At Last

About forty years ago, I decided to go on my first century ride (100 miles on a bicycle). It was a major ride along Long Island’s south shore, and everyone would return on the train (the LIRR). Of course, I didn’t know what I was doing.

Maybe  200 people signed up for the ride, and my plan was to join some experienced riders I knew and ride at their pace. I did not know how to pace myself. I chose poorly, and at about the 60 mile mark, I found myself alone and exhausted. Somehow I struggled on to the end, dragged myself to the train and fell into a seat, completely exhausted, dehydrated, unable to move. 

At that point a much older experienced rider noticed me and brought me some bottled water and food from the club stores. He talked to me for a bit, made sure I would survive and went  back and sat down. I recognized him, at least to the extent that I knew he was a character actor I’d seen many times. I didn’t know his name, and I never saw him in person again. But this week I saw him on a really old TV show. His name was Murray Matheson. 

Changing Races

Times change. Today if someone is born with the genetic attributes of a male but realizes she is female, we understand and accept that. You are who you believe you are. But if a woman with white parents realizes she is a black person, we shun her. You can’t just change the social conventions we call racial categories, unless you move to a different country with different racial criteria. Or unless you are a black person who becomes white. 

The Dude and the Creamsicle

Seth Meyers has pointed out that The Dude (in THE BIG LEBOWSKY) and Minority President Trump have a lot in common.

Each has been photographed while wearing a robe.

They are fixated on their rugs.

Both men love White Russians. 

The CNN Panels

Jon Lovett talked about the typical CNN news panel (on CNN!), and I did not take notes. This is my faulty memory of what he said.

The usual CNN panel of talking news-heads consists of seven people. The first member is a smart but dowdy old journalist, a woman with sharp insights into which party has scored a small point. She will never say anything profound, but she might say something interesting. Sitting next to her is a moron. The third member is a venal party hack who has never uttered an honest word in his life or felt a genuine emotion, other than avarice.  The fourth is the moderator, a conventionally handsome man or pretty woman who is adept at contradiction. If someone on the panel says, "I am a Republican," the host or hostess will jump in with, "Are you really? Not according to a majority of real Republicans.You've seen the polls." (This is proof of aggressive journalist integrity.)

The fifth member of the panel is a drooling idiot in a bib. The sixth is some old guy who was a liberal congressman during the Presidency of Jimmy Carter, and the last member is a retired  Bloomberg writer, slumped in her chair, dead. 

explode, crash and burn.

Minority President Trump’s first plan was to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act. That failed today. His announced backup plan is to let the ACA explode, crash and burn. 

North Korea has announced that it is building a missile large enough to carry a nuclear bomb to Portland. Trump plans to wait for it to explode, crash and burn.

The planet faces global warming, which can be handled, according to Trump EPA leadership, by watching the weather system explode, crash and burn. 

Also, if his favorite team, the New England Patriots, doesn’t win the Super Bowl, Trump will take his football and go home. 

Davin Nunes in Charge

As you may know, Davin Nunes (who represents my father's birthplace in the Big Valley) is a close ally of Speaker Paul Ryan and chair of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. He's in charge of investigating links between Russia and the Trump transition team. I'd like to explain why Nunes is the perfect person for the job.

1.   Nunes holds a degree in agriculture from Cal Poly San Luis Obispo.  He knows how to grow red beets for borsch as well as any Russian. And he can speak Portuguese.

2.  Nunes famously said that "global warming is nonsense," proving his adherence to Republican science and to the needs of economies, like that of Russia, dependent on selling oil at more than $60 a barrel. This is a farmer who fearlessly names names. In his book he called environmentalists "followers of neo-Marxist, socialist, Maoist or Communist ideals." He did not intend this as faint praise.

3.   Nunes was a member of the Trump transition team and leads the committee investigating it.. No one knows more about the Trump team than Nunes.  On the house committee, he currently serves as witness, judge and recorder. Just ask yourself, who is more thoroughly prepared to investigate Nunes than the man himself? 

The Size of Ideas

When I was in graduate school, I had a friend who set out to write a novel about Nothing. This was many decades before Seinfeld's TV series. Anyway, I thought the idea was great in its way. I can't recall exactly how the novel began, but it was something like this. "Tom was afraid of Nothing. He understood that Nothing could hurt him. He had no allies. People who believed in Nothing were scarce, and most of them argued that Nothing was too good for him."   And so on. My friend's problem was that the idea was excellent for a short-short story, but it could not support a novel. We see something like that in Democratic politics, where proposing a very small raise in the minimum wage cannot support a winning campaign.

A Hurdles Race with Death

In a recent terrorist incident in France, a minor criminal and drug abuser apparently decided to commit suicide by attacking some soldiers guarding an airport. His last words were, "I'm here to die for Allah." As someone has written, there must be 3,000 gods humans have believed in, and this unfortunate man did not believe in 2,999 of them. He killed real people to demonstrate his commitment to a single imaginary spirit in the sky. He thought that that was a good idea. This man was almost an atheist, but he didn't clear the final hurdle. 

Baiting Our Rump-Spung Ruler

All of us develop patterns of behavior as children that we use from then on to cope with problems. I  suppose one thing that psychologists do is identify the childhood patterns that hold us back or do us harm as adults. 

It's become obvious that a major pattern our Minority President follows is to bluster, scream and rage in public on each small occasion someone criticizes him (or implies a minor  imperfection). That's his coping pattern. If we want to watch Trump throw a childish temper tantrum every single day for the next four years, someone has to press his button. That kind of robotic behavior is funny. But it's hard to laugh when the Republicans are trying to cut back on the food supplied to helpless seniors (while claiming that they do it to give the penniless seniors tax relief).

Two Thoughts About Republicans

I recently shifted (in my own mind) from being a Democrat to being an independent voter. This doesn't mean I have given up on the Democrats; it does mean that, to get my vote, they will have to earn it. Mike McGuire, for instance, has earned my support many times over. I hope that there are people working inside the party to get it to listen to workers, Latinos, angry non-voters, Black Lives Matter and so on. Democrats should find out what people really want and then give it to them. That's how Democrats can win. (The majority of people do not sit around hoping for tax breaks for billionaires, for larger aircraft carriers or to see Latino families broken up.)

I have two thoughts about the Republican Party. The first is really a question. Why do they keep electing Presidents who are mentally ill? Nixon was paranoid. Reagan was senile in office. Now we have Minority President Trump, a malignant narcissist. Why do Republicans pick bobbleheads to lead western civilization? (My guess is that the hodge-podge of bad ideas guiding Republicans can't even be considered unless you first abandon reason.)

My second thought is that Ryan's current Republican health care plan will kill people who get cut off, abruptly, from lifesaving medicines and treatments. I doubt if a plan this savage will pass, but how can Ryan, who maintains he's Catholic, ignore the Pope and just bump off a million people to save money, money that will be converted into a tax break for billionaires who don't need it?

I can see why Trump would back Ryan's plan. Trump is mentally ill and neither sees nor cares what happens next. Ryan's excuse is that he is a Republican.

I Feel Good Now

I know I’m a writer because John Barth once told me I am.  Nevertheless maybe ten years have gone by since our local newspaper has printed one of my letters in its letter-to-the-editor section. I gave up long ago. But recently I was sufficiently outraged to try one more time, and on Saturday they printed my letter. They must have a new person editing that section of the paper. I feel good now. 

Deep State

In THE NEW YORKER, John Cassidy points out that what successful authoritarian leaders do is expand the social safety network. Then the people like them. Minority President Trump is too bonkers to grasp this history, and he has set off on a path to shrink the social safety network. (Yes, there is a "deep state" that is working against Trump, called ordinary American people.)

Slavery Revisited

Back when slavery was a fact in the United States, it had to be defended in print and in speeches by the rich white men who had invested in it. There was never anything good about slavery, of course. It was viciously inhumane. Defending slavery took a warped mentality, and the consequences remain to this day (look at how certain mentally warped Americans today find justifications for voter suppression).

Now some mentally warped federal bureaucrats are proposing to take the children away from undocumented families who cross our borders without papers. Breaking up normal families and removing children is a form of cruelty we haven't seen in our country since we freed the enslaved. It's absolutely indefensible cruelty, much as the Holocaust was absolutely indefensible cruelty. When we rounded up Japanese Americans in 1942, even then, we didn't separate the children from their parents and turn the children over to an inadequate foster care system. Should America really be considering a proposal this ugly?

The Arrival

A year or two back, about a quarter of our voters were still waiting impatiently for a certain kind of leader to emerge. They were hoping for someone tall with a large ass and hair transplants dyed yellow. Someone Aryan. He would have to have a simple vocabulary made up of one syllable words derived from Old English, a Germanic language. No three syllable words derived from Norman French.  The new leader would have to be as stupid and nasty as they were, so he could represent them, male and female, in matters like the grabbing of private parts. 

These voters had been waiting a long time, since the 1780s. They’d put up with the fancy dudes like George Washington and smarty-pants like James Madison, a college boy. Handsome empty guys like Harding and Bush came and went. The voters had suffered through the Presidencies of generals like Andrew Jackson, Grant and Ike. But soon it would be their turn, and the new leader would be, at last, one of them, a feckless turd. 

(also on Facebook)

Is Trump a Man?

Is Minority President Trump a man? 

Words have meaning, of course, and “man” has many meanings. Sometimes it’s an interjection, as in “Man! Did you hear what that President Goofy just said?” In other circumstances “man”  can mean “boss.”  (I’m working for the man, every night and day.) “Man” is what Wittgenstein called a family resemblance word, one with a variety of loosely related usages. 

“Man” is a descendent of the old English “mann,” which meant “a human person.” About a thousand years ago, that changed to “adult male.” In the United States it became “adult white male.” But a chess piece is also a man. “Man” can be a verb, as in manning a destroyer, and some of the men will be women. You man up to fortify yourself, and so on. 

Science claims that some examples of the category “man” are recognized as more central than others. Donald Trump clearly has several attributes of men. He has lungs. He has hair on his back, some of which has been transplanted to his head and dyed the color of urine. On the other hand, his vocabulary is so small as to be sub-human, and it contains non-words like “bigly.” Restricted to a meager hundred words, he repeats them like a parrot. “My day was great. It was really great. The Mormons I met were great people. I love Mormons. Many told me my speech was great. The fake news won’t say it was great.”

As I understand it, categories like “man” have central members. Minority President Trump is robotic, too stiff to meet the main definition of a man, but we have to give him this: he’s a fringe member of the category, nearly a person, the kind linguists and linguistic philosophers call a nutty creamsicle. 

The Fix Is In

Two weeks ago, Minority President Trump instructed that "all new pipelines, as well as retrofitted, repaired or expanded pipelines, inside the borders of the the United States, including portions of pipelines, use materials and equipment produced in the United States."

That seems to cover all pipelines. Buy American! But the fix is in. Yesterday the White House noted that "the Keystone Xl pipeline is currently in the process of being constructed, so it does not count as a new, retrofitted, repaired or expanded pipe line."

Hey, baby, let the good times roll.  

Steven Bannon's Talent

When I woke from my nap this afternoon, I understood Steve Bannon's talent. He's a world-class master of ass-kissing. Everyone who works for Trump spends night and day smooching that sagging Aryan posterior, but Bannon does it best. He has the best lips and longest tongue. He lets Trump pull his hair bigly.

Democrats Get Older and Older

I watched the first few minutes of the Democratic response to Trump's latest speech. Then I grew unbearably bored and moved on, as did nearly everyone, I'd guess. 

There was one moment when the ancient white fellow representing the Democratic party said something like, "I am a Democrat, I am a Republican, and I am an American."  To which Stephen Colbert replied, "I am a man, I am a woman, and I am a human being and a dog, ruff ruff."

The multi-millionaires running the Democratic party, lagging miles behind its ordinary voters, can't quite grasp that the party needs new leaders, new voters and new ideas. Many of the rich leaders do not care. The Democratic party is a pot of gold. 

The Clinton/Obama wing can't drag itself away from the past, when everything was right of center  Today it insists on repeating the stale mash that has lost them most states in the union, the House, the Senate, the Presidency and, soon, the Supreme Court. Loss after loss means you are losers. The Democrats should try to find out what people--particularly those who refuse to vote--actually want from the government. What would get citizens interested in going to the polls?