Diatribes of Jay: How Trump could Kill Your Kids

[For comment on MLK Day 2019 and the structural legacies of slavery, click here. For reasons why the partial government shutdown helps Dems the longer it lasts, click here. For a discussion of how our national openness hurts us and what we really need from China, click here. For a brief explanation of how badly both Trump and his opposition are failing at “the art of the deal,” click here. For a deep dive into how Apple tries to thwart Google’s capture of the web-browser market, click here. For a review of Speaker Pelosi’s superb qualifications to lead the Democratic Party, click here. For reasons why natural-gas and electric cars are essential to national security, click here. For additional reasons, click here. For the source of Facebook’s discontents and how to save democracy from it, click here. For Democrats’ core values, click here. The Last Adult is Leaving the White House. Who will Shut Off the Lights? For how our two parties lost their souls, click here. For the dire portent of Putin’s high-fiving the Saudi Crown Prince, click here. For updated advice on how to drive on the Sun’s power alone, or without fossil fuels, click here. For a 2018 Thanksgiving Message, click here. For a list of links to recent posts in reverse chronological order, click here.]

A New Sheriff in Town

Good news on a Friday evening! The partial government shutdown is over. Government workers will get paid, including their back pay. Congress is thinking about ways to make whole all the people who were “privatized” into government contractors, in accordance with GOP dogma, and so lost big in the shutdown.

Trump caved. He’ll turn on his most powerful reality distortion field, of course. But it won’t work this time. The progressive hippie from San Francisco beat him fair and square. As Mark Shields said on PBS, “[h]e took on a San Francisco Democrat, and found out that Nancy Pelosi had steel in her spine.”

How did that come about? Maybe it had something to do with Speaker Pelosi’s 41 years of experience in politics, versus Trump’s chaotic two. Maybe we really are a nation of rules, institutions and orderly procedures, not a bunch of mavericks and lone wolves trying to turn the script from The Godfather into government. Maybe Trump would have better luck if he started reading his briefing papers more and watching Fox less.

Trump’s temper tantrum over his widdle wall provoked widespread peaceful rebellion. The Dems held firm. The economists and business community complained about a totally gratuitous big hit to our economy. So a few Republicans revolted, making Mitch nervous. The rebellion reached a crescendo when the pilots complained and the air traffic controllers, the TSA, and the IRS started not showing up for unpaid work. Once Trump read the polls, it was all over but the lying.

There’s also a pop-psychology angle. Through Trump’s colleagues, the Speaker convinced him that it would be unseemly to deliver his State of the Union speech while hundreds of thousands of federal employees were doing unpaid work. So Trump couldn’t have his shiny “presidential” thing—his big show starring himself—until the shutdown ended. A grandmother knows how to control a child by withholding his favorite toys.

Has Trump learned a lesson? It’s hard to tell. This deal is temporary; it ends February 15. It’s hard to see another government shutdown, just as it’s hard to see a new one having any other result. Trump may try to declare an emergency, but he’s lost so often in the courts already that he may consider doing that too much a gamble. Maybe he’ll try to make a real deal, by actually compromising. He’s already started talking about enhanced security, not a “wall” like the one China built. Maybe he’ll consider using modern technology rather than “technology” from the third century before Christ.

But the shutdown’s most important lesson is that there’s a new sheriff in town. She’s a woman. She knows her stuff and she reads her briefing papers. If Donald Trump wants not to become her patsy or her foil, he’s going to have to start reading his own, and maybe some rules, too.

The Second Coming

Less than ten months from today, the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month will mark a century since the end of most senseless big war in human history. We call it the “Great War,” the “First World War” and “World War I.” These very names suggest that we look forward to an endless series of similar reigns of human carnage, running right up to our species’ self-extinction.

World War I didn’t sink to the level of World War II in total military and civilian casualties. According to modern estimates “only” twenty million died, as compared to some fifty million in World War II. But what distinguishes the “Great War” as our most awful was its senselessness. It was also the war that started the whole half-century of carnage off.

The Second World War began because two powerful military tyrannies, Hitler’s and Tojo’s, set out to conquer the globe from opposite sides of their “Axis.” After Neville Chamberlain’s failed attempt to negotiate “peace in our time,” the rest of the world didn’t have much choice but resist. And if the truth be told, valid economic grievances underlay both German and Japanese aggression. The victorious Allies had overreached in collectively punishing all Germans for prosecuting and losing World War I, and the US had imposed unfair and rather racist Smoot-Hawley tariffs upon Japan’s exports, just as Japan was starting to succeed in industrializing.

But what caused the “Great War” that started the half-century of horrors? Our schoolbooks say it had something to do with the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria-Este. But why should the killing of one man set a whole continent aflame?

Only historians have a clue. And even they neither agree nor make a concrete or convincing case.

The fact is the “Great War” was as near to a military free-for-all—a senseless, multinational barroom brawl—as our species ever has perpetrated. Nations at the apex of human civilization, including Britain, France and Germany, were spoiling for a fight. Nations on the periphery, such as Russia and the Ottoman Empire (now mostly Turkey) were ready to join in. There was no rhyme or reason, no overarching purpose, no theme but nationalism, imperialism, tribal advantage and the primitive “glory” of conquest.

The so-called “Great War” was a species-wide demonstration of how the “glory” of military manhood depicted in the Odyssey and the Aeneid could degenerate into the bathos and pathos of innocent teenagers bleeding out in muddy trenches or gasping their last breaths of poison gas. It was a lesson how we humans can apply our still-primitive science and technology to make our small planet resemble Hieronymus Bosch’s most diabolical vision of Hell.

The crux of the matter is that we humans need rules to live by. We need order. We need rules we can believe in and that most of us follow, day by day, if only because we have no better guide on how to live. If we rely on our emotions, our “gut,” our inherent selfishness, easy rage and craving for advantage take over. When coupled with our technology, they move us to convert our world straightaway into Hell.

Lawyers know this full well. The see the evil glints in the eyes of their clients and opponents every day. They understand the need for the “rule of law.”

But we don’t pay much attention to lawyers or their law nowadays. Didn’t they let the Crash of 2008 happen with nary a peep? Anyway, aren’t they members of the feckless and self-serving “elite”? Don’t they belong to the vile 1% and therefore, like journalists, the “enemies of the people”?

Yet there’s another term for the “rule of law,” much less used today. It’s “civilization.” Today we seldom recall using that word as an antonym to the twin evils of anarchy and barbarism. As a result, where we’re headed is right toward those twin evils.

Everybody knows it. Everybody feels it. The spirit of Yeats’ Second Coming is in the air. Anarchy is being loosed upon the world. You can feel it even as you read the sober output of mainstream newspapers, such as this article or this one, which recounts the professional assessments of our American intelligence community.

The men of “passionate intensity” who will destroy us include Donald Trump and Steve Bannon. They speak openly of crushing the existing order, without conceiving anything tangible to replace it. They have no plans for, and don’t even seem to care, what comes next. Trump in particular seems only to worry about feeding his own boundless ego. He doesn’t even read his briefing papers.

Then there’s Mark Zuckerberg, whose business motto in the early years was “Move fast and break things.” Hasn’t he done that well? Hasn’t he already broken democracy?

Yes, at the moment—in his first term—Trump seems to be shunning war. He’s kow-towing to our most dictatorial adversaries, even when the greybeards think he shouldn’t. But isn’t he also setting the stage for future wars? By moving our embassy in Israel to Jerusalem, didn’t he taunt the tens of millions of Arabs who live in and near Israel? By abrogating the nuclear deal with Iran, wasn’t he making a nuclear push by, and a conventional war with, Iran more likely? And doesn’t weakness before Russia, whether or not collusive, make conflict more likely, not less? Didn’t we learn that from Neville Chamberlain? Does abrogating our nuclear disarmament treaty with Russia show strength or weakness?

And what about China? Doesn’t anyone notice the close analogy to prewar Japan? An Asian nation not long risen from poverty and disorder has become wealthy and powerful mostly through its own effort and in spite of antagonistic Western racism. So what do we do? We try to dominate China with economic isolation and trade wars, just as Smoot and Hawley did with Japan in the run-up to World War II. Can’t we learn from history?

Doesn’t anyone see the resemblance? Doesn’t anyone remember that the Smoot-Hawley tariffs were a significant cause of World War II? Japan’s diplomats were complaining of them at the moment its planes started bombing Pearl Harbor.

Doesn’t anyone also see the vital distinctions? China’s not just a rising Asian power but the center of Asian civilization, the largest single nation on Earth, and one of the World’s oldest and most respected civilizations. No one doubts that it will soon become the world’s largest economy. Do we really want to get into a senseless dogfight with it, with no clear end in sight and no plan to reach an end?

And what about global warming, that very real and menacing phenomenon that Trump derides as a “hoax”? Already it’s built into our atmosphere, in the form of increased masses of carbon dioxide that trap the Sun’s heat inside like a car’s closed windows in summer. Already various forms of real feedback are increasing the acceleration, a mathematical phenomenon that physicists call “jerk.” (How appropriate for something that Trump derides without comprehension!) Whatever we do now, warming will accelerate for a long time, likely long enough to bring our whole world rising seas and horrendous heat waves, cold snaps, floods, hurricanes and tornadoes.

And what about tropical diseases? How will your sons and daughters, granddaughters and grandsons fare as zika, chikungunya, dengue and perhaps even malaria and yellow fever march relentlessly northward, through Miami, Houston, Charleston, Arlington, Washington, D.C., and even toward New York?

And if you think migration is a global problem now, wait until sea level rise and storm surges drive tens of millions from Bangalore, Dacca, Los Angeles, Miami, Mumbai, New York, Rome, Singapore, and Tokyo, to name just a few? Won’t we need some rules and order then? Or will we just drive back or murder refugees with tanks, planes, machine guns and drones, exchanging our humanity for barbarism?

There are so many ways that Trump could kill your kids and grandkids by making a world without rules or order. Your progeny will not be safe in the world he is making. He seeks to rule by chaos—rescinding DACA by executive order so he can negotiate its phase-out, destroying the postwar trading order, which took a half-century to build, just to force China to the bargaining table. If you believe in religious manichaean duality, it’s not hard to imagine Trump as the Dark Lord.

Of course there are others. There are Bolsonaro in Brazil, El-Sisi in Egypt, Orban in Hungary, Duterte in the Philippines, Morawiecki in Poland, Putin in Russia, Erdogan in Turkey, and Maduro in Venezuela. But Trump is the symbol, the leader and the inspiration for the worst of them. [Search for “new world order”] As leader of the nation that served as architect of the postwar order, he’s a powerful advertiser of anarchy and chaos.

His anarchy and chaos threaten your kids and grandkids. So does a world in which science is ignored, journalists are “enemies of the people,” honest public prosecutors are bent on “witch hunts,” global warming is a “hoax,” and real problems among people grow rancid through vengeance and recrimination, without a trace of the human empathy with which Nelson Mandela negotiated his people’s freedom from within a prison cell.

Yes. There are others. But Trump is the paradigm and chief goad of them all. If he remains in office, there may soon be no rules or order to protect your kids from rampant trade wars, real wars that are sure to follow, the tragic consequences of runaway global warming, the mass migrations that are sure to follow, and the decay of human civilization globally under the stress of all this plus the dark temptations of disinformation and weapons of mass destruction. Trump could be the one to pull the pin that releases both the Furies and the Dogs of War.

So if you care about your kids and grandkids, if you seek their safety and comfort, you must work to impeach and remove Trump. You must do so not because he’s a Republican, not because he’s a so-called “conservative,” not because he’s just an incompetent buffoon, and least of all because of his insults, foul mouth and self-evident bigotry. You must work to oust him simply because his continued misrule gravely threatens the very existence of global rules and order—civilization!—that might keep your kids and grandkids from the abyss.

Only by stopping the trend toward anarchy that Trump is both leading and promoting can we avoid repeating the last century’s blaunders. Suppose we can’t avoid repeating them. Suppose we have another international free-for-all, even one that starts out focused “only” on economics and migration. With the menace of global warming bearing down faster and faster, and with the temptations of cyberwar, disinformation, and weapons of mass destruction, there’s a good chance your progeny might not survive long enough to pass on your genes. Only empathy, Reason, rules and order can save them—none of which Trump has or respects.

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Diatribes of Jay

24 January 2019

How Trump could Kill Your Kids

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