not a heroic art. It is, of course, necessary if one is to have a healthy life, but it has nothing to do with Francis Fukuyama’s ideas about finding the most equitable way of governing. It is purely a display of prowess, and only in the form of a very specialized talent, like being able to wiggle one’s ears or twirl two tassels at once in opposite directions. Nevertheless, it is accepted in teen-age male circles as a test of manliness, and manliness is generally accepted (at least by men) as a desirable characteristic. Success at it is admired by historians, who are mostly men. Battle scenes — the ultimate forms of masculine competitiveness — go all the way back before Alexander. In literature (the Iliad), in sculpture (the bas reliefs on the great gates of ancient Persia), in the wall paintings of wars in ancient Egypt between the white hats (the Egyptians) and the black hats (the Hittites). These contests could involve thousands of contestants, or sometimes just two, like David and Goliath, but they always boil down to the desire of somebody to demonstrate his ability to out-piss an opponent.

What’s the point of all this? Why can’t we just let be? From whence comes this desire to be bigger, more powerful, more domineering than the next guy? Sometimes we make up pseudo-social reasons — a need for lebensraum, a need to get rid of Jewish bankers and steal (back) their money, a need to return Mother Russia to her ancient glory, a need to establish that our God is more powerful than your God (my dad can lick your dad), or a need to establish our Messiah is more of a messiah than your messiah (Mohammad versus Jesus) — but the basic itch is the old Alexandrian one. Let’s just put it to the test. Alexander had more resources with which to make his point than most modern troublemakers have.

But what’s the inevitable result? Somebody wins; somebody loses. The Hittite ruler had to grovel before the Egyptian Pharaoh in chains, the Roman emperor had to abase himself before the Persian conqueror, Hitler got to ride his open Duesenberg up the Champs de Lycée to the Arc de Triomphe (although he declined to ride through it, knowing that that would diminish the symbolism of its being the culture capital of the world culture that he was conquering), MacArthur got to chew his corncob in the emperor’s palace. But now Persia is a memory, Hitler’s Germany is trying desperately to save the EU, and MacArthur is a name barely recognized by today’s high-school students. Ozymandas must surely have been a strong pisser, but we can’t remember what he did except model for a statue that ultimately fell down and was covered by windblown sand. (To be excavated in 2016 by archeologists who are not even sure if he was real.)

So it will be with Trump. He will win, or he will lose, and his accomplishments, if he has any, will be finally overshadowed by those of his successors, but he will have the distinction of having been the first to be publicly and openly honest about his motive. Unless you think that Anthony Weiner beat him to it. His comb-over, his suntan spray, and his genital braggadocio will soon be forgotten. (Although he may of course succeed in touching off a nuclear war that will effectively erase all human history, including his own contribution, in which case he will have won the pissing contest but still be forgotten because there will be nobody left to remember.)

Did those of these determined gentlemen who succeeded in living into old age finally have to get up like all the rest of us three times a night to for relief? It consoles me to think so.

Since the Trump insists that we are all divided into winners and losers, it doesn’t seem inappropriate to inquire whether Mitch McConnell emerged from the health care reform fiasco as a winner or a loser.

Mr. McConnell, famous for being the Phoenix on the Potomac, capable of emerging from his splendid corner office waving full-fledged legislative programs generated by himself alone, with no advice from anyone, friend or foe, and with debate or discussion prohibited before he forces a vote, just appeared on TV with a homey yellow figured necktie to stress his hors de combat neutrality and acknowledged the misfires of Republican torpedoes A, B, and C aimed at Obamacare. His usually inscrutable expression was as inscrutable as ever. Was he surrendering or gloating?

My guess is, both. He was publicly surrendering, to satisfy the “fake news” media’s thirst for resolution, but I think behind those coke-bottle glasses he was secretly chortling over a personal victory. In the spirit of “when you’re stuck with a lemon, make lemonade” let us go down the list of what he has accomplished in the last few weeks.

• He has burnished his bones with the Godfather. He did his best to comply with an impossible demand.

• He has donned the approved Republican mantle of victim (of overwhelming Democratic opposition) despite their total lack of power in any branch of government throughout his battle.

• By calling off a roll-call vote he has allowed Senators of his party to avoid the stigma (possibly fatal down the road) of having voted to deprive 22 million people of their health care insurance.

• He has allowed the health care insurance industry to keep its ten percent markup on the new revenue that Obamacare bestowed on them with the addition of millions of new customers (most partly financed from the federal coffers).

• With the unexpected news of John McCain’s surgery he has been able to demonstrate “loyalty” to a colleague (loyalty being the only quality accorded any value in the Trump administration, replacing such old-fashioned virtues as experience, intelligence, and capability).

• He has gained one more opportunity before the summer recess to focus on destroying the tax code, which has always been his primary objective (and that of the Godfather).

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Does all this sound like defeat? He comes away more firmly in control than ever, with his troops more indebted to him than before for taking them off the hook. He has buttressed his defenses against both the First Son-in-Law’s anticipated sabotage and Loose Bannon’s campaign to drain the swamp, and temporarily assuaged the fears of old-style Republicans who came to Washington to legislate, not dismember the Grand Old Party.

I would say this puts him among the winners. The losers? Anyone who had hopes that there was actually a plan to drain the swamp.

One of my grandsons is studying to become a sommelier. He tells me that a sommelier is a person, usually employed by a restaurant, who suggests to customers “pairings” of specific wines with specific food dishes, supposedly to the enhancement of both. I say “supposedly” because he and I do not agree on some things that characterize his chosen specialty. Basically, I am a Occamist in most matters. KISS. “Keep It Simple, Stupid.” If it tastes good, that’s all I need to know. But he is intent on becoming a wine scholar, able to reel off at a moment’s notice a string of descriptors from his new oenophilic vocabulary to prove that he can predict my taste. The “legs” on my glass will reveal alcoholic content, the “nose” will remind me of a certain suburb in Provence, the “finish” will stay with me as aftertaste when the wine is gone. My favorite term is “palate”, which holds that different areas inside the mouth are preferentially sensitive to certain tastes (saltiness, sweetness, sourness, for example), which can be serially consulted by an expert. My grandson will expertly swish a newly discovered vintage into these separate areas to test its “dryness” or “fatness” or some other esoteric quality before rendering his opinion. My problem with that is that it has no scientific basis, despite several actual studies on actual people with actual taste buds. Experiment shows them to be identical. I have other adjectival quibbles, among them that wine, being liquid, cannot be either “dry” or “fat” since by definition a liquid is wet, and fat may describe the drinker but not the drink. He brushes this aside as inconsequential, like Trump confronted with a CNN fact. He is in pursuit of his Grade Three Level sommelier certificate, which (the school offering the certification promises) will add a zero to his potential annual earnings.

I remember a time during my college days when I was an aspiring oenophile (in addition to being an accomplished after school dishwasher at an East Side private school for silver-spoon boys). In search of sophistication I paid a private expert for evening classes that met once a week to discuss such things as “body”, “bouquet”, “balance”, and “terroir”, and test my burgeoning knowledge with bottles provided by our instructor (and paid for at the door to his apartment). The final meeting of the class featured a blind tasting of several wines, during which I undercut my aspirations by picking as my favorite what turned out to be the cheapest label on the table. However I defended my choice in a torrent of those specialized terms that so overwhelmed my fellow students that they ended up agreeing with me, much to the chagrin of our instructor. I cannot resist bringing up this youthful experience from time to time in discussions with my grandson. So far our family ties have nevertheless managed to stay firm.

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All this is just personal prelude to a discussion of the opposing roles of jargon and substance in the ever-widening fields of expertise that have burgeoned under the triple stimuli of specialized education institutions (culinary institutes that explore various ways of applying heat to food, computer schools that regard printouts of the help files of various apps and operating systems a curriculum, and less academically strict organizations that teach such wide-ranging skills as paddleboarding, rollerblading, and digital gaming) and governmental education subsidies of pseudo-academia promoted by legislators to cope with the shrinking private job market and their consequent desire to keep potential agitators off the streets and on the need by newly graduated children to find a reason to keep on living rent-free at home until the age of thirty.

There is no question but that it helps to keep carping critics at bay if you have the shield of an impenetrable private vocabulary. How can you criticize my sense of smell (“aroma, bouquet, nose”) or taste (“hint of almonds , lasting finish”) since I am the only one who can testify to them? If you don’t know what I am talking about, then we really can’t talk, and you will have to cede me the right to my opinion. If, as a critic, I have to hold an advanced degree from your alma mater to find the words to make myself understood in your world, is it really worth the trouble? Is a “vertical transportation associate” any more qualified than an elevator operator, if they both make $10 an hour, and are in any case due to be replaced next month by an automaton?

This protective strategy is not an innovation. The monks in the scriptoria guarded their knowledge of Latin, or at least of Latin spelling. The priests successfully used Latin for protection too, until their parishioners got nosy and started asking what they were really talking about. The Cockney merchants of East London, scrambling to evade the Queen’s tax collectors, used rhyming slang to communicate under the noses of the officials who couldn’t fathom such wonderful convoluted constructions as “aris” for buttocks (“ass”, a short form of arse, rhymes with “bottles and glass”, which in turn rhymes with Aristotle, which is then shortened to “aris”, as in “up yours”); or “use your loaf”, which rhymes with loaf of bread, which rhymes with head; so “use your loaf”. (Thank you, Wikipedia.)

According to a young acquaintance of mine who has applied for a job with Starbuck’s, the system is still alive and well. She reports that the normal names for ingredients, such as “tea” or “coffee” or “milk” are forgone in today’s hip world. Instead, customers ask for a “red eye”, a “black eye”, a “skinny” or a “blonde”. Having learned these basic substitutions, post-grads going for their barista PhDs can proceed to higher levels with such things as a “frappuccino affagato”, or a “venti cappuchino, wet, with extra whip”. My young friend tells me she will have to attend a special boot camp and demonstrate mastery of this lingo before even being actually interviewed for an actual job involving actual ingredients.

I think that’s wonderful. Consider the boost to the ego of the “in” consumer, bellying up to the counter and ordering a “vente upside down caramel/hazel nut macciato” with all the casual bravado of a James Bond in training. The poor slob has been slaving in his cubicle all morning — number 62 in his row — trying to stand out from the crowd with his monogrammed shirt (on sale on the Net with an order for three), aware that his life is just going to be more of the same until he is eventually replaced by an algorithm. Now he strides boldly into Starbuck’s and for a moment at least he is the envy of the assembled multitude for his easy mastery of this majestic string of coded nonsense. Life does not offer many such fulfilling moments.

I applaud such rampant imagination. But I remember that “cream and two sugars” did the job for years at twenty-five cents a cup. The world of specialized jargon is also the world of exorbitant prices. (A thousand bucks for a bottle of wine strikes me as a bit exaggerated, just as a million bucks is a bit much for a couple of colored smears and a signature on a piece of cardboard.) If you can afford to play the game and if it makes you feel good, and you have nothing better to do, why should I care? You could have chosen a riskier set of objects to collect — like golf courses or casinos or hotels with gold faucets.

But seeker after status in argot, beware. There is a price beyond the price tag. As we develop these specialized in-group vocabularies, incomprehensible to outsiders, we are cutting the lines of communication among our non-specialist selves, and maybe even within our own minds. Building a verbal wall against the uninitiated helps to ensure your “specialness”, but it may also be creating a barrier between your chosen special world and the real world you are also forced to inhabit. By substituting esoteric in-group terms for ordinary words you are in danger of imbuing them with a separate sense of reality that is independent of “real” reality.

Thus, “possible epidemic vectors” become bloodless statistics to be cited in drafting legislation to hold suffering sick people in forced detention (even though medical specialists, using their own jargon unintelligible to politicians, may have testified that there is no danger of contagion by contact). “Illegals” are easier to deport than the American kids born to loving parents who sneaked into this country to get a better life for their babies, or children adopted from other lands by American parents who forgot to have them naturalized. “Upward income distribution” sounds more academic than “sock it to the poor”. We use the bloodless term “enhanced interrogative techniques” to avoid looking at the sufferings of the poor Afghanis who just happened to be in the vicinity when the IED went off. (And when we sought more details about just what “enhanced interrogation techniques” were, our vice-president dismissed the question as “a bunch of hooey”.) We forget that an “economic refugee” is a human being trying to find a safe road for himself and his wife and children to the future in a world that offers no safety to those born in the wrong place. We forget that wine is just fermented grape juice.

We, as economists, politicians, pundits, forget these basic distinctions at our peril. We may eventually get so good at this kind of sanitizing that we forget that we are all desperate human beings at the mercy of sudden reversal of fortune (a thoughtless left turn, a house built too close to the sea, a shaky extension ladder). Our reliance on jargon will have betrayed us into complacency when we see children with inherited drug addictions or lead poisoning or autism being left to fend for themselves because the funds to help them are needed elsewhere — to grant billionaires tax relief.

Maybe we ought to think seriously about the unifying vocabulary of “milk and two sugars, please” versus the class-divisive “vente latte sweet” to show our in-group cred.

I started out being angry. I couldn’t accept the idea that we had a congenital liar for our president — someone who simply disregarded the difference between fact and fiction whenever it suited his purposes. When you first run into someone who displays such a blatant refusal to think, the frustration level is so high that you don’t stop to wonder what the explanation might be. Your first thought might be something more like a punch in the gut. But in the case of an elected president, this is impractical. The Secret Service may be so woefully incompetent that they can’t stop a man with a knife from slipping into the White House, but you can’t count on it. And the consequences would likely be distinctly uncomfortable for the next trespasser, given the ear-wired guardians’ embarrassment and their desire to demonstrate improvement.

So you are reduced to ineffective fulmination. You dream up all sorts of schemes to combat this new form of beyond-the-pale behavior. You go back and research the tactics that eventually brought down Joseph McCarthy. You get yourself a “Resist” button for your lapel, or a pussy hat, depending on your gender, and you start making it a point to fact-check the man every time he opens his Tweeter. At first this provides some satisfaction, but in the end it proves useless. For one thing it is too easy. He is so obvious (and oblivious) that he can generally be fact-checked on the fly by any competent reporter, even before the evidence is gathered. And to his chanting choristers his over-the-top lying is not a minus; it’s a plus — it relieves both them and him of the burden of actual thought. Just let go, yell and enjoy your new power. “Lock her up!” “Build that wall!” And anyway he himself doesn’t worry about being caught off base. On the contrary, he revels in it. He uses his gaffes to claim that he is being unfairly hounded by the “enemies of the people” — the press, with their nitpicking insistence on accuracy. “Gotcha!” you realize, will do you no more good than it did Sarah Palin.

But resistance is nevertheless the only course that offers any promise. The Right’s reviled “Deep State” — the institutions that generations of serious politicians have over the years legislated in place to ensure a modicum of logic and decorum among the people elected to execute the complicated business of running the country — will not be so easily Tweeted out of existence. The Donald’s wild claims and baseless promises will still, you tell yourself, have to be vetted by responsible adults — representatives and senators who have sworn to uphold the laws of the land with oaths no less binding than the one he is so cavalier about. This vetting will surely bring his ravings down to earth, you say, and in the end bring him down too. “You can fool some of the people, etc…”. But lo and behold! A voting majority of the grownups you were counting on turn out to be not so grown up after all. They are as easily seduced by promises of permanent personal incumbency and future employment by the Koch Brothers (or, in other words, access to the public trough) as the reddest redneck who believes that global warming, automation, and the switch to sustainable energy can be stopped with a Luddite sledge hammer, wielded by a lunatic with tangerine-colored hair and an itch to grab women like bowling balls. They are so focused on their perks and their tax rates that they have forgotten their oaths. So that’s not going to work either. No use betting your money on companies planning to market buggy whips.

So what’s left?

How about trying a little patience? There will be some damage along the way, yes, but the country is not basically in such bad shape that it can’t survive a little chip or two around the edges.

A moment’s reflection will be enough to convince you that a man who is so thirsty for genuflection that he invents magazine cover pictures of himself to hang in his golf clubs — evidence of adulation that he knows full well doesn’t exist because he had to create those magazine covers himself when there wasn’t any other way to get them — such a man’s hunger for recognition cannot ever be satisfied. He is fated to be forever disappointed. The adoring crowds that continue to exist in his mind but that no one else can see or photograph will never be real. Deep down he knows they weren’t real. That knowledge will gnaw and gnaw and gnaw inside him until it finally reaches a vital organ. Like Pygmalion he has set himself a goal that is unattainable. “They love us! They love me!” he shouts, knowing that they don’t. The shouts will have to get ever louder to drown out the doubts, but there is a limit to how many decibels a single madman can generate all by himself.

Where does this end up, then?

That’s not so easy to predict, except that it seems certain that it will probably be ugly both for the patient with the disease and for anyone whose well being is in any way affected by that patient’s whims. Relevant examples are easy to cite : from Cheops, whose pyramid could not reach the clouds, through Ramses, Caesar, Louis XIV, Napoleon, Stalin, Hitler. Those are just some of the big names among overreachers. There are plenty of smaller names : Mussolini, Ceausescu, Saddam, Khadaffi. But they have all ended up the same way, overthrown eventually by their “adoring” subjects who could no longer put up with the farce. The question is how long those “adoring” subjects in West Virginia, dying of untreated Black Lung and watching their children die from medical neglect, will wait to exact their revenge.

So I don’t have to waste my time feeling anger. I can waste it instead feeling sorry for the poor tormented demented tangerine-haired invalid and waiting for him to blow his own top. With some sympathy left over the country that didn’t see this coming. Better luck next time.

I will try to be patient.