What we should be fearful of

A few days ago  I watched our president ramble on TV for nearly an hour without a teleprompter or using scripted notes.  He was extemporizing about a National Emergency that no one else can see. In talking about it, he admitted that he didn’t need to do it.  He essentially undid his argument by saying he was just trying to do it “a little quicker.”

For 46 years I have observed politicians, including myself, reacting to the pressures of political life.  As I watched Donald Trump today, I couldn’t help thinking of a great and powerful Congressman whom I knew from Chicago. Danny Rostenkowski was from Chicago where I was born. 

When I came to Congress, I wanted on to the Ways and Means Committee because I was interested in establishing a National Health insurance plan for all. I asked the Speaker, Tom Foley to appoint me to the committee.  He said, “Danny never lets anyone on the committee whom he has not had a chance to observe for a full session. There is some one in line ahead of you but, in two years, you will get on the committee.

Two years later I was appointed to the Ways and Means Committee and then Tom asked for a favor in return. He asked me to be on the Ethics Committee.  During my term of service on the Ethics charges were raised against Danny.  Mostly his Ethics charges resulted from acting like a ward Politician from Chicago in the era of the senior Daley.  In a variety of ways, he misused his Official Account for the running his Congressional Office.  To cut a long story short he agreed to plead guilty to some small charges and was sentenced to two years in the Federal Penitentiary.

 I had become a good friend over the 6 years we served together.  We often went out to dinner and since I had a car, I became his occasional driver. 

On the night before he reported for his imprisonment, we had dinner in DC.  He asked for a ride home and as we got near his apartment, he said “Doc, let’s have one last drink at the Democratic Club.” 

Over that last drink he asked if I wanted to know why he finally plead guilty. I said,” Sure. I wondered why you fought so long and, then caved in.”

He said,” I plead guilty cause I felt so bad for Virginia, my secretary for years.  The justice department was pressing her and my whole staff to turn on me and she was falling apart. She’d been so loyal I couldn’t stand putting her through this any longer. It wasn’t right so I agreed to plead to take the pressure off my staff.”

You might ask “what about today reminded you of Rosty.”

Donald Trump, to my trained eyes, is falling apart under the pressure of the Mueller investigation.  He is talking in half sentences and jumping from topic to topic with no apparent reason. He lies endlessly and manufactures his own reality and statistics. As the investigation gets tighter it seems the day is coming when there might be an indictment of Donald Junior or Jared or Ivanka.  Imagine for a minute, the pressure a father will feel as he thinks about watching his own children being tried and perhaps convicted. Children he raised and got ensnared in the Justice system will face the future knowing that their problems are the result of loyalty to a father who led them astray.

The only defense Mr Trump has shown in the whole of his life has been to Attack and bully anyone with whom he disagrees. He will be like a cornered animal who can only attack.  What fruitless and destructive action he may take should be the concern of every person in a responsible position from the Vice President on down. 

Everyone is absorbed, at the moment, with the nuances of the Constitutionality of the Executive order.  Mr McCabe’s book and Jim Clapper’s book should be careful read and thought about. They express the concerns of rational men thinking about a president who listens to no one except those who tell him what he wants to hear.

Perhaps its time to listen to the childlike wisdom of the mythical child who opined that the emperor has no clothes before it is to late for us to stop some act that has longstanding consequences.  I am reluctant to write this. I don’t want to raise fears, but I can’t ignore what my eyes see.       

Sports are the roots of Politics

The president should stop watching Fox and cable news and watch some sports on TV. Politicians talk often in terms of sports analogies. What this reflects is the deep roots that sports sink into our souls as young people. Sports are the place where we learn the rules of the society in which we live and each society has its own special sport. If one looks at the world, soccer is the most dominant sport, but each country has some variation particular to the people of that country.

Cricket is the game of England: a complex, slow-moving game played in a leisurely fashion over many days. It is thought to be a gentlemanly and polite game of the effete upper class. But I recently read a story of a cricket batter being killed by bowler who used the method of “Spinning.” It turns out that outsiders don’t know you can legally kill an opponent, using this technique but English cricket bowlers know about.  It isn’t considered “cricket” but there is no rule to stop it.

Irish football has its own set of rules. But hurling is the true Irish sport. It became their national sport when the English tried to ban it. In confrontations with ill-equipped Irish peasants, the English observed that the methods the Irish used to throw stones that killed them was identical to the game of Hurling.  The British wanted to prevent them from practicing  the game because they simultaneously became adept at throwing rocks with deadly speed and force. Preparing for combat and practicing hurling became  a sporting way  to prepare to deal with the hated English.

Melbourne Australian football is played on cricket fields but is totally different .Australian football is a combination of rugby, soccer  and some elements reminiscent of American football except it is played without the American football armor(pads). Sending thousands of Irish and English prisoners to Australia and dumping them as far from as possible from civilization had an effect on the Aussie national personality.  The first thing that strikes you as you enter the stadium is that the game is played on the oval cricket pitch.  The message of disrespect for the English national game is clear.

Many years ago, I met a man named Whitney Azoy who was a long time USAID contractor in Afghanistan. He had long and distinguished career in Central Asia. Before we attacked Afghanistan in the late 1990’s, I was visiting an Afghan refugee camp in the Peshawar, Pakistan. One night over beer with him he told me, “You will never bring democracy to Afghanistan. It is a country whose national game, Buzkashi, has few rules except for the one that says you cannot knock your opponent off his horse with a whip. The goal of the game is to get the goat which has been thrown into the middle of the field among multiple teams of horsemen. There is no time clock. There are no sidelines or goal lines. When the sun goes down the game is over. The rule of law is a western idea that is foreign to how Afghanis see the world.”

That conversation got me thinking about the way our politics differ from country to country. And then I began to look at the United States. Our national game before the Second World War was baseball. After the Second World War our national game began to be football.

 Baseball is a game where one person stands 60’6” from another and has a ball thrown at him or her as hard as possible. It is an individual game, in which one person, seeks to dominate another. It was a game of individual courage and strength like knights of old, jousting.

After the Second World War we adopted the martial feeling of war to such an extent that we accepted football as our national game. Teams line up like armies on both ends of the field and then run at each other, attempting to smash the other side into submission.   Increasingly we have armored football players in order to protect them but to be honest, we don’t really care about injuries. Irony of ironies, president Trump announced on the day of the Super bowl that football is alright for the ordinary people, but he was wary of allowing his son to play football.

  We start each game with a kickoff where 11 men from one side run as fast and as hard as   they can at 11 men from the other side and smash into each other to begin the game. Of late they is some hand wringing over head injuries but it reminds me of our attitudes toward PTSD and veterans. It only becomes an issue when we can’t avoid it any longer. We accept casualties in war or sports, as long as, we win.

A recent event highlighted by a story in the Economist about soccer protest in Turkey illustrates the principle of the connection between sports and politics.  Like our President, the Turkish leader, Erdogan was upset by protests by soccer fans at a match in Istanbul.  But he couldn’t figure out who the guilty were. His answer was to require fans to have a ticket AND a government card that could tie their identity to their seat number. Thus, he could identify who the fans in Section 105 were, who were holding up banners or signs opposing the great leader.

Protests by sports figures like those who “take a knee” similarly seem to perturb our great leader.  The people of the country that support him feel threatened by a non-violent protest.  Right now, we are celebrating the 100^th anniversary of the birth of Jackie Robinson who showed us all what a true hero is. By his merely showing up at Ebbets field in Brooklyn every day and playing magnificently, he demonstrated what our politics should be. Colin Kaepernick is the modern day equivalent but the President and the football owners are afraid. There no one of the character of Branch Rickey in the whole  group of Football owners.  They are all fearful millionaires/billionaires who  take a knee to a President who believes that our national sport is, “Who is the biggest Bully wins.”  Maybe he thinks Buzkashi is our national sport.