She was valued for her beauty. Her family and her beau basked in that reflected honor.

And the fastest man in that village was, well, the fastest. And even if he did lose the annual race to the fastest guy in the next village over, still…..it was close! he was awfully damn fast. And we’ll get ‘em next year.

He was valued for it.

The strongest man in the village. The best storyteller. The funniest person. The best healer. The best hunter. The best baker of bread, brewer of beer, the man with the straightest and most weed-free furrows.

The smartest person in the village. The best at math, and the best at making peace between fractious neighbors. The one closest to G-d, the most graceful dancer, the best tailor or seamstress.

All honored. All revered. All proud, perhaps humbly so, but proud nonetheless.

It is from this history that we retain the mythos that everyone has a special talent, that everyone is good at something. For most of our history, that comported with lived reality.

And this is something that first printing and art reproduction, then radio and movies, then television, and most importantly, the Internet, destroyed.

Because the bigger our known, experienced world got, the smaller the talents of our neighbors, and even ourselves, seemed to be.

“Jimmy is the fastest guy I know!”

“Jimmy? He came in 11th place at the state meet.”

The fastest runner we personally know exists in our consciousness in the shadow of Usain Bolt. The prettiest woman we know lives in constant knowledge of the existence of Isabella Rosellini. The strongest man at our local gym is quite a specimen, but the guys on ESPN pulling trucks with their teeth or tossing beer kegs over walls dwarve him.

The funniest guy at work is no Chris Rock. The best dancer in town couldn’t make it in New York and had to come home and teach children tap and the positions of ballet.

It is impossible to overstate what has been lost as our ability to compare the unique talents and esteemed traits of our friends and neighbors to the best in the world has grown.

We once needed these people so much. The most beautiful woman, to dream about. The strongest man, to help unstick that boulder. The best storyteller and singer, to pass long winter evenings, and the best healer, to keep us whole and hale and hearty, and the best brewer and vintner, to soften the hard edges of life with a perfectly potable wine or ale.

Imagine what it would be like to again see the small talents and knacks of the people around us as needful and valued and cherished. Imagine what it would feel like to be seen as needful and valued, to be cherished, because of our unusual (but not world-beating!) competence as bakers or seamstresses.

Imagine a community in which we again recognized and celebrated the value each person brought to that community. Imagine how we might feel about ourselves. About each other.

I say this knowing how much I gain from exposure to Adele and Dave Chappelle and the New York Knicks and the best days of Tiger Woods and Michelle Pfeiffer and Cormac McCarthy, how I revel in their accomplishments at the very heights of human ability and beauty and competence.

Even so, I’m trying to recognize the small good things that people do very well, even if not well enough to earn them fame.

Most everyone IS good at something. It’s just that we decided that good wasn’t good enough to celebrate anymore, and it’s a decision we’d do well to reverse, if we want others and ourselves to lead joyous and fulfilled lives.

Turns out that’s a privilege extended to the cute daughters of high rollers he’d brought along before, but not underfunded guppy males trailing along after table whales.

How I managed to survive hours and hours at $200 Blackjack and $50 craps tables is a column for another time (and perhaps, for another, very specific audience that excludes my wife, my accountant, my shrink, my banker and a delightful Mohegan pit boss named Frank “Nutcracker” Bocabella.)

But one of the ways I stayed financially intact was by doing a few things other than gambling while at the casino, where for most of the past 40 years I generally limited my non-gambling activities to urinating and visiting the ATM machine (and maybe a quick sandwich if staying more than three days).

I have, for instance, heard rumors there is an ocean in Atlantic City, but never seen solid evidence to back that up, in 35 years of investigation.

At Mohegan, I was desperate for breaks from tables stacked with chip colors I’d never even heard of.

“Wait, those gold chips the size of cafeteria trays, how much are they worth?”

“It depends on the price of gold that day.”

So…..I went and smoked a cigar which both cost $75 and kept me away from the craps table for 90 minutes, which precluded being scolded by dealers shouting “No phones at the table, sir” while I googled “How to sell a kidney (or two!) online.”

I went for indoor walks. I went for outdoor walks.

And twice, I went to the Mohegan’s gorgeous, palatial and empty high-tech fitness center.

I had always heard these places had gyms hidden away but it was like hearing the rooms had beds…..seemingly mythical and obviously unimportant information.

Yet I went down to move some metal, and out of the blue, achieved something joyously unexpected.

I said it was empty, but one other fellow sweated away, a handsome young man, early twenties, with shoulders the size of bowling balls, biceps the size of …..um…..candlepin bowling balls?…. and a beer-keg chest that tapered to a ballerina waist.

Dude was ripped, yoked, stacked, packed and jacked.

As our workout went on, we began sharing Bro head nods and the sympathetic grimaces and smiles of addicted weighlifters hiding alone together in a cavernous gym while outside the bars and tables pulsed with thousands of people gambling, dancing, overeating, overdrinking, and in the case of the bachelorette parties, wearing dildos like jewelry.

Eventually we found ourselves seated next to each other at free-weight barbell benches, and I said something self-deprecating to acknowledge the gap between the 45s I was shoulder-pressing and the 120s he was benching, something like “Don’t get old, man.”

To which he replied, with obvious sincerity. “Dude, you’re exactly where I want to be at your age. You’re healthy, you’re in the gym while everyone else is out there fucking around, and you’re grinding out free-weight sets to failure. That’s the dream, man.”

And I thought “OHMYGOD, I’m THAT guy! Old cool grizzled free-weight! guy. I’ve always WANTED to be that guy, or leastways ever since I gave up on being young strong NON-grizzled sexually attractive guy! NOICE!”

But that was weights, where, if I do a half-decent imitation of competence.

Running, these days is different. At my very best as a runner, when I could go 26.2 without stopping, I was still pretty awful. I ran a marathon doing 11-minute miles, and a bunch of halfs doing 10-minute miles, and I could manage a 5K in 24 minutes if it was cold and the route was downhill and dogs were chasing me.

I stopped running six years ago, because I went to a doctor to get a full checkup in order to buy life insurance and when they put the EKG on me it exploded, and when I asked the tech what that meant she said, “It means I’m calling ALL the doctors, right now, including the pathologist.”

And it was sort of decided I would never ever run again, so as to avoid the falling down and dying rigamarole.

And then, recently, it was sort of decided that maybe I could start again, as long as I was super-sensible and listened to my body and was entirely moderate and non-compulsive in my approach and stayed hydrated and was honest with myself and everyone else about the felt effects of running in real time.

Which, if you know me, you know that “moderate, sensible, non-compulsive and honest with myself and others about my weaknesses” is practically my middle name.

So I’ve started running again, very slowly, in intervals mixed with walking, on the treadmill only, until Friday, when the treadmills in my building were both taken up by two residents, RPI students I believe, perusing their phones as they conducted a study to determine whether it’s possible to walk so slowly on a treadmill that one actually gains weight mid-session.

I headed outside, and I was glad I did. The weather was scrumptious, the pavement was not so concussive as I feared, and seeing the sights. was pure pleasure.

So there I was, in the middle of my final eight-minute run segment (technically, shamble) which I’d alternated with four-minute walks. Doused with sweat, doing an admittedly lax 12-minute per mile pace and moving a lot of Lane in a jiggly and herky-jerky manner, when an awesomely fit, shirtless forty-year-old gazelle of a man cried, as he ran past in the opposite direction, “Keep it Up!”

In so doing, he employed the maniacally upbeat tone and forced smile normally reserved for staggering 96-year-old entrants trying to complete a 10k as the sun sets and the cops demand the race organizers take down the timing equipment and clear the street.

And I thought, “Damn it, I’m a punchline.”

But….two things bucked me up. First, I just returned to running after six years off and it’s quite possible that with enough training, I could lift myself up from sad to thoroughly mediocre.

And the second, more heartening reality, is that I’m now old enough to thoroughly enjoy the use of the magic comma, that standard-lowering, ego-boosting bit of wizardry that graces us right around the time the AARP mail starts gushing in.

The comma, as in, “He’s a pretty damn good weightlifter….COMMA…..for his age.”

“He looks great ….COMMA…. for his age!”

“He’s a wonderful lover…..COMMA…..for… well… he’s got real potential when he moves up to the 75-year-old judging class!”

The comma means being told I have a dad bod is a compliment, because I’m old enough to be a grandfather.

It means all I have to do to get far better is not get much worse.

I’ve always wondered how, when, and whether I’d ever find the key to unlocking my success.

As it turns out, ever-lowering standards were all I ever needed!

A soldier’s heart wins wars, not his equipment

Clashes with entrenched Russian troops continued Sept. 24 in the city of Kupiansk, which was recaptured by Ukraine forces. Credit: AFP via Getty Images/YASUYOSHI CHIBA

By Lane Filler September 27, 2022

When it became clear that Russian President Vladimir Putin would attack Ukraine, Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Mark Milley told lawmakers that Kyiv, the nation’s capital, could fall within 72 hours of an attack.

Milley wasn’t alone. The practically unanimous consensus was that Russia would devour Ukraine like teen boys attacking a bag of Taco Bell.

Russia began its assault on Feb. 25.

It withdrew the last of its forces from the area on April 2.

And seven months after the Ukrainians’ seemingly hopeless defense of their homeland began, the Russians are on the run.

In the satellite age, experts can count any nation’s tanks and planes and troops.

But no experts can say what people will do, because they don’t know how people will feel, what they will sacrifice, or how quickly fear for one’s family or pride in one’s heritage might turn to anger, and action.

Humans can be so much more than we’d guess, and so much less.

The United States’ last major military operation, in Afghanistan, ended with a similar surprise. Experts said the Afghan government could hold on for months against the Taliban. The reality: moments.

The strength of the Taliban was hugely underestimated, it turned out, because they’d stood down for years while American forces were a threat. The Taliban hadn’t softened, they were resting. And the forces American leaders hoped would slow the Taliban never made a stand.

In 1991, in the run-up to the First Gulf War, military experts warned of the power of the 1 million-soldier-strong Iraqi Army, then the fourth-largest in the world. The particular prowess of the Republican Guard, which had seized 380 square miles of territory from Iran in 1988 and was armed with Russian T-72 tanks, foretold a long, bruising campaign, the Wise Ones said.

But in the end, the biggest danger Iraqi troops posed to the coalition come to free Kuwait was stampeding surrender. Ground operations lasted six weeks, and just 147 American and allied forces were killed by Iraqi forces.

The troops weren’t willing to die for Saddam Hussein in defense of Kuwait. And a decade later, when the Republican Guard was again touted as troops who’d fight for the homeland, they again melted away like Fudgie the Whale at an August picnic.

The troop counts and weapons assessments were right, but the measure of the Iraqi soldiers’ hearts was off.

So, too, was our estimation of what came next. In March 2003, then-Vice President Dick Cheney said, “I think things have gotten so bad inside Iraq, from the standpoint of the Iraqi people, my belief is we will, in fact, be greeted as liberators.” John McCain made similar statements.

But we weren’t, and the miscalculation left us with years of insurgency, thousands of American troop deaths, and our own shameful killing of hundreds of thousands of civilians.

Protesters are in the streets in Iran, but the last promised Arab Spring brought no harvest of freedom or peace. Will this one?

No one can say, which won’t stop them saying.

Someday we will learn this lesson. Someday we will understand that human courage and cowardice, love and hate, despotism and devotion, sacrifice and stubbornness, are beyond our planning and estimation. Someday we will come to understand how much cannot be guessed about our own species’ behavior.

Or perhaps that’s just another brash prediction.

Columnist Lane Filler’s opinions are his own.

That’s a lie. But it’s a lie granted tremendous power by the fact that while Trump’s disapproval rating currently sits between 56% and 60%, which is “Jimmy Carter telling the nation eight American servicemen died in an aborted attempt to rescue the Iran hostages” level unpopularity, less than 3% of Americans protested Saturday.

It’s not enough. Not even close.

There are two easily accessible ways for people to signal strong disapproval of the horrors Trump, his Cabinet and Republicans in the House and Senate are foisting upon us in their apparent attempt to discard the Constitution and establish permanent non-Democratic control of the United States:

You can raise a ruckus on social media, which looks performatively ass-hatty and leads to Facebook nastiness with Uncle Mortie, and you can sign up for, and then attend these rallies, which, ok, but you’re tired and the new episode of “Rooster” just dropped.

It’s entirely reasonable to question the effectiveness of both strategies. And I have. But I think everyone who opposes what’s happening has to speak out and march along, anyway.

My perspective changed based on this one question: If you oppose Donald Trump and his cronies, and you do not sign up for and attend rallies and trumpet your opposition on social media, how does anyone know you oppose him.

Why would he and his cronies fear your quiet, invisible opposition?

And are you going to be happy, if this all goes, bad, knowing you never, or hardly ever, stood up to be counted, and feared?

I get it, you vote for the right people, or, you know, not the horrifyingly WRONG people (if we could find the RIGHT people we might not be in this mess)….but we have secret ballots in this nation. You’re not attaching your name, your credibility, the respect people have for you or the threat of your future civil or uncivil disobedience to your opposition.

Obviously, not everyone can attend these rallies. About 30% of employed Americans work on Saturdays, and I’d say work is generally more important than standing in a crowd chanting “Hey hey, ho ho, Donald Trump has to go,” at this point, catchy as that is.

And a significant number of Americans had other reasons they could not rally: caring for children and loved ones, traveling, too sick or handicapped to attend.

I made it Saratoga Springs Saturday for a protest and was glad I did, but I missed the last two rounds of “No Kings” for work.

The crowd there was good, hundreds and hundreds of people spread down both sides of Broadway for several blocks, signs in hand, mood generally upbeat, cars honking approval, colder than I’d have wished, but what are you gonna do?

So, chilly, I popped into Starbucks and scrolled Facebook while drinking my coffee, and was sort of startled at the level of anti-”No Kings” rhetoric from the MAGA corner of my feed.

Startled because I think the true MAGAs are a tiny minority of the nation, but they have so much voice because they unanimously are so loud.

Even so, their caterwauling ought to be drowned out by the much larger group that just as vehemently oppose Trump, but so many of us are publicly silent.

We’re never going to get 343 million Americans to rally, but can we really not get 80 million, instead of 8 million? That would be just less than a quarter of all Americans. And if this all goes bad, a lot more than 80 million people are going to wish they spoke up sooner and fought harder and marched.

We’re also never going to change the world strictly by touting our views on social media….but…..if social media didn’t have a certain effectiveness……would the world be nearly this fucked up?

When smart, trusted and reliable people share their views of the situation publicly, it makes people who know and trust them question their own beliefs. It also affects the algorithm: every comment in one direction tilts the slant that way, and every such comment we fail to share fails to tilt the algorithm that way.

And I understand that speaking out and marching may well not be enough to stop what these people are trying to do. But it is what absolutely anybody can reasonably do right now.

I don’t know what might be asked of us or required later, but what is asked of us and required right now is not a heavy lift, It’s simply letting our enemies know the opposition is numerous, motivated and active.

This is a very pushy column, I know. But I’m pretty sure no one in a nation that’s suffered a fascist takeover ever said, “Man, remember how annoyingly pushy that guy was about the impending fascist takeover, always bugging us about marching and posting and writing letters to JD Vance’s mother begging her to make him behave?! What a pain-in-the-ass he was!”

Obviously if the fascist takeover is forestalled, you DO have to live with that pain-in-the-ass reputation for eternity.

But that’s probably the best possible outcome, and it’s certainly the one I’ve been training for all my life.

It was a Saturday like any other, which means my father likely declared he was making grilled cheese and bacon sandwiches. He’d ask me how many I wanted and when I answered “Four!” he’d reply “I’ll make you two.”

There was no exaggeration in my stated desire for four, he was a wonderful cook and I was a born glutton….nor was there any judgement in his halving my order. But his square griddle pan held only four grilled cheese sandwiches, he wanted two himself, and he wasn’t going to stand in the kitchen all day trying to fill my bottomless gullet.

I don’t know where my mother and sister were that day, but I have no memory of them as present. They could have been elsewhere in the house, or out and about. They may have come through the den a dozen times, seeing baseball on the TV and, disinterested, moving on.

(To this day my sister swears that 90% of the time our family console was tuned either to TBS showing only a spread tarpaulin during a Braves rain delay, a nature show mostly about plants hosted by a South Carolina Public Television legend who recently died named Rudy Manke, or the mating gazelles of Mutual of Omaha.)

What I recollect is my dad and I both comfortably ensconced in our usual spots, he in his recliner and me on the couch, reading our books, which is what we did, all the time. He, an autodidact with wildly varied tastes, could have been reading anything from a collection of Mike Royko columns to a history of 11th-century England.

I was likely perusing a Travis McGee mystery or some Heinlein or Asimov, titles grabbed from his shelves in a home where there was neither censorship nor any acknowledgement of childhood as a time for reading any particular author or genre.

It being South Carolina in September, the shades were drawn to separate the sliding glass doors from the heat, the five-ton air conditioner laboring nonstop as it did from May to October each year.

As the game began, my father pointed out that Nolan Ryan, one of the true greats, was pitching for the Astros. I watched intermittently, as did he, reading as the game went on, both of us looking up from our books to focus on Ryan, who was dealing.

I think it was probably around the fourth or fifth inning that my dad pointed out Ryan hadn’t given up a hit, mentioning it in some contorted way, as he explained the superstition about never mentioning an in-progress no-no.

Broadcasters seem to respect that less now, but back then they absolutely would not mention Ryan was potentially on his way to making history…..and significant history. Nolan Ryan already had the record for no-hitters, but another iteration would be his unthinkable fifth (he would retire a decade later with seven).

This is not a story about a father and son who found the terrible distance between them bridged by a bonding baseball moment. There was no distance between us, and we bonded over pretty much everything, just as I have also been blessed to do with my daughter.

But it was the first time I had ever watched a sporting event with such high stakes, and where it felt like he and I, as an audience were so totally in it together.

We desperately wanted Ryan to get his no-hitter, even as my dad knew that six or seven or eight inning outings with no hits were a dime a dozen, and he’d almost certainly not make the distance without a batter scoring a base hit.

The tension was extraordinary, the way it built, and the eeriness of the announcers dancing around the subject.

And when Ryan finally cemented the feat with his last out, it felt as if my father and I had achieved some great triumph ourselves, as if, because Ryan was a human and so were we, we had every right to exult in his triumph as if it were our own.

I have always rooted for the greats in every sport, even when they played for nemesis teams, something my friends chide me about. I loved Jordan and Montana, Tiger and Nicklaus, Tom Brady and Roger Clemens and Bjorn Borg and Martina Navratilova.

I always wanted to see the best be even better.

I root for humans to achieve amazing things, and my dad taught me that…..that our team is all of us and greatness among humans, in any field, elevates us all somehow.

And that game was 45 years ago, and he has been gone nearly 30. He was 39 years old that day, and I am now 55. I achieved hardly anything while he lived, but managed to be married and sober, a decent father and a decent journalist and a decent man, after he was gone.

And tonight I watched the Yankees opener, texting with fellow fans, my wife humoring me as she read and glanced up occasionally, and even knowing that it is March and no manager would let a starter go very far in the game, in a sport where no-hitters have been made nearly impossible at any time thanks to pitch counts and caution, I watched closely for the first hit by each team.

I look for a no-hitter in every game, and feel a bit of sadness when the possibility is slapped away with a base hit. I have watched for them for 45 years, and remembered that Saturday with my father, Steve Filler, with every game.

He’s applied the warning to dozens of situations, with the highest profile being:

*To the protesters gathered on January 6, 2021, whom he was exhorting to overturn the 2020 election results, his exact words being “If you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore!”

*If Clinton beat him in 2016, Biden beat him in 2020 or Harris beat him in 2024.

*If Democratic lawmakers could advise military personnel to disobey illegal orders and refuse to commit crimes at the command of their superiors

*If we don’t control the border

*If the media reports the truth of Trump’s actions, or, you know, quotes him accurately

*And most recently, if we don’t pass draconian voter ID laws

Personally, I also imagine him using the threat (or promise?) in his personal and non-political dealings.

“If I don’t get a bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken Extra Crispy pronto, we’re not going to have a country anymore,” or “If I’m not allowed to wander unchecked through the dressing room of the Miss Teen USA Pageant we’re not going to have a country anymore,” or “If you don’t let me grab your pussy and kiss you we’re not going to have a country anymore!” or “If you don’t find me a red tie that’s nine feet long and festoon the walls of this place with gold, we’re not going to have a country anymore!”

It’s a tiresome phrase that’s lost it’s meaning to anyone but the hardest-core MAGAs years ago, but it has me thinking lately …. What real risks could lead to the loss of a recognizable United States of America.

And I think the biggest is simply…..if we lose our ability to trust the words of our president and his top advisers, we’re not going to have a country anymore.

The general (but admittedly not perfect) credibility of our federal government throughout most of my lifetime has been an irreplaceable underpinning of our nation, and now it’s shot to shit.

I often excuse MAGAs some of their delusions because they’ve been encapsulated by a media and social media bubble that reinforces itself from every direction, allowing and encouraging them to believe a series of untrue facts are valid, and decide those “facts” support insane conclusions.

But, here’s the thing…..we should at least be pay enough attention to notice when the lies change.

So if Trump says (and FOX and OAN and Newsmax and the MAGA-Twitterverse parrot) we destroyed Iran’s nuclear capabilities during the 12-day war, and then starts another, much larger war to destroy the same capability a few weeks later, his fans ought to notice.

And call bullshit.

If Trump and his media minions say the Epstein Files matter, and then decides that they don’t…..

If Trump says gas prices won’t go up, and then says they will but it doesn’t matter….

If  Trump says he’ll eliminate both the deficit and the national debt, and “it won’t even be that hard,” then runs up both the deficit and debt….

Ok, I could list the lies all day, and castigate the MAGAs for not catching on all night, but we have bigger fish to fry.

When I was reporting from Baghdad I came to understand why the Iraqis were so craven about corruption and cowardice in public service. It was because the Iraqi government was provably, inarguably not worth dying or suffering for. Doing so would have been foolish, not honorable.

And it made me realize how special the United States and other western democracies were in the general trustworthiness of their governments, often forced by generally trustworthy and harshly critical media and generally trustworthy members of loyal political opposition parties.

We now are suffering under a federal government so dishonest, from Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s vaccine lies to Pete Hegseth’s battle lies to Kristi Noem’s ICE lies to Trump’s “oh look, his mouth is moving” lies, that “informed debate” is becoming impossible.

How are you informed? By our lying government. By the media members being lied to by our government? By the lies being told by Netanyahu to our lying government?

Or, on the other hand, by our lying enemy and frenemy governments and media in Iran, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Iraq, Gaza and the West Bank, et cetera.

It wasn’t so long ago that American politicians caught in lies paid a dreadful price in public condemnation and lost popularity. From Richard Nixon’s cover-up costing him a presidency for a crime that never would have, to Bill Clinton’s Monica Lewinsky madness, to Obama’s “If you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor,” deceptions and even misstatements weakened and even ended presidencies.

And thanks to that fact, were pretty rare.

Much of my career involved spending hours on the phone with pols and government workers as they tried to get you the exact right information to inform your story and keep themselves honest…”No, wait, it was June, not July”……”I’m checking but I think the last increase was 3.96%, not 4.05%.”

Seriously, truth in governance mattered SO much, for SO long…… and in media too. The mistakes and lies that now pepper journalism with nary a penalty were absolute career-busters throughout my lifetime and time at newspapers, until he came down that escalator in 2015 to change all the rules.

So this, then, is what’s going to leave us without a country if left unchecked. Dishonesty and ever-changing stories from our government, complicit media, and a population that refuses to pay enough attention to remember what is said and reported from one day to another.

Because once you don’t trust your government, you don’t really even consider it a government anymore. It’s just a bunch of people getting paid with our own tax money to lie to us and fuck us over.

It’s an institutionalized, ongoing criminal conspiracy.

That’s how a lot of the world is. And a lot of the world sucks. And we always thought we’d convince them, over time, to become more like us.

And instead, we’re becoming just like them.

And by interesting, I mean, in some sense, completely insane......except.....that the people I love, with whom I now so vehemently disagree, are being so artfully conned and misled that it’s hard to entirely blame them.

To put that in context, it’s important to remember that the tragic aspect of the “Brother against Brother” Civil War divide was not that the conflict tore families and communities apart. The tragedy was that one of the brothers believed it was OK to kill people in support of a treasonous upstart government that favored owning human beings.

“No, Mom, I didn’t stop inviting Frank for Thanksgiving because all he brings is a can of raw Pillsbury crescent rolls. It’s because he tried to kill me when I wouldn’t let him own people like they were cattle. He shot at me and my pals for four years. He’s a dick. Let him cook his own turkey.”

Now we are in a moment when the political argument centers around whether ICE detaining and arresting people without probable cause, including citizens and foreigners here legally, and you know - murdering them - is ok.

A moment when the political argument centers around whether the president and his administration should grant outrageous political favors to foreign nationals and Americans who buy hundreds of millions of dollars worth of his fake cryptocurrency or do deals with his kids and corporations.

A moment when the political argument centers around whether removing evidence and stymieing education about our worst failures as a nation, from slavery to the wholesale slaughter of indigenous people and everything in between, is ok.

A moment when the political argument centers on whether removing leaders of other nations, indiscriminately bombing schools and then lying about it, threatening an illegal takeover of elections, ignoring court orders, stocking the cabinet with Secretaries whose only qualification for their positions is the ability to promise unswerving loyalty to a madman, bombing boats because they might have drugs on them, starting wars seemingly at random, pretty much entirely destroying a post-World War II world order that kept peace in the West for 80 years ........ok, you get it.

Point being, if disagreements over these issues aren’t worth destroying friendships and family relationships over, WHAT IS?!?!

This is on my mind because I continue to follow, on social media, a lot of the influencers I tracked as an opinion writer for Newsday. One example is a guy named Shawn Farash, a founder of Long Island Loud Majority and MAGAman who has achieved some influence and notoriety.

He’s not a household name but he has hundreds of thousands of followers, appears on OAN and Newsmax and Dan Bongino’s show, and seemingly makes a decent living spewing awful lies.

One recent post asserted that the single possible reason Democrats could oppose having ICE in and around polling places was because they want undocumented immigrants to vote….as if ICE isn’t detaining, intimidating and even killing American citizens and immigrants here legally, and their presence might have some impact on whether legal voters, particularly brown and Black ones, feel safe voting.

Another asserted that Kentucky Republican House Rep. Thomas Massie, a consistent libertarian and constitutionalist of the old-timey Ron (not Rand!) Paul school and a huge opponent of illegal wars, assassinations, and holding back Epstein files is, in fact, pro-pedophile, not anti, because he has questions about us killing the Iranian Ayatollah and in Farash’s view, Khameini’s brand of Islam is not sufficiently anti-pedophile.

The reason people we love, and in some ways even respect, have fallen for MAGA is because is presents as a wholly-integrated universe of fact. As long as the bubble remains unpierced, every assertion feels true.

So I, on Farash’s Facebook page, politely and calmly rebutted these claims.

And I think this is only marginally more effective than not doing so, in the same way that marching and rallying is only infinitesimally more effective than not doing so.

But the space between doing nothing and doing a tiny little bit of something is, in fact, infinite in a way.

There are too many good people doing nothing, myself too often included. Evil is flourishing. It behooves me to do whatever I can, no matter how small it seems, and then….more.

You must understand that, at least 20 years ago, MLK Day was a huge deal in Spartanburg, where I was then a columnist, reporter and general dogsbody.

The city of Spartanburg is about 50% black, and Jim Crow left marks there which will never fully fade. McCain, for whom I have significant affection even despite the fact that he frequently referred to me as “You Jerk!”, had in 1983 voted against the creation of MLK Day as a federal holiday. By 1990 McCain recanted his opposition, and he took great pains throughout the rest of his life to admit and atone for the mistake, but …..still, not a great guest speaker for an MLK Day event so important to the city that crowds regularly packed Spartanburg Memorial Auditorium to capacity.

In response, the “mother church” of the Spartanburg Black community, Mt. Moriah Baptist Church, invited the Reverend Jesse Jackson to speak from its pulpit the day before McCain was due in town.

Mt. Moriah’s then-pastor, a legend named Benjamin Snoddy, claimed the invitation had nothing to do with the McCain debacle, but it rang true to approximately no one. Mt. Moriah, besides anchoring the city’s Black religious community, was a place of worship where King himself had frequently preached in his youth, the community was in an uproar, and Jackson’s appearance was a clever response from Snoddy

I was lucky enough to nab the assignment of covering Jackson’s appearance, and I mean that both personally and professionally: I LOVE traditional Black churches, love the music and warmth, love that even a white stranger in a suit 11 times nerdier than the gorgeous ones won by the men of the congregation, is welcomed joyously and treasured, love that they embody an obvious truth many white church congregations fail to recognize: if you truly believe you are going to live for eternity bathed in the light of Jesus Christ, it behooves you to be extremely cheerful about it, excited and rapturous.

If you’re not beside yourself with joy at this boon….do you REALLY believe it?

Professionally, I met Jackson, wrote some good copy, and the whole standoff landed me on CNN for the first time, so yeah, doubly good times.

So…..three impressions from that day which have never left me.

First, what I, and I think, so many of us, always forgot about Jackson. He was most importantly and centrally, a preacher of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, and it stunned me how fantastic he was at the job. Jackson had that place rocking and rolling with the Holy Spirit, and it is no exaggeration to say that as he went through his altar call to convince attendees to come down front and be born again and bathed in the eternal light, he saved a passel of souls that day.

I myself was honestly tempted to walk down and accept the Word and Spirit myself, and that’s really not something nice Jewish boys are supposed to do, not matter how inspiring the call.

Second…..myself and a few local TV reporters were scheduled to interview Jackson after the service and while waiting to get started, I experienced something totally new. I was in a room with him, waiting for the others, and while we shared the space, he would not acknowledge me in any way. He stared straight ahead, stone-faced and remote, unwilling to chit-chat or…..even look at me.

I have always assumed he had simply been burned so many times by fake “off-the-record” exchanges or loose interpretations of his words that he had given up any attempt to relate to press personally, a very rare decision for a politician.

But whatever the reason, he was live for the cameras and questions during the official interview, and wholly unreachable, utterly distant and unavailable, outside of that.

And third, and this has always stayed with me and strikes me more strongly with every day…..his catch phrase, which he thundered again and again from the pulpit: “You are somebody. You ARE Somebody! YOU ARE SOMEBODY!”

That has always been interpreted, and I believe was mostly meant, to express the idea that those he was preaching to, no matter how beleaguered or poor or downtrodden, had import. Had dignity. Mattered. Were fully human and entirely significant.

Jackson himself was an illegitimate child who grew up poor, living next door to the married family-man father who impregnated his single mother (and that man’s wife and children), and often spoke of the many ways he felt “less than” and the importance of the phrase “You ARE somebody!” in his life.

But I take it differently, always have, since I heard him sing it out. For me, Jackson’s voice thundering “YOU ARE SOMEBODY!” rings in my head anytime I hear someone say “Somebody ought to do something!” and any time I think that stupidly irresponsible and impotent thought myself.

We are in desperate times. And I don’t entirely know what to do. But I know somebody ought to do something.

And I know I am somebody.

And I know you are too.

And I have a phrase that’s integral to my tales about Kuwait, that sneaks into every telling, because it both explains the mood of the soldiers there and the reality on the ground.

“Kuwait, you have to remember, is literally safer than Iowa. It’s safer than AMES, Iowa, for fuck’s sake. It’s literally crime and danger free.”

I always make, or made, this clear for two reasons:

First, because I have tried to be very careful to never sound as if anything about my time overseas was more hair-raising than it was. As we’ve seen with the “hails of bullets” lies of newsman Brian Williams and Hilary Clinton, if you stretch the truth a little, by the third time you tell the white lie it’s a Double Whopper with Cheese, and by the fifth time, you believe it yourself.

I saw a bit of shit in Baghdad, but at Arifjan sunburn was the worst thing we contended with.

But the significant reason I always clarified the safety of the Kuwait was to explain the mood of the soldiers stationed there, which was miserable. They wanted to be in the fight.

Young, 100% volunteers, bored, and drawn to military action, they hated to lose a year of their lives and not even have a scary story to tell about it.

Camp Arifjan had a Burger King and a Nathan’s Hot Dogs, two gyms and a swimming pool. And against an Iraqi military that lasted three weeks and an Iraqi insurgency that droned on endlessly but mostly consisted of improvised explosive devices and mortars fired blindly from pickup trucks, Kuwait really was that serene.

It helps that the oil kingdom is fantastically rich, and every speck of the real work is done by labor imported from other, poorer nations.

I wrote stories from Arifjan about homesickness and boredom, haircuts and exercise, wife and kid troubles on the homefront reported to helpless soldiers via pay phones and satellite phones the size of bowling balls, and Internet Cafes …. and I wrote about commanding officers working to keep the troops vigilant in the face of a seemingly complete lack of danger.

Why do I share this now?

Because three Americans were killed by Iran this weekend, in Kuwait, at Camp Arifjan.

I’m not going to make some dire prediction about how long this conflict with Iran will last, or what dangers it will wreak. I don’t know.

But Iran ain’t Iraq. It has at least some actual military capabilities, missiles, tentacles that stretch around the world, oil resources, and a population four times that of Iraq.

And I know they’ve accomplished at least this: they killed three Americans on a base where I lived for a fair piece of 2004, without an ounce of fear, swimming and grilling and lifting weights and interviewing soldiers from Northeastern Pennsylvania when I could figure out what the hell to ask them.

My personal FOMO (fear of missing out) does not involve worrying that I’ll be excluded from the next neighborhood taffy pull, front-parlor singalong or community orgy.

What I can’t abide in myself is a personal inability to enjoy activities or experiences other people revel in. It’s as if I’m being cheated, leaving potential pleasure on the table, if YOU like it and I don’t.

Now obviously, some experiences truly aren’t meant to be enjoyed by decent people: Extreme bondage, the misfortunes of others, haggis, the Reba McEntire sitcom vehicle “Happy’s Place.”

Et cetera.

But when it comes to contentious pleasures, ones treasured by some and reviled by others, I tend toward believing the treasurers must be correct. Ballet or NASCAR, chamber music or rap, calves liver or Cristal, male bisexuality…..they are by definition enjoyable, because many people derive joy from them. Those of us who don’t simply haven’t acquired the taste yet.

At family Sunday dinners my maternal grandfather, a massive deep-voiced man named Irving, would always, when asked whether he cared for some corn or a serving of mashed potatoes, invariably answer “I want everything I’m entitled to,” then consume it all with a deep and obvious relish.

I envied that, and like him, had mostly always eaten like a deprivation-haunted child of the depression, although his was the Great Depression and mine was the “Good grief but I’m fat” depression.

Even so, I was not always able to match Irving the Great’s gustatory gusto. I hated raw tomatoes as a youngster, and I’m defining youngster as “Lane at any point before age 50,” though I always liked V-8 and never balked at scarfing a bucketful of spaghetti and meatballs.

To my tongue, raw tomatoes just seemed ….larval. Not fully finished, gooey in all the wrong ways.

But by about age 30 I began eating them anyway, in different dishes, gag reflex be damned. I simply couldn’t abide being left entirely out of the oohs and ahs and yums my wife and others emitted as they enjoyed romas and beefsteaks and cherry tomatoes.

And over time I came to enjoy slices on a salad or piece of Buffalo mozzarella or an Italian sub or white pizza. I’m still not looking to make a dinner of tomato pie, and an actual tomato sandwich will likely always remain beyond my abilities, but I now semi-honestly claim to “like” tomatoes.

In truth, though, taste buds are mostly less pliable than our ability to enjoy pastimes and hobbies and entertainments.

When I hear someone say they don’t enjoy football, for instance, I can only reply with the stolen line “It’s not your fault….It’s a matter of not being raised properly.

People often say sports are boring, or operas are, or tap dancing or art.

But in my 25 years as a journalist, I learned apathy toward nearly any pursuit usually derives from ignorance. It is nearly impossible to remain apathetic toward any pursuit about which we have acquired a decently deep knowledge.

The best thing about being a general assignment reporter is learning enough about everything from beekeeping to ballot design to ballet to Barolo to be interested, and find joy.

Like so many things I write this is, in many ways, a note to myself, a reminder to stay interested, keep questing …..to LEARN to care about and enjoy the things with which we are unfamiliar.

Except, of course, “Happy’s Place.” We’re not savages.

My BEST head-space is the first five minutes after yoga, or the second half of a football game in which my wager is winning by 21 points, or any time my wife winks at me, which causes instant lolling.

I’d begun my 11th straight hour of ubering after dropping my wife off at the airport as she headed to South Carolina for a week, a period in which I will root around in the apartment like a rabid badger for 6.5 days, then clean frantically for 12 hours.

Pulling into the parking lot of a Stewart’s Convenience store to drop off a smiley Mexican woman who spoke not a word of English, I was on the phone (hands-free, bluetoothing, STOP JUDGING!) with a semi-sponsee who’d informed me of some fairly dire emotional happenings in a text I did not see for nine hours.

So I cruise into the lot with the store and front parking on my left, and I’m coming around a van parked in a spot just left of center. As I begin pulling into a spot next to the van, I spy a man walking into the parking lot just as he spots me driving toward him.

We’d been mutually invisible thanks to the van, and as slowed I stopped with my front bumper perhaps six feet from him. If he had wanted to Ratso Rizzo it, smacking my hood and bellowing “I’m waking here!” he’d have needed at least one hop, one skip and one jump to reach.

We see each other at the same time and I see first his fear, then his rage….and I get it, because it’s exactly what I feel, in the same order: “OH SHIT….whew, that was close, who the FUCK is this motherfucker to terrify me by WALKING in my path, does he know who I am!!!!!”

I cool down quickly, though, because no harm, no foul, and also, no fault. It seemed to me that nobody had done anything wrong, just one of those things.

But I see, as my fare exits the car and my phone pal asks “What the hell are you DOING!?!?” that this gentleman, as he resumes walking to his car, is still staring ragefully at mine.

He’s big, but like half muscle, half fat, and kinda old but not too old (55? 60?) and Black, not a mad-scary guy but also not a pushover.

But as I get organized to leave the lot and pick up my next fare, I realize he’s STILL glowering. And that makes me mad all over again, not because I think he did anything wrong, but because ……who the hell is he to still be glaring and acting tough toward me….and…..disrespecting?

So as I drive by him I roll down the window, tell my phone-a-friend to hold on a sec lean out, and before I can say anything he looks at me and yells “You need to just keep on going!”

And of course I’m going to, because I neither live nor work nor hang out in the Stewart’s parking lot, but I’m leaving because it’s TIME to leave, not because he told me to but because I want to leave I don’t even have to leave I LIKE leaving.

But he’s acting like he can TELL me to leave. Cue male rage.

Hiding that emotion, I yell “What exactly are you angry about?”

“You don’t know me,” he answered. “You need to go on now!”

“I hear you,” I answered, “but can you explain what you feel I did wrong.”

“You don’t want to mess with me….fuck out of here!”

“Yes, you are furious, I get it, but can you elaborate on why?”

“I ain’t elaborating shit! I’m not your motherfucking elaborater!”

And here’s the thing. I left but….I almost got out and fought him….for….I dunno, for being mad at me?

No, for dismissing me, for disrespecting me, for acting as of his anger was forcing my hand, which made me feel as if I was being pushed around, which bruised my manhood and ego.

And, two days, later, intermittent thoughts of what I should have said, or what body part of his I should have smashed with a tire iron, continue to crop up.

Because being a man is kind of a dumb thing. And the triumph of acting like civilized grown-ups is, for most of us, the most we can manage.

Feeling like a civilized grown-up? I’m not even close.

“Oh no, I’m happy to chat,” I replied. “I just didn’t know you were in the market for a conversation.

In truth, when I picked him up outside the St. Peter’s emergency room in Albany, I hadn’t figured him for chatty: a senior citizen, obviously an immigrant from India, fairly heavy accent, exhausted expression.

“So what do you do,” I asked.

“I own a filling station,” he replied. “Actually, I own two, one in Scotia, where you’re taking me, and one in Catskill.”

“How long have you been here,” I asked.

“It’s been since 1995. I was a doctor in India, and my sister came here, trying to get her papers. We decided to come for a three-month visit, and we hadn’t been here a couple of weeks before my sons said they didn’t want to go home, they never wanted to leave.”

“How old were they?”

“One was 18, the other was 13.”

“And what do they do now,” I asked, sure that he would say they were doctors.

“They are in the gas station business with me, all together,” he said.

“You couldn’t be a doctor here,” I said.

“No….well, yes, but they were going to make me do five more years of school….it just wasn’t worth it.”

“And are you glad you stayed?”

“Oh, very much. My wife and I at first wanted to go home, but now we are very glad we stayed.”

“And does your wife work in the stores?”

“No, she likes to stay at home. And I like to be at work, always at work…..I do not like to sit and watch TV, you know. I like to work.”

“Me too,” I said. “Work is what I always like best.”

And there is not real point to this anecdote. When we got to his station he asked if I wanted a coffee or anything, I said “No, but I could definitely use a restroom if you have one. I’m at an age where any restroom I see, I use.”

“Me too,” he exclaimed, laughing.

When we went in, he ushered me past his son at the register and into the back, and I realized they station did not truly “have” a restroom, he was allowing me access to the one he and his sons used, behind the register bays, by the cleaning supplies.

I stopped on the way out and we shook hands. I promised to stop by and say “Hi” soon, and I probably will, since I have bathroom privileges.

Ok, if there is a point, it’s this: I was born in the United States. People in the rest of the world would rather run gas stations here than be doctors in India, rather be janitors here than engineers in Russia, rather be cabbies here than professors in Nigeria.

So yes, it is wonderfully lucky that I was born here. But it’s wonderfully virtuous that Ketan and his family were able to move here.

I love immigrants, their stories and their dreams and their paths.

They are the one and only ingredient in “American Exceptionalism.” The fact that we got the striviest strivers and the dreamiest dreamers and the workiest workers from every nation in the world is what makes us the finest nation in the world.

Anyone who tells you otherwise simply doesn’t understand the story of this nation.

This was particularly shocking because Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard told Congress earlier this year that Iran was not building a nuclear weapon and the Ayatollah had not reauthorized the nation’s dormant nuclear program.

Normally, Gabbard and Trump agree on so much. The joy (and profitability!) of nestling snugly in Vladimir Putin’s pocket. The value and efficacy of constant lying. The importance of that perfect made-for-TV outfit and hairdo!

But here, Trump answered, “I don’t care what she said!” and argued Iran was “very close!” to having an adorable little bomb of its very own.

And if this does turn out to be a 12-day war, it ended with a similar level of disagreement. A U.S. government intelligence report said we set back Iran mere months in their quest, but Trump and his henchmen went ballistic, calling their own intel “fake news,” and arguing that any news outlet that publicized the report was bad and sad and wrong, traitors who were undermining the soldiers who had, what the hell did Trump say……”the most successful military operation in the history of blah blah blah.”

To add to the unreality, it was again confirmed that Iran can have a bomb instantly, with or without its own program, because Putin is all “I would happily give Iran a nuclear warhead of its own any time!”

So would North Korea. Plus Pakistan, which would sell a warhead to just about anyone for $713 and four decent all-weather Michelins.

We grew up believing the truth of our government’s actions and motivations and process was knowable, its statements mostly honest.

Presidents hated to be caught lying. They did! It happened so rarely that we can remember the individual instances. Bush’s “Mission Accomplished.” Obama’s “If you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor.” Clinton’s “I did not have sexual relations with that woman!”

Biden’s “I totally know it’s Friday and we’re in Oslo and I’m the president of the United States and it’s the 21st century. I WAS kidding!!!”

But we didn’t simply rely on the presidential need for truth. We knew the opposition party was always watching their asses, popcorn on lap, a lie patrol 24/7. So were the House and the Senate. And the good-government organizations.

And the journalists, whom we mostly trusted.

So, later if not sooner, the truth came out and opinion writers, as well as normal folk, had their say.

A justified say. A meaningful say.

Today no one knows whether Iran was actively working on a bomb, or how effective our bunker bombings were in knocking out three of its facilities.

And most of what people are opining is unjustified, and thus meaningless.

The real goal of this administration’s handling of information is to make it all so unclear, so contradictory, that people doubt themselves, doubt the experts, and in self-defense, stop paying attention.

Stop caring.

I have a few opinions about Iran.

First, Iran has not been sincerely dedicated to achieving nuclear status since the takeover in 1979 shut down Shah Reza Pahlavi’s very-serious program.

If Iran wanted nukes, it would have them by now. It’s an 80-year-old technology that we utilized before we had televisions, antibiotics and jet planes. This is like arguing over whether Iran can develop its own toaster strudel: they can if they want to.

Iran, much like Iraq before it, likes to act like it might have nukes soon, to look powerful to its own people and other nations. Our government knows this, as does Israel. But the ruse provides a great excuse to rain down a little hell when we need to change the headlines.

But…..and this is important….our current Iran adventure is NOT Iraq-like in the “endless war” sense. There is nothing in Iran to send in U.S. ground troops over, nothing we want that they have that we can reap with marching Marines.

Iran would be an amazing liberal democracy. It has the culture, the education, the people, the tradition, the desire, the wisdom and the history.

But if it’s to be done, they’ll have to do it themselves. Trump doesn’t want a piece of this, nor does our military leadership, so let’s drop the “quagmire” pearl-clutching.

The lesson, though. The lesson.

We just got into a military conflict in which the government is lying about whether the action was called for and whether it was effective. We know it’s lying because it gave multiple, contradictory narratives.

Congress ain’t oversighting. Democrats are hiding under the covers and when they do peak their heads out and pipe up, they’re neither compelling nor believable. The press is an echo chamber, or rather two echo chambers.

And the people are lost.

In the old USSR, did people read Pravda, and argue over the fake articles? Because that seems like a ridiculous waste of time to me.

That’s why it took me two weeks to comment on this.

I mostly don’t know what’s true, and I won’t pretend.

If we can’t trust the government, we can’t have a democracy.

Or rather….we currently can’t trust the government, so we currently don’t have a democracy.

“Computer” was a term for human employees with math skills.

And the United States dropped two nuclear bombs, on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Those bombs were built via Manhattan Project, which was not even created until 1942, and delivered via prop planes, because … we didn’t have jet engines.

That’s how long nuclear weapons technology has been around. There were people alive when those nuclear bombs dropped who had been old enough to vote when Abraham Lincoln was elected.

And for my entire adult life, I have been asked, nay, ORDERED to believe Iran, one of the most intellectually sophisticated nations on Earth, just can’t replicate an 80-yearold technology Americans pioneered using an abacus, a few electrons, and several back issues of “Popular Mechanics.”

I’m not a conspiracy guy, but I make a couple of exceptions.

• All skin care products, regardless of price or brand, are actually the same viscous liquid, and are stored in one enormous vat in Ogden, Utah.

• “The Longshot,” starring Seth Rogen and Charlize Theron, is the finest movie ever made, and only ruthless chicanery cost its creators the 2019 Academy Award for Best Picture, along with a Nobel Peace Prize.

• Iran has NOT teetered on the verge of mastering an 80-year-old technology for decades without managing to cross the threshold.

Earlier this week Israel bombed several Iranian military sites, claiming the nation is again on the verge of enriching enough weapons-grade uranium to build a nuclear warhead.

Iran’s nuclear program actually began in the 1950s, with the support of the United States, focused largely on power production. With the Revolution in 1979, Iran lost US support for its nuclear project, but the work continued apace, and by the late 1990s senior Iranian officials reportedly approved the Amad Plan, a commitment to constructing nuclear weapons.

Iran operated numerous enrichment facilities through the years, and has generally been considered capable of building a nuclear weapon for decades.

More recently, the United States pulled out of the Iran nuclear deal, the JCPOA, meaning the nation has had twice as long to pursue a warhead without American oversight as the United States had to invent and build the bomb in the first place.

Iran also has top-notch technology centers, including Shiraz University, Shahid Beheshti University, and the Iran University of Science and Technology. It has always been a scientifically and intellectually advanced nation, a trait pre-Revolution that has not been squandered even as religious extremism captured the government and hamstrung the society.

What’s more, Iran has a cash-poor ally, in North Korea, that, even with far less intellectual heft and financial resources than Iran, built approximately 50 nuclear warheads, any of which it could simply sell to their buddies. North Korea is rumored to be “helping” Iran with its weapons program, but why not just give the Ayatollah some highly enriched uranium if you want to do a holy homie a solid?

It simply belief that despite decades of trying, Iran has failed to mimic a technology we invented and constructed before Donald Trump was born.

It’s not just a lie …..it’s kind of a dumb and obvious lie, like the Academy claiming “Green Book” was a better movie than “The Longshot!”

In 2004 I got an all-expenses paid trip to Iraq and Kuwait as an embedded reporter, thanks in large part to another weapons lie too many people believed.

Saddam Hussein, in order to project an image of power, was always pretending to hide nuclear and chemical weapons programs that should have been easy to conceal, since they did not exist. I’ll never forget a former Iraqi Army solder who was working wiyth my unit as a translator telling me that in the military in the 1990s “We had to buy our own food! We had no uniforms! Everyone knew Saddam’s ‘weapons programs’ were a brag meant to make anyone who might attack think twice.”

Who benefits from the myth that the Iranian nuclear program has been on the precipice of completing a warhead for 35 years but never quite gotten over the hump? It seems to vary.

This week, the ruse gave Israel an excuse to launch an offensive that gets the attention off Gaza and backs up Israel’s offensives against the proxy groups Iran funds to harry Israel and spread mayhem.

In the past, fear of the program has fueled the repeated imposition of sanctions and the repeated removal of sanctions, along with all kinds of shifts in Iran’s relations with other nations.

And Iran’s leaders have often buoyed the spirits of its own people by using the promise of a nuclear program as a manifestation of strength and importance.

Internationally, Iran has always claimed the program is only for energy production, which demands uranium enriched far less than what’s needed for weapons, but with nods and winks galore.

And I do not claim to know whether Iran has a nuclear weapon, or why it has played its nuclear cards in this way.

But in 1992 a House Republican Research Committee claimed there was a “98 percent certainty that Iran already had all (or virtually all) of the components required for two or three operational nuclear weapons.”

In 1995 Benjamin Netanyahu and other senior US and Israel officials told the New York Times Iran was “five years away from a bomb.”

In 2011 a report by the Federation of American Scientists concluded there was “no question” Tehran already had the technical capability to produce a “crude” nuclear device.

And for the past 15 years hawks in Israel, Saudi Arabia, the United States and the EU have frequently sounded the alarm about an imminent Iranian nuke.

Which, again, the United States built in three years, in the 1940s, with zero know-how, and the Soviets constructed in the 1950s, working with little more than vodka, potatoes and the enthusiastic cheers of Boris and Natasha.

So I’m simply saying this: if you believe Iran has been pursuing a nuclear weapon for decades, as we serially hear whenever spreading such gossip suits the teller, but the nation has somehow failed to construct one such weapon throughout that time …..I’ve got some very expensive skin-care products to sell you, out of a vat, in Ogden, Utah.

It wasn’t risky from a customer-service perspective, the fare was a 23-year-old guy and we’d already been conversing freewheelingly. He made a similar noise when he saw what I saw: a motley and mixed group of … protesters, I guess you’d call them, or activists, with signs declaring “ICE checkpoint up ahead! Caution!”

We saw the small groups on multiple corners in three intersections on Ontario Street, leading up to the 112th Street Bridge, and then we came to the checkpoint itself, where three cops immediately waved us through.

“I guess you’re too black to mess with in an immigration sting and I’m too white,” I said. “I’ve never been too Black to be fucked with by a cop before,” he replied.

When I checked the googles later I learned that:

*The presence of ICE at the regularly scheduled seat-belt checkpoint conducted by local law enforcement was minimal, planned and highly unpopular, and so it may have been our securely snapped seatbelts that got us waved through

*The event led to 116 people being ticketed, and ICE arresting two, both of whom allegedly had criminal histories.

*This wasn’t the first time ICE was on the scene for such a checkpoint locally, and it’s not clear whether this was the first time civilians set up warning parties.

And rather than sharing my opinion of all this from on high (which honestly, nuance-wise, I’m still thinking about), I’m going to segue to a different immigration tale from earlier this week.

Her name was Isabel, and when I pulled up to the eye clinic to give her a lift, I knew she’d be taking me to Anecdote City.

The extreme sunglasses of the deeply vision impaired, colorful bucket hat, tall and lithe, wavering a bit as she walked to the car, shirt festooned with flowers, popping purple pants.

The weather was miserable Wednesday, as it has been in the Capital District nearly all spring, and when she launched into a meteorological bitchfest, I answered that I was lucky enough to be sitting in a warm, dry and comfy car, listening to great audio content, music and books and podcasts, and generally jollying it up.

“Oh, you’ve got one of those positive outlooks,” she said grimly, her speech entirely clear but obviously accented. “You’re lucky. Let me tell you, we lived in Las Vegas for eight years and days like this, I sure miss it. Even in Pittsburgh … we were in Pittsburgh for 26 years…..I don’t remember any May being like this.”

“Where are you from originally,” I asked.

“The Philippines,” she said.

“And were you a nurse,” I guessed.

“No, a doctor, a pediatrician,” she said. (And yes, that was sexist and I fully repent, but also, what percentage of 78-year-old Filipino women in the United States are physicians?)

“So how long have you been here?

“It has been 52 years. We came here for our residencies and specializations, and I had my daughter, and then got pregnant with my son here. By the time he was born, extremely prematurely, our visas were running out. And my father called me from home and told me we could not come home, because Ferdinand Marcos had declared martial law and it was a disaster.

“And we knew we could not get the health care our son needed back home.

“So we went to court, and two other pediatricians came with us to testify to the judge, and we begged him … and he granted us permanent residency. He knew sending us home was a death sentence for my son. Later my husband and I became naturalized citizens, but our kids were all born here so they were always citizens.

“As it turned out, my son would die as a result of his early health problems anyway, but much later. Back then they did not use protect patients during x-rays, and my son has SO many x-rays. When he was 44 he contracted testicular cancer, because of that. He survived, but all the chemotherapy and radiation led to leukemia, and he died a few years later.”

Isabel was philosophical about a life lived between pain and joy, and we had fun bonding. She was excited to hear about my close relationship with Beloved Sapling, and her educational and professional triumphs. Her husband, Horatio, who had been a cardiologist, is besieged by dementia, she confided. She has a daughter, a lawyer in San Diego, and a son, an administrator at Skidmore, with whom she and her husband live.

She and her husband and the children pretty clearly contributed abundantly to our nation, and I’m awfully glad they came and stayed. They came here illegally, but I got the impression there was at least a short period of time when their status was iffy.

It’s heartening that the system had the sense to let them stay. And that the 14th Amendment, at that time, automatically made their children citizens.

And I very much hope, and increasingly doubt, that the same would happen today.

The concept imagines foreign contestants vying for citizenship by doing difficult, highly Americanized tasks like, (I imagine), lumberjacking, crushing all-you-can-eat buffets, taking Ubers six-tenths of a mile or driving pickup trucks the size of aircraft carriers festooned with deeply unsettling bumper stickers.

“Honk if You Love Hate!”

But I will argue that writing funny about Trump has always been harder than it looks: when the presidential plan itself is an untoppable punchline, what’s a jokester to do.

Producer Rob Worsoff, of “Duck Dynasty” fame, “Dating Naked” infamy and “The Millionaire Matchmaker” apathy, is the brains behind the concept he also pitched to the Obama and first Trump administrations, and DHS officials recently admitted to “preliminary discussions.”

So I was batting this about on the telephone with an editorial cartoonist pal, and he said, “Yeah, I don’t take the bait on these. This is Steve Bannon ‘Flood the Zone,’ stuff……they get you to pay attention to this instead of the legislation they really care about.”

And I thought that a superb point, and one I’m not always quick to grasp.

This administration is looking to knock millions of people off Medicaid, run up huge deficits slashing taxes on the rich, erode speech freedoms and press freedoms, demolish every department that protects consumers from voracious corporate greed and eviscerate the power of the judicial and legislative branches.

This game-show idea is a great way to divert attention, and it has worked. The same is true of the $400 million plane Qatar wants to gift the nation, or Trump, or whatever.

Trump doesn’t care about the plane. He just knows that every reporter squirrel-chasing that story is failing to write about the billions his company is going to get from Qatar via real estate deals, or the billions being funneled to him through his cryptocurrency scam, while they wax indignant about the plane.

Ditto flooding the nation with “refugee” white South African farmers. Yeah, it’s nutso base-bait, but it’s also more a diversion than a policy. “Ok, let them scream about that while we pretend to pay for tax cuts that go into effect immediately, with benefit cuts that don’t go into effect until I leave office!”

It works because it’s so unexpected. We’ve never had a president willing to float ridiculous ideas to divert attention from his evil ones, which was an astonishing run of good luck, in retrospect.

Meanwhile, we columnists enable the Trump tactic because…..poking fun at the diversions is a decent living. My pro pitch for a biting but humorous column on the citizenship gameshow flap would be….just reel off a bunch of other gameshows the administration is considering for primetime:

“Try-Mester!” Watch teens, incest and rape victims, high-risk pregnancy gals and even married mothers who hail from states that have banned abortion, as they compete in a series of parenting challenges, with the winner getting an all-expenses paid abortion trip to a state where the potentially life-saving procedure is still legal!

“Dying to Win!” Sure, they all want to die with dignity, but only one can. Contestants share their tales of woe, and the nation votes on who will be released from their endless hellscapes of pain and degradation via euthanasia!

“He Said, She Said, They Said!” You say you were born into the wrong gender, America says “Prove It!” Watch contestants attempt to play sports against contestants of every gender, parallel park, find food items in a part of the refrigerator other than the top shelf and share anecdotes without tangential side-trips as America casts binding votes on which gender players get to be.

“Ka-Boom” Lots of foreign leaders want American weaponry to defend against aggression, or simply bring the pain, but they can’t all have the missiles and fighter jets of their dreams. Now we’re going to let favorites Zelensky, Netanyahu and MBS, and a host of underdogs battle it out for the tools they need to make a big bang on the world stage, in events like “Propaganda Polka,” “Put Down That Riot or I’ll Shoot” and “If You Want Something To Cry About….”

“Primary On a Prayer!” Plenty of Republicans want election support from President Trump, but only a few can get his full backing. Now all of MAGA can participate in the decision as Republican incumbents and prospective challengers compete in boot-licking, pandering, casual misogyny and hypocrisy, and fight to be Donald’s lil buddy!

And of course, “Jammin’ On Famine!” Watch all-star teams from nations besieged by food shortages compete for rice, beans, baby formula and powdered milk, in events like “Fly-Swatting,” “Waiting in Line for Days” and “Overthrowing Another Government,” with the winning nations earning enough nutrition to get them to next year’s competition and the losers getting a dandy home version of the game, complete with a year’s worth of flies!

The problem with these jokes though, is the stark terror that administration officials will hear about my gameshow concepts, and have several of them up and running on Fox by next Tuesday.

By Lane Filler

August 23, 2012

You say you're a United States citizen. I say let's see that IQ test before we decide.

There's talk in Republican circles about changing the rules of citizenship. The 14th Amendment says people born here are citizens, even if their parents are here illegally.

It's called birthright citizenship, and it's how we've done it since 1868, when the 14th Amendment was ratified, mostly to make sure ex-slaves and their children weren't denied citizenship.

But as the rhetoric on the melting pot moves toward a rolling boil, efforts have sprung up to end birthright citizenship. A platform declaring that children born of parents here illegally should not be citizens found its way into the 1996 Republican Party platform, but presidential candidate Bob Dole and vice presidential nominee Jack Kemp, those old softies, repudiated the concept.

Still, the idea of changing the rules to exclude the offspring of illegal immigrants keeps popping up. It's now part of the Texas Republican Party platform, has again gotten support as a plank in the national party platform, and legislation has been introduced in Congress and at least 14 states to set the "anchor babies" adrift.

If we're changing the rules, I say let's do it right. Let's have everybody reapply for citizenship -- all of us -- and make the vetting comprehensive.

"Ma'am, I can see you've been a law-abiding citizen for 78 years, but it says here that not only do you pay for groceries by writing a check, you don't fill out the check until the cashier tells you the total. You don't even fill in the date while she scans. You're driving other shoppers insane. We have to ask you to leave."

People who are really proud their families came over on the Mayflower should go, too.

"Your family has enjoyed hundreds of years of limitless opportunity, and failed to come up with a single achievement more impressive than how you got here? You've had your chance at America. Scram."

Then there are the people that have really loud, personal cellphone conversations in public.

"It's been reported you held a graphic, 26-minute phone conversation about getting a boil lanced while in line at the bank. We don't care where you go, but you can't stay here."

People that can't define the difference between astrology and astronomy? Gone. Those who drive in the breakdown lane during a traffic jam, then try to merge back in? So gone.

Of course, we could take a different approach. Rather than redefining citizenship in a way that would make about 10 percent of people born here nationless, we could act as if we understand that immigration is a form of self-selection bringing us the best, most motivated people -- and made us the nation we are. We could consider that, for a parent whose family faces hopelessness and starvation, taking a huge risk to get into the United States, even illegally, is morally justified.

We could acknowledge, as President Ronald Reagan did when he granted amnesty to 4 million undocumented people, that once they become part of our national fabric, it is too painful to rip them out. We could recognize that expelling 11 million undocumented folks would demolish the housing market by emptying 3 million more units, and deprive us of a population segment young and fertile enough to give us some hope of funding Social Security and Medicare in future decades. And we could create a legal immigration system accommodating enough to make illegal immigration unattractive.

If we don't want to do all that, fine. But if we do change the rules of citizenship, I'd prefer we bounce folks on their merits rather than the pedigree of their folks. Isn't that the real American way?

The meeting was reasonably important, an opportunity to hear where our company is headed (forward) and how we're going to get there (umm ...), and I vowed to pay attention and not let my mind wander off the way I so often … wait … what?

Oh, the meeting. It was held in the break room. As people filed in, it became obvious not everyone was going to get a chair.

I was one of the last to arrive because I have two rules for meetings with mucketymucks:

-- Do not go early.

-- Do not ask questions.

Sometimes I'm forced to ask a question because the mucketymuck says, "Come on, don't be afraid to challenge me and second-guess my leadership and make it sound like I'm deranged. That's what I'm here for," and my boss nudges me and hisses "Ask him something, and if you embarrass me you'll be scrubbing the Italian marble in the Executive Belching and Foot Massage Lounge with your toothbrush for a week." In such a case, the only acceptable queries are variations on the theme, "Have you always been a fearless orb of awesome or did it come over time?"

So toddling in at the last possible moment, I was among the 20 or 25 people who stood throughout the meeting. Several of the employees standing throughout the meeting were women. Many of the people seated were men.

And I couldn't help wondering when that happened. When did it become acceptable for men to seat themselves while women were forced to stand?

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I'm not really asking when women became willing to stand while men sat. For all I know, women were willing to stand while men sat for the past 8,000 years, but it never came up.

That part of it, the part about how women behave, is none of my business.

I would not take an available chair in a situation like that while a woman was forced to stand. If I did my grandfather, Wilbur Filler, would come back from the grave and, well, probably just look at me with disappointment. Like most Wilburs he was pretty easygoing, but still.

I wouldn't try to convince a woman to take the seat I vacated, and if her feminist ideals forced her to stand beside me and leave the chair empty, that would be fine. But I wouldn't take the seat.

I come from a long line of men who never subjugated women in any way. We Filler males believe women can outearn us (and hopefully by a wide margin), outthink us (we wouldn't marry a woman who couldn't even if we could find one) and outtough us (they've been known to give birth to animals the size of bowling balls).

What does any of that have to do with behaving properly?

I've always thought it would be wonderful to have perfect Old World manners. I've never achieved it, and in fact never come close, both because I wasn't trained well enough and because I am almost criminally obtuse. The upshot is that while I desperately want to be the kind of man who stands when a woman arrives at or leaves the table at a restaurant, I am actually the kind of man who looks up from my plate and my internal reverie on the failed presidential aspirations of 1928 Democratic nominee Al Smith to think, "I wonder where Angela went?" three minutes after she leaves to powder her nose.

I also forget to walk closest to the street when squiring my lady around the city about 50 percent of the time and only remember to open her car door, for some reason, when we're dressed up.

But I'm trying to get better, and there are a few things I'm pretty good about.

I hold the door for anyone within reasonable door-holding proximity, man, woman or child. Having waited tables for years, I call everyone ma'am and sir, from the smallest and sweetest child to the folks who phone to say, "This column is so bad it would have to study to be dumb."

And I don't sit when doing so would force a lady to stand.

That's not because I perceive women as weak. It's partly because I perceive women as exceptional and deserving of special privileges, which is pretty much the opposite of weak.

But the biggest reason I wouldn't sit while a lady was forced to stand has nothing to do with what I think about ladies. It has to do with what I'd like them to think about me, and how I like to think of myself.

We should treat them like high mucketymucks, I say.

In truth, though, the United States is at full employment, and we are busily deporting the recent immigrants who make up the hardest-working segment of our populace.

So …. it’s not really clear who would perform all these manufacturing jobs if they returned to the United States, which is ok, because at this point the “dark factories” of China have almost no human employees. These factories are called “dark” because they don’t even bother to turn on lights except when the machines are being cleaned, or when the machines are having huge Artificial Intelligence orgies and gabbing about how they’re going to turn humans into domesticated servants/pets/sex slaves/professional entertainment combatants.

I fully acknowledge that it makes sense to produce the things we need here, particularly now that everyone else hates us so much. We don’t want to run out of toilet paper if it means begging China, Canada or Mexico to hand us a roll under the stall door, much less food, rare-Earth minerals or children’s toys.

You think you understand how badly we’ve spoiled this generation of children? Try telling them the Tariff Grinch stole Christmas this year. You’ll be sleeping with one eye open until June.

AND, as I say every time this comes up, Trump is right that other countries, and especially China and the European Union have been merciless in blocking us from their markets.

But it increasingly seems that the war to bring manufacturing back is less about romancing the 1957 economic model, which will never return, than it is about advertising the 1957 social model, when the men had the good jobs and the gals stayed home and baked sweaters, or knitted pies, or whatever it was we imagine they did.

The manufacturing industry employee roster in the United States today is 71% male and 29% female. Perhaps more importantly, the professional and managerial occupations pay 40% of employed women and just 33% of employed men, a huge shift over the past three decades.

The Great Recession crushed construction and manufacturing jobs, which mostly never returned, while payrolls in health care, education, government and service exploded in the recovery, creating a much better employment market for women than men.

And women deserve a better employment market than men, because men increasingly flounder at professional preparation. In 2022, women earned 63% of all associates degrees, 59% of all bachelors degrees, 59% of all masters degrees and 57% of all doctoral and professional degrees.

It’s also worth noting that the far more Black and brown students are earning degrees: In 2022, 37.5% of undergraduate degrees were granted to underrepresented minorities, more than double the percentage in 1997.

So, two quick points.

In case you don’t understand the sense in which bias is “systemic,” ask yourself what the link is between an increasing percentage of degrees going to women and minorities, and in parallel, an increasing societal drumbeat telling us that “college isn’t the key,” “degrees aren’t worth the cost,” and “campuses are hotbeds of liberal elitism” (which they are, but still!)

All of the sudden, as soon as white men suck at higher education, higher education must be devalued, must be stripped of weight and prestige.

And in case you don’t understand why Trump talks so much about bringing manufacturing back to our shores….it’s because that’s how you get all those white guys who can’t or won’t graduate from college to support you….even if the jobs themselves, in Asia and in Akron alike, will be filled mostly by our future AI overlords.

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