Thursday, March 01, 2018 8:44 PM
Build and Break (2018Mar01)
I was just re-watching “Patton”, the scene of the Nazi counter-offensive that began the Battle of the Bulge—Panzers rolling over (and also through) the farmers’ stone walls, crossing their fields. I thought of how many years spent plowing up rocks, pickings those rocks up, carrying them over to be set in the surrounding wall. I pondered the contrast between those years of honest sweat and the brief, casual destruction of that work as an infinitesimal moment in that mad, murderous conflict.
Then I related that to Trump. How easy it is for the battering-ram of his blunt ignorance to smash through what it took centuries of thought and feeling to build. Our federal government is one of the great wonders of the world—our strength as a nation, as a people, has a potential that we, as modern Americans, stubbornly refuse to commit to—but it abides.
Unfortunately, cooperation and capitalism don’t go together very well. That’s a bad thing because democracy is cooperation—and capitalism is compulsory competition, wherein cooperation becomes a ploy used against the ‘weak’.
This is also why, though we’ve often flirted with a tycoon candidate (like Ross Perot) we’ve never actually done it before. Dare I say: Now we know why? Business is important, yes—but ‘governing’ and ‘doing business’ are so different as to be, in many ways, opposing activities—and a businessman like Trump has all the wrong instincts. He’s trying to win—he’s not trying to do good.
He’s not even doing a very good job of masking his struggles against the emergence of the truth. I’ve seen people so full of guilt that they start shouting rebuttals before anyone accuses them—but their age is usually still in the single digits when they behave this way. The White House’s group effort to back up the President’s ravings sometimes goes so far as to claim that a certain comment was a ‘joke’—that’s quite a show, though we’re in no position to enjoy it, as entertainment.
But I am most bemused by the duality of, on one hand, Mueller’s very official and technical case being made concerning the administration and the president—and, on the other hand, the ongoing mountain of public knowledge that accrues to us normal folk, just reading the papers every day. Whatever Mueller finally wraps up with, the investigation’s longevity is itself an opening for this firehose of bad laws, bad relations, bad oversight, and quasi-criminal ‘presidenting’. Trump is an historically bad apple—he cannot be removed quickly enough.
Last but not least—those of you who don’t like the strategic outlook following a Trump impeachment, when Pence would take over and do God knows what—you must accept that. Trump must not be allowed to finish his term as if he were just another president—our nation’s disgrace would be that much deeper and more lingering. And I wouldn’t worry too much about a President Pence after he’s appointed via impeachment—that doesn’t sound like political capital to me.
Let’s get rid of the Putin-puppet first—we’ll worry about the weirdness of Pence later. Every day Trump stays in office adds another layer of slime to our national pride.
Friday, March 09, 2018 9:09 PM
We just got resettled back into our house, after a week without power, staying at the Danbury Hilton Garden Inn. The hotel was great, especially considering the alternative—Claire, Jessy, Baby Sen, and I (Spence stayed with Nana, who’d had a great fall earlier in the week).
