Traitor Week #7: Donald Trump—"No puppet; you're the puppet"

      The traitors we've looked at this week have one thing in common: betrayal of the country to which—or, in Judas' case, the person to whom—they supposedly had allegiance.
     Some did this by fomenting revolt. Some welcomed invaders, or sold information to hostile powers, or friends.
     What has Trump done?
     The short, candid, answer is: nobody knows.
     Maybe nothing.
     Maybe he just really likes Vladimir Putin. He certainly acts that way. No crime there. It isn't a crime to fawn.
     That said, Trump certainly acts like a man who's done something wrong. His continual assaults on the Justice Department, FBI, and particularly the Robert Mueller investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential elections.
    If Trump is a criminal, then he's not a very smart one, hanging around the police station, cat-calling the investigators. Lex Luthor the man is not.
    Were I to say, "Trump is a traitor," his supporters would jump up and object that nothing has been proven. And they'd be right. But they, like their leader, are also assailing the process by which what Trump and his associates have done is being investigated. There is no proof he is a traitor. But there is no proof either to support Trump's cries of "witch hunt" mantra and his claims of bias. One email from one FBI agent.  It would be laughable to rational people, an increasingly small subset of America at this point.
     So Traitor Week was a smokescreen? Maybe. I don't know. You can't expect other people to assess the world clear-eyed and then refuse to do so yourself. We don't need to guess, we only need to wait. There is a truth out there, and it will present itself.
    What could that truth be? Perhaps Trump will be found to be deeply in bed, financially, with the Russians. Perhaps there really is a "pee tape." Perhaps his operatives merely huddled with Russian agents, eager to get their hands on the embarrassing Democratic emails the Russians stole, never considering that they were helping a foreign power undermine the legitimacy of the electoral process, as fatal a stab at American democracy as can be imagined.
    We'll find out.
    Honestly, I'm not that interested in what Trump actually did. What is more important, to me, is how indifferent his supporters are to the possibility of Trump treachery. They just don't care. Nothing is going to make them care. This is worse than any meeting with Russians. Their my-side-versus-your-side, dodgeball mentality is a staggering revelation.
    Should it be? A hundred years ago we imprisoned pacifists and deported union leaders. In the 1950s, we were so terrified of the Soviets we adopted their methods, of loyalty oaths and star chambers and secret lists. Johnson lied to Congress to justify the Vietnam War, Nixon scuttled the Paris Peace Talks to help his election chances in 1968. We know far more about Trump's possible treachery than Americans knew at the time of those betrayals.
    Yet we don't feel better off.
    Maybe the horror of the Trump years is not that America became some awful place under his watch, but that a certain segment looked around and realized what we are. The illusion vanishes, the beautiful skin withers, and we see the grinning skull that has been here the whole time.
    Maybe that's it.
    No rush in figuring this out, to be honest. With a voting system hopelessly skewed toward rural Republican voters, I don't harbor much expectation of either flipping Congress this November or defeating Trump in 2020. If you immediately insist that Trump won't be re-elected, then answer this: who'll beat him, and where is that person now? What are they saying and doing? Because it sure isn't resonating now. It's a steady march of Trump Trump Trump and if you cup your ears against that chant and try to detect a warble of Democratic leadership you only hear crickets. It's maddening.
     Sorry to be Debbie Downer. I ran Traitor Week while my wife and I drove our younger son to law school in Virginia. The good news is, it's still a vast, beautiful country. People are still nice, individually. Make eye contact in Ohio and people will smile and nod, even wave.
     A young generation prepares to take up the task from us, and honestly, we have to be optimistic about that, because really, they couldn't do a worse job, could they? Couldn't screw up our country any more resoundingly than we have, could they? An ignorant president with vast, unjustified love for himself, and no concern at all for his country, supported by a devoted swarm of the passionately defrauded. We don't need Robert Mueller to tell us that. Could the next generation do worse than this?
    Of course they could.  There are hells below this one. Keep that in mind.

Traitor Week #3: Benedict Arnold—"Whom can we trust now?"

Benedict Arnold

      No, I'm not Nostradamus—I conceived Traitor Week months ago, starting with Catiline, then Judas, and continuing today with the most famous traitor in American history, posting it now because I'm on vacation. Not that I knew Trump would put in a jaw-dropping display of obsequiousness and betrayal in Helsinki. But because he was a traitor last week, and last month, and last year. Only now it's finally dawning on some folks who have spent years being willfully blind. Welcome to the club. What took ya? And what's going to prevent you from doing that Terminator II metal man thing you do where, however the Trump is Great worldview is blown apart by reality, your folly somehow manages to reconstitute itself and keep plodding forward? 

     Whoever glorifies the past is displaying a profound ignorance of it. People weren't nobler or better back then. They were always people, alas. What happens is we forget the long stretches of selfishness and meanness, remembering only the stuff we want to remember: the moments of splendor, chiefly.      
      Although there are exceptions. With traitor Benedict Arnold, we tend to remember the treason and forget the glory that went before.
      Benedict Arnold was a hero of the American Revolution. He was with Ethan Allen and his Green Mountain Boys when they captured Fort Ticonderoga. Half his men died or deserted during the long march to Quebec City, where Arnold's leg was shattered by a British musket ball. He was brave, daring, dedicated.
     But Arnold's heroism, rather than fortify the man, only embittered him, and he felt less appreciated, more passed over (not without reason; he had powerful enemies). He sulked. He complained to Washington, who summed up the American mood of the moment in a way that would shock our veneration of the Spirit of '76.
     ''Such a dirty, mercenary spirit pervades the whole," the Father of Our Country wrote, "that I should not be surprised at any disaster that may happen.''
     That disaster was Benedict Arnold, who took his greed and jealousy and began putting out feelers to Mother England around 1779. He made contact with the British and, as befits the business man he had once been, carefully negotiated just how much he would get for the specific treason he had in mind—the surrender of the key American fort at West Point. 
      He earned the command, and all was going according to plan when one Maj. John Andre, of the British Army, fell into American hands carrying incriminating papers of Arnold's plot. Often it is not the traitor himself but his confederates, who first give away the game.
     "Arnold has betrayed me," Washington despaired. "Whom can we trust now?''    
     Not as many as Washington would have liked. A quarter of colonists, remember, supported the Crown, and given they had been subjects a few years earlier, it could hardly be considered treason, and more a case of picking the wrong side of history. With Arnold, the treason is more direct, since he wore a uniform.
     Arnold not only escaped, but published a letter, rationalizing his treason with the classic taken-out-of-context defense. As is common with traitors, he insisted he was a patriot, trying to make his country great again:
     "Love to my country actuates my present conduct," he wrote. "However it may appear inconsistent to the world, who very seldom judge right of any man's actions."

     Arnold escaped to serve the British during the war and to live in London afterward, his only punishment being that his name would go down in infamy for the rest of American history. Although I would suggest that another name might soon be synonymous with treason, drawing even more scorn that Arnold's
     Although we are in different times and the amazing development now is that while Trump's treason has long been suspected and openly discussed, his supporters show an astounding resilience. There is no development so explosive that its radiance penetrates through the hands clapped over their own eyes. The skill of ignoring sins, honed on gaffes and insults, has proved strong and durable. The issue of just how strong and how durable are the institutions on which our country's future will depend. 

Traitor Week #2: Judas Iscariot—"Do quickly what you're going to do"

     I could have started Traitor Week with Judas, the ur-traitor in Western culture. 
     But everybody knows Judas, or thinks they do, so I decided to go chronologically and begin with Catiline, nearly a century earlier. 
     Plus Catiline has the benefit of being undeniably real, while Judas is obscured in  the mist of the Biblical—while few suspect Jesus was spun from whole cloth, after that the factual nature of the disciples is hazy at best. But Judas was no doubt an important literary figure, whose famed treachery, whether it occurred or not, echoes to this day. 
  
     In the 34th and final canto of "The Inferno," after a gut-turning, heart-rending trip through all nine circles of Hell, replete with sorrow and torture, Dante gets to the very bottom, the sump of the pit, and his guide Virgil turns to him and says, in essence "Okay, now here you have to brace yourself." ("Ecco il loco ove convien che di fortezza t'armi" literally, "Here is the place where you need to be a fortress.") 
    Which of course makes Dante go cold and  feel faint, though that isn't anything new for him.  The duo turn the corner and see Satan, a giant, buried to his chest in ice. Three faces on one head, a toothy mouth in each face, and in each mouth a sinner in agony, being chewed to bits. 
    "That guy," Virgil says to Dante, "Who suffers the most is Judas Iscariot."
    Of course it is. Sins like greed and fornication are minor misdemeanors compared to betrayal, and Judas is the very definition. To be a Judas means betrayal. What's interesting to me is though almost every soul they meet in Hell is closely quizzed by Dante, allowing the damned to recount the crimes that earned them eternal damnation.
    There is no such questioning of Judas. He never speaks. The reader knows. Judas betrayed Jesus Christ to the Romans, he led them to the Garden of Gesthemane. That's pretty much his entire role in the Bible. He does little else.
    The tougher question is why, and here even the Gospels disagree. Greed—those 30 pieces of silver. The aforementioned Satan injecting himself into his heart. That's the reading of John—Jesus announces that one of his disciples will betray him; the Gang of 12 immediately demand to know who, Jesus says, the person he is going to hand this bread to will betray him, gives it to Judas, saying "Do quickly what you're going to do." 
    Which sort of undercuts the obloquy that Judas has been held in for 2,000 years or, as Joan Acocella put it in the New Yorker: "If Jesus informs you that you will betray him, and tells you to hurry up and do it, are you really responsible for your act?"
     Apparently yes. Remember that "Judas" is just the Greek rendering of "Judah," which is "Joe" for Jewish people. Judas has to betray Jesus to justify his co-religionists' persecution, though I don't see why the Pharasees aren't enough.     
    Once the Bible finishes with Judas, however, popular culture gets in its licks, although its interpretation of Judas cuts across the spectrum.
    At one end, in Bulgakov's "Master and Margarita," Pilate is treated so sympathetically, he becomes the good guy—the most richly-drawn character in the book, certainly more appealing than Jesus. Yet Bulgakov doesn't even allow Judas to kill himself; Pilate orders him assassinated, a grab at redemption.
    At the other extreme is  the hit musical "Jesus Christ Superstar," which could have more accurately been called "Judas Iscariot Superstar," since it's really the story of his disillusionment with Jesus, his temptation, betrayal and remorse.
     The remorse, I would suggest, is the essential part of the story. Remember, the Bible was crafted, in essence, as a guide to behavior, and Judas is the model for all who sin, who betray not Jesus, the man, but his teachings. You might get the silver now, but you'll be sorry later. That's the Christian template for sin.
    Their policy in the personal realm, that is. In the political realm, when dealing with the sins of the powerful, we see another dynamic altogether. Christians line up to shrug sin off, when convenient, "Sure, Donald Trump sins. So do I. We are all flawed, all in need of grace." They wave away error. When they want to. 
     When they don't, it's damnation, both now and later. 
     Judas' motives come into play because motive is always a mitigating factor—are you doing what you think is right, or abandoning your principles for personal gain? The question of whether Trump genuflects before the Russians because he admires strongmen like Putin, because Putin has incriminating evidence against him, because of business interests, is something historians will argue over forever. My guess is that Putin saw something that 40 percent of the country couldn't: that Trump is a dumpster fire who will drive the country to the brink of ruin. So Putin backed Trump, as a way to strike at the country, and Trump fell in love with Putin because he is a broken man who adores anybody who likes him. The welfare of the country never entered into it. Which makes Trump worse than Judas. At least Judas thought about Jesus when betraying him. For Trump, the United States of America, its needs and interests, never crossed his mind, the mind of a man locked in fatal embrace with himself, doting on Trump, Trump, Trump, me, me, me, all the time. Who doubts that it is so? 

Tomorrow: Traitor Week #3: Benedict Arnold.

Traitor Week #4: Vidkun Quisling—"A vile race of Quislings"

Vidkun Quisling

    Few traitors can commit their betrayals alone. They need collaborators, co-conspirators, dupes, lackeys, water carriers. Even the most famous traitors do. As singular as the role of defense minister Vidkun Quisling was in handing Norway over to the Nazis in April, 1940, and as unpopular as he would become, he had help. Lots of it, as Winston Churchill pointed out in a speech on June 12, 1941, when Quisling's name was already well on its way to becoming a staple in many of the world's languages:

      "The prisons of the continent no longer suffice. The concentration camps are overcrowded. Every dawn German volleys crack. Czechs, Poles, Dutchmen, Norwegians, Yugoslavs and Greeks, Frenchmen, Belgians, Luxemburgers make the great sacrifice for faith and country. A vile race of Quislings—to use a new word which will carry the scorn of mankind down the centuries—is hired to fawn upon the conqueror, to collaborate in his designs and to enforce his rule upon their fellow countrymen while groveling low themselves. Such is the plight of once glorious Europe and such are the atrocities against which we are in arms."

     Joseph Goebbels was so dismayed to see the name of the Nazis' man in Norway being used as a synonym for "collaborator," he used his propaganda machine to try to similarly tar the names of pro-Allied politicians as synonyms for a people leading their country to disaster.
     It didn't work. Quisling's unpopularity couldn't be reproduced. He was already disliked in the 1930s, when Quisling created the Norwegian fascist party and embraced Hitler. Quisling was more enthusiastic about the Nazis invading Norway than Hitler had been, and had to convince him. 
     Contempt for Quisling only deepened when the war broke out and Quisling handed his country over to the Germans, infecting a group you might not expect: his supposed masters. The Nazis also grew to hate and distrust Quisling, because he couldn't get things done. He was too disliked.  When Quisling was installed as prime minister in February, 1942, his popularity was estimated at 1 percent, and was met with terror bombings and the resignation of the Supreme Court, en masse. He was more an annoyance than an asset; eventually the Germans had to forbid Quisling from writing to Hitler.       
     Not that much of this sank in. The vanity of the traitor knows no bounds. Even as the war ended, Quisling assumed he could slip out of this misunderstanding. He always had Norway's best interests at heart.  In May, 1945, he surrendered himself, arriving at prison in the silver-plated Mercedes-Benz limo that Hitler had given him. Quisling complained about being kept in an ordinary cell, and that its chair was too small. His captors were not sympathetic.
     Sullen and defiant, Quisling shouted out at his trial that he was the "Savior of Norway!" 
     He was sentenced to death before a firing squad, and executed in October, 1945. His last words were the very Trumpian, "I am convicted unfairly and die innocent." 
     Which leads to an interesting question: will it be "Trump," as in, "If he sells those secrets he'll become a Trump." Or the lowercase "trump"? And how many of his collaborators will share his deathless shame? Time will tell. 

Tomorrow: Traitor Week #5: Julius and Ethel Rosenberg.

Traitor Week #6: Jonathan Pollard—"I never intended or agreed to spy"

Jonathan Pollard

      Jonathan Pollard is the only American ever given a life sentence for providing secrets to an ally. The Naval intelligence officer was arrested in 1985 for passing military secrets to Israel because, as he put it, "the American intelligence establishment collectively endangered Israel's security by withholding crucial information."
    He always insisted, "I never intended or agreed to spy against the United States."
    No matter.
    As Traitor Week ends tomorrow with, of course, the man of the hour, we must realize that it doesn't matter what your intentions are. Or the entity with which you are colluding. Republicans trying to justify Trump's alleged collaboration with the Russians by saying the Russians aren't so bad are badly missing the point. They could be, not our fiercest enemy—as the Russians certainly are—but one of our closest allies, like Israel. Treason is treason. The crime could be a classified cookie recipe given to Canada. 
     It's important to understand why: it isn't so much the specifics of what is being revealed to whom, but the structure being revealed and who else might see it. The information Pollard passed along to the Israelis cast a light on American intelligence practices and procedures, and of course once the Israelis knew them, there was no guarantee where else they might go. And indeed, intelligence officials believe that material leaked by Pollard to Israel eventually found its way to the Soviet Union. 
     It's a shame that the GOP doesn't apply the same "the law's the law" rigidity it directs at every hardworking immigrant who crossed the border illegally decades earlier to the president and his associates. But hypocrisy is the grease on which Trump's America spins.
     So even if you just thought you were accepting the help of friendly Russian intelligence agency with a load of embarrassing emails of your rival in the presidential campaign, what matters is that you undercut your nation's vital interests—say, being able to hold free and fair elections—for your own selfish, private interests, whether those are pro-Israel or pro-yourself. Noble motives don't get you off.
     They might come close. Bill Clinton was about to release Pollard, but his CIA director, George Tenet, threatened to resign if he did—America's intelligence agencies tend to always take espionage more seriously than does the executive branch, Republican or Democratic. 
     During the Clinton administration, Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz was a vocal defender of Pollard—a reminder that having the back of traitors isn't new to Dershowitz, if their politics align with his.
     Pollard served 30 years of a life sentence—his wife, implicated in his actions, served three— before Obama commuted his sentence. Thanks Obama. Some Americans felt that Pollard's long sentence was unfair—Chelsea Manning served just seven years after releasing far more damaging documents to Wikileaks. But justice is a crapshoot, and should you get your hand caught in the machinery, the rest of you just might follow that fingertip in. Once you are stuck with an espionage charge, and that jailhouse door clangs behind you, it can be a challenge to get out.  The public tends to forget about you. Something for Paul Manafort and Trump's other confederates, abandoned by their boss to twist slowly in the wind, must be thinking about a lot lately. 

Traitor Week, #1: Catiline "Our very lives and liberty are at stake"

Cicero denounces Catiline, by Cesare Maccari 

     Americans have a hard time wrapping their heads around treason. Maybe because our history is so relatively free of traitors Protected by our oceans, enjoying our supposed freedom and relative security, we just don't expect our citizens to be in the thrall of foreign powers. 
     Then again, considering that the Southern half of the country renounced the Union and broke away to form a new nation in 1861, all to preserve slavery, maybe we have treason aplenty, but just don't recognize it as such. Nixon, remember, scuttled the Vietnam peace talks to help himself get elected in 1968. Tens of thousands of American soldiers subsequently died. The truth came out, but barely left a mark on him.
     Even now, with a president so obviously enamored with the Russians, if not in their actual employ, nearly half our country displays a willful blindness even toward the possibility. They don't want to know.
     They should. History, including American history, is rife with traitors, and as their stories, each its own way, could be applicable to the current moment, and since readers might be unfamiliar with most, I thought them worth revisiting during the mid-summer lull, while I am on vacation from the paper and Donald Trump is holding his Treason Summit with his master, Vladimir Putin.

     Much of our Roman history comes to us through Shakespeare. We know Julius Caesar, and his murder, "Et tu, Brute?" Plus a few writers—Marcus Aurelius, Virgil—whose works remain popular. We are aware of the worst emperors—Nero, Caligula. We know the empire fell to various Goths and Vandals.
     And that's about it.
     Ancient Rome's greatest traitor isn't on the radar, or wasn't, until Donald Trump was elected and started his virulent opposition to key elements of our republic—the free press (when it disagrees with him); the courts (when they make rulings he doesn't like). His efforts to burn down our government evoked another patrician who wanted to burn down his motherland: Catiline.
     In March, 2017, Nation reporter M.A. Niazi dubbed Trump, "The American Catiline," though his article bogs down more on the historical differences—Lucius Sergius Catiline lost two elections in 65 and 64 BC and his plot to seize power in 63 BC failed. He was killed in battle, which displays more courage than Trump could ever muster.
    Besides, Trump won.
    To me, the similarity is more a matter of tone, particularly after I took the time to read Sallust's "The War With Catiline" translated by J.C. Rolfe (Harvard University Press: 2013).
     The parallels pop out.
     "Catiline could be held up as a prime specimen of a decadent nobleman who sought political advancement by espousing the cause of the drowntrodden simply to maintain and further selfishly his own dignitas," Rolfe wrote in his introduction, using an untranslatable Latin word akin to "prestige."
    That sounds familiar. Or consider Sallust's description of Catiline's motives:
     "His insatiable mind always craved the excessive, the incredible, the impossible. After the tyranny of Lucius Sulla, Catiline had been assaulted by the greatest passion for seizing control of the government, and he did not consider it at all important by what means he achieved his objective, provided he gained sovereignty for himself."
    Sound familiar? 
    Sallust saw Catiline as a reaction, not to adversity, but success.
     "Those who had easily endured toil, dangers, uncertain and difficult undertaking, found leisure and wealth, desirable under other circumstances, a burden and a curse. Hence a craving first for money, then for power, increased; these were, as it were, the root of all evils. For avarice subverted trustworthiness, integrity and other virtuous practices; in place of these it taught insolence, cruelty, to neglect the gods, to set a price on everything."
     Trump wasn't conjured up by desperate poor Americans, but by desperate rich ones.
      Just as the right cavils against the media, even while Fox dominates TV news, so Catiline in his speeches made it seem like his rebellion was an uprising of those on the fringes, and not powerful insiders trying to grab even more.
     "All the rest of us, energetic, good—nobles as well as nobodies—have been a common herd, without influence, without prestige, subservient to those to whom, if the state were healthy, we would be an object of dread," Catiline told his supporters. "Accordingly, all influence, power, office, and wealth are in their hands...How much longer still will you put up with this, o bravest men?"
    Like Trump, he made tearing down the state seem easy.
     "We need only to begin," he exclaimed, "existing conditions will take care of the rest.
    Ring a bell? Sound familiar? The Roman mob also bought it. Ancient Rome was also a powerful republic stabbing itself in the heart.
     "At that period the dominion of the Roman people, it seems to me, was by far the most pitiable," Sallust writes. "Although the whole world, from the rising to the setting of the sun, had been subdued by arms and was obedient to Rome, although at home there was peace and wealth, which mortals deem the foremost blessings, nevertheless there were citizens who from sheer perversity set out to destroy themselves and the state."
     The Republic of Rome, like the United States of America, had no enemy who could damage it the way a committed traitor could. 
     The left tortures itself with polls, amazed that Trump's supporters cling with him. So did Catiline's followers
     "Neither was anyone out of such a great throng induced by a reward to betray the conspiracy, nor did a single individual desert Catiline's camp, a disease of such great intensity and just like a plague, had infected the minds of a great many of our countrymen."
     In a sense, we have it worse. Catiline was opposed by the greatest Roman statesmen of all time, Cicero and Cato. The Democrats are a ragtag, disillusioned band, placing our hope in Joe Biden.
     Cato saw the problems as an embrace of enemies and a paralyzing cynicism:
     "Citizens of the highest rank have conspired to set fire to their native land; they summon to war the Gauls, a nation most bitterly hostile to the very name of Rome....
     "We extol wealth, we pursue idleness. No distinction is made between good men and bad, and ambitious appropriates all the prizes for merit. And no wonder! When each of you takes counsel, separately for his own personal interests, when you are slaves to pleasure in your homes and to money or influence here, the natural result is an attack upon the defenseless republic."
     He tried to put the situation in the materialistic terms that even senators could understand.
     "I call upon you, who have always valued your houses, villas, statues, and paintings more highly than the nation; if you want to retain the possessions to which you cling, of whatsoever kind they are, if you want to provide freedom from disturbance for indulging your pleasures, wake up at least, and lay hold of the reins of government. At issue is not revenues or the wrongs of our allies, but our very lives and liberty are at stake."
     Cato's appeals at least inspired action. Today, the Trump crisis isn't even perceived by his supporters, at least not publicly. There is no one to stir them to resistance. At least not yet. 

Tomorrow: Traitor Week #2: Judas Iscariot.

Traitor Week #5: Julius and Ethel Rosenberg—"A society which does not defend itself is not worthy of survival."

     Now that betrayal of our country has practically become a Republican folk illness—79 percent approve of Donald Trump's disgraceful genuflection to Vladimir Putin this week—it might be the right moment to remind ourselves that liberals have done their share of traitor-coddling, once upon a time.
    Remember the Rosenbergs, Julius and Ethel? A married couple in their mid-30s, accused of passing atomic secrets to the Soviets. Julius had worked in a sensitive Army job during World War II; Ethel enlisted her brother who worked at Los Alamos.
     During their trial, and for decades after, the Left was enthralled by the notion that the Rosenbergs were innocent, victims of a police state trying to squash dissent. The couple had either been set up, or were being persecuted for non-crimes.
     Writers such as Nelson Algren, scientists like Albert Einstein, world celebrities like Picasso, all spoke out in defense of the Rosenbergs. Sartre compared the case to the Dreyfus affair—the Rosenbergs were Jewish. Which didn't stop the pope from appealing to Eisenhower for clemency.
     In calling for the death penalty, U.S. Attorney Irving Saypol said, "A society which does not defend itself is not worthy of survival."
     Common wisdom is that Ethel was a bit player, condemned to encourage Julius to tell all he knew. It didn't work. "She called our bluff," a prosecutor later reflected.
      Those caught up in the Trump campaign collusion with the Russians should not forget Ethel Rosenberg. They might cling to the notion that whatever role they played was small they'd somehow escape notice. Ethel's low level of involvement didn't matter when the switch was thrown. 
     ''When you're dealing with a conspiracy, you don't have to be the kingpin," said James Kilshiemer, a prosecutor who built the case against the Rosenbergs. "You have to participate,."'  Treason is like pregnancy; you can't do it a little.
     The couple died in the electric chair at New York's Sing Sing prison on June 19, 1953.   
     After the fall of the Soviet Union, classified documents came to light showing that not only had the Rosenbergs conducted espionage, but they recruited other spies to join them. 
     Oops.
     Even after their undeniable guilt came to light, some kept the flame,
     "While the transcriptions seemed inconclusive, they forced me to accept the possibility that my father had participated in an illegal and covert effort to help the Soviet Union defeat the Nazis,''wrote his son Robert Meeropol who defended his parents for years.
     "Accept the possibility..." "defeat the Nazis" -- because it wasn't so bad to hand over atomic secrets to a foreign power during World War II, since we both faced a common enemy. Nice try,
     A reminder: no matter how damning the evidence against any traitor, there will always be defenders. A 79 percent approval rating of Trump kowtowing to Putin means that no amount of proof will be enough to shake his support. We might as well get used to that now. 

Summer Fiction Week — "Bad Report Card"

                                     Bad Report Card


     I pick up coffee and an uncut bagel from the cheerful Korean woman at the grocery near my  building. On impulse, I add the Post. Sometimes I get it, sometimes I don't. Ten minutes later, upstairs at the office, I sip the coffee, bite the bagel, and look at the newspaper. "JERRY ROBERTS' GRADES PLUNGE" the front page screams.
     Jerry Roberts is my 9-year-old son. I set down the bagel, pick up the phone, hit "1" on the autodial. Two rings and it's Claire, my wife. "Honey..." I begin. "Yes, the Post," she says, without my asking. "They called yesterday. I forgot to tell you."
     The pictures looks as if shot through a telephoto lens from 100 yards away. Grainy, his hair uncombed. He looks like a maniac. As usual, the headline overstates the gist of the article. From a B to a C in math. From an A to a B minus in English. Everything else pretty much the same. Some plunge.
     Still, repercussions come quick. Long Island Newsday calls before I finish the coffee. "He's growing," I say, around the last mouthful of bagel. "This is nothing that hasn't happened before." My boss sticks his head into my cubicle, pretending to ask about some small business matter. But he soon cuts to the chase. "So how's everything at home?" he says, awkwardly faking conversation, the way a bum asks you for the time. "How's your boy?"
     "Well Stan, you know how kids are," I say, exuding false bonhomie like a gas, squeaking back in my chair, spreading my hands goofily and grinning. "Yadda yadda yadda." He seems mollified.
     Nothing is getting done, work-wise, so at lunch I head over to Jerry's school. Two television trucks parked outside—big, white, boxy with telescoping masts swaying high above.  One WNYC, the other, French television. I enter the school—that school smell, what is it? Boiled hot dogs? Wet scarves?
     Empty classrooms—everybody is at recess, on the patch of crumbling asphalt penned by chain link fence they call a playground. Out back I find Jerry's teacher, Mrs. Something-or-other standing near the Four Square courts, her little powder blue cardigan draped over her shoulders and held in place by a chain and clips. She calmly watches two boys pound the tar out of each other. "I'm Mr. Roberts," I say. She jerks her thumb over her left shoulder, wordlessly.
     Jerry's sitting by himself, on a milk carton, his hands placed limply on his knees, staring at a spot on the ground. I squat down on my haunches, reach out and squeeze his shoulder. "Hey sport," I say, in my best, reassuring manner. He doesn't look at me. I resist the urge to lift my hand off his shoulder and slap him upside the head. Instead, another gentle squeeze and a full 60 seconds of silence. 
     "The Post was mean to me," he finally sniffs, pitifully, starting to cry. He looks at me for the first time. Ball in my court. "Now there hey," I say. "Don't Jerry. Don't." I stand up, and look around for help. Some two dozen kids holding sticks with red streamers fluttering at the ends, one in each hand, are going through an elaborate running dance, arms straight out like airplanes taking off. It looks like something out of a Red Chinese opera. "Come on," I say.
     I lift him up and sling him over my shoulder. He doesn't struggle or protest. Walking quickly I pass the teacher, who starts to say something, but I cut her off. "How did the Post find out about his grades, anyway?" I ask. Her eyes narrow. "Quisling! Traitor! Judas!" I shout at her, over my shoulder, gesturing with my free arm.
     On the street the television people, pressed against the window of Jerry's empty classroom, notice us and hurry in our direction, each woman reporter in full high-heeled tottering trot, their cameramen and sound men chugging after them. New York is faster than France.
     "Mr. Roberts!" she yells, as I reach the corner. "Mr. Roberts!" I shift into overdrive and nearly sprint in front of a garbage truck. The pause gives the French reporter just enough time to get into earshot. "A qui me louer?" I hear her screaming as I hustle out of sight. "Quelle bete faut-il adorer? Quels couers briserai-je? Quel mensonge dois-je tenir? Dans quel sang marcher?"
       Three blocks away, my heart is going like an air hammer as I set Jerry down. He is beaming happily—he enjoys the escape; it is something from a TV show, something he can understand. We stand there smiling at each other, catching our breaths. I look down at him and he looks up at me with a "Now what?" look. "You want a beer?" I say. This doesn't register. "Let's go home to your mother." We do.
     After dinner we sit on the sofa and laugh as WNYC runs a four-second clip of me huffing by, Jerry over my shoulder like a blue duffle bag with legs, change jingling in my pockets, my hair sticking up in random directions, a look of sweaty lunacy slapped all over my mug. God knows what they'll think in France.
     The next morning, I go for the pecan roll with the coffee. The papers ring me like a bell—"Bethpage Dad Sloughs Off Grade Shocker," Newsday bleats. The Post puffs me into a trend: "U.S. School Score Lag—Are Lax Dads to Blame?" At work, Stan mutters, "You could have mentioned the new thermocouple unit," as we pass in the hall. I look bad, but at least the focus has shifted away from Jerry. And we got knocked off the front page by a 12-year-old girl in Elizabeth, New Jersey who still wets  the bed.
     That night, Jerry and I make her a big Valentine—a red construction paper heart festooned with glitter and stickers and gold braid from gift boxes. In the middle, Jerry writes "HANG IN THERE HONEY!" and we all sign it.

                                                           # # #


      The questions the French TV reporter shouts out, by the way, are lifted verbatim from Arthur Rimbaud's poem "A Season in Hell." Translated: "For whom shall I hire myself out? What beast should I adore? What holy image attack? What hearts shall I break? What lies should I uphold? In what blood tread?" I've always considered that passage to be the credo of professional journalism.



  

So now being the GOAT is all caps and a good thing...

     Summer's over?! And I never got the chance to lie under a cherry tree, a la Sydney J. Harris, and just muse. About the small mysteries of life. About writing and language. That's so unfair. 

     I blame the 24/7 news cycle. You just can't get in the proper musing fashion with your ex-president vigorously manifesting himself as a traitor, continually ramping up to tear the country apart violently to return himself to undeserved high office.     

     But you can try.
     I watched Serena Williams play in the U.S. Open — my wife is a tennis fan. And while it was thrilling and dramatic, one small aspects of her monumental success kept tripping me up. 

     Just look at it. 
     She's the goat. And not because Williams lost her bid for a 24th major title. Everyone was intensely gratified by how well she played, at 40, against opponents who sometimes weren't yet born when she began her professional career.
     No, Williams is the GOAT because that stands for "Greatest of All Time."
     You know that. I know that.
     And yet. It just doesn't feel right.

     To me. 
     Decades of habit cannot be abandoned in a moment. Up until fairly recently, a goat, in sports, was someone who failed in spectacular fashion. Boston Red Sox first baseman Bill Buckner was perhaps the archetypical goat for letting Mookie Wilson's grounder go between his legs in the sixth game of the World Series. Charlie Brown was a goat. 

     (Note that, in this strip, Charlie despairs at being "the goat," which strikes me as unusual, since the definite article seems more used in the greatest sense. Blow a play and you risk becoming a goat, part of a braying herd. Rise to the summit and you achieve the rare distinction of becoming the GOAT.)

     Yes, I'm always the one, when some other old coots complain about changes in the language, who points out that language is supposed to be plastic. That's something of an in-joke, as plastic today refers to the artificial substance, while previously it evoked the ability to be formed, taken from the Greek word plastikos, to mold or sculpt (hence "plastic surgery.")

     Goat as a metaphorical term, and not just a barnyard animal, is traced all the way back to 1530, when William Tyndale translated the Bible from Hebrew and offered up "And Aaron cast lottes outer the gootes; one lotte for the Lorde, and another or a scape-goote."

      Hence "scapegoat," or animal upon which the people of Israel's sins were imposed upon, came into the language. "Scape" was coined in the 1300s as a shortened term to describe the act of escaping. Thus a "scapegoat" is literally an escaped goat, as opposed to the one that gets its throat cut. 

Metropolitan Museum

     The new meaning, "Greatest Of All Time," starts with Muhammad Ali, who used the term to refer to himself. It was abbreviated by LL Cool J, who put out an album, "G.O.A.T.," in 2000.

     This was all sorted out a couple years back by Sports Illustrated and others. I'm late to the party, I know.

      I wonder. Will the Charlie Brown sense be effaced by the Serena sense? I could say I hope not, because the Bill Buckner goat is such a useful term. What would its replacement be? A ... what? Loser? Clod? Blunderer? Nothing comes close. While GOAT, as in Greatest Of All Time, still has a whiff of the barnyard. At least to me, though that has to be my age, since few seem hesitant. "The most fierce GOAT = Serena Williams," former presidential press secretary Jen Psaki tweeted this week. The language changes, and time reminds us of the fact. When the Hindenburg zeppelin blew up at Lakehurst, New Jersey, in 1937, Herb Morrison, broadcasting its arrival on WLS, described the disaster as "terrific," meaning "full of terror." It isn't terrific anymore.

In defense of John Kass

     Back in my Medill days, professors would sometimes pose a trick question: What is the main purpose of a newspaper?
     Apple polishers and future do-gooders would wave their arms, eager to rhapsodize about reporting the news and speaking truth to power, penning the first draft of history, blah blah blah. We worldlier sorts would let them embarrass themselves for a while, then float our hands up.
    "To make money and stay in business," one of us would drawl, with a half smirk, knowing even before we were told that this is the only correct answer. Because a paper that has gone out of business can't do anything good, bad or indifferent. The Chicago Daily News was a fantastic newspaper, the best in the city, right up until March 4, 1978. Then it was nothing but a painful memory.
     One way newspapers try to avoid this fate is by casting a very wide net. A newspaper is a universe, or should be. Like Walt Whitman, they contain multitudes. There isn't a section titled, "Airy nonsense for dupes"—we call it the horoscope, and the Sun-Times ran two last time I checked because apparently one just isn't enough. We run three pages of mostly undistinguished comics. Why? When I once asked why we didn't dial the comics back to make room for actual journalism, the features editor shot me a withering look that said, "Because readers would show up here carrying gas cans and solemnly set themselves on fire in front of the paper, that's why." Half of the people who tell me they read the Sun-Times only for my column then add, "...and Sudoku." Which is fine. You can read the Sun-Times for me and the tide tables. Or just for the legal notices. All good, so long as you read.
     That is why John Greenfield's Jan. 11 piece in the Chicago Reader, "John Kass washing his hands of responsibility for last week's riot was a bridge too far" demanding that the Tribune columnist be fired for his supposed role fomenting the Jan. 6 Capitol attacks evoked an unfamiliar emotion, one that I have never felt nor could have imagined it possible to feel: a need to defend John Kass.
    Not the material, God knows. I concede that Kass's writing is that of a monotonic right-wing troll, with all the hysterical self-pitying whine that has pervaded our nation like stink in a bus station bathroom for the past four years. At least to my recollection. It's been a while since I've actually read him. So maybe he got better. I try to extend the benefit of the doubt, even to those of whom I disapprove, which is one of the many differences between us. (For instance, I've had colleagues tell me that he is a nice guy, in person, and I have no reason to doubt them. Though, if true, that only deepens the mystery of how avuncular right wingers can smile and nod at passersby while neck deep in a sewer of hateful ideology). But when I did read him, or try to, he was reliably repetitive, dull, tone deaf, mean-spirited and shrill. And that most fatal flaw, incurious. Remember that John Kass column where he eagerly explores some unusual topic just because it is fascinating? Yeah, me neither. For a while, I would test myself by reading the first three paragraphs of his column and then stopping, just to see if I had any problem bailing out at that point. I never did. Then I gave up doing even that. As Gertrude Stein said of Oakland, there was no there there.
     Which is okay, because he isn't for me. Part of the trick of not being John Kass or writers like him is to realize that not everything is supposed to be for you. There are other people in the world who believe other things. They have a right to exist and passionately believe all sorts of ludicrous nonsense. They get to read stuff they like too.  
     From time to time readers would challenge me, since I had written "BobWatch" in the Reader for two years in the mid-1990s, to reprise the column with Kass as my material. I'd patiently explain that doing so would be physically impossible. Bob Greene was deeply weird in a captivating way—you almost had to read his column, excuse me, skein of related columns, celebrating scab baseball players or mourning the passing of soda fountains or keening over Baby Richard, whatever fragile hobbyhorse he had firmly mounted between his monstrous thighs and was now riding into splinters. Bob Greene was like a patient in an Oliver Sacks book, damaged in a creepy, fascinating way. Sure, you might read through latticed fingers, pausing to choke back a half ounce of hot vomit, or turn to an imaginary audience to say "can you believe this shit?" which is actually how BobWatch started.
     But Kass? I'd have great difficulty reading an entire column. Not if you paid me $1 a word. Not if you put a gun to my head and cocked the hammer back and told me I had to get to the end and summarize it or you'd pull the trigger and splatter my brains against a white wall. I mean, I would try, particularly for that buck a word. And maybe, probably, I could do it, but it would take intense concentration, fingers raking my cheeks, eyes whirling to track the pale little moths of thought as they slide off the page and flap silently away, casting strange shadows, circling around me like butterflies around Alice's head. 

     Like Greene, Kass could write at one point. To read his sharp 1996 profile of Richard Daley, with its priceless opening vignette of Daley running home to his mommy with a fever, is to mourn the ruin that can come bundled with a column. I distinctly remember his first one, a riveting. two-parter about a Chicago public school teacher being beaten with a metal bar. Then, as often happens, success and ego and laziness got to him, and soon he was doing a bad parody of Mike Royko, haunting the Billy Goat, sharing recipes for beer can chicken, coining fake insidery lingo and adopting a bully's swagger he passes off as a style. A colleague summed him up far more succinctly than I'm doing here with: "He sees people who aren't there," adding a few lines about how Kass can drive down an empty block and see wise guys in loud plaid jackets picking their teeth under street lamps while grannies in babushkas kneel in front of their bungalows, scrubbing the front stoops with Comet.

     I suppose that's imagination of a sort.
     But after enough years of that passed Kass, like Greene, became a mere parody of himself, as the sentient wandered off, fanning the air. By now he has to be the least consequential columnist on the Tribune's roster, in all of Chicago, if not the world, if not in the history of the world. Nobody I know has ever said, "Did you read John Kass today?" Though, again to be fair, this must be due to my being in a self-selective group. I don't hang out with people who read John Kass. They certainly exist. I'm sure when his column is published on, er, whenever it runs, a cheer goes up in Mount Greenwood. 
     Here's where John Greenfield goes astray. I don't know Greenfield, but I imagine he's not down at Dugans holding up the bar with the guys from Second City Cop, shaking his head about how fuckin' Obama was given every break in the world by the pansy liberal press while poor old Donald Trump never was given a chance. Hated because he was so good and decent and American. Those who see the world as a vast conspiracy of the semitic and the pigmented arrayed against them, and Kass as a brave cry in the wilderness giving voice to their deep existential pain at hearing Spanish spoken by a kid running the fryer at McDonald's.
     In our world, Kass, like Louis Farrakhan, never comes on the radar unless there are hoots of outrage over his occasional lurches into anti-Semitism. But that doesn't make him responsible, just one tiny piping voice in the great Right Wing chorus harmonizing fear of globalism and religions not their own. He's in the back, warbling, he isn't conducting the choir. It's not his fault. Heck, I wouldn't blame Kass for a fist-fight between neighbors over chairs set out in dibs in Gage Park, never mind large-scale mob action in Washington. There isn't a justification for Greenfield's claim that "it's time for Tribune leadership to get rid of Kass's column for good." 
     First, the request is naive. I don't have many rules for myself as a columnist, but one is: never advocate the impossible. One thing Bob Greene taught us is the Tribune never gets rid of anybody over issues of quality. Once in the club, always in the club, no matter how stunted or sporadic their work has become. I can't tell you how many Tribune writers I've met over the years where I had to swallow the reply, "Good to see you; I thought you were dead." Bruce Dold wasn't in the business of cashiering mediocrities; he would have had to start with himself. Granted, that will change under Alden Capital, and this whole conversation might be like debating whether a man who is condemned to hang next week should be shot today instead. I used to feel competitive with the Tribune. Now I just feel sorry for them. They used to have office aeries with semi-circular windows looking out of the Gothic horror show of Tribune Tower at Michigan Avenue, far below. Now they're going to be tucked behind the presses at the giant windowless bulk of Freedom Center. I assume they got rid of the chap in livery handing out warm towels in the executive washroom long ago.
     Second, until Alden pulls the plug and runs the whole place off an algorithm and four workers in Kashmir, Kass will have a valid function. To be the blithering nincompoop that Greenfield decries. That's his job. Half of the Tribune readership laps up that kind of garbage. Why not keep them happy? The Sun-Times used to run Dennis Byrne, who though not quite as sphincterific as Kass, still wrote a column that was similarly a head-shaking mystery to those of us not locked in the grip of right-wing batshittery, I never thought the man should be drummed out because of it. Just the opposite. I was glad he was there. He gave me cover. Whenever someone would accuse the paper of being merely a liberal rag, I could murmur, "But we run Dennis Byrne. Read him instead of me."
     Remember, nobody forces you to read any particular columnist. That's what the photos are for. As a subtle hint of what you'll be getting below. Which, to be honest, still flies past many readers, who will write in to inform me, "A-HA, I'm onto you, Steinberg. You are in the LIBERAL camp!!!" Figured that out, huh? All by yourself! Thank you for writing.
     So maybe that's just me, with the superpower to nimbly jeté over the John Kasses of the world, and hoo-boy, there are a lot of them. I have never watched a moment of Sean Hannity. Why would I do that? You have to keep the poison out, and if I seem irked, it's because the Reader made me think more about John Kass over the past hour than I have in the previous decade. I hope none of this is seen as an indictment of John Greenfield, who has been around the block himself, often on a bicycle, and is editor of Streetsblog. He seems a solid guy, this an understandable lapse and I am not criticizing him for it, personally. Think of it more brotherly advice. I'm only telling him what I would tell a friend who left the dead mouse of a John Kass column on my pillow, as sometimes happens: don't be a vector, don't be the dim cat sharing your limp prize. If you didn't bring Kass up, I'd never think of him at all, and isn't that a happy place to be? Even as a Tribune subscriber. I can look at a page he is on and his column doesn't even register. My eyes dance over him without perceiving one word, the way you step over a turd on the sidewalk without needing to study its topography. I don't even realize he's there. Originally, I grabbed his headshot to illustrate this page, but I had to remove it, because otherwise my eyes couldn't focus on the words underneath. 
      Yes, it galls that the Tribune would keep Kass while showing the gate to such luminaries as architecture critic Blair Kamin, arts maven Howard Reich, and restaurant reviewer Phil Vettel. It is what I used to call, in the years that David Radler ran the Sun-Times, the Bean Soup Theory of Journalism, where occasionally you look into the bowls of soup you're selling and think, "You know ... I could pluck out a few beans, and it would still be bean soup." Until you find yourself with a bowl of broth and three beans.
     I'm glad that the Sun-Times seems on the way to becoming the preeminent newspaper in Chicago, but sad it had to happen this way. This is like winning a 100-yard dash then, as you cross the finish line, turning to see your opponent 30 yards back, writhing in the cinders, clutching his calf. It's good to win. But not like that.
     So if keeping Kass means that Eric Zorn will have a job a little longer, I am all for that. Remember, Fox News didn't turn rural America into gobsmacked haters who will buy any lie provided it's idiotic enough. Rather, Fox found them that way, and printed money by parroting their stunted biases back at them. The right wing media is like those vibrating mattresses once found at seedy motels. The Magic Fingers don't give you a bad back, and they don't make it better. They just provide the illusion of soothing your damage while charging you a quarter a minute. John Kass didn't lead that mob, he followed it. They're all followers, sheep beseechingly bleating for a shepherd, cattle in a chute. That's the problem.    
      Okay, you get the point. No mas. I do prattle on, and I apologize for that. One of the central if unspoken tenets in journalism is, "You have to put the slop where the pigs can get at it." You have to empty the bucket within reach of the readers.  So if the swine snuffling around the Trib are hungering for a big trough full of John Kass's musings then, soo-EEE, come and get it. If Fox News can keep Sean Hannity on the payroll, a truly evil man, a traitor and genuine abetter of terrorists who should probably be on trial in the Hague, then the Tribune should have no worry about its moaning Hannity homunculus, its wan Tucker Carlson wannabe, who does no harm to anybody but himself, and probably fattens the Tribune's thinning bottom line while he's at it.
     So I throw my full and enthusiastic support behind John Kass, for all it's worth. Besides, when I have doubts about myself as a columnist, as often happens, all I need do is think of Kass, his brow uncreased by doubt of any kind, and suddenly I find serenity and pride, confidence and satisfaction. I might not be much, but I sure ain't that. So for selfish reasons alone, I hope that the Tribune ignores calls for his firing, and keeps the man for as long as Chicago can stomach him.

The $46.95 pizza.

     I write a lot. Every goddamn day, in fact. Okay, some days on EGD I don't write more than a brief intro to go atop something I've hauled out of the vault because my brain is just too spent to do anything else. Though usually that's because I've been working on some massive project that drained away all my energies. For instance, Tuesday's post — I thought of writing something new, but had just polished off a 3,000-word history project for the paper. I was fried.
     Trying to fill that void, I pretty much touch on anything. Yet there are things I don't say. For instance, our older son was with us for a few days last week, and that required pizza from Lou Malnati's — "the Prodigal Pie" as I call it. My wife and I always get the same thing — deep dish, buttercrust, spinach and mushroom. Though his wishes had to be considered, and he voted for sausage and onions. So half one, half the other.
     Do you see what's coming? I didn't.
     Place the order. Wait 25 minutes. Get in the car and drive the minute to Lou Malnati's — I can walk, and have. But something about the five-minute quickstep with a hot pizza in your hands. I figure, speed is my friend.
     I go into the empty store. Give the youth at the counter my name. He consults the register and says, "That'll be $46.95."
     Forty-six dollars. And ninety-five cents. For a large pizza. I don't understand how that's possible. The pizza wasn't quite ready — I like to come a few minutes early, to maximize hotness when it hits the table. So I pulled out my phone and consulted the menu. A large pizza is $28.89.  Realization dawned. The toppings. The toppings were the culprit. Four toppings — spinach, mushroom, onion, sausage — at $3.70 per, and no break for just covering half the pizza. "Full price charged for 1/2 portions." it says, right there. So 4 x 3.70, or $14.80. Plus the 99 cents for butter crust. That comes to $44.68. Plus tax.
     I've heard of this inflation business, but never had it struck home in quite this way before. Yowza. This pricy pie seemed worth sharing. A near 50 buck pizza seems a milestone (though not, I hasten to add, one that makes me even a tiny bit inclined toward electing a liar, bully, fraud and traitor as president. As bad as people who support Trump because he echoes their biases and fears, even worse are the guys who claim to be ready to shred their country's core values because gas costs $4).
    I took the pizza home, shared the news, put in a plug for two toppings next time, and we dug in. I never wrote any of this because ... well, a person as blessed as I am should not complain about trivialities. I'd have forgotten all about it. 

     But the same day, David Brooks, the conservative troll living under the bridge of the New York Times, tweeted a photo of a cheeseburger and a double whiskey, complaining of their price. I thought my pizza was expensive....
     “This meal just cost me $78 at Newark Airport,” Brooks wrote  on the social media site some still call Twitter. “This is why Americans think the economy is terrible.”
     The tweet blew up the Internet — as of Wednesday it had 38.5 million views, as readers piled on. Why? Somebody was ignoring the booze aspect. The restaurant itself pointed out that $17 was for the burger and the rest was Brooks' bar bill (I often wonder how he can live with himself; now I have a clue).

     Suddenly my expensive pizza conclusion (order fewer toppings) seemed like solid Midwestern good sense compared to Brooks' East Coast faux economic insight,  "This is why Americans think the economy is terrible." (No, they think the economy is terrible because publications like the New York Times keep telling them it is). 

     And perhaps because a pizza can push fifty bucks if it has a few extra toppings. Though at least with Lou Malnati's, it's worth it.

The Era of Contempt

     People try to soften the sting of whatever humiliation Donald Trump is inflicting upon the nation today by pronouncing it "the bottom," but that is based on the giddiest kind of optimism, the faulty logic that just because our leadership has sunk to a startling new low, it can't get worse. 
     When in fact, if a stone is sinking, experience tells us it'll keep going deeper and deeper. Yes, there's a hoped-for bottom, somewhere, in theory. But merely being deep underwater doesn't mean we're there. Stones don't bob back up to the surface just because they've sunk a long way.
     With a new low every day, or nearly, there is no reason to even suspect that today's depth will not be exceeded by worse tomorrow. I would be sincerely delighted if I believed this is as bad as it is going to get.
    But I don't. Rather, it will go on for years and years and get worse and worse and this country will be severely damaged. We're damaged already, in ways we haven't begun to consider.
     That said, I am human too, and like to comfort myself, when I can. Not by saying that today is as bad as it'll get, but by remembering that it must end. It has to. Not now, alas, not even soon, but someday. 
     Someday it'll be over and we'll have the luxury of looking back and wondering what it meant. Someday there will be history books, I hope, and one chapter in those as-yet-unlived histories will be about now. And as is common with such texts, the chapter will begin with a descriptive phrase. "A Nation Sundered" for the Civil War, and such.
     For our current betrayal of American values and norms, I'd like to nominate "The Era of Contempt." Because that is the basic operating principle here: yes, there is ignorance, and vanity, and greed. But those are specifics, related to a particular situation or three. Contempt — visceral disregard and scorn—is the overarching principle, the general theme. It's what Donald Trump appeals to and has always appealed to. It's why he was elected. He touched Americans in a certain spot and they reacted with a purr. He stroked the meanest, basest, most scornful and scoffing core of many Americans, and told them it was okay be like that. In fact, it was great.
     And they believed him. Believe him. Always will believe him. Why would they not?
     His followers manifest this sneering disdain like tuning forks. It's really all they ever say. I hear it every day. They do not write to argue, or observe, or reflect. They write to mock, to ridicule, not realizing that, to an outside observer, since the ridicule is coming from a person such as themselves, really, how much weight can their thoughts be given? Not only don't I write back, but I'm not even tempted to write back anymore. And say what? "You know, the low opinion of someone going hog wild for a bully, fraud, liar and most likely traitor just doesn't carry the heft you seem to think it does."
     In their defense, their opinion certainly counted in November, 2016. It's counting now, on an international scale. 
     Why bother talking back? Even if you would score points—and you can't, even if you could defeat them rhetorically—and you won't—well, congratulations: you bested a moron.
     So I silently put such people in the filter, where they gibber to each other, sometimes for years. Every few days I look in the spam filter, like a man looking at eels swimming around a watery pit. Letters still arrive, and I tend to throw them away unopened if they don't have a return address, and most don't. Maybe open them and read I line or two if I'm bored.
    But this one had a pre-printed sticker, with name and street address—Alan Leonard of Tinley Park. So I started reading, maybe because the handwriting is so neat. And that purple stationery. I read to the end, and decided it is in some ways an epitome, a classic example of its genre. It should be presented for your shock and edification. I originally said, "for your entertainment" but it really isn't funny. Rather, it is funny, but it shouldn't be. That future history will not be kind to us, and this is why. Should we survive this era and anyone bother to write fact-based histories, which is not the certainty it was two years ago. 
     No comment is really necessary, though you are free to remark upon its various wonders. It wasn't the only letter he sent me this week. Once they start, they seem to have trouble stopping.