Under His Thumb

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In a presidential race between unpopular Hillary Clinton and unpopular Donald Trump it always struck me as bizarre that Trump chose to appear to the strains of The Rolling Stones’ “You Can’t Always Get What You Want.”

No kidding! But it’s now prophetically true that we haven’t got what we want, nor what we need, and it’s no joke. However, help may be on the way. We are told Trump has decided he now understands the job of president. In the tradition of “Prometheus Unbound” and “Hercules Unchained,” we are now going to have “Trump Unleashed.” Or perhaps, off the leash.

He is no longer going to be held back by traditions, norms, law or order, restrained by the so-called adults in the room. He’s going to get the cabinet he always wanted. Apparently in his mind, establishment types like Reince Priebus saddled him with all those people he’s had to fire. So, he’s going to get rid of uptight generals, CEOS, Goldman alumni and go with Trumpian outsiders.

He declared his independence by eliminating Rex Tillerson in a typically cruel and craven way, at long distance via tweet. He also engineered the firing of Andrew McCabe at FBI, hours before he would qualify for his pension, and before an IG report faulting him for dealings with the press was released or an appeal of its conclusions could be offered.

McCabe may have erred, but the barrage of tweets from the president prejudiced the case and appears vindictive, for McCabe’s refuseal to pledge personal allegiance to Trump. In Trump’s mind this made him part of an imaginary Comey cabal, out to stage a coup. Ruining McCabe may have been fun, but it may also add another count in a Mueller indictment for obstruction or evidence of the cover-up of the collusion Trump denies.

As usual the new blood Trump brings in will either be people he hopes will provide the loyalty it seems so hard to find, or the same old blood that has already passed the test. Mike Pompeo his CIA director will now become the Secretary of State, Senate permitting. Trump likes Pompeo because he does a daily briefing that requires no reading and lots of pictures.

Of course, Pompeo is also a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Koch cabal. They invested in his defense business, bought him his seat as their hometown congressman, and he now serves as one of their administration moles. Trump is replacing mainstream Republican appointees with Koch people and Murdock people.

Since Trump gets all his information from Fox News and Breitbart, it’s hardy surprising that he would rely on them for personnel. Kellyanne Conway and Steve Bannon were creatures of the Mercer family whose money and ideology are embodied by Breitbart.

As to Fox friends, Scaramucci came from there. Peter Hegseth of Fox Weekend is rumored to be the next Secretary of Veterans Affairs. Foreign policy super-hawk John Bolton, also from their stable, has now been tapped to head the NSC in place of a three-star general who advised against scrapping the Iran deal. Bolton prefers war-war to jaw- jaw. Heather Nauert, a Fox cohost, has been promoted from a departmental spokesperson to an Undersecretary of State. You get the drift.

Trump is also demonstrating his freedom by erratic and self-defeating moves. He decided to impose tariffs on steel and aluminum against the advice of Gary Cohn, head of his Economic Council, who promptly resigned. He’s going to be replaced by Larry Kudlow who also happens to be a free trade advocate but has preached the supply side gospel on TV, which is a credential that carries weight with Trump. TV, that is.

Trump has also ignored warnings from many advisors and lawyers to stop tweeting about the Mueller investigation or pursuing the lawsuits involving sex with a porn star and a playboy bunny and one by a woman he slandered after molesting her.

Instead, he has followed his own advice, and that of his mentor the late Roy Cohn, to attack anyone who attacks you, no matter how counterproductive. Thus, his assaults on Mueller have caused even people in his own party to begin using the I word, impeachment, and his draconian attempts to enforce his non-disclose agreements suggest all the things he has denied are true.

One of his many lawyers, John Dowd, quit since his client won’t follow his advice. Only one? Not to worry, though. Trump has found a new one in the usual place, on Fox News. It’s Joseph diGenova, one of the originators of the right wings’s counter-conspiracy theory.

According to diGenova, Russia didn’t help tilt the election to Trump with the help of Facebook, Cambridge Analytica, Mercer money, Bannon, Manafort, Stone, Kusher, Parscale, Papadopoulos, et al. Oh no. Instead, “there was a brazen plot to illegally exonerate Hillary Clinton and, if she didn’t win the election, to then frame Donald Trump with a falsely created crime.” Who was behind this treason? “A group of F.B.I. and D.O.J. people.”

Trump’s ire warms itself at such theories, but it seems to originate in his feelings of persecution and inferiority. He looks around the word and all the leaders he envies and admires — Putin, Duterte, Erdogan — get to have their own way. They aren’t being investigated by a Special Counsel, told to behave by appointees and attorneys, thwarted by Congress, criticized by the press, defied by women. And if they are, heads roll, critics disappear, women comply, troublemakers somehow encounter a dose of nerve agent.

Trump not only can’t always get what he wants, he almost never gets what he wants. He thought when he became president the Stones’ song that would be this anthem would be “Under My Thumb.” Instead of having any girl he wanted doing his bidding, the whole country, the whole world would do as they were told. Instead, people expect him to negotiate and compromise. In short, he can’t get no satisfaction. It’s very disappointing.

This Is Osseous

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At the knee of her writer mother, Nora Ephron was taught the secret of the writer’s life: Everything is copy. She learned this sufficiently well to get a best-selling book and Meryl Streep movie out of a humiliatingly unfaithful husband.

On this principle, though on a far more trivial scale, instead of mining the rich lode of venality, sedition, and egomania that characterizes the democracy-threatening events of the day, I am here to turn my last unforgettable week into copy.

Seven days ago, after a minor league freeze, my wife strolled around the corner in the early morning hours to do fifteen minutes of exercise, slipped on a patch of black ice, and broke her right kneecap into several shards. Two men working on the adjacent house helped her to her feet —or foot — and assured her (incorrectly) that everything would be fine.

She foolishly took them at their world and tried to tough it out for a day, using a cane to attend a funeral no less, then graduated to a walker and ice packs. By the next day her knee was swollen to the size of a black-and-blue cantaloupe, and I put my flat feel down. Off to the orthopedist we went after the kind of pathetic wheedling needed to get a rapid appointment in our health care system, so much better than Canada, France or Britain.

Once there, we got to see a PA rather than a man wth a medical degree and soon the X-rays told the tale. With luck, eight weeks with the leg immobilized in a mummifying black rubber cocoon with a steel spine up the hamstring will permit the piece to knit back together. Without luck, surgery.

This was surprising because men who earn their daily bread with sharp knives are rarely known to pass up a chance to profitably use them. But the reprieve may be provisional. This week we will be off to another venue for a CT scan, and then the following day back to Ortholand where the bone whisperers may get a second chance to prescribe the knives.

I am worried because there may be a localized epidemic of this sort of thing in the neighborhood. Sometime ago, our friend across the way was walking her dog, went down, and had to keep her foot immobilized for sometime. My daughter, around Christmas, came out of a store talking on her phone, performed the same trick, and wound up in a Frankenstein boot for weeks.

And shortly after our mishap, a second neighbor came to the door to offer sympathy.
Her arm was in a sling from a break in her humerus, which is clearly no joke. Get it? She slipped on a floor she had made so clean as to be slick as ice. All of which provides plenty of useful healthy living lessons. Avoid dogs and the walking thereof. Never exercise or shop. And clean only sparingly.

Meanwhile, the victim spends her days on a walker and psychotropic drugs shuttling between bed and couch. Her daughter has taken a week of family caregiver leave from her job, a nice benefit rarely offered in my day. She and I are cooking up large pots of freezable Mexican, Cajun, and all-American stew-like substances to get us through the next week or two. Then friends of the invalid arrived with even more provender.

The victim has become the Dowager Duchess of Downton. The caregivers are strictly members of the below stairs staff, assigned to the scullery work, buttling, and chauffeur duty. Get me a glass of water. Yes, milady.

At first I feared the two girls might use their downtime for yet another viewing of the six-hour Colin Firth version of “Pride and Prejudice,” but instead the patient decided now was the time to find out what all the buzz was about concerning “This Is Us.” My counter-argument, in favor of something a bit grittier such as “Marseilles” or “Tin Star,” was voted down by an overwhelming 2 to 1 margin. Direct democracy is a bitch, and in this case I believe there’s some sort of gender bias going on. But mine is not to reason why, mine is but to watch and cry.

So I have spent the last three days in the presence of two women in full binge mode. Thus far, we have plowed through the complete first season’s eighteen weepy episodes. And another eighteen loom in my near future. Since “This Is Us” is the work of many of the same people involved in “Thirtysomething” and “Brothers and Sisters,” I realize I have suffered through a cumulative eleven seasons and 213 episodes of family travail.

If I were going to be lying on the sofa for eight weeks in an immobilized state, this might not be the way I would chose to cheer myself up. But, in this time of red and blue division and polarization, maybe it’s encouraging that we can all care about the struggles and triumphs of the flawed, uplifting, annoying, but endearing Pearson family.

Even with its substance abusers, blue collar strivers, upscale compulsives, black and white brothers, overweight sister, dying biological father, it is a far better crowd to spend binge time with than the competing TV spectacle of the Potus family. It is the difference between heart and bile. So, crank up Season Two, and let the sobbing begin.

Maybe What’s Bad Gets Gone

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Merle Miller said there are two kinds of people, those who stay home and those who leave. I might add a corollary that there are two kinds of those who leave, the ones running away from something and the ones running to something.

But no matter whether you stay or go, run to escape or run to discover, it’s questionable whether you can ever leave your home behind. Mark Twain in India, full of years and fame, said, “ All the me in me is in a little Missouri village halfway around the world.”

Jane Smiley, in a recent piece in “Smithsonian” about Grant Wood’s Iowa, says, “What we see in our first decade makes strong impressions that influence us for the rest of our lives…everything we once knew remains in our memory — the tiny yard that looked huge, the seven-step staircase to the front porch that seemed impossible to climb. There is an eternal fascination with those locations that we knew before we gained perspective.”

I have lived more that half my life far away from where I began, but still feel like a stranger in a strange land. And it is not just different folkways, accents, enthusiasms, but something more visceral or sensual. The shape of the land itself, the trees that are not the trees that sheltered me in my earliest days, the seasons with their different durations and slants of light are odd. The architecture of the homes and schools and downtown are related, of the same genus but a different species. It is the look, the smell, the taste, that is subtly different.

Though I was an English major, when I finally got to visit the land of Austen, Trollope, Marvell, Herrick, I did not immediately warm to the place. Yet in France I felt, an immediate, pleasurable deja vu. It took me years to realize that those small, provincial towns with a river through the middle, soft air under colonnades of trees, the shop of butcher and baker were an echo of that small town, on a rocky river, where I was young.

The actual town where I grew up is actually on a stream called the Rocky River. It is greatly changed from when I was young there, now a suburb of the nearby city that is reached in twenty minutes by a superhighway surrounded by big box retailers and fast food restaurants. In my day, that acreage was the Rosbaugh farms where we bought summer sweet corn from a roadside stand. They really did pave paradise and put up a parking lot.

So many of the ugly family feuds of our national political conversation since
World War II have been about change, pro and con. Rational discussion of its inevitability is in short supply because it does not address the human longing for the way we were, the days that are no more. Republicans have been very adept at exploiting backward-looking nostalgia by blaming change on scapegoats. Democrats have been remarkably tone-deaf to the natural reluctance to abandon a fondly, if rose-colored, remembrance of a past or passing way of life, an understandable anxiety about an unknown, possibly alien and disruptive future.

Such polarization makes impossible a debate we need to have, about which traditions to conserve and which to let go, what change to fear and what to welcome. All of us want to keep some things permanent and sacrosanct. Tree huggers want to conserve a vanishing landscape and its biodiversity. Gun nuts want to shoot for sport what their ancestors hunted for game. We all want cheap goods and energy, but are we willing to pay the cost in befouled air and water?

Coal miners and steel workers want their booming industries back, perhaps less for the actual labor than for the reliability of a living wage. Newspaper reporters and editors feel their pain, having been disrupted by the same technical revolution that makes almost all jobs provisional, and possibly obsolete.

We are all sad for our loses, alarmed by impermanence, and want to preserve some of what was good and safe and true. But being a Luddite or in permanent mourning for the Lost Cause, is no solution. Blaming scapegoats for the flux won’t turn back the clock. Refusing to confront the inevitability of change won’t get you a vote in what shape the future takes.

I number indentured servants mariners, pig farmers, brick makers, blacksmiths, tanners, axe makers, blast furnace puddlers, seamstresses, silk mill weavers, schoolmarms, firemen, telegraphers, gas station owners, secretaries, punch press operators, among my forebears. My daughter works for an airline, my son for a biotech company, his boys someday, no doubt, for enterprises we cannot imagine.

Our ancestors endured the uprooting required to come here, revolution, wars, booms and busts, floods and droughts without any social safety net, medical care, workplace safety rules. We know from estate records many died with fewer possessions than clutter our hall closet or garage, an axe, some farm tools, some crockery, a few sticks of furniture.

My parents are gone and so is the small town and the rust belt city adjacent as I knew them. You really can’t go home again, nor stand athwart history saying stop. We will all be forced to go wth the rocky river’s flow. But we can try to hand down to the next generations a Constitution, equal justice under law, e pluribus unum, civil rights, and all that.

Too many of us seem intent on handing down grievance, resentment, invidious comparisons, hatred of the other, and a refusal to compromise, to tear down instead of build up. Better to celebrate American ideals, including reinvention. After enduring plenty of bangs, are we really going to be undone by divisive whimpering? Shame on us.

I leave you with the closing lyrics of “Norma Rae: “It goes like it goes like the river flows, and time keeps rolling on, and maybe what’s good gets a little bit better, and maybe what’s bad gets gone.”