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Yes, ’n’ how many times can a man turn his head
Pretending he just doesn’t see? Bob Dylan Blowin’ in the Wind

There are so many wars, so much hatred, violence and slaughter. We rightly look abroad at the victims in Gaza and the West Bank as well as in Israel, Somalia and Congo. If we are not moved by the suffering and deaths of our fellow human beings, then we aren’t human. Deaths caused by wars, civil wars and tribal wars are terrible. Our rage is built into our genes. This may have helped our genes survive from the primordial slime to today. However, it is not at all clear that our adrenaline-fueled violence will help us survive these modern yet still primitive times.

Rage and violence, xenophobia and fear motivate much of the horror we actively perpetrate on each other. Yet most human suffering and preventable deaths are not caused by anger and hatred. More humans die every year through indifference and neglect. Yes, bullets and bombs, armies and guerilla militias kill hundreds of thousands of us in the Middle East, Ukraine, Russia, Africa, Asia and Latin America. Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO) estimated that 250,000 people were killed worldwide by these conflicts in 2025. This is obviously tragic and deserves our attention and our commitment to stop the madness.

This terrible number, however, is but a small part of preventable deaths in our violent world. The World Health Organization, from which we withdrew under Trump1.0, estimated that in 2025 HIV, now both treatable and preventable, killed 570,000 people. They calculated that Malaria, which is also both preventable and treatable, killed 610,000 (with 9 million more cases diagnosed than in the previous year). The WHO estimated that in 2025 some 4.8 million children died from malnutrition and disease. Children!

As horrifying as our deadly anger is, our indifference is more lethal. There may be little we can do to control our built-in ability to dehumanize others in order to accept and even celebrate their destruction. Our more deadly lack of compassion and empathy should weigh on our souls.

We humans have a moral and legal duty to render life-saving aid when we can. We don’t have to bankrupt ourselves to do so. Nor do we have to risk our lives to save others.

We, in the United States, have played a vital part in saving human lives, in preventing preventable deaths. Through our contributions to individual nations, to the WHO and USAID, we saved 91 million people between 2015 and 2025. Our destruction of USAID and withdrawal of aid to medical programs abroad will (according to a UCLA study) cause 14 million preventable deaths between now and 2030—4 million of whom will be children under 5 years old!

We had the ability to give aid and save lives, and we did. We did not bankrupt ourselves nor cause undue suffering here, yet we stopped. Why? This government gives various rationales:

We don’t like the unfriendly governments of some nations. Some money may be wasted. There is some degree of corruptions (a topic with which we are truly expert).

Really? Our distaste for a regime or the existence of some level of fraud is enough to condemn millions of people to preventable deaths? This is morally monstrous and the very definition of the specific Crime Against Humanity that is the Failure to Render Life-Saving Assistance when practical. Are we really ok leaving others to die because of our depraved indifference?

We had life-saving food surpluses already purchased and shipped to Africa that rotted in storehouses. We had anti-malarial drugs and HIV drugs also purchased and shipped that expired in unrefrigerated storage. How was this possible? Maybe our transgression against law and decency is not legally depraved indifference but actual malice. How else to explain the cruelty of not simply withholding assistance in the form of food and medicine but actively destroying programs, aid and millions of lives.

We rightly see and condemn leaders who wage cruel wars and kill without conscience or limitations. Still, it’s too easy just to blame the active cruelty of the leaders of other nations and ignore the true depravity of our own government’s indifference. Beyond holding leadership accountable, we should consider our own personal lack of outrage and then focus on what we can do to restore vital programs that save countless lives. We had the ability to save lives. We did save lives. We still know the way but do we have the will?

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Israel is in danger of being subverted and destroyed, not by its traditional enemies of the Arab states, the Gazans and West Bank Palestinians. The great existential threat to Israel is coming from the inside. No, not some Fifth Column of Lefties and Peaceniks. The threat is coming from the far-right wing, from Jewish supremacists, the ultra-religious and political nationalists.

Yasser Arafat, the late leader of the PLO, made war for decades but could never make peace. Yahya Sinwar, the late leader of the Hamas terrorist group, who planned the slaughter and mayhem of October 7, never sought peace but only the destruction of Israel. These two and many more have certainly been major catalysts for the violence from Israel’s far right. Arafat and Sinwar were as violent, hateful and reprehensible an enemy as Israel has ever had. However, none truly threatened Israel’s survival as a Jewish state. For most of Israel’s history Israel’s enemies could challenge its way of life; they could take Jewish lives and could constrain the population through their external threats. They helped the right believe that peace was impossible.

I have no doubt that much of the hardline’s enmity towards Arabs is deep seated and utterly sincere. For all of Netanyahu’s abundant political cynicism, he genuinely believes in his guts, his Kishkas, that there never can be peace between Israel and the Palestinians. These beliefs come both from his father, a noted Israeli historian, and from the death of his brother Yonatan at Entebbe.

Sincerity, however, is not an automatic virtue. Most bad things are done by sincere people certain of the righteousness of their cause. I have no doubts as to the sincerity of John Wilkes Booth, Sirhan Sirhan, John Hinkley. Jr. or indeed the terrorists of 9-11.

Neither do I doubt the sincere rage that consumes Bezalel Smotrich and Itmar Ben-Gvir. The sincerity of their hatred of Gazans and Palestinians does not constitute a virtue, neither does it bring Israel closer to peace. It does poison Israel’s body politic as well as Israel’s soul. Ben-Gvir, a member of Israel’s government, says that “Israel should kill 30 to 40 more Gazans a day” and “There are people there who are not worthy of life. They shouldn’t live. They’re not even people.”

I find Ben-Gvir’s words to be monstrous, a negation of both law and decency. They should immediately disqualify him from any political position, no less the Security Portfolio in Netanyahu’s government. This is completely unacceptable and undermines Israel’s admittedly shaky acceptance in the world. He advocates war crimes by specifying quotas in taking human life.

It is one sad and tragic thing to forecast a level of violence, it is quite another to advocate a number, as a goal or quota. It is the difference between our National Safety Council predicting that from 364 to 487 of us will be killed on our roads during the Labor Day weekend, and if the number were to fall short, executing enough to make them fit into a Procrustean Bed of fulfilled expectations. We would rightly see this as abhorrent to reason and decency.

Even if you believe, as I do, in Israel’s right to survive and the necessity to fight for its survival, can you believe that such statements and policies could enhance Israel’s chances of surviving body and soul?

Except for a few crucial hours during the 6-Day War of 1967, Israel has lived and prospered free from the fear of physical destruction. Israel has bragged that it had the most moral military in the world, and if difficult to prove, it was an agreed upon aspiration. This is no longer self-evident—even as an aspiration. How could it be when such hateful rhetoric comes from the government? These horrifying sentiments too often combine with hateful actions?

Israel is in peril of losing both its physical life and its soul. In my view the worst threat is not coming directly from Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran, but from terrible domestic forces tearing apart Israeli society. As with so much of our current world, we are all dealing with realities that would have seemed unreal and impossibly paranoid only a decade ago.

I freely confess that I’m a committed Zionist. It’s not a dirty word and I embrace the Zionism of my ancestors. I believe in the Jewish state and support its right, its duty to survive. A Jewish state does not have to be a religiously observant state. It should, however, be informed by its Jewish values, its Jewish soul and its Yiddische Tam (Flavor/Atmosphere (ייִדישע טעם).

Anti-Semitism has existed from the very beginning of history. Israel going out of business would not end Anti-Semitism, nor would Israel changing its policies towards Gaza and the West Bank. If Israel should change how it acts, particularly towards Gaza and the West Bank, as I believe it should, this change should not be predicated on ending or even ameliorating Anti-Semitism. It should be changed for Israel’s survival body and soul. I pray, in the words of the MiSheberach, the prayer for healing, that Israel have a full and complete healing of body and soul. Refu’at hanefesh u’refu’at haguf רְפוּאַת הַנֶּפֶשׁ וְרְפוּאַת הַגּוּף .

The threats to Israel are real and dangerous. They come from both outside its borders and from within. It’s easier to focus on the threats at the gate from some foreign “other” who shouts, “Death to Israel” and hurls stones. It’s equally important to respond to the threats from within, from people who look like us, sound like us and who truly believe that their violent rage is motivated by love for us. Such perverse manifestations of love cannot aid in our survival as a people or nation.

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As I look back at the 60s from my 80s, I swing between two different feelings. The first is the great temptation of nostalgia, and thinking about how cool, dedicated, optimistic and effective we were.

We marched, sat in, protested, laughed, wept and we sang! There were great and hopeful protest songs: We Shall Overcome, Blowin’ in the Wind and The Universal Soldier.

We took on a war and even if we didn’t end it, we’d like to think we effected its duration. We protested for civil rights and registered new voters. We began to engage the environment and were moved towards recycling, energy conservation and the preservation of our natural resources. We got involved in women’s rights and the great issue of choice.

There were times when we thought we had won. Politicians seemed to have learned “the lessons of Vietnam,” and appeared reluctant to go into forever wars. Civil Rights seemed forever changed, and we twice elected an African American with an Arabic name. Civil Rights and Voter’s Rights were permanently won! Wow!

We were recycling what we once thought of as trash. Backyard incinerators were replaced by blue recycling bins. The EPA regulated air and water pollution. The smokestack was no longer the symbol of American industry. And yes, Roe v Wade granted women autonomy over their own bodies.

We may have given ourselves too much credit, but some credit was surely due. We believed that we’d built a lasting legacy. This now seems to be delusional which cues the second reaction when we return our gaze from the halcyon 60s to the present when Halcyon the drug is not strong enough to allay our disappointment and despair.

Not all of our songs were positive and inspiring. We also sang some darker songs that contained anger and irony, often under a layer of satire.

The Merry Minuet included the line:

What nature doesn’t do to us
Will be done by our fellow man

We sang: National Brotherhood Week

Oh the Protestants hate the Catholics
And the Catholics hate the Protestants
And the Hindus hate the Muslims
And everybody hates the Jews

Today, as I quietly sing these songs to myself, I realize that they are both over 50-years-old. Yet they are as current as any Trump threat or lie. I am forced to ask “What did we really win?” Maybe we should adopt Stoicism or try for Buddhist detachment knowing that nothing really changes—as the French say Le plus ça change, or as in Tunisian Arabic Dima Hikaya Hea Hea. “It’s always the same old story.” History just keeps repeating itself and cycling from tragedy to farse and back again. What the hell is the point?

The point is that trying and striving are still worthwhile because even if we can’t know the results, we do know that if we don’t try, our values will not survive, and our moral DNA will not be passed to a new generation. Striving doesn’t assure success, but passivity does assure failure.

We also sang in the 60s “When will we ever learn?” We thought we had learned but somehow, we forgot. So now we’re again marching off to another ill-conceived war without a realistic objective. Our streets are not filled with anti-war protestors, and our universities are heartbreakingly calm. We have seen our Supreme Court rescind voting rights and civil rights. They held that civil rights had been accomplished and we didn’t need to oversee elections or for affirmative action or even for the goal of having our schools, corporations and lawmakers look like America. Women’s rights have been under constant attack since before Roe v Wade. Still we thought Roe v Wade was safe. We were wrong. Roe begat a serious backlash against women culminating in Dobbs v Jackson. Environmental progress is in full retreat under Trump. Parks are opened to logging and mining. Coasts are re-opened to drilling. Drilling rigs are no longer unacceptable eyesores, but wind turbines are? Go know.

There are also newer issues that we thought had advanced irreversibly. For example LGBT+ rights won in the 90s are under attack. Anti-Semitic slurs which, following the Holocaust, were whispered, today are blasted through bullhorns. Islamophobia didn’t seem much of an issue (to non-Muslims) in the 60s, except for the animus against Farrakhan’s Nation of Islam which many understood as not traditional Islam. We didn’t consider a potential Muslim threat. There were too few and many were well integrated and on the road to assimilation.

Today, both Antisemitism and Islamophobia are chronic and acute. Muslims and Jews have been manipulated into believing that we are eternal enemies condemned to be in violent struggle. We don’t remember the years and centuries of relatively peaceful co-existence. With the current pain and conflicts, we don’t seem to realize that the racial and religious animus that society inflicts on both communities puts us not in separate caravans bound on different destinations but on the same leaky boat on the same storm-tossed sea.

There will be peace someday. Why not work to bring that day closer? Impossible? If John McCain could return to Vietnam and embrace captors who had tortured him and they could embrace McCain, who had bombed them, can we not be inspired at our human capacity, not to forget but to forgive? My late mother-in-law was a prisoner in Auschwitz and several slave labor camps. If she could visit Poland and embrace old neighbors—only some of whom hid or helped Jews—how can we feel hopeless? She never forgot but also never drank the bitter poison of the past. She turned away from hate and back to life.

We are not trapped by a Faustian choice of looking at our troubled and challenging world and becoming either spectators or victims. We can be actively engaged in trying to make a difference by witnessing through our actions the values we want carried forward. We are not trapped by a false dichotomy between naïve hope and dark despair. We can be inspired by the clear fact that the world is not finished—not finished with us and we dare not be finished with the world. Paradise has not been found but neither is it lost. There is still work to do. Yes, it’s tough to accept that there are no final victories. Still, it can be inspiring that there are no final defeats. We give ourselves and our values a chance when we: Stand Up! Speak Up! Show Up!

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Much of Antisemitism is rationalized by a simple lie, a lie that is used as a cover for Antisemitism. People say, perhaps sincerely, “I don’t hate Jews. Some of my best friends are Jews. But Antisemitism would go away ‘if only…’”

“If only” covers a multitude of sins and we will now explore those sins. It clearly implies that Jews are to blame for Antisemitism, and that seems logically true. If only there were no Jews, there would be no Antisemitism. Therefore, if only Jews would disappear by converting or assimilating, Antisemitism would go away. To that I say, “If only.”

The historic truth is that neither conversion nor assimilation has ever eliminated Antisemitism. In 19^th Century Vienna roughly half the Jews converted to Christianity—about half of them to Catholicism and the rest to Protestantism. However, when the antisemitic forces that encouraged conversion grew, Jewish converts to Christianity were still mistreated as Jews. If they attended a Jewish event like a family wedding or funeral they could lose their Christian classification. As Antisemitism spread further, their lives became increasingly constricted until there was no functional distinction between Jews who remained Jewish and Jews who had converted.

This repeated a pattern seen earlier in Spain where Jews had been relatively well tolerated by Muslims. However, this tolerance ended with the reconquest of Spain by King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella. They issued the Alhambra Decree (1492) that sought to deport or convert or kill the Jews. The earlier Toledo Decrees that defined Jews not by observance but by blood remained influential. Conversions in Spain were assumed to be insincere and therefore the converts (Conversos) were not “real Christians” but only Christians by convenience. They were often called Marranos, a word possibly derived from an old Spanish word for pig or, more likely in my view, from the Arabic, Muharram, “The Forbidden Ones.” This was even worse than simply being Jews. It made them hypocrites and blasphemers.

In England, conversion was never fully accepted. Prime Minister Bejamin Disraeli, despite his father’s conversion to the Anglican Church, was always seen as a Jew. In France, my late cousin and former Prime Minister, Michele Debre’, was identified as a Jew despite being a practicing Catholic. And yes, here in America, arch-conservative Barry Goldwater’s Jewish heritage was enough for him to be attacked as a “Half Jew,” despite having a Christian mother and never practicing Judaism.

Zionist leaders in the late 19^th century considered mass baptism in the Danube. However, following the Dreyfus Affair and the antisemitic riots against both assimilated converted Jews, they understood that neither conversion nor assimilation offered real protection.

Today, the hot “If only” concerns Israel and Zionism. If only Israel hadn’t “over-reacted” against Gaza after 10/7, we would not have anti-Jewish sentiment. No. This is a lie. It took only till 10/8 for the first charges of Genocide to be lodged—long before Netanyahu employed understandably controversial policies. It was plainly not the ferocity of Netanyahu’s retaliation that caused fierce Antisemitism. This reverses the truth by changing the order of events. Antisemitism caused 10/7.

This is naturally rejected by most of the world which holds that “If only” Israel did not exist there would have been no 10/7. Well, again this apparent tautology is demonstrably false. There was no Israel nor occupation of the West Bank and Gaza in 1920 when Jerusalem’s Grand Mufti Haj Amin al-Husseini (Eventually a Hitler ally) began an organized campaign of violence against Jews—both indigenous and immigrant. His murderous attempts to purge Jews reached its nadir in 1929 when Jews were slaughtered while praying in Hebron and simultaneously attacked in Jerusalem and Jaffa. Alas, “If only” they hadn’t been there.

While historically Jews have fared better in the Muslim world than in the Christian, even the so-called Golden Age in Spain was only gold-plated and anti-Jewish sentiment went back to: “If only Sarah hadn’t forced Abraham to exile Hagar and their son Ishmael.”

Ironically, this blames the original sin and the cause of alienation on a woman, just as Genesis blames Eve for luring Adam into eating from the forbidden tree. Antisemitism and misogyny are a natural and deadly combination. If only this weren’t so.

Today in Europe and here in America, Antisemitism tries to innocently protest that there would be no problem “if only” Israel did not use their “Jewish money” to influence American politics and give marching orders to American Jews. Jews are assumed to be agents of Israel unless they denounce Israel. But this too is untrue. Anyone identifiable as a Jew by literally profiling a nose or wearing Jewish jewelry or identifiable garb can be accosted, challenged and banned from entry to a conference or coffee shop or political rally.

Being secular and non-observant offer no secure protection, nor does the assertion of not being a Zionist. It’s not the religion, it’s not the practice, it’s not anything extrinsic. It’s still in the blood as it was in the early Church when Jewish converts to Christianity, who had risen in the church’s hierarchy to positions of leadership, were purged because their blood made them suspect.

As with Israel, where anti-Zionism pretends it’s about Israeli policy when history shows it is actually about Israel’s existence, Antisemitism pretends it’s about Jewish money and influence when it too is about Jewish existence.

“If only” is a pernicious lie—a lie told to the larger world and a lie the larger world tells itself. As in the epigram above (*“Az di bobe volt gehat beytsim volt zi geven mayn zeyde”) If only my grandmother had balls, she’d be my grandfather, “If only” is only an excuse for Antisemitism.

My Book on Anti-Semitism

(Available from me for $25 including shipping)

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Boxing great Joe Louis remarked of a swift opponent, “He can run but he can’t hide.” When I look at the rapid (even rabid) growth of Antisemitism in the “Progressive” wing of the Democratic Party, I’m faced with a serious quandary. As an 81-year-old Jew, I really can’t run anymore, but I’m sure as hell not going to hide!

I wonder if I can survive in the Democratic Party. I also wonder if the party can survive the growing power and influence of the Socialist “Progressives?” Others may wonder if the party can survive without the energy of the progressives? Fair questions and I fear their answers.

I can hang out in a big tent. I accept people and positions to my left and right, but there are positions that I cannot live with. I have never been a single-issue voter with a single litmus test for a party or candidate. I understand that to govern political parties must be coalitions that tolerate and even honor diverse points of view.

Today there is a single issue that controls my support and that is Antisemitism. I am amazed at its growth in our country and in the world. I know it has always existed, but after WWII and the Holocaust, it was mostly whispered. It was “The sin that dared not speak its name.” Now it is no longer whispered or conveyed by dog whistles audible only to those in the know. It is shouted through bullhorns. It manifests in taunting, threatening and bullying Jews. It is acted out with vandalism against Jewish institutions, businesses and even cemeteries.

I grew up in a Golden age for American Jews. I believed in American exceptionalism and that anything like the Holocaust “Couldn’t happen here.” I never dreamed that people would ask me, as a retired professor from American Jewish University, if they should take their Mezuzahs off their doorposts, refrain from displaying their Menorahs in a window during Chanukah or avoid wearing clothing and jewelry that identified them as Jews? However you or I might respond to these questions, that they seem appropriate is shocking.

No, I don’t see a domestic version of a Holocaust on the horizon. I don’t anticipate the government building work camps or concentration camps for Jews. But then I never anticipated that our government would build concentration camps in Florida swamps, in Texas deserts and nation-wide in converted warehouses for Hispanic people. With people being deported to dangerous countries without due process, any fidelity to justice or hint of mercy, how can I maintain my faith in our exceptionalism?

I try to comfort myself by saying, at least we’re not building death camps. Yet. I am troubled that twice as many people have died at the hands of DHS, ICE than in our current war with Iran. I must ask how much depraved indifference to human suffering and how many deaths it takes to make a camp a death camp?

When my party embraces Zohran Mamdani and Abdul el Sayed and they offer Hasan Piker speaking parts in their rallies, I feel both unsafe and unwelcome. My response is not about their being Muslim. Muslims should run for office and hold office. Hell, Muslims are in Israel’s Knesset and Supreme Court. I am not opposed to political candidates who don’t support Netanyahu’s policies in Gaza. His hateful and violent policies are also unacceptable to me. I too want Bibi gone but they want Israel gone. Their animus isn’t focused of Israeli actions but on Israeli existence.

Abdul el Sayed, when offered the off-ramp of focusing on Netanyahu’s actions, said the problem of Israel being an Apartheid and genocidal state began long before Netanyahu. Of course, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Lebanon, Libya, Syria and Jordan don’t practice apartheid against Jews. All the Jews have been driven out. Even in my beloved Tunisia, where I spent two wonderful years in the Peace Corps, they can only raise a minyan on the Island of Djerba. On an ironic note, the largest Jewish population outside of Israel in the Muslim World is in Iran with a Jewish population around 15,000.

Both Mamdani and el Sayed repeat old Antisemitic tropes. Both accuse AIPAC of trying to buy American elections with Jewish money. They imply that AIPAC is fronting for Israel. AIPAC, as the name makes clear, is an American organization and legally exercising its American right to participate in the political process just like big oil, big pharma and all the dark money that I agree is corrupting. Yet AIPAC is singled out as uniquely evil and foreign. 1933 anyone? This conveys the common assumption that American Jews are Israeli agents. This is dangerous and even deadly and also inaccurate. Mayor Mamdani characterized members of AIPAC as being “Monsters.” El Sayed called Israel an illegal apartheid regime and smeared Israelis as “Bloodthirsty.”

Their rhetoric puts every Jew in America in increased peril. Already American Jews have been refused service in restaurants and coffee shops and taunted with accusations of committing genocide or being complicit in genocide. To achieve potential, but not certain, acceptance, Jews are pressured to denounce not only Israel’s policies but its very existence.

Following Michigan, Jews are told by Dems that winning the Senate and the House are just so important that we should see the big picture and prioritize the threat from Trump and his corrupt and brutal government. We should therefore overlook any regrettable Antisemitism and support the team.

My response is, “Uh, No! I can’t.” Antisemitism is a growth industry and if rationalized, minimized and excused will be the end of the Democratic Party. This potential wake-up call could instead sound taps for Dems and usher in a long midnight of the soul for our party and our nation.

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Trump argues that our war with Iran is not a war—only an excursion. Trump’s immoral bookkeepers argue that four American soldiers killed by Iranian missiles are not real “war dead,” since they were killed during a proclaimed ceasefire which saw no ceasing of fire. But it’s all ok since we have been winning and winning bigly. As Trump says, “No one has ever seen anything like this kind of winning.”

While Trump denies this is a war, our pundits wonder if this war with Iran will become a regional war. They should not trouble themselves by perseverating over this already answered question. This is a regional war. With Iran fighting and rocketing American bases in Iraq, Syria, Bahrain, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia how could this not qualify as regional? Add the fact that Israel is fighting and bombing Iranian proxies in Yemen, Gaza and Lebanon and denial of a regional conflict seems, even in these polarized times, to be undeniable. Interestingly, as of this writing (August 1, 2026) Iran and Israel are not actively fighting.

Whether we see it as limited or regional, Trump says we’re winning, or actually he’s been saying we won and “We destroyed their Army, sank their navy and destroyed both their Airforce and their air defenses.” Alas, we are not yet “tired of winning,” as Trump promised. Our win is disputed by Iran which clearly believes that they are winning. They are committed not simply to beating us but, as I described in my July 15^th article, “Trump Looks for an Out, While Iran Blocks the Exits,” they are committed to humiliating us.

Iran knows, as the Taliban knew, that “the west has the hi-tech watches, but they have the time.” They believe that Trump has political and election limitations. Authoritarian regimes don’t worry about elections. Their only concern is being overthrown. So, they are ready and willing to endure escalation against them in order to humiliate us.

In order to understand why and how they could be winning, it’s helpful to recall the Mohammad Ali v George Foreman “Rumble in the Jungle” in 1974 in Zair, now the Democratic Republic of Congo. Big George Foreman was heavily favored with his amazing knockout power. The experts knew that Ali was faster, but they believed Joe Louis’ dictum that an opponent “Could run but couldn’t hide.” The experts thought that some time in a long fight a Foreman punch would find a dancing Ali and knock him out.

Foreman threw his much feared big punch repeatedly, but most either missed the dancing Ali or hit Ali’s arms when Ali played rope-a-dope. As Foreman punched himself out, Ali trash talked and hit him with unorthodox right-hand leads. By the eighth-round Foreman fell as much from physical and emotional exhaustion as from Ali’s punches.

Ali v Foreman was an example of asymmetric warfare in boxing. Iran v America is asymmetric warfare in warfare. We have the big guns. We have the firepower. We have the technology. We won and will continue to win every battle. They cannot go toe-to-toe with us, but they can dance; they can strike us and our allies with cheap drones and handheld rockets. They can be offered a ceasefire yet choose to refuse and play their exhausting version of rope-a-dope until we become totally exhausted, physically and fiscally and our morale sinks in the Gulf of Iran.

They understand that Trump can’t keep claiming victory while escalating. He can’t keep saying that Iran is “begging for talks and understands that they have to give up control of the Strait of Hormuz and their nuclear program,” when the Iranians clearly state “No, we don’t agree to giving up Hormuz and will never give up our right to have a nuclear program.” They know that Trump is lying, not to them but to the American people. They believe that our democracy will bring Trump down and that they have an enduring patience that America lacks.

Iran knows that Trump genuinely wants this war to stop. He’d only calculated it to last days or perhaps weeks, but not months. They know he’s lost faith in the efficacy of his decapitation of Iran’s leadership. He’s had enough and wants to come home. Iran isn’t interested in giving Trump an easy out. They see him sinking in their desert’s quicksand. And they’re enjoying the sight. They know he’s reluctant to escalate, since he no longer believes in bombing alone. They know he is loath to put boots on the ground for fear of more American casualties. They know he can’t just go home leaving Hormuz under Iranian control. And they know he can’t stand still and survive an infinite stalemate. Does this leave us between Iraq and a hard place? Yes. Are we stuck in a sandy quagmire? Yes. Will increasing our attacks on Iranian oil, military targets and civilian infrastructure bring us a victory that converts this regional war into regional peace? You know the answer.

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Karl Marx was wrong. The critical issue for society is not who owns, what Marx called, “The means of production,” meaning the industrial machines. The critical issue today is not industrial but technological. The industrial age made factories and brought people out of their cottages and into cities. Cities and factories needed energy—oil, coal and electricity. This begat drilling, mining and damming.

Later, the automobile created roads, freeways, interstates and suburbs. Suburbs broke up the extended family and left the nuclear family—idealized by husband, wife, 2.3 children plus a dog, all guarded by a white picket fence. This created the motel, the drive-in and, along with “the Pill,” changed our mating and matrimonial morés. It didn’t make much difference who owned the business, who owned the car factory or which Pharma profited from “the Pill.”

Today we live in growing fear of Artificial Intelligence and its potential for overwhelming the organic intelligence of humanity. Yes, this is a challenge, a problem and a threat but not our greatest threat.

Our fundamental existential crisis is not technological but epistemological. We no longer share an agreement on what is true and what is real. When the late Senator Daniel Moynihan remarked “Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts,” he didn’t foresee our world of “alternative facts.”

Today we dispute nearly everything. With our understandable skepticism, that morphs easily into cynicism, we can take little at face value. We reject explanations that don’t fit our predilections and seek, and therefore find, conspiracies.

My generation began distrusting official narratives from the time of JFK’s assassination and the Warren Report. It just couldn’t have been the one communist in Texas who changed history and broke our hearts. It had to be the Mafia or the CIA, or Khruschev or LBJ. We went on to wonder at the shifting and often shifty explanations for the Vietnam War. Was it to stop China, or defend South Vietnam’s democracy (which wasn’t democratic) or to prevent the dominos from falling throughout Southeast Asia? Or maybe it was for oil.

More recently we have wrestled with 9/11. Some posited that it couldn’t have been organized by a primitive turban-wearing Arab hiding out in Tora Bora. Must be clever Israelis. Or maybe it was orchestrated by President George W for reasons that remain unclear. We saw film purporting to show missiles, not planes, crashing into the Pentagon.

We naturally had to ask a critical question that remains the critical question of our time: What is real? Since we can’t trust our politicians, nor corporate spokesfolks, nor any “Official explanation,” can we trust our eyes? When we look at a picture, are we seeing a depiction of reality? How much does a picture need to be tweaked, cleaned and photoshopped before it becomes a false representation? We get SPAMs and Spoofs trying to manipulate our politics and purchases. We get “Catfished, Pig Butchered and Phished.” To survive we must decide on what is real, but we can seldom be certain.

From CGI (Computer Generated Images) to AI, we wonder if some famous actor really endorsed a product guaranteed to reverse balding or cancer or dementia? No! Only a few years ago we could be entertained by Woody Allen’s Selig being convincingly inserted into historic events and Tom Hanks, as Forrest Gump, showing up and interacting with famous filmic ghosts. We should not be seduced by the production values but worried about losing our grip on what once was a shared reality.

If democracy needs an informed electorate to flourish or even survive, what are our chances when any politician can be credibly shown to lie, to kill, to be drunk or violent? Even without AI and CGI, Hillary was depicted as sick, near death and being carried to her car during her campaign against Trump—and Fox News. With AI, what can’t we distort? The Trump White House regularly releases AI generated lies. It doesn’t just use normal and unfortunately normalized lies; it shows us visual lies which our eyes tell us to believe.

When WWII was coming to an end, General Eisenhower encouraged the filming of the liberation of the Nazi death camps, because he believed that this would make the horrors of the holocaust undeniable. His belief today seems naive. Despite the film, Holocaust denial started much before AI. But now with AI we can create credible yet false depictions of events that never happened and show positive proof that regular history got it wrong.

I’m not talking about stupid falsifications like Trump putting up signs at the Smithsonian telling people that the museum is lying. His whitewashing will fail. However, what won’t fail is AI’s bi-partisan undermining of the social convention we used to call our shared reality.

Consider the irony that now, when we are insisting that police and ICE agents have bodycams to show us if the first official stories are true or fabrications, the images can quickly be made to show us what didn’t happen.

Yes, AI may take our jobs away. It could turn on us and convince themselves that we humans are incompetent to run the world, then label us redundant and set us out to pasture or to perish. Yes, this could happen, but we really won’t know since reality will have long since been replaced by prejudice, opinion, conspiracies and alternate, not facts but, realities. In our news silos and bubbles, fixated on our algorhythmically determined personal feeds, we will become isolated and powerless.

Is it already too late to stop this bending of reality past both its and our breaking point? No. Not yet. But soon. As Hamlet said of death, “if it be not now, yet it will come. The readiness is all.” We are not ready.

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I’ve been teaching current events and writing Op-Eds on current topics for more than 30 years. Despite commenting on controversial issues, the number one push back is not on the controversies but on my failure to propose a to do list and pitch solutions. I understand their frustration when they say, “Thanks for bringing this to me but what can I do, other than be depressed and want to flee?”

I know that my usual glib response of, “At these prices I can’t give you solutions.,” is a cop-out. So, let me try to remedy this with a “to do” list for coping and making a difference. I will caution you that my Rx is pretty simple in content but difficult in execution.

First is showing up—being present and attentive. This is sometimes challenging because we may fear showing up without answers and solutions. Many of us have trouble simply being witnesses and not fixers. We sometimes feel driven to offer a bad fix rather than remain silent and seem powerless.

When dealing with a sick friend or someone in mourning, we all want magic words to take the pain away. They don’t exist and probably shouldn’t be used even if they did. Fear and pain can’t be buried or medicated out of existence. We all experience painful. We all have opportunities and desires to help our family and friends, but may hold back because of feeling inadequate.

Here’s our real challenge: Stifle the impulse to solve the problem and become good company. There is a Hebrew word in the Torah, Hineni. It translates as “Here I am.” To me this is the single most important word and commitment we can make. Theologically, Hineni implies being ready to be an instrument of the divine. Socially, its implication is similar. To our sick and grieving friends, “I am here” means that I am present to you, listening and ready to be good company on your journey. I don’t need to fix you or distract you.

This was driven home to me when I was in an ICU, intubated with a breathing tube and on a respirator. The most meaningful moments for me were not words of encouragement or optimistic assurances that I’d be fine. What counted most was my friend who visited and sat with me for an hour silently holding my hand. His silent presence spoke words and made a world of difference.

This experience has informed my own actions. I visit people in hospitals and try to restrain my usual loquaciousness and just be there. I attend funerals and memorial services because I remember the unexpected people who attended my father’s service 61 years ago and my mother’s 20 years ago. They may not have known my parents, but they showed up for me. I remember their kindness and am inspired.

This week I attended a funeral for a former member of a class. She and her sister were with me for over 15 years. I deeply appreciated them and their entire group. I felt genuine affection for them, and instead of the too often proforma “Is there anything I can do?” I showed up. And by showing up I conveyed respect, affection and a willingness to be of service.

The service gave me something invaluable. The words of the Rabbi were wonderful, and the singing of the Cantor was lovely, but the inspiration was in the words of the eulogies from the family. Yes, we certainly expect nice things to be said in eulogies, however these eulogies went well beyond praise. They centered on their experience of their aunt, sister, mother and grandmother always being there for them. She acknowledged their triumphs and challenges, attended their events both large and small and took them on adventures. She didn’t need answers. She didn’t have to be a perfect role model. She could be memorably goofy. She embodied Hineni. She lives on as an inspiration to them and to me for showing up.

Also, this week, after doing a 90-minute presentation on our current events, during the question time, one attendee observed that a theme ran through my presentation. She pointed out that when I was talking about a domestic political controversy, I counselled not demonizing those on the other side but instead listening to them, without feigning agreement, but searching to affirm our common humanity. She pointed out that I also suggested the same respect in foreign controversies and I referenced my two yearlong Peace Corps experience in Arab, Muslim Tunisia and how that took away the stereotyping, fear and even hostility that my West Side Jewish upbringing inculcated in me. Real people, real friends, colleagues and students—along with their extended families—replaced cartoons with three-dimensional human beings. What a great gift this experience was to me. I’d also like to think what a similar gift it was to some of my students and colleagues who experienced an American and a Jew, not as a foreign and frightening “other,” but as a fellow human being. Seeing the humanity of a friend or foe, with our human flaws and virtues, trumps simple Manichean false distinctions of all good versus all evil and brings us together not in agreement but in our shared bond of humanity.

No, I didn’t bring peace to the nation or region. I had no messianic ambitions to solve the problems and do great and dramatic things. I later encountered a phrase from St. Mother Teresa who said “I don’t do great things. I do small things with great love.” YES!

I was greatly influenced to seek a human connection with people when I attended a small group meeting in 1970 with Nobel Laureate and Holocaust survivor and chronicler, Eli Wiesel. He said that when he sees a stranger, someone from a different religion, race, ethnicity or culture, he doesn’t shrink away in fear, nor does he make assumptions about what he doesn’t know about them. Instead, he is driven to go over and sit with him or her and be open to learning who they are and what they have experienced. He seeks to connect. He wants to get past the word “Stranger,” which has at its root the word “Strange,” and find a person.

Do all these encounters make a huge difference in our world? Of course not. It’s only a small thing, usually a brief moment, though it can sometimes be the beginning of a longer connection. However, if I believe that every grain of sand thrown into a malign machine can eventually be added up to jam that machine, so must I believe that every drop of the social lubricant of respect will combine with drops to lubricate a good engine of reconciliation and healing.

If I want peace on earth, if I desire peace in the hearts of grieving and pained people, I must begin with calming my own savage heart. Pete Seeger paraphrased Ecclesiastes, “There is a time of love, a time of hate, A time of peace, I swear it’s not too late.” I believe it’s not too late for us to find more healing calm in our hearts.

As my student pointed out, I affirm the words attributed to St Francis of Assisi “Let there be peace on earth and let it begin with me.” YES!

Treffid: A Cotton Candy Nebula

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At first blush this must be one of the most self-evident headlines of all time, right along with yesterday’s “Renewed fighting imperils ceasefire.” However, upon closer examination the “scientists” were Astrochemists, and they are not referring to Milky Way candy bars. Finding no free-floating chocolate amongst the stars, they moved on to analyze the presence of sugar dispersed throughout the universe.

They found that the universe contains an abundance of naturally occurring sugars—the very same sugars that are found in raspberries, which we must now consider to be a heavenly treat. The specific sugar is called Erythrulose, and since it is obviously natural it must be healthy. After all, most of us believe that natural and organic is healthier than manmade and artificial. This might be falsified by the fact that Socrates died after drinking 100% organic Hemlock. Oh well.

Rejecting the old idea that the moon is made of green cheese, they wondered if Mars might hide a cache of Mars Bars. Alas no. Again, no chocolate. But the whole idea is quite attractive and compelling, both from a scientific and symbolic point of view.

It’s nice to consider that in our vast universe, with stars being born and dying, going Super Nova and collapsing into Black Holes, that all of these spectacular dramatic events might be sweetened with a hint of sugar. With galaxies crashing into each other and Black Holes swallowing stars and star systems, some of the horror of this cosmic scale destruction might be mitigated with a celestial spoonful of sugar to make this bitter medicine go down.

Even without finding chocolate (so far, but we can hope) this discovery may help us understand what the great space telescopes have been showing us for years. Pictures from both the Hubble and the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope (200 times more powerful than the Hubble) show us great nebulae that look in both color and shape to be made of cotton candy. In fact, two nebulae are referred to as the “Cotton Candy Nebula.” Their official names are the Lagoon Nebula and the Triffid Nebula. The trouble with Triffid is that while it looks like cotton candy, they haven’t yet scanned it for Erythrulose sugar. But when they do, I am confident that both cotton candy and an adjacent snow cone will be identified. (See photograph at top. Cotton Candy on left and Snow Cone on right)

These truly cosmic levels of sugar should settle the issue of whether the universe is steady-state or expanding. With all the sugar in the Milky Way and the Cotton Candy in numerous nebulae, our universe must be expanding. No longer young at 13.8 billion years, this is typical middle age spread. We, the Universe and Everything, are rapidly expanding, even speeding up, due to a sugar rush, as all existence seeks to dine (Thank you Doug Adams) at the Restaurant at the End of the Universe!

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The Tragic Price of Coming Heartbreak

President Trump is due some kudos. (Perhaps the most unanticipated topic sentence I have ever written). Still, credit is due him. The historic pattern of most of our presidents, when faced with a military operation not going according to plan and getting stalled, is to escalate and redouble our efforts. Historically this doubles the damage we inflict while raising our own pain exponentially.

Trump is right not to want escalation in our (his) war with Iran. He learned the hard way that Iran would survive the decapitation of its leadership. He realized that increased violence would be costly, not simply to Iran but to us. The cost of gas, oil, fertilizer and helium would rapidly go up—as one might expect with helium. At the same time, the exposure of our military would inevitably lead to more losses of blood and treasure.

Impatience and boredom, two of Trump’s traditional weaknesses, here could become virtues. He has been ready from the first week of this ill-considered misadventure to “Declare victory and pull out.” He has, in fact, been declaring victory since the very first week of this debacle. His commitment didn’t last two weeks before he began looking for the exit. Good. He understands that he miscalculated this war. Well, that’s not quite true. I’m sure that he does not consider the miscalculation to be his. He never owns mistakes but finds others to blame. So, this war is the fault of Bibi Netanyahu and Mohammad Ben Salman, or maybe Gen Caine or Marco or Pete Hegseth. But the bottom line is that this was not a quick Venezuela style victory, and neither he nor our nation is in the mood for a long slog. He would leave if given the chance.

Iran’s miscalculation is as bad and costly to its people and the regime as Trump’s—maybe worse. They think they are winning and punishing the “Great Satans” of America and Israel. They see Israel getting more and more isolated from former allies and even from Trump and the United States. They see the American people, left, right and center, not buying into this war. They see Trump’s attention drifting away and focusing not so much on wanting to destroy Iran and its civilization but on destroying, er beautifying, Federal buildings in and around the White House and Washington DC.

Iran is moved to push what they see as their advantage and punish us. They know that Trump does not want to plunge deeper into an endless Middle Eastern war. They understand this from his wild swings of false flattery alternating with his unhinged threats to commit massive war crimes. Trump has no credibility to the Iranians. He scheduled peace talks and attacked their land three times. Logically and correctly neither his offers of peace nor threats of destruction are believed.

Trump wants out, but Iran will not let him out. Trump seeks a dignified withdrawal and desires to leave the cleanup to the Gulf States and Europe. Iran, believing that we are on the ropes and losing both the American people and Europe, wants total victory, and that means not letting us go but instead humiliating us. Iran understands that there is no such thing as an orderly retreat or a dignified surrender.

Iran wants a replay of America’s withdrawal from Saigon with our undignified end to that war and pictures of desperate former allies grasping onto to our rapidly retreating helicopters with some falling to their deaths. They want to write the sequel to our even more disastrous leaving of Kabul with our troops being killed by a human bomber while again former allies desperately tried to rush onto overloaded airplanes. Some failed to board desperately and futilely tried to cling to handholds and landing gear. As the jets lifted off, our former friends and employees, not lucky enough to be on board, fell.

Iran liked our first failure and loved its sequel. Now they intentionally block our exit believing that their ultimate victory is assured, as is our humiliation. This is their tragic miscalculation. While they are right that Trump wants out, closing the exit is a mistake. He will escalate and offer peace. They will agree to talks and then slow-walk them. He will get frustrated and use proportional violence. They will respond with their own, and then we will go to Israeli-style disproportionate retaliation. Iran then escalates its attacks on its Gulf neighbors and hits their oil infrastructure and desalinization plants. Then we do the same to Iran. Trump will abandon his efforts not to escalate, for which I gave him kudos, and he will escalate bigly, for which I withdraw my kudos.

Together, our misbegotten policies will leave much of the world without a reliable oil supply and the Middle East without both salable oil and drinkable water. When I was studying the Middle East and the politics of oil in grad school, our common belief was that water would eventually replace oil as the vital resource over which to fight in the 21^st Century. We were partially right. Water is critical for drinking, agriculture and electric power e.g. Cooling nuclear reactors. And yes, oil too is still critical because the world did not switch as efficiently as we believed it would to renewable energy.

So, here we are. Trump wants out and is looking for a great big, beautiful door that will allow some ersatz form of “peace with honor” and Iran won’t open that door. So, where to? Needless death and destruction, broken economies, broken lives and broken hearts.

In the Bad Old Days Foreigners Ate Uncle Sam. Now they Only Eat Pets

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President Trump has made “Birthright Citizenship,” the ugly centerpiece of his meanspirited and xenophobic campaign of cruelty. He has repeatably lied that “No other country in the world does this.” We don’t have to look too far to find that both Canada and Mexico grant birthright citizenship. He also asserts without evidence that this “costs us billions and billions of dollars.” Really? Well, NO! This follows his typical pattern of solving a “terrible crisis,” with a blunderbuss, when the crisis is nearly nonexistent. This “issue” and “crisis,” upon analysis and some rational thought, turns out to have little, if any monetary or cultural impact.

The Supreme Court came to the proper decision on Birthright Citizenship. Although the fact that three justices dissented, is appalling based on the arguments presented by the attorneys representing the Trump administration. These dissenters couldn’t find the Constitution in the clear words of the Constitution.

There is an argument that they could have made that was not absurd and might have been taken seriously. The fact that they did not make this potentially viable argument inclines me to wonder if they tanked it and might prefer having this issue rather than solving it.

Before I get to that “good argument,” let me make clear that I fully and unambiguously support birthright citizenship. While it may have expanded beyond the original intent of the 14^th Amendment, the costs of that expansion are minimal. It is true that there is “birth tourism,” people coming to the United States with the intention of giving birth to an American citizen. Is this taking advantage of our largess? I suppose so, but where is the damage?

If people in China have the means, what is our cost for them to come here, have their babies and go back home? They are trying to secure a lifeboat for their children, in case things turn bad in China.

Yes, some wealthy mainland Chinese are both coming here to give birth and buying property in case China cracks down and further betrays their growing upper middle class. I do not see either an economic or cultural downside for us.

Nor do I see much of an impact when people from South America come here and have American citizen babies. If they go back home, where is our harm? If they remain here legally, what is our cost? If they remain here illegally, what difference does it make, long-term or short-term? It won’t protect them from deportation. Do we have as records and statistics concerning American citizen children coming back here, asserting their citizenship and committing crimes, sucking up social services and displacing long time citizens from schools or the workforce? If not, what is the real basis of the fear that Trump is stoking? This seems to me to be just another meanspirited act of xenophobia.

The lawyers for the administration argued the intent of the 14^th Amendment and the context of the United States v. Wong Kim Ark (1898) which held that the child of Chinese immigrants was indeed a citizen, even though our government argued that they were under the control of the Chinese Emperor and therefore were not “subject to our jurisdiction.” This argument was plainly rejected, and that decision has stood for over a century.

What the Trump administration did not argue was one seemingly clear cutout from birthright citizenship in the text of the 14^th Amendment itself. Children born in the U.S. to “hostile invading military forces” are excluded from 14th Amendment and birthright citizenship.

Trump has seemed to be setting up this argument by talking about foreign “Invasions” for two decades. He has called immigrants invaders. He has characterized Latin American gangs as “Invading armies,” and tried to invoke the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to deprive them of due process and speedily deport any and all of them by labeling them as invaders and war time enemies.

This is to me hateful and vile rhetoric and even worse policy, but I cannot conceive of any reason that this was not argued to the Supreme Court. Was he afraid of winning?

This argument wouldn’t just be applicable to South Americans. In Trump’s xenophobic world, it could just as easily apply to others from largely Islamic nations and further his blatant Islamophobia and employ it against Syrians, Afghans and Somalis. He consistently argues that many immigrants come here not to be “real Americans” but to convert us, undermine our European origins and traditions and eventually overthrow the good white folks. He promotes the fear that these invaders, with no commitment to our culture and Christianity, dilute both our culture and our blood. He has compared brown people, Muslims and other foreigners to diseases that must be stopped.

How did his administration fail to argue the specific language of the 14th amendment that the children of hostile invaders were an exception to birthright citizenship? I, who resist conspiracy theories and generally favor interpretations of inexplicable behavior to come from incompetence rather than conspiracies, am at a loss here. While I’m always inclined to see Trump’s thugs as incompetent, I cannot reject completely that some cunning might be at play here, and he wants the issue to linger and last. Am I too cynical or not cynical enough?

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I feel politically homeless. The Democratic Party is moving in a direction that has no room for me. The Republicans, though more loudly Philo-Semitic, are not to be trusted either. Right wing anti-Semitism has always been threatening, and left-wing anti-Semitism has been growing—particularly at elite universities. Anti-Semitism is once again uniting left and right, the very rich, the very poor and many in the middle, in a pincer movement against “The Jews.”

Jews are charged with being the capitalists exploiting the working people and controlling the banks and media. Jews are also the poor, undercutting the salaries of other “more deserving poor.” Jews are blamed for being victims and thus charged with earning our sad fate. We are also the exploiters and victimizers taking advantage of good decent Christians and Muslims.

We are blamed for our own pain when we fight back. People called Israel a committer of genocide on October 8^th before Israeli retaliation was even significant. This evidenced bad faith to me. One of the first on this bandwagon of hate was Rama Duwaji, the wife of New York mayor Zohran Mamdani. From most we may get a four-day window of sympathy and empathy when we die but none when we fight back and kill.

What has been happening in recent years, as anti-Semitism grew from guilty whispers to open talk, from embarrassing confessions to amplified bullhorns of hate, culminated in new York’s Democratic primary on June 23^rd with the election of Mayor Mamdani’s three candidates and the defeat of three liberal candidates, including Rep. Dan Goldman.

Goldman lost because he didn’t distance himself sufficiently from Israel to satisfy Mayor Mamdani and the progressive Zeitgeist that demands both distance from Israel and denial of Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state. Criticizing Israeli policy is not enough. Progressives hold Jews as complicit in the pain of Palestinians unless they explicitly condemn Israel and affirm the label—in my view the libel—that Israel is committing genocide. Refusal to stipulate to that one word shibboleth is cause for excommunication.

I have been excommunicated from the new, hip, young self-righteous, energetic and increasingly progressive Democratic Party. Right now, that makes me politically homeless.

You see, I’m a committed liberal and also a committed Zionist. This never seemed to me to be a contradiction. Being a Zionist means that I favored the creation of Israel and its sustaining as a legitimate state, a democratic state and a Jewish state.

Being a Jewish state does not entail controlling other faiths any more than England being an Anglican state interferers with the rights of Methodists, Baptists, or Presbyterians. Neither should it interfere with Muslims and Jews.

I’m also in favor of a Palestinian state and homeland. I have both great respect and affection for my Muslim cousins. This may be confusing or contradictory to some, but again, not to me. However, it is not enough to get me accepted into the newly progressive Democratic movement.

I accept my exile because I have grown from wariness concerning the Democrats to disappointment to disaffiliation to despair.

It didn’t start with Zohran Mamdani, but he does represent the Democrats problem as well as mine. He is a talented, gifted, articulate and smart politician. I wanted him to succeed, to bring New Yorkers of all faiths, classes and ethnicities together. I understood that as a Muslim he might feel differently about Israel than I. That is fine and appropriate. His lived experience is different from mine.

I did hope that his problem with Israel was policy based, that it was Netanyahu and his brutality that he opposed. I could have met him there. But his issues with Israel go far deeper. They are not about Bibi’s policies but go to Israel’s legitimacy. It isn’t about Gaza alone, or the West Bank. It’s not about a two-state solution. He, like the ultra-nationalist Israelis, is for a one state solution. No Jewish state.

“Palestine free from the river to the sea” has ramifications. There is no place for me and my family. There is no place for the 7 million Jews living there. Does he believe they should go back to where they came from, Berlin, Vienna, New York, Warsaw, Kyev, Baghdad, Djerba and Teheran? Or does he believe that they, (We!) could live nicely under Muslim rule?

We can’t live nicely under Mamdani’s rule in New York City. What happened to Rep. Dan Goldman this weekend and Mamdani’s tepid response, lets us know where we stand and that is on the gallows—gallows that so far are symbolic and metaphoric. So far.

Goldman and his daughter visited a coffee shop, and she needed to use the restroom. They allowed her, and Goldman, out of gratitude, bought a coffee and left a tip. The shop realized who he was and didn’t approve of his political position concerning Israel. So, they posted this on their website: “See, here at Poetica, we don’t serve racists, fascists, homophobes, genocide enablers, or anyone in between. Too bad we didn’t recognize you right away, or we would have turned you away.Do you see how it doesn’t taste like genocide juice? Or are you still having a hard time telling the difference? We don’t need your money (it’s probably coming from AIPAC anyways).”

Mayor Mamdani responded: “I have many a political disagreement with Congressman Goldman when it comes to his votes and his views on Israel. I think that what we saw online goes beyond.”

This is clearly faint condemnation. So faint that it’s not condemnation at all. How could he respond to the charge that the money for Goldman’s coffee probably came from AIPAC when he had openly called the members of AIPAC “Monsters?”

What could he say when he backed winning candidate Avila Chevalier who attended an anti-Israel, pro-Hamas rally on October 8, the day after Gazans raped, tortured, slaughtered and kidnapped 1,200 people. And recently when asked if Israel had the right to exist, she refused to answer. Her silence on this point and Mamdani’s words of support for her speak volumes.

Both their words and their silence shatter me. They refute my old faith that “It can’t happen here.” “It” meaning virulent, violent and dangerous anti-Semitism. And so, I am bereft of a political home and condemned to being politically a“Wandering Jew.” As to Mamdani and Chevalier: Their words shatter my ears, while their silence breaks my heart.

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I don’t want to bury the lede, I want to drown it. Drown it in the stinky, slimy green slop of our national swamp in DC, our Lincoln Memorial (formerly) Reflecting Pool.

This Trumpian misadventure is the platonic form of unintended consequences. He wanted to improve the pool, which is to say assert his dominance by changing something someone else had accomplished. He set out to make the pool his own creation and impose his taste—which is “unbelievable and nobody’s ever seen anything like it.”

In keeping with his personal tradition, he moved fast and broke things i.e. the pool. He avoided any real process, (even competitive bidding). He didn’t involve recognized experts and consulted only with himself and his personal pool man, who no doubt will soon emerge as the next head of the Environmental Protection Agency, having clearly established his lack of qualifications.

The consequence of Trump’s on-brand combination of ignorance, arrogance and impulsivity resulted not in a beautiful pool that looked blue and reflected better than before but had the unintended, yet predictable, consequence of resulting in a fetid ugly mess.

Not all unintended consequences are bad. There are sometimes happy accidents and unforeseen benefits—although not usually with Trump. For positive examples we can look to Archimedes slipping into his bath and as the tub overflowed had the epiphany that the weight of the water displaced by a body, in this case his own body, was related to buoyancy.

We know that the first antibiotic was discovered, or more accurately recognized, by Sir Alexander Fleming, a famously untidy researcher, who left some petri dishes out when he went on vacation and upon return found that staphylococcus bacteria was not growing around the Penicillium mold.

Perhaps the most immediately relevant unintended consequence, as we approach the 4^th of July and our 250^th birthday, was Christopher Columbus setting sail for India. Looking for a shortcut to the land of silk and spices, he “discovered” America. Of course, America like Penicillin was always there. His unsuccessful quest to reach India had tragic and unintended consequences for the Indigenous people of the continent he ran into by mistake. For Europeans, however, this landfall in the New World was a windfall for their treasuries and eventually for European immigrants.

Some unintended consequences can go both positive and negative. Trump constantly attacking, hectoring and demeaning our European NATO allies could seem highly negative. You don’t alienate our friends and when you do, it seldom has good results. However unintended, Trump’s mistreatment of our NATO allies brought them together, and they began contributing more to their common defense. Yes, Trump drove them away from us, but he also drove them into each other’s arms.

With Trump the unintended consequences usually are not good—not even for Trump himself.

He promised to drain the swamp, and instead he created a truly great and visible swamp. With nearly encyclopedic ignorance, he repainted the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool with dark blue paint, what he called American Flag Blue. Every swimming pool owner, except Trump, knows dark colors absorb heat, and this results in warmer water. That’s why to save heating costs many of us have dark, even black, pools.

We normal pool owners know that we get more algae as the water warms. We understand that as long as the pool filter is working, we can partially control the algae. We run the filter longer hours in the summer than in the winter. Yes, we also add chemicals, usually chlorine. We know that if the pool motor goes down, we will have a choice of draining the pool or pouring in enough chlorine to blind us, bleach our hair and melt our skin. We know that the use of chlorine in battle is a war crime and that chlorine is listed as a chemical weapon.

The former reflecting pool does not have a filter system. It’s fed by Washington DC water. With its dimensions of 2,028 feet by 167 and depth of only 18 inches it seems designed to heat rapidly in the sun and grow algae at a truly impressive rate. And it does. Even more efficiently with it’s already peeling dark bottom. Who knew? Clearly neither Trump nor his pool man.

Trump sets out to “Make America Great Again” and what does he do? He makes America weaker and virtually friendless. He tasks RFK Jr with Making America Healthy Again,” and what does he get? The spread of measles . He sets out to cut waste, fraud and abuse from our budget and sics Elon Musk with a chainsaw on our governmental institutions, from the EPA to USAID, from the IRS to DOJ, from Inspectors general to food inspectors. He’s making America sick again—both physically and fiscally.

Trump sought to establish his foreign policy bona fides with a quick legacy-building takedown of Iran. Not believing “his” chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General John “Razin” Caine, who told him that Iran would block the Strait of Hormuz, he went ahead believing that the regime would quickly topple and the new leadership would be cooperative, if not docile. His miscalculation has left us weaker and Iran stronger. Truly not his intention but certainly foreseeable given his impetuosity, mercurial temperament, invincible ignorance and profound shallowness—a shallowness much like the formerly reflecting pool and current swamp. What a fitting symbol and soggy epitaph for Trump’s Reign of Terrible.

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The Empire Strikes Back! This is to be expected but not accepted. It must be resisted. The Empire, personified by President Trump and his MAGA people, is actively trying to reverse the advances of the 20^th Century. We are in the midst of a counter revolution. The Trump regime is perpetrating a coordinated attack on what many of us consider essential rights—rights, though hard-won, we thought would never even be questioned, no less lost. We gravely err when we see these as bunch of disparate attacks on laws, traditions and institutions. These are complex and coordinated acts of cultural war which must be seen as a true counter revolution and not as isolated skirmishes.

It is not accidental that voting rights are under attack with Trump and his MAGA people scrubbing voter rolls, trying to impose innocent sounding but insidious proofs of identity and even citizenship to “prevent voter fraud.” They are designed to prevent the old, the poor and immigrants from voting. They use both law and intimidation. Birth certificate identification disproportionately raises the bar on women, particularly married women who do not go by their birth name. To the multiple married, with a string of names, this presents an imposing barrier.

Nor is it accidental that at the same time, they are attacking our First Amendment guarantees of freedom of speech and freedom to peacefully assemble. Talking or witnessing against the Trump policies is often smeared as “treason and sedition,” by Trump himself. Opponents are investigated, indicted and often tried. Fortunately, the courts and many juries are fighting back. However, while we might take comfort in the absence of final defeats, many of us feel discouraged at the absence of final victories. We didn’t think we would have to re-litigate civil rights.

Nor did we believe that women’s rights would suffer organized and committed efforts to erode and overturn them. Setting their sights on a woman’s autonomy over her own body, the political right played a long game and worked to get judges and politicians elected who would rescind Roe v Wade (1973). They were stymied for decades, despite having elected anti-choice presidents. But with Trump and the stacking of the Supreme Court, they finally won.

The counter revolution stayed focused on women, going on to strip women in our military from promotion lists and forcing the retirement of high-ranking women officers, then changing the qualifications for equal deployment.

They quickly launched attacks on birth control—from Plan B to birth control pills and even IUDs. At the same time, they began their assault of LGBTQ+ rights, naturally including Gay Marriage. There have been hints at revisiting Loving v Virginia which made it unconstitutional to outlaw “miscegenation,” i.e. marriages between races. This may be the one-time Mr. Justice Clarence Thomas bucks his fellow conservative jurists! These attacks are not random!

The racial and racist elements of our anti-immigrant sentiment reflect historic xenophobia, which attacks, marginalizes, demonizes and seeks to deport people, most of whom are not white—or not white enough. Yes, during the Civil War, Lincoln suspended Habeas Corpus. Trump considered officially suspending Habeas Corpus, but he didn’t have to. ICE is openly doing it for him but not legally. They are rounding up people, immigrants, residents and citizens and holding them indefinitely, often without charges or respect for their Habeas Corpus rights to due process.

The very nature of the society we thought we had created is being questioned and is changing. The great social changes that came about in the last quarter of the 19^th century are not secure.

The Emancipation Proclamation seemed to abolish slavery. And it did, at least in theory. Though not subject to being owned, poor people, mostly of African origins, could be retained in servitude by economic chains. They could be kept in servitude by withholding education and the opportunity to advance. The right to vote and to hold office were offered—but only briefly in the south. The vote was stripped away by violence, intimidation, poll taxes and “literacy tests.”

Having lost their “Revolution,” AKA. the Civil War, the south launched a counter revolution, and it succeeded for over half a century. This provoked its own pushback, a counter-counter revolution in the 50s with the birth of the “Civil Rights Era.” For a while many of us who were involved in speaking, demonstrating and working for civil rights believed we had won. It was over. Black people could say, as Dr King quoted, “Free at last. Free at last. Great God almighty, we are free at last!” But that freedom would not last. It would be blatantly challenged by southern states and somewhat more insidiously by northern states.

The attack on minority rights proceeds under a rubric of colorblind fairness. They argue that any policy that renders a disproportionate negative impact on white people is unconstitutional, and any policy that disproportionately benefits people of color is obviously unconstitutional. The goal of making our schools, businesses and military “look like America” is being swept away. All the while they cynically argue that this is based on Dr King’s famous words, “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” These words are in a dream, in a future America that does not exist at present. They are aspirational. The path to fulfilling that dream cannot be followed with blinders on that let us pretend that color doesn’t count.

The counter revolution opened a front on working people by attacking unions with both legislation and rhetoric. They are still going after academia trying to tie grants to compliance with the administration’s demands. They want research grants to be based on the “Administration’s priorities,” and not science. Politicizing science didn’t work in the USSR under Lysenko, whose Marxist theories that rejected Mendel, led to millions of deaths from starvation. Compliance means accepting every demand: Turn over the names of immigrants, foreign students and Jews! What could go wrong? History answers that question with eloquent brutality.

There is a battle going on today against our courts and the rule of law. Trump, in his first term, admitted that he didn’t understand how a judge in Hawaii could issue a ruling that could be national. He constantly challenges the courts’ authority and goes so far as to assert that the courts don’t have jurisdiction over the Executive branch. He holds that he must be allowed to do anything he considers to be “national security,” which is everything. He doesn’t stop at national security but extends his reach into art, architecture and esthetics. He has tried to argue that the courts might order him to stop working on the ballroom/bunker, but he must trump them. He claimed in court last week that no court could prevent him from tearing down the Statue of Liberty!

He is actively and consciously trying to turn back the legal clock to the time of Herbert Hoover when women’s rights, minority rights and union rights hardly existed. The concentration of power that he pursues rejects our constitutional doctrine of the Separation of Powers and would eliminate the protective tension amongst our three constitutionally co-equal branches of government.

It does not take the adoption of a Hegelian “Thesis Antithesis Synthesis” dialectic to see that every seemingly successful revolution provokes a counter revolution. Both fortunately and frustratingly, history does not end in a single victory or defeat. In fact, history never ends—at least it hasn’t yet.

A counter revolution is not surprising. Push back and recentering are normal. The Empire will always strike back, but the Return of the Jedi will surely follow…eventually.

Decline & Fall in Two Pictures
From Pablo Casales to Aaron Rourke

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How have we come to this? How did President Reagan’s evocation of a “Shining city on a hill,” give way to Trump’s characterizing of America as “Rusted out factories scattered like tombstones across the landscape of our nation”?

How can we mark our descent from noble, if not completely realized, aspirations to psychic desperation, even despair? How did “We the People” turn our votes from the traditional candidates who faced the eastern sunrise with confident hope to an angry prophet of doom?

If we’re looking for the milestones marking our fall, look no further than this: Once upon a time the White House hosted the great cellist Pablo Casales, soprano Beverly Sills and violinist Itzhak Perlman. Today the President brags about hosting a UFC cage match on the site of the former, now paved, Rose Garden.

Our cultural decline also shows up in both the name and content of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts versus its illegally counterfeit “The Donald J. Trump and John F Kennedy Center.” The real Kennedy Center honored soprano Rene Fleming, comedian Billy Crystal and Amy Grant, star of Christian music . On the polar opposite, the Trump-Kennedy Center honored country star George Strait (God knows Marvin Gaye wouldn’t have made the cut), the long-tongued rock band Kiss and cultural icon Sylvester Stallone.

No, President Trump did not single-handedly cause our fall from ambition to demolition, but he did sense the anger and grievance of many and instead of appealing to our better angels, he organized and weaponized the angry and alienated. Some leaders inspire us and involve us in great and positive causes. JFK exhorted my generation to generous patriotism with “Ask not what your country can do for you, but for what you can do for your country.” He called upon us to sacrifice for our great nation.

Trump does not call for sacrifice. Instead, he promises winning, “You’ll be winning so much you’ll get tired of winning.” And instead of bringing us together as a nation, he separates us into factions by demonizing the poor and the stranger—exactly what Jesus would not have done.

Instead of speaking truth to power, he speaks rage at the powerless while giving tax breaks to the powerful. This has consequences both in political policies and in cultural tone. Our politics and our culture are, I believe, inextricably bound together.

Our leaders have never been saints, though some tried to pretend. Yes, they swore but mostly in private. Yes, they were often racist, anti-Semitic and corrupt. However, they worked assiduously to hide their sins of lust, greed, avarice and envy. They mostly eschewed public vulgarity. Sure, we knew that Presidents Truman and LBJ swore like sailors, but they mostly took their responsibilities as role-models seriously and were not vulgar in public.

Today with Trump, this propriety and image of moral probity are gone. He admits that he does not love his enemy. He celebrates the death of a former adversary. He calls people stupid. He liberally sprinkles his vocabulary with vulgarity—screaming only this week at Israel’s Premier Bibi Netanyahu, “You’re f***ing crazy. You’d be in prison if it weren’t for me. I’m saving your ass. Everybody hates you now. Everybody hates Israel because of this.” Okay, I’ll admit that I might share his frustration with Bibi, but is this how an American President speaks to the leader of a foreign country—and not just any foreign country but our main ally?

Trump’s vulgarity has cultural consequence and is both milestone and catalyst for the debasement of our comity and leaves our nation not striving to reach the shining city on the hill but living like so many recent graduates in anger and fear in our cultural basement.

What a tragic fall.

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The Democrats in Congress could very well be doing both the right thing and tossing Trump a lifeline. If Trump is smart, he’ll grab that lifeline. Of course, speculating on Trump being smart might not make sense but even if you can’t buy into that premise, he certainly has guile and might indeed grab it.

That potential lifeline is the War Powers Act—an act and restriction that no President likes. The act allows a President in an emergency to engage in state violence in the absence of a declaration of war. However, it also requires the President to come back to Congress after 60 days to seek congresses’ consent to continue.

Right now, the Democrats in Congress are trying to pass it, and Trump is forcefully urging the Republicans to block it. The Dems scored an historic (but perhaps meaningless) victory this week when the House passed a motion to invoke the act. This was a first. It was technically bi-partisan because four Republicans voted with the Dems. Trump is not happy. But maybe he should be.

Trump has painted himself into a box in Iran. He has declared victory yet must continue the fight because the objectives of the war have not been met. He has declared that Iran’s military has been destroyed, its Airforce eliminated and its Navy sunk. Still Iran fights on with rockets and missiles and drones. Most critically, Iran still controls the Straite of Hormuz.

Trump does not want to escalate. He now knows that he was sold a bill of goods that the war would be quick and the regime would surely fall if he decapitated their old leadership. Well, he did but they didn’t. He understands that Iran is far too big to be occupied and bombing them into submission is not working. He would love to declare victory and get out, but he can’t withdraw with the Straite controlled by Iran. He doesn’t want to escalate yet can’t withdraw, and the status quo is unsustainable. He’s sinking in the quicksand of the Middle East.

The much-maligned War Powers Act could be his political lifeline. He could lightly oppose it but release his Republicans and allow a “vote of conscience.” If it then passed the Senate, instead of casting a veto, he could seem to give in to the “Will of the Congress” and sign it. This would require him to withdraw from the fight and cast the blame for the incomplete mission and failure to advance our war aims on the Congress. He could immediately spin his retreat as a political betrayal and claim that “HE” had been winning but the Congress had prevented him from achieving final and absolute victory. It would be a very on-brand Trumpian spin.

Will the Dems throw the lifeline? Would Trump take it? Unlikely but possible. Frankly, despite the potential benefit to Trump, I’d support throwing the lifeline and hope he has the wisdom, make that cunning, to take it.

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I was young, very young, probably about ten or eleven, when I saw Marilyn Monroe at the famed Brentwood Country Mart. This encounter changed my life and sent me on a quest that has neither ceased nor been satisfied. Though my sighting was a good eight years before she purchased her home on the Fifth Helena Dr. in Brentwood, she visited the Mart along with many celebrities of the time and many more who still hang out.

That evening, I was doing the dishes because it was the maid’s night off, and my parents believed that weekly dish-doing would be good for me and keep me from being spoiled. My wife may report that it failed miserably as a spiritual/moral discipline. However, I now do the dishes every night, there being no live-in help.

So, I’m standing at the sink, rinsing and wiping the dishes. My father and mother were sitting in the breakfast nook. My father was dressed casually and not in the Ozzie and Harriet, Fred McMurray or Robert Young sweater and tie. My mother, on the other hand, was dressed, I mean dressed: Skirt, sweater, full makeup, perfectly coiffed hair and smoking a cigarette in a long holder. The very picture of 1950s elegance and glamor.

I casually remarked that I’d seen Marilyn Monroe that day, and my mother asked me what I thought of her? I responded with a “Wolf Whistle.” Why? I don’t know. At that age I wasn’t sexually attracted to her or anyone. I think of myself at the time as pre-sexual, but the four psychoanalysts who lived on our street would have surely disagreed.

My mother took in my report, paused, and raising both the cigarette holder and one eyebrow, replied rather archly, “So, you like blondes, do you?” I immediately shot back, in the voice of Groucho Marx, “So, who looks at her hair?”

The words hung in the air for a moment, and then my mother exploded. She came close to falling out of her chair during paroxysms of gasping laughter. My dad also guffawed, but I sensed pride along with the shock. He wasn’t a Little League dad living vicariously by my sports accomplishments—which is good since I didn’t have any. He was more Show Biz and performance centered. He was getting Nahcas from my rapid and funny comeback.

I was instantly changed. I had killed. I had killed my parents—and yes, I’m sure the four psychoanalysts would have had some Freudian interpretations of my pleasure in killing my parents.

That moment, with that one unplanned joke that physically moved my folks, gave me a feeling, an energy, a sense of satisfaction whose equal I have never again experienced. Though God knows, I’ve tried. I have been chasing that moment, that laugh, those involuntary paroxysms ever since.

I did stand up during the 60’s in local clubs such as The Balladeer, The Unicorn, The Troubadour and The Ashgrove. I also performed at the Top of the Tangent in Palo Alto and Coffee and Confusion in San Francisco. I also brought my quest for deep laughter to a career of public lecturing and teaching. It has served me well, and I have a reputation for bringing humor to serious subjects. (Thank you Mort Sahl)

More recently, I tested my stand-up chops with four sold out 90-minute sets at Pasadena’s Ice House and the auditorium at American Jewish University, where I taught for 25-years. It was all very satisfying. The people laughed, applauded and I felt the power of causing that laughter. However, although affirming and fun, I never again killed as I’d killed my folks.

I haven’t retired from this glorious quest. I give four ninety-minute “sets” (ok, lectures) a week. Yes, though well past the age of retirement, I’m still teaching, and I’m going to keep trying to kill till I die. I’m still in the game that drew me in with one off-hand remark about Marilyn Monroe. Sincere thanks for how you inspired me and changed my life. Happy Birthday Marilyn!

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I have been diagnosed with the dreaded and dreadful infection of the soul that is Trump Derangement Syndrome. Since both my political allies and adversaries agree on this diagnosis, I must confess that I am both a carrier and, I hope, a major spreader of the syndrome.

I must acknowledge that the syndrome carries a double meaning. In one sense, I suffer from Trump’s own, very clear to me, derangement. In fact, the first most dangerous understanding of this is that we all suffer from his derangement, his increasingly wild swings of mood and policy. We all suffer because his words, not only from day-to-day but from hour to hour, are often contradictory and mutually exclusive. “We’re ready to sign an agreement with Iran, but if they don’t sign, I’ll bomb them into the stone ages.” Or take, “We won on the first day and have to finish the job.” “We obliterated their nuclear program and set them back a decade.” “They pose a nuclear threat and are days away from being able to attack Israel and us with nuclear weapons.” And all this is just about Iran.

Now try to follow him as if he were a normal person (or even a normal mendacious politician). At several Memorial Day weekend commemorations, he kept drifting into plugging his Big Beautiful Ballroom and Bunker. He couldn’t stay on message and focus on the great sacrifice of others but had to bring it all back to him and his great architectural taste. He started by claiming that our nation needs a glorious ballroom in which to celebrate. Then he finished by trying to sell the ballroom as a security project for his Big Beautiful Bunker.

Historians have noted that the evolution, or devolution, of autocrats is marked first by grabbing and concentrating power by limiting the media and intimidating the judiciary. Then comes the corruption, accruing money for himself and family, then enriching cronies with bribes to assure their loyalty. Then they proceed by finding or creating an enemy against which the people must unite by turning over their power to the Dear Leader who alone can save them. This is followed by the Dear Leader distracting the people with both fear and circuses. The fear is self-evident and the circuses are designed to give people a sense of vicarious achievement.

The circus could be, oh maybe, an Ultimate Fighting Championship at the White House celebrating our all-American gladiators. Nero would be proud but would miss the lions. Then maybe add the modern version of chariot races and have an Indy-type race around our National Mall. Caligula would be applauding. Circuses also mean building great monuments to convince either the people or himself of his epic grandeur. Enter the ballroom, the arch and all the gold-plated graffiti with which he marks other people’s properties just to advertise his power.

The final stage is driven by the authoritarian’s sense of the falseness of his support and the increasing fear that some enemy will turn against him and he’ll end up upside down strung up from a streetlamp like Mussolini. Of course, the strongman’s facade is as false as a western set in a cowboy movie or an old Russian Potemkin village.

This overwhelming fear and insecurity, driven by his own doubts about his legitimacy, inevitably takes him to the last stop before destruction: The Bunker Phase. When they switch from towering architectural achievements e.g. Colosseums, Arenas, Cathedrals, Palaces and Arches to Mausoleums their end is nigh. The Bunker Phase marks the eve of destruction. Clearly, Trump, following the Authoritarian’s Playbook, has arrived with his massive dream bunker under his Grand Ballroom.

His derangement is contagious and I have been infected. Yes, some find me unhealthily obsessed by the clear and present danger I feel from his erratic misbehavior. I am obsessed because when I see what I believe to be an existential threat to our democracy, our environment and the world, I feel obligated to call it out, call him out. When I believe we are being ruled by both a Mad King and a Petulant Child all incarnated in one damaged yet powerful person, neither silence nor denial is appropriate.

For me this is not a partisan issue. Trump is neither the liberal Democrat he pretended to be most of his life, nor is he a conservative Republican. I’m confident that neither Goldwater nor Reagan would find common cause with his appetite-driven impulsivity. He is not a political thinker but a narcissistic cult leader who sees his personal Jonestown ahead. He is heading for the false safety of his bunker, where the pre-mixed Kool-Aid is waiting.

Something is happening here. What it is ain’t exactly clear. Trump did not attend son’s wedding. Not shocking given Trump’s priorities, His excuse was that he was too busy with war. This may be a hint. He also just left his golf club and returned to DC while cancelling previously posted schedule. Trump has tended to launch attacks on weekends.

Iran or Cuba? I don’t know but stand bye for news!

Ah, but right now, no news: No special bulletin from NYTimes No coverage on CNN, MSNOW, Fox or BBC.

Look for something to break soon!

UPDATE 2:05 PDT

War or Peace? Maybe an Iran deal. We’ll see.

As of 2pm, only Fox was covering live. CNN & MSNOW still on pre-recorded talking heads.

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He Wasn’t Pushed. He Jumped!

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If character equals fate, as Greek philosophers asserted, then Trump’s character, or lack thereof, is bringing on his tragic fate. I know that this is sentence that will provoke pushback. How can I call his journey tragic, after all, isn’t he getting what he deserves? Yes, he is. But, you may observe, isn’t a tragic figure a hero? If so, Trump is certainly no hero to me?

We should remember that the tragic figure, who falls from great power to ruin, is not always (or even mostly) what we would call heroic. Tragic figures are deeply flawed. Oedipus is violent, arrogant, impulsive and morally blind. He doesn’t simply marry his mother, but in the first recorded incident of road rage, kills his father at the crossing of two roads. He refuses to take the advice of the people and worse, he ignores the blind seer Tyresius.

One also has to admit that McBeth is less then heroic in plotting and carrying out the assassinations of his opponents, Banquo, King Duncan, Mac Donwald and Siward. Though he may seem to die bravely, closer reading shows that his courage came from his arrogant assurance that fate had made him invulnerable since Burnam Wood was unlikely to come to Dunsinane. The moment he realizes how Birnam Wood arrived where he fought in Dunsinane, his bravado disappears, and he is killed.

Finally, again from Shakespeare, King Lear is hardly heroic by our standards. He is vain, impulsive and subject to bribery. He destroys his family, his kingdom and his life with his passionate shallowness.

If tragic figures are defined by arrogance, impulsivity, violence and shallowness, I think Trump fits the model perfectly.

He has taken his wealth for granted and only assumed he earned it. He has taken the power he inherited and accrued in private business and in public office (He doesn’t distinguish between the two) and misspent it terribly.

On his way to destroying America by alienating our traditional allies, sweeping precedent and guardrails away, weakening every branch of government (except the Executive branch), attacking science, law and academia, he has fallen from the “Only I can save you” to a pathetic unstable figure whose only genius is creating chaos and destruction.

He has been on this path forever. He took his inheritance from his father and had to be bailed out after some bad investments. He has declared business bankruptcy at least six times: 1991: Trump Taj Mahal (Atlantic City) 1992: Trump Castle Hotel & Casino (Atlantic City)1992: Trump Plaza Associates (Atlantic City)1992: Plaza Operating Partners (The Plaza Hotel in New York)2004: Trump Hotels and Casinos Resorts 2009: Trump Entertainment Resorts (includes Trump Taj Mahal, Trump Plaza, and Trump Marina) .

He is driving our nation into bankruptcy, both moral and fiscal, through incompetence and corruption. And ironically, this insecure man so driven by wanting to be respected and honored, undermines away his obsessively pursued legacy by wasting his time and our money on vanity projects to wit (or to halfwit) a ballroom, a Trumpfiant arch, and gold guilt applied to every surface he can find. He is leaving a legacy in Fool’s Gold.

He is distracted and even obsessed with demands for loyalty and sees any hesitation to say Yes Sir, as a betrayal demanding his revenge. This will eventually leave him isolated and abandoned howling like Lear against nature and fate—the fate he created.

He doesn’t need an enemies list. He doesn’t need to search for traitors. He is his own worst enemy. He took the political issues that, deserved or not, he could call his own and campaign on and gave them away. He was betrayed by himself and the advice from others, who knew to tell him only what he wanted to hear.

In his second term, he got the approval and support of many Americans for his assertion of control of our southern border. His fix may not have been strictly kosher, but it was accepted, and he got credit and bragging rights on immigration. He promptly threw it away by empowering ICE, his virtual national police, not to go after the worst of the worst and violent criminals but anyone brown or with a foreign accent. Oh, and yes, killing two white protestors who were supporting their neighbors and our Constitution. He went too far with too much violence, intimidation and humiliation that were not bugs but a features.

He had a winning issue in controlling inflation. And, although the worst of the Biden inflation was already tamed, he got credit for bringing it down. He then abandoned anti-inflation policies for the destructive chaos of tariffs. Paid for by consumers and not other countries that were indeed taking advantage of us. He reduced the amount of products we exported and imported. The loss of income on exports hurt small businesses and farmers. The raised prices on imports raised prices for everyone. Inflation began to creep up.

His biggest unkept promise was staying out of “Stupid forever wars.” Here he has failed miserably with his war of choice with Iran. Yes, some day we probably would have had to take on Iran, but he made no real case for why now and without seeking any buy-in from the congress, our allies or the American people. Though advised that this war was unlikely to be a two-week effort ending in the overthrow of the Iranian regime (Which I would have supported) and his rejection of the warning that Iran would close the Strait of Hormuz, he waded in with his typical invincible ignorance and arrogance. Today, we are bogged down in quagmire neither able to withdraw nor desiring to escalate. Hormuz is closed. The world economy is suffering. The reduction of 20% of oil on the market, naturally drives up its price. No one is happy, not our allies, not even our enemies and most critically to him, not the American people.

His enemies, and he has enemies, have not brought him down. His allies and enablers have not exactly created his fall. However, by telling him only what he wants to hear and letting him be as unmoored as he wants to be, they have, in the name of loyalty, betrayed him. But he ordered this betrayal.

The feckless Democrats have not wounded him through “Lawfair.” His wounds are self-inflicted. His growing isolation will continue as Republicans come to terms with his inability to get them elected. He can destroy but not build—not loyalty, not alliances, not coalitions and not affection.

His tragedy is that he will likely end up like Shakespeare’s King Richard III abandoned on his final battlefield and desperately crying out “A horse, a horse, my kingdom for a horse.” That’s his tragedy. Our tragedy is that he is bringing us down by ruining our institutions, setting us against each other and isolating us from our allies.

He deserves his fate. We don’t.