Skip to main content

No. 1 Signature!

This is where we are now:
our President is governing by proclamation,
and inordinately proud of his signature.

Every time he signs a miserably crafted order,
he holds it up so that we can see
his very bold, decisive, reality-changing signature.

That is the problem with Twitter:
you really do not have a place
for a really good signature.
"#TrumpRules!" does not cut it.
It is like a ball-point alongside a Montblanc.

I will not say that Ego is our President.
I will say that Ignorance and Narcissism are.

Like many people in business,
Donald Trump seems to believe
that government should be run like a business;
like a car dealership, or a hardware store;
like a for-profit college or business school;
like a Trump business.

Government is not a for-profit business:
it is a solemn pact to be a nation;
to live in peace and to provide for the common good.
Government is how we manage our life together,
how we provide for our common defense and civil order,
how we educate our children to understand and achieve
what it is we have committed ourselves to,
how we treasure our resources, build roads,
provide clean water, and maintain the health of us all.

The aim is not to make a profit.
It is to achieve common purpose.
While profit-making companies are useful,
they are not our main purpose.  In fact,
it is the role of government to insure
that profit-making companies also serve
the larger goals of governing ourselves.

Good government is a balancing act.
In a democracy, a republic, it is the case
that a flurry of opinions exist about everything,
and those voices must be heard, and negotiated.

And like it or not, we are just one of the nations of the earth.
That is a balancing act, too.  What Germany, or England,
or China wants is not necessarily what we want,
so we learn to juggle, and wrestle, and dance.
Boasts about being No. 1, or America First and Finest, are childish.
Howling that our god thinks the USA should win all the games is infantile.
It is like demanding that every transaction should give us the advantage.

There are a lot of good things about America,
but that is true of Ireland, too, and France, and Finland.
And in many things, we are not first, but about twentieth.

To mangle a Barry Goldwater quote,
ignorance in the service of government is no virtue,
and learning something instead of parading a stunning signature is no vice.


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Friends-- My step-father of 35 years died this morning. His name was Conrad Royksund. He was 86 years old. He was born into poverty on a farm near Puyallup, WA. He was the first member of his family to attend college and earned a PhD from the University of Chicago. He paid his way through all of that by fishing in Alaska. He spent his professional career as a college professor. I met him when I was just 3 years old and don't actually have any memories of my life befor e he was in it. He was intimidatingly smart, funny as hell, and worked his ass off. He taught me to meet people with kindness and decency until I was certain they could not be trusted. He taught me to meet ideas with carving knives until I was certain they could. I will remember him as one of the bravest, most curious, and funniest people I have ever met. He left this world with a satisfied mind. We are so grateful. Dan Hubbard
1 comment
Read more

Nice to Run Into You Again

We do not see things in enormous time-frames.  We human beings are fairly new at figuring things out for ourselves.  For instance, some  people today still think of the earth as a newly created thing, perhaps ten thousand years old.  Earth is actually about four-and-a-half billion years old.   That is to say, the earth is 450,000 times older than the Adam and Eve story, and the universe is three times older than that! I recall first hearing that continents were slowly drifting around the earth, and that there quite likely had been several times when the continents were squeezed together.  But people could stand on the edge of their own continents, and not see Africa or Asia getting closer.  It took at least fifty years to figure things out. We called our continent something special. But sure enough, there have been numerous times during several-billion year history of the earth, when supercontinents formed, and eventually drifted off. ...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Sea is Rising

Let us just step back:  two hundred and fifty years ago, or so, the ships of England and Spain had drifted onto a whole new continent, as they saw it, from far north to a savagely cold south; pole to pole, as if there were such things. Millions of people already lived here, some of them still hunters and gatherers; some of them very wealthy, indeed!  Gold and silver stolen from the southern Americas funded Spanish and English dreams. There was land, lots of land, under starry skies above, rich land, and oil and coal and iron ore.  The whole western world learned how to build industries not on simple muscle power, but on steam and oil.  We farmed, too, of course.  All we needed was cheap labor--slave labor from Africa, mostly, so the ships came with slave labor.  Chinese labor built railroad beds where there had been rock cliffs. Europeans, long used to killing each other for good, religious reasons, brought their religious savagery with them. ...
Post a Comment
Read more