BACK ON THE BEAT...BRIEFLY

A reader reminded me recently that when I started this blog I said I was going to talk about the misuse of words in public discourse.  Be a word cop, in short.  I confess I’ve strayed from that mission, what with Reichsleiter Donald Trump threatening our very lives nonstop here on planet earth. 

In any case, I resolved early this week to find time to return to my original purpose.  

My first action was to put two much-abused words on the disabled list (DL), with hopes that they might return to health and use with rest. 

The first was “absolutely.”  You can’t listen to talking heads talk these days without set-up questions being answered with an “absolutely.”  Besides the lethal repetitiveness of the word, it’s risky usage: in a post-Einsteinian world of relativity, very little, if anything, is absolute.  Give the word a break.

Second is the puzzling popularity of “existential,” as in “existential threat.”  Why this fancy way of saying “real,” “factual,” or “empirical”?  Is it because of its visually close association with the word existentialism, the fashionable philosophy that makes you sound important?  Then quit showing off, I say as a practicing existentialist (Camusian variety).  You’re only confusing your listeners for no good reason.

That’s where I was when Trump fired FBI Director James Comey.  Why?  Front and center with the answer came the president’s back-up flack,  Sarah Huckabee Sanders: Trump did it “for atrocities [committed] against the chain of command.”  Really?  Against Trump’s chain of timid and misinformed toadies?  Atrocities? Really?  Did Comey bomb Yemeni hospitals?  Re-open Auschwitz?  Or not swear loyalty to the mentally deranged New York street thug who obstructed justice by demanding he do so?

I suggest all you Trumpenproles out there open a dictionary and look up the word “atrocity” for starters.  And do I think firing Comey after asking him to end his investigation of General Flynn for his ties to Russia poses an existential threat to our continued existence as a democracy?  Absolutely!

LATE, BUT WORTH IT

Sorry to be two weeks late and two rubles short, but here, by popular demand, are my (and your) picks to click in the 2017 Major League Baseball Season.  You’ll remember that last year, against the wisdom of my higher paid colleagues in the soothsaying business, I predicted a Cub/Indian World Series; those of you who listened, drove to Vegas, bet a wad on my prescience, shoveled your haul into the Brinks truck rental, and were rewarded by being bumped up into the 39.6% tax bracket.  You are welcome.

Why not do it all again?  I must alert you though that picking the winners this year is far more difficult than last—particularly in the American League East and National League West divisions.  In the former any team but Tampa Bay could win it all this season.  In the latter the Dodgers will have their hands full fighting off the Diamondbacks and Rockies; the Giants will do a major fade, however. (Ditto for the Angels, I’m sorry to report.)

Without further ado the final regular season standings for 2017 are:

What about those playoffs?  Well, the Chicago Cubs will face the Washington Nationals in the National League final series.  The Cleveland Indians will face the Boston Red Sox in the American League final.  World Series?  Washington over Cleveland in six.  You can take it to the bank.  Or to Las Vegas again, if you’re one of those greedy folks intent on passing our president in personal wealth.  And remember...per my usual policy, these selections are guaranteed.  If they all do not finish in the order predicted, I will provide you next year’s picks absolutely free of charge!   

By the way, I remain a baseball card collector in my old age.  And I’m desperately seeking the Major League Rookie card for the guy pictured below in an early photo.  If you have it, or know where I can find this guy’s rookie card, I will give you $25,000 cash for it!  Help me out.  Remember all I’ve done for you.

MADNESS IN MARCH

Ready for a break from life-or-death matters?  To ease your ongoing suffering in the Time of Trump, I bring you my second composition from the Caligula Suite, “Divertimento #2: Variations on The Madness of March.” Enjoy!

Anyone can play Bracketology.  And watch the NCAA basketball tourney on the telly. Be assured it’s good clean fun, exciting to see the world’s best pure athletes compete in a game famed for its nonstop excitement.

You need not bet on the madness in one of those popular brackets you have heard about.  Not mandatory.  But for me, the absence of a monetary stake in the games has all the thrill of kissing a sibling.  So I advise putting some fleeting spice in your life and plunge a fin or a sawbuck or next month’s mortgage payment into the nearest pool.

The odds of picking every winner in the pool are approximately 3.4 trillion to one, I’ve been told.  Not an easy task, even for a seer like me.  So I trust that if I miss a pick or few, you’ll cut me some slack.

Donations to your favorite gambling guru are not required but welcome.  No, I’m sorry to say, such humane and worthy acts are not tax deductible.  I do stand by my standard guarantee, however: if you do not profit from my predictive powers, I will provide you with the same service next year absolutely free!  How fair is that?

May the peace of Pacifica be with you.

 

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Going to Vegas?   Remember to reserve your Brinks truck rental early.

OFTEN IS THE QUESTION ASKED: ARE YOUR PRESIDENT SANE?

At long last (has it been only a month?), the mental health professionals have stepped forward to evaluate our new president...without any close-up examination, they concede.  Fortunately (if that’s the right word), our reichsleiter exhibits his psychic wounds like campaign ribbons for all to see.

The shrinks seem to have come to a consensus diagnosis:  Mr. Trump is a Paranoid Narcissistic Sociopath.  I’ve also heard a professional in the field describe him as a malignant narcissist.  Yet a third suggestion, that of infectious disease specialist Steven Buelter, in a recently run piece in the New Republic, opines that Trump may be suffering from neurosyphilis, perhaps picked up during his extended, carefree, salad days that even he admits were fraught with risk.  Beulter adds that this king of STDs can be easily cured if treated. But who among us has the courage to tell the emperor he should get a Wassermann Test?

Meanwhile, we’ve lately heard that the Russians are building a psychological profile of Trump in advance of his first post-election meeting with his Russian chum, Vladimir Putin.  Do you think Donald is doing the same?  (Given his low regard for intelligence in all its forms, I doubt it, too.)

So what do we do?

First and foremost, go back and read my blog entry of October 7, 2016, in which I made light of my fears, reproduced here.  Note the section in bolder face.

Mural by Mindaugas Bonanu.

Mural by Mindaugas Bonanu.

THE RUSSIAN CONNECTION

Why won’t Donald Trump show us his income tax returns? Every other presidential candidate has in the last 35 years.  Why should he deny us a look into his bona fides?  They would shed much light on the claims and character of a man who wants to lead us? 
Trump has an oft-invoked answer.  He can’t because he’s being audited by the IRS.  Lame response; the IRS itself says an audit should be no hindrance to their release.   Donald and his son Eric tell us the current return runs to more than 12,000 pages—apparently more than we could digest and understand is the clear implication.  Try us; surely we can hire a skilled accountant or two to explain the contents.
Hillary Clinton in the first presidential debate echoed a common speculation that Trump was hiding the fact that he was worth a lot less than he claimed—not a billionaire at all.
And that he was most likely gaming the tax code and paying no federal tax at all.
Investigative reporting by The New York Times has since confirmed the likelihood of both, though Trump stays mum on the subject.   The greater part of the story—a complex one of international import at the highest level—is yet to be fully told.  We only know it in its sketchy outline as The Trump-Putin Affair.  Yes, the short and fit Russian assassin and the American Master of Bluster have something going.
Open and Inquiring minds want to know more about this strange match.  Just watch the orange heap light up at the mere mention of Putin‘s name.  What’s behind it?  Is it a joint power grab...or...what?
Well, it’s widely believed that Trump, who has for many years wanted to build hotels in Russia, is deeply in debt to Russian oligarchs.  Putin, on the other hand, flatters Trump with kind words, including the Russian word yarki, which Trump chooses to translate as “genius” while Putin prefers “flamboyant.” (Western analysts believe Putin’s flattery is meant to encourage Trump in his disruptive view of the West’s geopolitical interests, thus serving the Kremlin’s own.)
 Add to this strange pairing Paul J. Manafort, a shady lobbiest who received millions for helping pro-Russian dictator Viktor Yanukovych to power in the Ukraine, subsequently becoming Trump’s second Campaign Manager before the press got wind of his past and the man was summarily demoted out of sight.
Complicating matters further is Lt. General Michael J. Flynn, the fired former director of the pentagon’s Defense Intelligence Agency and now one of Trump’s closest advisors, previously seen seated next to Putin at a Russian state dinner.  Apparently he was also present with Trump more recently at the top-secret security briefing given to presidential candidates.  Now season that mix with Russian hackers who seem to know every other secret we as a nation have, and feed them to Wikileaks’ Julian Assange, who has threatened to alter the outcome of the pending American election with an October bombshell.  Yes, it’s all a big puzzlement.
While no one has put all the puzzle’s parts together yet, Trump’s attachment to Putin was evident in the first presidential debate.  Though Trump had been informed of Russian intrusions into our cyberspace at a previous security briefing, and heard it again from Clinton at the first debate, he quickly came to Russia’s defense, saying we didn’t know for sure it was Russia, that it could have been China (always his favorite scapegoat) ... or somebody else, for that matter.  Trump as skeptic...now that’s a new one on me!
I despair of ever unraveling this Gordian Knot of international intrigue, preferring the less complicated and more hopeful back story I’ve been told by reliable sources who prefer to remain anonymous.  What if all this cloak-and dagger stuff is just a cover?  For what, you will ask.  Some good old-fashioned amour, that’s what!   Yes, I’ve heard it said by some very, very smart people, whose names you would recognize, who say the vodka the lovers share has been spiked with bearnip.
Moreover, while I have no first hand knowledge, I’ve been reliably informed by unimpeachable observers in the know that Trump recently went on one of those legendary manly rides with Putin and his biker gang, the Night Wolves.  Can’t you see them now, Vlad and Donnie (as they call themselves when mounted in tandem on Putin’s Harley) preparing for the adventure.  The short, fit conqueror of Crimea gallantly helps the pudgy would-be leader of the free world with his girdle as the “Wolves” look on.
Picture them now on their wild ride east at dawn over the Moscow River on Vlad’s hog, roaring across the meadowlands and past the Isle of the Dead before spending a stormy night on Bald Mountain, only to descend onto the steppes of Central Asia, there to pitch their tent and snuggle up against the autumn chill by generating some real heat in their shared sleeping bag.  Ah! A little warming of the earth to speed along the thaw.  Ain’t love wonderful!  And to think there might even be a split Nobel Peace Prize in the offing!  That’s the good news heard on the grapevine. Amor Vincit Omnia.                                                  

To echo Hamlet’s words, “oh my prophetic soul!”  Put aside my self-indulgent final paragraph meant to playfully show off my knowledge (and love) of Russian music that amused no one but me.  Focus instead on the bold-faced section and the names mentioned.  Flynn.  Montrafort.  Murky background players then, central figures in a widening scandal of truly unimaginable magnitude now.  I hope I’m wrong.  But the more I hear of the election last fall the more likely it seems that Trump and his alt-right associates have sold us out to Putin and imperiled our democracy.  Absolute proof may be lacking now, but evidence is mounting in spite of Trump’s desperate and diversionary attacks on the press.  And so we slip and slide rapidly toward at least a constitutional crisis.

Usually I fight fear by writing light and harmless fantasies intended to amuse. It’s not working this time.  I’m scared. 

So what do we do? Let’s first remind ourselves again that change is the only constant.  We should seize it and the opportunity it inevitably brings.  Let’s move briskly and peacefully away from the doomed union and establish ourselves as that sovereign nation, Pacifica, where we preserve and improve on the best of what was.

IT'S A DOG'S WORLD

I’m back!  Again.  You thought I was hiding out somewhere from Herr Trump and the New Order (Neuordnung) and had deserted you in your hour of need.   Not so.  Got a cold and the shingles at the same time.  Not recommended for the living... and those who wish to go on with it.

Accept my apology for not covering President Elect Trump’s first press conference for you Wednesday last; I bailed on it early with the hope I could take an incomplete, pleading the above illnesses as an excuse, when it was really my state of mind that was hurting.  Every time I see our reichsleiter-to-be on TV I feel as though his angry eyes and fulminations are directed directly at me for stumbling into his alternate universe, and he means to persecute me for my faith (in science).

So what did I do?   What you should do. I changed channels.  To?

Dog TV, my usual refuge in trying times.  For those of you who know it not, I give it five stars in stress relief.  Yes, as you rightly guessed, I first subscribed to it for my two dogs, thinking they would enjoy having kindred company when I left them home alone.   Not to be. They just didn’t dig it, and went back to reading The New Yorker for their escapes. I think Gypsy looked up once while I held her and forced to view another Golden Retriever on the tube; not interested.  As for high-strung Heidi, true to her shepherd genes, she cannot be forced to look at anything when on the trail of imaginary possums.  And that’s almost always. 

Talk about balms to hurt minds.  Dog TV delivers comfort and solace, a quiet joy along with a sense of what is right in nature.   The background barking is simple, pleasant, unobtrusive—and when a human voice intrudes, it is brief and muted.  And added plus for me is that some of the scenic footage was shot at my very own Dog Beach here in Surf City.  How do I know?  Because when I watch those pups splashing joyfully in the waves, I see in the background the familiar oil-drilling platforms in stubborn place.

As for our unaware canine friends, photographed mostly in the outdoors and free to be their antic selves, they run and roll at will, yip and woof without restraint, wag tails and sniff out all identities in soothing harmony.  Such a melodious melee!  It makes you want to pile right into the frolic and forget the millions of folks about to lose their Obamacare.  

The cost for Dog TV?  A measly five bucks a month.  Am I your best friend or not?  (By the way, this is Divertimento Number One in a series from my Caligula Suite, composed to get you through the Reign of Trump.  More to follow.)

Here are three happy subscribers to Dog TV,With Heidi, left; Gypsy, right; I’m in the middle.(We are real dogs and people, not paid actors.)

Here are three happy subscribers to Dog TV,
With Heidi, left; Gypsy, right; I’m in the middle.
(We are real dogs and people, not paid actors.)

MAD ABOUT DYLAN

Is my envy showing?  I suppose it is.  I know I’m still seething.  About what?  About Bob Dylan winning the Nobel Prize for Literature, that’s what.  Dylan?  Literature?  Come on!

True, I confess that I no longer polish my own acceptance speech for the Nobel Committee.  Yes, I’m man enough to face the fact that I’ll likely never receive the Nobel Prize for Literature...at least not while I’m among the living.  But Bob Dylan?  For literature?  Be real!

Maybe Bob Dylan agrees with me.  That would explain his rude behavior for the last month and a half, when he failed to acknowledge the Prize and planned not to go to Stockholm to receive it...until last Saturday when his singer friend Patti Smith showed up at the last minute to accept the Prize in his stead and read for him his almost acceptable acceptance speech.

Since when do guitar-strumming troubadours long over the hill win against serious novelists, dramatists or poets, many with a voluminous life’s work behind them, in competing for what has been considered in some quarters to be the world’s top literary prize?  Was Dylan’s body of songs compared to David Mitchell’s many brilliant novels, for instance?   Or if you Nobel judges were dead-set on wading into the shallower water of pop culture, why not Paul Simon or Leonard Cohen over Dylan?   Did you even compare them?

It is possible, of course, that Bob Dylan is not a reader and thus unaware of the gravity of winning the prize that is newly his. That would explain his inability to make it to Stockholm to claim the prize in person.  Talk about your chutzpah!  Something tells me he still managed somehow to collect the million dollars or thereabouts that comes with the honor.

If Dylan thought he was dissing the Nobel people with his above-it-all conduct, I have the pleasure of informing him he was beaten to that dubious achievement at least twice.  Yes, two predecessors had the gall to actually decline the award.  Well, it was the Soviet government, not honoree Boris Pasternak (a Russian poet and author of the novel Doctor Zhivago, 1958), that declined it for the author.   (The Cold War raged then, don’t you know.)

More telling, John-Paul Sartre (yes, the world renowned philosopher, novelist and dramatist) refused it outright in 1964 because, according to the French polymath and political activist, he would lose his independence as a writer, and if his name were tethered to the Western-biased Nobel folks, it would be used against the Eastern Bloc, where his true sympathies lay.   It gets pretty abstruse after that.  Yes, J. P. remains his hyper-intellectual self, and reading him is just as challenging as ever.

Or maybe all this is just symptomatic of the times in which we live.  Which leads me to ask the question that is becoming increasingly rhetorical.  Doesn’t anybody read anymore?  Does everything have to be reduced to a one-page gulp of  few words to get read or heard these days?  Has the tweet word limit been imposed on literature? I believe we’re all in trouble when the Swedes reading for the Nobel Committee think so.

Your Verse for the Day

Today, I’m speechless.  But fortunately W. B.  Yeats (my favorite poet) is not; he saw all this “coming” almost a hundred years long ago.

 

       THE SECOND COMING

 

Turning and turning in the widening gyre

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.

 

 

Surely some revelation is at hand;

Surely the Second Coming is at hand.

The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out

When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi

Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert

A shape with lion body and the head of a man,

A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,

Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it

Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.

The darkness drops again; but now I know

That twenty centuries of stony sleep

Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,

Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

MONDAY'S POLITICAL CLEAN-UP: AND THE WINNERS ARE...?

Fresh from successfully predicting the World Series participants six months in advance, I’ve decided to put my newly discovered powers of prophecy to work on tomorrow’s election.  Why?  To calm your fears if you’re a Clinton voter, ease you into your impending disappointment if you’re a follower of Gauleiter Trump, and advance my own late-in-life change of career from aging scribbler to internationally celebrated soothsayer with my own prime time, hour-long show on Fox TV.

So, without further ado (as we say in show biz), here are your final results for president and senate two days in advance.  (Yes, you may quote from them to astound your friends; all I ask is that you credit me as your personal prophet and guru.)

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You're welcome,

Vaya con Lorenzo

MONDAY'S POLITICAL CLEAN-UP: SO MANY QUESTIONS

And so little time to find the answers before that fateful November 8.  For example?  Why did FBI Director James Comey release such sketchy information on newly found e-mails eleven days before the election?  Why was the bombshell so vague in its particulars?  Did Obama’s Republican appointee break the Hatch Act by divulging to his party’s congressional members what must be called a tenuous connection bound to raise doubts about Hillary Clinton’s character and take her off her message?  Most importantly, why did Mr. Comey break protocol if not the law by making public his renewed Clinton E-mail investigation, yet mentioned not a word about his current probe of a possible link between the Trump campaign and the Russian government?  Is not the subversion of our democracy of more pith and moment than the waywardways of some nutcase smitten with his penis?

Hillary’s predicament reminds me of the one Josef K faced in Franz Kafka’s novel, The Trial: Being charged and convicted of a crime never named by people you can never confront.  Or is my allusion to Kafka’s masterpiece dead on arrival?  As dead as K is after his execution?  Or is Kafka even read any more?  Shouldn’t it be required in high school?

Questions seem to beget more questions, until they start sticking together to form a many faceted major question/nagging puzzle that you want to forget about but can’t because the answer seems too threatening.  Normally, I am not big on conspiracy theories.  That said, I confess to being deeply troubled by what I call the Trump-Putin-Assange Triad.  What are the three up to?  Trump says on telly that he’s met Putin and he finds him an agreeable fellow who considers him (Trump) a genius. He’s also said on the telly that he’s never met Putin.  So Trump’s a serial liar, but we already knew that.  Putin flatters Trump but appears to put some distance between himself and the American entrepreneur.  Doth he protest too much?  Where does Wikileaks fit in this sorry scheme of things entire? What moral justification does Julian Assange have for meddling in U.S. domestic politics?  Is he merely an indifferent conduit for Russian hackers?  Acting at Putin’s behest?  Is Trump wired directly into the operation as well?  We know the Ruskies have hacked the Democratic National Committee and individual Democratic politicians; we also know they’ve attempted to penetrate several of our voting systems.  What other institutions have they compromised that we don’t know about yet?  The defense establishment, maybe?    Are we drifting toward a renewal of the Cold War?

Am I coming down with an acute case of paranoia?  Ya think?

TIME TO PAY THE PROPHET

The World Series begins today, dear reader, and it’s time for you to pony up.  Pay the guy who made it possible for you to rightfully claim your place among the nouveau riche and buy that dream house in Newport Beach.  Yes, I’m that same guy who told you via this blog, early in April this year, that the Chicago Cubs would meet the Cleveland Indians in the World Series. 

I recall you were more than a bit skeptical, asking me where I got such a foolish notion that two such perennial losers could contend for baseball’s biggest prize.  Why that would make for one of the longest of long shots in the annals of wagering, you said.  I agreed, while attributing my insight to some mysterious late-in-life powers of reading the future that had been slowly invading my mind.  Your skepticism persisted, as it should have. Then why, you asked, wouldn’t I keep this knowledge to myself and thereby up the take I’d make from an all-in bet?  I countered by telling you that my religion forbade gambling, but not from passing the results of my prescience on to friends...and all of you out there in Bloggersville are my friends—good friends.  All I ask is to be remembered with a pittance...say a 15% agent’s fee...yeah, let’s call it a standard agent’s fee.

Here, if you wisely burned my message after making your Vegas bets (or even if you didn’t act on my inside information and regret it now), are those picks made then and given to you with the correct calls of playoff teams shown in All caps and bold face.  You will note that I correctly picked five out of six playoff teams; only with the Los Angeles Dodgers did I miss.  (Not even Nostradamus batted a thousand.)                                                                                                    

                                    (EXCERPT FROM THE PRESEASON BLOG)

 

NATIONAL LEAGUE
 
WEST                                      CENTRAL                               EAST
SAN FRANCISCO                     CHICAGO                                WASHINGTON
**Arizona                                  St. Louis                                   *New York Mets
L.A. Dodgers                             Pittsburgh                                  Miami
Colorado                                    Cincinnati                                  Philadelphia
San Diego                                  Milwaukee                                 Atlanta
                                                           
AMERICAN LEAGUE
 
WEST                                      CENTRAL                               EAST
TEXAS                                     Kansas City                                BOSTON
**Houston                                 *CLEVELAND                         TORONTO
L.A. Angels                               Detroit                                       New York Yankees
Seattle                                       Minnesota                                  Baltimore
Oakland                                     Chicago                                     Tampa Bay
 
         *Denotes First Wild Card Team
** Denotes Second Wild Card Team
You can take it to the bank.  Or to Las Vegas, if you’re so inclined.   Now you’ll no doubt want to know who among these powerhouses of the enchanted diamond will meet in the World Series?  And who will be crowned World Champion?  Prepare yourself for a shocker.  The Chicago Cubs will face the Cleveland Indians in the World Series!  And the ultimate winner is?  I won’t help you there... for personal reasons that I may or may not divulge in a later blog.   But haven’t I brought you far enough already?  So how do you pick a winner between two habitual losers?  Flip a coin or bet them both; either way, you come out mucho chips to the good.
By the way, these selections are guaranteed.  If they all do not finish in the order predicted, I will provide you picks for next year free of charge!  And be sure to reserve the largest U-Haul truck available when you arrive in Vegas to collect your winnings.   You’re welcome.

That was back in April.  Let’s return to the here and now.  Yes, I know that a few of you did not take my baseball predictions seriously and did not act upon them; you now feel left out of the company of swag takers.  Take heart.   I will soon be putting my predictive powers to work again on the upcoming national election.  I will be posting on this blog November 6 the winners and losers of the presidency and the U.S. Senate, with the hard numbers –in time for you to lay your wagers in Vegas and make a social splash at your Election Eve party by calling the results before the pundits do.

Until then, happy days!  And kindly remember your agent.  A measly 15%.

THURSDAY'S POLITICAL PRE-DUMP: SELLING OUT TO A GENIUS

When I played football (poorly, to be sure) many years ago, the game exacted a 15-yard penalty for“piling on”— that is, for leaping on the heap forming over a player already on the ground.  Apparently that transgression is now covered under the catch-all words “unnecessary roughness,” because I haven’t heard the specific foul cited for many years now.

I prefer “piling on.”  Not just for its specificity, but it also soothes any guilt I might feel at this, my piling on Gauleiter Trump along with the many other fault-finders.   Yes, I realize you will accuse me of missing the forest for the trees...or fixating on one insignificant sixth magnitude star out of the entire Milky Way array.

Point well taken.   Hasn’t he’s been branded with virtually every neurosis and psychosis and mental shortcoming known to man by those more learned than I?  What could I possibly add?   Well, I do have a modest past in academia, and I feel professionally obliged to protect our beloved language from every very terrible, horrible, disaster of a Trumpian trampling.  And I must defend our noble tongue from a self-proclaimed genius no less. 

Genius?  Who says?  Vladimir Putin, according to Trump.

At issue is the Russian word “yarki,” used by the shrewd ex-KGB agent in his wooing of our vain sociopath.  The word can be translated as “very bright,” but is more commonly rendered by western scholars to “colorful.”  When recently asked for clarification of what he meant when he first used the word, the wily Putin chose “flamboyant.”

Trump will have none of this pointy-headed hairsplitting.  Once a genius, always a genius.  And the good news must be spread.  Tellingly, the day after Trump bragged at the first presidential debate about his brilliance in avoiding paying taxes, his top two lickspittle knaves, Chris (“Rosenkrantz”) Christie and Rudy(“Guildenstern”) Giuliani, appeared separately on the tube trying to convince the world that only a “genius” (parroting their master’s word choice, under orders no doubt) could come up with such a scheme.  Really?  Hasn’t many a common tax cheat done the same thing many times over?

But I digress from the subject of Trump and Language.  Let me submit that Trump communicates by Twitter because its word limitations fall nicely in line with his working vocabulary. More than a few linguists have applied their scientific tests to Trump’s tweets and addresses and found a third-grade level vocabulary in use and a high-fifth-grader’s command of grammar; that’s somewhat below the levels of your garden variety genius, but good enough, I guess, for a six-year-old bully vying to remain king of the sandbox.

My own year-long analysis of Trump’s diction confirms these studies.  You will find among the limited and recurring words disgusting, terrible, horrible, believe me, rigged, crooked, lying, by the way, huge, great, tremendous, bad, good, very, very very.  Not only are they few in number, there are often vague in meaning.  As a former teacher of writing and editing, I feel professionally obligated to tell The Donald there are remedies. Vocabulary building would be priority one, Donald.  And that’s best done the old fashioned way—reading.   That means “reading up,” challenging your mind (something by Frederich Nietzsche or Martin Heidegger might have special appeal), not escape reading like Playboy. That may mean getting help with your ADHD, but it’s worth the investment, believe me Don.

Unfortunately, limited vocabularies invite a related fault: word repetition—a sure sign of an amateur at work.  And when those words are “terrible," "horrible," "disaster,” and the like, the reader concludes that the writer flushed his morning lithium tablet.

Then there’s the vagueness problem.  You solve that with the words you employ.  Choose concrete words over abstract words, nouns over adjectives, short words over long, words with Anglo-Saxon roots over those with Latinate origins. And it’s no crime to have a model, by the way...someone you admire, feel comfortable with, providing he or she has a definable writing style.  I recently heard you on the telly voice your affinity for Ernest Hemingway.   A worthy model — especially for you.

You know, the more I think about it, the more I believe I can make a writer of you yet.  But it won’t be easy and I don’t come cheap.  Giving you my standard politician’s discount, we could seal the deal in the mid six figures within the month.  Payment in advance, of course.

Good.  A deal, then.  What I want you to do is spend the next four years immersing yourself in Hemingway’s oeuvre, then bring me a 10,000-word essay on what you’ve learned from Papa.  Then I can spot where more work needs to be done...all contingent of course on my being back from Cap Ferrat.

THURSDAY'S POLITICAL PRE-DUMP: THE RUSSIAN CONNECTION

Why won’t Donald Trump show us his income tax returns?  Every other presidential candidate has in the last 35 years.  Why should he deny us a look into his bona fides?  They would shed much light on the claims and character of a man who wants to lead us?  

Trump has an oft-invoked answer.  He can’t because he’s being audited by the IRS.  Lame response; the IRS itself says an audit should be no hindrance to their release.   Donald and his son Eric also tell us the current return runs to more than 12,000 pages—apparently more than we could digest and understand is the clear implication.  Try us; surely we can hire a skilled accountant or two to explain the contents.

Hillary Clinton in the first presidential debate echoed a common speculation that Trump was hiding the fact that he was worth a lot less than he claimed—not a billionaire at all.

And that he was most likely gaming the tax code and paying no federal tax at all.

Investigative reporting by The New York Times has since confirmed the likelihood of both, though Trump stays mum on the subject.   The greater part of the story—acomplex oneof international import at the highest level—is yet to be fully told.  We only know it in its sketchy outline as The Trump-Putin Affair.  Yes, the short and fit Russian assassin and the American Master of Bluster have something going.

Open and inquiring minds want to know more about this strange match.  Just watch the orange heap light up at the mere mention of Putin‘s name.  What’s behind it?  Is it a joint power grab...or...what?

Well, it’s widely believed that Trump, who has for many years wanted to build hotels in Russia, is deeply in debt to Russian oligarchs.  Putin, on the other hand, flatters Trump with kind words, including the Russian word "yarki," which Trump chooses to translate as “genius” while Putin prefers “flamboyant.” (Western analysts believe Putin’s flattery is meant to encourage Trump in his disruptive view of the West’s geopolitical interests, thus serving the Kremlin’s own.)

Add to this strange pairing Paul J. Manafort, a shady lobbyist who received millions for helping pro-Russian dictator Viktor Yanukovych to power in the Ukraine, subsequently becoming Trump’s second Campaign Manager before the press got wind of his past and the man was summarily demoted out of sight.

Complicating matters further is Lt. General Michael J. Flynn, the fired former director of the Pentagon’s Defense Intelligence Agency and now one of Trump’s closest advisors, previously seen seated close to Putin at a Russian state dinner.  Apparently he was also present with Trump more recently at the top secret security briefing given to presidential candidates.  Now season that mix with Russian hackers who seem to know every other secret we as a nation have, and feed them to Wikileaks’ Julian Assange, who has threatened to alter the outcome of the pending American election with an October bombshell.  Yes, it’s all a big puzzlement.

While no one has put all the puzzle’s parts together yet, Trump’s attachment to Putin was evident in the first presidential debate.  Though Trump had been informed of Russian intrusions into our cyberspace at a previous security briefing, and heard it again from Clinton at the first debate, he quickly came to Russia’s defense, saying we didn’t know for sure it was Russia, that it could have been China (always his favorite scapegoat)...or some 400-pound bed-ridden nobody, for that matter.  Trump as skeptic...now that’s a new one on me!

I despair of ever unraveling this Gordian knot of international intrigue, preferring the less complicated and more hopeful back story I’ve been told by reliable sources who prefer to remain anonymous.  What if all this cloak-and dagger stuff is just a cover?  For what, you will ask.  Some good old fashioned amour, that’s what!   Yes, I’ve heard it said by some very, very smart people, whose names you would recognize, who say the vodka the lovers share has been spiked with bearnip.

Moreover, while I have no firsthand knowledge, I’ve been reliably informed by unimpeachable observers in the know that Trump recently went on one of those legendary manly rides with Putin and his biker gang, the Night Wolves, on a magical musical tour.  Can’t you see them now, Vlad and Donnie (as they call themselves when mounted in tandem on Putin’s Harley) preparing for the adventure.  The short, fit conqueror of Crimea gallantly helps the pudgy would-be leader of the free world with his girdle as the “Wolves” look on.

Picture them now on their wild ride east at dawn over the Moscow River on Vlad’s hog, roaring across the meadowlands and past the Isle of the Dead before spending a stormy night on Bald Mountain, only to descend onto the steppes of Central Asia, there to pitch their tent and snuggle up against the autumn chill by generating some real heat in their shared sleeping bag.  Ah! A little warming of the earth to speed along the thaw.  Ain’t love wonderful!  And to think there might even be a split Nobel Peace Prize in the offing!  That’s the good news heard on the grapevine.  Amor vincit omnia.

THURSDAY'S POLITICAL PRE-DUMP: RETURN OF THE GEEZER

I’m baaack!  From?  A twenty-three-day unwanted stay in the hospital (two hospitals actually, but I wont go into the details, since I wasn’t conscious half the time).  Turns out the doctors, after a seemingly endless number of highly intrusive tests on my tired old torso, have concluded that my July 27 seizure was a legacy of the West Nile fever that I contracted two years ago and thought I’d kicked for good.  Apparently not.

What might you gain from my pain?  Well, I advise you guard against the mosquito, and not just for its carrying the fashionable Zika virus, but the West Nile as well.  How do you do that?  The old familiar precautions: Liberal use of insect repellent--particularly from dusk to dawn when mosquitoes are most active.  Wear long-sleeved shirts as well; the same for long pants.  Close your doors and windows at dusk when the bugs are on the hunt.

Most importantly, rid your home and yard of standing water: in gutters, pots, barrels, old tires, bird baths, pet bowls—anything that might pool it for their breeding; wipe down likely breeding sites with a cloth to kill larvae.  Water plants at the soil line, not their tops.  Report
the presence of dead birds—often an indicator of the virus’s presence—to authorities.
Another plus for you from my minus?  Well, you have another fact to drop in the lap of your climate-change-denying Uncle Ed at this coming Thanksgiving Day dinner.  Yes, tropical fauna are moving north with the heat, bringing their unwanted viral baggage with them, infecting our Southern California paradise.  Doubters need only consult their local county health office records to see the alarming rise in casualties, including a sobering spike in deaths.

Leaving a hospital alive is almost always a cause for joy.  This time I had to wonder.  I found myself walking out and onto a stage in media res of a play that might be titled “The Further Follies of Gauleiter Lumpen von Trump,” a farce co-written by the ghosts of Samuel Beckett and Franz Kafka.  First there was cristalnoche (if I may be allowed a neologism in a language I don’t speak), playing out on two stages in one day—first rather awkwardly in Mexico City, hours later raucously so in Phoenix, where roasted Mexicano was served on the rare side to the angry local white folks.

Had nothing changed?  I found myself in need of some peace and quiet to speed along my recuperation.  Not to be.  Seems Donald, almost overnight, had transformed himself from clumsy diplomat to would-be admiral; Iranian patrol boats had buzzed a U. S. Navy destroyer in the Persian Gulf and insulted its crew with gestures.   An incensed Trump told his Florida audience he would have handled it differently: Those who circle our “beautiful destroyer with their little boats...and makegestures at our people that they shouldn’t be allowed to make, will be shot out of the water.”

What!  Go to war just for getting flipped off in international waters!  That’s insane.  Perhaps I was better off in the hospital where one is shielded from the news of the day.  OK, so I was in no personal danger, having done my five years of military service during the Korean War.  But counting children and grandchildren, I had eleven hostages clutched in fortune’s cruel hand.  Instead of more conflict, what the world really needed was a little love.  Even a whiff of romance.  

Patience, and the media will provide anything and everything.  

For some time I had been reading of a mutual admiration between Mister Bluster and the Short Assassin.  Could it be?  Normally I consider conspiracy theories and the theorists who spin them products and occupants of the nut bin.  But the persistence in the press of a Trump-Putin romance has triggered in my insulted forebrain a conspiracy theory of my own.  It’s a great, truly terrible and horrible shocker that’s going to change your whole world view.  No, I can’t give it to you now.  Believe me, though, it’s yuge. And some think it’s disgusting.  Greatly disgusting.  I’ve got some people in Moscow right now and you’ll be shocked at what they’re finding.   But before I expose the truth, I want to validate it with more research in the Book of Revelation and Nostradamus.

It’s absolutely coming.  Within a week...or two.  Right here.  It’s going to be the best blog, believe me!  IT’S GOING TO BLOW YOUR MIND!