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?

Empathy is putting yourself in someone else’s shoes. Sympathy is then discovering that they fit. Empathy does not automatically result in sympathy. If I hear that you have bunions, I can probably both empathize and sympathize. If I hear that you have mistreated your feet with pointy shoes all your life and now you are complaining because you have bunions, I may still be able to empathize but I will find it hard to sympathize. I can feel sorry about your suffering decline to condone your stupidity. Your life is your life, and as the Pope says, “Who am I to judge?” That’s empathy. But if we are to go together on a shopping trip for your next pair of shoes, we will have to distinguish between opposing motives. In order to help you pick suitable footwear I will first have to understand why you chose pointy toes in the first place before I can judge whether I can forgive you (sympathy).

To apply this example to politics, which is where we are of course headed, I am a Democrat who regards some Republican positions as misguided, but if I am to have any influence on the GOP’s choices I will first have to understand why they chose these positions in the first place. So if you are a Republican let me address you directly and simplify the grammar. Before I can decide whether I can sympathize with you I must first try to put myself in your shoes.

Let’s start right in with a hot issue : abortion. Before I can decide whether your profession of horror over abortions is rational or hysterical I have to know on what it is based. If I understand your attitude, you feel that only God should have the right to terminate a pregnancy. Once the sperm has met the egg, His rules are in effect and they are immutable and we have no right to interfere. Our interference will in fact amount to murder, and we can all agree that murder is bad. So I ask for a little further clarification : If murder is bad, how can you support abortion, capital punishment, and drone bombings at the same time? Or are there different degrees of murder : some cases where mitigating circumstances have to be taken into consideration and other cases where they don’t? I find empathy difficult when it involves such directly conflicting ideas housed in the same brain.

Further, if you profess devotion to the sanctity of life, why does that devotion cease to count once the fetus has emerged from the womb? What happens to the right to life when the baby has entered the world of hardscrabble capitalist competition — the “get off your butt and go get a job” world? Wouldn’t consistency suggest that you continue to offer support for the newly created life by making sure it receives continuing loving care instead of being left to the vagaries of prejudice, poverty, and lack of education provided by sometimes incompetent or evil parents or underfunded social agencies? Why wouldn’t you advocate for guaranteed quality education, adequate diet, and a safe environment for every new baby brought into the world with God’s approval? If I could first understand that I might be able to better decide whether to sympathize.

I have had a problem with self-contradiction because I have been taught to believe that a reasonable question is entitled to a reasonable answer — not an ambiguous evasion. “God is in charge” is evasive. It seems to mean, “Let me off the hook; it’s above my pay grade”, “I’m not my brother’s keeper” or “We can’t afford it”, none of which is compatible with other professed parts of your belief. So if you want my sympathy, first give me a logical answer.

*

How about another tough one — refugees? These are people who for one reason or another have decided that uprooting themselves completely from their homes and fleeing the comfort of their cultures is less demoralizing than the prospect of staying where they are and wasting their lives in dead-end circumstances. They risk their lives in leaky inflatable boats and on sun-scorched deserts to leave one place and find refuge in another. Because this involves crossing borders between conflicting sovereignties and sometimes also conflicting ideologies we (“we” the so-called civilized world in the person of the UN) have written laws intended to protect these beleaguered people. They are (we have ruled) entitled to be welcomed, protected, and given whatever assistance we can furnish. Specifically Article 1 (A) (2) of the 1951 UN Convention says that a refugee seeking asylum is to be afforded the same rights in the country where he seeks refuge that any other citizen of that country enjoys.

So my question for you is why your platform policies include building walls to keep people trapped inside their national borders, turning them back on the high seas to prevent them from setting foot on the soil of the country to which they have chosen to flee, and detaining them for indeterminate periods in camps where they are denied even the most basic rights of citizens? If you are being told by your political leaders that there is a possibility that terrorists or rapists or just plain crooks may be sneaking in among these refugees, I can understand that you may worry about that (although the probabilities are ridiculously small according to all the surveys I can find) but then I have a problem figuring out why you ever accepted the idea of a UN in the first place. If you want a walled-in space where you can be protected from any outside influences (“Foreign laws have no place in our court system,” your legislators say on the record.) you will have to explain to me where our American court system acquired its laws in the first place. Our Declaration of Independence is unequivocal : The right to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” defines everyone’s right; not just those reserved for white plantation owners or holders of privileged birth certificates or green cards. Those rights are “inalienable”, and “governments are instituted among men” to secure them. Will you sacrifice our founding beliefs on the altar of “we/they”? Who are “we” and who are “they”? Who is to decide?

If you feel marginalized by our constitutional commitment to laws, I can empathize to a degree — the degree to which I believe you have been misled by people whose motives I mistrust — but I cannot sympathize with the intellectual choice I think you have made. It is not morally defensible to place personal privilege above humanitarian impulse. How can I accept the idea of a starving dark-skinned baby being denied a few dollars’ worth of medicine by the prejudices of a well-fed Texas billionaire?

*

I have a similar problem with whether what you call “Big Government”. What I find good you often think is bad. According to you many of our national problems can be traced to too much government. You say that too many things are politically regulated instead of left to Adam Smith’s “Invisible Hand”. Mr. Smith believed that unregulated conflicting selfish motives would cancel each other out and soften capitalism’s predatory nature. Regulations, you say, are stultifying — holding back what would without them be an amazing surge of growth and happiness for us all. And in addition to getting rid of layers of annoying regulations, you point out that this would shrink the amount of tax money required to fund the technocrats and bureaucrats who oversee this oppressive regulatory structure. As policy, briefly : “Starve the Beast.” Reduce those taxes, bleed the resources of the agencies entrusted with drafting and enforcing regulations — and we will get back to a Golden Age when it was every man for himself and John Wayne and Ayn Rand told us how to live.

I can empathize with that. I grew up idolizing John Wayne as a Saturday afternoon double-feature movie fan, and later on I devoured Ayn Rand as a soak-it-all-up college student. But then I grew up. I had watched as Tom Swift and Horatio Alger lifted themselves by their own bootstraps, but that was before I met Huck Finn and Jim. Especially Jim. Jim haunts me to this day, and I will go to my grave feeling that I owe him an apology for what my ancestors, and yours did to him. I won’t mention General Custer here.

After all, what is democratic government? (Small D.) It is the formal structure arrived at by mutual agreement (or, if necessary, by majority vote) among people living in the same polity to ensure that their relations with each other are fair. (In this sense isn’t the whole planet itself a political entity? That’s a question for another time’ we have here only so much space.)

Historically, as conflicting goals multiplied and disputes required creation of a body of law and compromise we gradually assembled a written compact to which citizens could turn for both validation and prediction. Dodge City originally had a few dozen inhabitants. Both the variety of its problems and the number of rules and bureaucrats needed to administer them were minuscule compared to those of the 326 million people in today’s America — all jostling and bloviating and competing for elbow room and a share of the available material goods. One man with a sheriff’s badge and a .45 and a reliable sense of fair play is no longer sufficient to constitute “the law”. All things considered, this country’s present-day bureaucratic workforce of 24 million (which includes everyone on a direct government payroll : federal, state, and local, including the military) doesn’t seem to me to be out of line. Just under 15% of all workers. In Saudi Arabia, for example, it’s two-thirds of the workforce, in Egypt 23%, in France 28.5%, in Sweden 33%. But that’s only my opinion, after a little research. Your opinion, if I hear it right, is that that 15% is bloated, and that the only practical way to bring it down is to refuse to provide the taxes that fund it. Stop funding these people’s paychecks and let them then fight over their personal share of the diminished funds. If the special areas of concern with which they have been entrusted with managing have to shrink, let each agency struggle with that, and let the previous recipients of government largesse (sick people, the elderly, the public school kids who need lunches and books or more education) just deal with it. The loudest voice here is that of Grover Norquist, but he seems to find few among you who will admit to being dissenters.

That, in my opinion, is like telling a sick man, “Just ignore your symptoms and whatever’s causing them will go away. Or maybe not, as the case may be, but it’s your problem; not mine.” To me that’s exactly backward. In my view, the patient’s health should be the first concern, and the dollars are just numbers on pieces of paper. They neither bleed nor suffer whether they are black or red. Costs are what we pay for humane social behavior. Patients are people; not numbers. If it should require 50 million bureaucrats to serve 318 million citizens properly, then so be it. Raise the taxes and “Just Do It.” Sweden and Norway, not known for oppressive regimes, each have ratios of public-service workers to population more than twice as high as the U.S. They also rank equally high in the tax tables. They also rank much higher on the recently released “Happiness Index”. They also function quite efficiently, thank you.

According to you none of this information matters. Just “starve the beast.” It will find a way to cope. People will die without medical subsidies, without free lunches, without subsidized housing, without schooling. We will stop funding research, stop worrying about global warming, stop subsidizing artists who may be producing iconoclastic works (like “Fearless Girl”), stop putting limits on predatory lending and monopoly. The sacred National Debt will be reduced (Huzzah!), bank loans will have their name euphemistically changed to “available liquidity” and be protected against regulations protecting borrowers, and stock bonuses at the top of the one percent will retain their non-inflationary full value.

Empathy says I can imagine what it is like to have to worry about whether my yacht is a foot longer or a foot shorter than yours. Maybe. But I cannot muster up any sympathy. Until each newly arrived child is guaranteed an equal amount of both empathy and sympathy from the rest of us, I will remain dissatisfied. There is a moral obligation larger than the desire for a balanced budget, and we ignore it at our peril. Once we start writing off living breathing people in the interests of avoiding red ink, we are on the road to perdition. I don’t see this as a political choice; it’s a human imperative

*

Before we leave the subject of whether the ability to accumulate money is a reliable measure of virtue, let me add one more comment. If you are rich I can, with a certain amount of effort, convince myself that I can imagine what it feels like to be in your shoes, even if I have a hard time with the details since I have never experienced them. That’s empathy. When it comes to sympathy, though, I have a much more difficult time. Why, whether you have either been born on third base or have worked your way up to the corner office from a start in the mail room — why, once you have racked up that first two or three million which will be all you can reasonably spend on food and shelter during the rest of your life — why do you want more? Neither empathy nor sympathy seems to be possible. I can’t think of anything further to say about that, so I will simply leave it there.

*

Now we come to the color of our respective skins. Mine happens to be white — or a pinkish approximation of white. This grants me a number of privileges, whether I seek them or not. In a sidewalk space dispute with a person of a different color — red, brown, black, yellow, or whatever — I get a certain deference. I get the same unthinking deference from the cop who writes my beef into his notebook first. In front of a jury, even one composed of people of mixed colors, I am given extra subconscious points for probable honesty. The apartment I want to rent, or the house I seek to buy, doesn’t turn out to have been rented or sold yesterday to someone else once I show my face. These are symptoms of hold-over Jim Crow, which is itself a hold-over from the Civil War that supposedly ended 150 years ago, won on the ground by the folks who found these privileges unconstitutional and wrong, but they are still considered normal by all too many of my fellow citizens today. And those are just minor bits of evidence of what a difference a little melanin can make. More serious effects are exclusion from jobs, denial of visas and green cards, lynchings, police shootings, and “stand your ground” laws.

Being white, and privileged, I admit that I cannot truly empathize with people of color, since I don’t have the everyday experience of waking up every morning with the knowledge that an innocent encounter may make it my last day. But I can sympathize. And being sympathetic with people of color prevents me from empathizing with my compatriots who value their white privilege more than the color-blindness of the law or the human rights of everyone. Unfortunately it has been my observation that the preservation of Jim Crow — once the forthrightly proclaimed obsession of white southern Democratics— seems now to have passed into the wink-wink, dog-whistle, only-partly-concealed program of you Republicans.

I don’t foresee that I will be able to change my view, nor do I see what beneficial purpose it would serve were I to try to either empathize or sympathize with you about it. I will simply admit my failure and go to another topic.

*

Your currently elected leader has explained that in his view the population is neatly divided into winners and losers. For winners he has admiration and encouragement. For losers scorn and admonishments. For those of us who don’t see the world that way, this is unreal. Many in both of these categories have landed there by luck — that is, circumstances beyond their control. George W. Bush didn’t get born on third base through his own efforts; he started there courtesy of his family name. There was no way he was going to end up homeless on the streets of Midland, sucking on a bong for solace, even if he tried. By the same token that homeless man on the street, sucking on the bong, didn’t have much chance at the White House if he was born to a single crack-addicted mother who kept him home from school to keep her supplied with cigarettes and beer and simply shrugged her shoulders when the landlord showed up to collect the rent.

A large part of life is a lottery whether you like it or not. The question is whether the proper role of government is to simply look away and let you fend for yourself, or do whatever it can to avoid unfair results. Should it provide public education and enforce certain academic standards to make sure that in case one day you are elected President you will be qualified to make good judgments and decisions? Should it attempt to ensure that you get a healthy diet, a decent home in safe housing, and access to mentoring agencies to look after your interests while you are too young to look for a job or make your own choices?

Yes, I can empathize with strong, self-reliant people who believe they have lifted themselves by their own bootstraps and think everyone else should just follow their example. Especially if they have parlayed their own successes into comfortable lifestyles and “prestige” possessions, and fear that the increased taxes necessary to help the losers will decrease their own hard-won status as winners. I can empathize, but not sympathize. Lifting yourself by your own bootstraps is a myth, as anyone who has ever tried it can testify. There are two ways to be winners. One is to be an avowed crook. You can just refuse to obey the rules and rely on your cleverness or your muscle or both to simply steal what you want from the people who live by the rules —making them losers. Or you can study the rules and learn to prosper within them. Either way you must show that you understand them, and remember that the rules were established by previous winners whose consciences wouldn’t allow them to look away when they saw losers. Using your self-touted genius to dodge your taxes is not worthy of your humanity. The same goes for efforts to put people in jail for having a few ounces of pot in their pockets, or to give investment advisors permission to put their commissions first and their clients’ returns second, or to force bait-and-switch victims to confront international corporations as individuals in a lawyer-dominated courtroom to get redress, or to dictate which bathrooms people can use, or whether pregnancy remorse should be illegal, or whether the UN law on refugees seeking asylum should be simply ignored. I admit to being able in some of these instances to sympathize, by taking into account the deficient education with which the law has provided you and the undue respect sections of your media have accorded to acknowledged rabble-rousers and demagogues, but sympathy? No.

*

So let’s admit that accommodation is all but impossible, and that continuing combat is what the future holds. The goal is not bipartisanship; it is domination. Obama may have been intelligent and forward-looking, with his eye always on the bigger picture and the longer run, but he had a flaw — he was a nice guy. Trump is ignorant and prejudiced and his balls are bigger than his brains, but he lives in the now (that is to say, in the tiny interval between his tweets and the morning news) and for him the long run is the future of his hotels and his towers and his golf courses. We shall soon see with which view Americans ultimately decide to back. Hold onto your hats. (And ladies, watch your crotches!)

Tonight the first item before us is of particular relevance because of what’s recently been going on in the news. I have listed it on the agenda as “Do we want to engage a celebrity as our public spokesperson? Pros and cons.” What has been in the news, of course, as you are all aware, is that tying your brand to a celebrity has a potential downside. If that celebrity turns out to have, shall we say, both feet in his mouth? Think of Lance Armstrong. On the other hand there are plenty of examples of heroes who have kept their reputations pure and have undoubtedly helped to sell extra thousands of sneakers or watches in spite of serious accusations of labor exploitation both overseas and domestic. Despite the Supreme Court’s definition of companies as persons it is hard for the public to love a public corporation. It is much easier to love a famous and beloved spokesperson who presents him or herself as the company’s representative. So I propose that we consider at this meeting whether or not we are justified in hiring such a spokesperson, if we can find a suitable one. The cost in dollars comes right out of the cash drawer, since there is no reliable way to measure its effect, and the more beloved the spokesperson the higher the fee we will have to pay for the endorsement.

Shuffling of feet and papers, as participants, old hands familiar with the game, get ready to show their serious concern.

First, the pros. A beloved celebrity has a faithful following and that will include many worshippers who will want to wear their football player’s jersey or their tennis player’s watch or eat what he or she eats or read what he or she reads. At least some part of this adoration should in theory be translatable into strengthened brand loyalty. The more your brand can be identified with an accepted hero the more you should be able to expect it to be respected in the public arena.

This sets off the usual variety of off -the-record gestures and expressions that members have perfected over the years to ensure that the chair and the other members understand their reactions, but that won’t appear in the official minutes.

Another plus : In the event that something goes wrong with your plans, the calming voice of your celebrity can be counted on to offset some of the unhappiness generated by whatever catastrophe has befallen your enterprise. He or she is, so to speak, the first-line buffer against immediate judgment, giving you a little time to devise a believable defense. A reassuring smile on a recognizable human face is a far better initial counter tactic against any accusations than a formal statement by a hired spokesman who can be expected to be both on the company payroll and biased by his own share of complicity. There is a lot of reassurance in the message : “I still eat _____, or I still use ______, so how dangerous can it really be?”

More sub rosa signs of agreement or disagreement — raised eyebrows, barely perceptible nods of assent, a half-hidden thumbs-up while reaching for a water bottle.

On the other hand (rustling as everyone sits up a little straighter as a sign of increased attentiveness) there are the dangers, exemplified by the Armstrong case, for example, that if your spokesperson turns out to have a secret history of groping or cheating or taking too strong a position on a controversial issue you risk having your brand seriously damaged by association. The payment of millions of dollars of endorsement money to “heroes” who turn out to be flawed is not easy to defend to the voters who will decide whether or not you are returned to your organization. A public disavowal of any real connection with your actual product may not come quickly enough to ensure that the association will be erased without harm.

A low rumble of throat-clearing signals that the message has been heard.

And a mis-chosen representative’s fall represents a waste of several millions of dollars paid to the representative and his or her agent in the first place, most likely largely under the table and hence unrecoverable. This can be the subject of embarrassing investigations as to who approved the choice and whether there is any possibility of provable kickbacks or nepotism.

Several sotto voce comments are distinctly heard, but again not clearly enough to appear in the minutes. The word “investigation” rouses a particularly strong reaction.

So, gentlemen (and one lady, excuse me, ma’am for at first overlooking your presence) I offer a motion to turn these deliberations over to you for a more thorough examination. Does the Republican National Committee want to engage Donald Trump as its spokesman or not? Do I hear a second?

I don’t know where we’re going with this essay, but ever since the beer truck in Stockholm mowed down a group of people on the main street, steered apparently by a refugee Uzbek nutcase, uneasy questions have been ricocheting around in my head, and I can’t seem to find satisfactory answers. I got the news with my morning coffee, and I filed it away with the stories about the Nice Promenade des Anglais and the London bus and the Paris nightclub and the Saint Petersburg subway — things that happen that I would be glad if they hadn’t, but that I can’t do anything about.

Then I got a message on my phone from my son in Philadelphia : “Everyone’s all right.”

As it happens we have relatives and friends in Stockholm and my son had taken it upon himself to check and let me know that all of them were okay. I found that thoughtful, and would have let it go at that, but then I began wondering why my son had been concerned enough to check. It had never occurred to him to be similarly concerned about acquaintances in London or Paris — or in Oklahoma City. These were all events that took place in the newspapers; not in our personal lives. We didn’t expect them to impinge on us. Even the disaster of the trade towers on 9/11, though it happened where I could see the smoke plume, didn’t prompt me initially think of the possibility of it being fatal to any of my personal acquaintances.

Was this one somehow different? Apparently, at least for my son. But why? Because Stockholm is small, because Sweden itself is small? Because Sweden is notoriously neutral and level-headed, and should therefore logically be immune to crazy upheavals in the rest of the world? Or just because the people my son was checking on were family; not just strangers?

Deaths from terrorist attacks are statistically such a tiny fraction of deaths from other random events — lightning strikes, floods, earthquakes, mudslides, epidemics, incurable diseases — as to hardly figure in our daily worries. (Your chances of being hit by lightning are in the neighborhood of one in a million worldwide; your chances of being killed by a terrorist are somewhere around one in six million, even lower if restricted to murders in the U.S. involving foreign-born perpetrators.) It wouldn’t occur to my son to send me a reassuring message after every Stockholm summer thunderstorm. Why this sudden concern?

I think it somehow has to do with the malicious intent. Lightning strikes and floods are impersonal; the result of chance, not animosity. This makes it futile to expend much effort on thinking about prevention (although a law against building your summer cottage directly on the beach might make sense). So we just shrug (after doing whatever we can to deal with the consequences) and go on with our lives. When it’s a terrorist attack, though, we may fancy that we could perhaps have taken some measures to anticipate it, even prevent it. We don’t look at the odds and wonder whether it would be a better investment to investigate the possibility of reducing the number of lightning strikes, the chances of dying from which are six times as great. That would be called cost-benefit analysis — not a catchy term like “Build a wall!” There is no funding available for such research. There is plenty for combating panic attacks, though. When it comes to terrorists, last year the United States invested 41.2 billion dollars in the Department of Homeland Security, which (considering that there were actually six deaths directly attributable to terrorism in the U.S. during that whole year — the normal rate over the past 10 years) seems like a lot of money to spend on a rather minor threat. By way of comparison, in the whole EU last year there were 134 such deaths, where the population is much larger and the hatreds much stronger. In the U.S. over the past 40 years there has been a yearly average of 74 deaths from mass killings, mostly non-terror-related (and that would of course include 9/11’s 3,000 victims). From a cost-benefit basis the department is an obvious miscalculation.

Our readiness to fund expensive anti-terror measures would therefore seem to be based on irrational fear, with perhaps an admixture of frustration and a desire for vengeance. The fear is statistically unreasonable. The desire for vengeance would seem to be unrealistic, considering that the perpetrators, mostly Muslim, have usually already committed themselves to martyrdom, and would be only too glad to further glorify their successes and priority access to the welcoming virgins in Paradise by having a chance to bloviate against Unbelievers in open court in the West before being executed — by guaranteed humane drugs. Any threat to bomb their surviving families and neighbors back home and raze their houses after the fact doesn’t seem to me to be an effective deterrent, besides being distasteful to us as retaliation on the innocent.

What, then, is the point?

We could certainly find other worthwhile uses for those 40 billions. I would be happy to leave my shoes on and my neighbor’s bag uninspected and just rely on the odds, especially when most of the luggage down there in the baggage hold has been unexamined anyway. A scientific inquiry into the chances of cutting down on the frequency of lightning strikes, or of improving STEM education in the public schools would also meet with my approval, although if given the choice I would be happier about spending it on the schools.

This afternoon a friend suggested another way to look at it. Given the current rate of unemployment among our citizens who have only high school educations, the large number of TSA employees required to make sure we take off our shoes and do not have explosive substances concealed in our toiletries as we board planes (but not trains) is a blessing that reduces the burden on the budget for welfare. He made a similar point about the bloat of our armed forces, which will have to be beefed up to be prepared for possible reactions to the latest round of unplanned tweets from our unpredictable dear leader.

Certainly this whole anti-terrorist campaign might well be looked at again — together with all the other competing budget items that are going to have to be eliminated to balance the budget document now being so bitterly debated by the newly triumphant and gloatingly unified Republican majorities in both houses of Congress. It will not do to pretend that anti-terrorism funding is separate from that for food stamps or health care. It’s all one credit card. But as my friend also pointed out, logic is not one of the talents that distinguishes the present generation of legislators. Still…can we hope?

“…history and experience prove that foreign influence is often the most baneful foe of republican government.” That was George Washington. 1796.

Mr. Washington lived in a time when the sanctity of national sovereignty was unquestioned. Safety was seen as staying disconnected from outside influences, free from outside ambitions, and untouched by outside wars. Two oceans were our protective walls, and the limitless Western Territories were our future. George can be forgiven for not foreseeing the effects of jet travel, Internet-speed banking, and global-minded businessmen. In the world of 2017 republican government is dependent for its survival not on isolation from foreign influence but on closer and closer international cooperation to establish common rules of conduct and provide a dependable framework for safeguarding a common future. America lived successfully by his insight for over a hundred years. That success ended in 1914. Starting in 1920 and with increasing intensity after 1945 we have slowly embraced the exact opposite position — we have striven to thoroughly entangle our affairs with those of other nations in order to avoid either accidental or deliberate annihilation by our newly empowered technology.

“If there are men big enough in this country to own the government of the United States. they are going to own it.” That was Woodrow Wilson. 1920.

“The business of America is business.” That was President Calvin Coolidge. 1923.

So now we come to 2017. Of the 193 countries currently members of the UN almost all governments are overtly controlled by government-tolerated oligarchs (as for example by Iran’s Revolutionary Guard or China’s Communist Party) or covertly run by sycophantic businessmen dependent for their success on the favors of legislators, who are bought and sold like commodities, as in the United States. In authoritarian states dissenters are intimidated by threats of poisoned umbrella spears or lethal face creams, in republics like ours the intimidation takes the form of money — supplied to ensure re-election of incumbents or withheld to discourage challengers — but the result is the same.

Foreign entanglements, in the form of treaties, trade agreements, and cross-border investments have become so all-pervading that they are now the norm, not the “baneful foe” that the squire of Mount Vernon worried about. Indeed, the United Nations itself is no more than an expression of the desire of nations to become more and more entangled with each other all the while paying lip service to the fiction of sacred national sovereignty to keep super patriots at bay.

So, much as it pains me to find myself defending the Trump administration’s cavalier attitude toward national secrets, I am compelled to concede that the current hysterical efforts to portray the “Russian connection” as a form of betrayal of our national interests are overblown. This is a president who has stated flatly that he is less interested in government than he is in strengthening his “brand”. He has refused to cut the ties between his money-making machines and the legislation he hopes to push through to make them still more profitable. He has declined to reveal the details of his historical tax evasion and in effect replied to our requests for information with an upraised finger. For him his office is just another business win. He is the other side of the “Kremlin, Inc,” coin. We were warned before we elected him. We didn’t care. To complain now is like dreaming that Adolph Hitler would have renounced the ideas in Mein Kampf once he became Chancellor, or that Mao would have tossed away his Little Red Book once he gained entrance to the Palace of the People.

Reagan’s conniving to stall off a Carter deal with Iran to release our diplomatic hostages until he could take the credit for it, and Nixon’s maneuvering to prolong the Viet Nam disaster to ensure his own election victory chances do indeed qualify in my book as treason. They were unheard of transgressions against all humane norms, they cost thousands of lives and millions of dollars, and accomplished nothing but political advantage. Trump’s messages to Putin, to the extent that they may have actually happened, amounted to no more than insider trading tips, and we have seen that today’s laws against insider trading have essentially withered away under the onslaught of vastly improved technological methods of instantaneous and encrypted information exchange. Treason? Hardly. Just solid business tactics, like his avoidance of taxes or hyper litigiousness.

So let’s cool it. The indignation over the Russian connection is just a variation on the furor over the Benghazi and Clinton’s e-mails. Any form of political bludgeon is acceptable to some people. Like Stephen Bannon or Stephen Miller. Let’s leave that type of attack to their ilk and let’s hope that the American people, once having realized how badly The Donald has conned them with promises he has no way of keeping (and clearly no understanding of the risks involved) will come to their own conclusions as to the morality their methods, and whether they more are in the spirit of Washington or of Reagan and Nixon.