Congenial-speak #33

In my book, Ten Years and Change: A Liberal Boyhood in Minnesota, I relish the days of Watergate. I recall hearing our president's hollow words echo across the lake at our cabin. They resonated, and sounded as desperate and lonesome as the loon calls they accompanied. Nixon beat impeachment by resigning “for the good of the nation.” I ran the song “Haldeman, Ehrlichman, Mitchell and Dean” through my head countless times in the summer of '73. I saw Redford and Hoffman in All the President's Men. It was unprecedented, not the burglary so much, but its cover up. That people risked their credibility and were willing to go to jail for a man who had protracted the Vietnam War five years is, in hindsight, a lesson on the statutes of loyalty.

Mr. Trump has yet to do anything for the good of anyone but himself and possibly his nine figured brethren. If and when his scandal ends in impeachment hearings, maybe through the summer of 2018, Trump will stay to for the end. He won't resign, too much pride. Will anyone write a song or make a movie? The movie that most resembles the DJT administration was made a few years before All the President's Men. It was called One Flew Over he Coo-coos Nest.

Ties that bound

Loyalty is a dish best served. LBJ wanted it. He wanted it at high noon, kissing his ass in Macy's window. Nixon wanted it, he just expected it, like it was supposed to follow the title of POTUS.

DJT wants it. He routinely asks for it and, ala The Apprentice, fires those who are disloyal. He fires or humiliates. Sally Yates, Mitt Romney, Chris Christie, James Comey were victims. (Kasowitz is likely to be the first lawyer to self destruct under the Trump retainer fee.) With DJT it is a family affair. He is the Godfather, the Don, and no one should cross the family, least of all Fredo. Carter, Clinton, Obama, at least two of those I don't recall any real scandals. However in none of them do I recall loyalty ever being an issue. To need it, to go out of the way to ask for it, reeks of insecurity. It presumes trickles, perhaps billows of smoke coming from a WH. Johnson, Nixon and Trump all needed loyalty because something they were doing, some cake being baked in the kitchen, was not kosher.

Puppet regime

The onions have strings. The towers have lines that reach across the Atlantic. Putin has Trump wrapped around his finger. Trump is loyal to him. Putin knows just which buttons to push, strings to pull, levers to work. Ever since the FDOTUS scouted out the location of a tower in Moscow, the Trump brand of loyalty was as good as the gold crappers of oligarchs.

A dumber time

Phones were not nearly so clever in the ten years I speak about in my book. Or, maybe they were. Since that time communication has lost substance and, ironically, personal accountability. Every Tom, Jane, Doe, or Mary is tweeting their uppermost things on their mind. Trump can't keep his thumps away when each jab test the thickness of his skin. We, as kids playing in a suburban neighborhood, communicated with one another, audibly, to make things happen. We had each others back. Now no one “hears” anyone and having someone's back is hyperbole. Friends log into Facebook or video chat and never meet.

Watered down Russia-gate

In Ten Years and Change: A Liberal Boyhood in Minnesota I recall a politically pivitol time in America when long-term societal change was ripe. I honor the people who identified themselves as constituents to a Democratic administration that lost its way. I grew, I changed and, as I point out, my life changed before I was six years old. The war's proliferations and milestones followed me. I grew up through it, because my parents and almost everyone I knew opposed it. They sat in, taught in, demonstrated and went to jail to end it. We knew it in America though. We knew it in the whispers of trees, of codes on the windows as the sun set and painted them blank. We saw it in the crows' flight as they went like sentrys protecting us. We had a healthy hatred of Russia as the enemy. As the second-generation of Cold War shivers we knew red was bad. We knew, above anything else, that abetting the Russkies in any fashion was grounds for excommunication from the great U.S.A. The Soviets and the eastern bloc were the ones financing North Vietnam and the Viet Cong, our stealthy enemy.

The scandal, to me, has lost an appeal. Trump is so naive about any subject, foreign or domestic. He is such an embarrassment that any sense of identity was lost the moment Obama left the WH grounds. How can a “third rate burglary” and the cover up by people far more experienced in government, with the technology available to them in 1972, be compared to a series of tweets by dim-witted real estate investors? It can't. The homey feeling is gone. The patriotic feel is gone. The “look back one day and laugh” sentiment is gone. No one will laugh as Russia is being welcomed with open arms. At Trump, yes, I am laughing. Most of the world is laughing.