Month: September 2017

Rocket Man Speaks

Dear Donald,

I trust you will not mind my addressing you as “Donald”. In return I will let you address me as Rocket Man if that will be of any help to you.

I send this handwritten letter on a piece of paper in the pocket of one of my most trusted friends (Mr. Dennis Rodman) in whose integrity I have complete confidence. There is no other record of these words. If they ever reach the public I will of course deny them and ascribe them to your well-known paranoia. I will also, of course, know who leaked them.

I write because you have cultivated a reputation as a deal-maker. Let’s see if you are smart enough to accept one proposed by someone else when you are offered a good one.

The first requirement for success will be that we define in precise terms what we each expect togain. For my part I need a face-saver after some of my overboard threats to A-bomb Los Angeles. I made those threats from a need to show muscle to my people who are who are beginning to chafe at their starvation rations while they watch the galling economic successes of their South Korean compatriots. I needed to show them my world A-list qualifications. Whether we actually have the capacity to A-bomb Los Angeles I am not going to tell you. What I need is to get invited to pull up a chair at the international table as an equal player with the Big Five. This will insure me of a firm place in world history and at the same time safeguard my investments (and those of my family members and close friends) in your admirably solid dollars.

From where I sit I think that what you need is a win. You have been so busy accomplishing nothing of any political substance during your first nine months that your approval ratings are below fifty percent. This is so out of line with your pre-election promises and so damaging to your own image of yourself that it must be what keeps you up till all hours dreaming up those stupid tweets. You are on your way to becoming the most ridiculed president ever, and to someone who seems to have no sense of humor or humility to fall back on, this must be especially galling. (I see no need to mince words, Donald. We are beyond diplomacy, I think.) A win — getting me to mothball my nuclear weapons — would reverse all this for you at one stroke.

So here’s the deal : you greet me in the Oval Office for the photographers, shake my hand, promise me enough food to keep my people alive for the next five years, and arrange for my country to be seated at the United Nations. In return I open my nuclear facilities to UN inspection (for real; I will hold nothing back) and promise to scale down and eventually eliminate entirely the program according to a fixed, verifiable schedule.

That’s it. You win and I win. The only losers will be those people (I presume there are some) who would like to see us commit mutual planetary suicide in the name of some cause about which they have become delusional — presumably a pseudo-religious cause, since they have to believe in some other venue where their beliefs will be able to flourish after the Big Bang. You don’t appear to have any more sympathy for such people than I do. Actually, it seems to me that there is a possibility that both of us might benefit from the elimination of a number of screwballs in each of our retinues who persist in putting hopes of short-term advantage ahead of survival.

Assuming you agree to the deal, how do we then proceed?

  • First, you do a ‘Nixon-to-China’.

  • You turn up in Pyongyang without your full state-visit $300,000-an-hour entourage (just Air Force One if you insist on having your personal chef fry your hamburgers).

  • I greet you at the airport. The cameramen record everything. We announce our agreement.

  • Mr. Rodman retires in silence, financially taken care of for life, along with anyone he desires to have with him, to the private estate I have granted him. He is forbidden all future contact with the outside world except for an occasional game of HORSE with me (he has agreed to this).

  • You take me back to Washington as a guest on your plane, where we request a special session of the Security Council to approve the details of the multi-nation supervision program.

  • I return to Pyongyang as a conquering hero, having established North Korea as a World Player.

  • I stage the largest parade ever seen. (I will help you arrange an even larger one for Pennsylvania Avenue on the Fourth of July.)

  • You announce the end of the nuclear standoff from the steps of the Capitol in front of the absolutely guaranteed largest crowd of people ever assembled on the planet. (I can help you with that too.)

Do we have a deal? RSVP.

With all good wishes to your wife and those of your family who are currently in your good graces,

Rocket Man

Pyonyang, September 2017.

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Emotion and Reason

If we needed any more reminders, Donald Trump’s election has reinforced the lesson :

 Reason, the characteristic that supposedly distinguishes Man from the rest of God’s creatures, doesn’t stand a chance when opposed by emotion.

You may consider that this is because of genetic instinct or conditioned reaction; the explanation hardly matters. It’s the effects that count. In the face of consensus that the world has slowly been making some progress toward a greater degree of cooperation since 1945, a couple of stupid slogans have easily upset the applecart. The chants of “Build that wall!”, “Assassinate the bitch!”, and “Put her in jail!” that distinguished Trump’s rallies were demonstrations of unbridled resentment and anger, without the slightest nod to logic. And they won easily.

So we have now, at least in America, embarked on a “yuge” retrograde epicycle. We are going to try to renege on hundreds or maybe even thousands of years of painstaking progress in order to stoke the ego of a buffoon who believes that civilization is merely a matter of crowning winners and sneering at losers. Outright KKK epithets are going to replace dog-whistle whispers in refutation of pointy-headed academic consideration of facts. Vote-getting lies are going to be acceptable as legitimate political currency, so long as they work. Nielsen ratings are going to replace the numbers formerly supplied to legislators by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office. Threats of “fire and fury” are going to replace thousands of State Department employees so that Mr. Tillerson will be able to point to “significant” payroll savings and provide a protected route through the minefield of career diplomats currently undermining the Twitter decision-making of his humorless and constantly furious boss.

Will this prove fatal to our 230-year-old experiment with democracy? Or will sanity reassert itself as the shouters and haters start to see the results of their victory? Will they come to understand the connection between their vanishing health insurance, their diminished social security, their doubled Walmart prices, and their loss of power in the gig economy as the Donald continues to focus on his ever-thinning comb-over and his ever-waxing belly? Or will they just conjure up new scapegoats — Chinese or North Koreans or Muslims (or black or brown or LGBT people) — and chant all the louder?

Only time will tell. But short of prayer and fist clenching what should the rest of us be doing? Can we, each one of us, swallow his or her anger and make it a personal point to reach out to one of the shouters and try to start a conversation? Is it possible to reach the part of their cortexes where thoughtfulness is located and attempt to explain that shouting not only relieves personal stress, but that it has community consequences, some of them decidedly unpleasant? (Yes, I have tried. I have only one Trump supporting friend. I asked her about it. What reaction did I get?)

 “I still think we needed shaking up. Trump shakes the tree. He may not drain the swamp, but it’s a start. Let’s see where we go from here.”

 OK, let’s see. But in the meantime we have to resist the Tillersons and the Bannons and the Kushners over every bit of the ground they covet. Open our doors to refugees and immigrants. Refuse tax relief to the one percent without meaningful concessions on steps to mitigate planet warming. Rescue our conned students from deadening debt. Retain every last provision of Dodd-Frank and deny every request from the Pentagon for more preparations for war. The threat is not from “out there”; it is from “in here”. Morality counts. The Bible counts. Charity counts. If American is to be Great again, it must lead by example. Trying to lead by muscle only gives the Kim Jong Uns the advantage. We are weak when it comes to weighing the future of the planet against temporary attempts at coercion. We will give in when the red lines are crossed. That’s our humanity talking; not our bluster. We may not be able to influence Trump by our example, but we can still reach his supporters. Fortunately there is a time limit to his reign. We need to hold the fort until the cavalry comes in sight.

Who do you know who voted for him? Reach out. There is power in one-on-one that goes beyond chanting and cursing. The message is that we are all in this together. That’s the key word : together. Even Kim Jong Un.

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To My Chinese Reader

This blogging shtick continues to bring surprises. WordPress.com, which hosts my blog, gives me all sorts of feedback numbers about “visits” and “views” and other descriptors I don’t fully understand. This is welcome, if confusing. Since I retired some years ago after fulfilling my capitalist duty to put enough money in the bank to get my kids through college and provide for the probability that at some point my wife and I will need long-term health care I have had the leisure to indulge my high-school ambition of becoming a writer. I started by launching my brilliant thoughts in letters to our local newspaper, hoping they would be noticed by influential big city people summering in our little Connecticut town. I envisioned being invited to join literary discussion circles. I would engage in correspondence with the leading intellectual lights of the age. Now, 30 years later, I have written over 500 essays for two local newspapers without getting more than a couple of dozen responses. I console myself that my opinions have been at odds with the political beliefs of most of my readers. My little town voted two to one Republican, and I identify with the one, not the two. I think the editors of those papers originally accepted my political OpEds more as evidence of their open-mindedness than of their convictions, but I considered this a fair exchange. I got space to air my views and they got credit for being non-partisan. I sometimes tried to spice things up by being deliberately provoking, but instead of the discussion I sought I tended to get either a frustrating silence or angry dismissals (“Why should we pay for a town beach if ‘those people’ are going to be allowed to use it for nothing?”). But I found no specific points that I could use to gin up a conversation. Eventually I gave up — using my columns more as an opportunity to try to clarify my own thinking than to make any attempt at either conversion or conversation.

So when one of the papers changed owners, and the new editor found some of my vocabulary choices objectionable (Specifically, I used the word “nigger” in a piece about euphemisms which she felt might somehow come to the attention of an under-aged and impressionable child reader, scarring him or her for life.) There were in addition other sins involving what the Times sometimes refers to as “a reinforcing expletive” (This was before the Mooch made the word itself the object of the news), and she fired me, I found that I was not happy with enforced silence and I turned to blogging as a solution.

Being of the generation that predated the IT gene, I had the good sense to ask for help from younger friends who were experts. They were kind and patient and set me up with what I needed to get started. I owe them thanks.

I was dubious at first about what the loss of editorial constraint might bring. I could use the words nigger or fuck any time I liked, without fear. But I soon discovered that since they were now easily available they had lost a lot of their power. In fact I haven’t found occasion to actually use either of them so far. I also worried that without having to search for subjects that would interest both me and potentially convertible readers I would end up just ranting. This hasn’t happened either. I find that without deadlines I can spend more time than before on my chosen subjects (and be more careful about researching them), to the benefit, at least in my opinion, of the logic of my arguments. Plus, I no longer felt obliged to comment on every controversial event that popped up in the daily papers, or to post an essay before I was really ready to let go of it. (In this new world, my expert friends explained to me, one doesn’t publish; one “posts”.) My current SOGOTP list (Shit or Get Off the Pot) is currently 31 items long. Blogging has been therefore a blessing on several counts.

OK. A modest audience of no more than a couple of dozen was a major comedown from the combined 9,000 print-run of my two former papers, but I never believed that any large fraction of that supposed readership was mine anyway. WordPress records the number of visitors to my blog every day and reports back. I assume the tallying algorithm is aware of the identity of these visitors, but it doesn’t give me that information. I invite comments at the end of each post, and anyone who wants to can send me a message at the price of disclosing his or her email address. WordPress also gives me a report by geography. It does this by means of a little world map where the country I have reached lights up in highly ego-satisfying color. To see the little map light up in such widely separated spots as South Africa and Sweden and Morocco is a thrill. (All right; I know who it is in Morocco, and the Swedish hits are family members, but South Africa? I have no connection with South Africa.

How do people find my blog and light up my map? My words are of course accessible from the standard web search engines, but I find it more flattering to assume that it is through that “sharing” icon, which is a painless way of passing along to an acquaintance with a simple keystroke something you enjoyed. This surely accounts for a recent unexpected burst of interest from Canada that gave me over 20 hits the other day. I don’t know anyone in Canada who would be reading my blog, but someone apparently just happened in and enjoyed some of my lambasting of the Donald and passed it along to friends.)

But I have one regular visitor who turns up three or four times a month who intrigues me. He or she is in China, which lights up a really gratifyingly huge swath of Asia. I can speculate all I want, but I will probably never find out who that person is. Is he or she some clever dissident who has found a way to bypass the government filters and explore ideas unacceptable to the current rulers of the Kingdom of Heaven, sneaking to the Wifi cafe under cover of darkness; or is he or she a faithful cubicled bureaucrat, keeping tabs on a list of possible sources of information from beyond the wall? I tend to favor the second possibility, given the risks of the first. In my imagination I conjure up an unforgivably prejudicial image of a little man in thick glasses hunched over his laptop and checking the boxes to convince his superiors that he has done this week’s duty to the Party. The really interesting part of this is, of course, that now that I have written this, he or she can possibly be presumed to eventually read it. Will that produce a tear in the cloak of anonymity? Will he or she leave a comment with a return email address? Will we be able to start a conversation?

At any rate, blogging is a new world, and promises new experiences. Life is not over just because you are 94 years old and have been fired by your editor. You can now react in ways formerly inhibited by the state of your bank account (although I was only briefly paid for any of my essays, through a slip of the administrative gears once during an ownership change years ago), and look forward to slowly increasing the number of your hits by paying attention to problems outside your own parochial concerns. Maybe even expand your mind and become a true citizen of the planet.

China, are you there?