The Vision Thing

I am not religious and am not susceptible to vision problems, but lately I have had a recurrent nightmare, which I hope to be able to exorcize by telling about it here. In my dream my office is wall-papered with neatly aligned sheets of blank white White-House stationery, its tasteful and modest sized golden presidential shields at the top arranged in rows, their regularity and predictability dignified and reassuring. But crawling up from the baseboards are invading armies of obscene tarantula-like Donald Trump signatures, looking like animated LA seismograms made by the stump of a worn-down Sharpie. This vision of invasion reduces me to fear and terror. I try to take shelter under my desk, but there is no room — other people have already crouched there. It’s full and I am left out in the cold. That’s when I wake up, of course.

OK, it doesn’t take Father Sigmund to figure this out. I am neither a psychiatrist nor a graphologist, but how much of a specialist do you have to be to recognize that those tarantula signatures are evidence of a very sick human being? Of all the signatures on the three main documents of our national heritage — the Articles of the Confederation, the Declaration of Independence, and the Constitution — there is not one that even remotely approaches the brutality, the egotism, and the deep sense of personal insecurity displayed by those of The Donald on his tiniest regulatory memos. Those men relied on their ideas and the integrity of their personal lives to attest to their sincerity, not splashes of ink (even if some of them couldn’t resist a modest flourish before the quill pen ran dry — see John Hancock and Lewis Morris). None attempted to overwhelm the message of the documents they were signing with the imposition of their own personal grandeur. We have arrived at a new definition of the role of President. How long can we expect that little gold shield to survive? It is a reminder that it is the office commands respect, not the occupant. This must rankle Mr. Trump every time he is forced to use it to ensure the authenticity of his memos.

Is there anything constructive we can do about this ? Possibly not. The creator of these obscene scribbles seems to think they are testimonials to his power and his genius, which he buttresses further with his own version of reality by raving and ranting on his Twitter account in the early morning hours of each new day of prevarication and deception. Maybe our best bet would be to actually encourage his psychotic behavior in the hope that it might eventually burst the boundaries of believability, even among those counting on him to line their personal pockets at taxpayer expense and human suffering.

I envision a giant Pants-on-Fire clock overlooking Times Square in New York, like the world population clock on Sixth Avenue that clicks so fast that it seems to be just continually streaming. Every time Trump tells a public lie, the numbers would increment. One dial for today only, and another for the cumulative total since January 20, 2017. (There has to be an agreed-on starting point, even if it gives him a break.) This could be accompanied by a brief blast from an air-raid warning siren. Just a single burst, to call the attention of everyone to the gradual attrition to our common belief in the value of facts over fiction.

Perhaps his reaction to this would be so over-the-top as to convince even the most obtuse of his supporters that there is something basically wrong with the man.

He is sick.

Or am I?

Confession of a Rapist

Yes, you read that right. I am a rapist. The girl was only nine years old, which made it a clear-cut case of statutory rape in the State of North Carolina. Of course, I was only nine years old myself, which may or may not be considered an exculpatory factor, since all this took place in North Carolina, a state where the only generally recognized exculpatory factor is a white skin. But I am not a lawyer and that’s a different subject. I will just tell you what happened and you be the judge. On my ninth birthday my mother presented me with a book called “Where We Come From.” Whether she did this out of a desire as a dutiful parent to equip me with reliable information, or from a wish to avoid an embarrassing face-to-face conversation, I don’t know. I do not remember any family discussion of sex in any context at all before that time, or at any other time, for that matter. My parents, aside from being mostly worn out from the effort to recoup financially after having been floored by the Great Depression, never displayed much physical affection around the house. I do remember one occasion when they indulged in a few dance steps in each other’s arms in the living room before going out to a neighbor’s party. When father bent my mother backwards in her little flapper dress in a graceful tango move I was greatly embarrassed.

The book was slim. The text was dry and contained terms I had no familiarity with, like “gestation” and “fertilization.” Of course I knew about fertilizer, living on a farm, but I had a hard time connecting that with the diagrams in the book, which were hard to understand. The “female reproductive tract”, for example, was depicted as a Y-shaped arrangement that looked mostly like the willow branch old Mr. Simmons our local dowser had used when he was figuring where we should dig our well. Eggs, I was familiar with, since my first assigned chore every morning was to visit the henhouse and collect the night’s production, and I knew that if you left them under the hen instead of collecting them, they would eventually hatch chicks, but I had never associated this with the idea of a woman producing a baby. Sperm, shown as little teardrop-shapes with long tails and black dots that might have been eyes, were totally mysterious.

I puzzled over the book, and finally decided to seek help from my best friend, Barbara, who lived at the dairy farm up the road. She often helped me with my homework, although I would never have admitted this to any of my overalled barefoot buddies . For Barbara and me this was just another puzzle to be deciphered. We pored over it together, and finally figured out that something had to be transferred from my wee-wee to her wee-wee for her to start making a baby. Beyond that the process remained a mystery. But the start looked to be simple enough, and we decided to give it a try.

We swam together in the pond naked all summer, so our differing physical configurations were not news to either of us. How this transfer might be accomplished though was not obvious. But the idea of a baby that we would be able to play with — to dress and undress and tickle and try to persuade to laugh — was an irresistible attraction. Practical details, like what would we do with the baby when we got tired of playing with it, or how we would feed it, or where we could keep it so our parents wouldn’t find it, didn’t concern us. Sufficient unto the day… Nine-year-olds are not any bigger on foresight than tangerine-haired real estate barons. But that’s another subject and we need to stick to the story.

So we went up into the hayloft, took off our clothes, and tried out the transferring part. After a few attempts, the prospect of success became clearer, but while the game was enjoyable enough, even a repetition over several days running produced no sign of the baby, which was supposed to give notice of its pending arrival with a swelling of Barbara’s stomach and a kick or two. We went back to the book, and decided that our problem was that nothing had passed from me into her during our gymnastics. The only logical candidate was pee, so we tried that. In fact, we tried both peeing at the same time, just in case, which was messy but the hay would dry out long before the cows got it in the winter and we used to salt it anyway, so no harm done. We washed ourselves afterwards at the pump in the yard, which occasioned no comment since my mother always encouraged us to clean ourselves up after being outside to avoid tracking Carolina’s red clay onto her kitchen floor.

But still no baby, even after an interminable wait (a week?), so we gave up the attempt at parenthood in favor of trying to excavate a rabbit hole all the way down to where the rabbit must be. There were no consequences to the rabbit but there were unfortunate consequences to my mother’s kitchen floor, and we heard about them. The book got shuffled under my bed with the previous year’s dog-eared schoolbooks, and it was several more years before the memory turned up again on my calendar, this time not because of Barbara.

I trust that by now the statute of limitations in North Carolina has run out. I ran into Barbara years later, at the front door of her house in town where I had tracked her down and rang the bell. She remembered me, and she wasn’t embarrassed; just tired. There were three kids clinging to her knees, and a fourth perched on her hip. Her hair was in mostly a bun, with some loose strands. From the bulging belly under her bathrobe she had obviously figured out the proper procedure.

There is no moral to this story.

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Graduation Speech

I have sat through enough of these in my day to consider myself qualified to tackle the subject. Graduating from grammar school was not considered a big deal when I did it. There was no ceremony, just a handing out of final report cards and perhaps a pat on the back from a favorite teacher. All just part of the drill. But when it came time for my grandson to graduate from high school, fifty years later, things had changed. There were all the suburban child-centered cultural tokens — robes and parties and special dresses and mortarboards with tassels and lists of medals and cups and prizes to be awarded (The Federstein Left-Handed Penmanship Prize, the prize for the Most Progress in Table Manners as a Senior, the DJ Twister Prize for Break Dancing — everybody got a prize for something — it’s a sin to overlook an opportunity to beef up your child’s self esteem). There were live performances by those members of the class whose career ambitions involved the entertainment world, which after an hour seemed to include just about everybody. (Talent was not that much in evidence. Ambition sufficed. My grandson whacked away at his drum set, and he proved to be an exception. He definitely had the beat. As he got warmed up there were shouts of “Go, Will, Go!” from his temporarily awakened classmates.)

And of course the bestowal of college degrees is the really big deal — with a “name” speaker to inspire the newly fledged masters of the universe. The properly prominent and robed speakers, slashes of school colors peeking out from the folds concealing their McDonalds addictions, having themselves just received their honorary degrees, dispensed advice in pontifical cadences, usually presenting themselves as examples of hard-won success gained by their own extraordinary diligence.

During these oratorical orgies I amuse myself by pretending that I have been the chosen Commencement Day Speaker, instead of the eminent gentleman (It was always a gentleman.) at the podium. At the bestowal of my own modest BA, I didn’t actually listen at all; the PA system proving inadequate in the brisk breeze at the outdoor conclave. I just watched the traditional passing of the rolled-up diploma-batons and watched for where the extra loud applause was coming from so I could spot the proud parents and friends.

But recently, at my grandson’s college graduation, I let my mind wander. Could I do better? What if I were really asked to give the big speech? No danger, of course. I have done nothing to warrant being selected for the role — I stopped giving money to my alumni fund when I discovered that the president of my college had a bigger salary than the president of my country (Eight times as much, would you believe, plus a mansion, for a cushy job heading up an Ivy League University?), and I have done nothing in my professional life to give me either audience-drawing or donor-drawing power. What would I find to say?

“Hello, graduates. I know what you are thinking. You are thinking, ‘This old fart is like all the other old farts at campuses around the country who revel in their moment in the spotlight, and he will say what they all will say. I will just sneak this earbud in and find something in my playlist that will drown him out.’

“Well, perhaps this is one old fart who will surprise you. At least I will try.

“I am now in my tenth decade. At twenty there is no way you can imagine what that feels like. I have already lived longer than any of my forebears. I didn’t expect this. It was not part of my life plan.

“I am financially independent. I mention that first because it came as such a surprise to me. After starting with a T-shirt and an army discharge certificate and neither job nor bank account I have ended up comfortably retired. I didn’t expect that. No one in my family had ever before been even comfortably well off. They all worked till they dropped, worried about whether to pay the doctor bill or the rent.

“I am in reasonably good health. I walk without a cane, I can still (with the help of glasses) read the six-point type of the obituaries in the Times, I can hold my own in one-on-one conversations provided I can see your face well enough to read your lips, and I can still think straight (at least I think I can think straight). I didn’t expect that either at 95.

“The main message here is that things don’t turn out the way you expected. So most of the time you have spent planning on what you will do in the future — near or distant — is wasted.

“Lady Luck will be a huge factor in your life whether you like it or not. Cases in point:

My grandson who spent endless hours on the Schuykill River to qualify for a spot on the Olympic Rowing Team, was knocked off his bicycle by a careless motorist one afternoon on his way to practice, and had to abandon his ambition and find another one — all in the space of a few minutes.
My brother-in-law who retired and sold his house in New Jersey and moved with his wife to Florida where they planned a calm retirement, had their plan derailed when his wife developed dementia and he developed glaucoma and they would up in a hospice and an assisted care facility respectively.
My temporary gig as manuscript typist turned into regular employment as a typesetter which turned into the proprietorship of a keyboarding service which turned into a book composition house which turned into a scientific journal production company, none of which had any relation to any subject I studied in four years of college or three in the army, and for which I had no formal training whatsoever.
My best friend at college spent hours and hours practicing at the music room piano (while I listened and did my homework and grew to appreciate both Beethoven and Rachmaninoff). He did it to please his mother, who envisioned a shining Carnegie Hall career for him. Meanwhile his pocket-money job as a stringer for newspapers covering local sports developed into a byline and eventually into full-time employment, several sports books and induction into the Basketball Writers Hall of Fame.

“These are random samples from my own experience. There exists a journal called The Journal of Unintended Consequences, an issue of which should appear on every library shelf that holds Dale Carnegie’s 1936 book, How to Win Friends and Influence People. His book assumed that what you had to do was work out a plan, follow his recipes for good behavior, and reap the rewards. (It worked beautifully for him, of course — eleven titles, all on the same subject, fifteen million copies.) But he was the exception; not the rule.

“So as you new graduates go forth from this place, with your ambitions and your strategies, remember that as Bobby Burns told us ‘The best-laid schemes o’ mice an’ men/Gang aft a-gley.’ Allow for surprises. Life, like history, is just one damn thing after another.

“Hey! Wake up! Take those wires out of your ears! This old fart is giving you valuable advice. What do you think this is — a joke?”

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Hard Choices

Chief Executive Officer: Come on in, buddy. My office door is always open. Have a sit.

Chief Financial Officer: Thanks.

CEO: What’s new?

CFO: Well, it ain’t exactly new. We’re due to report to shareholders on the fiscal year this month. Happens every year. But this year I see a problem.

CEO: You’ve handled them before. You can handle this one. I’m going to be in Bermuda. Family and I leave Monday. We chartered a jet.

CFO: I don’t think it’s going to be that easy this time. It’s been a lousy year. I might even say superlousy.

CEO: Tell me about it.

CFO: Revenue down 25 percent. Same store sales down 35.

CEO: How come?

CFO: Who knows? The gadget market is always risky. People want the latest one; not necessarily the best one. Combination lipsticks and Mace sprays are just not big this year. Plus we got some new competition.

CEO: So we come up with the next big thing. Don’t have to tell ‘em what it is; just tell the analysts it’s coming. They’ll have their tongues hanging out in anticipation. Everyone wants in on the next Xerox. Stock price will go over the moon.

CFO: We did that last year, but the designers never came up with anything the salesmen felt they could sell.

CEO: So we hire new designers.

CFO: Haven’t got enough money to offer them good salaries.

CEO: Not enough money?

CFO: Cash flow negative, we’ve already put our suppliers on notice — payables on 90-day basis now, 120 days starting next week, but we’re already 120 days behind with most of them. We’re paying C.O.D. on two of our biggest accounts already.

CEO: So call the bank. They have to be on our side if they expect to ever get their loans back.

CFO: I think they’ve already written us off. They don’t answer my phone calls. I have to hike down to the branch office and sign the visitor sheet.

CEO: So tell the shareholders we need another round of start-up financing — to expand our share of the market.

CFO: Tried that at the last board meeting. It won’t fly. Our own directors are selling on the sly. Scared.

CEO: So we move production overseas. India. Fifty cents and hour, same quality, same schedules. And everybody speaks English, not Cantonese.

CFO: We’re already there. And they’re wising up. Seventy cents in the last contract.

CEO: How about layoffs? Bring the payroll down. Employees don’t want to risk losing their jobs if the company goes bust. They’re more willing to bet on their chances of personally escaping the ax. Besides, the union needs us bad. Did I mention that Charlie and his girlfriend are meeting us in Bermuda? He’s the celebrating his election as the new union president. How many would we have to lay off?

CFO: Thousands. And don’t forget that in the end they’re our customers. If we lose any more customers we’re going to die of loneliness. And we’d be losing even more revenue.

CEO: So what do you figure on doing?

CFO: So I checked out Chapter Eleven. Lawyers say we’re not good candidates. No believable plan. Judge would probably order liquidation.

CEO: What’s left then?

CFO: You and I resign. Let the Board take the heat. How is your retirement fund doing? Is your golden parachute in good repair? How’s the weather in Bermuda this time of year?

CEO: Time for lunch. We’re booked at noon. We need to draft an announcement.

CFO: I’ll get my tie.

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The Myth of Win-win

It’s a favorite cliché of politicians. It’s cover for those pushing any proposal for change. It’s like the “free gift” you will get for just trying our product. It has a nice ring to it. It is totally bullshit.

There can be no such thing as win-win, since the only way you can tell if you are winning is to find a loser to compare yourself with. You can’t win a race in which nobody else is entered. (Although I do have a 65-year-old acquaintance who routinely collects medals from barefoot skiing tournaments because he is the only entrant in his age class.) And there can be neither winners nor losers if there is no race.

Note that the promised benefits of a predicted win-win situation are usually promised to become apparent at some generally rather distant future moment, preferably far enough off so that the promisers will have had time to disassociate themselves from the actual result. If you have already accomplished something you have no need to brag about it — the world will take notice. When you are out to flim-flam your audience you need to do your bragging in advance. But choose your clichés carefully. They must seem to promise, without actually promising.

In politics win-win is an assurance that there is something in your bill for everyone, and therefore it cannot hurt anyone’s chances of re-election. The actual result is most often found to be lose-lose for those people who took the bait. In any political action that involves actual change (which covers every political action more critical than naming a state flower) some people will win and some people will lose.

The political game is, after all, a contest to see who can get his or her hands on the largest portion of the money collected by the taxman (based on the honor system of self-reporting — holy of holies!). If I, as a public servant supposedly with fiduciary responsibility to my constituents, get to save an extra buck by means of a law allowing me to stash my earnings tax free in Luxembourg, it will correspondingly decrease the Treasury’s ability to help you care for your mother in hospice with Alzheimer’s. There is no way to escape that, once we are dealing with a fixed budget. Dollars are fungible. It’s a clear win-lose. And so with every such political choice. It’s not even win-place-show. Losers flat-out lose. Winners buy memberships at Mar-a-Lago at $200,000 a pop. There are no consolation prizes.

So what? Politicians need to have a lot of clichés in their rhetorical quivers, to be plucked forth when one of their favorite scams threatens to come undone.

“No one will lose his Medicare.”
“Tax cuts will provide the greatest boom in job creation the world has ever seen.”
“There has never been a president with so many accomplishments in such a short time.”
“I will stand up for the little guy.”
“We are always in favor of full transparency.”

What’s the harm in adding one more? Why do I bother to write about it? What’s new, after all? Well, for one thing I think we are increasingly in danger of letting clichés undermine our capacity for serious thinking. Courtesy of Fox TV we are allowing tangerine-colored hair, long red neckties, and arm candy nepotism to replace the town meetings, public debates, and straightforward reporting I grew up with. Quick, mindless characterizations such as win-win are taking the place of democratic process. (What, for another example, does “She doesn’t even look presidential” mean? Since when is a presidential nomination a casting call?) “I’ll bring back your coal-mining job and kick China’s ass at the same time — an easy win-win” — sounds a lot better than “I’ll bring back your coal-mining job and guarantee your grandchildren miserable deaths from silicosis before they reach the age of fifty.”

A “public enemy” journalist or a “failing” newspaper is one who can be counted on to point this out to the constituents of a politician focused on justifying his campaign contributions from the Koch Brothers. So it behooves the scammer to use a cliché (“fake news”, “worst kind of people I have ever dealt with”) in an attempt to exonerate himself.

The only way to combat this strategy is to ask more questions. Specific questions. Questions with real answers. “How many new houses?” “How many old jobs?” “How many protected dollars for health care?” “Exactly how will you preserve Social Security?” But to do this there must be a forum where losers can interrogate the winners. Daily White House press briefings are but one example. Answers to queries shouted at public officials as they make their brief prairie-dog-like appearances, emerging from closed conference rooms onto public sidewalks before disappearing hurriedly into the Senate Subway are another. Regular presidential press conferences used to be still another. (It is worth observing that we have had exactly one so far in the last sixteen months that didn’t involve the cover of a visiting foreign dignitary or a new unqualified nominee.) The annoying pushiness of the mic-toting wretches in the corridors of the capitol used to be accepted as part of the political process. Replacing these with a daily dose of one-way Twitter feeds, an insulting nickname, and a jutting lower lip is a scary development.

Sure, every president, every legislator, would like to keep his plans secret until he can find the best moment to spring them. (That would ideally be midnight before the no-further-amendments vote on the desperation deadline spending bill, “our last chance to keep the government operating” — until next time.) Reporters worth their salt will fight this, even at the risk of pink slips from their employers. This is what we teach them to do in journalism school. This is not what they teach in the school of hard knocks known as practical politics, where “classified” or “privileged communication” or “off the record” is a shield as cherished as the Church’s index, and as sought after.

The next time you hear “win-win” you can be sure that someone is out to bamboozle someone, and that someone being bamboozled is usually the taxpayer.

For once Trump has it right: there are winners and losers, never just winners and winners.

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Donald as Teacher

PROFESSOR DONALD

This is a response to my correspondent who asked, “Don’t you ever have anything GOOD to say about Donald Trump?”

Since reaching senior-citizenhood I have found that my social life is increasingly dependent on correspondence, since I can communicate more easily by the written word than by the spoken (and often ill-heard) word. In some ways this has been a broadening experience, since my former social relationships tended to consist of attendance at functions mostly attended by like-minded political believers. My “old buddies” from high school and college were pretty much all in the same category — I went to a liberal prep school and a college where ‘conservative’ was almost a dirty word. Now that I can reach out via the Internet to anyone with an e-mail address I have been able to get in touch with people with whom I disagree politically, and this has proved helpful in allowing me to better understand their positions. It was one such contact who recently sent me that query.

OK. Fair question. So what can I say about the good side of Donald Trump? I have pondered the problem deeply and here is my reply.

I think Donald Trump should get credit for doing all Americans a valuable service by reminding us of what our criteria should be for choosing our political leaders. We refer to them in Congressional debate as “Honorable” and we expect them to live up to the appellation. Our Constitution is written to encourage cooperation and compromise, not to encourage domination by any of the three branches of government. It assumes both good manners and good will. When it comes to our presidents especially (George Washington having declined to consider the offer to be our king) we have always been pretty much agreed on what the basic requirements are. Namely,

An education that includes a familiarity with our cultural heritage, and a interest in the relationship between Man and his maker — fairness — that goes deeper than just rules covering non disclosure contracts between lender and borrower, or investor and broker, or employer and employee.
Respect for the fact that his or her national status brings with it a responsibility to represent us all; not just push for benefits to one group of citizens at the expense of others.
Eloquence in public rhetoric — reasoned persuasiveness rather than bluster and bluff.
A dignified demeanor that can make us proud of him or her as our representative on the international stage.
Unquestioned honesty, both political and personal.

In terms of these job requirements Mr. Trump is providing an unparalleled example of an executive who possesses none of them. As a role model he is such a repellent character that even people who continue to defend him on the grounds of the selfish personal benefits they want him to keep on providing them with will privately admit that they would not be able to stomach him as their boss in a private enterprise — or as a son in law.

There are signs that we are starting to learn our lesson. Capable people are declining invitations to work in Washington. Numbers of civil servants, and even legislators, are retiring, unwilling to face more of what Harry Truman called “the heat in the kitchen”. Journalists are abandoning the Fox and Breitbart propaganda machines. Farmers and steel workers and coal miners are waking up to the con game they fell for.

The Donald will undoubtedly be able to continue to find enough Boltons and Sessions and Pences and Pompeos, to help him pull the wagons into a tight circle. That might under ordinary circumstances be enough to keep him in power and out of jail, but unfortunately these are not ordinary circumstances — Kim Jong-un is brandishing his missiles, Vladimir Putin is sending his little green men across his borders in a desperate effort to achieve achieve tsardom, Theresa May is trying her best to pull the plug on future European unity, Angela Merkel and Emmanuel Macron have been liberated from centuries old enmity into collaborating to try to save the EU, Ayatolla Khamenei teeters day-to-day with the hard choice between serving his tenth century vision and allowing Iran to join the modern world, and the likes of Xi Jinping and Mohammad bin Salman have not relinquished their delusion that a rigged vote constitutes a devotion to democratic principles. Meanwhile, thousands of Rohinga and Syrians and Muslims and Hindus and Buddhists and Salvadorans and Venezuelans are being blown up or shot or tortured while we in America do our best to look the other way. All these crises cry out for leadership and intervention by our government; not bluster and pouty faces.

I think it is safe to say that almost any American with an interest in living out his or her lifetime without nuclear annihilation has a better appreciation of these problems than does our present President.

For these lessons in civic responsibility and the criteria for responsible leadership, I give credit to Donald Trump. He calls our attention to them every day by his example of a total lack of any of them. I hope we can learn from him while there is still time.

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Nobody Said It Would Be Easy

So, did you learn anything life-changing at your lecture?

Is that supposed to be a snide remark?

Yes, I guess so. You go to all these lectures and symposia, three and four a week, and then you come back to the same old routine — bitching and criticizing and grumbling about how stupid everyone else is, but nothing changes. And you don’t do anything differently. That’s a life?

What would you have me do? I retired 20 years ago. Nobody is going to give a 95-year old any kind of responsible job where he can have any effect on the world. I’m in the Golden Age warehouse, my friend. Waiting for the forklift to come and select me. The only defense I have is to try to keep my mind from atrophying — to keep up with current events. To be concerned. Anyway, what’s it to you? Who am I hurting by going to lectures?

OK. Sorry. It’s just that I think too many of us confuse bitching with politics. What was the lecture about this time?

Problems with prisons. Speaker was an ex-warden. The title was, “Rehab or vengeance?”

And what did he have to say?

Nothing new. You can have one or the other, but not both together. That we use prison as a catch-all solution to a lot of unrelated social problems : petty crime, drug use, mental illness, dangerous malefactors, political insurrectionists, terrorists, gang warfare. Most of them not even faintly related to each other. We don’t know what to do with these people so we just lock ’em up so they can’t annoy us. We forget that they all have different problems. If they complain, there’s always solitary confinement. One size fits all. The black hole swallows you. We can go back to dealing with other more interesting topics : the Celebrity Hall of Fame, football, the difference between a pat on the ass and a pass.

But you have to admit; prison works. Those people are taken out of our hair. That’s really the purpose. We don’t really want it to change. It works. So why do we waste time talking about it?

Because it’s expensive. We pay more a year to keep someone in prison than it would to pay for his full Harvard tuition. But a year in prison will leave him exactly where he was before he went to jail, except more bitter and better skilled by fellow prisoner tutors in being a crook. A year’s education with a good teacher in a civics class might start him on the road to change. If you give him the education he missed out on for whatever reason : poverty, anger, skin color, bad luck — to learn about what society owes him and what he owes society — he might come out of jail more inclined to play a useful role and we might all get some benefit from his rehabilitation.

This is what they call in Silicon Valley a “cost-benefit” analysis?

Right.

So then let’s just do it. Why do we need more lectures? What’s stopping us?

Let me list those who are stopping us :

Politicians who find “Law and Order” a nice resonant off-the-shelf slogan that costs them no campaign funds.
Private stockholders who find investing in the outsourcing of the correction system irresistibly juicy since crooks can’t vote and can’t even complain without being beaten up.
Poorly educated correction personnel who have passed a sinecure job down from generation to generation and regard it as their birthright.
Politicians in need of ready-made jobs to distribute to their friends and donors.
Victims of crime who prefer an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth to cost-benefit analysis and Christian forgiveness. “My daughter will never walk again because of his DUI. May that son of a bitch rot in solitary the rest of his life. Spend the money on sending my grandson to Yale; not on that animal.”

Pretty tough lineup. What did your warden have to propose?

That while there isn’t much hope of making a dent on the first four groups, there still might be a chance to reach some of the eye for an eye people.

Based on what?

The “Christian forgiveness” bit. The “Lock ’em up” groups include a lot of evangelicals and people who feel left out by elite politics. They tend to be emotional about it. See everything personally. We could try to convince them that Christ was serious when he said that saving one black sheep was worth more than rewarding a saint. Get them really worked up over that. Saving souls. Prostrations before the altar. Tears and ululations. Torchlight parades with confetti for people who are born again. If you can do that you can stifle the other groups, whose reasons are more practical, but who are not about to tackle a fight against Christ.

And what in the world makes you think that such a far-out unbelievable and unanticipated crazy program could ever get a foothold in today’s United States of America?

The election of Donald Trump as President.

Oh. I forgot about that.

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Brilliant Comrade

(Recently revealed Proceedings of a Meeting of the State Affairs Commission of the DPRK, Pyongyang 18 December 2011)

Gentlemen,

We are at a crossroads.

Now that our former Dear Leader has died and I have modestly assumed his mantle, I have analyzed our nation’s position and achieved certain insights about our future, both immediate and long-term.

[“Hear, Hear!”]

First, since my grandfather was Great Leader and my father was Dear Leader, I have retired those titles and decided to call myself Brilliant Comrade.

[“Hear, Hear!”]

Second, since questions of succession inevitably give rise to jockeying for power and foster underhanded plots, I have decided to eliminate this possibility by having both my half-brother and my uncle assassinated. My aim in this is cleaner politics. I trust there will be no further discussion on this point.

[“Hear, Hear!”]

But I have called you together here to discuss my thinking and give me your considered counsel about the direction of our national future. Like my father and his before him I always make it a point to listen to trusted experts and follow their advice so long as it agrees with my thinking. So in this case we shall begin with an analysis of our country’s present position in the world.

[“Hear, Hear!”]

Although we are only half as numerous as our cousins in the south, we are by far the purer descendants of our ancient Korean ancestors, relatively uncontaminated by the effects of Russian, Chinese, Japanese, and American occupation, and therefore are the rightful heirs to the entirety of the Korean Peninsula.

[“Hear, Hear!”]

It will therefore be my job to reverse recent history and reassert North Korean dominance. Domestically, in this effort I will take advantage of every opportunity to include members of my immediate family and trustworthy close acquaintances in the operations of government. Any thought of civic advancement based on anything other than a blood relationship or complete personal loyalty to me should be abandoned. Further assassinations are not beyond consideration if required.

[“Hear, Hear!” General Applause.]

On the worldwide scene, it will be necessary to qualify for the KDR to gain membership in the various international organizations established by currently larger and more powerful nations that for the moment dominate world trade and politics. Given the paucity of our natural resources and our current cash position, this will require extraordinary levels of sacrifice by our populace. It cannot be accomplished solely by economic development, since we start too late. It will have to be done by threats and bullying. The educated few will have to be offered privileges and comforts denied to the ordinary citizens in order to provide them with the incentives to create terrifying weapons to be used for blackmail and extortion. That this may well include starvation rations for millions of farmers and lethal conditions for many urban poor is deplorable but unavoidable. You will have to trust your Brilliant Leader that this course will in the end bring our currently more powerful neighbors sniveling to our doorstep to avoid annihilation by our weapons. We have less to lose than they, and that’s why we will succeed. They will be afraid that we are unpredictable and irresponsible and in the end they will come crawling in search of assurance that their already established wealth can be protected. Do not cringe at the growlings of the paper tiger in the U.S. He is spineless in the face of a threat of a war of mutual annihilation. We are the ones who have nothing to lose.

[“Hear, Hear!”]

So that’s the program. Now that I have listened to your comments and gained your assent, we can start implementing it immediately. Step number one is to steal or buy all available information on nuclear weapons and delivery systems from whatever source. For this purpose we will cozy up to those already in the nuclear club who are willing to deal with us, and look for opportunities to deal with foreign traitors in possession of such knowledge. For our protection during this phase we need a credible threat against those who might want to impede us. This threat will consist primarily of letting those nations with which we have borders, including our brothers in the south, know that a collapse of our government will bring a flood of dependent welfare seekers so great as to overwhelm their capacity to absorb it. In fear of such a development they will allow us to pursue our ultimate aim, although they may even be aware of our purpose.

[“Hear, Hear!”]

So, in the words of our national motto : “Onwards Towards the Final Victory”.

[“Hear, Hear!” Applause. Foot stomping.]

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Vanka

Three a.m. is such a lonely time. I hate it. The sidewalks on Independence Avenue are empty except for the police cars. There’s nothing on the TV except guys with disgusting abs peddling gym memberships and combination apple-corer/wine-bottle-stopper/cummerbunds. No commentators to challenge. No recaps of those inspiring shots of me coming down the steps of Air Force One and waving to the crowds. My worshippers have all gone to bed. It’s just me and my demons. Three a.m. is a preview of death.

Once upon a time I would have waked you up and we could have talked. Now you are sleeping with that Jewboy. (Sorry, honey; habits are hard to break.) Melania, bless her, may have gotten a Number Ten body, but nobody has yet put her up for a Nobel Prize in political science. She yesses me to death, and she enjoys my physical attributes but she doesn’t get the same charge I do out of stirring the pot and honing the knives. And Pence says he’ll quit if I don’t stay off Twitter, so who the hell am I supposed to talk to? I don’t trust Kelley as far as I could throw him, and the boys of my posse are either the usual blinkered military mental midgets or so flabby-rich that they have no idea what it’s like to have to fight for your place at the table. Not to escape poverty, of course, Daddy insulated me from that, but for rejection by those mealy-mouthed bluebloods who have been living on their Princeton and Yale degrees and Yacht Club memberships while I have had to fight for recognition. Do you know how many golf courses I could have built by now if I had had the foresight to be a Whiffenpoof instead of a Fordham grind and a Wharton MBA?

So I pace this apartment at three am and try to think up ways to show them up. All their degrees and memberships and blue blood aren’t worth shit when it comes to stirring up a crowd. “Facts”, they say they want. There’s no such thing as a fact. There are slogans that work and there are slogans that don’t work. “Lock her up!” is sure-fire. “Show me your tax returns” is just plain boring. Who wants to read a tax return? His own or anyone else’s. “Build that wall!” is a killer — it makes no sense but it resonates with half-remembered echoes of Saint Ronnie and it creates a vision of “other” people being denied a free ride on my money. A winner.

I may have mentioned to you at some time or other that I am a winner. Everyone else is a loser. To what extent they are hopeless losers (like Christie or Jeb or Mitt or Hillary) is perhaps debatable, but I will be the judge, and if I have to create my own facts to do it that’s not a problem. If people wanted to be governed by facts there wouldn’t even be political parties. We would all agree on everything. I may or may not try to salvage what’s left of the Republican one. Haven’t decided yet.

But now, because of the stupidity of all these losers, I am in the hot seat. I am the President. I have to make the decisions. And even though I make fun of Pence, sometimes he’s right. Decisions have to be based to some extent, however distant, on reality, or they won’t work. And reality bores me stiff. He says if I turn the whole thing over to the generals, they will keep us safe. Generals! A bunch of frozen-sphinctered time servers. They sit so upright in their damned chairs you’d think they were made of cardboard. They haven’t dared to fart since they graduated from West Point. All they know is, “Give me bigger weapons to play with and I’ll kill anyone who won’t listen.” You want a fact? If you kill everyone who won’t listen who is going be left to dig your sand traps and plant your zoyzia grass and manicure your greens? After you kill off all your workers will you then start incinerating your customers, too? Who will then be left to pay for the memberships and the greens fees?

“All right,” Ryan says, “then leave it to us politicians.” Hah! Spineless amoebas with nothing on their minds but their peckers and their perks. Anemometers with legs. And social-climbing wives. Wave a few votes or a few dollars in front of them and they come crawling like ants to sugar. They don’t want to make decisions; they want to duck decisions so they can never be held responsible for anything. Even I am better qualified than they are.

I hate the whole idea.

So this morning I had an inspiration. It’s true. I am the President. This can be seen as an opportunity like no other. How did Rod Blagojevich put it? “This is golden.” I can outsource the job.

You know and I know that the President is so hemmed in by congressmen, civil servants, and lobbyists that he can’t accomplish anything, even in four years of trying. Look at poor Barack. And even what little he got done we are about to reverse. So how much real difference does it make who is President? But that’s not the popular perception. What people see is Air Force One. What they hear is “Hail to the Chief” until it becomes an earworm. What they admire is the title “The most powerful man on the planet”. They are awestruck with envy. And that’s not just the ordinary guy. Every little tinpot African dictator in his shitpot country dreams of qualifying for treatment like that. And not just African tinpot dictators. Tinpot dictators everywhere. Russia. North Korea. Turkey. The Philippines. And now, apparently, China.

So what if we were to divide the job up into one-day segments and auction them off? “Be President for a Day”. How much damage can one man do in 24 hours when everything he deals with today can be reversed tomorrow? Let him fly around in AF–One to his heart’s content. Put the Marine Band in a C5M and let them land first and be ready to play on every tarmac as he arrives. Give him the big bullet-proof limo with the flags on the fenders. Let him shake hands with Prime Ministers and government leaders wherever he goes. Let him grab at their wives’ tushes or pussies if that’s his pleasure. Bring girls to the back cabin through the “Kennedy bomb bay”. How much do you think Putin would be willing to pay for that? Or Duterte? Or Erdoğan? We could probably wipe out the national debt the first year. And I could go back to what I know. There are still over a hundred countries on this planet in which there is as yet neither a Trump golf course nor a Trump hotel. Even working around the clock with no political distractions it will be a hard race. I want to leave office with 200 golf courses. I may even learn to cure my slice!

Three am is such a damn lonely time. Maybe you should ditch that Kushner jerk and come back home where we could talk like we used to. Vanka?

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I’d Be Dead

You know what? If I had been born 50 years sooner I would probably be dead by now.

What do you mean, ‘probably’? You’re 93. You would be 143 years old. Nobody lives that long. You’d be dead, all right.

That’s not what I mean. I mean that my chances of reaching the age of 93 would have been slim to zero. Look at how many life-threatening things I have avoided just by being born in 1923 instead of 1873.

I don’t see what you’re driving at. Life-threatening?

Well, for one thing, my life expectancy in 1873 would have been 43 years instead of the 53 it was in 1923. That’s a 10-year gain right there.

Averages don’t apply to specific cases. There is no such thing as the law of averages. It’s only in hindsight that averages mean anything.

Well then, consider just my medical escapes. I had pneumonia when I was 21. In 1894 sulfonamide and penicillin were still three or four decades away. Statistics say one person out of three who got pneumonia in 1894 died of it. Fifty years later the cure was almost routine. A few shots and a little rest and you were okay. No need to spend months in the Alps. trying to understand Thomas Mann.

OK. I get your point.

And what about the influenza epidemic in 1918 that killed 25 million Americans who hadn’t yet heard of flu shots? True, I might not have caught it, but by being born after that I avoided it altogether. And what about surgery? In 1987 when I was 64 years old I developed a double inguinal hernia. The surgeon just tucked it back in behind some plastic mesh, a routine procedure then. That operation hadn’t yet been heard of in 1937, when the mortality rate from hernia operations was also about one out of three. And even if I had survived in the OR, there would have been no Medicare to pay for it — I would have been stuck with a bill that would probably have bankrupted me.

Now I see where you’re going.

My hearing went south in 2006. In 1956 I would have been carrying an ear trumpet, if I had had the courage to advertise my problem. As it actually happened the Geek world gave me a little peanut inside my ear, and by that time nobody would have considered that embarrassing, even if they had noticed. But my narrowest escape was four years ago when my small intestine somehow got twisted into a knot. My wife called 911 and an ambulance with EMTs and all kinds of testing equipment was at our apartment within ten minutes. Three hours later I was on an operating table and four and a half feet of my gut was in a bucket on the floor, beating fatal gangrene (the surgeon later told me) by no more than a few hours. In 1962 there would have been no 911 to call. The hospital would have been many more hours away and I wouldn’t have made it.

All right. I agree you’ve had some close shaves. But…

Wait. Last year I was hit by something called CRVO — a Central Retinal Vein Occlusion. It occurs inside your eyeball. No warning. Suddenly your retina swells up and your vision becomes just hazy light and shadow. There is no cure, but luckily for me two drugs had just come on the market that could stop the swelling and restore sight and stop further deterioration. My ability to read and write is now back again. (You don’t really want to hear about the procedure for the monthly injections in the eyeball unless you are a fan of Buñuel movies, but so far it’s working.)

All right. I hear you. If you had been born 50 years sooner none of these treatments would have been available.

Right. And I would be dead instead of sitting here asking you to consider whether the much-bemoaned economic stagnation in their standard of living that the American middle classes have supposedly suffered over the past half-century is really as ruinous of the quality of life as the critics say. Maybe GNP is not the full measure of our well-being. Other things need to be counted. I am surely lucky to have been born when I was instead of fifty years earlier. I’d be dead by now. Economic inequality is still a major problem to be sure, but at the same time maybe it’s true that in some respects a rising tide does really lift all boats. My doctors and my insurance broker and my pharmacist and the president of my local hospital may all have gotten rich while I haven’t, but I’m still here. My boat hasn’t sunk. Yet.

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