“That’s not who we are.”

Barack Obama used that phrase no less than 46 times in November of 2018 alone — the first days of the Era of Trump. He used it many times thereafter, and no one was in any doubt as to its meaning. There was a general understanding that America basically stood for something other than bullying, bullshit, racism, and hate. We thought we stood for an idea, and an ideal — a country where everyone got a fair shot at happiness, where one had a right to justice (if not always right away), and one’s character and abilities and behavior counted for more than the size of one’s bank account or the inherited advantages conferred by one’s social heritage. Obama could use it so confidently only because everyone understood it. He didn’t have to cite chapter and verse with each new outrage. It was a pithy useful shorthand to convey a pithy and indignant message : ‘Have hope. This presidency is an aberration, and it, too, will pass.’

I fear its very pithiness is becoming embarrassing as the evidence piles up that Mr Trump IS in fact what we are. We (or at least a voting majority of us) have long secretly nurtured a wish that the good old days would come back, that the white majority could regain its conviction that an unreliable and undisciplined citizenry would once again become docile and allow itself to be screwed by the elite as their status is diminished and their money is stolen, unhindered by Rooseveltian conscience twinges or common sense, and that future historians may have to dig deep to figure out what he meant. Because today it is becoming more and more obvious that that is exactly who we are. And presumably have been, under a thin skin of pretense at better, for most of these two and a half centuries since the Founders tried to codify ‘decent’ behavior for us in a Constitution. Bullies, bullshitters, racists, and haters.

We enjoy standing in the sunshine in our red baseball caps with our hot dogs askew and mustard dripping into our sleeves chanting “Lock her up!” and “Build That Wall” far more than we enjoy paying attention when an aspiring young leader proposes an actual solution to an actual problem. ‘Actual’ carries no weight against ‘Fake’ if fake promises that with just one more megaphone-inspired yell you, too, will be entitled to screw your neighbor and evade the common sense of regulation to protect us all.

This is not a new revelation, of course. There has always been a minority nursing this conviction, but it has generally found it wise to keep the worst offenders safely hidden under their cone-headed sheets or in their evangelical pulpits where the misapplied quotes of long-dead and mythological figures can be freely misinterpreted to one’s heart’s content without repercussions (thanks mostly to the Founders’ respect for free speech and their confidence in its power). The minority’s numbers have, however, generally been kept within bounds by the restraining attitudes of the ‘Establishment’ — a combination of the public school system, the church, and the hopes of a political reversal giving the dissenters access to the public trough before their own opportunity slips away. This time we have found ourselves with a leader with a foghorn voice and a fogged brain willing to voice the worst of our prejudices and make them ‘mainstream’. And we are thronging to acclaim him as our Pied Piper while the exhilaration of freedom from restraint and responsibility lasts. It’s a party, and you’re all invited. The way we laugh and cheer and jostle on our way to the cliff’s edge you might think that we had all gone mad, but for the little side drams and subplots of the Wells Fargos and the Sacklers and the calculated infiltration of political water-carrier judges to where the Supreme Court is today merely a reliable a 5-4agency of the administration’s policies, probably soon to become 6-3 and then 7-2 and then — quite possibly : think about it for a moment — just another patronage job to be awarded by the Leader for loyalty and faithful service..

Is there anything to be done about it? Yes, but only one thing suggests itself : throw the bum out, and his whole filthy crew after him. Is such a thing possible? Again, yes, but on one condition : that his opponents decide to act in unison and accept the fact that it will take a whole village — not just half a village. Your most precious project may have to be put aside — or even be abandoned for this generation — to create a united front. that will sometimes seem to be caving in, but think of the alternative : Ivanka and Jared and more tanks and bombs and planes and invective and the disrespect of every civilized county on the planet.

We might contemplate using Joseph Welsh’s “At long last, sir, have you left no sense of decency?” as our ultimate test. Each of us can think about it separately and come to his or her own conclusion. If we do that carefully, there is still plenty of time to clean the house and send the creeps back under their cone caps and guilty anonymity.

For how long? Who knows? But I’d rather take my chances about that than go down divided, leaving Mr. Trump ‘s divide and conquer strategy the winner.

Where’s your backpack? Have you combed your hair? We have ten minutes to catch the bus.

Why is there no school today, Mommy?

Because it’s Potemkin Day. National holiday. Everything closed to honor the Lord’s commandment about an occasional day of rest. Except, of course, the stores, the theaters, the supermarkets, and the restaurants. Major shopping day. We need lots of stuff.

What’s that : Potemkin Day?

Long story, littlegirl. Sure you want to hear it?

I always want to hear your stories, you know that. Even when I don’t have any idea what you’re talking about.

Sometimes neither do I. All right. Many years ago — 232 years ago, to be exact — the Russian Empress Catherine II decided to take a boat ride from Moscow to the Crimea to check on the condition of her back country. Which at the time was not particularly good. Famine, disease, poverty, rampant corruption. Her entourage included a number of ambassadors from countries equally eager to assess the same thing for their own employers. One of her ministers, Grigory Potemkin, who also had an after-hours job as her lover, helped her devise a scheme to persuade them that everything was fine.

A fake village, of freshly-constructed building façades, like Disney World, and populated by actors was assembled every morning of the cruise on the riverbank for them to inspect, then as darkness came, it was replaced by strategically placed torches and candles to simulate illuminated windows while the buildings were disassembled and shipped ahead to be re-erected along the next day’s route so the dignitaries could see for themselves how prosperous Russia was — filled with bustling activity and happy citizens.

Pretty far out if you ask me.

Yes. But it’s amazing how many such deceptions can be perpetrated by really determined sycophants determined to defend their protected positions. And not all historians are convinced. But the designation ‘Potemkin Village’ has been used ever since to denote a fake papering over of a rotten situation.

And we celebrate that in this country? Why? What has all that got to do with us?All those people are dead and gone.

Well, 200 years on, a situation came up in which our home-grown version of Catherine, a guy named Trump, found a need to use a similar strategy, but this time, so desperate was he for the love and adulation of his subjects that he turned the game totally around, revising it to deceive not others but himself. He portrayed the country as a wild success story for his ‘gut’ theories of government and established a propaganda empire to support his view. Anything tending to contradict his portrait he simply labeled ‘fake news’ and ignored. For a while it worked reasonably well : after all the grandchildren from whom he was stealing the money to create his Potemkin village hadn’t yet been born, so they were in no position to complain, and those in power were too preoccupied with the details of redecorating their homes and offices with de rigueur gold trimmings that they had no time to assess what collateral damage they might be causing to the basic structure. But eventually his various ministers and technical experts realized that only disaster could lie at the end of that road. His spur-of-the-moment firings of people he had just hired meant that there was no security in their own positions. His deliberate destruction of the formal institutions of government meant that they couldn’t even be sure of exactly what it was they were aspiring to. Even the corruption became unpredictable. They could no longer be guaranteed delivery on their earmarks and loopholes and rackets..

What to do?

They finally decided they would have to turn his own tactic against him. His insatiable thirst for praise (always claiming to be a genius, with the ‘biggest’ crowds at his rallies, his ‘highest ratings’ of any president in history, being everyone’s ‘favorite president’) fell apart at the seams of its own own accord until finally he and a couple of close allies were his only remaining fans. But he was also in fact still the President, and therefore in control of many of the levers of power. After much discussion a secret cabal was formed to enable the real work of government to be performed without his participation, leaving him under the impression that it was still he who was in charge. The Potemkin village was constructed around him, not by him, to wall him off from the real world in a cocoon of fake news. The windows of the White House and Air Force One were doctored to show adoring crowds no matter where he looked, and the sounds of cheering and Hail to the Chief were piped into every room he entered. Special editions of the newspapers were published showing that his every plan was a roaring success. His cell phone was monitored to bring him only good news, including constant encomiums from all the heads of states of the rest of the world. His golf card was adjusted by his caddie to assure him scores in the high 60s. Even his shaving mirror was tinted a nice shade of sepia.

With him safely taken out of the action, the normal workings of government were quickly re-established, and the country, which had been teetering on the brink of crisis in the lack of ability to make any coherent future plans or commitments, began to recover. It took months to convince other governments that the new regime was solid and its promises reliable, and to restore the faith and confidence that the world had formerly granted its leadership, but by the time he figured out what was happening it was too late — for him. He raved and ranted but to no avail. The voters overwhelmingly backed the new regime, and the Republic was saved.

Since then we have devised a number of constitutional amendments to prevent backsliding, and we have established a national day of celebration on the anniversary of his abdication : Potemkin Day.

How come I didn’t already know that story? My teacher never mentioned it.

Because the story no longer matters. What counts now is that you get a day off from school and Hallmark gets another special day to celebrate — although with Internet cards, they say the business is nowhere near as lucrative as it used to be.

I’m ready.

Then let’s go.

Where’s your backpack? Have you combed your hair? We have ten minutes to catch the bus.

Why is there no school today, Mommy?

Because it’s Potemkin Day. National holiday. Everything closed to honor the Lord’s commandment about an occasional day of rest. Except, of course, the stores, the theaters, the supermarkets, and the restaurants. Major shopping day. We need lots of stuff.

What’s that : Potemkin Day?

Long story, littlegirl. Sure you want to hear it?

I always want to hear your stories, you know that. Even when I don’t have any idea what you’re talking about.

Sometimes neither do I. All right. Many years ago — 232 years ago, to be exact — the Russian Empress Catherine II decided to take a boat ride from Moscow to the Crimea to check on the condition of her back country. Which at the time was not particularly good. Famine, disease, poverty, rampant corruption. Her entourage included a number of ambassadors from countries equally eager to assess the same thing for their own employers. One of her ministers, Grigory Potemkin, who also had an after-hours job as her lover, helped her devise a scheme to persuade them that everything was fine.

A fake village, of freshly-constructed building façades, like Disney World, and populated by actors was assembled every morning of the cruise on the riverbank for them to inspect, then as darkness came, it was replaced by strategically placed torches and candles to simulate illuminated windows while the buildings were disassembled and shipped ahead to be re-erected along the next day’s route so the dignitaries could see for themselves how prosperous Russia was — filled with bustling activity and happy citizens.

Pretty far out if you ask me.

Yes. But it’s amazing how many such deceptions can be perpetrated by really determined sycophants determined to defend their protected positions. And not all historians are convinced. But the designation ‘Potemkin Village’ has been used ever since to denote a fake papering over of a rotten situation.

And we celebrate that in this country? Why? What has all that got to do with us?All those people are dead and gone.

Well, 200 years on, a situation came up in which our home-grown version of Catherine, a guy named Trump, found a need to use a similar strategy, but this time, so desperate was he for the love and adulation of his subjects that he turned the game totally around, revising it to deceive not others but himself. He portrayed the country as a wild success story for his ‘gut’ theories of government and established a propaganda empire to support his view. Anything tending to contradict his portrait he simply labeled ‘fake news’ and ignored. For a while it worked reasonably well : after all the grandchildren from whom he was stealing the money to create his Potemkin village hadn’t yet been born, so they were in no position to complain, and those in power were too preoccupied with the details of redecorating their homes and offices with de rigueur gold trimmings that they had no time to assess what collateral damage they might be causing to the basic structure. But eventually his various ministers and technical experts realized that only disaster could lie at the end of that road. His spur-of-the-moment firings of people he had just hired meant that there was no security in their own positions. His deliberate destruction of the formal institutions of government meant that they couldn’t even be sure of exactly what it was they were aspiring to. Even the corruption became unpredictable. They could no longer be guaranteed delivery on their earmarks and loopholes and rackets..

What to do?

They finally decided they would have to turn his own tactic against him. His insatiable thirst for praise (always claiming to be a genius, with the ‘biggest’ crowds at his rallies, his ‘highest ratings’ of any president in history, being everyone’s ‘favorite president’) fell apart at the seams of its own own accord until finally he and a couple of close allies were his only remaining fans. But he was also in fact still the President, and therefore in control of many of the levers of power. After much discussion a secret cabal was formed to enable the real work of government to be performed without his participation, leaving him under the impression that it was still he who was in charge. The Potemkin village was constructed around him, not by him, to wall him off from the real world in a cocoon of fake news. The windows of the White House and Air Force One were doctored to show adoring crowds no matter where he looked, and the sounds of cheering and Hail to the Chief were piped into every room he entered. Special editions of the newspapers were published showing that his every plan was a roaring success. His cell phone was monitored to bring him only good news, including constant encomiums from all the heads of states of the rest of the world. His golf card was adjusted by his caddie to assure him scores in the high 60s. Even his shaving mirror was tinted a nice shade of sepia.

With him safely taken out of the action, the normal workings of government were quickly re-established, and the country, which had been teetering on the brink of crisis in the lack of ability to make any coherent future plans or commitments, began to recover. It took months to convince other governments that the new regime was solid and its promises reliable, and to restore the faith and confidence that the world had formerly granted its leadership, but by the time he figured out what was happening it was too late — for him. He raved and ranted but to no avail. The voters overwhelmingly backed the new regime, and the Republic was saved.

Since then we have devised a number of constitutional amendments to prevent backsliding, and we have established a national day of celebration on the anniversary of his abdication : Potemkin Day.

How come I didn’t already know that story? My teacher never mentioned it.

Because the story no longer matters. What counts now is that you get a day off from school and Hallmark gets another special day to celebrate — although with Internet cards, they say the business is nowhere near as lucrative as it used to be.

I’m ready.

Then let’s go.

Where’s your backpack? Have you combed your hair? We have ten minutes to catch the bus.

Why is there no school today, Mommy?

Because it’s Potemkin Day. National holiday. Everything closed to honor the Lord’s commandment about an occasional day of rest. Except, of course, the stores, the theaters, the supermarkets, and the restaurants. Major shopping day. We need lots of stuff.

What’s that : Potemkin Day?

Long story, littlegirl. Sure you want to hear it?

I always want to hear your stories, you know that. Even when I don’t have any idea what you’re talking about.

Sometimes neither do I. All right. Many years ago — 232 years ago, to be exact — the Russian Empress Catherine II decided to take a boat ride from Moscow to the Crimea to check on the condition of her back country. Which at the time was not particularly good. Famine, disease, poverty, rampant corruption. Her entourage included a number of ambassadors from countries equally eager to assess the same thing for their own employers. One of her ministers, Grigory Potemkin, who also had an after-hours job as her lover, helped her devise a scheme to persuade them that everything was fine.

A fake village, of freshly-constructed building façades, like Disney World, and populated by actors was assembled every morning of the cruise on the riverbank for them to inspect, then as darkness came, it was replaced by strategically placed torches and candles to simulate illuminated windows while the buildings were disassembled and shipped ahead to be re-erected along the next day’s route so the dignitaries could see for themselves how prosperous Russia was — filled with bustling activity and happy citizens.

Pretty far out if you ask me.

Yes. But it’s amazing how many such deceptions can be perpetrated by really determined sycophants determined to defend their protected positions. And not all historians are convinced. But the designation ‘Potemkin Village’ has been used ever since to denote a fake papering over of a rotten situation.

And we celebrate that in this country? Why? What has all that got to do with us?All those people are dead and gone.

Well, 200 years on, a situation came up in which our home-grown version of Catherine, a guy named Trump, found a need to use a similar strategy, but this time, so desperate was he for the love and adulation of his subjects that he turned the game totally around, revising it to deceive not others but himself. He portrayed the country as a wild success story for his ‘gut’ theories of government and established a propaganda empire to support his view. Anything tending to contradict his portrait he simply labeled ‘fake news’ and ignored. For a while it worked reasonably well : after all the grandchildren from whom he was stealing the money to create his Potemkin village hadn’t yet been born, so they were in no position to complain, and those in power were too preoccupied with the details of redecorating their homes and offices with de rigueur gold trimmings that they had no time to assess what collateral damage they might be causing to the basic structure. But eventually his various ministers and technical experts realized that only disaster could lie at the end of that road. His spur-of-the-moment firings of people he had just hired meant that there was no security in their own positions. His deliberate destruction of the formal institutions of government meant that they couldn’t even be sure of exactly what it was they were aspiring to. Even the corruption became unpredictable. They could no longer be guaranteed delivery on their earmarks and loopholes and rackets..

What to do?

They finally decided they would have to turn his own tactic against him. His insatiable thirst for praise (always claiming to be a genius, with the ‘biggest’ crowds at his rallies, his ‘highest ratings’ of any president in history, being everyone’s ‘favorite president’) fell apart at the seams of its own own accord until finally he and a couple of close allies were his only remaining fans. But he was also in fact still the President, and therefore in control of many of the levers of power. After much discussion a secret cabal was formed to enable the real work of government to be performed without his participation, leaving him under the impression that it was still he who was in charge. The Potemkin village was constructed around him, not by him, to wall him off from the real world in a cocoon of fake news. The windows of the White House and Air Force One were doctored to show adoring crowds no matter where he looked, and the sounds of cheering and Hail to the Chief were piped into every room he entered. Special editions of the newspapers were published showing that his every plan was a roaring success. His cell phone was monitored to bring him only good news, including constant encomiums from all the heads of states of the rest of the world. His golf card was adjusted by his caddie to assure him scores in the high 60s. Even his shaving mirror was tinted a nice shade of sepia.

With him safely taken out of the action, the normal workings of government were quickly re-established, and the country, which had been teetering on the brink of crisis in the lack of ability to make any coherent future plans or commitments, began to recover. It took months to convince other governments that the new regime was solid and its promises reliable, and to restore the faith and confidence that the world had formerly granted its leadership, but by the time he figured out what was happening it was too late — for him. He raved and ranted but to no avail. The voters overwhelmingly backed the new regime, and the Republic was saved.

Since then we have devised a number of constitutional amendments to prevent backsliding, and we have established a national day of celebration on the anniversary of his abdication : Potemkin Day.

How come I didn’t already know that story? My teacher never mentioned it.

Because the story no longer matters. What counts now is that you get a day off from school and Hallmark gets another special day to celebrate — although with Internet cards, they say the business is nowhere near as lucrative as it used to be.

I’m ready.

Then let’s go.

Could the Blockchain save us from ourselves?

The arrival of budget-making time in Washington brings out all the best qualities in our lawmakers — obfuscating, bullshitting, prevarication, storytelling (both optimistic and pessimistic), and just plain blatant thievery. It is based on a principle that would have seemed unthinkable to the Founders — namely, that each Senator, Representative, official, and Cabinet Member has as his primary mission the looting of money from the national Treasury money to the benefit of the locality political machine that sent him/her there. Elections are fought on the issues of who gets more and who gets less, not on where it might do the most good for the greatest number of folks.

If you don’t believe me, try a thought experiment : Imagine FIGHT GLOBAL WARMING! instead of BUILD THAT WALL! in the bullhorns of the red-hatted cheerleaders at one of Trump’s just inaugurated taxpayer-financed campaign rallies in undereducated blue-collar land where he can draw cheers just by claiming that people who criticize him should ‘go back home’ even if they’ve never been anywhere else in the first place . Imagine the relative decibels. Draw your own conclusions.

In our current reality-show version of reality one of the tools employed by the cheerleaders is the woeful inefficiency of our present method of evaluating one political options against each other — their costs. Promises, totals, predictions, post-dating, spin, and just plain lying make dollar-total promises ideal weapons for scammers. Costs, especially ones safely relegated to ex post facto accounting, can be misrepresented in so many ways that it might almost be said they are never much more than convenient fiction. And politicians are happy to take full advantage of that.

Campaign slogan: “A chicken in every pot.”

Underlying assumption: “I can make pots faster than you can”

This is all based on the notion that there are a fixed number of dollars to be fought for, and that they have fixed values. What if we ditched that idea? First of all it isn’t true — the ins can always just crank up the printing presses and transfer the final accounting to their (our) more and more distant great grandchildren.

The Winklevoss twins shook the foundations with their claim that a variably-valued currency (Bitcoin) could function perfectly well, if its denomination at any given moment could be speeded up. A blockchain-based system could eliminate the skullduggery associated with the phony bookkeeping. (Blockchain accounting assigns a published and unchangeable public history to every transaction — no matter how big or how small — enabling any interested party to examine it. No fudging or Mulligans. If it happened, it’s on the public record. Simplest concept since Nixon killed the gold standard.) This revelation has been greeted with something less than enthusiasm by the Timothy Geithners and IMF and central bank chieftains who feel that the survival of their personal fiefdoms is more important than the life or death of any starving Greek or Salvadoran family they can imagine. After all, their imaginations of starvation or oppression are somewhat limited by the scant personal opportunities they have had to meet ruined Greek small businessmen or starving Salvadoran refugee families in the dining halls of Yale and Harvard.

The basic idea is ridiculously simple — if the value of every dollar and ruble and yen in which national budgets are written (for convenience call them all BB’s — Budget Bitcoins) is instantaneously recalibrated to the value of all the other dollars and rubles and yen out there then we now have a means of evaluating every transaction — including the mortgage values of castles in the air — and the bullshit factor disappears.

Currency, in fact, would just be the percentage value we have assigned to it relative to whatever is the current total value of all the goods currently out there — its BB. Not ‘six hundred and forty billion dollars’ but ‘eighty-seven times what we allot to refugee relief’. We can no longer argue about how much of an effect a change in the military budget will have or won’t have on our conceptions of the proportion we have thoughtfully assigned to it in legislative deliberation. If that allocation changes we will be able to see it immediately; it won’t be hidden under a foot of paper in the annual budget bill, tucked into the spending bill in a midnight foray by a real estate developer’s paid legislator (no names, please) interested in getting a larger tax abatement for his 99 million dollar ‘slum clearance’ tower apartment that can be shopped to the newest New Delhi billionaire eager to show his bank account’s superior robustness over last month’s newest billionaire. The change will be not only obvious in the tax-abatement bill; it will simultaneously show up in the adjusted military budget as well. If we reduce the amount available for school hot meals to pay for more ICE agents, that news will instantly be available to monitoring apps at both educational and immigration agencies and — most importantly — reporters.

Call this Budget by Blockchain. Call it Honesty by Sunshine. Call it Get Your Hand out of My Pocket. Call it anything you like, but put it up there at the top of your requirements of your favorite presidential nominee.

Think about it. I’m serious. “BB” fits nicely on a square piece of Amazon cardboard.

If you look around the table and you don’t spot the sucker in the first half hour — it’s you.

The Donald seems to be deaf to that bit of poker wisdom, offered by a list of hard-bitten movie and detective story heroes. (As are Eric and Jared and Ivanka.) This would be a consoling thought on which I could fall back during sleepless nights, if the ultimate cost weren’t likely to be so high. But unfortunately, because of our electoral negligence, Mr. Trump finds himself in a position to make us pay a huge price for whatever satisfaction we may eventually reap from the dénouement to come.

Our blessed country has spent only a quarter of a millennium in trying to find solutions for the problems that have bedeviled us ever since the Founders first took them on. The scholars who have been studying the Koran and Mohammad’s Hadiths have already been at it twice that long. The sages who have grappled with the Torah’s conundrums have put in far more time on it than either of them — all of them puzzling over ways to keep men from each other’s throats.

Newcomers that we were at the international table, we Americans spent our first ‘half hour’ enjoying our initial easy successes and testing our strategies. We had some successes, bluffs we lost through optimism, pots we won, partly through the luck of the draw and partly through the fantastic good fortune of finding two opponents (Indians and blacks) from whom we could steal without much worry about retaliation since they were even more inexperienced than we were, and armed only with bows and arrows and gospel songs. Progress was painfully slow, but it was undeniable. Domestically, the slaves did get freed. The boundaries of legally established reservations were drawn up, even sometimes honored. Internationally, we did oversee the establishment of a number of tribal councils to introduce rules that would govern all countries equally and we began to set the standards for fairness in multinational negotiations. We slowly began to be recognized as the major force for sensible government among the world’s 193 nations. There seemed to be an excuse for cautious celebration.

Then the Bomb came along and screwed everything up. For the modest price of starving a few of their own citizens (some of them people the leaders didn’t especially value having in the first place) some players discovered that they could scrape together enough money and expertise and chutzpah to make potentially civilization-ending weapons of their own. With these they could terrorize their ‘peace-loving’ colleagues, holding their aspirations hostage. In self-defense the more sane nations tried to resist with ‘binding’ treaties and agreements. That gave Messrs. Putin, Jinping, Jong-un, Erdoğan, and their ilk greater presence at the table, which they didn’t hesitate to exploit.

But America remained a formidable obstacle. Certainly the most powerful obstacle to anyone with dictatorial ambitions. We were unlikely to give up our hegemony without a struggle. Unless … the Trumps, having gained power largely through an unforeseen upset, and inexperienced in dealing with old hands at diplomatic booby traps, could perhaps be suckered through their naive enjoyment of their new positions, their love of pomp and ceremony, and their narcissism — their susceptibility to any form of flattery, no matter how obvious. They could be tagged by winks and nods as the big sucker and unseated by a group attack. No sooner said than agreed to — under the table.

Now we are faced with the ludicrous spectacle of Jared — sweet well-meaning child — offering to settle thousand-year-old religious disputes with a Queens air-rights-type agreement, Ivanka planning for a smooth introduction of Holocaust-themed luxury handbags for her brand, and Donald — aah, irrepressible Donald — grinning atop a 60-ton tank whose treads will have chewed up the pavement of Pennsylvania Avenue and the grass of the Mall in an infrastructure insult that will cost the taxpayers over a million dollars in repairs when he tires of waving and smiling for the red hats and calling for Hillary to be locked up for losing the election

And a whole new group of players have been allowed to edge up to the table — the plunderers are back : the passenger-pigeon-killers. the beaver-slaughterers, the oil-drillers and the coal miners and the lumber-lovers who have been slavering at the mouth through all these Roosevelt (Theodore) regulatory years waiting for just such a patsy to be enthroned. It’s feasting time at the trough, guys. Get it while the getting’s good!

How will all this play out as an older, angrier generation fades from the scene and a younger more reality-based bunch starts to see the power of their votes, we cannot now know, except that it seems unlikely to slip by without confrontation of a kind we haven’t seen since the Great Depression and apples were being sold on street-corners of Wall Street for nickels by men in threadbare Savoy suits. How will Trump react to being dumped? Where will his sycophantic thugs find a new political home, encircled by gerrymander fences strong enough to protect their predatory-payday-lender ideal form of government? What cracks will they crawl into when cornered? When will Jared and Ivanka go back to the social whirl and give up the notion that a ‘deal’ is the obvious solution to thousand-year old stalemate? When will Donald himself finally realize that grabbing pussies is not really a worthy style of life for a grown man?

If you’re young enough, dig in and wait and see. I’m probably not going to make the curtain call. Maybe that’s a consolation prize for being old.

(The comparison may seem inelegant or à propos, depending on your opinion of my observations in general, but I am accustomed to storing the first glimmerings of an idea in a preliminary file that corresponds to the first stomach of a goat — where it can stay until I get a chance to decide whether to try to expand and refine it or junk it as not worth further effort . Here are a few that were headed for the junkpile but seem worth passing along in their raw state.)

Advice for Washington politicians: When your favorite project (or that of your largest campaign fund donor) is threatened by lack of funds, you can always steal from your great grandchildren in the form of new Treasury paper (notes, bills, money). Your kids cannot object, since they do not yet exist. (Republicans haven’t yet figured out how to extend personhood across generation lines. If they could, they would.) If you assume a future administration will honor these debts, this is borrowing; if you have no confidence in that outcome, it’s called stealing. In either case you are safe from the law, since you write the laws. Your conscience is another matter. Any public mention of that can always be redacted.

Why “Guns don’t kill people; people kill people” is bullshit: Once upon a time in a war you had to face your enemy one on one and see the terror in his eyes and the sweat on his brow as you hacked at him with your sword or pounded his face with your mace. You could see him bleed and fall. (Homer’s Iliad, and Stephen Crane’s Red Badge of Courage, are particularly vivid.) You had to be really angry and really determined to kill. The invention of weapons that worked at a distance (Spears, for example. See the Iliad again.) put a little distance between you and the ugliness of watching a man roll up his eyes and die. The comfort offered by improvements in lethal weapons such as catapults, arrows, and kettles of boiling oil poured from the battlements further de-personalized killing. Cadavers became more statistics than individuals. How big were the armies? How many died at Agincourt and what were their names? By the time we get to the great abbatoirs of Gettysburg or Flanders the killers don’t have to see an enemy face at all. It’s just a matter of having a well-oiled weapon : a gun. By time we get to Teddy Turner and Dresden or Harry Truman and Hiroshima we don’t even think of the flesh-and-blood victims our technologically improved arms have managed to eradicate. The complicated mechanisms involved in building weapons of mass destruction have pretty generally removed individual anger, or even, often, an awareness of the political points at issue, in a tangle of gold braid and government contracts. The urge to kill remains, but the power to do it is vastly multiplied by the improvement of our weapons. Guns come in many forms, from handy side arms to missiles and atomic bombs, but they are all guns and have the same purpose. Inventing them, building them, aiming them, unleashing them have become so institutionalized and specialized that for most people in the chain of their manufacture and use their participation has been entirely neutered. So “guns do kill people” especially innocent bystanders. They also make it easy. You don’t have to develop the back muscles to power two hours of swinging a sword or whirling a mace. Just a little touch on the trigger or the FIRE key and the job is done. You can spray a whole group of watchers who didn’t even know there was a quarrel to be settled. Thirty or forty death-dealing slugs at a time from your assault rifle. A hundred thousand victims sentenced to slow death by radiation poisoning. The barrel bomb is a perfect example : a bucket of shrapnel specifically designed to do “collateral damage”. It is merely a gun in another form. And now we come to the ultimate development — the atomic bomb — the ‘gun’ so powerful and so indiscriminate that its use will very probably annihilate both the shooter and the target. (“I just did what I was told — when the light came on I pressed the button. Bombs away! Somebody down there will clean up the mess.”) Guns most certainly DO kill people. The bigger the guns, the more powerful the guns, the more people they kill. If only we could go back to the days of the club and the fist, the world could be a much safer place. Denying that is bullshit.

You are the editor of your city’s morning paper. Overnight the dictator of an ally has managed to corner in another country, kidnap, torture, and kill one of its own citizens who had the temerity to question his total authority. The evidence is incontrovertible, including videos. They are sensational pictures. How do you handle the story? (1) You could put it ‘above the fold’, with the gory pictures in full color. It will beckon from the newsstand and sell a lot of papers. It will also advertise to any other of his citizens who may be contemplating protest what awaits them, even in exile, which was the tyrant’s purpose. Or (2) you could downplay the crime by treating it as a simple murder with a couple of inches on an inside page, which would frustrate the dictator, preserve your honor, and cede the profits to the yellow tabloids that you know will be happy to milk the gore and politics for all they are worth and do their best to inflame the hatreds already loose in a world that you are convinced is careening toward war. Or (3) You could curse the unfairness of this decision being pushed on you by your profession, and resign to become a professional bass fisherman in what is left of a vanishing Lake Mead, leaving your wife and kids with no breadwinner. Nice problem.

Proverbs 13:20 — “Ye shall be known by the company ye keep.” I ran across this the other day in an obituary, and I decided to think about it seriously for a few minutes. In particular I applied it to the Golden-Haired One, and made a list, in no particular order — just as people came to mind :

Victor Orban,

shining humanistic light of Hungary, famous for rejection of immigrant refugees seeking asylum and dog whistles about Jews.

Muhammad bin Salman,

supporter of the Saudi travel pack containing a reel of piano wire and a bone saw. (Shouldn’t every tourist carry one?)

Kim Jong un,

crusader for an adequate diet for North Korean soldiers and elite civilians even if that means a few farmers starve

(And think how much will be saved on electricity. Check your satellite picture.)

Bashar al-Assad,

major stockholder in the United Barrel-Bomb and Chlorine Gas Company of Aleppo and Damascus.

Recep Tayyip Erdoğan,

who somehow finds errors with every Turkish dissident journalist’s tax forms.

Roberto Duterte,

who advocates shooting first and planting the evidence afterwards.

Benyamin Natanyahu,

whose example in Israel will soon serve as Donald’s road map to what happens after presidential immunity expires and the corruption becomes public.

Vladimir Putin,

whose little green men whose uniforms bear no insignia enable Russia to disown them while nibbling away at Ukrainian borders.

Narenda Modi,

whose troops somehow failed to detect the odor of burning flesh in the Gajarat Province of India.

Have I forgotten anyone?

The mysterious transmogrification of the supposed profits from tariff increases to tax cuts for the 1%. According to government statisticians, new tariffs cost every American taxpayer an average of $414 more in 2018 than would have been due without them. Did the GNP increase? Yes. Was this a boon to the big corporate investors in the U.S.? Yes? Did it drive the cost of living up? Yes. Did wage earner income increase commensurably? No. So the tariffs managed to transfer all those little extra $414 raids on the incomes of millions of the poor and middle classes to the bank accounts of the already well-off. And there were a lot of them, too. About a million and a half taxpayers at the last count. Call it a billion dollars. Legerdemain that puts Penn and Teller in the shade. The secret, as with all magic tricks, is to keep your audience’s attention away from the real action. Keep watching the red necktie. Never mind the deficit; your grandson will pay.

Robert Mueller’s mouse : ‘A president is not indictable while he remains in office, so we decline to express an opinion on whether we believe Mr. Trump is guilty of anything.’ This paraphrase of Mr. Mueller’s long-awaited report is mystifying to say the least. Having been hired to determine whether or not Trump was guilty of collusion with a foreign power — a crime — and/or of impeding an official government inquiry — also a crime — Mr.Mueller seems to be saying that since no indictment is legally enforceable no inclusion of a final judgment or recommendation for any action ispossible. Isn’t this is sort of like telling Elie Wiesel to go and learn to play golf and forget about the Holocaust, since the perpetrators are now almost all dead, and therefore unpunishable? You might even say that such an argument could be extended to include all the malefactors of history, since the events to be investigated are all over and done with and the perpetrators beyond the reach of the law. Just suck it up and get on with the planning of the Fourth of July festivities installing Mr. Trump more firmly in the pantheon of 1-45.

Then may we respectfully ask “What was the point of investigating in the first place? All that work for nothing?” And then to cap it off Mr. Barr goes to work with his chubby little magic marker (Did he borrow one of Donald’s signing supply?) and makes sure that no smallest bit of the critical opinions of all those lawyers and professional investigators makes it into the light of day. Trump gets to claim justification for his NO COLLUSION! tweets. The special investigation lawyers collect their (fat) paychecks. The results are safely bottled up. Maybe we should just shrug and say that’s what we expected.

Probably that is what realists expected from the beginning, but not on such flimsy grounds. Because there is in fact no law that says a sitting president can’t be indicted. There is an opinion on the books by the Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel, passed by a notoriously biased administration trying desperately to save Richard Nixon’s presidency on September 24, 1973 and never tested in any court. Tricky Dick’s resignation mooted it at the time. Why Mr. Mueller chose to take it out of moth-balls in 2019 (without any proposal for any court test) is hardly obvious. He was certainly in a position to propose a test, having been appointed a special (outside the normal rules) prosecutor, a status one would assume was intended to grant him freedom from partisan restrictions.

The Constitution is silent on the subject except for a suggestion that such indictment would be appropriate after impeachment (Art. I, Sec. 3, Clause 7), but no specific prohibition about doing it before impeachment. So Mr. Mueller has left us as much in the dark as before, and Mr. Trump as much in violation of the law as before, and the country in as much confusion as before, but the Treasury depleted by the millions of dollars spent by all those lawyers and their ‘business’ dinners at Washington’s tonier restaurants. It is possibly worth noting that Ken Starr, who believed so fervently in the indictability of a sitting president when Bill Clinton was the target, is now equally fervent about his immunity when Donald Trump is the accused felon.

Winning the tariff war. So far, according to the published numbers, Mr. Trump’s “easily winnable” war has cost the Treasury 58 billion dollars. Assuming that the assets in the Treasury belong to all of us, that’s $414 each. The details would bore both you and me. Just accept the official report as accurate. Why quibble? The citizens in our red states, safe behind their rose-colored lenses, will pay no attention anyway, and the grownups on the coasts are neither surprised nor yet ready to do anything about it. Who said, “Too much analysis leads to paralysis”? And this is just the beginning. The Donald has discovered a new weapon in his battle against common sense and institutionally regulated procedures : an executive-imposed punitive tariff. (“If you don’t stop those refugees, we’ll stop buying your tomatoes.”) Not that the one has anything to do with the other, but he can portray himself as the fearless commander holding all those godless foreigners’ feet to the fire — a lesson in the power of his gut strategies and the wimpiness of collective action. First NATO, now NAFTA, what’s next? Maybe he’ll issue an executive order abolishing climate study.

The deadly danger of impeachment. Just one final word : Pense.

I found him with his head down on the table, apparently taking a nap. After the bright sunshine outside the interior seemed gloomy and at first I didn’t understand what I was seeing — I thought it was someone playing with a large yellow cat. No. He was just resting his chin on his folded arms. I had come to Bedminster to see how the golf club was dealing with its legal travails. Seeing the golf cart with the American flag on the bumper and the huge presidential seal on the front parked on the 18th green, next to the sign saying “No carts on the greens, please” I took a chance and just stuck my nose in the clubhouse.

He heard the click of the door latch and looked up, but sort of into middle space; not at me.

“I can’t believe it,” he was mumbling to himself. “All I said was that Vlad had put forward some interesting ideas and the whole crooked media world exploded. I didn’t say he was right and my intelligence community was wrong; I just said there were good people on both sides. There are always good people on both sides, people with large bank accounts and good connections. There was a time when Rupert would have smoothed that one over for me without breaking a sweat. But somebody came up with that scare word ‘treason’ and right away there was a chorus yapping about my supposed failure to defend the country and the Constitution and that that was treason. Who knew what was in the Constitution about treason? Who reads the Constitution? I thought Constitution was an Avenue — or a ship. Someone should have warned me. But Sarah goofed. Why wouldn’t Vlad’s word be as good as Coats’s? Or better, if it comes to that? He’s probably got better hackers, and he has a whole country that will solidly back him up or be put in jail. What’s Coats got? A miserable little Pentagon office and a few computer geeks on the payroll. Oh, his people must have some skills, true — look how they were able to doctor the photographs of the crowds at my inauguration. That wasn’t grass; it was people. I was there. I saw them. She was there, too, the loser. She lost. I won. I’m the President. Hillary can go home to Chappaqua and count her delegates but it won’t do her any good. I got mine. And they still can’t find those e-mails. Where are they? And that famous server from the DNC. Who was the DNC colluding with? Will we ever know? And then the whole thing went off the rails when that jerk Muller, (Miller? Moller? Whatever his name is) started offering people immunity. I sure messed up when I appointed HIM. He shouldn’t be allowed to offer people immunity. I should be only the one with pardoning power. I always figured I could fire the little jerk if he got too annoying. Now they tell me I can’t can him without looking guilty. NOW they tell me, NOW. When it’s too late. Why didn’t Jeff warn me about that in the beginning — instead of all that self-serving stuff about recusing himself? I used to think the New York real estate scene was vicious. Believe me, for back-stabbing it’s a kids’ birthday party compared to D.C. These turncoats think nothing of abandoning their loyalty to the guy who gave them their jobs. How many lawyers does it take to survive in such a place? I don’t even know — that’s why I have so many lawyers. Cohens come and Cohens go, Mnuchins come and Mnuchins go, Manaforts come and Manaforts go, I can always find another boy. But Roy is gone. I told him to be careful. Only two people I can trust now are Jared, who understands the power of a buck in the right palm, and Ivanka, who knows the power of a brand and a too-tight dress. But, to tell you the truth sometimes I’m not sure that Netanyahu isn’t playing games with Jared. The kid is still a little wet behind the ears. Israel is trickier than it looks from a Fifth Avenue rooftop. And this Moller-Miller character sweeps witnesses up like a new busboy who’s just learning to use the crumber. Rounds ’em up and asks judges to grant them immunity and listen to their BS. It’s enough to disillusion even a genius dealmaker like me. So now what have we got to look forward to? President Pocahontas? She doesn’t look any more like a president than her supposed ancestor — she looks like the lady from the census who came to check on your skin color. And that raving radical Bernie. What a pair. But the worst thing is that suddenly nobody comes to my beautiful golf courses any more. They’re losing money. If it goes on like this I’ll have to put it in bankruptcy pretty soon. Of course that’s no real problem — I am probably the world’s foremost authority on bankruptcy. Onward and up yours, Charlie! — that’s always been my motto, from subcontractors to the EU. But it IS one more headache I don’t need. I could use some heavy consoling right about now. Where’s Melania? Well, come to think of it maybe not Melania — where’s Stormy? Speaking of pairs, SHE knew how to calm me down. She’s running for Congress? The whole world has truly flipped out. I have to be my own caddy on my own golf course? Where’s the Marine Band? Where’s ‘Hail to the Chief’? Where’s my helicopter? Where the hell am I, anyhow?”

I tiptoed out the door and closed it quietly behind me. I don’t think he saw me.