Another Recent Email

A lifelong friend sent me a link to some thoughts about donnie's war in Iran.

This was in reaction to a poem that I posted yesterday.

The material at the link is thoughtful and non-strident.

It's by a person I am not familiar with and in a format that is the opposite of that I try to use.

But there is a lot there in the first ten or fifteen paragraphs, so I am providing it, above.

The real purpose of this post is to provide as briefly as I am able to document the thoughts it provoked in me.

Because I think those thoughts have general applicability to the mess that trump has created.

*****

There are so many ways to look at the world that trump has crafted in only 18 months, and they are all shiveringly bad.  

The link you just directed me to brought out of never land a feeling that I could feel but couldn't ever get into words.  

The link brought the words: "trump has just fallen prey to what happened to Napoleon - and Hitler - at Moscow".

Then there is a feeling that I HAVE had words for: "this smells a lot like 1914".  

This link somehow gets me to think: "just like 1914 except, in reverse".  

The exact shape of that idea remains to be formulated.

The necessity of intervention is supported by the apparent fact that trump has pissed away anything that could give us conventional arms argument against China annexing Taiwan - and TSMC.

That posture also puts us at fatal disadvantage to Russia, Canada and even Iran. 

And that disadvantage puts us in put up or cut and run mode, with "put up" left only nuclear, not as a rational, but as the only, option.

And when nuclear and rational get into the same sentence, the depth of the hopelessness of our situation becomes apparent.

If the military could catalyze a loudly disclaimed cut and run maybe nobody would notice until the historians got after it.

The 25th amendment gives the format for intervention and removal, except it's supposed to be initiated by the Cabinet, not the Army.

And it's too much like a coup for my tastes.

That notwithstanding, Robert Reich has been encountering the Cabinet Scenario at intimate dinners with his republican friends for months.

The maelstrom of dysfunction and incompetence that is donnie is offset by the massive external calm of "the rest of us".

That maelstrom can't be left swirling much longer without, at some imminent point, the "the rest of us" blowing up.

There is a point at which acutely dangerous chaotic incompetence will be called to task.

It's not far away.

My poem is just the words.

Somebody needs to write the music.