Hanging up is too good for them

“Don’t hang up. This is not a sales call. Are you suffer—”

The only thing I was suffering from was the inability to complete an afternoon nap without some telemarketer interrupting me.

This country used to stand for something. Our people used to stand for something. We took pride in our work. When did we become a nation of people who don’t care?

What I’m talking about, of course, is pick-up lines. Pick-up lines today leaves a person with no choice but to hang up.

How many times can a person cold-call me and ask if I’m suffering from chronic pain and not expect me to answer, “The only pain I’m suffering from is a pain in the ass about four times a week from someone like you asking me if I’m suffering from chronic pain,” after which I brashly hang up.

How many times must I be reminded that the warranty on my 2003 Tribute has expired? Hell, yes, it’s expired. It expired in 2005.

How many times must Bridget from card services call to inform me that, no there isn’t anything wrong with my credit, but yes I might be paying too much interest on my credit card debt, which apparently she doesn’t know doesn’t exist.

Bridget has no credibility. Sometimes it’s Bridget from Cincinnati. Sometimes it’s Bridget from Des Moines. Sometimes it’s Bridget from Paducah. 

I keep getting these calls with the same worn-out, meaningless opening lines. As young men, hell, as high school boys, we learn that pick-up lines are useless at best and lame ones are actually damaging to one’s reputation—unless you’re living in a war zone.

The last time pick-up lines worked on me was when I was serving in Vietnam. Whenever a Vietnamese girl wearing hip American-styled clothes, enough make-up to put Mona Lisa to shame, and calling herself, Linda, might have approached me on Tu Do Street, smiled and uttered the words, “Hey, G.I., you look lonely. You looking for girl friend?”

My answer, unless an M.P. was standing within listening range was always, “Yes. Yes. I am. How did you know?” We’d then go inside the bar and I’d spend the last of my monopoly money on endless drinks. Hers was a pick-up line I couldn’t refuse.

However, my living room is not a war zone. The sofa I’m lying on is not a bunker. Most of all, I’m not falling for a pick-up line that begins with, “Don’t hang up.”

Really! “Don’t hang up” is how you expect to keep me on the line.

I used to be a door-to-door vacuum cleaner salesman. I’m not bragging, but I will say, it was harder than being stationed in Vietnam. I wasn’t a particularly good salesman, but a man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do. In many ways, I wasn’t much different than today’s telemarketer. I arrived unannounced, probably at a bad time and selling a product most people already had and didn’t need.

There was one difference between me and today’s intruder. I was working a whole lot harder. I wasn’t running down a list of names. I was walking a neighborhood of houses. Slamming the door in my face was still an option just as slamming the phone down is today, but as a salesman and not a telemarketer, I think I brought a little more to the table.

Can we at least agree on what compromise is?

Why can’t they just reach a compromise?

Seems like a reasonable enough request. There’s only one problem. Many people don’t appear to understand what a compromise is.

Example: A high school girl has a crush on a classmate and offers her parents a proposal. If you don’t let me stay out till midnight with this boy I like, I won’t eat my dinner or do my homework.

Compromise isn’t, okay, if you eat your dinner and do your homework, you can stay out till midnight.”

The compromise is, we all know you have to eat. We also know you have to do your homework. These are not bargaining chips.

The real question, is how late the girl can stay out. The answer might be, because you really like this boy, and we know him and his family, and he seems polite, and we trust you, we’ll let you stay out an hour longer than usual.

Or, it could be something else. The thing with compromises is you never know what they’ll be; and you shouldn’t. If you do, they aren’t compromises.

Compromises aren’t accepting something bad to get something good. That’s hostage negotiating.

Take the immigration problem.

Most people, including members of Congress are on the side of dreamers in the DACA debate. At least they say they are.

Everyone agrees that we need more judges and agents handling immigration cases.

Everyone agrees that separating families and putting kids in cages make us look barbaric.

Everyone agrees government workers have nothing to do with border crossings.

These are not bargaining chips. Nor should they be. These issues can be dealt with easily and quickly. Then we can move unto solving the real problems, whose solutions not everyone agrees on.

Like an immigration problem that entails more than our southern border, or a very real drug dependency problem in this country that is much more complicated than stopping drugs from coming across the Rio Grande.

Almost everyone agrees that these problems are more complicated than the way the president presents them. Most people realize we don’t live in his gold-plated, black-and-white world.

Compromise is working on those areas where two sides don’t agree, but are willing to listen.

Yes, it involves giving in to some extent, but the giving in is in the area of contention. Most importantly, the discussions must revolve around indisputable facts.

On July 24, 2016, I wrote a piece, “The colors of compromise” that appeared in the Forum. It offered the idea that mixing colors is not something magical or mysterious, but rather something based on hard, cold physics. A tremendous range of colors (look at any Glidden paint display) can be derived from mixing just a few basic colors (red, yellow and blue). But, you can’t just throw them together.

It is a slow, deliberate process.

Compromise in Congress or between nations is rarely accomplished at the highest levels. Two sides can’t come to the table with demands and expect success. What they can expect are stand-offs like the one we currently have.

The way around this roadblock is for Congress to pass the laws it knows it can pass and get those issues off the table.

Then, people who aren’t the president or the Speaker of the House or the Majority Leader of the Senate can start talking. They can debate real facts, not hyperbole, and look for real solutions, not game winners. The compromise will be a position that makes the most of the best of both sides and uses the least of the worse of both sides.

I lean more in favor of Speaker Pelosi than Leader McConnell, but I understand that as veterans of Congress, both have a better idea of how compromises are arrived at. They both know they are dealing with a president who has gotten his own way his whole life.

These two leaders must first stand up for Congress and explain to the president how government works. Then they must assign their members to begin work in an orderly manner, paying attention to detail.

Sadly, this is what Congress did during the Bush administration and made considerable progress until outside forces scuttled the process. I believe smart high school students given the facts could do this again, if they truly wanted to.

These students would understand that compromise is more than just, I’ll give you this if you give me that. It depends on what this and that are, and do they relate to the problem at hand.

Inside Trump's Brain

THE SETTING: An idea has just been put on the table.

THE CAST (in order of appearance):

Sensible Opposition (aka the grown-up in the room, voice of reason, Sanity).

The Bad Idea.

Trump’s Gut.

Trump’s Brain—the final word.

Trump’s Mouth

An unlimited cast of loco extras—bad ideas from anywhere and everywhere, all unchecked and  uncensored.

THE SCENE: A decision must be made on whether to make the idea official, which is to say, whether to put it on Twitter or save it for another day.

Inside Trump's Brain

“No, no, no, a million times no,” said the voice of reason.

“Shut up. Don’t listen to it, Brain. This is the best idea, ever. People will think you’re a genius.”

“People will think you’re an idiot. No one has ever thought you were a genius. Not once has anyone ever thought you were a genius.”

“I think he’s a genius.”

“Who said that? Is that you, Gut? Can’t you mind your own business just once? I might even stand a chance of getting him to do the right thing for the first time in his life if you would stay out of it.”

“He wants me here. He likes me. He listens to me a whole lot more than he does to you guys.”

“Wait a minute. He listens to me. He listens to me all the time. He’s been listening to me for so long, he doesn’t even have to think about it,” said the boastful bad idea.

“And who do you think is responsible for that?”

“Okay, you are, Gut, but he still needs me. Without me, he’d only be hooked on a feeling, with nothing there. I give him something real to latch onto. Those dumb-ass ideas don’t come out of the blue, you know.”

“Don’t you guys get it? The voice of reason was growing more frustrated. “You’re both responsible—responsible for making him look like an idiot. You, Bad Idea, when are you going to grow up? And you, Gut, you keep jumping on these bad ideas like a vulture on a piece of fly-infested road kill. When are you going to realize no one in their right mind jumps on dead meat?

“All I’m asking for is a minute...a lousy minute...to try and talk some sense into him...to make him understand the consequences of listening to a bad idea and a gut telling him there’s no such thing as a bad idea.”

What makes Trump really mad

The civilized world looks upon Mohammed bin Salman and Vladimir Putin as they greet each other at the G20 Buenos Aires Summit and cannot believe their eyes. These two suspected (with good cause) murderers are laughing and high-fiving and fist-bumping like two teenage boys celebrating a little league victory.

One can only imagine how this image must infuriate Donald Trump, the man who lives in awe of these two brutal dictators. Trump makes no secret of his admiration for strong leaders—Putin, Erdogan, Kim Jong-un, Duarte—men the rest of the world recognize as bullies and murderers.

Among the many criticisms of President Trump is his seemingly inability to grasp the intricacies of how a Constitutional republic operates. The idea of checks and balances, a representative government accountable to the people, the simple concept of respect for those who don’t agree with you seem foreign to him.

He can’t understand why his Attorney General is loyal to the Constitution and not to him. He doesn’t understand why he can’t get the FBI, his FBI, to investigate his political opponents. He sees the opposition party as not that, but rather as traitors. In his mind, voting on principle is a vote thrown away.

All this should come as no surprise. His business empire is built, like most empires, on nepotism, not sound business practices. There was no board of director’s oversight. Laws regulating his business were seen as obstructions to be ignored.

Family, and the loyalty that family provides, were the cornerstones of the Trump organization. They remain at the center of the Trump administration.

But to say he doesn’t understand what democracy stands for or how it works is to shortchange him. That great brain that he is always pointing to, the one God could have given to anyone, but chose to give it to him, might not be all Trump imagines it to be, but he would be the first to agree that he ain’t stupid.

What bothers him most is not the difference between our system of government and the governments that his admired dictators rule over, but rather that there has to be a difference. Why can’t a president possessing his unique talent not still get the special treatment these dictators receive, despite living in a free country?

Every Trump move is questioned—by Democrats and Republicans, as well as foreign leaders. The press won’t leave him alone. He has publicly voiced his frustration that the American press won’t defer to him the way the North Korean press fawns over Kim Jong-un. It’s not that he doesn’t know the reason. It’s that he doesn’t think the reason should exist.

For two years, he has had to repeat constantly that there isn’t, and never has been, any collusion between him and Russia. He barely knows Russia. Yet, he can’t shake the idea that whenever he makes these proclamations, everyone in the room is winking and rolling their eyes.

At the same time, Putin is able to say whatever he wants and no one in Russia questions his motives.

In Helsinki Trump shared the stage as Putin admitted he wanted Trump to win the 2016 election, an election that Russia interfered with, and who's interference Trump denies. Now, in Buenos Aires, Trump has to pretend his cancelling of talks with Putin is because of Putin's barbaric behavior in Ukraine and has nothing to do with revelations that Russia and Trump are, and have been for a long time, tight as thieves. 

Then he must listen as Putin's spokesperson explains that yes, Trump says it's about Ukraine, but the real reason is probably rooted in his domestic problems back home—problems Trump insists don't even exist. 

Trump is relegated to tweeting stupid stuff because he can’t speak the truth, while Putin can say anything he damn well pleases and face no repercussions. When Trump exclaimed that he could shoot someone in Times Square and get away with it, even he knew that while his supporters might accept that behavior, such action would be seen by everyone else as unforgivable. Such is not the case in their own countries for the real life murderers that Trump holds in such high esteem.

Putin, Mohammed bin Salman, and guys like them can say and do whatever they want. They can literally get away with murder, while Trump is unable to get away with what he considers no more than political shenanigans, things he thinks everyone does—mainly because they are things he has always done.

Trump is a great believer of democracy. He just wishes that when a great leader like him comes along, democracy could cut him some slack, and operate more like a dictatorship.

This just in...

Regarding Federal Reserve decision to raise interest rates:“They’re making a mistake because I have a gut, and my gut tells me more sometimes than anybody else’s brain can ever tell me.”

Regarding scientific findings on climate change: “One of the problems that a lot of people like myself, we have very high levels of intelligence, but we’re not necessarily such believers. 

You look at our air and our water, 

and it’s right now at a record clean.”

This just in from the House Intelligence Oversight Committee:

We know for the past two or three years, or possibly the last 20 or 30 years, people—some people—but definitely real people, have been asking to see Donald Trump’s tax returns. We would all like to know where and whom he’s gotten his money from, how he’s managed to survive so many bankruptcies, and how many women he has paid off to keep his affairs out of the news. We’d like to know whether he is a billionaire or billowing cauldron of hot air.

We’d certainly like to know these things.

However, after listening to him talk for a year on the campaign trail, being exposed to two years of non-coherent rambling coming out of the Oval Office, and being subjected to nonsensical tweets that appear to be written by someone taking an ESL course, our committee has decided there is something more important for Americans to know.

For this reason, we, on the House Intelligence Oversight Committee, have contacted Kew-Forest Elementary and New York Military Academy and subpoenaed Trump’s I.Q. tests results.

He should not be allowed to talk to one more foreign leaders—either publically or privately, or enact one more questionable policy decision snatched out of thin air after fermenting in that vat he calls his brain, albeit for 30 years or 30 seconds, until Americans know if their president possesses the basic intelligence needed to make high level decisions.

We don’t need a psychiatrist’s report to know if he’s crazy. We don’t need a quack doctor telling us he’s the healthiest president ever. We certainly know those around him lie as much as he does. We don’t need close friends or associates telling us he’s really a funny guy who’s simply getting a bad rap. We know for a fact that any rap he gets is a rap well deserved.

We do have to know, once and for all and beyond any reason of doubt, whether the president is an idiot, because we know what damage idiot leaders have done in the past.

Furthermore, it comes down to more than agreeing he acts like an idiot. Behaving like an idiot is every man’s right in a free country that guarantees the right to happiness, just as being able to vote for a man who behaves like an idiot is also a guaranteed right.

Maybe our founding fathers were too generous.

Nevertheless, behaving like an idiot and being an idiot are two different things.

A person who is not an idiot, but merely behaving like one, can shape up. He can wake up one morning, shake the cobwebs out of his head, and declare, enough is enough. I’m going to stop acting like a jerk. For a person who is not an idiot, this is a reasonable expectation. People turn their lives around all the time.

Let’s be honest. This is what we have all been hoping for. It doesn’t happen often, but it can happen, but it usually doesn’t.

Kids do it as part of the natural maturing process. They stop the name-calling, constant fighting, pushing and shoving. They become more responsible and less erratic. In short, they grow up. They can do this because they are not idiots.

Idiots don’t grow up. Their intelligence limitations keep them frozen in time—forever young, but unfortunately forever incapable of functioning in a grown-up world.

We don’t know what the case is with Trump. He could be someone simply pretending to be an idiot—and it would take a super smart person to explain why anyone would do this, or he could be an idiot. No one knows, but anyone who is not an idiot should want to know.

Trump often points to his brain and tells us what a smart man he is. This isn’t something we absolutely cannot take his word for.

We don’t believe him when he tells us how rich he and what a smart businessman he is because we know about the bankruptcies, business failures, and inability to get a loan from anyone other than Russian oligarchs.

We don’t believe him when he tells us he’s not a racist because he continues to spout racist comments, enact racist policies, and—to his great chagrin—racists seem to love him.

We don’t believe him when he tells us he’s not a misogynist because we have heard him so many times bragging about being a misogynist.

We can’t go on believing what he tells us about his “great brain” when we have seen so much that tells us just the opposite. We don’t know if he is really an idiot or whether it is all an act to make him more appealing—and someone, someday will have to explain to me how that works.

We don’t need to talk to him. That would tell us nothing because we know listening to him for the last forty years has told us nothing.

We need to see those I.Q. test scores.

After that, we can look at his financial records.

After that, there might be a lot of his own associates questioning their own intelligence.

One final point. We all have guts and we all have brains. Wise men, using their brains, understand that guts should only be used to digest their food. Trump is right about one thing. Nobody else's brain can ever tell him anything.

The Laziest Man in America —getting under my skin

DURING THE 2016 campaign, Donald Trump accused Hillary Clinton of having no stamina and Jeb Bush no energy. How ironic, coming from Donald Trump—the laziest man in America.

Being in your 70s and being lazy is no crime. There are lots of 70-year olds, who are kicking back, watching a little more TV than they should be. As the saying goes, “They earned it.” For the record, say what you want about Hillary, but I don’t think she has ever been lazy or lacked stamina, but this isn’t about her.

The thing about Trump is, he’s been lazy all his life.

Many will take issue with that assumption. How can he be lazy? The man is everywhere. He’s into everything. He barely sleeps. If nothing else, his twitter thumb is working around the clock.

One can be busy and still be lazy. In fact, being busy might be a sign of laziness—if nothing else, at least intellectually laziness.

An intellectually lazy person like Trump doesn’t take the time to think things through. He won’t make the effort because he doesn’t think the effort is necessary.

I can’t prove it, but I honestly think he came up with the idea for the wall during that famous ride down the escalator. He looked at the crowd on either side and saw how well protected he was from them. After all, he’s no Bobby Kennedy, mixing it up, shaking hands, patting supporters on the shoulder. He likes to keep his supporters at a distance. The closest he gets to them is his name on the sign they’re carrying. Walls are one way of achieving the separation he relishes.

Trump doesn’t read because that is only getting someone else’s thoughts. Likewise, he doesn’t need briefings. He hardly needs a staff. He’s got ideas popping into his head every minute, and a device in his hand to get those ideas out there.

Trump’s first instinct is to always trust his first instinct because in his gut, he knows that instinct is right.

If that instinct were right, he’d have a valid point, but it’s wrong, so he doesn’t. What he does have is a case of laziness.

He goes for easy answers to difficult or sometimes non-existent problems because it reinforces his brand—that he’s a strong and decisive businessman. On a side note, I think making money through branding is probably the laziest way to make money.

Here is the president, in his own words, acting off the top of his head—posing the problem and arriving at his solution.

“All Mexicans are rapists and murderers.” “We will build a wall and Mexico will pay for it.”

“I think Islam hates us.” “We must have a complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States.”

“Football players kneeling during the anthem are unpatriotic.” “Fire the sons of bitches.”

“Democrats are un-America and treasonous...and don’t love our country.” He insults them, belittles them, blames them and demands we vote them out.

“Journalists are the enemy of the people,” He says. Refers to ‘Fake News’ more than any other term, except maybe “no collusion,” securing his position alongside past dictators like Stalin and Hitler and current ones like Putin and China’s Xi Jinping.

Where there are real issues like Russia interfering in our elections, he doesn’t see them. “Putin says he didn’t do it and I believe him.” “Mueller’s investigation is a witch hunt, a hoax.”

When his staff puts loyalty to the Constitution over loyalty to him, he shames and bullies them, calling them names you’d expect to hear in a playground from a five-year old.

When they put loyalty to him over loyalty to the Constitution, they are pretty much given a green light to do anything they want—separate children from their parents, find their wives jobs, or just run the country into the ground.

These are the instincts of an intellectually lazy man. A man who has never met a perceived problem that didn’t catch his fancy—or an easy solution, he couldn’t latch onto and stick with as if bound with super-glue.

He lives in a world where everything we thought was true is false, where friends become enemies and foes become new best friends. Putin is a strong leader, not a dictator. Kim Jong-un is a funny and honorable man, but Trudeau is dishonest and weak.

His lack of substance and unmatched shallowness feeds the national nightmare of a nation divided. His flights of fancy are met by citizen’s fits of fury and 200 years of at least a charade of mutual respect morphs into twitter wars, which solve nothing, but sure do make everyone mad—except him.

For the last three years we’ve listened to our frustrated Congressmen and Senators publicly offer tired prayers that Trump will mature, do the right thing, grow into the office; that he will get serious by getting down to serious work. Where Obama’s iconic “Hope” poster became a symbol of change, Republicans only hope is that he changes before he screws up.

Newsflash: 70-year-old men don’t suddenly see the error of their ways—especially when those ways have worked out so well, even leading to the presidency?

I’ll tell you what 70-year-old men can do. They can remember Louie Prima.

The country’s relationship with Trump reminds me of the Louie Prima/Keely Smith duet. She, foreshadowing our current political climate, sang, “I got it bad, and that ain’t good,” and Louie, as the voice of the laziest president in history, responds, “I got it good and that ain’t bad,” before quickly adding, “I ain’t gonna change.”

This essay appears in my recent "Trump Dismantles Washington" 

Learning: It's not as hard as you think, if you put your mind to it

Don't blame Democrats, blame the genie

Donald Trump and I are practically the same age.

He is 26,396 days old.

I’m 26,266 days old.

I express our ages in days rather than years because the subject of this essay is learning, and I believe learning is an on-going, day-in, day-out experience. Yeah, we might have graduated in such and such year, or our twenties—pick your own decade –may have been throwaway years, but learning is a never ending process. At least, it should be.

While Trump is about four months older than me—a hundred and thirty days to be exact, I strongly believe he has wasted some of them, maybe more than he would likely admit to.

For almost every day that I have lived, I strongly believe I have learned something. I’m not saying I always put that knowledge to good use, or that I didn’t at some point forget what I’d learned, only to have to learn it again. To be sure, there were days when I didn’t learn a damn thing, and for that, I have no one to blame but myself. Nevertheless, I try to keep an open mind.

In my opinion, based on observations I have made over the last 15,000 days or so, Donald Trump hasn’t learned a damn thing on most of the 26,000 days he’s spent trying to impress on us, how much he knows.

What does it matter?  

I don’t know.

I just finished writing a novel about Trump that might not sell 100 copies if it were to stay in print for the next—let’s just keep it simple and say 10,000 days. Meanwhile, he is president of the United States.

That should tell anyone all they need to know about the greatest nation on earth and what it takes to succeed in it.

Nevertheless, this is an essay about learning and how every day is important. It’s certainly not about fairness or irony or luck.