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. 

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 #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, #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.

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.

GTFO

     I can't imagine hating someone so much that I'd advertise it on the bumper of my car.
     Sadly, I didn't have to imagine it. All I had to do was walk by. There's a lot of that in contemporary American life: grotesqueries that grab you by the sleeve as you go about your business, or try to, and snarl out a low, wet, mean "Hi!"
     Thanks pal, thanks for sharing your cramped little world with me. Proud, are you? 
      The car was sitting in the parking lot of a moderately upscale restaurant in Northbrook where my wife and I went for lunch. So its owner isn't suffering so much he couldn't pop twenty bucks for lunch. I noticed the bumper sticker walking back to our car. Here, I'll blow it up for you. 
     If the acronym's meaning doesn't immediately leap out at you, don't feel bad. It eluded Edie too; I take that as a sign of purity of spirit. When you are immersed in this stuff, as I am, a certain sixth sense emerges.
      As a clue, notice the "O" contains the sunrise symbol used in Barack Obama's campaigns.
      Another hint. On the left bumper of the car, almost unnecessarily, is a yellow sticker, a version of the Revolutionary War "Don't Tread on Me" flag that Tea Partiers have embraced, representing their delusion that they are fighting for freedom, and not fighting against the freedoms of their fellow Americans and against their own country's success as a whole. Trying to hold back changes which are going to steamroll them, the way way the ignorant and the fearful and the prejudiced are always steamrolled by history, sooner or later.
      I've obscured the license plate, not because I worry someone would use it to track the car owner down and harass him—you just know it's a man—but, well, as as kindness. I don't anticipate the driver of the Durango will ever see this, but you never know, and I wouldn't want him to be made afraid. Or rather, more afraid. These people live on fear, clearly, and if real threats don't present themselves, they make them up. They need to justify their anger, to create villains, the way a slasher movie needs to establish the evil of its maniac before he can be subjected to the cruelties the audience is eager to enjoy.
     Fear and malice are the driving factors in their lives, and I don't want to add to it, because I'm a nice guy, and don't want to be like them. "When battling monsters," as my pal Nietschze said, "make sure that you do not in the process become a monster."
     Oh, GTFO stands for, "Get the Fuck Out." 
     Because Jan. 20, 2017, can't come around quick enough for these people. They have to cheer it along, to yearn for it, to celebrate and anticipate it. Because they have suffered ... um, oh let's come out and say it ... seeing a black man in the White House. That has to be reason because there's no possible explanation otherwise. Really, what has Barack Obama done to these folks that they would hate him so? What is the horror they're reacting to? Certainly not gun control. Or immigration reform. Just the contrary. Obama stepped up deportations, dramatically, trying to please those who would never be pleased (I assume; it certainly wasn't the right thing to do). The Affordable Care Act? It's affecting five percent of the country. Is that why there is a GTFO page online counting down the seconds? An entire line of GTFO products, bumper stickers and t-shirts and such? On a page offering t-shirts, I noticed this particular revealing design: "HOPE HE FAILS." 
    That's like the joke about the man drilling a hole under his seat in the row boat. I guess they don't realize that the president failing means the country failing, and them too. Which shows the difference between Obama scorn and Bush scorn, which Obama haters immediately bring up when attention is directed to their overarching hatred, as if Bush haters were suddenly their moral compass, as if the two were comparable, and they're not. This t-shirt illustrates why. People hated Bush because he was failing; people hate Obama so want him to fail. That might be a subtle difference to some, but to me seems clear and significant.
     For six years, the Republican right has hurt the country, and themselves with their insane rear guard action against anything Barack Obama has done. Our nation is frozen, largely. We can't do what we need to do, what the rest of the world has done long ago. In the next two years we'll no doubt see more of that, emboldened by their electoral win earlier this month. 
     Me, when it comes to Obama, I vacillate. Part of the time I want to fault him for not pushing harder, for not standing up more for his ideals more, whether by closing Guantanamo Bay, coming out earlier for gay marriage, trying harder for immigration reform, crafting a more comprehensive national health care laws.
    That view is based on his promises and his potential.
     But he is nothing if not a politician, and given the roadblocks he's run into, you can't fault him for not sprinting faster into the brick wall.
     When you hold his accomplishments up to the doorjamb-gnawing vehemence of his enemies, it's amazing he's done anything at all, from the Affordable Health Care Act, to this week's agreement with the Chinese to establish curbs on greenhouse emissions. Lack of participation of the Chinese always made international agreements trying to stem global warming somewhat pointless, as the Republicans liked to crow. Bringing them on board is hugely important in mitigating the disaster we can no longer avoid.
     Of course the Republicans, who don't recognize global warming as a real, man-made phenomenon, will find a reason to hoot him down on this too—they can't claim it doesn't go far enough, since they don't recognize the problem is within our control to begin with. Maybe they'll claim he's a traitor, for working out a secret deal with the Chinese. As with "amnesty," the actual situation doesn't really matter, they just need to find the right negative term they latch onto. Maybe they'll call it "accommodation." 
     And no, I did not key the car with the GTFO bumper sticker. Though the thought did cross my mind. When battling monsters....
       

Or would they just steal faster?

     An amateur is prone to oblivious mistakes. Chief among them is laboring under the illusion that the skill yet to be mastered is easy. Or, if not easy, then something that he, the neophyte, has an inborn, nay, God-given ability to achieve without the usual investment of hard work, time and talent. 
     Thus Republican Bruce Rauner, with no experience in politics and no qualifications beyond an excess of self-regard and the ability to buy expensive TV time claiming he would make a fine governor, issues the alarming claim that people who have experience with government should be banned by law from participating in it. He snaps the whip, and urges the feeble idea of term limits, like an exhausted circus pony, out into the hissing limelight for one more prance around the miserable ring. 
     Term limits imply that, unlike every other career—where years of work makes a professional better able to meet challenges—politics is so uniquely corrupting that anyone venal enough to want to serve in office must be given the heave ho, by legislation, after a certain brief span of time. Rauner thinks eight years is as much as any human being can be trusted to serve as governor. 
     This was a topic I addressed — good God! — 17 years ago, on Feb. 16, 1997. I don't know if this is any worse than what I would write now, it's certainly no better, and I hope doesn't suggest I should have been compelled to resign. No one should. The American way is that we work hard, rise or fall on our merits, and stay there for the same reasons, not be declared rotten by the whim of people who don't know what they're talking about and given the gate. The Clinton reference is a reminder that we libs were never the drooling partisans that the Right Wing fanatics would paint us to be. 

     Whenever I lend a book to someone, I make certain they never forget about it. Feigning curiosity, I ask for frequent updates— "How's that book going? Enjoying that book?" The goal, of course, is to get the volume back someday.

The great H.L. Mencken

     I do this with the same care that a pickpocket extends toward his own wallet. Because other people's books have a habit of straying into my library and never straying out again.

     Thus I was astounded to find myself, unprompted, actually preparing to return a book. And not just any book, but H.L. Mencken's A Carnival of Buncombe. An out-of-print gem lent to me a year or so ago by my friend Cate, blinded by kindness.

     Faced with the daunting prospect of losing such a treasure, I began browsing over the master's ruminations from long-lost days.

     The sentences sizzled and popped, as always, and there were flashes of recognition so personal that it was disconcerting. Almost like picking up a 1921 yearbook at a flea market, flipping it open, and seeing your own senior photograph, smiling in sepia from among the rows of high collars and pomaded hair.

     "I believe that all government is evil, and that trying to improve it is largely a waste of time," Mencken writes, in a 1924 essay.

     Here is a credo if ever there was one—I might have it needlepointed and framed and hung over my bathroom mirror, so I can recite it each morning, with my hand over my heart.

     That single sentence explains why there isn't a lot of intense debate about the nation's politics in this column. Any given senator can hardly affect policy, despite the fact that he or she is working like a ferret 20 hours a day trying to do so. What hope have I?

     Anyway, politics at every level is hypocrisy in action. I voted for Bill Clinton while sincerely believing he is the worst president to hold office since his predecessor, with a record of bumbling and insincerity that will go unmatched in history until whoever succeeds him is sworn in.

     This does not mean, however, that I would keep an important observation to myself just out of the belief that sharing it won't make a lick of difference.

     The notion of congressional term limits is heating up. Last week, the House voted them down, again, but more than 70 percent of Americans say they are in favor of them and the idea isn't going away. Even normally sensible observers such as George Will sing their praises. In Newsweek, he writes, "Term limits can produce deliberative bodies disposed to think of the next generation rather than the next election."

     In Utopia, maybe. Term limits are a stupid idea, holding the peril of all sorts of horrible, unexpected consequences. I knew this in that half-formed, unspoken way that most people know things. Not in a way I could articulate.

     As luck would have it, just as I was mulling how to express the problem with term limits, the answer—eloquent and convincing—popped out of a most unexpected place . . .

     First, I must acknowledge that the following confession will tar me as a freakish anomaly, as out of step with the times as if I said I dipped candles or took snuff. But the future of the Republic is at stake, and I can't let embarrassment hold me back.

 

Josephus

   I was reading Antiquities by the ancient Roman historian and traitor Josephus. (We don't have cable; I have to spend my time doing something). He was going on about Tiberius' policy toward colonial governors (you have to wade through a lot of tedium to get to the good stuff) when he pointed out that, unlike other emperors, Tiberius never replaced the governors of Rome's colonies "unless they died at their posts."

     Quizzed as to why, Tiberius replied that, first, it was a bother to keep dismissing and replacing people, and besides, "it was a law of nature that governors are prone to engage in extortion."

     Given that law, Tiberius said, governors with permanent positions "would be gorged with their robberies and would by the very bulk of them be more sluggish in pursuit of further gain."

     Constantly cycling in new governors, on the other hand, would only make them grab for all they could during their brief reign. As Tiberius so artfully put it, "Their natural appetite for plunder would be reinforced by their expectation of being speedily deprived of that pleasure."

     Wiser, truer words—or a more ringing indictment against term limits—I cannot imagine. The idea intended to reduce crookedness would only accelerate it. But that's the risk with gimmicky ideas.     
     Returning to Mencken: "The older I grow the less I esteem mere ideas. In politics, particularly, they are transient and unimportant."

     What politicians need instead of faddish ideas, Mencken concludes, is "character." If they had character, we wouldn't need a constitutional amendment to periodically expel them from the government.

     We can always vote them out of office—an exercise that even Mencken recognized carries some satisfaction, if scant practical result:

     "Turning out such gross incompetents, to be sure, does very little practical good, for they are commonly followed by successors who are almost as bad, but it at least gives the voters a chance to register their disgust, and so it keeps them reasonably contented, and turned their thoughts away from the barricade and the bomb."

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.