Ass kicker, ass licker

It is typical of bullies to kick down and kiss up. Donald Trump is in at least one respect a very atypical bully: not many bullies make it to the presidency of the United States. But in respect of kicking down and kissing up, he is perfectly typical. The kicking down part hardly needs documenting. Hardly a day goes by that Donald doesn’t attack someone, and from his official perch, which is high despite his dwelling always at the bottom of a moral cesspool, most any attack will necessarily entail a downward thrust. But not all his interactions with the rest of humanity are hostile. Some are merely condescending, and some, as the world saw with startling clarity during his just-finished trip to Asia, are downright affectionate. In classic bully fashion, as nasty as he is to those he deems his underlings, he acknowledges his place in a hierarchy and kowtows shamelessly to those he recognizes as outranking him in it. Thus his serial fawning over Vladimir Putin. Thus his sycophantic kissing last week of Chinese President Xi Jinping’s ass.

          During the campaign Trump accused China of “raping” American workers and “robbing us blind” and vowed to get tough with it. Then he went there. In Beijing Trump absolved China of any blame for the imbalance in trade between the two countries. “I don’t blame China,” he said. “After all, who can blame a country for being able to take advantage of another country for the benefit of its citizens? I give China great credit.” To Xi, a communist apparatchik who has recently succeeded in consolidating his grip on one-man rule over the country to which Trump seems to be relinquishing with unseemly haste the United States’ longtime role as the world’s dominant power, he tweeted effusive thanks “for such an incredible welcome ceremony. It was a truly memorable and impressive display!” And he called him “a very special man.”

          If that wasn’t enough, he proceeded to the Philippines and gushed there about his “great relationship” with President Rodrigo Duterte, a man who boasts even more openly of having committed homicide than Trump has of committing sexual assault. Logically, Duterte should not outrank Trump in any hierarchy except perhaps one of depravity. But in the psychic Good Fellas-like strutting tough-guy world they both inhabit, a tough guy who can boast of having killed someone outranks a tough guy whose greatest claim to infamy is having stiffed a bunch of contractors, bamboozled tens of millions of credulous white people into voting for him and prevailed in a number of professional wrestling matches. Those are all formidable credentials, but none of them compares with real murder, and though Trump may yet succeed in killing billions of us, hands-on homicide is one crime he can probably not yet boast of.

          When Trump was a mere bankruptcy-prone real estate developer and casino boss in New York and Atlantic City thirty years ago, he routinely bullyragged his executives and humiliated them in front of one another. You can go on YouTube and watch Trump’s cabinet members degrade themselves back in June in an almost ghoulish round of apparently on-command bootlicking. It’s a creepy spectacle that would seem more appropriate to a totalitarian fantasyland than to the United States. If his signature smug grin is any indication, Trump seems to relish that sort of thing as much as he does the approval of the thugs he makes no secret of currying favor with around the world. The problem, or one problem, for Donald Trump is that second-tier tough guys, like Mussolini, with whom he has so much in common, or like Tommy DeVito, Joe Pesci’s character in Good Fellas, the wannabe made man with whom Trump also has a lot in common, tend to end badly. After a while reality intrudes on their pretensions, and all their tough-guy swaggering dissolves in a brief epiphany of helplessness.

In Donald Trump’s case, that moment, if it comes, may wipe his signature smug grin from his face for good. That would make for a gratifying spectacle. But if it were somehow possible to cut a deal with the great artisanal dealer and just have him crawl back under the rock he emerged into our politics from, back into his tabloid netherworld of gambling and boxing and professional wrestling and beauty pageants and Roy Cohn and racial discrimination and sexual predation and bankruptcy and stiffing contractors and firing people on TV and Howard Stern interviews and racist conspiracy mongering and Chinese neckties and prenup agreements and extramarital affairs and massive Trump University-style fraud, and have him take with him all the sycophants who want to kiss his ass and all the thugs whose asses he wants to kiss and all the yahoo birdbrains who feel so free to vent their racist passions at his ugly rallies, he can sit there and grin all he wants. That would be fine with me.

Liddle' Donny Trump

When Donald Trump mocked Sen. Bob Corker a couple of weeks ago, tweeting disparagingly about “liddle’ Bob Corker,” it said a lot more about Trump’s own diminutive moral stature than it did about Corker. Corker, a Republican from Tennessee who recently announced plans to retire, is said to be five feet seven inches tall. He was under consideration about a year ago to be Trump’s secretary of state, but Trump reportedly deemed him too short for that job. For Donald Trump, in everything from inaugural crowds to TV ratings to cabinet officers, size matters.

The irony, of course, is that Trump’s obsession with size reflects just how small-minded he is. Trump embodies the opposite of Teddy Roosevelt’s adage about speaking softly and carrying a big stick. Or the opposite of half of it, anyhow. He carries a big enough stick in the form of history’s most powerful military, but he’s not exactly soft-spoken about it. Now that he’s actually in Korea, he’s toned down his childish rhetoric about visiting “fire and fury” on that peninsula. But in his backyard shouting match a month or so ago with his North Korean psycho counterpart Kim Jong Un, a.k.a. “Little Rocket Man,” the stick Trump brandished with such typically crude carnival barkeresque bravado was one you would hope even he knew he couldn’t really use. He threatened a war he couldn’t realistically fight—not without putting millions of lives at risk, a risk the professionals who run the military he ostensibly commands would probably refuse to run. He vowed to repeal and replace—with something “great”—his predecessor’s signature health care law and failed to repeal it at all or replace it with anything. He vowed to build a border wall he will probably never build more than a fraction of, and to build it with funds from Mexico he could obviously never get.

                Trump, as his fellow Republican Mitt Romney observed back before Romney, along with so much of the rest of the Republican old guard, lined up to kiss Trump’s fat ass, is a con man. He’s a great entertainer, but he’s all show and braggadocio. Someone so intent on making America great again and so enamored of all things huge should be big in spirit. Trump is petty and vindictive. Insults and mockery are his stock in trade. Jeb Bush told him during one of the Republican primary debates that he couldn’t insult his way to the presidency. Bush was wrong, but as intensely appealing as Trump’s childish petulance may be to his base, it is not conducive to legislative achievement. It may have helped get him elected, but it won’t help him get laws passed.

Trump tweeted insults about “liddle’ Bob Corker” on October 24, hours before he was scheduled to meet with lawmakers on Capitol Hill to push for tax reform. Insulting a widely respected member of your own party is not generally an effective way to win votes in Congress. If Trump were not in fact the moron Rex Tillerson (the man, five feet ten inches tall, he did choose to be secretary of state) reportedly called him a few months ago, he would know that. It would seem obvious. Maybe, if Trump’s attempt at tax reform fails as ignominiously as his health care plan did (if in fact he or the Republicans ever had a health care plan), that fact will dawn on him. But no one should hold his or her breath in anticipation of Trump’s growing in stature in any desirable way, intellectual, emotional or otherwise, to match the size of his head. Trump is big and tall, famous, powerful and rich, but by the metrics that matter, compared to Bob Corker, Trump is the liddle’ man.

With Donald Trump, it's personal

One fundamental thing to keep in mind in any discussion of Donald Trump Is that his appeal is essentially emotional, not rational. Politics generally engage people’s emotions to one degree or another, but to his die-hard supporters, Trump’s appeal is almost entirely emotional. He purports to have some policies—building a wall, deporting illegals, repealing Obamacare, or now, letting it implode, reforming the tax code, restricting immigration by Muslims—but he changes his positions so often, and so glibly, and at so little cost to his base of support, it’s obvious the fanatical devotion he inspires among so many middle- and working-class white people has very little to with matters of policy. His supporters are devoted not to his policies but to him. We have in the US what we have long seen in dictatorships right and left: a personality cult.

Some commentators are making much of the fact that voters in Alabama’s recent special primary election ignored Trump’s intervention on behalf of the incumbent, Luther Strange, appointed earlier this year to replace Jeff Sessions, who had resigned his seat in the Senate to become Trump’s attorney general, and voted instead for the archconservative firebrand Roy Moore. Breitbart cited that result as evidence of the supposed fact that Trumpism is bigger than Trump, that the fidelity of the people who elected Trump is more to the ideas he stands for than to Trump himself. But the critical thing with Trump is style, not substance—he has no substance—and stylistically Moore bears a closer resemblance to him than Strange does. In a very real sense, Trump’s strategic endorsement of the other guy notwithstanding, Moore’s victory was more an affirmation than a rejection of Trump, and Trump himself is probably not unhappy about it.

                Trump’s appeal to his supporters is less ideological than tribal. It’s more personality- than policy-driven. It’s performance driven, but only in the vaudevillian sense. It’s not rational, it’s emotional. Emotionally both Trump and his devotees in Alabama and elsewhere are much more in tune with Moore, the Bible-thumping culture warrior, than with Strange, the staunch but common-garden-variety Southern conservative, and for the same reason—because Moore will do more to stir things up and aggravate the liberals. He’ll mix it up and get in fights. The people who voted for Moore voted for him despite Trump’s policy of supporting the other guy, not despite Trump himself. To them, Moore’s appeal and Trump’s are basically the same. It’s the gratifying prospect of watching one of their own climb into the ring with the liberals and beat the crap out of them. It’s like having a front-row seat at an endless tag team match in professional wrestling, one of the multiple forms of scripted low-brow entertainment Trump has actually participated in. The combat itself, as it plays out on TV, may be at least superficially intellectual, but the appeal of watching it, for viewers both left and right, is fundamentally visceral. For liberals, it’s the fun of watching the preposterous vulgarian self-destruct, assuming, as they tend to, that that’s what he’s doing. For his supporters, it’s largely a desire for revenge—revenge on the liberals Trump’s legions blame for just about everything that sticks to one degree or another in their collective craw, including the triumph of the civil rights movement, defeat in Vietnam, the denigration of rural white culture, gay marriage, wage stagnation, affirmative action, political rectitude, nonsectarian holiday greetings and, perhaps worst of all, the election of a black president, this last compelling proof of the loss, or at least the imminent demise, of white primacy in American society.

These issues can all be cast in conceptual terms, but for Trump’s supporters they all ring emotional bells. They all touch on tribal identity. If you’re of a theoretical bent, you can weave theories around them, but the people aggrieved by them don’t have to think about them to get upset by them anymore than you have to think about neural transmission to feel pain when you grab a hot skillet bare-handed, or than a dog has to reflect on territoriality to get belligerent when a stranger comes to the door. These issues invoke emotional reflexes, and Donald Trump, the great counterpuncher, with his racism, carnival-barking bravado and defiant vulgarity, has just the personality to evoke and convey them. He’s the doctor wielding the hammer that evokes the reflex, and the hammer the patient uses to bludgeon those he blames his poor health on.

For a personality cult to take hold, it helps to have a strong, charismatic personality, and whatever screaming deficiencies he may have, Donald Trump has that. His charm is lost on lots of people, but among the people it works on it obviously works very powerfully. Say what you will about him, Donald Trump is not your typically preprogrammed politician. No one, apparently including Trump himself, quite knows what to expect next out of his mouth or his Twitter feed. He’s spontaneous, outrageous and unpredictable, in stark and refreshing contrast to Hillary Clinton and just about anyone else in our political history this side of Huey Long, with whom he has a lot in common.  

                The flip side of his verbal unpredictability is his attitudinal consistency, and therein too lies much of his charm. Under duress from his more sober-minded managers, he may make an occasional requisite denunciation of the very bigotry he thrives on politically, but when he does, his delivery is so obviously devoid of conviction, his words serve more to provide his bigoted followers cover than to discourage them. Trump is a loose cannon. He contradicts himself or his spokespeople with astounding frequency, switches policy positions—on abortion, on invading Iraq, on withdrawing from Afghanistan, on trade with China, on funding for his border wall—with almost wild abandon; but the underlying mettle he’s made of has never changed and never will, and his followers know that. In one sense his populism is as fraudulent as his claims about millions of illegal voters, or his preposterous guarantee that Mexico would pay for his border wall: he cares for the middle class only insofar as he can exploit it for money, as in the form of tuition for classes at his bogus “university,” or for votes. But in another sense it seems real. His supporters see in him a kindred spirit, and they’re probably right. Financial assets, place of residence and avoidance of military service aside, he’s one of them. He’s unapolegetically low-brow. His psychological habitat seems to overlap midtown Manhattan and the tabloid rack at the supermarket. It’s entirely fitting that an old friend and major supporter of Trump’s publishes the National Inquirer. Among the subjects Trump has seen fit to tweet about is Kristin Stewart’s love life. He’s actually wrestled, or pretended to wrestle, in a professional wrestling match. He’s not much of a reader. He didn’t merely produce and star in one of the crassest TV shows ever made, he’s an avid consumer of TV. He tweets insults about people on TV.

                Trump can shift positions from now til Sunday and break every preposterous promise he made during the campaign or has made since—he may commit more troops to a war in Afghanistan he’s described as a total disaster, fail to impose tariffs on Chinese imports, fail to replace Obamacare with anything at all, much less something “really great”; he may fail to deliver any significant rebuilding of the nation's infrastructure, much less a trillion dollars' worth; he may fail to revitalize the coal industry, or to rid North Korea of nuclear weapons, or to build anything resembling a real border wall, and he will certainly fail to get Mexico to pay for it. In word and deed he may prove as changeable as a chameleon. But his personality and style will never change, and his cult followers know that and love him for it. He’s permanently, indelibly crass, intrinsically dishonest and unfailingly entertaining, and as big a pile of broken promises as his first term may look like by the time it ends, just having him to cheer for, and to jeer at the liberals with, is so gratifying to his fans, by the time his surreal new reality show completes its first run, his ratings may have already won him an encore.

The Tweets He Tweets

The Tweets He Tweets

(Lyrics by Tim Loughman; sung to the tune of “On the Street Where You Live”; with apologies to Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe)

I have often heard the birdbrain tweet before,

But the tweeting never got so indiscreet before.

All at once the guy’s more bricks than usual shy

Of a load judging by the tweets he tweets.

Is all the world’s crap in that head of his?

Does no one’s bullshit ever rate ahead of his?

Do his brain farts roar out of every pore?

So it seems judging by the tweets he tweets.

And oh, the unsettling feeling

Just to know that new tweets are near,

That nasty nettling feeling

That any second he may tweet out loud and clear.

                                                                                           

People gasp and gape, they don’t faze the fool,

‘Cause there is no way on earth that he would rather rule.

Let the tweets spew out, don’t try to stop the lout,

‘Cause, you see, he’s gotta key the tweets he tweets. 

People shake their heads, they can’t believe their eyes

Every time they read another brazen batch of lies.

Let the con man spew, it won’t work if you

Try to stop the flood of slop from Donny’s tweets.

Let the tweets spew out, don’t try to stop the lout.

Let him be, free to key the tweets he tweets.   

Tweetin' Cretin

(Sung to the tune of “Rockin’ Robin”; lyrics by Tim Loughman, with apologies to Jimmie Thomas and Bobby Day)

He tweets in his jammies all night long,

Tweetin’ an’ twerkin’ and singin’ his song.

All the little birdies down on Right Wing Street

Love to hear the Donald goin’ tweet tweet tweet.

Tweetin’ cretin, tweet tweet tweet

Tweet excretin’, tweet tweedle lee dee

Blow, wordy birdy,

‘Cause we’re really gonna tweet tonight.

Every little wingnut, every little clown,

Every little Trumpie in the whole damn town,

The old white coot, the redneck squab,

Flappin’ their beaks, sayin’ “Dude, good job!”

Chatty choughy, tweet tweet tweet

Fluffy tuffy, tweet tweedle lee dee

Chirp, scudgy budgie,

‘Cause we’re really gonna tweet tonight.

Predatory pecker with a big fat dome

Taught himself to gussy up his big bright comb,

Tints an’ tarts an’ shapes it up an’ sure as day

He outshines the toucan and the popinjay.

He tweets in the morning, tweets late at night,

Tweets as he tries to get his topknot right.

He tweets in the mirror as he primps an’ preens

So we can read his stupid birdshit on our smart phone screens.

Preenin’ weeny, tweet tweet tweet

Mity meanie, tweet tweedle lee dee

Simper, prissy primper

‘Cause we’re really gonna tweet tonight.

Daddy got him started up in New York land,

Buildin’ nests and rentin’ ’em and it was grand.

Son, he said, if Blackbird asks to rent one please,

Tell ’im sorry but we’ve got no vacancies.

He struts through the White House all night long,

Tweetin’ an’ twerkin’ an’ jerkin’ along.

All the paratweeties in the right-wing cage

Love to have the cretin tweetin’ center stage.

Tricky flicker, tweet tweet tweet

Sleazy slicker, tweet tweedle lee dee

Peep, spewin’ sparrow,

Yeah, we’re really gonna tweet tonight.

Gaudy little fraudy with a day-glo do

Hatched a scheme to make an extra buck or two,

Offered business classes for a big fat fee

Through a shabby scam he called a university.

Every hulkin’ vulture, every bird of prey,

Every skulkin’ scavenger on Con Bird Way,

The loan shark lark, the pay day jay

Bobbin’ their heads, sayin’ “Dude’s OK.”

Stellar seller, tweet tweet tweet

Sewer dweller, tweet tweedle lee dee

Cheep, scummy scammer,

‘Cause we’re really gonna tweet tonight.

‘Bout the time they figured out that they’d been screwed,

Bunch of angry students went to court and sued.

Shameless sharpy paid ‘em millions by and by--

Better pay ’em off than have ’em testify.

He tweets in his birdhouse, tweets on the links,

Tweetin’ out whatever silly crap he thinks.

Every time he tweets another tweet it shows

How close it is to nothin’ that the birdbrain knows.

Ignoramus, tweet tweet tweet

Foul and famous, tweet tweedle lee dee

Blabber, goony gabber,

‘Cause we’re really gonna tweet tonight.

Nasty little raptor from a foreign land

Showed him how to steal his job and it was grand.

They started goin’ steady and bless my soul,

Out popped a little orange Cossack troll.

He played to the racists all race long,

Spewin’ out hate an’ thrillin’ his throng.

All the turdy birdies down on White Rage Row

Love to hear ol’ Donny tell ’em “I’m your bro.”

Tootin’ rooster, tweet tweet tweet

Bigot booster, tweet tweedle lee dee

Crow, crockadoodle,

‘Cause we’re really gonna tweet tonight.

Pussy grabber wants to keep the rapists out,

Wants a wall to block the immigration route.

Best thing ‘bout his wall is that it’s free, you know,

‘Cause the tab is gettin’ paid in full by Mexico.                                                                                                                   

He struts through the West Wing ’fore the sunrise,

Poppin’ out crap an’ tellin’ big lies.

Doesn’t seem to faze ‘em down on Bird Brain Lane

Just chicken shit an’ feathers up in Donny’s brain.

Huffin’ puffin, tweet tweet tweet

Full o’ stuffin’, tweet tweedle lee dee

Gobble, quirky turkey,

Yeah, we’re really gonna tweet tonight.

Sworn a hundred times he’s gonna build that wall,

Swears that Mexico is payin’, bricks an’ all.

You believe that’s really gonna happen, well,

There’s a certain bridge to Brooklyn that I’d like to sell.

Every little parrot, every little cock,

Every propagander in the Flax News flock,

The fake wrath rook, the crap craw crane,

Insists despite the evidence the cretin’s sane.

Nutty hatcher, tweet tweet tweet

Chicken scratcher, tweet tweedle lee dee

Rave, loony goony,

Yeah, we’re really gonna tweet tonight.

In marriage flighty tighty’s got a cardinal rule,

Always gets a prenup first ’cause he’s no fool.

Makes it less expensive when he gets a yen

To do some pussy grabbin’ with another hen.

He tweets in his Fruities all night long,

Squintin’ an’ squawlin’ an’ gettin’ things wrong.

All the correspondents on the White House beat

Love to hear the Donald goin’ tweet tweet tweet.

Touchy feeler, tweet tweet tweet

Wheeler dealer, tweet tweedle lee dee

Coo, luvvy duvvy,

‘Cause we’re really gonna tweet tonight.

Bible thumpers really seem to love the lout—

Hey, Ten Commandments don’t rule pussy grabbin’ out.

Holy rollers figured they would roll the dice

On a gamy gamin’ monger who’s been married thrice.

He tweets in his throne room left and right.

Verbal diarrhea keeps him up at night.

All the flutternutters in his flack flock clap

Every time he tweets another batch of crap.

Potty poster, tweet tweet tweet

Reamin’ roaster, tweet tweedle lee dee

Honk, loosie goosie,

‘Cause we’re really gonna tweet tonight.

Puffy little tuffy with a trophy wife

Proud of all the rubbish in his white trash life,

Crows about his money and his business smarts,

Boasts of grabbing women by their private parts.

He plays on the golf course all the day long

Puttin’ butt naked, not wearin’ a thong.

Every little penguin in the club house knows

Orange-crested emperor’s got no clothes.

Great pretender, tweet tweet tweet

Sex offender, tweet tweedle lee dee

Chirp, struttin’ perp,

Yeah, we’re really gonna tweet tonight.

Flashy little masher with a coo clucks crew

Hardly ever says a single thing that’s true—

Maybe one exception: that the fix was in

In a vote he sorta won although he did not win.

He lied about Obama, lied about his crowd,

Lies about as often as he talks out loud.

Lied about his taxes, lies about the press,

Lies about as often as he can, I guess.

Phony flyer, tweet tweet tweet

Brazen liar, tweet tweedle lee dee

Sing, trillin’ villain,

Yeah, we’re really gonna tweet tonight.

Pileated pecker and his freak show cast,

Starlings in a parody that just can’t last

Featuring a narcissistic psychopath

Cavorting with his budgies in a bird crap bath.

He fouls our civil spaces with the song he sings,

Whistlin’ up the wind beneath the bigots’ wings,

Bills and coos and cuddles with the selfsame jay

Whose interference helped him on election day.

Donald Clucker, tweet tweet tweet

Dictasucker, tweet tweedle lee dee

Quack, little lackey,

Yeah, we’re really gonna tweet tonight.

You’d almost think the GOP had changed a bit,

Having swapped a figurehead of gold for shit.

Lincoln must be turning in his grave by now,

His ship of state converted to a garbage scow.

He struts through the White House all night long,

Twerkin’ an’ jerkin’ an’ lurchin’ along.

All the little pullets in the West Wing know

Donny can’t help it, gotta blow blow blow.

Tweetin’ cretin, tweet tweet tweet

Tweet excretin’, tweet tweedle lee dee

Blow, wordy birdy,

‘Cause we’re really gonna tweet tonight.

Tweedle lee deedle lee dee, twee dwee

Tweedle lee deedle lee dee, twee dwee

Tweedle lee deedle lee dee, twee dwee

Tweet tweet tweet twee

Two encounters with hawks

Sunday as I was riding my bicycle down Highway 1 to San Luis Obispo, a hawk or a turkey vulture drifting on an air current just off to my right cast a shadow that wobbled at an angle across the shoulder right into my path. I rode right through it, and for a fraction of a second—about the time it would take light, traveling about 67 million times faster than I was pedaling, to circle the earth twice, if light traveled in a circle—that bird was the only thing between me and the sun.

Then this morning, or it might have been yesterday, I was sitting here at my sister’s desk, which affords a lovely view through a picture window of Morro Bay and the sand spit that frames it and the ocean beyond, when a hawk came swooping in under the eaves of the garage on my left about five feet off the ground, made a hard left turn around the birdbath about ten feet from the house and flew off. It came in so low and went by so fast, I couldn’t tell but thought maybe it snatched up a mouse just before it made that turn. If it did, it was the smoothest, quickest act of predation I’ve ever either witnessed or wondered whether I had. If you blinked, you missed it entirely, if in fact it happened at all. I thought I saw a rodent’s tail and various other extremities dangling from the hawk’s beak as it flew off, but I couldn’t tell for sure. I might have imagined the mouse, but the hawk was real, a blur of fluttering red and brown feathers, pumping muscles and grace. It made that hard turn look easy, and as it came out of it, it flapped its wings and for a second, through the double-paned window, you could hear them drubbing the air. Then it flew up and off, back toward the left, toward Los Osos, with a smaller bird in characteristic pursuit. Maybe it found a perch somewhere and enjoyed a leisurely snack, or congregated with its friends and gave them a good laugh describing the gawking human in the house it buzzed.

Anthony Wiener's weird role in history

What’s lost amid all the hoopla over Donald Trump’s firing of James Comey is what sparked the FBI’s decision last October about a week and a half before the election to reopen its investigation of Hillary Clinton’s e-mails—a decision for which Trump effusively praised Comey at the time and which now factors prominently in the tortured case the administration is making for his firing. That investigation, and Comey’s remarks about it, had already done serious damage to Clinton’s candidacy, as plenty of her supporters observed bitterly at the time. It was reopened, at about the worst possible time for Clinton, too late for her to recover from it, in response to the discovery on a laptop used by former Rep. Anthony Wiener (D—NY) of State Department e-mails his wife, Clinton aide Huma Abedin, had forwarded to him, reportedly so he could copy them and deliver them to Clinton. And why was law enforcement looking at Wiener’s laptop? That was because he was suspected of “sexting” lewd pictures of parts he should have kept more private to a teenage girl.

This was not Wiener’s first brush with notoriety on that sort of account. He resigned his House seat in 2011 after revelations of just such behavior involving multiple young women—a story with which New York’s tabloid headline writers had a protracted field day. More than five years later, it seems, he was back at it in what may rank as history’s most consequential bit of recidivist sexual perversion.

Historians will have plenty to say about the Trump presidency. Every day it seems to break new ground. We’ve never had a comic opera carnival barker buffoon as president before. With any luck we’ll survive this one and never have another. The damage we’ve inflicted on ourselves and on our standing in the world may be contained. We may look back on the Trump administration and miss its farcical comic side. Certainly no administration has ever supplied better grist for comedians’ mills. But there’s nothing funny about Trump’s ambitions. To the extent he achieves them, the damage to our environment and our place as the world’s foremost champion of Western democratic values could be irreversible. Momentous historical developments are generally attributed to correspondingly momentous forces, and there clearly were such things at work in Trump’s election victory. But there’s a good case to be made that the pivot point on which the election swung was a dark corner of a disgraced former congressman’s brain.

Sweet surrender in Soledad

The other day about 2 p.m. while driving and drowsy northbound on Highway 101, I pulled off at Soledad, parked facing another car at a modest-sized shopping center, turned the engine off, put the key in my pocket, cracked the windows, cranked the seat back and went to sleep. One minute I was hurtling along at 60 or 70 mph, struggling to stay awake and in grave danger of killing myself and taking a bunch of other people with me, and the next I was carefree and happy and stock still. We think of going  to sleep as falling or sinking, but in the brief bit of consciousness I retained while undergoing that transition, it felt more like taking flight, as though my thoughts were a flock of birds, each free to wheel and soar wherever it pleased at absolutely no risk to me or anyone else. It was the opposite of risk. Having first taken the sensible precaution of stopping, I knew that by surrendering to my fatigue and letting go entirely, I was protecting myself. The contrast between the misery of driving and the relief of suddenly not driving was so sharp, it gave me a conscious sense of buoyancy even as I lost consciousness. We identify mobility with freedom, and being stationary with confinement, but on that freeway I was in a sort of prison, and in that parking lot, in park with the hand brake on and the motor off and my eyes closed, I was free. 

Image courtesy Google & WallpaperUP

The word smiths in the White House

It used to be, in the good old days, which were neither old at the time nor entirely good, that political phraseology had some staying power. The 1960s gave us some expressions great only in that they contained the word, such as the Great Society and the Great Silent Majority; some decidedly ungreat ones such as Vietnamization and Burn, baby, burn; and some completely ridiculous ones courtesy of Spiro Agnew, including radiclibs and nattering nabobs of negativism; and most of them, even some of Agnew’s, stuck around long enough to gain some popular traction. You could use them in casual conversation and people would know what you were talking about.

          The George W. Bush era brought us a fresh batch of concepts du jour, including compassionate conservative, boots on the ground, and the American Dialectic Society’s 2002 so-called Word (singular) of the Year, weapons of mass destruction. Boots on the ground fell out of common parlance not long after the expiration of the six-month time limit the Bush administration initially set on their remaining on the ground in Iraq, and weapons of mass destruction fell out of favor too, discredited as the most egregious of the false pretenses under which we invaded Iraq. You don’t hear compassionate conservative used much anymore either. Compassion seems to have fallen out of favor among conservatives, or at least among a sizable percentage of people who purport to be conservative. Cruelty, or at best indifference to suffering, seems more the order of the day in the Republican Party under Donald Trump.

But if you can fault Trump and his supporters for lactating too little the milk of human kindness, you cannot accuse them of fostering too little catch-phrase formation. Trump and his manic freak show of a presidency are generating new phrases or highlighting previously seldom-seen older ones at a stunning clip. Before he ever ran for president, he inspired The Donald. His campaign introduced us to Lyin’ Ted, Crooked Hillary, the wall, fake news, extreme vetting and tweet storm; grabbed our attention with Grab ’em by the pussy and focused it on the white working class (a group including, or more or less corresponding to, people previously more often designated as rural whites, evangelicals, the Great Silent Majority, hardhats or Reagan Democrats); and marshaled a bunch of robust imperatives, some new, some retreads from bygone contests, including Make America Great Again, Build the Wall, Lock ’er up! and Drain the Swamp, this last an old expression but with a new hashtag short form of DTS. His election instantly brought forth Not my president; and somewhere along the line we’ve gotten alt-right and, more predictably, Trumpian, Trumpist and the Party of Trump.

This has all been verbally fecund enough. But since Trump took office, the terms and outlandish remarks have been popping up and going viral so fast, to quote Trump himself, “your head will spin.” Or perhaps yours has already begun to. In just its first three months his presidency has given us alternative facts, the lying media, its German counterpart, Lügenpresse, and its analog, the press as the opposition party; the deconstruction of the administrative state; the de-operationalizing of the National Security Council; Tweeter in Chief, incidental intelligence, unmasking and deep state; highlighted NAFTA, the emolument clause, filibuster, judicial review, the Congressional Review Act and sanctuary and resurrected the nuclear option, all amid a swirl of collusion, recusal, preposterous allegations, Russian links, early-morning tweet storms, war crimes, terror attacks, congressional probes, sex scandals, a missile strike, gratuitous antagonizing of allies, comically adversarial press conferences, West Wing power struggles and Kellyanne Conway hawking Ivanka Trump’s clothing line on Fox & friends.

How long the verbiage tossed up amid all this mayhem sticks around will no doubt vary from phrase to phrase, but the sheer volume of political terms being coined, recoined, highlighted or inspired by Donald Trump probably dooms many of them to brief currency. Some of them seem to have faded already. The so-called deep state may pop back up from the depths, but it seems already, after a week or so of notoriety, to have sunk back into the conspiratorial ooze from which it emerged a month or so ago.

Those of us still around ten or twenty years from now may still remember some or all of the many novel terms and concepts and stunning quotes the Trump presidency will have generated by the time it runs its course, but how many of them will seem as quaint then, and suffer as much neglect, as radiclib or, say, from a slightly later era, the Moral Majority, does now?

In any case, Donald Trump’s astounding flaws and limited vocabulary notwithstanding, in sheer volume he and his entourage figure to enrich, or at least enlarge, our political lexicon more than any previous administration. Their political circus features an etymological sideshow as creative as the action under the Big Top is destructive. They’re both fascinating. If we’re lucky, we’ll emerge, feeling grimy and vulgar but alive, from the collapsing Big Top one day and look back on it, lying limp and deflated amid a bed of verbal debris, and wonder, “Did any of that make sense?”

In honor of baseball...

...some doggerel I wrote while driving a taxi cab in San Francisco twenty-plus years ago. Or actually, while sitting in my cab between fares:

The Answer

Is it better to dress up in feathers,

Photo courtesy Wikipedia

Or to clam oneself up in a shell?

Or to play the showboat in a fancy fur coat?

How is a creature to tell?

Might one to do better to dress all in wool?

Could millions of sheep all be wrong?

Or maybe in frills and porcupine quills.

Maybe they’ve had it right all along.

Perhaps we should take our sartorial clues

From the fish in the sea who wear scales,

Or the penguins, perhaps, who take showers and naps

And go swimming in black tie and tails.

Photo courtesy Wikipedia

Or perhaps one should carry a shell on one’s back,

But if so, what sort of a shell—

The curlicue kind or a tough turtle rind?

How is a creature to tell?

Maybe the practical tactical tack,

The safe and sensible course to pursue,

Is to dress head to tail in a coat all of mail

As the armadillos do.

Image courtesy Clipart

But I shudder to think of the weight of such clothes.

What a terrible burden to bear!

Better flee if need be, or cry “Please spare me,”

And find something lighter to wear.

Photo courtesy Wikipedia

Now snakes have a curious custom in dress,

One I blush just a bit to disclose:

Attire of which they have tired they ditch,

And crawl about in their underclothes!

Well, it’s all very well for a snake in the grass

To slither about in its drawers,

But what other beast from a yak to a yeast

Would be caught dead in its shorts out of doors?

Photo courtesy the Baltimore Orioles

What we need is a beast of impeccable taste

To follow in matters sartorial.

Hmmm, let’s see…a flounder? A flea?

Wait! I’ve got it! The glorious Baltimore Oriole!

O, what a hit that foul makes as he takes

With his mates to the field to play ball,

In his cleats and his glove, with his cap on above,

The dashingest player of all!

O, what a figure he cuts as he trots

Round the bases and prances toward home!

The sultan of style! Beyond all denial,

League leader in looks and aplomb!

And O, the proud picture he makes as he doffs

His cap to the boisterous throng!

How splendid his plumage, his posture and groomage!

How loud the applause and how long!

Photo courtesy National Geographic

Three cheers for that Chesapeake champion!

God bless that brave Baltimore bird!

O say can’t you see not to dress to a T

Just as he does would just be absurd?

That’s it, then—that bird is the answer.

There’s no finer model to find.

It’s just indisputable: his uniform’s suitable

For any and all creaturekind.

So hear me, I call on all creatures,

In the sea, on the land, in the sky:

Toss off your old trappings, your weary old wrappings—

A new day in fashion is nigh!

Go hire a tailor or sew it yourself.

Beg, borrow or steal or make payment.

Do what you must, just get yourself trussed

Up in Baltimore Orioles raiment.

Image courtesy Wikipedia

Then see as you step in your cleats from the door

What a spring has sprung up in your stride,

What esteem you receive, what awe you perceive

In the youngsters who flock to your side.

Just see as you stride through the door where you work

What respect you collect from your peers,

How tender the smile your boss smiles while

You acknowledge your coworkers’ cheers.

And see as you come back full circle to home

What a hero you are in your house,

How warmly you’re greeted, hugged, high-fived and feted

By your kids and your dog and your spouse.

And after all that if you’re still doubtful whether

In Orioles leggings to dwell,

Just dwell on the riches you’ve reaped in those britches—

That’s how a creature can tell.

(c)

Photo courtesy the Baltimore Orioles