Month: June 2019

Ruminations

(The comparison may seem inelegant or à propos, depending on your opinion of my observations in general, but I am accustomed to storing the first glimmerings of an idea in a preliminary file that corresponds to the first stomach of a goat — where it can stay until I get a chance to decide whether to try to expand and refine it or junk it as not worth further effort . Here are a few that were headed for the junkpile but seem worth passing along in their raw state.)

Advice for Washington politicians: When your favorite project (or that of your largest campaign fund donor) is threatened by lack of funds, you can always steal from your great grandchildren in the form of new Treasury paper (notes, bills, money). Your kids cannot object, since they do not yet exist. (Republicans haven’t yet figured out how to extend personhood across generation lines. If they could, they would.) If you assume a future administration will honor these debts, this is borrowing; if you have no confidence in that outcome, it’s called stealing. In either case you are safe from the law, since you write the laws. Your conscience is another matter. Any public mention of that can always be redacted.

Why “Guns don’t kill people; people kill people” is bullshit: Once upon a time in a war you had to face your enemy one on one and see the terror in his eyes and the sweat on his brow as you hacked at him with your sword or pounded his face with your mace. You could see him bleed and fall. (Homer’s Iliad, and Stephen Crane’s Red Badge of Courage, are particularly vivid.) You had to be really angry and really determined to kill. The invention of weapons that worked at a distance (Spears, for example. See the Iliad again.) put a little distance between you and the ugliness of watching a man roll up his eyes and die. The comfort offered by improvements in lethal weapons such as catapults, arrows, and kettles of boiling oil poured from the battlements further de-personalized killing. Cadavers became more statistics than individuals. How big were the armies? How many died at Agincourt and what were their names? By the time we get to the great abbatoirs of Gettysburg or Flanders the killers don’t have to see an enemy face at all. It’s just a matter of having a well-oiled weapon : a gun. By time we get to Teddy Turner and Dresden or Harry Truman and Hiroshima we don’t even think of the flesh-and-blood victims our technologically improved arms have managed to eradicate. The complicated mechanisms involved in building weapons of mass destruction have pretty generally removed individual anger, or even, often, an awareness of the political points at issue, in a tangle of gold braid and government contracts. The urge to kill remains, but the power to do it is vastly multiplied by the improvement of our weapons. Guns come in many forms, from handy side arms to missiles and atomic bombs, but they are all guns and have the same purpose. Inventing them, building them, aiming them, unleashing them have become so institutionalized and specialized that for most people in the chain of their manufacture and use their participation has been entirely neutered. So “guns do kill people” especially innocent bystanders. They also make it easy. You don’t have to develop the back muscles to power two hours of swinging a sword or whirling a mace. Just a little touch on the trigger or the FIRE key and the job is done. You can spray a whole group of watchers who didn’t even know there was a quarrel to be settled. Thirty or forty death-dealing slugs at a time from your assault rifle. A hundred thousand victims sentenced to slow death by radiation poisoning. The barrel bomb is a perfect example : a bucket of shrapnel specifically designed to do “collateral damage”. It is merely a gun in another form. And now we come to the ultimate development — the atomic bomb — the ‘gun’ so powerful and so indiscriminate that its use will very probably annihilate both the shooter and the target. (“I just did what I was told — when the light came on I pressed the button. Bombs away! Somebody down there will clean up the mess.”) Guns most certainly DO kill people. The bigger the guns, the more powerful the guns, the more people they kill. If only we could go back to the days of the club and the fist, the world could be a much safer place. Denying that is bullshit.

You are the editor of your city’s morning paper. Overnight the dictator of an ally has managed to corner in another country, kidnap, torture, and kill one of its own citizens who had the temerity to question his total authority. The evidence is incontrovertible, including videos. They are sensational pictures. How do you handle the story? (1) You could put it ‘above the fold’, with the gory pictures in full color. It will beckon from the newsstand and sell a lot of papers. It will also advertise to any other of his citizens who may be contemplating protest what awaits them, even in exile, which was the tyrant’s purpose. Or (2) you could downplay the crime by treating it as a simple murder with a couple of inches on an inside page, which would frustrate the dictator, preserve your honor, and cede the profits to the yellow tabloids that you know will be happy to milk the gore and politics for all they are worth and do their best to inflame the hatreds already loose in a world that you are convinced is careening toward war. Or (3) You could curse the unfairness of this decision being pushed on you by your profession, and resign to become a professional bass fisherman in what is left of a vanishing Lake Mead, leaving your wife and kids with no breadwinner. Nice problem.

Proverbs 13:20 — “Ye shall be known by the company ye keep.” I ran across this the other day in an obituary, and I decided to think about it seriously for a few minutes. In particular I applied it to the Golden-Haired One, and made a list, in no particular order — just as people came to mind :

Victor Orban,

shining humanistic light of Hungary, famous for rejection of immigrant refugees seeking asylum and dog whistles about Jews.

Muhammad bin Salman,

supporter of the Saudi travel pack containing a reel of piano wire and a bone saw. (Shouldn’t every tourist carry one?)

Kim Jong un,

crusader for an adequate diet for North Korean soldiers and elite civilians even if that means a few farmers starve

(And think how much will be saved on electricity. Check your satellite picture.)

Bashar al-Assad,

major stockholder in the United Barrel-Bomb and Chlorine Gas Company of Aleppo and Damascus.

Recep Tayyip Erdoğan,

who somehow finds errors with every Turkish dissident journalist’s tax forms.

Roberto Duterte,

who advocates shooting first and planting the evidence afterwards.

Benyamin Natanyahu,

whose example in Israel will soon serve as Donald’s road map to what happens after presidential immunity expires and the corruption becomes public.

Vladimir Putin,

whose little green men whose uniforms bear no insignia enable Russia to disown them while nibbling away at Ukrainian borders.

Narenda Modi,

whose troops somehow failed to detect the odor of burning flesh in the Gajarat Province of India.

Have I forgotten anyone?

The mysterious transmogrification of the supposed profits from tariff increases to tax cuts for the 1%. According to government statisticians, new tariffs cost every American taxpayer an average of $414 more in 2018 than would have been due without them. Did the GNP increase? Yes. Was this a boon to the big corporate investors in the U.S.? Yes? Did it drive the cost of living up? Yes. Did wage earner income increase commensurably? No. So the tariffs managed to transfer all those little extra $414 raids on the incomes of millions of the poor and middle classes to the bank accounts of the already well-off. And there were a lot of them, too. About a million and a half taxpayers at the last count. Call it a billion dollars. Legerdemain that puts Penn and Teller in the shade. The secret, as with all magic tricks, is to keep your audience’s attention away from the real action. Keep watching the red necktie. Never mind the deficit; your grandson will pay.

Robert Mueller’s mouse : ‘A president is not indictable while he remains in office, so we decline to express an opinion on whether we believe Mr. Trump is guilty of anything.’ This paraphrase of Mr. Mueller’s long-awaited report is mystifying to say the least. Having been hired to determine whether or not Trump was guilty of collusion with a foreign power — a crime — and/or of impeding an official government inquiry — also a crime — Mr.Mueller seems to be saying that since no indictment is legally enforceable no inclusion of a final judgment or recommendation for any action ispossible. Isn’t this is sort of like telling Elie Wiesel to go and learn to play golf and forget about the Holocaust, since the perpetrators are now almost all dead, and therefore unpunishable? You might even say that such an argument could be extended to include all the malefactors of history, since the events to be investigated are all over and done with and the perpetrators beyond the reach of the law. Just suck it up and get on with the planning of the Fourth of July festivities installing Mr. Trump more firmly in the pantheon of 1-45.

Then may we respectfully ask “What was the point of investigating in the first place? All that work for nothing?” And then to cap it off Mr. Barr goes to work with his chubby little magic marker (Did he borrow one of Donald’s signing supply?) and makes sure that no smallest bit of the critical opinions of all those lawyers and professional investigators makes it into the light of day. Trump gets to claim justification for his NO COLLUSION! tweets. The special investigation lawyers collect their (fat) paychecks. The results are safely bottled up. Maybe we should just shrug and say that’s what we expected.

Probably that is what realists expected from the beginning, but not on such flimsy grounds. Because there is in fact no law that says a sitting president can’t be indicted. There is an opinion on the books by the Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel, passed by a notoriously biased administration trying desperately to save Richard Nixon’s presidency on September 24, 1973 and never tested in any court. Tricky Dick’s resignation mooted it at the time. Why Mr. Mueller chose to take it out of moth-balls in 2019 (without any proposal for any court test) is hardly obvious. He was certainly in a position to propose a test, having been appointed a special (outside the normal rules) prosecutor, a status one would assume was intended to grant him freedom from partisan restrictions.

The Constitution is silent on the subject except for a suggestion that such indictment would be appropriate after impeachment (Art. I, Sec. 3, Clause 7), but no specific prohibition about doing it before impeachment. So Mr. Mueller has left us as much in the dark as before, and Mr. Trump as much in violation of the law as before, and the country in as much confusion as before, but the Treasury depleted by the millions of dollars spent by all those lawyers and their ‘business’ dinners at Washington’s tonier restaurants. It is possibly worth noting that Ken Starr, who believed so fervently in the indictability of a sitting president when Bill Clinton was the target, is now equally fervent about his immunity when Donald Trump is the accused felon.

Winning the tariff war. So far, according to the published numbers, Mr. Trump’s “easily winnable” war has cost the Treasury 58 billion dollars. Assuming that the assets in the Treasury belong to all of us, that’s $414 each. The details would bore both you and me. Just accept the official report as accurate. Why quibble? The citizens in our red states, safe behind their rose-colored lenses, will pay no attention anyway, and the grownups on the coasts are neither surprised nor yet ready to do anything about it. Who said, “Too much analysis leads to paralysis”? And this is just the beginning. The Donald has discovered a new weapon in his battle against common sense and institutionally regulated procedures : an executive-imposed punitive tariff. (“If you don’t stop those refugees, we’ll stop buying your tomatoes.”) Not that the one has anything to do with the other, but he can portray himself as the fearless commander holding all those godless foreigners’ feet to the fire — a lesson in the power of his gut strategies and the wimpiness of collective action. First NATO, now NAFTA, what’s next? Maybe he’ll issue an executive order abolishing climate study.

The deadly danger of impeachment. Just one final word : Pense.

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Ship of Fools

“The science is clear but politically it’s impossible.”

That statement, included without further comment, explanation — or indignation — in a news story in the New York Times about the gigantic boondoggle that has plagued New Orleans’s struggles with decades of Mississippi floods, suddenly struck me with its basic insanity. I had, of course, always accepted such statements as a matter of course in the country in which I live and in the state in which I live (New York). I had grown so used to accounts of the anti-reality biases of our present President and our recent Albany lawmakers that the words no longer aroused any reaction — they were just another innocuous caveat, like ‘It’s probably going to rain.’ or ‘…who asked to remain anonymous because he was not authorized to speak’ or ‘Assuming the Mets lose again’. But this time its frank acknowledgement of intellectual corruption suddenly stirred my indignation.

Of course devious politicians from Julius Caesar to Donald Trump figured it out long ago and have routinely used it to their advantage. As a public figure, how you talk and how you behave are always two different things. Your public persona gets you the ticket to legislate on behalf of the people who have agreed to put their trust in you. Your private arrangements get you the dollars you need to reward your allies and your relatives, repay your lobbyists, place your bribes effectively, and buy off your enemies (and perhaps your ex-lays). Not difficult to justify unless you still have some scruples left over from your Sunday school classes or your Torah studies or madrassa lessons. But when put baldly and without comment by a newspaper reporter without the complications of any specific issue, it should constitute a shock to anyone not worshipful of willful ignorance. “The science is clear but politically it’s impossible.” “We would rather commit planetary suicide than relinquish a short-term advantage buttressed by lying in the service of partisan advantage.” Is that sane or insane?

In the case of New Orleans, how do we have the blind shortsighted lack of vision to look the other way when the coffins start to float up from the cemeteries every time Old Muddy slides over the levees? In Britain, how do we expect complicated Remain versus Brexit decisions to be sensibly conducted when facts are simply considered an option — to be cited when helpful to the cause; ignored when inconvenient? People are already so busy trying to survive loss of their once-secure jobs, deterioration of their once-adequate wages, and resentment against the use of public revenues to refurbish the stately mansions that are supposed to rescue the country with their admission fees (although, of course, they belong to the people already) that they hardly have time or interest any more for that consoling after-work pint and thoughtful political discussion. When accurate information is missing from the news no hasty referendum is going to reveal anything beyond pure ‘follow the sheep in front of you’ prejudice.

But my paper today holds out a glimmer of hope. It tells of at least two federal court judges who seem to be inching toward an understanding that future generations are entitled to a place at the table where things that will affect them are being discussed. In the name of as yet unborn and unnamed children, actual proxy plaintiffs with the money to pay lawyers are reported to have filed lawsuits claiming that those unborn children actually have legal ‘standing’ to sue the current political classes that are destroying their chances even before they can get born and speak for themselves. How those lawsuits will progress, if indeed they are permitted to progress at all, is of course unknowable, but I find it encouraging that they have at least got this far. They are now on some court’s official docket. They have the necessary stamps of approval and assignment numbers and scheduled trial dates The cases apparently will actually be argued. There will be public discussion. There will be media babble. At least, there should be public discussion, barring possibility of the Pecker Defense (‘buy the story and bury it’, as practiced by our President, among other loose-zipped men with adequate wallets) doesn’t rise to the level of infecting the major channels. We will perhaps be allowed to factor in the future cases of silicosis, epidemics, stunted growth, lead poisoning, and 20-yard smog visibility into our considerations of new environmental regulations and universal health care. How big a blessing would that be — not only to the unborn children but also to those remaining worried citizens who still care about what seems to be happening to their faith in big-D Democracy?

How much, in the form of contributions to the current crop of insurgent candidates, would you be willing to bet on it? What can you do to encourage those judges and discourage those coal revivalists and oil-well resuscitators and wild promisers of a return to the forever-vanished 19th century fossil fuel job economy? Are you willing to write letters to your newspaper editors, to your representatives, (to the troglodytes as well as the reformers)? Will you stand up in town meetings and ask questions? Will you refuse to be intimidated by the flag-wavers and KKKers and the MAGA chanters with the hate oozing out of their ears? For Brits, read, will you call out the nostalgic Empi-ah rooters, dreaming of reviving pith helmets and teacups? Same thing. Or will you remain silent and resign yourself to the bitter judgments of your children and your grandchildren and their grandchildren, who will perhaps be the beneficiaries of a clearer view than you can manage — if they are not physically blinded in a choking worldwide smog?

Rule number one : don’t vote for anyone older than 40. Rule number two : see rule number one. Rule number three : be sure you vote!