Donald's Brain

Is there a scarier place on Earth than Donald's brain? Unfortunately, we're all trapped in it.

In a time when irony is dead, what could be more ironic than the last election, when the incumbent was forced to step aside because he was accused of lacking mental acuity due to age, and instead America chose to elect his opponent, a man of almost the same age and would be the oldest President in history, who was clearly suffering from mental incompetence in a form of criminal sociopathy and disassociation from reality, which we now see is getting worse with every passing day.   

Whatever you might have thought about Biden's verbal gaffes and painfully hesitant debate performance, the one thing you could always say with certainty is that he cares about responsible governance and always respected and listened to his expert advisors. What we have instead is a demented narcissist who doesn't believe in the rule of law or government, is bent on destroying them, and has surrounded himself with a group of lackey 'advisors' devoid of expertise and self-respect whose chief talent is for humiliating sycophancy. Whatever happens now depends on one thing and one thing above all: What goes on in trump's addled, warped mind. In that sense he is far closer to Kim Jong-Un and Putin (Hitler, Mussolini, Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Louis XVI, Henry VIII etc.) than any other President in US history. The difference between trump and the rest of this rogue's gallery of tyrants, is that he is far more powerful and his actions potentially far more consequential, than they could ever be.  

Biographies are written about every US President in an effort to get at the source of their personality and thinking because there is the sense that it's significant to their presidency. The same will be done with Donald (and indeed already has), but perhaps for the first time the main research tool will be the DSM - the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. The most accurate analysis I've heard of his political decision-making has focused on trump's amoral disordered mind, charitably called 'neuro-divergent'. For instance, when asked in the Oval why and when he decided to pause his 'reciprocal tariffs, trump answered, “Over the last few days, I’ve been thinking about it. I think it probably came together early this morning, fairly early this morning... We wrote it up from our hearts, right? It was written from the heart, and I think it was well written too.” This 'answer' about a Presidential decision with vast global consequences would be surreal if it wasn’t so insane. It sent the pundits and commentators scrambling for interpretation, trying to find some rationale or justification so the public could make sense of it. Is there some sort of hidden logic? 4D-chess? Ideology? Long-term plan or strategy? Criminality? Thought of any kind? If you answered none of the above in your Psychology 101 multiple choice midterm, that would probably be closest to the correct answer.

America was not made to be trapped in the mind of a mad king. In fact, America was constituted for the exact opposite, "...government of the people, by the people, for the people,” as Lincoln put it in the Gettysburg Address. America and the world is in a scary place now: The dark, cold, bat-shit encrusted cave of Donald’s Neanderthal brain (apologies to Neanderthals). And like caveman paleontology, any useful artifact you might find there is really nothing but a matter of pure speculation 

Who Do You Trust?

I walk 47 miles of barbed wire/ I use a cobra snake for a necktie/ I got a brand new house on the roadside/ Made from rattlesnake hide/ I got a brand new chimney made on top/ Made out of a human skull/ Now come on take a little walk with me, Arlene/ And tell me, who do you love?

Bo Diddley revolutionized rock 'n roll when he asked "Who Do You Love?" He was the first badass. But I gotta say, his description of himself and his lifestyle doesn't exactly instill confidence - "A rattlesnake necktie" and "a chimney made of human skull." Not what I'd be putting on my Tinder bio (if I had one). He's basically saying to his girl, take a chance with me. Which suggests he understands that the more important question is Who Do You Trust? 

"In God We Trust" is what it says on the American greenback - until this week the most trusted currency in the world - which is bizarre enough. Aside from the fact that it suggests only God is trustworthy ie. people can't really be trusted, Americans seem to equate God and money. 

But the more important message is that everything is built on trust: Every relationship, from love and family to business, every time you go to see the doctor, every time you get into your car to drive somewhere, every time you open your phone to get the news. Trust is literally the glue that holds the entire world together. And the more interconnected the world has become the more complex and confounding the network of trust is. 

It wasn't too long ago when doctors made housecalls. You knew your 'green grocer' and dairy was delivered to your home by a milkman. Ours was named Maurice, and he drove an orange Guaranteed Milk Truck that had sliding doors, sort of like the Amazon Prime delivery vans you see today. Maurice would give me and my friends rides down the block with the doors open. But trust was not only a function of neighbourhood relationships. A sense of trust existed at many levels of society. For instance, in every household we watched the 6 o'clock news on television when dad got home from work. It was  a national ritual everyone shared. There were four or five channels, the broadcasts delivered more or less the same information, and CBS anchorman Walter Cronkite was called 'the Most Trusted Man in America'.

I'm not saying this to wax nostalgic, but rather to describe how fragmented our world has become, and  the tangible way that fragmentation has impacted our daily activities and interactions. Sixty years ago, it was much easier to decide if people were trustworthy when you dealt with them face to face on a regular and ongoing basis, and I believe this translated into a general feeling of trust and security in society at large. The world we live in is impersonal and remote. The crises we are facing today - and I use the plural term because it's multiple crises political, economic, cultural, layered one on top of the other, like a cake - is actually only one crisis: A crisis of trust. People don't know who to trust, so they end up trusting no one, and the reality they live in loses meaning and coherence. They self-cocoon with their screens. When that happens they become susceptible to believing the most outlandish ideas; conspiracies, fanatical religions, extreme politics, grasping for anyone and anything that projects certainty and confidence. 

A talent for gaining the confidence of people is the main trait of every snake oil salesman and swindler - that's why they call him a con-man. Trump is not the cause of the crisis we find ourselves in, he is a symptom of it. His main talent for exploiting insecurity could not have asked for a more fertile environment in which to operate. A person like him, without principles, values or morals, thrives in an environment where trust is low. His followers are devoted to him not because they are stupid, but because they are desperate. The one thing he offers his constituents that the Democrats have failed miserably at, is vision, even if it's the most absurd, impractical, cynical and backward-looking one. In trump's case, it's a vision of security provided by a fence that Mexico would pay for, or the security of manufacturing jobs that would come flooding back to America once the tariffs start working their magic, or the security of Russia making peace with Ukraine in 24 hours etc. It doesn't matter if the vision has any relationship to reality, it's the vision that counts. In some sense the more outlandish the vision the more deeply committed the followers of the visionary become, often at their own personal expense. And once the followers have committed it's nearly impossible to get them back - the hardest thing to admit is that you're wrong. Trumpism is unique in that it combines elements of nihilistic religious devotion and craven individual self-interest, which makes it an undeniably potent and dangerous political force. Trump will inevitably self-destruct, but it won't be because the cheering crowds will suddenly realize that the emperor has no clothes. He'll push the envelope too far. He's done it several times before, but got lucky and survived. His luck will eventually run out, as it always does at some point.    

In the meantime, he will continue to do further damage to the already-deficient and declining level of trust that exists in society. I'm not sure what we can do to restore it at this point. I'm just hoping that it doesn't take a catastrophe to do a re-set.  

Thin Skinned Jews

Jews are as worthy of criticism as anyone else. If they can dish it - and they do that as well as anyone - then they should be able to take it too.

First, let me say that there’s something deeply ironic about what is going on at the top American universities: A purge by the government to ‘cleanse’ the institutions of their antisemitism. It's being done against the administrations by threatening to cancel billions of dollars in federal research grants. Cowering in fear, the faculties appear to be caving one by one to the pressure. It's also being done against individual student activists being accosted by federal goons sometimes wearing ski masks to hide their identities. The students, who are legally in the country, get hauled off for detention, usually to other states, without due process. This purge is using antisemitism as a hammer against free speech and the rule of law, as the Yale philosophy professor Jason Stanley puts it. The irony of course is that it wasn’t too long ago that many of these same universities practiced discrimination against Jews in a variety of ways, including admission quotas and practices designed to ensure that Jewish students could not participate fully in campus life and organizations. For more on this I recommend a podcast called Gatecrashers. 

Stanley, a child of Holocaust survivors, who has taught at Yale for twelve years and written books on fascism, has publicly announced that he has taken a position to teach next semester at the University of Toronto. He says he will be leaving his home country because life has become untenable for him and his two Jewish African-American children. His move is clearly intended as a political statement as much as a career decision. As an academician, Stanley is appalled at the attack on free speech he is witnessing on campus as well as the craven capitulation of the administrations. But even more, he is angry as a Jew. I suspect he feels a lot like I do. 

Here’s what I find so hard to swallow: Jews have always been sort of experts in the field of self-examination, analysis and criticism. It’s a tradition, part of the Jewish cultural DNA. Which is why witnessing Jews who can dish it out but can’t seem to take it, turns my stomach. I'm talking about the Jews who are cheering on the trump regime's anti-DEI kapos as they go after the universities in the name of protecting Jews on campus. The idea that Jews would support a blatant threat to freedom of speech and the rule of law because of name-calling, or offensive chants, is one obvious point. But also, to side with the likes of trump, who famously dined at Mar-a-lago with neo-Nazi leaders and called them very fine people after they chanted "Jews will not replace us" at their Charlottesville hate rally, makes it even worse. How thin-skinned do you have to be to seek the protection of an unconstitutional, immoral, anti-democratic, felon extortionist because you feel threatened by a bunch of ill-informed, nose-ringed, flag-waving, social-justice warrior kids chanting slogans they barely understand?

Unwise as well. Are we not supposed to think that there won't be an antisemitic backlash against the Jews for getting into bed with the autocrat? In what world are we not expecting that it won't take long before the Jews are blamed for controlling these authoritarian goons? It's the oldest and most enduring antisemitic trope there is.

I'm not naive. This week my youngest daughter who is a first year student at McGill was unable to attend classes on two occasions because she was blockaded from entering the classroom by pro-Palestine protesters. She spoke to her teacher who was standing passively outside the classroom, asking her what she was going to do. The teacher responded by simply saying class was cancelled. My daughter said her impression was that the teacher was sympathetic to the blockade and that's why she didn't demand the protesters be removed by campus security. The McGill administration seems to have learned very little from the debacle of last summer's disruptive and destructive protests, so there's a good chance it'll get worse.

But that isn't a reason to side with the fascist goons trying to quell a basic constitutional right. There's a steep price to pay for cowardice for the sake of expediency. This week another example was the disgraceful settlement with the trump regime announced by the prestigious New York law firm Paul Weiss. The blue chip partnership caved, fearing that if they didn't, their mergers and acquisitions business would suffer because their deals would be refused government regulatory approval. In announcing the settlement, Weiss Chairman Brad Karp invoked the name of the firm's co-founder Simon Rifkind, a revered legal figure. Two of Judge Rifkind's granddaughters, lawyers themselves, took him to task for it in a letter made public. It's really worth reading. Paul Weiss and other 'Jewish' law firms were established at a time when it was not easy for Jews to find work in the legal profession, so they had to strike out on their own. The letter is a reminder that when you bend the knee, you know where you stand.

My body reminds me

My body reminds me that I am my body,

My body is me, as a tree is a tree.

Should I, at times, have a mind to disagree,

My body reminds how it feels to be me.

My body speaks when a thought arises,

How and from where always surprises.

My thought says "move," and my body complies,

Or my body moves 'fore my thought apprises.

My body reminds me of entropy,

A law of nature, a stark decree.

Life is unique, yet nothing is free—

Disorder increases, degree by degree.

A threadbare coat frays at the seams,

A weathered barn sags with rotting beams.

An empire falls with failing regimes,

A dream is a dream—and only a dream.

My body reminds me that I am my body,

My body is me, as a tree is a tree.

Should I, at times, have a mind to disagree,

My body reminds how it feels to be me.

Trump Teaches a Lesson (in Economics, Geography and History)

There's so much to love 

about Trump,

but most of all the way he makes us laugh.

Today it was tariffs,

which some are calling a tax

we pay when we buy things,

but others are not so sure. Trump

says it'll teach those nasty Canadians

for taking advantage of our big

American hearts (and bank accounts).   

And then he shows this chart of import tariff rates

he's 'charging' to other countries,

and on it are a bunch of places

I've never heard of 

so I Googled them:

Heard and McDonald Islands,

off the coast of Antarctica with no inhabitants 

(except seals and penguins)

who get slapped with a 10% tariff;

Svalbard and Jan Mayen,

uninhabited volcanic islands in the Arctic Ocean

get slapped with a 5% tariff;

Norfolk Island, off the coast of Australia,

population 2,000 -

those people must be especially mean to Americans -

gets hit with a 29% tariff; 

somewhere called Réunion,

which is what a family does when they miss each other, 

gets a 37% tariff.

And anyone know where Tokelau is?

Saint-Pierre and Miquelon? They get tariffs too.

Trump has to be a 'stable genius' like he says

to know so much about the world.

Switzerland gets a punishing 31% tariff,

mostly on watches and chocolates I suppose.

I know where Switzerland is

(I actually lived there for a year)

and can't argue with that one.

Switzerland deserves every punishment it gets

for hiding Nazi loot. They are politically neutral,

but everyone knows neutrality is a lie.

It's 'Liberation Day' Trump cheers!

Of course, I think of D-Day, WW2,

how the fascists fascinated us

with their big show of strength,

their tanks and pressed black uniforms,

their death camps and efficiency,

because they were really weak inside,

in their messy hearts,

and it eventually destroyed them.

Hitler was a funny little psychopath,

easy for Charlie Chaplin to parody

in The Great Dictator 

and make us laugh.

Where was I?

Oh yeah, the best teachers make us laugh.

April is National Poetry Month - Floaters

I'm seeing floaters

tiny bubbles dancing 

across my vision field

that no amount of blinking 

will dispel

like dandelion seeds 

suspended permanently 

on a summer breeze.

 

It's the beginning of a new season

according to the web-doctor,

along with flashes of white light 

that I first interpreted 

as headlights reflected by the chrome 

of passing cars 

while I was driving,

but still flickered off and on

at home

in the corner of the bedroom

while my wife was out -

I was in a panic 

and had no one to ask 

if getting old 

is like a hallucination -

cars speeding by, bubbles 

always on the verge of bursting,  

or if it's a symptom of mortality 

settling down over you   

barely perceptible

as dusk,

a gradual blindness

mistaken for 

reality,

and then

I heard the sound of a key 

turning in the front door

I think.

The Connection Between Tariffs and Imperialism

A word about autarky. Autarky is a term related to autocracy, but instead of describing a form of iron-fisted political rule by one person, it relates to economic self-sufficiency. It's essentially a description of the policy that trump seems to be pursuing with the widespread imposition of import tariffs. As he puts it constantly, America has been economically 'ripped off' or 'treated really badly' or 'subsidizing other countries' - if there is one thing that trump has been completely consistent about it's believing he is always a victim. 

But the stated rationale seems to be to encourage international companies who sell product to American consumers to move their production facilities to the United States to create jobs. In theory that makes some sense, and historically tariffs have been used in a more surgical fashion to protect particularly vulnerable domestic industries by raising prices on cheaper goods coming into the market. One recent example is the 100% tariff imposed on imported Chinese electric cars designed to protect American electric car manufacturers. 

Import tariffs have two primary impacts: First they raise prices on imported product to make more expensive domestically produced merchandise more competitive, and second, they raise revenues for the government, like a federal sales tax would. The inflationary effect is why import tariffs have generally been used by government very sparingly. There is a lot of speculation that trump's blanket approach, which he says is aimed at protecting American industries and bringing manufacturing home, is actually meant to maximize government revenues (through his 'Exterior Revenue Service') to offset the cost of continuing his first-term income tax cuts which are scheduled to expire in 2025. One problem is that it's self-contradictory, the inflation generated by tariffs would produce a slowdown in the economy which would result in a drop in revenues from tariffs. Another problem is that an increase in unemployment would necessarily follow, so-called 'stag-flation'. These would be the short term impacts of tariffs felt very soon by Americans. In the medium term, if the policy did succeed in encouraging companies to move their manufacturing facilities to the US - a process that would take at least a half decade or more - the cost of producing domestically is inherently higher than producing overseas and consumers would pay that price.  

In other words, the plan is economically disastrous in both the short and medium term. But that's not the worst of it.

There's a political side to this terrible economic approach. Countries pursuing economic self-suffiency, even if they have established the factories and manpower, require natural resources. They need inputs from other places that have what they don't have. What to do? Can't trade with other countries because that goes against the goal of self-sufficiency. The only answer is to take them. Autarky and Imperialism go hand in glove, hence trump's interest in absorbing Canada and 'buying' Greenland, two places rich in minerals and energy, and why his threats need to be taken deadly seriously. It's not just rhetorical disrespect, or a distraction away from other disastrous headlines like Signalgate, although it's that too. If trump is serious about autarky then he's also serious about subjugating Canada and Greenland, and the sooner we acknowledge it the better.