Response to Extraordinary Loyalty to a Malicious Man

(See: Just Above Sunset: Extraordinary Loyalty to a Malicious Man)

Really, why does Donald Trump act like such a jerk?

He apparently does it on purpose. There's actually a whole philosophy about this, that the bigger an asshole you are, the more successful you’ll be, and Trump has openly hinted at believing in it. He may be the first card-carrying proponent of “assholeism" to ever be elected president of the United States, but he’s not the first human being ever to think that pissing people off is the most effective way to make them do what you want.

For example, maybe Mexico would, without any prompting at all from anybody, work a little harder at keeping refugees from coming to the United States, but why not threaten them with a possible border closure, just to make sure? Just think of the quote, “You can get much farther with a kind word and a gun than you can with a kind word alone”, which either originated with Al Capone or possibly Professor Irwin Corey, nobody knows for sure.

But an even better question is, why do all these Republicans, with all their piety and talk of morality, allow Trump to get away with being such a jerk?

I think the answer is, mostly, they’re afraid of the dark. And when I say “the dark”, I mean they’re afraid of the unknown. Trump may be a big arrogant brat — very sure of himself, although near-totally clueless — but these Republicans, although equally clueless, are all stumbling around, while somewhere in the dark, they seem to have lost possession of their moral compasses.

Although they may have learned as kids, maybe in Sunday school or even from Hollywood movies, that "you should always do the right thing”, once they grew up and found that doing the right thing was rarely a winning strategy, they learned to improvise — which, often as not, meant not being a goddam “goody-goody”. Nobody likes good people. Nobody wants to admit it, but good people are weak, and nobody is afraid of them, because they’re too nice. As famous tough guy Niccolo Machiavelli once said, "It is better to be feared than loved, if you cannot be both.” And you can’t.

When it comes to political discourse, I think of it as having two levels:

The best known of these is what some call “the horserace”, but what I prefer to call “the game”, since the object of the game is to win, and when it comes to elections, everybody seems to think that winning is all that matters.

That’s one of the reasons you pretty much only hear “the game” being discussed on TV, rather than serious seminars on history or civics, or even science. After all, it’s safer to form an opinion about who will win an election, and what it takes to do it, than to opine about, say, whether we should raise the minimum wage, based on whether it would be good for the economy or not.

Which brings us to that other level, which is, “The way things ought to be”. (I need to find a pithy one- or two-word description for this level, but for the time being, this is all I got.)

And the most important thing to remember is something sort of surprising, and this is that the second level — “the way things should be” — is the top level, and "the game" discussion belongs below it.

An example?

What would happen if, say, in an NFL game, one player took out a gun and just shot to death the opposing quarterback?

First of all, is there anything in the NFL rulebook that says he can’t do that? Maybe “unnecessary roughness”? I’ve seen the rules on this ("Penalty: For unnecessary roughness: Loss of 15 yards. The player may be disqualified if the action is judged by the official(s) to be flagrant”), and take my word for it, there’s nothing there about not being allowed to shoot another player to death.

But, of course, it doesn’t really matter. The refs don’t need to get in a huddle to discuss what to do about this, since the cops will eventually come in and arrest the guy. And this is as it should be. You can't get away with saying that all that matters is the game, and that “the way things ought to be” doesn’t figure into it at all.

So if you believe in morality, or maybe even in some God that determines right from wrong and how humans should behave, then doesn’t that take priority over the rules of some stupid game?

We need to give conservatives something to think about. But still, what if they still don’t come around and help us do something about America’s only (to date) asshole president?

Well, then screw it! In that case, we just crush ‘em!

Response to A Constitutional Reality Show

(See: Just Above Sunset: A Constitutional Reality Show)

I think the secret password that Chief Justice John Roberts is asking the administration to figure out before he’ll let them include the citizenship question on the census form is, “Open, Sesame!!!”

But to make sure it works, they’ll need to say it really, REALLY LOUD!!!

(Or was it “ Rumplestiltskin”? I forget.)

My problem with this SCOTUS decision is that Roberts has turned a court case into some sort of children’s fairy tale.

Instead of giving the White House another chance at coming up with a more believable rationale, he should just be saying “No!”, followed by, “You have failed to explain why this thing should be done — and by the way, there is at least one obvious reason it should not be done. End of story. Go away.”

Their argument needed, from the get-go, to include both (a) an explanation of the problem that they seek to solve, and (b) an explanation of their proposed solution to the problem.

Furthermore, these two things need to be presented concurrently! — not making the solution independent of some non-existent, random, last-minute, thunk-up-out-of-thin-air problem — or maybe some possible unconnected explanation that some parallel White House might have accidentally concocted in an alternative universe. The Chief Justice shouldn’t be hinting that he might be open to changing his mind, depending on whether Trump's team can come back in a few days after having captured some wicked witch’s broom.

Another meme for what Roberts is doing — as if one is needed — might be that of the headmaster of the local university, in a quiet room, reluctantly retesting the star football player on his botany final, hoping, along with the whole student body, that this clueless thug, who happens to have bean-dip where his brains ought to be, can finally pass the course, thus allowing him to play in, and indeed win, the state championship game this coming Saturday, and by so doing, also saving the institution from the wrecking ball.

As engaging as all of this is, I’m tired of living in a drawn out Hollywood fantasy. Can’t we just go back to the boring old days of not having to pay so much attention to all this crap?

Response to The Enterprises of Ambition

(See Just Above Sunset: The Enterprises of Ambition)

I guess most people, including Donald Trump, never wondered why there has been so little previous celebration of American military might in our observances of July 4th, 1776, a day when leaders of the American colonies (most, if not all of them unarmed!) finally met in a room somewhere to jointly declare those colonies no longer colonies of Britain.

Except for sometimes having a few old war veterans march down Main Street of our hometown, this holiday has traditionally skipped over all the military stuff and correctly focused on the independence stuff. In fact, Washington’s army probably had less to do with winning independence than our militia, who, unlike the regular army, rarely seemed to lose their battles.

Although I doubt that’s why we don’t do all the tanks and flyover stuff on the 4th. It may have more to do with such hardware display reminding people of such dog-and-pony shows as Moscow’s Red Square on May Day, with its huge ICBMs on wheels and giant portraits of the current top mucky-muck of the party, the kind of foolishness that most of us tend to giggle at when we see it on the news, but with which Trump is apparently infatuated — which is sort of ironic because of that whole bone-spurs thing.

But if Trump says one goddam thing in his speech that’s partisan, we need to send a bill for the whole shebang to the RNC. I always wonder, come to think of it, if we are charging him for his use of Air Force One, et al, every time he flies off to a rally in some gymnasium where he mocks everyone who disagrees with him, which he seems to do often. We should.

And maybe for next year's Independence Day, America could collect dimes and pennies to rent a secret venue somewhere to celebrate the 4th the old fashioned way — with music and fireworks, but no Sherman tanks and no military flyovers — and best of all, we don't invite Donald Trump.