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Trumped up

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So now it appears that Mr. Hyde is hidden, and Dr. Jekyll has come out.  It’s hard to know what to make of that.  Trump has completely reversed his opinion of both Hillary Clinton and Barak Obama, both of whom he’s warmly complimented in the last two days.  It is, of course, completely opposite what he has said about them during the campaign, but contradictions have not exactly been unusual for him.  In a way, it’s reminiscent of his meeting with  Enrique Peña Nieto, the president of Mexico, during which he was all smiles and conciliation; he seemed cowed by the presence of a head of state.  That didn’t last 24 hours; by that evening, back across the border, he was his old obstreperous self again, apparently to the extent of lying about what was discussed during the meeting.

Many people who supported Trump, and presumably voted for him, are holding out an olive branch, saying that what Trump said during the campaign was just rhetoric, and he’ll calm down now that he’s been elected.  I can’t help feeling that if we don’t fall in line, we will feel the sting of that olive branch, converted into a whip.

I caught the tail end of an interview on the radio with a CEO who supported Trump.  Her take was that, yes, Trump is a jerk, but he has a talent for hiring competent people to actually run his businesses, so his personality is irrelevant.  I’m not sure reducing his unprecedented gall to merely annoying is justifiable, but there is a ray of hope, albeit small and not very satisfying.  If Trump appoints normal Republicans to his administration, and goes off to play golf, his administration will only be a normal Republican disaster, that is, slightly mitigated rather than unmitigated.

The big question for the rest of us is, what next?  The Democratic Party is in disarray at the moment.  I doubt that will last, but we’re between the proverbial rock and a hard place.  Does the party move to the right, to try to accommodate moderate Republicans, or does it move left, and offer its own brand of populism?

I doubt very much that ideology played any part in the election of Donald J. Trump.  We brought, as they say, a knife to a gun fight, and now we’re licking our wounds and arguing about what kind of knife to bring to the next one.

There are almost as many reasons given for his victory as there are pundits, desperately trying to salvage their reputations, after failing miserably to predict almost everything about the election.  There is, however, one factor which I find the most disturbing.  NPR reported on All Things Considered yesterday on a new app-centric polling company called Brigade, which found in results from election day that as much as 40% of registered Democrats crossed over to vote for Trump.

In a campaign full of ingenious imagery, the one that sticks with me is that people just wanted someone who would tip over the table, reset the process to point zero.

We can only hope that Trump is a one-off, and when people see his policies in action, they will be disabused of their illusions, and we can pick it up from there.  Right now, I see neither hope nor despair, just a long wait.

Diverging paths: an allegory

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Say you’re walking down a dangerous path in a forest, overgrown with thorny vines, progress is difficult.  You’re increasingly fed up with hacking at the vines to eke out a few steps at a time.  Someone has told you this is the path that leads out of the forest, but you’re no longer convinced it’s true.

Suddenly, the path in front is suffused with light, and there’s an easier looking path splitting off to the left.  The first light you’ve seen in days of wandering, so tempting, but on examination, you see that it just leads to a small clearing a few feet away, surrounded by the same thorny vines on the path you’re on.  A nice enough place to rest, but it won’t help you out of the forest.  Still, you’re utterly exhausted, tired of slogging away, unsure you’re any closer to being out of the forest than when you started. Could you be going in circles? You think, I could just live in that clearing, give up trying to find a way out altogether.

Then you notice that all of the light doesn’t come from that side; on the right is another, narrower path leading away.  It is small, but straight, so you follow it for a few steps, until you see that it leads straight over a precipice to jagged rocks below.  It’s a long way down, you think, but a person might just survive the fall, and it’s definitely out of the forest.

Shuddering, you return to the path you started on, with considerable dismay.  It hasn’t gotten any less thorny, has it.

What to do?

Tradition under fire?

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White Christian males in America have forever been the gold standard of uprightness. They have assumed that their beliefs, traditions and moral compasses have defined the values of the nation. They have seen themselves as the epitome of all that is right and good in America, or indeed, the world, and the measure of all that is evil has been the extent of deviation from their cherished beliefs.  They have seen themselves as righteous enforcers of these principles, guardians of beauty and goodness, arbiters of social place, gatekeepers of heaven.

Never mind that these values have changed substantially since the foundation of the country. Never mind that they once included the right to enslave any human being of a culture they deemed inferior and a set of superficial features they found lacking. Never mind that they included, in my own lifetime, the right to execute summary injustice upon those same formerly enslaved people for having the audacity to behave as if they were equal. Never mind that, even today, a whole set of dubious “rights” is invoked in the repression of those people.

Never mind that, despite a constitution which claims all are equal, these ideals include the right to exclude anyone who differs from the prestige demographic from those very rights.

Of course they’re furious. Of course they’re frightened, convinced their cultural and moral hegemony is being mortally threatened.

They’re right; it is, and good riddance.

A letter to the peeps

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Dear people,

You despise the idea of always having to choose between the lesser of two evils, so you don’t vote.  You either lash out at anyone who criticizes anything you say or do, or you stick your fingers in your ears and go about your business.  Your go-to response to disagreement is insult.  You cut off “negative” people and cultivate “positive” ones.   You get mad and get even.

Maybe your parents told you you could be anything you wanted, you could have anything you were willing to work for, that there were no limits. That if you were true to your ideals, things would always work out the way you wanted, and so you should never compromise, for that was weakness. That if you wanted something badly enough, you would get it. The Law of Attraction.

They lied.

Not only that, but you should have seen through it instantly, even as young as you were. All it takes is the realization that there will always be someone else whose parents also lied to them, who wants the opposite of what you want. You should confront your parents with this; they need to be held responsible for raising children to be the adults we now have to deal with in politics.

As always,
Your Uncle Mike

PS: If you’re old and still feel this way, shame on you. You should have learned something by now.

Thanks, but no thanks

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Another Veterans Day looms, or, judging by my local paper, Veteran’s Week. It won’t be long before we start decorating our front yards with little plastic tanks. People are falling all over themselves thanking anyone they see in uniform for their service. I’m sure by the end of the week, many a doorman will have been thanked by mistake. Although in the case of doormen, the gratitude is probably warmly appreciated.

Every once in a while, someone finds out I served in the military, and thanks me profusely. You might think it’s strange, but I find this irritating. In the first place, I was in the Air Force. As the always insightful (not to say inciteful)  Jim Wright has noted, the Air Force is known for the finest battle-tested high tech espresso machines in any of the armed forces worldwide. In the second place, although I was in during the Vietnam war, I was never sent there; I served in Okinawa and Frankfurt, Germany, not exactly hazardous duty, unless you consider the night life out the back gate. The most heroic thing I ever did was show up at morning Commander’s Call with a hellacious hangover. In one particular case, this was, in fact, cured, when the CO decided we all needed to know what hashish smelled like, the better to turn each other in. The First Sergeant stuck about gram of it on the end of a pin, lit it, and passed it around for us to sniff.

It never made it past the second row, and when questioned, no one seemed to know where it had gone. Those of us in the first two rows especially.

Of course, it wasn’t all fun and games. As a member of Prime Beef, an elite group of engineers, I participated in several NATO exercises; in particular, I recall one near Thessaloniki, Greece. We arrived and within a few hours had dug our latrines and set up our tents and command post, along with the simulated combat airstrip that was our mission.  Since no actual aircraft were going to land on it, we were essentially done until the exercise was over. Under the circumstances, my commander entrusted me with the most important job that remained unfinished: taking a new 5 gallon jerry can into town, and getting it filled with cheap wine.

This was the late 60s, of course, and I’m sure things are more professional now, but I’m willing to bet these stories would not look all that unfamiliar to today’s troops..

My point here is that this is a far more typical military service experience than the Sgt. Rock stuff people imagine. The usually quoted ratio for support personnel to actual fighters is 9:1. That means 90% of us veterans did no significant fighting; for those stationed in combat zones the ratio probably goes down to about 6 or 7:1, but there are no hard figures to base this on. To be sure, things have changed, and the line between combat and support troops has gotten fuzzier, but not as much as you would think. Those truck drivers you hear about are certainly in harm’s way, but keep in mind that attacking supply lines has been a key military tactic at least since Alexander the Great.

The biggest difference, and a significant one, is the way troops are deployed. Up until Vietnam, troops were in-country for the duration of hostilities. In Vietnam, it was 11-13 months and out; you pretty much had to volunteer to go back a second time. What makes things difficult nowadays is the recurring deployments, arguably more stressful than even the long duration single deployments in the world wars, especially with the increased use of reservists. That recurring shift of perspective is, in some ways, worse than continuous deployments of the past. Still, even in places like Afghanistan, most of that is non-combat, although the constant threat of IEDs, suicide bombings and the like certainly takes a toll.

So, why am I being such a curmudgeon about this? Don’t I think some thanks are deserved here? Well, yes and no.

Apart from the disquieting realization that most of those doing the thanking haven’t the slightest idea what they’re thanking us for, and the suspicion that they’re just happy they didn’t have to do anything for the society they live in, there are other very good reasons.

It’s undeniable that some percentage of veterans have, indeed, endured harrowing experiences. Some of them will suffer from the effects for the rest of their lives. But most will get over it rather quickly, and settle into the routines of civilian life with no visible effects. Some, in fact, will have behaved disgracefully, and deserve nothing. A very, very small percentage will have been genuine heroes, not for ideological, or even patriotic, reasons, but for the personal sacrifices they made in circumstances all but incomprehensible to the rest of us, and I include the majority of veterans.

It’s for this tiny group that I object to the indiscriminate expression of gratitude to everyone who has had any military service. And I guarantee that you will never hear any of these people trumpeting their military experience, or even talking about it.  There’s a meme that makes the rounds of social media every now and then, which states something to the effect that anyone who has served in the military has voluntarily offered up his or her life for the good of the country. I seldom use the word bullshit, but it seems particularly appropriate here.