The Silent but Smiling Elephant of Harris’ Identity

As Kamala Harris goes about her crucial campaign, she’s decided to downplay her unusual identity. I have no logical basis to question that decision. She is, after all, running against a racist, misogynist and bully making every effort to summon the same demons from his cult followers. Who am I to question her campaign strategy?

And yet, and yet . . . I find her identity as a woman and a descendent of Black and South Indian people immensely inspiring. It gives me great hope, both for our nation and for our species. Here’s why.

I suppose the best place to start is with England and the UK. In 1971-72, I spent nine months in Cambridge, England, on an NSF-NATO Postdoctoral Fellowship.

My impression of the UK then hasn’t changed much in the intervening half century. I knew and know that three of the best thinkers in human history—Isaac Newton, Adam Smith and Charles Darwin—were British. (A fourth, Albert Einstein, was a German Jew.) But I couldn’t and can’t escape the feeling that Britain was and is past its prime. Like its house organ The Economist, today’s England seems to believe devoutly in widely held but unprovable assumptions like “Free trade makes everybody better off.” Even back then, its largely coal-based winter heating, it seemed to me, made the whole land smell like an old woman’s body.

Nonetheless, when Rishi Sunak became the UK’s prime minister, something deep within me exulted. Yes, I knew that the Brits had discovered DNA, the chemical basis of life, which we now know is 99.9% identical from person to person. I knew that their democracy had lasted—from the first Magna Carta in 1215—going on four times as long as ours. I had had Jewish friends, and even a distant family member, who felt perfectly at home in Britain. But somehow I had never lost my suspicion that an unexpressed racial snobbery permeated the British elite until Sunak, a man of Indian descent, became PM.

When that happened, something moved inside me. I thought of Stalin’s incredulity that Britain, with a mere half-million disciplined troops, had managed to subdue and retain a whole sub-continent as a “colony,” consisting of over a billion diverse people. I had often wondered whether that “miracle” had been based on better weapons alone, or some spark of British understanding—the same spark that had ignited the Western Enlightenment that later produced our nation. As short and unproductive as it was, Sunak’s prime ministership seemed a partial answer that question.

But Sunak, of course, was of the wrong party. The Tories’ long and disastrous rule was coming to an end. The economic superstitions that grownups had accepted as gospel had let China steal the West’s spark, industry, factories and science from right under our noses. To confuse the rubes, those superstitions were called “liberal” economics in Britain and “conservative” in the US. But they had been equally based on non-scientific assumptions in the obvious self-interest of the West’s oligarchs and ruling business elite. With all his inspiring identity, Sunak hadn’t had a chance.

Something similar had happened to Colin Powell. Remember him? He may have been one of our wisest military leaders ever. He developed the “Powell Doctrine” for optional military adventures: (1) defined goals, (2) overwhelming force, and (3) a clear exit strategy. He applied it to prevail in Gulf I in a mere two months, with a five-month force buildup. Thus he produced our only unambiguous military victory since Vietnam, and our shortest war ever. Later, as Secretary of State, he averted what could have been a war or skirmish with China by the simple act of apologizing when a plane of ours came too close to a Chinese spy plane and only ours managed to land.

Around the turn of the century, the GOP was considering running Powell for president. Just think what would have happened had he run and won! No decades-long war in Iraq. No decades-long war in Afghanistan, to end with a debacle as great as ours in Vietnam. And, best of all, no more GOP as the party of racism: the GOP could hardly have continued Nixon’s racist “Southern Strategy” and the senior Bush’s racist “Willie Horton” ads if it’s own candidate had been our first Black president.

But you don’t get to rewrite history. Powell acceded to his depressive wife’s wishes not to endure the kind of oppressive, pervasive racism that Barack Obama, our first actual Black president, later had to endure. And I got the chance to transform myself from an occasional blogger into a passionate one, with a whole category in my table of contents for posts about Barack and Michelle.

As I wrote later in describing the Clintons’ betrayal of Democratic principles, I didn’t think the Dems would have a clear revival until we have another candidate like Obama.

Now we do. But there’s a difference, including a difference in gender. And that’s what drives my hope and inspiration especially.

Unlike Germany’s Angela Merkel, who also inspired me, modern female leaders sometimes try to emulate Britain’s Margaret Thacher by taking charge like a man. Thacher was famous for coming into Cabinet meetings and saying, right off the bat, something like “I’m in charge here.” She reminded me of our pushy General Alexander Haig, who said exactly that, in the White House, in the chaotic aftermath of Richard Nixon’s impeachment.

But a real leader doesn’t have to “take charge.” Especially in a democracy, a real leader has to persuade, and at times impel, people to follow. A real leader who is right for the times makes leading seem almost effortless. A real leader leads by Reason, not psy-ops tricks. Obama was like that, despite his pitched opposition.

That’s where I think Harris’ largely hidden talent lies. Some may consider what follows a bit sexist and glib. But as a devout believer whose “religion” is science, I think it’s right.

Women and men have different evolutionary roles. Their physiology and their DNA are different. While men were out fighting the sabre-toothed tiger, catching the big game, and driving the aggressive neighbor tribes over the hill, women stayed home by the fire. One of their chief evolutionary roles—still extant today—was keeping rival siblings from pushing each other over the cliff or into the river or fire. In other words, our biological evolution gave women a peacemaking role, at least in the family.

Today we need leaders who can perform that evolutionary function more than ever. We have devastating, live wars in Ukraine (and now Russia!), the Middle East, and Sudan, and a China rapidly arming for a showdown with the West. The suicidal machismo of male leaders could well extinguish us—the more so by ignoring a major threat to our survival that we have created ourselves: planetary heating.

I think Harris is that leader, in part (but only in part) because of her gender. While rival factions shout each other down on campuses, she is the one calling for Reason and even-handedness in the Middle East. She has never said so precisely, but I believe that she will not give Israel’s rogue PM Bibi a blank check to use our nation’s military productivity to advance his bent personal goals. Nor will she see an Israeli government perpetually drifting into wider combat as an ally forever worthy of unquestioning support.

It’s not just that Harris has spent most of her twenty-one years in elective office putting bad people away. It’s not just that she, a relatively diminutive woman, shows little fear of bullies. It’s not just that she seems to have a deep, abiding sense of right and wrong for us as individuals and for our species. I suppose it’s in part her smile and occasional joy, which convey a woman’s and mother’s understanding that this terrible time, too, will pass.

I don’t know how to spread this sense of joy and hope. I’m not a campaign “operative,” and I certainly don’t get commissions on thirty-second video ads demonizing the other side. But I do know that I haven’t felt this way about a candidate for president since I wrote my post about Barack Obama and his chance of recovering what we had lost, as a nation, in the three terrible assassinations of the sixties.



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Could Nasrallah’s Death be a Game Changer?

Everyone seems worried that Israel’s assassination Friday of Hassan Nasrallah, by massive bombing of a Lebanese building complex, might lead to all-out war between Hezbollah and Israel. No one can predict anything with confidence in these uncertain times, but I think the opposite is possible. Nasrallah’s assassination has the potential to convince Iran’s leaders that the course they have been pursuing simply isn’t working. Here’s why.

All the analysis I have read of Iran falls into two general categories: (1) its weapons development, including drones, missiles and nukes, and (2) the evil and suspected imperial intentions of its current religious leaders. Little, if any, analysis focuses on Iran’s rich history, its recent development, and the mostly unseen recent changes in its people.

In other words, we’ve focused obsessively on the weapons and the leaders—especially the recent religious fanatics—but not the whole society. This, in my view, is a big mistake. Five glaring truths about Iran are AWOL from most analysis I have read.


1. History. In its guise as Persia, Iran is a very old nation with a rich history. It fought a big imperial war with the Ottoman Empire in the mid-eighteenth century. After a stalemate with the Ottomans, the Shah then in power attacked the Mughal Empire in India, the Ottomans (again), Georgia, and Dagestan. At the end of all this carnage, the borders of Persia/Iran ended up exactly where they had begun.

This same phenomenon occurred after we Americans and our allies enticed Saddam Hussein’s Iraq to attack Iran shortly after its Islamic Revolution. In that 1980-1981 war, over a million people lost their lives on one side or the other. Again, Iran’s borders remained right where they had been at the start. It is not a nation with a long or recent history of successful conquest.

Whatever else the Ayatollahs may be, they are good students of history. Might that be why they operate through proxies today, like (in order of decreasing power) Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Houtis? Bear in mind that, while all Iran’s big imperial wars were going on, today’s “big powers” on the Arabian Peninsula, including what eventually became Saudi Arabia, were nomadic tribes of traders on camelback.

2. Age.Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, is 85 years old. Our own supreme leader, Joe Biden, just had the wisdom and patriotism to step down at 81 and let the next generation take the reins. Our ex-president, Donald Trump, seems on a path to lose his bid to regain the White House, although he’s “only” 77. Do you think that Iran’s people, over 60% of whom are under thirty—let alone all the mid-level leaders in between—are eager to let their national and individual fates be decided in geriatric councils?

3. Islam and how it revived. Today we think of Iran as a rogue nation ruled by a bunch of religious fanatics, including the Ayatollahs and the Assembly of Experts, who are elected from amongcandidates they and the Ayatollahs choose. But Iran was not always so, not until recently. In the early 1950s, Iran was a democracy, with an elected leader named Mohammed Mossadegh. Like many emerging leaders in what’s now the EU, Mossadegh was a mild democratic socialist.

During the Cold War, we feared that Iran, by trending toward socialism, would drift into the Soviet camp. So with the help of the Brits’ spooks, our CIA engineered a coup, toppled Mossadegh, and arranged for a return of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi (then a sort of titular monarch like the Queen of England, but in exile) to real power. With Western help, he built up a dreaded secret police, the Savak, and then ruled with an iron fist, filling up Evin prison with political prisoners and torturing many there.

Apparently, the only thing strong enough to loosen the Shah’s iron grip was religion. So in 1979, Islamic revolutionaries toppled the Shah and held Americans and a few Canadians hostage for 444 days. The ruling Ayatollah released the hostages on the first day of Ronald Reagan’s new administration, cementing his reputation as a foreign-policy magician.

In this way did Iran’s religious leaders secure the best possible revenge: one served cold. They enhanced the undeserved reputation of a president who used his undeniable charm in the service of selfishness, private wealth and big business, thus helping produce the amoral, thoroughly corrupt society we have today. (Evidence of cahoots between Islamic Iran and the Reagan Administration became stronger with the subsequent “Iran-Contra” scandal, in which the Reagan Administration bought arms from Iran to be shipped to right-wing counterrevolutionaries in Nicaragua.)

4. Proxies.Whatever else the Ayatollahs may be, they are not stupid. They have spent their lives steeped in abstract thought, mostly about religion and Iran’s tortured history. If you want to know why they do virtually all their dirty work through proxies like Hezbollah and the Houtis, you need look no further than today’s ruins of Gaza and parts of Beirut.

However much you may protest Irans’ proxies’ acts of violence, you have to admit one thing. No part of Tehran or Qom (Iran’s religious capital) looks or recently has looked anything like the ruins of Gaza or the parts of Beirut hit with 2,000-pound bombs in Nasrallah’s assassination.

Through their violent proxies, the Ayatollahs and their Assembly of Experts have kept Iran’s people from the devastation and suffering of war, with which they are intimately familiar from their long history and their Pyrrhic stalemate with Iraq as recently as 33 years ago. Think maybe they’d like to keep things that way?

5. Nasrallah’s Assassination. If Iran’s Ayatollahs and their Assembly of Experts ever hoped to establish a wider Islamic Revolution throughout their neighborhood, Nasrallah’s death has disabused them of that notion. In their eyes, he was the “best of the best.” He was charismatic, a superb motivator, a gifted organizer, and adroit (until now) at keeping himself and his leadership safe from Israel’s Mossad.

Now he is gone, as is much of Hezbollah’s lesser leadership. Now Hamas’ leaders, if alive at all, are either in secret exile or holed up in tunnels in Gaza, trapped like rats. The Ayatollahs know this, and I think they will look for any sensible way out. So will their new, more moderate president, Masoud Pezeshkian, who has minority Kurdish roots.

Two final points. I have never believed that the Ayatollahs were hell bent on developing nuclear weapons. They are religious men with a bit of a crazy adulation for martyrdom. But perishing in a mass casualty event that kills hundreds of thousands and destroys a whole city, leaving it radioactive and uninhabitable for decades or centuries, is not martyrdom. It’s useless, senseless and catastrophic destruction of human life and civilization. The Ayatollahs are smart enough and (I believe) religious enough to figure that out.

So why do the centrifuges keep spinning? And why does Iran hide some underground nuclear facilities from international inspectors? In my view these are bargaining chips, to be surrendered for concessions that will finally bring some benefit to Iranians from the Ayatollahs’ tortured rule, including revival of their failing economy.

Lastly, why do the Ayatollahs seem to hate Israelis so? Are they really anti-Semitic? I think not: Iran has been dealing with foreign religions, including during the Crusades, for millennia.

To me, the answer is simple: they view Israel as an outside power imposed on their region by us, and they hate us. They and much of the Iranian people hate us because we deposed their first democratic leader and then, three decades later, incited Saddam’s Iraq to make a war on them that killed roughly half a million of theirs, only later to invade Saddam’s Iraq and oversee his execution.

Iran is a nation in a difficult region with a long history. It was busy fighting imperial wars long before the Enlightenment and colonization of North American that spawned our nation began. Its people are proud and rather well educated. (I got to know an Iranian student at Berkeley during the sixties and found him smart, funny, and a good person, with perhaps an outsized interest in American girls.) Again, 60% of its population is under 30, so Iran has vast capacity for change.

As for Russia, Iran knows the history of its centuries-long wars with Islamic lands to its south. Do you think Iran’s leaders are really eager to see Russia conquer all of Ukraine? Are they sure that Putin will next turn his imperial attentions to the rest of Europe, rather than next seek to annex the various Islamic “stans” to its south?

With Nasrallah dead and Iran’s dreams of victorious proxy wars in shambles, now is the time to treat its leaders and its people as equals, as we have never done. Now is a time to negotiate seriously for regional stability without preconditions. And we could well begin by apologizing, as a nation, for the damage we have done to Iran and its people by deposing Mossadegh and inciting Saddam’s Iraq to attack it.

Of course none of this can begin, and none of it can even be discussed, until our current election is resolved. But the Harris campaign could begin, in secret, to make progress in this regard a priority of the Harris Administration. They might even borrow a page from Richard Nixon in Vietnam and declare a “secret plan to end the war.” Their “secret plan” would be old-fashioned, even handed, respectful diplomacy, based on the advantages that recent events confer and the senselessly destructive trend of the ongoing conflict, which all involved can appreciate.



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How the Diné People, Whom We Call “Navajo,” Can Help Save America, Again

The Diné blanket pictured is small. It measures a bit over 1.5 by three feet. It’s wool and weave are coarse, its colors soft. It uses traditional, natural dyes that the Diné have used for thousands of years.

I bought it in 1963, decades before the Diné began to weave finer, much larger blankets, colored with modern dyes, and sell them for thousands of dollars in high-end galleries and at “Indian Market” in Santa Fe. I still remember the price I paid for it—63 dollars— because it was the same as the year. I bought it in a teepee-shaped store by the side of old Route 66, a part of what was then being converted into Interstate 40.

I’m not a big lover of things. I live mostly in my head. But that small, native blanket is one of my most prized possessions. I’ve kept it throughout my nomadic life, as I’ve lived in over twenty-one cities, including Cambridge, UK, and Moscow, Russia. Today it hangs in pride of place over our main bed in our home south of Santa Fe, New Mexico. For me, its beautifully stylized eagle is a symbol of our nation and our diverse democracy.

The blanket evokes memories of the road trip when I bought it. We drove from my parents’ home in Los Angeles to Arizona and New Mexico. My companions were two friends from the Summer Science Program that I had attended in 1961. We had little in my hand-me-down car besides our clothes, sleeping bags, camping gear, and some lifting weights for exercise.

As we traveled, we sought places off the beaten path, in the desert wilderness. In Northeast Arizona, we overnighted at a place forty miles by rough dirt road north of the nascent Interstate. It had a decent-sized pond, a concrete picnic table, a metal roof for shelter from the summer rains, and not much else. But our map had marked it as an official “campground.”

We built a fire and cooked a meal of liver and onions in a cast-iron skillet over it. Just after dinner, one of the Southwest’s famous summer storms hit us with torrential rains. We hid under the metal roof until the storm had passed. Then, just as the sun was setting, two huge, young Diné men came by on horseback. They came over to talk and invited us to a native gathering a mile or so down the road.

That gathering was one of the most fascinating experiences of my 79 years. We arrived at a large clearing in the desert, with cars and pickups parked all around the periphery. On one side was a row of small tables, staffed by older women selling food, drink and trinkets. We three were the only non-native people there.

At first, there was dancing in the middle of the clearing. Men danced with men, arm in arm, in a line like the dancers in Zorba the Greek. At the end of each dance, the people standing around would clap their hands, and those in the parked cars and trucks would honk their horns and blink their lights in appreciation. As the natural light faded, the cars and trucks kept their lights on to illuminate the central “stage.”

Then began the “talks.” A lone man would stand in the center of the illuminated clearing and speak for several minutes. The language of course was incomprehensible to us. But it was also strange in another respect. Unlike all foreign languages I had then heard or studied, it was completely uninflected. There seemed to be no accent or change in tone. The only way to tell the end of a sentence, or of the whole speech, was a pause in or an end to the talking. I had never heard anything like that until, nearly three decades later, I learned a bit of tourist Japanese. (More on this later).

Although we were visibly outsiders and “foreign,” everyone there treated us kindly. Someone explained that the speeches, which got vigorous applause and flashing of lights, were campaigns for tribal office. As the evening wore on, we three had had a little too much to drink. About 2 a.m., we stumbled back to our sleeping bags near the pond and fell asleep.

About 6 a.m., the sun woke us. As we stretched blearily out of our sleeping bags, the same two huge men, on horseback, were out tending their sheep, after what could have been no more than three or four hours of sleep. They smiled and waved to us. One of us remarked dryly, “So much for the so-called ‘lazy’ Indian,” and we all laughed.

That experience convinced me of the “land-bridge” theory of Native-American origin. About twenty thousand years ago, the theory goes, people whose descendants are Native Americans crossed a land bridge from Northeast Asia, including what’s now Japan. (At that time, toward the end of the last Ice Age, the seas were lower and the icy land higher, permitting passage on foot.) As soon as I had learned some Japanese, with its peculiar lack of accent, I recalled the Diné speech I had heard that evening, and it all fell into place for me.

Whatever their origin, the Diné have a special place in American history. They are by far the largest Native American tribe, some 300,000 strong. Most live on both sides of the northern border between Arizona and New Mexico.

The Diné used their unique language as so-called “Code Talkers” in our part of World War II. Theirs was the only military “code” that remained unbroken and inviolate throughout the entire war. Even the Nazis’ “Enigma” code, produced by an early form of mechanical digital computer, was broken.   (Movie goers may recall the 2014 movie, The Imitation Game, which told the story of how Alan Turing, a gay British mathematician, and his crew broke that code.)

As of 2023, some 140,000 Diné live in Arizona. They are, of course, American citizens by birthright and therefore eligible to vote. If only ten percent who are unregistered or reluctant voters vote Democratic in November, they could tip the whole state blue. Ruben Gallego could help keep the Senate blue, and Kamala Harris could add a key “battleground state” to her tally.

That’s where you can help. You can donate to the “Navajo County Native Organizing Fund, a Project of the Arizona Democratic Party,” formerly called “The Northeast Arizona Native Democrats.” You can donate through the secure, progressive donation site, Act Blue, as I do. Just type “Navajo” in the donee search field.

Wouldn’t it be wonderful if the Diné people, whose ancestors came across the land bridge 20,000 years ago to become the first Americans, who have been independent and self-sustaining ever since, and who helped win our battles against European fascism and Japanese Imperialism, were instrumental in saving present-day American democracy from the ravages of a narcissistic egomaniac bent on imposing his own personal kind of fascism on us?

What a story! And you can be part of it if you wish.


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Seven True Tales from Japan, Our Strongest Ally

In about seven weeks, our voters will deliver a verdict on our 248-year-old experiment in democracy. Many of us will be working like crazy, and donating all we can, to influence it. But whatever the verdict, there’s something else we all can do in the meantime: examine our own American culture with fresh eyes.

One way of doing that is comparing other cultures. In my 79 years, I’ve visited some forty foreign countries and lived in two: England (Cambridge) and Russia (Moscow). But as I look back on my travels, one country stands out as unique: Japan.

I’ll can’t describe Japan’s uniqueness. Words alone fail. But these seven stories may convey an impression of what makes Japan worth visiting and knowing:

1. The Shinkansen. Most Americans have heard of Japan’s unique train system. Its long-distance trains race between cities at a “slow” speed of 120 kilometers per hour (72 MPH, the “hikari”) and a faster 180 kilometers per hour (108 MPH, the “nozomi”).

The trains are superbly maintained and spotlessly clean. You buy reserved seats, by number. If you dislike smoke, you can buy a non-smoking seat in a car that never carries smokers, so all its surfaces and air conditioning equipment are smoke-free.

The tracks are so smooth and level that you hardly feel any sense of motion, except an air-pressure increase when another high-speed train passes in the opposite direction. You can work or sleep easily, but if you want to see the scenery, you have to pay attention. If you blink or nod, you might miss a gorgeous hidden bay on the coast, as your train rushes by it in an instant.

The trains in Japan run on time. They run so precisely that the clock in the station clicks into the precise minute slot just as the train opens its doors.

And therein lies my tale. Once, on a shinkansen trip from Kyoto to Tokyo, I exited my car rolling two suitcases. Just after I had left, I sensed that I had dropped my wallet inside. My heart sank, as I thought the doors would soon close and I would lose it forever.

But a Japanese “salaryman”—a complete stranger—rushed out of the car, holding my wallet before him. “Sumimasen!” (“Excuse me!”) he exclaimed, as if he had done something wrong, and handed me my wallet. I bowed and thanked him, and he rushed back into the car just as the automatic doors started to close.

2. Those multicolored, fringed envelopes. Some time before, on one of my early visits, I had found myself in one of the many proprietor-owned small shops in Tokyo. (Still today, small shops predominate over the “big-box” stores that, by and large, have made small retail businesses a thing of the past among us, except maybe online.)

The shop sold stationery, and the proprietor spoke fairly good English. He spent some five minutes helping me find exactly what I wanted.

Since he had been so kind, and since the shop was far from full, I ventured to ask him a question that had troubled me for several visits. All the stationery stores I had seen in Japan sold narrow, multicolored envelopes. Not only did they have pastel stripes; they also had long, multicolored pastel fringes, like the fringes on a cowboy’s leather jacket.

“What are these envelopes used for?” I asked. He replied that Japanese use them to send cash, in stacks of brand-new, ten-thousand-yen banknotes (about a hundred dollars each) for gifts, salaries and donations. Their garish colors and shape, he said, warn postal employees and others to take special care of cash mail.

3. The Errant Cabbie. On my early trips to Japan, I stayed in so-called “business hotels,” which are affordable. Their rooms have complete, private bathrooms, with good showers—all modular—and controls for all the lights, TV and A/C within easy reach on the night table. But the rooms are small: I had to take care doing my arm swings for exercise, so as not to scrape my knuckles on opposite walls.

Once, in Osaka, I stayed in a small business hotel called the “East” Hotel. It seemed to be on a big boulevard, and I was proud to be able to read the three letters of its name in neon katakana (more on this later).

On returning one evening, I gave the cabbie the hotel’s card and said the name. But he had trouble finding it in Osaka’s notoriously confusing labyrinth of streets. Finally, the neon sign “East” hove into view and he pulled up to the curb.

When I asked him how much the was the fare, he said “nothing.” He would not accept any money at all because, he said, he had provided poor service by not taking me right there.

4. The “Golden Week” Debauch. In Japan, the week between our Christmas and New Year (“Golden Week”) is the time when small-firm proprietors take their employees out for dinner and drinks. Drinking, including both sake and stronger stuff, is often to excess.

I had stumbled on this holiday ritual after contacting a Japanese lawyer whom I had helped years before, in law school, by lending him my antitrust notes. He had invited me out to this yearly ritual with employees of his small firm.

What amazed me then—it may be different now—was that all this treating of employees was done entirely in cash. Firm proprietors walked around the busy streets of Tokyo carrying rolls of ten-thousand-yen notes as big as their fists.

They stuffed these wads of cash loosely inside coats or overcoats. Many of them were old and frail. Most, if not all, were drunk and inattentive. And it was late at night.

Yet no one touched them, and none seems to have given any thought to possibly being robbed. It was on this night that the thought of Japan’s big cities being some of the world’s safest began to penetrate my American brain.

5. My Allergy Serums. During the time I was visiting Japan most frequently, I was taking “allergy shots” to desensitize me to various natural pollens and molds. The injections had been prescribed by an American doctor, but they had to be taken regularly to work. So I took them, in small vials cooled with ice, in a thermos jar, on my travels to Japan.

Once, in a bigger hotel, I was trying to reload the ice in the thermos jar from an ice chest in the lobby. A uniformed attendant approached me and offered to help. He (or I) pressed a little too hard on an ice cube, and the glass vacuum enclosure shattered inside the jar with a loud bang.

Just as I began wondering how to fix this problem, and how to retrieve the vials of serum from the mess of shattered glass, the attendant declared “Chotto matte, kudasai!” (“Wait a bit, please!”). He took the broken thermos and set off literally running. I could see him run out the main door of the hotel, across the street, and into a major department store.

In short order, he returned. He had my serum vials, all cleaned of glass shards, safely stored inside a brand new thermos bottle, all stainless steel. The jar he had bought as a replacement was much sturdier and better (and probably far more expensive!) than my broken glass-inside one.

He would not let me pay for anything and sent me on my way with an apology for his clumsiness. In fact, it had been hard for me to know whose clumsiness had caused the breakage, as both of us had been working on the jar at the same time.

6. Tokyo’s Crowded Streets. In one of my most recent trips to Tokyo, I began to notice something unusual. I was in Meguro, a youngish, hip district of Tokyo, in the evening when the wide sidewalks were full of people going to and coming from bars and restaurants. Some of them seemed inebriated, but others seemed to be walking fast and purposefully from late work to home.

But something struck me: in all this fast-moving crowd, no one seemed to come close to bumping into anyone else. So my long-ago scientific background urged me to try an experiment.

Feigning drunkenness, I stumbled around on the broad sidewalk, making eye contact with no one. Several times, I crossed perpendicular to the motion of foot traffic. Not once did anyone bump into me; nor did anyone shout a warning or a reprimand. Instead, the rapid flow of foot traffic parted for me like the Red Sea for Moses.

From this and other like events I reached a tentative conclusion about Japanese people: they look out for each other. They seem to feel an innate responsibility toward other people, even complete strangers and foreigners (“gaijin”) like me.

7. The Red Marking Pen. By now, I hope these stories have convinced you that Japan has a very different culture from ours. But I must tell one more story, about its different history.

The University of Hiroshima Faculty of Law became a “sister school” to the law school where I first taught law: the University of Hawaii’s William S. Richardson School of Law. That relationship supported most of my early visits to Japan.

At one time, I was lecturing on intellectual property before a small audience of law professors and students at the Hiroshima University. I would speak English in paragraphs, then pause for subsequent, sequential translation into Japanese. I highlighted points on a whiteboard in English outline, since most, if not all, of my audience could read English well.

The whiteboard had a collection of various colored pens in a shelf protruding below. I picked up a red marking pen at random and began my outline, but I soon noticed some awkward looks among the audience. The professor who had invited me to speak approached, gently took the red pen from my hand, and explained that, in Japan, red writing is reserved for the Emperor.

* * * I hope these stories have convinced you that Japan has a very different society from ours, but different in a good and enticing way. I’m a big Japanophile. I love traveling there and enjoy it more each time.

There’s no need to be intimidated by Japan’s Asian writing. In addition to the ubiquitous Chinese characters, many of which are simplified, Japan has two alphabets: hiragana (used for Japanese words) and katakana (used for English and other foreign words). You can learn these alphabets with a few hours’ effort and read many of the neon signs around Tokyo, Osaka and Kyoto, among other big cities.

As for transit, Japan has, IMHO, the best public transit systems in the world. In the old days, you had to know hiragana in order to get around Tokyo, because every third or fifth subway pillar would have the name in hiragana, in addition to the inscrutable kanji, or Japanese-adapted Chinese characters.

Today, it’s all infinitely easier. Every subway and train car has an electronic display that announces and displays the name of every station, in advance and on arrival, in Japanese, English, Chinese and Korean.

And don’t even get me started on the food. There are so many different kinds and flavors, and so many price ranges. You can easily afford to eat well, as long as you don’t hang out at the major hotels or restaurants for foreigners. In subway stations, for example, I’ve had excellent bowls of donburi for two, with shrimp or meat, for less than $7.

But what makes Japan most worth visiting today is its unique geopolitical position. It literally stands between us and the behemoth China, which its people understand better than we because they all can read its writing. And of all our close allies, Japan has the largest population (in 2022: Japan 125M, Germany 83.8M, France 68M, Britain 67M; compare Russia: 144.2M), the biggest GDP, the strongest economy and (perhaps tied with Germany) the best reputation for excellence in engineering. Most of all, as I hope these stories illustrate, this vital ally has a unique culture with aspects that we could do well to emulate.



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Twenty-Eight Reasons to Vote for Kamala Harris

1. The overwhelming majority of Trump’s cabinet were straight, white, older Christian men. His Vice-President, Mike Pence (who now disowns Trump), was one. Of Trump’s twenty-two other Cabinet members, all were non-Hispanic white men except for two women (Gina Haspel and Jovita Carranza) and one Black man (Ben Carson). Two are reported to be Jewish or of Jewish descent.

This narrow selection is not just an affront to diversity, inclusion and “fair representation,” whatever that means. It’s a fundamental matter of talent. Today, in 2024, white Christians represent only 43% of the US population. So white, male Christians represent less than 22%.

Do you want a quarterback who’ll leave 78% of the team’s talent on the bench? Our difficult times demand the very best, chosen without fear of favor from our entire population. Kamala Harris reflects our best, and, given these odds, her Cabinet will be far better than Trump’s.

2. President Joe Biden’s current cabinet is far better than Trump’s because it looks much more like America. Of his 25 Cabinet members besides now-VP Harris, twelve are women, and only nine are non-Hispanic white men. Of those, four are Jewish or of Jewish descent, two are Catholic, and one (Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg) is openly gay. Biden’s Cabinet also includes: three Black women, two Black men, three people of Hispanic descent, two women of Asian descent, and the first-ever woman of Native American descent (Transportation Secretary Deb Haaland). Crucially, both Joe Biden’s Secretary of Defense (Lloyd J. Austin III) and Joint Chiefs Chairman (Charles Q. Brown, Jr.) are Black—a point that may move white supremacists to self-select out of our military.

If you want a Cabinet that overlooks no one in a search of talent, and that looks like America, Harris is your choice. According to an independent newspaper in Michigan, “The Biden-Harris administration has appointed more women and people of color to the federal judiciary than any administration in U.S. history.” [Scroll to end]

With Harris as president, the unrestricted search for talent will have started at the top and will continue on down the line. If you self-identify as a “minority” in any way, this election may be your last chance to set things right.

3. Do you want a president who can think straight? If so, take a look at these three word salads served up by Trump. Hold your nose and force yourself to read them, word for word. (Reading is more analytical than listening.)

Next, ask yourself whether these are the words of a clear, incisive thinker and leader, or of a demented and maybe deranged senior losing his grip. Imagine yourself evaluating a candidate for a difficult and demanding job, involving great intelligence, insight and wisdom. Would you hire Trump based these words from his own mouth?

Our media hardly ever serve these salads raw. They clean them up. They may just be trying to make sense out of nonsense. But in doing so, they do you and our country a disservice: they fail to show Trump as he is, and his thinking as it is. Shouldn’t that evaluation be part of your choice in this crucial election?

4. Trump lies a lot, even in something as important and carefully scrutizined as a presidential debate. Here’s a simple tally, reported in clear terms, from a local newspaper. Trump out-lied Harris at the rate of over thirty to one. He told a whopper, on average, every 1.43 minutes.

Can you excuse him as an inveterate salesman, “reality” TV star, self-promoter and carnival barker? When a man lies that much, it’s unclear whether he even knows what’s true and what’s made up. In other words, his contact with reality is tenuous and fragile.

Do you want someone like that with his finger on The Button? For the sake of your and your offspring’s survival, I’d pick the clear-thinking candidate.

5. Planetary heating is real and accelerating. We could be reaching a tipping point at which it becomes self-sustaining. If you want to have just a good chance to slow it down, let alone to stop it, Harris is your candidate.

Harris sponsored, pushed for and cast the critical 51st vote for legislation to build out renewable energy, make electric cars and their charging infrastructure, and to build American factories with good American jobs to do so. Trump wants to “drill, baby, drill,” mostly in the oil-and-gas fracking states of Texas, Colorado, North Dakota, New Mexico, Pennsylvania, Oklahoma and Louisiana. If you want to drive on the Sun and wind and not heat our planet as you steer, Harris is for you.

6. Trump’s single administation was not just a climate disaster. It was a related industrial disaster. By dropping out of the Paris climate agreement, loosening pollution restrictions on fossil-fueled cars, and emphasizing fossil fuels and vehicles that burn them, Trump put our nation on its back foot in advancing five vital next-generation industries: (a) electric cars, (b) advanced batteries, (c) fossil-free short-range aircraft and drones, (d) solar panels and windmills, and (e) the mines and factories that supply their materials. As a result, as this article explains, China now makes more than half of the world’s electric vehicles (and the cheapest ones), more than 80% of the world’s solar panels and 75% of the world’s lithium-ion batteries. And China controls about 60% of the world’s production of windmills. We are now lagging so far behind in this century’s leading industries that we may never catch up.

Trump rode to the White House on a reputation for being a “business leader.” But he’s nothing like the leaders who built this nation’s industrial base: Andrew Carnegie, the Rockefellers, Henry Ford, Steve Jobs, or even Elon Musk. Trump developed, owned and traded (or trades) hotels, golf courses, a failed and fraudulent university, and gambling casinos. He has never designed or built a single piece of machinery, equipment or electronics, so he is no industrialist. When his beloved fossil fuels run out, almost certainly in this century, we will all be left holding an immense bag of stranded assets, including the machinery to dig up fossil fuels, refine them, transport them, and the internal combustion engines that burn them. We will have become a second- or third-world industrial power.

7. If Trump wins again, the Western Enlightenment will end, at least inside the United States. The Enlightenment stands for Reason, including science, in managing human affairs. By his own words, Trump stands for “retribution,” “vengeance,” and “loyalty” to him alone. That’s not Reason. If he wins, the US will go back over 2.5 centuries to the days before the Constitution, when our new territory, not yet a nation, hung on the whim of King George III.

8. Trump’s so-called “conservative” majority on the Supreme Court has done a lot to take us back to the nineteenth century. It’s given us money-driven politics (Citizens United), revocation of women’s reproductive rights (Dobbs overruling Roe), gun massacres, often with weapons of war, nearly every day (Heller, McDonald, Bruen), and rampant voter-suppression laws free from DOJ pre-clearance (Shelby County v. Holder). It has also effectively nullified the clause of the Fourteenth Amendment that disqualifies oath-breaking insurrectionists from holding federal offices (Trump v. Anderson), and put the courts, instead of scientists, doctors and other experts in charge of making close calls on regulatory matters (Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo). Finally, it has enabled despotic rule by making presidents immune from prosecution for breaking the law in performing their duties (Trump v. US). If you don’t want the Court to continue its reactionary supermajority for the entire lives of your children and children’s children, then vote for Harris, who will pick better judges and maybe help reform the Supreme Court.

9. Do you work for a living? Then Harris is your choice for president. She’s a protege of the only US president who ever walked a picket line. She believes in and and supports labor unions, fair wages, and corporations and the rich paying their fare share of taxes. She supports stronger labor laws, including higher minimum wages, no taxes on tips, family leave, child tax credits, and employer-provided health insurance. She also has proposed family housing assistance, especially for first-time home buyers. Trump’s sole significant economic legislation, besides pandemic relief, was to reduce taxes, primarily on the rich and big corporations.

10. Our nation is becoming a lawless society. Observance of law, let alone genuine respect for it, is dropping like a stone. Billionaires and corporations cheat on their taxes. Businesses cheat small customers in ways big and small; they brush away consumers’ complaints like flies.

Online businesses are special offenders. They take away our right of access to our courts with flypaper “click-here” contracts that keep you us out of court, preclude class actions, and relegate good complaints to secret arbitation. And antitrust law, which protects the little entrepreneur and consumers from the oligarchs, has undergone a false-flag revolution that makes it largely toothless.

Our ex-president has had 4,000 lawsuits, six bankruptcies, 34 convictions for felony record falsification, two impreachments, and adjudicated civil liability for fraud, defamation, and sexual assault. He is leading the full-scale attack by powerful people on our rule of law. As surely as a fish rots from the head down, re-electing him will complete our transformation to a lawless society, at least for everyone who’s not rich. If you want big corporations to continue to crush you in the courts as they do now in the marketplaces for both products and your labor, Trump is your man.

11. President Kamala Harris would be a breath of fresh air. She spent thirteen of her twenty-one years in elective office as a prosecutor putting criminals behind bars. Enforcing the law is part of her DNA.

She knows how the law works. She won’t have to consult private, paid lawyers to find out what the law is. And she certaintly won’t use our Department of Justice to circumvent it. She will put respect for law and law enforcement back at the top of the DOJ’s list of priorities. And she will make sure that the law applies equally to the poor and rich, the powerless and powerful, and big tax cheats.

12. Harris is a doer. One reason she stayed mostly close to home in her years as Vice-President is that she had to be near the Senate to cast the tie-breaking vote on key bills. She cast 33 tie-breaking votes, or about 11% of all those cast in our Senate since 1789. That was the largest number cast by any vice-president in American history.

In so doing, Harris enabled passage of major legislation for: (1) Covid-19 pandemic relief; (2) building and repairing infrastructure in every state; (3) major climate-change initiatives, including 500,000 charging stations for electric vehicles; and (4) laws to lower the prices of common prescription drugs like insulin.

13. In contrast, Trump is an inveterate, compulsive liar, quite apart from the desperate lies in his recent debate, discussed in Point 5 above. The Washington Post counted and substantiated 30,573 lies and misleading claims that he made just while president. In stark contast, Harris levels with her colleagues and the American public. She learned to be truthful beause she had to be, under penalty of perjury and disbarment, in her thirteen years as a public prosecutor.

14. Trump’s biggest lie was that Joe Biden “stole” the 2020 election. Fox, which helped promulgate that lie, settled a defamation suit by a voting-machine company (whose machines Fox had accused of being rigged) for $787 million dollars. Fox was forced to settle after news broke that its own announcers and executives had repudiated and even ridiculed that accusation privately while airing it “seriously” as supposedly truthful news. Do you want to encourage a proven liar who will likely incite another insurrection if he loses?

15. Trump favors and encourages political violence, at least by his supporters. He encouraged and helped incite the January 6 Insurrection, which ultimately caused four deaths and injuries, mostly to police. At his rallies, he had repeatedly approved violence against protestors and dissenters, whether by police or bystanders. For example, he lauded a Republican member of Congress for “body slamming” a reporter just trying to do his job.

16. Do you want government and other people’s religion telling you and your loved ones how to live?

Here’s what the Chief Judge of the Alabama Supreme Court wrote [pages 37-38], in ruling that a frozen fetus kept for in-vitro fertilization (IVF) is a “person” entitled to the same rights as a live baby:

“In summary, the theologically based view of the sanctity of life adopted by the People of Alabama encompasses the following: (1) God made every person in His image; (2) each person therefore has a value that far exceeds the ability of human beings to calculate; and (3) human life cannot be wrongfully destroyed without incurring the wrath of a holy God, who views the destruction of His image as an affront to Himself.”

Does this sound like good law to you, let alone science, medicine, or even Reason? Trump lauds and elevates judges like this. Over 80% of radical Christian evangelicals support him.

As president, Trump would likely put people like this Alabama judge in positions of power over you and your family. In contrast, Harris supports families’ reproductive rights and privacy. As a woman herself, she does so out of true conviction and personal experience. If you want government and other people’s religion out of your bedroom and your most intimate family decisionmaking, Harris is for you.

17. Trump is a classic bully, like a kid on a grammar-school playground. He has ridiculed and mimicked—among many others—a women (Meghan Kelly) for menstruating, an aging but beloved actor (Michael Fox) for suffering from Parkinson’s disease, and President Biden himself for suffering (and mostly overcoming) stuttering from an early age. Do you want a supreme leader who has empathy, or one who takes cruel joy in others’ disability and suffering, just like a mean kid?

18. If Trump wins, the US will hang Ukraine out to dry. Without American weapons and ammunition (which fit Ukraine’s needs better than anything Europe makes), Ukraine will lose territory or fall entirely to Putin’s Russia. Then Russia will pull right up to NATO’s border. That will increase the risk of war, including nuclear war. It will also put our strongest and longest allies—countries like Britain, France, Italy, Spain and Germany—closer to the front lines of a possible next world war.

UPDATE:  Less than eight hours after I originally this post first went live, I read a full-throated condemnation of Trump’s wacky distaste toward Ukraine and his self-obsessed reasons for it.

Its author, David French, is one of very few evangelical Christian pundits who is not a Trump fan.  He makes the case that Trump’s refusal to support Ukraine’s defense comes from personal animosity based on  Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s refusal to find dirt on Hunter Biden and inability to find “proof” of a mythical conspiracy-theory Ukrainian server that, rather than Russia, Trump believed had been the source of attempts to influence the 2016 election.

French concludes his analysis as follows: “Trump’s reluctance [in the debate] to say the plain truth—that a Ukrainian victory is in America’s national interest—demonstrates that he is still a prisoner to his own grievances, and there is no one left who can stop him from doing his worst.”   French’s must-read piece also corroborates Point 4 of this post.  Trump is, in French’s words, “corrupt and lunatic” enough to readjust our national foreign policy based on an ally’s failure to advance Trump’s own personal agenda and twisted vision of reality.

    19. If Trump wins, he will support Israel’s rogue and authoritarian Prime Minister Benjamin (“Bibi”) Netanyahu, without much question or pushback. As a result, the chance for a truly self-governing, peaceful Palestianian state will decrease, if not vanish entirely.

Don’t take my word for it. Take the word of Tom Friedman, a knowledgeable, connected and influential pundit on the Middle East, who incidentally is Jewish. Whether you support Israel or the Palestinians (or both!), a Trump victory will bring more disaster and death to the people you care about, because nothing important will change.

Yet more chaos is never a solution for war. Aren’t 76 years of Middle-Eastern carnage enough? A vote for Trump is an indirect vote for Netanyahu and more of the same.

20. Project 2025 is a near-thousand-page blueprint for a second Trump presidency. Although Trump claims not to follow it, and even not to have heard about it, its authors and backers include most of his prominent supporters and financial backers.

Among many authoritarian plans in Project 2025 is one to deprive workers in the federal administration of civil-service protection, fire them, and replace most or all of them with people whose primary qualification is blind loyalty to Donald Trump himself, or to the GOP that he now owns. The Plan also recommends eliminating the entire Department of Education, with all its rules for equal treatment of students and educational excellence.

Under this plan, the people most likely to be dismissed and replaced will be the doctors, engineers, Ph.D.s and other experts who, collectively, keep your: (a) air and water clean (EPA); (b) workplaces safe (OSHA), (c) food and drink healthy and safe (FDA and USDA), (d) drugs, medicines and medical devices safe and effective (FDA); (e) cars, trucks, roads and highways safe (NHTSA); and (f) aircraft safe and properly maintained (FAA). Do you want these tasks to continue to be done by well-qualified experts? Or do you want your and your family’s safety and health in the hands of political appointees chosen for their loyatly to a single man and his wacky right-wing views?

21. Harris has a sunny personality and a lot of empathy. She has lived the life of the middle class, coming up from the bottom as a daughter of two immigrants. Trump was born with a silver spoon in his mouth and belittles, insults and ridicules his opposition. He makes unlikely and absurd claims about his own intelligence, accomplishments and supporters. Like a cruel child, he makes fun of the lame and disabled and selects demeaning nicknames for his opponents, rather than argue with them on the merits. Which is the better way to “make America great again”? to build a coalition to get things done?

22. Trump cozies up to dictators and despots, including Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong Un. He even cited a rising would-be dictator, Hungary’s Viktor Orban, as a “character reference” in his debate with Harris.

Harris opposes dictators and tyrants and lays down bright lines that they shouldn’t cross. As an emissary of President Biden and our US intelligence community, Harris flew to Kyiv to warn Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy four days before the Russian invasion of his country started. That warning probably saved Ukraine from catastrophe. In a world that a nuclear-armed ICBM can cross in 30 minutes, who do you think will keep you and your family safer?

23. Harris believes in democracy. She’s practiced it all her life, with skill, experience, and bipartisanship. She has twenty-one years of experience in elective political office, the most of any president (except her mentor Joe Biden) since and including Bill Clinton. She also has had eight years of higher education. Trump’s only experience in politics is in the top job for four years, and he had only four years of higher education. These deficits show.

24. Many of Trump’s advisers, both formal and informal, were over-the-top right-wing radicals like Steven Bannon, Michael Flynn, and Stephen Miller, and the current conspiracy theorist du jour, Laura Loomer. Trump granted clemency or pardons to many accused or convicted of crimes, including: Bannon, Flynn, Charles Kushner (the father of Trump’s son-in-law), Paul Manafort, George Papadopoulos, and Roger Stone. Mainstream Republican Mitt Romney called Trump’s commutation of Stone’s sentence, “unprecedented, historic corruption.” Do you want a president whose team breaks the law to keep him in power and advance his “policies,” and who then grants them clemency?

25. Trump also granted clemency —against the advice of military leaders—to court-martialed military officers accused or convicted of war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan, and to seven Republican congressmen convicted of crimes: Chris Collins, Duncan D. Hunter, Steve Stockman, Rick Renzi, Robin Hayes, Mark Siljander, and Randall “Duke” Cunningham. Do you want a president who unndermines the rule of law by granting his political backers clemency after they’ve been adjudged to have broken the law? Is this the way to “drain the swamp”?

26. To anyone who has (or is) a grandparent, Trump is showing clear signs of age and dementia, if not derangement. He’s mixed up former President Obama and President Biden, and his own erstwhile Republican rival Nikki Haley with the much older Democrat Nancy Pelosi. These are gaffes that older people sometimes make. But only Trump has recommended nonsense cures like intravenous bleach and livestock-dewormer for Covid. Only he has bashed immigrants for speaking “languages” that “no one speaks.” Trump had a father who suffered and died from Alzheimer’s disease, which is known to have genetic roots and can be inherited.

27. This year’s race for the presidency is a two-person race. No one else has a ghost of a chance of winning. A vote for anyone other than Kamala Harris—or a failure to vote at all—is a vote for Trump. A vote for any third person is just throwing your vote away and, with it, your chance to influence the future of your country and your species.

28. This last point applies on steroids if you vote in a so-called “Battleground State.” Not only does every vote matter there: every vote is magnified at least tenfold.

Here are the margins of people’s individual votes by which Biden won all of each state’s Electoral College votes in 2020: Arizona (10,457), Georgia (12,670), Michigan (154,188), Nevada (33,596), Pennsylvania (81,660), Wisconsin (20,682). The total margin by which Biden won the Electoral College was 44,000 in three of these states. (Biden won the 2020 election nationally by nearly 7 millon votes; but that number didn’t and won’t matter; only the Electoral College vote counts.)

These are hardly astronomical numbers. Don’t be among the few whose votes, or whose failure to vote at all, puts Trump over the top.



For brief descriptions of and links to recent posts, click here. For an inverse-chronological list with links to all posts after January 23, 2017, click here. For a subject-matter index to posts before that date, click here.

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Cause and Effect I: What Will you Do? (Mass Deportation)

[Note to Readers: This is the first in an occasional series of very short posts about the consequences of Donald Trump’s stated priority policies.]

What will you do when the Deportation Troops come to take away your neighbor? your friend? your employee, gardener, cook, nurse, housekeeper, elder-care worker, day-care worker, medical assistant or farm worker?

How will you feel as you watch them being rounded up and taken away: men, women, children, toddlers, and infants, whose only “crime” is seeking a better life?

Will you stand idly by? Will you hide them as Christian Germans did Jewish Anne Frank from the Gestapo? if so, where? in your attic (like Frank)? in your basement, shed, spare bedroom, guest house, closet?

Will you resist? Will you sue? Will you fight? Will you take up arms?

And if you do nothing, how will you get the work done after they are gone? Will you do it all yourself?

Can you expect to pay the same wages after twelve million undocumented workers have been deported, in a time of record high employment? Have you heard that the law of supply and demand applies to wages, as much as to the prices of goods? Might prices for everything rise hard?

The time to consider these questions is now, not when you hear the siren or the knock on the door, or see the dreary troop carriers and prison vans driving down the street outside your home. If you don’t like the answers, maybe you should help GOTV.


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Trump’s Word Salads: Three Served Raw, without Editing

Now that Kamala Harris is the Democratic nominee, only one candidate is showing signs of age and age-related dementia, even derangement. One increasingly self-evident sign is his “word salads”: meandering, almost incomprehensible speech, raw streams of consciousness with little or no logic or sense.

During Donald Trump’s presidency, the Washington Post kept track of his lies and misleading statements. There were 30,573 of them, according to the final tally. That tally appears to have had little impact on Trump’s voters.

Perhaps his cult has come to view him as an oracle and discounts the Post’s so-called “liberal bias.” But it’s hard to discount the word salads as anything other than signs of senile dementia, or in Tim Walz’ parlance, signs of being “weird.” Maybe the Post or some online pundit should collect them all, with video clips and verbatim transcripts, and make them available in single, ever-expanding online source.

In the meantime, I’ve collected a small sample of three in this post. It’s hard work, and I’m pretty sure I’ve just scratched the surface. Just by itself, Trump’s Economic Club rant took me well over a half hour to transcribe, as accurately as I could, from the video clip linked below.

The headings below are mine. If in quotes, they are the question to which the word salad is a response. If not in quotes, they are the general topic of discussion or my own title. Otherwise, except for my final “Comment,” they are the words of Trump himself, verbatim, as transcribed by me from the linked video clips. Read them and weep (The many ellipses represent odd pauses; nothing is omitted.):

Rant against Kamala Harris during rally at Potterville, MI, August 29, 2024 (watch the less-than-one-minute video, in the scrolled down video box, for the full, deranged emotional affect):

“She destroyed the city of San Francisco. It’s — and I own a big building there. It’s — no — I shouldn’t talk about this. But that’s OK. I don’t give a damn because that’s what I’m doing. [cheers from crowd] I should say it’s the finest city in the world — telling ‘Get the hell out of there’ — right? But I can’t do that. I don’t care. You know. I lost billions . . . billions of dollars. You know? Somebody here . . . ‘What do you think you lost?’ I said, ‘Probably two-three billion.’ They said, ‘You think you’d do it again?’ And that’s the least of it. Nooobody [pause] . . . They always say . . . I don’t know if you know . . . [inaudible] Lincoln was horribly treated . . . Uhhh . . . Jefferson was pretty horribly . . . Andrew Jackson, they say, was the worst of all . . . that he was treated worse than any other president. And, I said, ‘do that study again,’ because I think there’s nobody close [laughter from crowd] to Trump. I even got shot. And who the hell knows where that came from, right?”

The Hannibal Lecter rant [Scroll down for Newsmax clip], ostensibly on the subject of immigration:

“‘Silence of the Lamb’ [sic: the title of the movie is actually “Silence of the Lambs,” plural]. . . . Has anyone ever seen ‘The Silence of the Lamb’? The late, great Hannibal Lecter [a fictional killer and cannibal], is a wonderful man. He oftentimes would have a friend for dinner. [slight laughter from crowd]. Remember the last thing? ‘Excuse me, I’m about to have a friend for dinner.’ And this poor doctor walks by, . . . ‘I’m about to have a friend for dinner,’ but Hannibal Lecter. Congratulations! The late, great Hannibal Lecter. . . . We have people . . . that are being released into our country, that we don’t want in our country . . . .”

Response to this question, posed at the Economic Club of New York on September 5, 2024: “If you win in November, do you commit to prioritizing legislation to make child care affordable and, if so, what specific piece of legislation will you advance?”

Here’s Trump’s answer:

“Well, I would do that, and we’re sitting down here . . . . I was, uh, was Senator Marco . . . Rubio, and my daughter Ivanka was so . . . impactful on that issue. It’s a very important issue . . . but, when you talk about the kind of numbers that I’m talking about . . . that . . . because . . . the child care . . . is child care. Couldn’t . . . uhh . . . it’s something . . . You have to have it. In this country, you have to have it.

But, when you talk about those numbers compared to the kind of numbers that I’m talking about by . . . taxing foreign nations at levels that they’re not used to, but they’ll get used to it very quickly, and it’s not going to stop them from doing business with us, but they’ll have a very substantial tax when the send product into our country, and those numbers are so much bigger than any numbers we’re talking about, including child care, that it’s gonna take care. We’re gonna have . . . I look forward to having no deficits within a fairly short period of time, coupled with the reductions that I told you about, on waste and fraud and all of the other things that are going on in our country, because I have to stay with child care.

I want to stay with child care. But those numbers are small relative to the kind of economic numbers that I’m talking about, including growth. . . . But growth also headed up by ‘what’s the plan’ is . . . uhh . . . that I just told you about. We’re gonna be taking in trillions of dollars and, uh, as much as child care, uh, as talked about, is, relatively speaking, not very expensive compared to the kind of numbers we’ll be taking in.”

“We’re gonna make this into an incredible country that can afford to take care of its people. And then we’ll worry about the rest of the world. Let’s help other people. But we’re gonna take care of our country first. This is about America first. This is about ‘Make America Great Again.’ We have to do it. Because right now we’re a failing nation. [weak applause]”

My Comment. Few, if any, reporters get these rants down verbatim. I suppose that reporters don’t like excess verbiage, let alone when it doesn’t make sense.

But here the lack of sense is precisely the point, isn’t it? When reporters cut, digest or summarize the rants, what they publish makes sense out of nonsense. It shows Trump through a reality distortion field, not as he is.

For the guy who aspires to be the sole person authorized to start a nuclear war that would extinguish our species, aren’t rants “news” when they make no sense and scream “disordered thinking,” if not “derangement”? Shouldn’t they be shown full bore and transcribed for reading in their entirely, as I’ve laboriously done above?

The people who attend Trump’s rallies and laugh or cheer at everything he says are probably beyond reason. But don’t the rest of the voters—especially those still trying to make up their minds—deserve to see Trump as he is?

Don’t they silently beg to read his “speeches” as given, without editing or “prettying up”? When reporters make logic and sense by picking the few sentences that seem to say something out of a minutes-long brain fart, aren’t they effectively, if unwittingly, serving as part of Trump’s campaign team? Aren’t they therefore complicit in the possible near-term destruction of our Republic? Inquiring minds want to know . . .


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The New Millennial War

No, I’m not writing about Ukraine or Gaza, or even the whole of the combustible Middle East. None of those wars is likely to last a millennium.

The war I’m writing about is not military—at least not yet. It’s a struggle for secular and political power as important as the struggle between Church and State that took most of the Second Millennium and is still ongoing, for example, in our current battle over reproductive rights.

Our new millennial struggle for power is one between corporations, collectively, and governments, collectively. I first predicted it over nine years ago, in this online essay. Two years later, I noted the results of the first big legal battle inside the US. Corporations won that battle decisively, without much of a fight. With simple “click here” contracts of adhesion, they wiped out most of the legal rights of their Anglo-American customers, developed over eight centuries since Magna Carta.

Our own government refused to fight that battle. Convinced that fluidity in commerce and on the Internet demanded efficiency and speed more than justice, virtually no one in the judiciary or Congress, let alone our Executive, raised a peep.

So the whole eight-century history of individual rights vis-á-vis government vanished for customers of corporations in a flurry of online “flypaper” contracts. Subject to a few general limitations on crimes and torts like assault, mayhem and murder, corporations got to write their own law. Among many other things, they wiped out customers’ right of access to our courts, the right to public trials, the right to a jury, and the right to class-action lawsuits, which make it worthwhile to sue over small swindles that, perpetrated on millions, can reap big bucks. (Our actual Bill of Rights never did restrict corporations or other private parties, only government.)

In that instance, you could say that our government was complicit with corporations, or at least asleep at the switch. But today’s New York Times reports an open battle in a war that will likely continue for most of our new third millennium, at least if our species survives.

As you might expect, the war involved the most flagrant and outrageous proponent of corporate and oligarchic power of our time, Elon Musk. And Brazil, unlike our own government, is not supine. It’s fighting Musk with all the power of its own divided government.

The battle turns on the most important issue of our age: speech. Musk’s notorious Internet mouthpiece, X (formerly Twitter), had been promulgating what a Brazilian Supreme Court Justice reportedly called “disinformation and hate speech.” Musk reportedly refused to obey a court order to take the offending speech down, and he refused to pay fines imposed for that refusal. Instead, he fired some Brazilian staff, so they couldn’t be fined or jailed.

Now, apparently, he’s trying to circumvent the entire government of Brazil by technical means. He’s using his own satellite service, Starlink, to pump the offending speech into Brazil, flouting its authority, and he’s reportedly advising Internet users in Brazil how to circumvent the Brazilian authorities using Internet and satellite technology.

This is hardly subtle. Musk is a notorious free-speech absolutist. He’s attempting to force his personal absolutism on the largest democracy in Latin America and the second largest (after ours) in the Western Hemisphere. And he’s doing it by practical, physical means, without regard to law, order, customs, or traditions. If he wins, he will have become a law unto himself.

The same might be said about our own most dangerous media oligarch, Rupert Murdoch. (I say “our own” because he was granted American citizenship by a special act of Congress, and his media empire reached the peak of its power here.) Protected by our courts’ near-absolutist interpretation of our First Amendment, Murdoch has created the most powerful and pervasive propaganda organ in human history. And it’s entirely private—a corporate empire mostly outside the control of any government.

Murdoch’s empire still hasn’t won its battle against government entirely, however. The Brits have dinged it for unlawful telephone eavesdropping, and last year it settled a defamation suit by a voting machine company falsely accused of helping “steal” the 2020 election for Biden for a record $787 million. But if you want to know how flagrantly and successfully Murdoch’s empire has pursued its private propaganda, watch this clip of John Oliver discussing the false meme of “migrant crime,” which Fox created, systematically and deliberately, over months, out of whole cloth.

As these examples illustrate, corporations can do bad things. They can do really bad things in propagandizing and manipulating voters, freaking everyone out, and driving our nation’s drift toward civil war. The bad things they do could result, next year, in the complete subversion of our government of law and the advent of fascism to America.

But corporations are far from all bad, and that’s the thing that makes this millennial struggle so difficult and interesting. As I’ve outlined in two earlier essays (one [skip the intro, which I now disavow, and search for “role in society”] and two) corporations make and service our airplanes, audio equipment, cars, cell phones, computers, food, homes, furniture, medical equipment, medical supplies, pharmaceuticals, and TVs, among other things. In other words, they are responsible for virtually all of the “creature comforts” that make our lives “modern.” They do a great deal of good.

But precisely because of that, and because they are consequently far more solvent and have far more money than governments, they have the potential to replace governments as the primary practical authority in, and the primary influence on, our individual lives. They are in the process of doing so right now.

The struggle for supremacy between corporations and governments will take centuries, maybe the whole of our new millennium. It will determine not only whether the Western Enlightenment survives the next election and beyond, but whether the Enlightenment and democracy have any ongoing practical effect on human lives as our new century progresses. Just think of all those flypaper contracts you “sign” in the course of your online life.

If governments are to have any real effect on individuals and the evolution and control of corporations, they are doing to have to start waking up now. They are going to have to stand up and resist the avalanches of corporate lobbying and monied corruption and promote the rights of individuals (including the right to organize!) and the power of democratic institutions. The resulting struggle might last as long as, and be even more consequential than, the millennial struggle between Church and State that forged our modern world.

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