Lance Mannion

Maybe they're just bad people

Mined from the notebooks, Sunday, December 2, 2018. Posted Saturday morning, December 22.

Like father, like daughter. Ivanka Trump and her proud old man: “Consider all the energy spent trying to figure out Ivanka Trump’s true beliefs, when she’s shown that what she believes most is that she’s entitled to power and prestige…”---Michelle Goldberg, the New York Times. Photo by Andrew Harnik/AP via NPR.

From the Department of True to the Point of Banality:

It’s a fact of life that wherever there’s money to be made there will be people who want nothing more out of life than to make money, and among them there will be many who will do anything to make it and keep it.

The same is true were any vain hope or desire can be satisfied. Wherever there’s power to be had, there will be people who want only power. Wherever there’s fame to be achieved, there will be people who only want fame, in any and all its forms---celebrity, notoriety, mere popularity---there will be people who only want to be famous and don’t care what they’ll be famous for. Wherever there’s sex or the prospect of love, wherever there’s attention to be grabbed, wherever people can satisfy their vanity, ego, greed, lust, need, there will be crowds of the vain, greedy, egomaniacal, egocentric, egoistic, lustful, and desperately needy doing whatever they can to get the satisfaction they desire.

And those desires can their satisfactions are to be found in just about all walks of life, in all places of work, from the most ordinary and mundane to the highest and most celebrated and coveted. The profession or endeavor can be in itself a noble one, but that doesn’t mean that all the people attracted to it are in it to do noble things or are ennobled by doing it. Take teaching and medicine and science and religion.

Or let’s not.

It’s too depressing to think about.

The arts seem especially attractive to awful people. But that’s because artists tend to be by nature exhibitionists with a talent for self-dramatization. They seem to think it’s their duty to live out their lives in public. And it’s in their professional interest to self-promote and to do that they self-glamorize and self-celebrate. They develop the habit of telling on themselves---in their conversation as well as in their art. Plus, because on the whole they are an attractive, intelligent, humorous, and fun- and joy-filled collection of human beings---even the ones who are unhappy can feign mirth---we pay attention to them. And we envy them because they appear to live their lives in defiance of the rules and social norms and inhibitions that constrain us and make us feel trapped in our own lives. The worst human beings among them can be obscenely rewarded despite their awfulness. Sometimes for their awfulness.

Politics is another arena in which the worst human beings can be obscenely rewarded and often for being the worst sorts of human beings. Power, money, fame, love, and sex are there for the asking---and taking---and even people who go into it to do good do despicable things right along with the good things they do because they can’t resist the temptations that they’re presented with as they climb the ladder. There are too many examples to list but just for the moment consider the biographies of the finest men to hold the office of President, the men with the most virtues and fewest vices, Washington, Lincoln, TR---another fight we can have later---FDR, Truman, and Carter. All of them did terrible things  for the basest of political reasons. All of them did things out of vanity, ego, anger, timidity, and even moral and political cowardice. Carter’s most salient flaw appears to be his faith in his own virtues and strengths. He seems to have thought that a man as moral and intelligent as he was certain he was couldn’t possibly make bad or unintelligent decisions. More to the point, he seems to have been convinced that anyone who opposed those decisions must be immoral or stupid or both.

I’d like to think that Obama is the single, glorious exception. And he does appear to be the most self-disciplined, least prone to temptation person not just to have been president but to have made politics their career. But we’ll see when the historians are done. I suspect, with a pang, that it will turn out that like Carter the temptation he gave into was the belief that his own moral rectitude was persuasive in itself and that it would and should carry him through every political fight he faced as president. It seems it sometimes mattered more to him to be seen doing the right thing more than doing the necessary and effective thing.

And time will tell if we are watching the beginning of President Ocasio-Cortez’s march to the White House. At any rate, whatever he political future bring, we are watching her struggle to keep her head from being turned and her energy and attention diverted by her sudden power, celebrity, and notoriety.

Imagine what must be going through her mind as she’s realizing there’s the very real possibility that she could go on quickly to be senator or governor or both and from either of those offices president. She could even skip over them and run for president as soon as she’s old enough.

Ocasio-Cortez in 2028?

Why not? People are talking excitedly about Beto in 2020.

Imagine also what she’s thinking as she becomes more and more the object of hatred, contempt, and jealousy of not only Right Wingers but her fellow Democrats and “Progressives”. Imagine being the subject of so much fascination and attention from the celebrity-machine that powers so much supposedly serious political journalism.

By the way, she appears to be handling it better than the young FDR did at a similar point in his career. When he was first elected to the much lowlier and therefore you would think less temptation-filled office of state senator, he almost undid himself through his vanity and self-importance. He appears to have thought all his fellow legislators should have recognized immediately his superior talents and abilities and deferred to him as if he was already a future president in waiting and then when he realized that wasn’t going to be how things worked fallen all over himself to placate the Democratic machine powers that be he believed he was elected to oppose and replace.

Like it says up top: this is true to the point of banality. We know the world is full of awful people who get away with their awfulness. We know it’s especially true of the world of politics because it’s in the news. All the time. But maybe we know it too well.

Voters looked at Trump, saw how awful he is, and either shrugged it off, told themselves he was no worse than every other politician, or even liked it because all politicians are self-serving, self-dealing liars, con artists, and thieves so might as well for one who can beat the bastards at their own game.

This has long been the case, that voters elect con artists, thieves, knaves, and fools, sometimes for rational or at least understandable reasons, sometimes because the voters themselves are feeling thievish, knavish, and foolish themselves, sometimes just for the fun of it, and it happened here and there on this past election day, all over the country, and some of those con artists, thieves, knaves, and fools were Democrats. Oh well, people say resignedly. Politics is corrupt and corrupting. No wonder the corrupt go into it. Even good men and women are corrupted by it.

Maybe we’re too accepting of this sad fact.

But you know who doesn’t accept it because they don’t let themselves believe it even though you’d think they’d know the truth better than any of us?

Political journalists.

For all that they pride themselves on their cynicism, savvy, and smarts---all of it amounting a collective boast that they know the score, no one can put one past them---they often give in to rank sentimentalism in their coverage of politics and politicians. In some cases it is actually cynicism. If they wrote the truth about the people they cover, no one would talk to them. But time and time again they show themselves to be suckers for the idea that political world is dominated and run by noble public servants doing the best they can for the good of the country.

All of Bob Woodward’s “Fear” is based on Woodward’s absolute faith in this notion. “Fear” isn’t about Trump and his awfulness. It’s about how Woodward’s sources in the White House are containing and constraining that awfulness for the public good, even though it’s costing them their reputations and large pieces of their souls. And look at how Paul Ryan, that fatuous fool and most prodigious of hypocrites, is still being portrayed as a principled policy wonk. Look at the effusiveness of the coverage of George Herbert Walker Bush’s death.

For all his virtues---and there really weren’t that many and the ones he did possess, even his wartime courage, weren’t extraordinary, and some of what are being celebrated as virtues were really qualities of an amiable disposition and signs of good manners---he could be as cynical and ruthless a political opportunist as Nixon. But you’d never know it from all the verbal laurels already being laid at his figurative tomb.

And some pundits and journalists are looking at Trump and still expecting the “pivot”. Some of them even seem to think that he made it, they just somehow missed it, and if they keep searching they’ll find the evidence he did it.

Some of them seem convinced that he doesn’t need to. He’s doing a good job just by being himself. Their proof is in the devotion of his base whom they insist on seeing as good and decent-hearted folks who are rightfully mad as hell and can’t take it anymore, instead of as the racists, religious bigots, ignorant yahoos, and otherwise hideous men and women they’re perfectly willing to let you know that they are, you just have to listen to what they say and not what the narrative tells you to hear.

Not everyone in politics is bad, but enough are that it shouldn’t be so hard to say so. New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg has no problem saying so, and I’ve been taking the long way around to lead into the column in which she says it:

It’s tempting for those of us who interpret politics for a living to overstate the importance of competing philosophies. We shouldn't forget the enduring role of sheer vanity…

It’s not exactly a secret that politics is full of amoral careerists lusting — literally or figuratively — for access to power. Still, if you’re interested in politics because of values and ideas, it can be easier to understand people who have foul ideologies than those who don’t have ideologies at all. Steve Bannon, a quasi-fascist with delusions of grandeur, makes more sense to me than Anthony Scaramucci, a political cipher who likes to be on TV. I don’t think I’m alone. Consider all the energy spent trying to figure out Ivanka Trump’s true beliefs, when she’s shown that what she believes most is that she’s entitled to power and prestige…

Trump is hardly the first politician to attract self-serving followers...But Trump is unique as a magnet for grifters, climbers and self-promoters, in part because decent people won’t associate with him. With the exception of national security professionals sticking around to stop Trump from blowing up the world, there are two kinds of people in the president’s orbit — the immoral and the amoral. There are sincere nativists, like Bannon and senior adviser Stephen Miller, and people of almost incomprehensible insincerity…

In many ways, the insincere Trumpists are the most frustrating. Because they don’t really believe in Trump’s belligerent nationalism and racist conspiracy theories, we keep expecting them to feel shame or remorse. But they’re not insincere because they believe in something better than Trumpism. Rather, they believe in very little. They are transactional in a way that makes no psychological sense to those of us who see politics as a moral drama; they might as well all be wearing jackets saying, “I really don’t care, do u?”

You should read the whole column. Follow the link to “Maybe They’re Just Bad People” at the New York Times, but keep in mind Goldberg’s not just talking about Trump enablers and hangers-on or Trump supporters or Trump voters or Republicans or even bad people.

Vanity is the great temptation of us all. Plenty of liberal readers of the op-ed pages and plenty of liberal bloggers think that having good political opinions makes us good people.

Hillary would know how to operate a backhoe

Mined from the notebooks, very early Sunday morning December 2, 2018. Posted Tuesday morning, December 18.

Inauthentic: Hillary Clinton at a campaign stop at the Union Diner in Laconia, New Hampshire. September 17, 2015. Photo by Faith Ninivaggi/Reuters via MSNBC.

This is actually a follow-up---or at any rate an aside---to a post I need to blast out of the notebooks and type up which itself is a follow-up to another post lying dormant in the notebooks that I plan to title “Daredevil for English Majors”. All three posts include quotes from Richard Russo’s novel “Empire Falls” which I’m beginning to think should be required reading for anyone who wants to skip past the clichés of the national political media and truly try to understand life the small fading mill towns of white working class America beyond what happens in diners when journalists breeze in looking for quotes to confirm their narratives, and for anyone who just wants to read a very good novel by a very good writer. The irony in the previous statement is that “Empire Falls” centers around a restaurant that’s indistinguishable from the diners I eat in and the protagonist, Miles Roby, is the manager of the restaurant. Miles has half-hearted ambitions to own the place and turn it into an upscale restaurant with a creative menu that’s more than eggs for breakfast, sandwiches for lunch, steak and potatoes for dinner, and coffee all day. Half-hearted because his real ambition is to leave town for a more intellectually stimulating and spiritually fulfilling life somewhere else.

He’d actually been on his way to that somewhere else when he had to drop out of college and come home to take care of his mother who was dying of cancer. But for various reasons, once back home, he found himself stuck and twenty years later there he still is...

Only after taking over the restaurant did Miles begin to realize his relationship to the patrons of the Empire Grill had changed profoundly. Before he’d been the smart kid---Grace Roby’s boy---who was going to make something of himself, and this had been the object of much gentle, good-natured ridicule. The men at the lunch counter were forever quizzing him about things---the operation of backhoes, say, or the best spot to sink a septic tank---they imagined he must be learning about at college. His complete lack of wisdom on those subjects led them to wonder out loud just what the hell they were teaching down there in Portland. Often they didn’t speak to Miles directly, but through [his boos, the grill’s manager] Roger Sperry, as though an interpreter were already necessary. After Roger’s death, the food improved in inverse proportion to the conversation. The men at the counter wouldn’t have said as much to Miles, but in their opinion he spent too much time with his back to them, attending to their sputtering hamburgers rather than their stories and grievances and jokes. While appreciative of his competence, they began to suspect that he had little interest in their conversation…

Note that Miles is defined in his customers’ eyes by his family, they have no idea what college is for or why anybody would want to go except to learn useful skills that he could take back home and put to work for the most practical and mundane tasks of living life as they live it, and they resent his competence, never mind his talent, as a cook, even though they enjoy his food, because it separates him from them---they think that he thinks it makes him better than them.

During the presidential campaign, whenever the political media could force itself to focus on something other than the topic of her emails, it was to shake their heads and intone solemnly about her supposed lack of authenticity and her supposed elitism and how both caused her to misunderstand and slight the concerns and troubles of white working class voters who were the only voters who mattered. She was, the concern trolling went, out of touch with the regular folks living economically anxious in Real America. For some reason I never grasped, her fondness for hot sauce was considered emblematic of her snobbery. Probably it was just the Clinton Rules at work:

Anything a Clinton says or does is suspect and a sign of their vaulting ambition even if it’s something every other politician says or does and is therefore to be covered as a scandal or a scandal-in-the-making.

I guess we were going to find out that the bottles of hot sauce she carried in her purse were paid for out of donations to the Clinton Foundation by hot sauce manufacturers who were paying to play. Questions needed to be asked!

Anywho…

This probably explains why I remember her statements about bringing broadband access to rural areas that didn’t have it---people in many out of the way small towns were using dialup, if they had any internet access of their own at all---were met with dismissive sneering and knowing smirks by savvy pundits who seemed to be willfully mischaracterizing what she was saying as complaining about her own inconvenience when she stumped in those unwired places. That was my impression at the time and how I’d remembered it since until I did a little homework for this post. I couldn’t google up any columns, op-eds, think pieces, or transcripts of TV bobbleheading to back me up. What I’m thinking now is that I was remembering some random Tweets that flew through my Twitter Timeline during one of the idle hours when I had nothing better to do than keep half an eye on Twitter. In this I was violating two basics of using social media:

1.) Never let strolls down memory lane take the place of doing your homework.

2.) Always keep in mind that what’s going on in your news feed at the moment is representative of nothing except what’s going on in your news feed at the moment.

Even so, it’s still my impression of the coverage she got generally---and googling does back me up here---that she was never given credit for the many detailed plans she laid out for dealing with the problems of working class and middle class America (which she didn’t just see as white and confined to the small towns and rural areas of the Midwest). Not by the media and not by the white folks living in those small towns and rural areas whose lives she intended to help improve.

The reason for the media’s stubbornness is pretty obvious. They were determined to find ways to compare her unfavorably to Trump. It wasn’t that they were in the tank for him. They were, as they always are, in the tank for their own institutional vanity. They pride themselves on their objectivity which they define as balancing one side against the other without taking sides even if one side isn’t just wrong but deliberately wrong and wrong to destructive purpose. Trump was the subject of too many negative stories---I wonder why---so they had to balance them out with negative stories about Clinton.

There were various reasons for voters to resist giving her credit---one of which is, I think, generally ignored by the media and by many ”progressives” who are convinced that what those voters wanted was an out and out socialist (preferably one with white hair that wouldn’t stay combed): they were Republicans with the natural partisan disinclination to give someone from the other party credit for anything. (We Democrats are never like that, are we?) But along with the partisanship---and the racism, sexism, xenophobia, and sheer bloody-minded vindictiveness---that Trump appealed to, enflamed, and exploited, was something that’s laid out in that passage from “Empire Falls”.

All political candidates have flaws. The ones analysts identify as “fatal” are usually identified in hindsight after a candidate has lost. One of Clinton’s “fatal” flaws was something her supporters (me among them) regarded as one of her greatest strengths---her competence.

That, along with her can-do spirit, separated her from the very people she had set out to help.

Trump liked to boast that he alone could fix what was ailing America. But he didn’t mean it. Fix it, that is. His message was things had gotten so bad that there was nothing to do but tear it all down while punishing the people who’d screwed it all up, and those people happened to be Those People, you know, THEM!

THEM and the liberals buying their votes with free stuff paid for with money picked from the pockets of Real Americans.

To a point, that was Bernie’s message too. Not the racist and punitive part. The things have gotten so bad that there is no way to fix it except tear it all down and start over part: We needed a revolution with himself as the man on a horse leading the charge.

Clinton’s message was we can fix it and I’ve got some good ideas how to go about it.

But inherent in that message was the assertion that she had a degree of competence, knowledge, experience, and expertise few of the rest of us possess. As the Babe said, it isn’t bragging if you can do it, but it’s how most of us tend to take this kind of assertion and we resent it.

This is just human nature. We don’t like people who are smarter and more competent than us because they remind us we’re not as smart and competent as we like to think we are. Not making people feel inferior while you’re demonstrating your superiority is a talent and a rare one.

Mind if I speak figuratively and not literally (although literarily) for a minute?

Thanks.

I have no doubt that if Hillary had been asked about backhoes or septic tanks, she’d have known the answers, having anticipated the questions and done her homework. If she didn’t know, she’d have gone and looked it up, studied the topic, and gotten back to the questioners with the answers.

Which would cause the Chuck Todds of the world to dismiss her diligence as her being “over-prepared.”

And put her in the same boat as Miles Roby.

The customers at her counter wouldn’t have wanted the answers. They wouldn’t need them. Not from her. They’d know where they were going to sink the septic tank and how to operate a backhoe. What they didn’t know individually, they could learn from each other. And they’d know which local experts to turn to otherwise. What they’d want to hear was that she understood why septic tanks and backhoes were on their minds. They wouldn’t appreciate her offering to go off and do her homework. They wouldn’t admire her conscientiousness and diligence. They’d want her to stay right there and just listen and not turn their back on them even if it was to make sure their hamburgers didn’t burn. They’d rather she talked with them about their problems instead of to them about her solutions for those problems. They’d rather she listened as they talked about the way things used to be instead of instructing them about the way they could be. They’d want her to be more interested in hearing about the past they still feel as their present and not so enthusiastic about outlining her plans for a future they can’t imagine except as having no place in it for them.

Trump got a lot of credit from the media for just using the word infrastructure during the campaign. It proved what a populist he was. He didn’t have any real plans to improve the country’s roads and bridges, schools and public buildings. He hasn’t come up with any since he became president. What he did provide was the opportunity for his voters to complain about their roads and bridges and schools. They didn’t want solutions. They wanted to feel aggrieved.

More to my point, they didn’t want to be told how improving infrastructure would make their lives better in the future, even if the future is only as far away as next year.

They wanted to grumble about the pothole they hit this morning on their way to work.

This is a problem every progressive politician with a technocratic bent faces. Actually, it’s turned out to be a problem for every conservative politician with an ideological bent too. Voters don’t want you to talk about your big ideas. They want to talk to you about themselves.

Internet access is necessary infrastructure. Clinton’s plan to bring broadband to places that don’t have it is the 21st Century equivalent of building dams and canals. For some out of the way places it would be the equivalent of electrification. You can’t do business in a national economy, never mind a global one, if you can’t communicate nationally and globally via reliable online services. Just the opposite of proving her out of touch, it showed how attuned she was to living anywhere in the information age.

But people are people wherever they live. They don’t want to talk about fixing their problems as much as they want to grouse about having those problems. If they start complaining about how their dialup kept hanging up the other day and the YouTube video they wanted to view kept buffering, and you start in on explaining how wonderful it will be when everybody’s wired to broadband, they’ll interrupt you to tell you you’re missing the point.

The point is that when they did get YouTube to load, the guy in the video didn’t tell them a thing they already didn’t know about sinking a septic tank.

___________________________________________________________________________________

“Empire Falls” by Richard Russo is available in paperback and for kindle at Amazon.

"Just because they didn't call doesn't mean they didn't like me..."

Undated entry mined from an old notebook. Posted Thursday morning, November 8, 2018.

Jessie Mueller in the Broadway production of the musical “Waitress”, which is basically the story of someone  doing the best she can to improve her situation in life while not letting her hopes dwindle, someone just like most of us and like the real-life waitress in this post. Photo by Joan Marcus, courtesy of the “Waitress” website.

People are so sad and fragile…

Waitress: I had an interview for a part-time job in Manlius. It was between me and someone else. They told me not to worry if they don’t call because they were going to keep my name on file. If don’t hear from them right away it doesn’t mean I’m out of luck, because the other person may get something else or she might not do a good job. So if they don’t call, it doesn’t mean they didn’t like me. I didn’t hear. But, hey, there’s always hope.

I found this in a box in the basement last week when I was moving stuff around down there to make room for the plumber to bring in the new hot water heater. It’s undated but I must have written it when we lived in Syracuse---Manlius is just outside Syracuse---so it’s at least fifteen years old but possibly twenty-seven! It was on a single stray page from a yellow legal page I must have been using in place of a regular notebook so there were no other notes with it that would pin down the date or tell me what restaurant I was in when I eavesdropped on this waitress. Actually, I don’t know if I was eavesdropping. She might have been talking directly to me. We might have been chatting while she poured my coffee or was leaving the check. I don’t remember the scene. I can’t picture it or the waitress. She sounds young. I can’t tell what sort of job she’d applied for, but I’d guess it was a second waitressing job, just because it was part-time and the unstated particulars seem like they were a given and she expected whoever she was talking to----me, another customer, another waiter or waitress---would know without her saying. The point, however, isn’t that I wish I could remember or am even trying.

The point is that it doesn’t matter where or when this conversation took place. It could have been at our favorite Italian place or at the neighborhood diner. It could have been at an IHOP or Friday’s or Denny’s. And it could have been any day during the twelve years we lived in Syracuse. I’d like to be able to picture her just to be able to say to myself “Oh, yeah, her! She was funny” or “She was nice” or “She was a good waitress!” To basically say she was her! A particular and unique individual. But it doesn’t matter here who she was. It’s important to note what she was.

Someone looking to better her situation in life and who had been stymied….again.

In other words, what she was was like most of us, trying to get by doing the best she could, working to improve her  lot, hoping things would get better and trying not to let her hopes dwindle.

What she was saying at some point between 1991 and 2003 was almost certainly said word for word by another waitress a hundred years ago or yesterday. It was said by thousands and thousands of  people of all sorts and conditions working every kind of job. It will be said by more today and will be said by people who won’t be born for another hundred years. It’s the human condition. We live in hope and with constant disappointment, sadness, sorrow, and pain.

I could stop there. Probably should. I made my point. But I’m mad. And when I get mad online I get political.

That waitress knew.

She knew that whoever took her application at whatever place she’d applied was trying to put it nicely, in the way they’d been trained, but was still saying, “Don’t call us. We’ll call you.” And she knew they weren’t going to call. And she knew it meant they didn’t like her. It didn’t necessarily mean they disliked her. It meant they didn’t think they could use her. That’s all that liking applicants for most jobs means. Here’s someone who will be useful for our purpose, which is to stay in business or, to put it bluntly, make money. She knew she was being told they didn’t judge her useful. She knew that when they said they would keep her name on file she was probably already being forgotten. As soon as she walked out the door, she knew, she’d ceased to exist to them. She’d never fully and truly existed.

That’s the way of the world.

For as much as it matters in the grand scheme of things, each of us might as well not exist.

And this is why I’m mad.

I don’t mean just existentially mad, although I am. I routinely curse God for not existing or, when in moments of weakness I give in and let myself believe that he does, for apparently not caring that we do. But this is political too.

It’s not just Trump. He is what he is, and that’s infuriating, but as I’ve said and has been said by wiser men and women, he’s the embodied expression of a general, and all-purpose hostility to having to be kind.

To having to care.

Trump’s cohorts of hideous men and women are a vindictive mob. They want to get even. They want to punish. But what they want to get even with is the world, which they have, quite rightly, recognized doesn’t care they exist. Who they want punished for this existential affront, however, is anybody and everybody they think is getting in the way of the world taking proper note of their existence and that turns out to be most of the rest of their fellow Americans and, although they’re apparently not aware of the irony, themselves as well, since the politicians they vote for to inflict the punishment don’t care about them and their existence except to the extent they are useful.

But the hideous men and women didn’t elect Trump. They didn’t elect most of the Right Wing politicians who survived Tuesday’s trouncing.

Republicans did.

The majority of Republicans voted Republican for the same reasons they always have. To keep their taxes low, to keep THEM in their place, and to be left alone.

Heartlessness and cruelty are defenses.

They don’t want to face the fact that life is unfair. That the universe doesn’t care they exist. That they can be victims of life’s unfairness. Have been. Are! They don’t want to know the universe doesn’t care they exist and that they are subject to its seeming heartlessness and cruelty that are really just human words for its mindless, soulless indifference.

Trump assures his mobs that is ok to want revenge, it’s ok to hate. But he assures Republicans in general that they don’t have to care. As long as things are working out for them, whatever is happening to someone else somewhere else, everything’s fine, life is terrific, and America is great again. This is part of the essential message of almost every Republican politician since Coolidge. It will all work out if people mind their own business and others just mind theirs.

Deep inside---but not all that deep it doesn’t routinely rise to the surface---they know. They know what that waitress knew.

That life is a string of disappointments. That hopes are really waking dreams and dreams too often come to nothing. That people are so fragile and so sad. That we really have nothing to count on but each other.

Ok, I’m done. Not much of an ending. But it’s a good point to quote Vonnegut again. Doctor Mark Vonnegut, the novelist’s son, on why we’re here.

We’re here, he’s said, to help each other get through this thing, whatever this thing is.

Filed under Life in these United States.

What friends are for

Posted Monday morning, September 25, 2018.

Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh at his hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee, almost looking as though he has a conscience to oppress him. Undated and uncredited AP photo via the Boston Herald-American.

More from the Department of Ideas in Search of a Post:

Just because a friend never did a bad thing in front of you or to you doesn’t me he didn’t do it when he was with other friends, the stupid pals, buddies, amigos, jerks, dopes,assholes, and other bad influences he should have known to steer clear of but for some reason didn’t.

One of the ways we get in trouble is to put ourselves in the company of bad company, out of sight of our true friends who care about us. This happens to us all our lives, not just when we’re seventeen. It gets worse as we get older, in fact, and the bad company doesn’t include just false friends but neighbors, coworkers, and bosses. We’re always tempted to go along to get along and hide the fact that we’re tempted from the friends who could help us resist the temptation.

When you are seventeen

Posted Wednesday morning, September 19, 2018.

A stageful of seventeen year old young adult men, including the author (far right), in our high school production of “Taming of the Shrew” back in the day. [Act II, Scene I. I played Biondello, in case you want to look it up.]

More from the Department of Ideas in Search of a Post:

At seventeen you’re not legally a full-fledged adult. The law doesn’t grant you all the rights, privileges, and liberties granted as a matter of course to adults over the age of twenty-one. But you can still do just about everything legal adults can do, either as a matter of course or under certain circumstances.

You can’t vote. You can’t buy booze, beer, cigarettes, or lottery tickets. But if your parents or guardians permit it you can have a glass of wine or a smoke on their property. You can drive a car. You can own a car. You can work full-time. You can have and manage your own money. You can live on your own. If you were responsible, hardworking, and smart enough, that is, if you were adult about going about your studies and extracurriculars, you can go away to college. In some states you can get married without your parents’ or guardians’ permission. You can join the military if you have their permission.

But in doing all these things you are expected to behave as an adult. You are expected to have an adult understanding of right and wrong and make decisions accordingly. You can be forgiven if sometimes you don’t. You are, after all, still a kid. But not automatically, and not in all cases, and only if you ask for forgiveness and make amends, and sometimes not even then. Most anything is excusable. Not everything is forgivable. There are things you can do that will and should cost you for the rest of your life and you are expected to know that and understand why. You are expected to take responsibility for your actions and accept and bear the consequences.

Above it all, through it all, with it all, as the foundation of it all, you are expected---required----to treat other people as fellow human beings and not as things you’re entitled to use for your own advantage and pleasure.

Trump on a bar stool

Mined from the notebooks, Wednesday, July 18, 2018. Posted Friday morning, July 20.

“Isn’t that right, Vlad, old buddy?”: Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin at their press conference after the Helsinki summit, Monday, July 16, 2018. AP Photo/Alexander Zemlianichenko via Newser.

Here’s how I understand Trump and Putin. I’m not saying how it is with them, because like I would know. And I’m not suggesting it’s how you should understand it. Besides its being the case that I don’t know and have no way of knowing, it’s the case with everything---you probably know more than me. Even if you don’t, it’s really the case I’m guessing and your guess is as good as mine. In any case, here’s my guess.

Say I own a business, and that business is about to go under. I’m about to lose the company, store, shop, firm, whatever and with it my house and everything I own. One thing I’m going to lose is any reputation I had for being a good businessman. Which makes it really hard to find anyone to bail me out. But then one seemingly friendly banker or rich acquaintance says, Don’t worry, I’ll take care of it. He would instantly become my best friend for life. I’d think the world of him. No matter what anyone said about him, I’d come to his defense. That may be so, I’d say, but to me he’s always been a great guy. From then on, I’d do just about anything for him. He wouldn’t have to ask me for any favors. I’d always be on the lookout for ways to show my gratitude and demonstrate my affection. Whenever I had the chance, whatever and however I could, I’d try to find ways to repay him in kind if I couldn’t muster the cash. And if he did ask me for a favor, I wouldn’t have to think twice. I’d do it, if I could, especially if it meant doing something I was already inclined to do and more especially if he didn’t make it seem like too much of a favor. He phrased it right, I might think it wasn’t much of a favor or any favor at all. Not enough of one, at any rate, to even begin to pay him back for what I felt I owe him, which, when you get right down to it, is everything. The guy saved my life, after all. If anything, then, instead of feeling I’d taken a step to make it up to him, I might feel more indebted, more grateful, and more beholden.

On top of this, imagine I know I’m going to need this guy’s help again. Soon. In fact, I already still need it. Imagine his generosity didn’t solve my problems. It just made them manageable for the time being. How likely is it then I’m going to refuse to do him any favors, let alone a small one, or what he’s convinced me is a small one? How likely is it I’m going to say or do anything that might offend him or make him think he made a mistake helping me out. How likely is it I’m going to say or do anything that might make him think I’m no longer worth his time or trouble. How likely is it I’m in fact going to go out of my way to do the opposite, buttering him up, flattering him, show him how I’m still worth his time, effort, friendship, and money every chance I get?

Now, one more thing to add. Imagine I suspect that I somehow did something wrong by accepting this guy’s help. That I’ve tangled myself up in his plots and schemes in ways I can’t see or understand if I did see. I have the feeling I’m in way over my head and I have no idea how I got myself here or how to get myself out. Imagine there’s no one I trust to explain it to me because it would mean making myself look like a fool or a crook in their eyes. They might feel obligated to call the cops on me, so to speak. In fact, the only person I trust not to rat me out and to understand how to get through the mess this guy has gotten me into is the guy himself! Maybe I’ll just let him string me along, hoping for the best, terrified there’s disaster ahead. More likely, though, for my own peace of mind, I’ll convince myself the guy knows what he’s doing. He’s a stand up guy. He wouldn’t put his friends at risk. He’s a smart guy. He’s an honest guy. He wouldn’t put himself at risk. He’s not the villain here. Everybody who says is, they’re the villains! They want to give me advice about how to deal with him? Fuck them! Who are they to give advice? He’s the only one whose advice is worth listening to because he’s the only one who knows what’s going on.

See, any other way of looking at it---that he conned me, that he played me for a sucker, that the reasons he picked me for his mark are I’m stupid and desperate and weak and crooked---makes me a loser, and there’s no way I’m that!

And I’ll go through all that because this guy saved me from losing a business that’s worth a few hundred thousand at most by fronting me a measly ten or twenty grand. Hell. I might go through all that if it was just three or four thousand. Or even just a few hundred.

Imagine, though, if it was millions and millions.

It’s hard to keep in mind that Fitzgerald was wrong and Hemingway was right, that the rich, famous, and powerful aren’t different from you and me. They just have more money---which buys them more freedom and scope to be themselves and with that more come more temptations to behave badly. They may look like monsters of greed, vanity, ambition, and desire, but what they really are is more human.

Donald Trump is probably the worst human being ever elected President. (Andrew Johnson wasn’t elected and, as I’ve often mentioned, Richard Nixon had to be President in order to be worse.) But if he’d not been elected, if he’d not been nominated, if he’d not run, if he’d not acquired the money and the celebrity that made it possible for him to run, if his father hadn’t staked him a fortune to squander, he’d still have been a rotten human being. He’d still have cheated on his wives, they just wouldn’t have been supermodels, maybe not even department store models, but whoever and whatever they were, they’d have still just been toys and trophies to him. He’d have neglected his kids, begrudged them their child support, used them to make himself money. He’d still have scammed his way through life, reneged on contracts, shaken hands on deals he never intended to follow through on, broken promises, bullied everyone he thought was weaker than himself, lied about everything, boasted and bragged only while sitting on a barstool instead of going on stage before thousands of adoring creeps like himself to do it. I think Kelly Anne Conway once said Trump’s strength as a public speaker was his ability to sound like a random guy in bowling alley bar in Wisconsin. If he hadn’t had that sack of his father’s money he carried over his shoulder to Manhattan, he’d have been some random guy in a bowling alley bar in Queens. And if he’d managed to start a little business on his own, a contracting business or gone into real estate development on a small scale and was on the brink of failing at that and a local banker or deep-pocketed friend bailed him out, he wouldn’t have felt unduly grateful or obligated---Donald Trump doesn’t do gratitude or recognize obligations---unless he knew he still needed the help.

President Trump---the random guy in the White House we wish was a random guy in a bowling alley bar---knows he still needs the help.

He know he’s in trouble. He knows he did something wrong, but he’s not sure what it was.  And it’s driving him crazy there’s no one he can trust to ask to explain it. Not that he’d really understand it if there was. He doesn’t have the moral intelligence. Or the regular intelligence. He doesn’t care he did something wrong. He just cares he’s in trouble over it. And the only one who seems to care, the only one who seems to understand, the only one who seems to know what to do is his new best friend Vlad.

And that’s how I understand Donald Trump and Putin. Trump is human. All too human. And that makes him a monster.

But it’s like I said.

Like I would know.

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I don’t know if the New Yorker’s Adam Davidson knows better than me. He probably does. And his guess seems better than mine. Much better sourced, at any rate. Much, much better sourced, as in based on actual reporting as opposed to based on stuff he just read online:

Kompromat can be a single, glaring example of wrongdoing, recorded by someone close to the Kremlin and then used to control the bad actor. It can be proof of an embarrassing sex act. [Keith Darden, an international-relations professor at American University] believes it is unlikely that sexual kompromat would be effective on Trump. Allegations of sexual harassment, extramarital affairs, and the payment of hush money to hide indiscretions have failed to significantly diminish the enthusiasm of Trump’s core supporters. But another common form of kompromat—proof of financial crimes—could be more politically and personally damaging.

Trump has made a lot of money doing deals with businesspeople from the former Soviet Union, and at least some of these deals bear many of the warning signs of money laundering and other financial crimes. Deals in Toronto, Panama, New York, and Miami involved money from sources in the former Soviet Union who hid their identities through shell companies and exhibited other indications of money laundering. In the years before he became a political figure, Trump acted with impunity, conducting minimal corporate due diligence and working with people whom few other American businesspeople would consider fit partners. During that period, he may have felt protected by the fact that U.S. law-enforcement officials rarely investigate or prosecute Americans who engage in financial crimes overseas. Such cases are also maddeningly difficult to prove, and the F.B.I. has no subpoena power in other countries. If, however, someone had evidence that proved financial crimes and shared it with, say, the special counsel, Robert Mueller, other American law-enforcement officials, or the press, it could significantly damage Trump’s business, his family, and his Presidency.

Follow the link to Davidson’s post, A Theory of Trump Kompromat, at the New Yorker.

Intergenerational assholery

Posted Tuesday morning, May 22, 2018.

Used to be a secular proverb that carried the wisdom of scripture: “If you meet an asshole in the course of your day, you’ve met an asshole. But if everybody you meet is an asshole, then you’re the asshole.” Now maybe I’ve become an asshole, but it seems to me that there’s now a critical mass of assholes and the world is more and more crowded with them so the proverb should be amended. “If you meet ten assholes…”

There’s an occasionally erupting debate over which generation is worse, the Boomers or the Millennials. For some reason, Gen Xers get a pass. If they haven’t contributed as much to the Republic’s decline and fall it’s only because they’ve never outgrown their original incarnation as a generation of slackers and it’s not that they’re not a generation of swine like the rest of us, it’s that they’re just not trying hard enough. But judging from my experience lately, assholery is an intergenerational condition and Generation X is an enthusiastically assholish cohort.

Going from what I’ve observed, there are many fewer assholes among the younger Millennials, the ones still in their late teens and early twenties. But I think that’s only because not enough of them have learned yet that there’s really not much of a price to be paid for being an asshole. (There’s not much of a reward either, a fact that drives Trump voters crazy. They see assholes making out like bandits and they want to know “Where’s my cut?” Of course a lot of Trump’s voters are people who give the above proverb it’s truth.) There are fewer assholes among the Boomers than there were, but that’s because we’re getting old. We’re worn down and worn out, and and most of us don’t have the energy and strength and stamina to be more than minor league-level selfish jerks. We also know which side our bread is buttered on. We’re becoming more and more dependent on the kindness and goodwill of our youngers and betters. Still, we contribute more than our fair share to making life unnecessarily more annoying than it naturally is.

But Gen Xers---people in their forties and early fifties---are in their asshole primes. And they have more opportunity to show it, since they’re running the show now. Don’t look at the Boomers at the top of the ladders. Look at the people a couple rungs down, the ones where the action is.

I don’t blame this on anything other than that people generally stink and are stupid, no matter the decade they came of age. There are more assholes now because there are more people than there have ever been. And the thing about assholes is that they make others behave like assholes back in retaliation and self-defense. So odds are even if you aren’t by nature an asshole you act like one regularly just to make it through the day.

Anyway, that’s my story and I’m sticking to it. And, like I said, it may just be that I’ve become an asshole myself, if I wasn’t always one.

Caveat: My opinion may be skewed. I’ve been spending a lot of my time lately driving in rush hour traffic and looking for open slots in parking lots. It’s my experience that people are at their stupidest in parking lots. Both drivers and pedestrians lose all their judgment and common sense in them. They walk and drive as if all the rules of the road and behavior are suspended and as if cars are made of soft rubber and will bounce off each other and them.

It'd be funny, if it wasn't so tragic

Posted Friday afternoon, April 13, 2018.

Determined to be themselves in circumstances that punish them for that: a scene from a 2011 production of Michael Frayn’s farce “Noises Off” at the Old Vic. Photo by Tristram Kenton for the Guardian.

Back when we were all engaged in armchair psychoanalysis of Our Mr President Trump and the term pathological narcissist was bouncing around the internet the way obstruction of justice and impeachment are now, I wrote that Trump didn’t actually have to be crazy to be crazy---that is, to be acting crazily. He’s so thoroughly unfit for the job---intellectually, professionally, temperamentally, psychologically, and morally---that there was no way for him to behave appropriately as President. He could only go about presidenting the only way he knows how to do anything: as Donald Trump. And since Donald Trump was the wrong man for the job---the wrongest man ever to hold the job---everything he did and said as President was wrong, and it was crazy for him to keep trying to Donald Trump his way through his presidency.

I think it’s pretty much generally agreed now that what’s wrong with him is simply that he’s a thoroughly rotten human being. But I’m still sticking with my “diagnosis” because I think it’s the right one in this way. Trump is trapped by circumstances he doesn’t understand and can’t control and couldn’t control even if he had any idea about how to control them. In that, he’s like most of us. He’s Everyman and Everywoman.

Trump’s most ardent acolytes love him because he reminds them of them. It seems odd that the residents of the small blue collar towns and suburbs of the Midwest and South and the parts of the rest of the country most like them culturally and demographically that make up Trumpland would identify so completely with a billionaire from New York City, but they do, because they see him their ideal self, the rich, successful celebrity they’d be if their luck would just turn (or would have been, if elitist liberals had rigged everything in favor of THOSE PEOPLE.) But I’m convinced that at least unconsciously they recognize he’s like them in another way. He’s in way over his head and has no idea how to get out of the trouble he’s in except to do what they know how to do and pray it works out for the best.

The problem is that circumstances control us to a much greater degree than we control them and force us to act in certain ways and carry us down paths we don’t want to go because we know we’re headed into more and deeper trouble.

I haven’t decided if I’m going to read Comey’s book. From what I've read about it, it doesn’t look as though it’ll tell me anything I don’t already know or that it reveals anything that will damn Trump once and for all in the eyes of his fans and, more importantly, his protectors and enablers in Congress. The passages getting a lot of attention in my Twitter feed are the ones in which Comey, the former federal prosecutor, compares Trump to mobsters he brought to justice, and those make me interested in reading about those investigations and trials, and I can’t tell from what I’ve read if Comey tells that story and if as a writer he’s got enough Jimmy Breslin or Gay Talese in him to tell it well. But the idea that Trump is like those wiseguys Comey went after is attractive to me. It’s not that I think Trump is like Sammy the Bull in character. It’s that he’s like members of the Gambino family in that, because he turned his real estate business into a criminal enterprise, he’s had to act like the head of a criminal enterprise to keep it going. He trapped himself in circumstances of his own making and once he did everything he’s done has been dictated by those circumstances. It’s another way of seeing my theory that he’s doesn’t have to be crazy to be crazy. He doesn’t have to be a mobster to be a mobster.

Just to be clear, I’m not making the case Trump---or any of us---have no free will. The circumstances that trap us include our own decisions to continue to pursue the goal or the treasure we got into trouble chasing after initially. It doesn’t matter if what we set out to achieve or obtain was good or bad or if we are a good or bad human being. Who we are and what we want are virtually irrelevant when the situation is not in our control.

This is the fundamental human truth at the heart of both farce and tragedy.

The horror of tragedy lies in watching noble characters try to act nobly in circumstances that won’t let them or against which acting nobly is of no avail.

The fun in farce arises from watching ignoble characters or less than noble ones (That’s most of us.) try to live their lives as usual and just go about the business of being themselves as circumstances make that increasingly impossible.

In other words, tragedy and farce are the same. The difference is that tragedy usually ends with the noble characters unfairly defeated and farce ends with the good characters improbably happy and the bad characters unrealistically given their comeuppance.

Our hope is that the drama of Donald Trump turns out to be a farce.

It would be, if only so many good everymen and everywomen weren’t being punished as the plot proceeds towards its inexorable end.

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"A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies, and Leadership" by James Comey will be available in hardcover and for kindle at Amazon and as an audiobook from Audible Tuesday, April 17.

Recommended diversionary reading for the fun of it: At the Guardian, John Cleese on how to write the perfect farce.

Also for fun, "The Gang That Couldn't Shoot Straight" by Jimmy Breslin and "Honor Thy Father" by Gay Talese.

Hero to himself

Posted first thing Wednesday morning, February 28, 2018.

Peter O’Toole as the title character in the 1965 film adaptation of Joseph Conrad’s “Lord Jim”.

I’m sure he would’ve, just like he charged all those machine gun nests in Viet…oh…yeah…

President Trump claimed Monday that he would have rushed into the Florida high school during the mass shooting earlier this month there that killed 17 people, and he called it “disgusting” that an officer assigned to the school didn’t enter the building while the attack was underway.

“I really believe I'd run in, even if I didn't have a weapon,” Trump said during a White House meeting with governors from across the country…---from the Washington Post, Monday, February 26, 2018.

Trump is soulmates with his voters. All over America grown men are saying the same thing to themselves. “If I’d a been there…” And these child-men are allowed to vote, drive cars, get married, and own guns.

Once upon a time, any blowhard who said something this stupid in public would have been laughed off his bar stool by his fellow regulars. Now he goes online to connect with his fellow blowhards and they exchange boasts and egg and cheer each other on.

One of the appalling things about Trump---and I mean Trump the phenomenon and totemistic figure here, the central idol in a cult of self-worship, and that’s what many of Trump’s most ardent idolaters are engaged in, worship of an idealized, glorified self. Through their identification with him they’re aggrandizing themselves, telling themselves they aren’t the losers they’re afraid they truly are---one of the appalling things, I say again, is the way he’s swooningly admired as if there have been no other presidents to measure him against.

The notion of Five Deferment Don, “Cadet Bone Spurs” as Iraq War veteran and Purple Heart recipient Senator Tammy Duckworth calls him, running headlong into a hail of bullets is laughable on the face of it. The notion of Trump running at all, toward, away, any direction, is side-splittingly funny. But we have had Presidents who did run into hails of bullets or at least put themselves in harm’s way. War veterans and actual war heroes. Working backwards: George Herbert Walker Bush, John Kennedy, Dwight Eisenhower, Harry Truman, Theodore Roosevelt, William McKinley, Benjamin Harrison, Rutheford B. Hayes, Ulysses Grant, Zachary Taylor, William Henry Harrison, Andrew Jackson---supposedly Trump's model president. I think he was really Steve Bannon's---James Monroe, and that first guy, I forget his name.

James Garfield was killed by a bullet---well, actually by the doctor's repeated attempts to remove the bullet. That story is well-told in Candice Milliard's great "Destiny of the Republic". But as reader John reminded me in a comment [Editor's note: Psst. This is an update to the post. I left Garfield out of the above list, intending to give him his own paragraph, like this paragraph, then forgot. Thanks for the reminder John.], Garfield was a genuine hero of the Civil War. He was an abolitionist too and a strict Reconstructionist. And he was a highly intelligent, capable, and decent human being. In many ways, he was his era's Barack Obama. He was the worthiest heir to Lincoln, and his assassination was a terrible injury to the Republic. That story is also well-told in Milliard's book, which you should do yourself the favor of reading, if you haven't already.

John also reminded me that Franklin Pierce was a veteran of the Mexican War. I'd completely forgotten about him. I don't mean his military service, I mean him. Pierce was a pretty poor specimen, as a man and even more so as a President. He's one of the very few Presidents next to whom Trump appears, not good, but a little less awful. He's still the worst by far, as a man. As a President, he's working hard on that. Only thing he does work hard on. Historians will have to decide, though, if the Muslim ban, the mass deportations, his betrayal of the Dreamers, and the encouragement he gives to white supremacists and neo-Nazis outweigh Pierce's signing of the Kansas-Nebraska Act and enforcing the Fugitive Slave Law in destructiveness and evil.

Richard Nixon was in the Navy during World War II. It’s said, sneeringly, that he spent the war safe and comfortable behind the lines, playing and winning at poker, but he contributed to that image himself, jokingly downplaying his service in speeches and interviews, trying to appear modest and unassuming while still making the point he was a veteran. Like all Nixon’s attempts to be funny, people missed the joke. But although he was stationed on land and not aboard ship—his first assignment was in Iowa!---like Mr Roberts he angled to get himself assigned to a seat of more action and was sent to the South Pacific, where he was technically in a combat zone, and, again like Mr Roberts, what he did was critical to the war effort even if it didn’t appear heroic or adventurous---he was the officer in charge of Combat Air Transport Command for Guadalcanal and the Solomon Islands and appears to have been pretty good at the job.

Jimmy Carter is a Navy veteran of the Korean War era but he didn’t see combat. He did serve in the submarine service, not the safest or cushiest of assignments back then, and twice put his life on the line---once accidentally but the incident demonstrated his courage and steel. You could even call him a World War II veteran too. He entered Annapolis in 1943 but the war ended before he graduated. And Abraham Lincoln was a volunteer captain in the militia and led his men off to fight in the Black Hawk War. He didn’t fight any Indians but he did have, as he famously said, “a good many bloody struggles with the mosquitoes.”

And here are the war heroes who ran for President just in Trump’s adult lifetime: John McCain, John Kerry, Bob Dole, and George McGovern. Kerry literally did run into a hail of bullets. Not unarmed but with just a pistol. Probably like he prefers heroes who weren’t captured, Trump prefers heroes who couldn’t shoot back as well as heroes who weren’t grievously wounded and crippled for life and heroes who didn’t win their medals for crashlanding their flak-damaged bombers on too short runways and saving their crew with their superior piloting skills.

Unfit as he is, Trump stands in their company. He holds the office they held or might have held. You’d think he’d have sense enough not to invite comparisons. You’d think he’d have sense enough not to invite comparisons to almost any president, seeing, as he is, the most miserable specimen of human being ever to hold the office, Andrew Johnson being possibly the only exception. Every other President had some virtues. But Trump has no shame, and besides which, along with being a liar and a conman, hand in hand with those qualities, in fact, he’s a fantasist. He routinely talks about himself as if he believes he’s the greatest President ever, the way a crooked salsesman will talk as if he believes the lemon he’s trying to sucker a credulous high school kid buying his first car into springing for is the greatest piece of automotive engineering since the ‘63 Corvette. It’s a key to his success as a conman, suckering the credulous and the greedy into buying his lemons---his get rich schemes. Which is what his campaign was and his presidency is, really. Vote for me and I’ll make you rich! Stick with me and I’ll make you rich! The reason his voters don’t see the ridiculousness of Trump’s placing himself in those other president’s company is they don’t see those presidents. All they see is Trump. Actually, all they see is themselves as Trump.

They see themselves rich without effort, successful without merit, celebrated without deserving, a boss without any special talent or brains or proven ability, having achieved all that despite all that, idolized by crowds, envied and feared by other, better men, with beautiful women at their beck and call. He’s the them they’ve always fantasized themselves as being, given the chance. And now that he’s declared himself a hero invulnerable to bullets, they’re free to indulge that fantasy too.

Like I said, this country is full of childish men convinced they’re heroes in waiting. They expect their big moment will come at any time and, I’ll add, they resent anyone and anything they think’s blocking that moment’s arrival.

We don’t necessarily imagine ourselves literally rushing into burning buildings, diving into the water to save a child from drowning, or rushing down a school hallway unarmed to take down a determined mass murderer with a semi-automatic assault rifle who can empty his magazine in less than the time it takes us to take even one step in his direction. But we take it for granted that when the critical moment comes we’ll do the decent thing, the moral thing, the courageous thing, because, after all, aren’t we decent, aren’t we moral, aren’t we courageous?

One of my favorite grace notes---those small touches in a movie that help illuminate a theme or reveal something about a character without calling attention to themselves so that we take them in and understand them almost unconsciously---in “Captain America: First Avenger”---Yes. Superhero movies can have grace notes.---is when Steve Rogers, still short and scrawny, unpacks after his arrival at the training camp for would-be Super Soldiers and we see that his small trunk is full of the boy’s adventure stories with moralizing titles he read as a kid and from which, an orphan, he taught himself what it means to be a good man. Steve is already Captain America. That’s why the serum works on him. He’s small but he has an extra large heart. The serum doesn’t turn him into Cap. It gives him the strength to carry on as the hero he is in but on a larger stage with a greater purpose. He hasn’t been a hero in his own mind. We’ve seen him at work, taking on bullies who bully others not himself, and we know how much more he’s trying to do by attempting to enlist again and again even though he keeps being rejected as 4F.

Steve---Cap---is the childhood ideal. Jim, the title character of Conrad’s “Lord Jim”, is the adult reality.

Conrad introduces Jim as being a shade under six feet, that is, a shade under the stereotypically heroic height, a powerfully built young merchant seaman, barely out of his teens, with “Ability”, looking down from his station in the fore-top on people below with the contempt of a man destined to shine in the midst of dangers”.  Like Steve Rogers, Jim raised himself on boy’s adventure stories. Unlike Steve Rogers, his ambitions and ideals are tinged with vanity. He goes to sea to give himself the chance to show to the world, and to himself, he’s the hero he’s meant to be.

On the lower deck in the babel of two hundred voices he would forget himself, and beforehand live in his mind the sea-life of light literature. He saw himself saving people from sinking ships, cutting away masts in a hurricane, swimming through a surf with a line; or as a lonely castaway, barefooted and half naked, walking on uncovered reefs in search of shellfish to stave off starvation. He confronted savages on tropical shores, quelled mutinies on the high seas, and in a small boat upon the ocean kept up the hearts of despairing men—always an example of devotion to duty, and as unflinching as a hero in a book.

Jim starts out well. He rises rapidly. He gets a berth as chief mate “aboard a very fine ship”, but…

…without ever having been tested by those events of the sea that show in the light of day the inner worth of a man, the edge of his temper, and the fibre of his stuff; that reveal the quality of his resistance and the secret truth of his pretences, not only to others but also to himself.

A minor injury to his leg forces him to give up the berth while he recovers. When his leg heals, he’s impatient to get back to sea and, with no other immediate prospects for employment, he signs on as chief mate aboard an old steamer sailing out of Singapore with a “cargo” of Muslim pilgrims on their way to Mecca. One night, far out to sea, the steamer collides with something floating just below the surface and starts to take on water. The cowardly captain and some of the crew abandon ship. Jim intends to do his duty and stay with the ship and its passengers even if it sinks. But at the last moment he reflexively jumps from the deck into the lifeboat and rows away. It turns out, that the steamer doesn’t sink and another ship comes to its rescue. Jim is disgraced. He spends the rest of the book both hiding from his past and looking for a chance to show he’s a hero and resolved that this time he won’t jump.

You know the rest.

None of us know ahead of time what we would do in a crisis, physical or moral. We can only go by how we’ve handled things in the past. But battle-hardened veterans have admitted that in the same firefight in which they’d acted heroically at the outset they had a sudden moment of fear in which they froze and survived the next hail of bullets either through blind luck or because someone else unexpectedly came to their rescue, often with tragic results for that someone else.

We can make plans in our heads. We can rehearse it in our imaginations. We can resolve that when the moment comes…

But we can’t know.

We can’t be certain that at the last second we won’t…jump.

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This post is dedicated to the memory of Old Father Blonde, a Navy veteran, who loved Conrad and, when he was Young Father Blonde and Mrs M was a baby blonde, read “Lord Jim” out loud to her when she was in her crib and falling asleep.

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The Editors recommend a related Mannion re-run: a story from real life about a young seaman who when his moment came did not jump, The day young Ensign Carter was almost lost at sea.

"Destiny of the Republic: A Tale of Madness, Medicine and the Murder of a President " by Candice Millard is available in paperback and for kindle at Amazon and as an audiobook from Audible.