What would Aristotle think of Donald Trump? (From comments by someone on MSNBC)
Don acts only in his own self-interest.
Don has denied access to the Epstein files.
Therefore, denying access to the Epstein files is in Don's self-interest.
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Denying access to the Epstein files has been harmful to Don.
Don acts only in his own self-interest.
Therefore, granting access must be even more harmful.
Most have seen MAGA events on TV. The people attending seem colorful, happy, excited and friendly. Also ignorant and cognitively undeveloped.
The rewards for joining MAGA include the joy of membership in a strong community and the pleasure that comes from the denunciation of pedophiles, scientists, creative types and anti-racists.
"That damned Trump has ruined the FBI," I said recently, to my own surprise.
In my family we haven't cared for the FBI. Like most police forces, it exists, in part, to protect the powerful and keep white trash and minorities down. So why do I, descended from Kentucky hillbillies, care if the FBI gets degraded?
For many reasons we need police, and we need a better kind of police.
I've argued that most of us have a liberal streak and a conservative streak. Two human impulses. Maybe two names for one mixture.
Right now we are caught in a struggle between those who like our system well enough to want to keep it intact (but slowly changing) vs. those who want to smash the system and adopt a new one. The proposed new system will work like a corporation with a CEO whose word is law. Like an army with a general or a football team with a coach. Like a Fascist state. Like Lucky, Bugsy and Meyer.
Our current, awkward system is held together by imperfect institutions. But it has democratic aspects. Keeping that system requires supporting the institutions that create it.
Politics has taken a strange lurch.
“And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?”
On page seven of yesterday’s newspaper, the headline read: GAZA: 85 KILLED WHILE SEEKING AID.
Now that Maurene Comey, who prosecuted Jeffrey Epstein, has been fired by Epstein's best friend (Donald Trump), I hope she writes a roman a clef. The main characters could be American President Amos Hilter, a convicted sex abuser, and his best friend, Junior Epcot, child pornographer. Having read many government files, Comey should be able to create believable fiction (with some help from AI).
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For 24 years I've been a member of a discussion group that meets at the senior center. We lost a member this week. She was 89 and seemed in good health until she stroked out.
We listen to old people talk.
Among our members we have a woman who set a world record in swimming, a gay Mexican-American, an Episcopal priest, a trial attorney, a former Hollywood child actor, a geologist and city planner, an English professor emeritus and several others. About half are women.
I think democracy's basic problem is that to win an election, you often have to win your share of the stupid vote. You can't do that with logic or issues. They don't register with stupid voters.
July 5 is a day for me to think about Walter Bligh. He grew up about a block from me in Compton, the only child of my aunt and uncle.
Walter was fifteen years older than I was. He's a shadowy memory now, shot down by the Japanese somewhere over Borneo.
I remember him.
At the onset of the war, black people could not vote in half the nation. No women held office. We interned Japanese Americans. Anti-Semitism was open and powerful. Yet women, people of color and Jews joined the military. They risked their lives for what small stake they had in a vigorous system that had already invented Hollywood, the light bulb, the airplane, the telephone. They must have felt the flaws, but they unashamedly fought for what they had and hoped to have.
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Donald Trump admires Andrew Jackson, an ignorant, uncontrollable, murderous cracker.
(My great-grandfather moved from Kentucky to California to escape the McCoys.)
Anyway, when several senators disagreed with him, Andrew Jackson threatened to cut off their ears.
Jackson got into a gunfight with Senator Thomas Hart Benton. He killed Charles Dickinson in a duel. As a general he ordered more of his own men executed than George Washington. He executed two British citizens, including a man who had actually been sentenced to one year in prison. Jackson found that insufficient.
He killed hundreds of American Indians, and he deported entire tribes from their own country.
To match Jackson, Trump will have to deport the Navajo Nation to prisons in Africa.
