Theory : In my lifetime, which is now in its tenth decade, I have watched as men ruled the world. There have been few women during that time who have gained power. So far as I can remember, none of them — the few women — have embarked on stupid wars, indulged in genocide, engaged in conspiracies to disenfranchise or disembowel their own citizens, given orders for the killing of millions of people, or murdered their own compatriots.

OK, maybe Evita was a bit over the top, or Imelda with her 3,000 pairs of shoes, and Suu Kyi turned out to be something less than a new Virgin Mary. But nothing on the scale of the Kaiser, Hitler, Stalin, Nixon, Kissinger, Kennedy, LBJ, BushII, Milosevich, Mugabi and their ilk. By and large, where women have ruled, we have seen a leaning toward democracy. There has been peace. Where men have ruled we have seen carnage, slaughter, hatred, and destruction.

That’s on the international level. On the domestic front the economic crooks — the grifters, the scammers, the conmen, the major white-collar criminals — have been men. The jails are full of them. The courts are full of them. We have grown used to them. From the Trumps and Madoffs to the directors of Wells Fargo and Volkswagen. Today they have congregated in the White House. They come in all shapes and flavors. But among women, aside from a few with special flair, like Leona Helmsley or Imelda, they seem to be scarcer.

My conclusion : If we go to the polls next month looking for a general rule to apply (instead of trying to investigate the actual qualifications of the candidates, who can be expected to be no more truthful in their answers to our questions than Supreme Court nominees) we can do no better than simply declare this the year of the woman. I’m for Her could be an all-purpose campaign slogan, without the need for all that wasted posturing and postering we normally put up with at election time.

How to do it : Go into your voting booth and take a few extra moments to look over the ballot. Take up the felt pen provided. (Pick it up off the floor where the previous voter left it for you.) Circle the names of the women candidates. This will cut the choices down considerably, especially in places like New York and North Carolina, where smoke-filled-room government has been the norm for so long. That will ease your choices.

Where there is only one woman included among the contestants for an office (usually the case, unless there are none), just fill in the little oval for her and move on. If there are several women (This may happen this year more often than in the past; we have seen more activism lately) you may have to consider other factors, like color, wealth, or determination. My inclination is to favor a nice shade of café au lait and enough money to cover the costs of complying with all the obstructionist registrations and forms that will instantly be set up by the male establishment. In the cases where none of the women’s names are familiar, just make a random choice, and move on. Don’t sweat it.

If there are no women listed, just don’t vote for anyone. This is generally considered a vote for the incumbent, but there are risks to my program as there are in any political plan. You can’t vote for “none of the above”, the rules won’t allow it. The message you send by withholding your vote altogether is that you don’t approve of any of the people on offer. When the tallies for the women candidates come in and are seen to be greater than those for the men on their tickets, it will not take a genius analyst to get the message. Too late for this time, perhaps, but a lesson for the next.

Cons : We lose some good men with experience who have simply been frustrated by their distaste for the kind of all-out war practiced by the Republicans since Nixon. Some will be Democrats and some will be Republicans. Their expertise will be missed. If they are old, they will have to retire, which it may parhaps already be time for them to do. If they are young, they can welcome the broom that is sweeping the old farts out of the way. If they are truly desperate they can transition, as the modern expression has it. It is not necessary that complete emotional transformation accompany a strategic gender switch. Many Spanish Jews who converted in the 1500s landed quite successfully on their economic feet, and their descendants are still enjoying the fruits of their pragmatism.

Pros : We gain a whole fresh attitude on the part of our elected leaders — one more concerned with promoting sexual and economic equality than with backroom deals, at least to begin with. Women trying to level the playing field and give everyone the shot at the pursuit of happiness, though sometimes loud-mouthed and inelegant, have a better chance of rescuing us than the old-style cigar-chewers and pussy-snatchers we have grown to tolerate. There are no guarantees, but I’ll take my chances on the women.

P.S. : As an extra plus, you can make your own lapel buttons. “I’m for Her” is short, easier to spell than “Chantorella-Savoskowicz” and relieves you of any doubts about correct pronunciation. Same goes for the yard signs, although my preference would be to forget about those — they just fill the waste bins after the election, to no purpose. A generously proportioned “HER” lettered with a Sharpie on a shirt cardboard or a panel from an Amazon box, and placed prominently in a

front window should suffice.

But VOTE!

A lot of ink and hot air are being expended these days on suggestions for strategies to survive Trump and get back to a normal civilized form of government. Of course they all depend on a clear distinction between “us” and “them”, which renders them futile, since we don’t agree even on that differentiation. Both sides consider themselves “us”.

As a democrat (or, more accurately, a democratic socialist) I regard the Trump-GOP army as definitely “them”, but of course Trumpists and Republicans regard me as “they”. Since “my” side tends to rely on such old-fashioned notions as facts and truth for support and “their” side relies on hand grenades and a combination of made-up numbers and chants and red baseball caps, we don’t seem likely to be able to find common ground any time soon.

What, then, can we look forward to?

It seems to me there is only one obvious scenario. First, we have to hope that the division is not “we” and “they”; it is tripartite.

1. Old-style Democrats, nowadays increasingly the young

2. Old-style Republicans, nowadays holding their noses and counting their blessings, but increasingly skeptical

3. Trumpians, exulting in their newfound power to disrupt the old networks that that believe formerly oppressed them.

There are no obvious reasons that I can see to expect much in the way of wholesale crossovers, certainly not enough to seriously affect the current 50/50 split between the (1)s and the (2)s and (3)s combined. Over time, the lack of willingness to face facts among the (2)s and (3)s is likely to show up in the form of cracks in the body politic itself. (If nation states are to deal successfully with one another they must be able to rely on each other’s promises, and not be subject to overnight “repeal by tweet”; and as grandiose promises of job restoration and economic revival are seen to fail, one by one over time, even the most raucous chanters or financial predators will be forced to admit that there is underneath it all still an incontrovertible “truth”.) This will leave us (1)s to pick up the pieces and try to put the body politic back together again. But we are talking here about a process that will take a long time — probably generations. During that time there is a real danger that frustration will push us (1)s to adopt the know-nothing tactics of the (2)s and (3)s in an attempt to speed up the denouement. This would soften the distinction between the two sides and delay the final confrontation.

But if Trump, being unable to give the (3)s what they want (complete and permanent domination of the government) eventually fails to produce (as he must fail, since he has no program except “Heil, Donald!” and not enough insight to see that he is intellectually challenged) where will his enthusiastic troops next turn? To the bankers and giant corporations who screwed them originally? To the Democratic “Deep State” that represents to them a worldwide conspiracy to take away their guns and their religion? Or perhaps to a new party, more reality-based, but still unwilling to admit that there were no dinosaurs roaming Colorado 4,000 years ago and that the desertification of our little blue planet by human misbehavior is not only possible but perhaps already beyond the point of no reversal?

Is there any chance that the young of both factions might see their youth and energy and better educations as sources of optimism and their numerical strength as a practical asset and form a new political party that would be capable of an end run around the road blocks to reform that the entrenched careerists have until now managed to maintain? If so, who would lead such a crusade? Has our worsening division over the past 40 years left us anyone who enjoys the confidence of both sides? Can the overwhelming power of the moneybags on both Left and Right (the Koches and Soroses) so corrupted the sources of political recruits that no revival of good government is any longer possible?

You and I, dear reader, will in all probability not be around to see how this script plays out. With a certain amount of luck, though, our great grandchildren will. And they will have every right to ask, between black-lung coughing fits, “Where the hell were you when this could still have been stopped?”

Well, where are you?

My name is Vance. When I was ten years old I lived in Asheville, North Carolina. In the square at the center of town there is an obelisk of impressive dimensions. On its base is carved the single word, “VANCE”. My parents used to kid me that they had erected it when I was born.

Next to the obelisk was a water fountain. No, there were two water fountains : one marked WHITE and the other marked COLORED. I don’t recall paying any particular attention to that as a kid. It was just part of the world that a ten-year-old was learning to navigate. The seats in the trolley that took me to Pack Square from Biltmore were labeled the same way. That’s just the way things were in 1933.

Not until a couple of years later, after several trips to Brooklyn to visit my grandparents, did I begin to really see those labels and think about what they meant. There weren’t any like that in Brooklyn. Everyone in Brooklyn drank from the same too-little burble of tepid water, trying to keep his lips away from the little spout out of which it emerged, which might well harbor any kind of strange germs you could think of, but they were not assumed to be necessarily either black or white. Nobody died from it. I started asking questions.

My displaced Ivy League parents gave me the “When in Rome…” bit, along with the “No point in rocking the boat…” bit, but I found that unsatisfying. A few years on, when I got my chance to cross the Mason-Dixon Line for good, I did. I have never been back, or regretted it. I discovered a world where, at least legally, skin color didn’t matter. Although I saw that none of my physician grandfather’s patients on Hancock Street were black, and no one in my private high-school class was black, and nobody who lived on our block in Bedford-Stuyvesant — this was 1936 — was black, and my very proper grandmother, who happily ate off the dishes washed by her black maid and wore the clothes she washed, would never have dreamed of inviting her to the table. There were no black kids in our neighborhood “gang”, either. The block of Jefferson Avenue directly behind ours marked the sharp dividing line between the white stubborn holdovers and the invading blacks. Our back yards and their backyards touched, and both were visible from our second-floor windows, but a mis-hit ball over the fence was considered as irretrievably lost as though it had flown to the deepest heart of the Congo.

What has this got to do with today’s news?

Well, General Zebulon Vance’s obelisk still stands in Pack Square, and probably most passersby haven’t any idea who he was (a big deal Confederate military hero, extensive slaveholder, and active politician during Reconstruction times). The obelisk was erected during a wave of similar Confederate monuments and statues intended as a 1896 middle finger to the 1865 winners by the 1865 losers who were exploring their states-rights power to continue to celebrate their cause. I will assume that the drinking fountain situation has been set right by now, but as last year’s Charlottesville rebellion vividly demonstrated other symbols are newly under attack, on the grounds that they are offensive to an increasingly black population that feels dissed by this white granite cavalry prancing on its pedestals with their oversized gloves and broad-brimmed hats. After all, much as I disapprove of the man, he has to be right once in a while. “We won; you lost. Live with it.”

There are an awful lot of these (often awful) statues populating the public squares of the Old Confederacy and still remaining to be dealt with. If we are to avoid future Charlottesvilles, it would be nice to have some agreed-on policy for guidance. So I have a suggestion.

There was once prevalent a (perfectly reasonable) myth that colonial portrait painters, who found it difficult to get to their patrons and subjects in the snows of winter, used to spend the cold months snug at home preparing generic bodies and backgrounds that could quickly be fitted out with specific faces when the weather improved. There is, so far as I know, no real evidence for this, but it remains an excellent idea. My suggestion is simply that we apply it to celebrity statuary and edifices of all kinds. The rearing stallions (or geldings in the more DAR dominated locations) and the brandished swords could be easily supplied with alternate (alt-right or alt-left, according to the prevailing political winds) heads and faces. The stones inscribed VANCE around the base of Asheville’s obelisk could be made interchangeable with other blank blocks without the cost of full demolition and reconstruction.

Sensible, but totally impractical, you may say. Well, I have to point out that some of our ancestors didn’t think so. Unless you exclude the ancient Egyptian pharaohs from among our ancestors, they were probably among the first to adopt the practice. Ramses II, who enjoyed one of the longest pharaonic reigns, figured it out early on. He simply had his masons locate the cartouches with which earlier monument-building pharaohs had signed their temples and tombs, and, after erasing their hieroglyphic signatures substitute his own. Presto! He had both acquired an additional monument to his own glory and had dimmed the name of his predecessor at one stroke. I would think this would appeal to our Donald on both counts. And in these times of incipient dictatorship, what the Donald says goes.

As to the actual galloping granite stallions and sword-brandishing heroes, a reconfigured face here and there would be enough to do the job in many cases. Not a difficult assignment for a sculptor. Other identifying accessories could easily be removed or exchanged. The largest of the large monuments (like Napoleon’s Arche de Triomphe) wouldn’t even have to be renamed. Nobody ever calls it that anyway. In Paris it’s L’Étoile. Haven’t heard any complaints from Napoleon.

I wonder how long it will be before New York City’s “Triboro Bridge” and “59th Street Bridge” will be replaced by “The Robert F. Kennedy” and “The Ed Koch”? You can still today hop in a yellow cab and say “Idlewild” and have a good shot at making your flight on time, and that name was officially changed more than fifty years ago. No cost beyond a few overhead signs and some tourist confusion.

So here’s to Ramses’s breakthrough discovery. Prosit!

But now we perhaps need to proceed to a more fraught subject. What about citizens glorified more by their works than their statuary? As scholarship, and the book industry’s pressing need for new sales digs up more and more dirt about famous people, should Michaelangelo’s dalliances with little boys prevent us from admiring his David?  Should Wilhelm Furtwängler’s games of footsie with Hitler’s thugs disqualify his recordings of Beethoven? What about Wagner’s unabashed anti-Semitism? Consign the Ring Cycle to the dustbin, a casualty of Dachau? “Michaelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni” was Michaelengelo’s full moniker. Maybe we could just change his signature to “Buonarratti”? After all, Plato owned five slaves when he died. None of our heroes is perfect. Hard as it may be to believe, even Donald is reported to have flaws.

That’s for another time. For now we should concentrate on how to give a generic statue a specific identity on demand. And the associated problem of what to do when a formerly honored honoree falls out of favor? Can we rename Columbus Circle just “the Circle”? Maybe “Santa Maria Square”?

Problems, problems.

“You’re right; that’s a hatchet. I always carry a hatchet when I go into a cherry orchard. You never know when a tree might fall and you would have to chop your way out from under the branches. I lost a good friend that way once. By the way, do you know The Cherry Orchard? Very good play, they tell me. Russian. Those Russians know a thing or two. Very cultured people. We should respect their history. Yes, OK, about the hatchet. Yes, that’s a picture of a stump that looks as though it might have been produced by such a hatchet. Could also have been done by a beaver, I guess. People are saying that. Some of the best people. No, I’ve never seen a beaver around here, but who am I to judge? Well, come to think of it, I did hear some chopping back there in the orchard. Could have been close to where I was. Maybe not, though. The acoustics are strange there. Even that guy Tolstoy noticed that. It wasn’t Tolstoy? Well, I’m not a lit major — I was busy at The Wharton School getting my MBA, so I could go into my Dad’s real-estate business and make a lot of money. A LOT of money! More than my Dad ever made. That’s W-H-A-R-T-O-N. Make sure you spell it right. A very high-class school.The best in the country. They only admit the best people. I was at the top of my class. Always the smartest guy in the room. No, I never kept the transcript, but you can use my career as evidence. One of the brainiest people ever born. Genius rating. IQ off the charts. The stump? Well, I admit it’s pretty strong evidence but I have two high-priced lawyers working right now trying to have it ruled irrelevant. No witnesses. I’d say probably beavers. But how about those 33,000 e-mails of Hillary’s? Where are they? And where is that server that was supposedly hacked in the office of the Democratic National Committee? Strange things happen to evidence when the Justice Department or the FBI gets hold of it for safekeeping. Like those doctored photographs that supposedly showed grass instead of people on the Mall at my inauguration. I never saw any grass. Not saying they are incompetent, but people are talking. I’m not responsible for what they say. I just listen. That’s my job. Listen to both sides. There are always good people on both sides. You never know how respectable and important they might be until they take off those sheets. I’m a big strong healthy fellow but I wouldn’t go to a peaceful meeting where a bunch of rabid socialists might attack at any moment without a weapon of some kind to defend myself with. Without taking sides, mind you. Well, to come back to that tree, I’m not outright denying that I might have done it. Practice in advance always helps when it comes to the actual emergency. Let’s suppose I did without really meaning to. Just chipping away to pass the time. What can we do about it now? Can’t graft the tree back onto the stump. Can’t put the cherries back on the tree. How about a deal? I promise never to do it again, even if I didn’t do it in the first place, and I agree to plant a replacement tree — even two. You forbid the media from talking any more about it (by telling the judge to seal the indictment), and I provide free cherries to your favorite charity for as long as the ones on this felled tree last. Deal? What did you say was the name of the Cherry Orchard guy? Sarah should have briefed me on that.”

Not the country, not the majesty of the office, not the health of the Chief Executive’s business arrangements, not the Chief Executive’s narcissistic image of himself, not the beauty of his (third) wife, not the supremacy of his political party. None of these. What then?

Something called the Constitution.

Against all enemies, foreign and domestic.

These words are in the oaths solemnly sworn to by all incoming senators, representatives, judges, and other elected officials, including presidents. The words are taken from the Constitution itself.

Nowhere in that document there is any mention of a political party, much less of supporting such a body, but now in 2018, after 242 years of fairly successful government of, by, and for the people we find ourselves unexpectedly engaged in an attempt at new definitions. Instead of defending, supporting, protecting, and preserving the Constitution, we are now asked by the likes of Mr. Donald John Trumpf, Jr. of the moronically oversized signature to support and defend “the Republican Party” or just plain “Me”. “The government” has become “my administration”.

According to his recommendation, our future elected representatives, at whatever level, and our judges, elected or appointed, should be chosen on the basis of personal loyalty —loyalty to their major campaign donors. This approach has already been blessed by an increasing number of the very sitting judges and nominees whose job it will be to protect us from our domestic enemies. The only remaining visible defenders of our founding document are apparently the civil servants who work for such non-political organizations as the FBI, the CIA, the military services, and other unelected branches of the government — those labeled pejoratively by Mr.Trumpf as the “Deep State”.

In his view “deals” should replace treaties. Lies should replace news. “They love me” should replace “e pluribus unum”. The strong-man type of government we once overthrew in 1776 should be brought back, with The Donald now at the helm instead of George III.

So much for 242 years of constructive nation-building.

Unless…

Unless what? Unless the millions of unimpressed voters at the bottom of the heap now decide to sit up and pay attention. Trumpf’s unholy gang can only be dislodged by a full-scale revolt. The courts will be the hardest to fix, but none of the others will be easy. The revolt will have to be led by less-than-perfect white knights, since we don’t seem to have any perfect candidates. It will have to start with state- and even municipal-level beginners — I would guess mostly women — and fueled by doorbell ringing and indignation and street demonstrations and placards on sticks rather than by under-the-table funding. A certain level of amateur raucousness and anger will have to be considered an acceptable part of the battle plan. Maybe even a few cracked heads, as the entrenched forces become more desperate.

There is of course no guarantee that this will work, but can you think of anything better?

As a first step, I suggest contributions to your local insurgents. The current Mafia have amply demonstrated the power of money in politics. In these days of “seniority equals power” and revolving doors lead to seats on corporate boards many politicians are for sale. But together we, collectively, can easily raise enough to outweigh the Koch Brothers and all the conservative undercover K Street PACs combined.

We are at a conservative guess, 116 million strong (There are now 200 million registered voters nationwide, although only 166 million of us — 58% —actually took the trouble to vote in 2016). The Donald got 62,984,825 of those votes. That leaves 137 million people who did not vote for him, despite his problem of estimating crowd sizes, a substantial majority. If every one of those 137 million wrote a check for $7.30 tomorrow that would give us a war-chest of a billion dollars just for starters.

My recommendation would be to send it all to Pocahontas, who seems to me to be the most motivated and the most straight-arrow in sight. Her snail mail address is: Elizabeth for MA, P.O. Box 290568, Boston MA 02129. Using snail mail would have the added blessing of providing the Post Office Department, our only remaining publicly accessible channel for secure communication, which lost 2.7 billion last year, with 6.85 million in new revenue. Not salvation, but every little bit helps.

Or, if you are web addicted : <https//donate.elizabethwarren.com/page/contribute/web> will get you and your credit card to her web page. Let her decide how to pass it around where she figures it will do the most good.

Of course you won’t agree with everything she says, or does, but then with whom do you always agree except yourself?

And what have you got to lose? $7.30 seems a small price to pay for getting rid of these hijackers. How much did you spend on lunch yesterday? So skip that salad or that burger tomorrow and you can feel patriotic and proud of yourself.

Why do you write these stupid little essays for those stupid little local newspapers that no one reads?

Whoa! That’s a lot of putdowns in one short sentence. Let’s take them one at a time.

1. That the essays are little is undeniable. Generally a few hundred words, given the amount of space allocated by the editors who publish them. It’s true that they need words to separate the advertisements on which their existence depends, and they are sometimes grateful to get free ones, but at the same time they have to avoid alienating readers who may not agree with all the words, and they can’t afford to use too much paid advertising space. A careful balance is required, even with the popular rubric of “Op Ed” to absolve them of responsibility before the temperature rises too much. Occasional expansive explorations of a particularly complicated subject may occasionally be tolerated, but not on a steady weekly or bi-monthly basis. I have occasionally had permission for a two-part dissertation, but those were definite exceptions. (I recall that when Newt Gingrich published his Contract With America in 1994, in the form of 15 proposed Acts of Congress that the insurgents promised to introduce, it took me a lengthy two-installment 6,000-word effort to point out one by one their inconsistencies and impossibilities — as well as the horrendous grammar in which they offered them. My editor at the time at the New Fairfield Citizen News, Ellen Burnett, blessed be her name, shepherded it through, and defended it in the fuss that followed. We never tried it again, though.)

There is also the matter of reader attention. A quick in and out is generally the best way not to be overlooked, especially if your opening words are challenging. And that’s usually the reason for an essay anyway. What’s the point of adding another string of clichés to a subject that everyone has already beaten into submission? Especially if the topic happens to be in the daily new broadcasts, to which the TV addicts (that’s most of us, by a wide margin) have already been subjected to endless analysis. You need a new “hook”. Put it out there in the first sentence, before opposition (or indifference) sets in. And keep it short.

2. “Stupid” is of course a judgment call. Every reader is entitled to his own judgment calls. Brevity in itself doesn’t make an essay stupid. In fact, quite the contrary. If an idea cannot be boiled down to 2,000 words it is probably either too specialized (occupied with nitpicking, for the cognoscenti only) or too vague to be worth reading. “I didn’t have time to make it shorter” is itself a cliché among writing workshop leaders, but clichés don’t last unless they are accurate and useful.

That judgment, applied to either the essay or the newspaper (or book, or blog) where it is given a public airing, is probably intended was a condemnation, but based on what?

There is an implication that a small circulation vehicle must not be a serious one. Luther’s 95 theses though were originally nailed up in an edition of one. They gained wider currency later of course, thanks to Gutenberg. Many a samizdat started as the three or four legible copies that carbon paper could produce on a typewriter, passed from hand to hand before they finally found a typesetter and a press. The Gospels began as handwritten one-of-a-kind scrolls. I don’t mean to suggest that my scribblings have anything in common with any of those, but the Sherman Sentinel perhaps had a circulation at its maximum of around a thousand; the Citizen News in Ellen’s day had a print run of only about 8,300 (the population of New Fairfield at the time was just under 14,000). That’s not quite chopped liver, although since I am sure many recipients were quite uninterested in anything I had to say it’s not necessarily a measure of readership either. I admi that the section that always interested me most as a reader of both publications was the Letters to the Editor, which dealt almost exclusively with local issues, hardly ever with the more wide-ranging topics I chose to write about.

3. Which brings us to the that stupid little local newspapers that no one reads part. There are 320 million Americans. One out of 320 sees The doctor and I New Yorker. One out of 3,200 sees The New York Review of Books. According to WordPress my blog gets seen by about 5 people on average, if you don’t count the Chinese guy who checks in once a month, presumably on behalf of Xi’s Censorship Bureau. The disparity in those numbers does not strike me as significant, considering that we are all three pretty much tilting at windmills. There are real differences of course in remuneration and reputation, but I don’t feel particularly disadvantaged. I seriously doubt that anything said by any of us has any serious effect on the movers and shakers of the world : the politicians, the corporate moguls, or the corrupt autocrats. They have their own methods of communication and their own world of their own made-up statistics. It works. They are not likely to listen to any suggestions from me, or The New Yorker, or The NYRB.

4. So why then bother to write essays in the first place? That’s trickier. “Because I have something to say” is in the end an egotistical claim like Trump’s — that my God-given brain is so exceptional that I am obligated to pass its benefits along to the less favored. OK. Guilty as charged. Anyone who opens his mouth or takes up his pen or approaches his computer keyboard with a public comment on other people’s behavior is admitting to a degree of pride he might well be embarrassed to admit to in other contexts. He may be truly concerned with the fate of the world, or of democracy, or of his favorite religion, but it takes a certain amount of chutzpah to try to tell everyone else what to do.

But one thing in favor of writing an essay rather than lettering a placard and picking up a bullhorn and screaming on the street corner is that the essayist has to be prepared to defend his thesis. He had better do his homework, check his numbers and names, and be ready to back up his recommendations with facts, because once he has made them public they are art of the written record and he is obligated to be able to defend them. This has a salutary effect on the essayist, unless he is into pure polemics (or Trumpian conmanship). The work of expanding a casual observation into a considered thesis, and then the reverse work of boiling it down into newspaper column length is enough to spare the world many a foolish notion. It has spared me more than one embarrassing faux pas. I have a large wastebasket, generally filled with wadded up false starts.

But why not race open wheel cars or raise chickens or build chairs? Why write essays in the first place?

There is only one answer to that : Why not?

We each ultimately have to find a meaning for our own lives. There is no agreed-on Master Book to which we all can turn to find out what the “right” life is all about (although a fortunate few like Joseph Smith and L. J hiju inRon Hubbard and a pious parade of popes and rabbis and imams believe that there is, and that they have found it). For the rest of us it is a matter of creating our own path and then being as faithful to our aspirations as possible. If you choose to build chairs, build the best damn chairs you are capable of building. Raise the fattest, most contented chickens. Win all the races you can. There is no standard that says one is more important to the future of mankind than another.

There is a case to be made that individual choice is too hard an assignment for many people — that lessons drawn from the past require too much effort and investment of time to discover what the past in fact was about. Joining a group that already “has it figured out” and codified (ten commandments for the Popes; 613 laws of correct behavior for the rabbis, 114 surahs and at least 4,000 hadiths for the imams) and letting their officially approved tenets serve to relieve one of the burden of individual exploration is a tempting alternative. It is also in many ways a more practical one, since groupthink is more powerful in politics than individual protest and politics is in its most basic form the art of survival.

Such debates are the reasons I choose to write essays. I will never equal Michel de Montaigne, who originated this literary form more than four centuries ago, but I will come as close as my talent allows. You may choose to read them or not, but if you do I hope to open your eyes to something you may not have considered before. It may have to do with politics, or war, or my reaction to stray puppies or whatever interests me at the moment. I will try to make it interesting to you too. I will even try to say something about it that may never before have been said, or thought of. I will try to back it up with facts, real ones, not made-up ones. I will be prepared to debate it with you, without shouting. On the occasions when I feel I have succeeded I will be proud. When I have failed I will be embarrassed, and resolve to do better next time.

So far there have been 600 next times. I have no intention of quitting yet.

There are people in many countries of the world who decline to participate in killing other humans just because their governments adopt a “zero tolerance” policy. Reformers have used a variety of definitions in an effort to establish an acceptable universal standard for such conscious objections to be legally valid. C.O. status used to be granted only to people who claimed it on the grounds of religious conviction but the religion part has been de-emphasized over the years (as some religions profess enthusiasm for official murder and as religious belief in itself has become less universal). The standards are now seen to include purely personal moral codes. The search for an acceptable worldwide phrasing continues. The UN’s Declaration of Human Rights is as close as we have come so far, and not everyone is ready to accept that (Mr. Trump, among others). But all agree that a key qualification for wartime C.O. status is that one’s beliefs must include all wars — not just a particular one.

The choice of applying for recognition of one’s C.O. status in preference to “just going along, with personal reservations” has never been popular. During World War II there were 34 and a half million men who served in the U.S. armed forces. 72,354 applied for C.O. exemptions when drafted — two tenths of one percent. It is an understatement to say that they were not then generally looked upon with approval. Similar numbers can be found for other countries, on both sides of that conflict, although in many of those countries the stigma was greater and in some it was never even an option.

But when it came to finding a suitable international definition for the Universal Declaration, there are several sticky wickets. Does the right include all wars, or only declared ones? Can the principle be recognized in non-war situations? If a government issues orders to its civilians to “Find all the Jews, turn them out of their houses, steal their belongings, strip them naked, check their teeth for possibly salvageable gold fillings, then stick your pistol in their mouths and blow their heads off”, were those citizens obliged by patriotic duty to obey, or did they have the option of declining to personally participate in pogroms? We have argued the point in courts. Eichmann’s conviction and hanging may have made us feel better and pointed the way, but it hardly settled the issue. According to Jeff Sessions the Bible does not accord that freedom to American Christians, at least. They are bound to follow the law — just or unjust. According to Donald Trump the question is irrelevant — it is all his persecutors’ fault : the Democrats have saddled him with a law that forbids us to even discuss the subject. He may be unhappy about it, but he remains law abiding.

So what about our Border Patrol agents in Texas? They signed up to join a military branch, sort of a dry-land Coast Guard. Steady employment, no advanced degree required, nice family allowance, good pension after 20 years. They thought they knew what their job was going to be. Patrol the border, catch and send back attempted illegal immigrants “wetbacks” looking for off-the-books work. They joined ICE and swore an oath to defend our country. Have they now an obligation in the light of the new job specifications (which now apparently include ripping nursing babies from their mothers’ breasts) to reconsider their individual actions from a moral point of view? If we maintain that World War II was the fault of the German citizenry for not opposing Hitler when Mein Kampf first hit the bookstalls, before he could assemble his crew of thugs and storm troopers, how can we now defend Mssrs. Sessions and Trump and their enablers? How can patrolmen defend their personal willingness to participate as they break up groups of incoming immigrants, deliberately fouling their life-giving water bottles, separating mothers and fathers from their babies as they risk everything in attempts to cross our desert border in search of a better life? How areTrump’s tweets Trump different from Mein Kampf?

Seems to me it’s time to stop allowing these questions to hide in the thickets of footnotes in liberal journals and on the Fox News shows where they can be debated to death while those babies are taught that there is no one to turn to for protection, no one to be trusted, only the permanent threat of self-serving politicians.

My hope is that each individual border patrolman will decide to answer these questions for himself or herself. Our established “Deep State” doesn’t seem to be prepared to defend common sense. But those babies will survive and grow up and we will have to deal with them and the lessons we have taught them, one way or another, here or in Mexico, or just within our consciences.

They have it within their power, we have it within our power, to fix it. Put down the guns, comfort the babies, and try to be helpful as the families struggle to find a foothold in an unforgiving world.

It seems to me we have arrived at the point where each one of us has to ask himself or herself the question: “What will I tell my grandchildren when they ask me? Where did I stand?”

There are 7.6 billion of us on this planet. I think it is safe to say that 7.5 billion of us would just like to be left alone with our private worries to work out our personal problems and make the best life we can for ourselves and our families using the cards we have been dealt. Life is a one-time proposition — no Mulligans. It is too precious to be wasted in hatred, resentment, antagonism, and untrammeled ambition.

1st Fly on the Wall: So where are you taking me now?

2nd Fly on the Wall: Hush! Be reverent. Be grateful that we’ve made it this far. This is the Cabinet Room, where the President meets with his advisers once a week to decide national policy. For many of his Cabinet this is the only opportunity they will have all week to even see him in person. That’s POTUS’s Chief of Staff, John Kelly, calling the meeting to order. Let’s listen.

Kelly: Is everyone here? Are there enough chairs? This has been getting a bit difficult with lately with so many people to accommodate. They tell me FDR’s cabinet meetings used to require only 12 chairs and a round table, but as you know we Republicans in our battle to starve the government have now got it pared down to 25, including all the “cabinet-level” appointees. But that means you will all have to speak up so you can be heard at the far ends of the table. No yelling, though. The higher decibel levels are reserved for President Trump’s exclusive use. And no applause, please for anyone’s remarks except his.

You all know the regular rules:

• No reports that won’t fit on one 8½x11 double-spaced page.

• Switch immediately to flattery if you detect signs of POTUS being threatened with GES (Glazed Eyeball Syndrome).

• Don’t hesitate to interrupt and change the subject at any opportunity; this is an officially approved discussion tactic.

• Curtsying and bowing upon POTUS’s entrance are optional but recommended.

Oh, and an encouraging note about last week’s meeting: I have just been informed that beginning next week a duplicate of Macy’s window will be installed next to the side portico where you all come in. Rules for its use will be posted during the week. Now is everyone ready? Applause, please.

POTUS: Everyone here bright and early, I see. Down to work without any preliminaries. I like that. Shows respect. Who do we hear from first, Mike?

Kelly: Alphabetical order, sir, us usual. Mr. Pruitt.

The Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency Pruitt: I fail to see, Mr. President, where my personal tastes have any bearing on the performance of my government duties and I am exasperated over the attention the phony media is giving these stories about my supposed weakness for luxury. If your administration wants to attract the best talent from the private sector, it must offer us the same level of reward that the private sector does. A personal airplane is after all only a relatively minor perk, and first-class travel and a soundproof private phone are no more than trivial conveniences …

Kelly: Now, now, Scott, remember what we agreed?

Mr. Pruitt: Yes, but …

Kelly: Alphabetical order, sir. Next is the Attorney General.

Attorney General Sessions: Here, sir. Right across from you. Remember me? No report to make, since I have recused myself from anything dealing with presidential malfeasance. Leaves me very little to do. Maybe at the next meeting. Your hair does look great though.

Director of the Central Intelligence Agency Haspel: Our Black Ops agents have been exceptionally successful recently, sir, in infiltrating the Deep State organizations responsible for white persecution in so much of the country. Especially in states harboring Sanctuary Cities, where several plans for coups have been thwarted — mainly instigated by impoverished Mexican illegal immigrants and Muslims exposed to head colds because of head scarf bans. We …

Director of the Office of Management and Budget Mulvaney: Your instruction about keeping the results of our assessments secret until after appropriation bills have been passed has proved difficult because of lack of cooperation from the full Nine, but we have put in place stalling tactics regarding publication that often have the desired effect. I look forward to helping you in any way I can to eliminate my office altogether.

Director of National Intelligence Coats: We are trying to keep everything quiet until your next Tweet, sir. Since we have been reduced to a footnote in the PDB, we have concluded that remaining as far undercover as possible is our best policy. Shhh.

Secretary for Small Business Affairs McMahon: Give me a moment, John. I’m just wrestling with my attaché case and trying to give the impression that the outcome is in doubt (haha! That’s a joke.) We’re working on a survey, Mr. President, that will show that a few large businesses are ten times more efficient than thousands of small businesses, since relevant legislation can be more effectively directed where needed, including subsidies and bailouts. Haven’t got all the numbers to come out right just yet, By our next meeting … John? Oh, sorry.

Secretary of Agriculture Purdue: I’m pleased to report that your export quotas on food shipments to those countries behind on their NATO bills have already resulted in thousands of farmer bankruptcies in both Kansas and Nebraska, which will enable us to close our local offices there and dispense with hundreds of bureaucratic staff, thus saving thousands of dollars. In fact I have estimated …Ooops! It’s great to have you here, Mr. President. As I was saying this morning to my wife …

Secretary of Commerce Ross: Commerce here, Mr. President. Pleased to report that the new import tax schedule has already reduced incoming port traffic by almost 30%. Thousands of stevedoring jobs have already been terminated, which will undoubtedly further weaken the Longshoremen’s Union.

Secretary of Defense Mattis: The threats to our power everywhere in the world remain unremitting, and I am strongly recommending a fifty percent increase in the Pentagon’s budget. The F-57 Invisible Fighter …

Mr. Kelly: Now, James, remember what I told you.

Mr. Mattis: Sorry, sir.

Secretary of Education DeVos: Together with the adoption of our new mission statement — Every public school student represents a lost tuition-paying opportunity for a for-profit school, and with the full elimination of the budget line for education we foresee a wide-open field of solid opportunity during the next two years, even sufficient, with luck, to withstand the inevitable pushback after 2020.

POTUS: You mean at the start of my second term? Why would there be a pushback then, as you put it? A horrible horrible word?

Mrs. DeVos: Well, our actuaries tell us that we need to protect our endowment structures, sir, and … Ooops! Sorry, John. What have HAVE you done to your hair? It looks wonderful. So shiny.

Secretary for Energy Perry: Sorry to interrupt, Liz. but my news is so encouraging I can’t resist. Thanks to your new import taxes, sir, on solar and wind hardware from China Wall Street oil futures and coal-mining stocks are reaching highs not seen since 2008. I would urge you to impose equally high import duties on automated mining and drilling machinery. Automation must be stopped if domestic jobs in the fossil fuel industry are to be saved. We are also exploring height limits for windmills. Ten feet has been suggested.

Mr. Kelly: Mr. Azar.

Secretary of Health and Human Services Azar: You can just call me Al. Actually, I would be glad if you just called me. I am getting pretty lonely in my office with no assignments. A little human warmth and companionship as signified by a nickname would be welcome. There is in any event little activity to report now that Mr.Gates has taken over so much of our burden, and we are expecting to cut back further as we discredit the vaccine people. They … Yes, John.

Secretary of Homeland Security Nielsen: I can proudly report that we have just created a new watchlist, sir, of unruly airline passengers who have protested against requests to be bumped from their flights to make room for government officials flying home first class on Friday nights. The people on this list will be refused admission right at the entrances to the airports, where TSA personnel will be assigned to check names. This is expected to prevent unsightly scenes. I am also … OK, John, OK.

Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Carson: We are working on a study to show that the housing shortage frequently cited by the fake news media is a myth. The actual problem is not a dearth of dwellings; it is a surplus of people. Some cultures seem to deliberately encourage overpopulation. Our new guidelines for applications for public housing direct that applicants with last names Roosevelt, Washington, or Jefferson be required to submit a photo ID, taken in strong light. There is reason to believe that some of these people are trying to use ancestral connections to gain preferred position in our waiting lists. We are prepared to institute DNA testing if necessary. The Wall is another step in the right direction …

POTUS: That’ll do for Miranda and José, but what about Mohammad and Khadija?

Carson: Give me two days for some research and we can create another list.

Secretary of the Interior Zinke: I have placed all my mining stock in LLC corporations in the name of my wife and my children and my Great Aunt Matilda. What more can I expected to do to show my complete independence from any connections with the enterprises I am sworn to regulate? What kind of a name is “Elephant Ears” for a national park, anyway. Stupid. Sounds like an ad for super-sized Q-tips. No dignity. At least Grand Tetons was a pleasure to think about. Some of my best friends don’t own mines at all.

Secretary of Labor Acosta: I guess you can call me Al, too. Nobody comes by my office even just to say hello. What am I, chopped liver?

Secretary of State Pompeo: First on a personal note, if you run into Rex Tillerson would you give him my regards and tell him he left a stale cigar in his desk drawer? He was in and out of here so fast I didn’t get a chance to meet him. But as to business, I can only express my admiration for your takeover of my department, sir. It relieves me and my staff of so much work. We can just check the Twitter feeds in the morning and forget about whether they make sense. It’s a great relief after years of trying to figure out where we rate in the world. The Foreign Service has now been trimmed by half of its former staff level, which is already saving us a small fortune on both salaries and diplomatic cables and airfare. Any new instructions this morning, sir?

Representative of the United States at the United Nations Haley: Adding up all the numbers, sir, and presuming that all foreign orders for military hardware remain firm, we find that immediately foreclosing on all client states for their due prorated contributions to NATO and all similar treaty commitments would result in sufficient billions in savings to finance a wall completely around the contiguous states, including sea walls high enough to eliminate danger from 1000-year storms. Besides, it’s only fair.

Secretary of Transportation Chao: We have just completed a study that shows that creation of new infrastructure only results in calls for redoubled expenditures on maintenance, which has serious deleterious effects on our Homeland Defense and Pentagon budgets. We therefore suggest … all right, John, can’t I even …?

Secretary of the Treasury Mnuchin: Your suggestion about switching treasury bonds to Bitcoin is under serious consideration, sir. While it is true that secrecy is nearly always a good thing, certain questions remain about anomalies in the routing of certain funds, especially in what used to be our ruble accounts. They don’t always seem as transparent as we would like them to appear. Plus, maintenance and power charges on all those mining servers threaten to be far more expensive in the end than the former monthly Fed meetings.

U.S. Trade Representative Lighthizer: I hate to interject anything personal at this point, Mr. President, but can you please tell me where to find my office? Presumably it is being efficiently run by my staff, but this constantly walking the corridors to show the paparazzi how busy I am is getting hard on my bunions.

Secretary of Veterans Affairs, Thomas Bowman: Mr. Shulkin gave me such short notice of this meeting, sir, that I haven’t had time to prepare any remarks.

POTUS: Splendid, splendid! We need more advisors like you.

Vice President Pence: President Trump will now say a few words. I shall listen carefully.

1st Fly on the Wall: I think we need a spot of lunch. Shall we repair to the cafeteria and look for something tasty?

2nd Fly on the Wall: Don’t we need to listen to Mr. Trump?

1st Fly on the Wall: I don’t. His little palms are itching to get around his cell phone and start tweeting about what a GREAT meeting this was and how pleased he was that everyone agreed that it was perhaps one of the greatest cabinet meetings ever held. He will thank everyone for coming and announce that he has found a high school football team in Utah that will accept the invitation to the White House that he withdrew from the Philadelphia Eagles when they refused to promise not to kneel in the Oval Office. Plus, my feet are getting tired. This is a slippery wall.

2nd Fly on the Wall: OK. We’ll hear it all in a different version on Fox News anyway. I’m hungry, too. Let’s go.