Helen, Lost in time

Two of my nieces started a family history project, taping various family members talking about the old days. They need photographs, so Susan and I went through a handful of boxes. I came up with a forgotten photograph of my mother’s siblings, Joe and Helen Farley. I knew Joe, but I never met Helen. She’d died about the time she’d have entered high school. I don’t remember what she died from. I think I heard a mix of stories about a disease like scarlet fever and a weak heart and a vaccination. Some combination took her.

In the photograph, professionally made, Helen looks about three. She’s in a cute dress, sitting sideways in a chair, and she’s smiling. The picture has no background, just the girl and the chair, floating somewhere. 

I believe Helen Farley was greatly loved. Her death ended a Catholic marriage (my grandmother was excommunicated when she later married a second time). Helen was named for my grandmother’s sister, an old lady who was a favorite of my mother and of mine. There’s no one alive now who remembers who Helen Farley was except one or two relatives. So it goes.  

Spanky Is Next

Trump and the Russians probably engaged, from the start, in a criminal conspiracy (not in collusion). I write "probably" because Trump's trial hasn't started yet. But we do have Trump on record asking the Russians to hack into Hillary's email, and I think we'll soon be looking at evidence that Spanky knew they'd already done that. I think Spanky and the Putin folks worked hand in glove, deciding which counties in which states to focus on. 

It follows that Trump had to ask Comey for personal loyalty. Spanky knew he was guilty of real crimes on many levels. Since firing Comey, Spanky has spent most of his time and tweets on obstructing justice and gathering illegal emoluments. The oaf has been trying to face down a tsunami with a public relations campaign. 

Spanky has used his inherited wealth to evade justice all his life. He probably thinks he can snow the court system with PR. That might be true at times. But by getting himself elected President, Spanky moved up into a position where his brainless cheating can't be ignored. He can divert us for a while by putting infants in cages, but we are putting Manafort and Cohen behind bars, and President Spanky will be next.

Translating Trump into English

Michale Wong wrote down some Trump to English translations:

"Silent majority" = "white people"
"Ordinary working class folk" = "white people in factories"
"Real Americans" = "white people who like country music"
"Populist movement" = "poor white people"
"Grass-roots" = "white people at Trump rallies"
"Law-abiding citizen" = "middle-class white people"
"Wholesome" = "white people in rural America"
"Family values" = "white people in church"
"Small business" = "entrepreneurial white people"
"Upstanding citizens" = "rich white people"
"Very fine people" = "white people"

By these standards I am a "real American."

Humans At Play

I have never been a fan of Chris Froome, who has won four Tours de France, the world's greatest bicycle road race. He is not likely to win this year, which pleases me, but I am surprised by the way French fans have been treating the champion. 

Fans line the French roads to watch the riders go by, and near the tops of steep hills, the riders are exhausted and moving quite slowly. (Downhill they reach speeds like 55 mph.) Anyway, as the riders slowly pump up the mountains, French fans have been running alongside Froome, spitting on him and punching him in the back.

Froome hasn't had a good Tour. One day he had three flat tires. He's fallen several times. The French police teargassed all the leaders in a stupid mistake. Yesterday a cop mistook him for an interloper and blocked his bicycle, and Froome fell yet again as a result.

Many decades ago, the Tour banned national teams. They wanted the race to be about the best men.  They did not want to foster the sort of nationalism that kept Europe boiling. Today the teams represent corporations (for the most part), and the teams are mixtures of men from many countries. Froome, a lanky White fellow, is from Rhodesia. But French fans want a French man to win, so, as he pumps slowly by, they throw cups of urine in the rider's defenseless face.

The Imbecile

According to Sarah Huckabee Sanders and Fox News, President Spanky and Dictator Putin secretly discussed allowing Russian prosecutors to interrogate our former ambassador to Russia, Michael McFaul. The President has not made a decision, as far as I can tell. I'm not an attorney, but I doubt if Spanky can force McFaul to submit to the Russians, and of course the consequences to our foreign service might be shattering. Not that Spanky would care. He's an imbecile.

Leave No Trace

Eight years back I was somewhat dumbstruck by a movie called WINTER'S BONE. It was directed and adapted by Debra Granik and others. The story unfolded in the Ozarks of Missouri among the kind of people my great-grandparents had been in the Kentucky hollows. It followed a teenage girl growing up and dealing with brutal adult problems as she searched for her father; it portrayed a community; it launched the career of Jennifer Laurence.

LEAVE NO TRACE is Granik's new film. It's a gentle film, but again it focuses on a father and a teenage girl taking hold of her own life in strange circumstances. Again, community matters in good and bad ways. The film has no exposition, no back story, just the lives being led. What you see happen is all you get, and it is enough. As Anthony Lane noted, this is an anti-war film in which a shot is never fired (I think maybe distantly related to COMING HOME). It's the best film I've seen in some time.

A Psychological Examination

If you are rich, you will seldom be required to sit for a psychological examination.

In case you missed it, the NY TIMES published a story on the rules that Latino children must follow when detained at our border. These children, separated by guards from their parents, classified as "unaccompanied," are ordered not to touch one another, not even your own little brother or sister. No hugs. Some are required to learn our salute to the American flag. And so on.

The people who wrote and enforce these rules are probably (mostly) stupid rather than evil. To do this sort of thing (or to vote for President Trump, a mentally disturbed weakling) you first have to know nothing about psychology and have no insights into your own behavior or Trump's. 

It isn't that psychology is infallible or a science like physics. But psychology offers insights. It provides a way to recognize trolls who are as openly narcissistic and stupid as President Spanky. Republicans with this kind of knowledge turned against Trump before he was nominated--but there weren't many of them, and now we--like Putin--end up staring in amazement at continuing  monumental and cruel folly.

The Cruelty of the Stupid

I accuse Donald Trump of child abuse and ask that he be tried in a California state court.

I don’t know how the laws on child abuse read, but I assume that if I grab a child and put it in a cage—even if it is my own child—I’ll end up in prison. To explain why this should be the case  I’ll turn to Oscar Wilde, who had observed children imprisoned in the jail where he did time. He noted that when a warder gave three small children cookies, he was immediately fired.

The quotations are from HARPER'S, August issue.

“Ordinary cruelty is stupidity. It is the entire want of imagination. It is the result in our days of stereotyped systems, of hard and fast rules, and of stupidity.”

Wilde wrote: “The child, consequently, being taken away from its parents by people it has never seen, becomes an immediately prey to the first and most prominent emotion produced by modern prison life—the emotion of terror. . . .To shut up a child in a dimly lit cell, for twenty-three hours out of the twenty-four, is an example of the cruelty of stupidity.” 

Wilde called for the severe punishment of anyone abusing children in this way. Trump should, if found guilty, be locked up.

The Liberal Democracies

Like others I am not watching as much TV news as I used to. In my case that’s because I can watch a woman deliver the news in the morning, and at night I get exactly the same news repeated by a man (because, as night falls, gravitas requires deeper voices).

Tonight I saw a damned fool from the editorial dept of the NY Times explain, for the ninth time, that when he refers to the liberal democracies of the world, he does not mean nations that lean left. Instead he is talking about a broader and older meaning of “liberal,”  one based on a belief in the democratic process, the rights of women, racial diversity, fair wages, the civil service, gay rights and health care for everyone. But none of the lefty stuff, no, ma’am. Never.   

Surreality

Last month I visited the Rene Magritte exhibition at the SF MOMA with Mowry Baden, an artist and a friend from childhood. I hadn’t paid much attention to Surrealism in the past, but the Magritte show fascinated me. MOMA presents a display that challenges preconditioned perceptions of reality, something almost inevitable in the Age of Spanky Trump.The art shifts repeatedly between illusion and reality, facts and “alternate facts.”  

What has struck me hardest in Trump Time has been a shift in my perception of human nature. About 30% of  American voters approve of Trump’s snatching infants away from their mothers and putting the infants in cages (where often diapers are not changed) along the Mexican border. That is obvious cruelty. Anything over 1% approval of it is shocking.  

Trump did this to discourage Latinos from seeking asylum in our country, which Trump hopes to make Whiter. About two-thirds of the voters disapprove of the absurd cruelty, but a third support these vicious actions with all their hearts. I didn't expect that, and I find it unforgivable. At age 83 the ground has shifted under me. My illusion about the goodness of ordinary people hasn’t matched  reality.   

Theoretical Checks Will Not Save Us

Any governance system devised by humans can be corrupted by humans. The Founding Fathers attempted, with our Constitution, to make the system as hard to corrupt as possible, but in the end it is up to ordinary citizens to defend the republic against sociopaths, con men, imbeciles and authoritarians like Mitch McConnell and Donald Trump. 

James Madison wrote: “Is there no virtue among us? If there be not, we are in a wretched situation, No theoretical checks—no form of government can render us secure.”

About 3,000 local people turned out Saturday in Santa Rosa to protest against sticking Latino infants in cages. We can stop the sociopaths if ordinary Americans act and act, time after time.