Thank You, Mr. Trump

Donald Trump is right. His comments about Mexican “rapists” and impregnable border fences, outrageous though they may be, have forced his fellow Republicans, and the rest of us, to talk about immigration. It’s truly the “elephant in the room” on many levels.

It’s very easy for us to have a theoretical discussion about immigration. True, we have problems: millions of people here illegally or semi-legally, who many of the rest of us think are draining our resources. But what would we do if our country were in Europe right now instead of being conveniently isolated by two oceans? What would we do if all these desperate people were washing up on our shores – if their boats even made it that far? Would they be a drain on our resources? Very likely – but some European countries, like Greece, don’t have any resources left to drain. We do have an easy life here!

Let’s roll back the tape a little bit. A few Arab Spring demonstrators several years ago in Syria inexplicably prompted their government to turn a mechanized army on its own people, killing hundreds of thousands. Nothing we can do about it, we said, not our problem, and the other Western powers largely agreed. Let them fight it out for themselves, we said. The country descended into total chaos, and now there is ISIS. Millions have been displaced, and not just from Syria. Did neglect come back to bite us? We haven’t really been bitten yet in this situation, just the Europeans. Some countries are still trying to say, not our problem. But the desperate thousands arrive anyway – their problem whether they like it or not.

There are no easy solutions to our own immigration issues, parochial as they may seem by comparison. Certainly, we have to come up with a fair system that allows for people living here and contributing to our economy as well as for those seeking asylum or those just seeking a better life. But as a friend of mine pointed out recently, most of our ancestors were immigrants – not always nice ones – who displaced the native population. We forced others to “migrate” here as personal property. You can keep rolling back the tape, and you’ll find that the hard distinctions between good guys and bad guys just get blurrier and blurrier.

But at some point we are going to have to set aside demagogic talk about anchor babies and fences and understand that we are all in this boat --- on this planet – together, and the hard distinctions between “our problems” and “their problems” are also a lot blurrier than they used to be.

Bye Bye, Donald

When it comes to PC, the world is now a china shop – yet we seem willing to tolerate the presence of the bull, and find it amusing when he knocks over a couple pieces of crockery. But then he hits the Ming vase, and he’s done.

I said to friends yesterday that I actually admired one quality in Donald Trump – that whatever anyone threw at him, he was invariably able to catch it and throw it back. Maybe what came out of his mouth was complete BS, but he said it with absolute conviction. He never let anything slow him down.

At a certain point, though, our expectations get so low that we’re not surprised when something bad happens. Look, I am no lover of Megyn Kelly. It’s chemical with me. I admire strong women, but she is what a female friend used to call a “hard number.” There was something unsavory to me about how the first individual question to Trump during the debate Thursday night had to come from her, and it was about his documented attitude toward women – and she asked the question with just a little too much glee for my taste. His response was kind of a joke, but he showed no sign of distress. He put his head down and charged.

But that was Cleveland, not Pamplona, and it was a Presidential debate, not reality TV – even though some 24 million people watched it, and I’m sure the popcorn consumption went up that night.

Then there is Trump’s other quality. True to form, he couldn’t leave things alone. He had to pile on Ms. Kelly during a CNN interview on Friday with remarks about what seemed to be her menstrual cycle. Could it be that even those who have been secretly enjoying Donald Trump now have to admit that their Enough Already buttons have been pushed?

Metaphors and analogies are so much fun, so I’ll leave you with another – and you can bring your popcorn. When I was a little boy, I liked going to grown-up movies, because I knew that a cartoon was shown at the beginning, so I had at least something to enjoy. But the cartoon lasted only about five minutes. The grown-ups who took me along may have chuckled at the cartoon a little, if it was good, but they weren’t there to see that. They wanted the movie to start. That’s what they paid their ticket money for.

The cartoon is over for the Republicans. Time to roll the feature.

He's Not Funny, Folks

A comedian friend of mine used to say when evaluating a colleague, “I know funny, and he isn’t.” Is anyone really enjoying Donald Trump? If I hear one more person say, “Isn’t it great how he’s shaking things up?”… No, I’d better not say what I might do.

Let’s see, he’s given us Mexican rapists crossing the border, John McCain not being a war hero, and the cell phone number of a fellow Republican he disagrees with. If Mr. Rogers were here, he’d be channeling Rick Perry: “Can you say, ‘Commander-in-Chief’?”

That’s not just a snarky comment. Donald Trump is showing us what kind of battles he picks – and one of the biggest jobs a U.S. president has is picking battles. If the battles Trump has been picking represent what he thinks will win him the presidency, what kind will he pick if he were actually elected? (A concept which is, thankfully, very remote).

In the case of McCain, one could actually make a semantic argument over the use of the word “hero,” though anyone who spends years as a POW has to be given some credit for simply surviving. And, of course, Trump never had to serve one minute in the armed forces, so he doesn’t have the standing to even raise that issue.

This is about judgment. I actually wouldn’t have minded if McCain had become president himself – but he picked Sarah Palin as his running mate, or at least let others pick her for him. What did that say about his judgment? I didn’t think anyone could possibly make me miss Sarah Palin, but Mr. Trump has done it. The sexist pig in me says she is much nicer to look at.

In a perfect media world (that I controlled) I would cease on principle to give Donald Trump one more second of airtime, drop of ink, or digital keystroke. Don’t we have better things to do? Can’t somebody just make him go away?

As for Trump “shaking things up” in the GOP, is the party, or the nation, that bored? I live in California, but I don’t sit around longing for the next earthquake. They usually just cause damage. And Trump is just shaking the surface anyway. The Republican Party needs to be shaken to its foundation if it expects to survive this Trump, or future Trumps – or survive, period.

The Big Thaw

Spring is only a few weeks away. The ice, still solid enough on northern lakes to support heavy trucks, is imperceptibly weakening as the sun angle increases a few degrees each day. When the ice finally starts to break up and water reappears, it will seem as if it happened all of a sudden, but the process will have started much earlier – we just couldn’t detect the evidence of it.

It’s my feeling that thaws are breaking out all over. Take immigration reform – an insoluble problem for decades. But Romney lost the election, many say, because of the Latino vote. It wasn’t some wild political swing. For decades, Latinos have been having more children than folks of other ethnicities – there are simply more of them, but the evidence is only now making headlines. True, not all Latinos are Democrats, but a lot voted that way. So now even Republicans are talking about immigration reform. Positions frozen for decades are unfreezing.

The same is happening with gun control, although it took a terrible tragedy to spur the breakup of long-frozen positions on that score. The NRA is no longer a solid block of immovable ice, or at least the block is smaller than it once was. Women will be officially allowed combat roles in the military – unthinkable until this month. Will widely accepted gay marriage and the legalization of marijuana be next? I wish the big thaw would extend to tax reform, but that ice is pretty thick yet.

Then there’s the economy. The struggling stock market has actually been improving for years, but it seems like it happened just last week, when the Dow closed above 14,000 for the first time in recent memory. Home sales are increasing; money is flowing again.

Even internationally, I hear ice cracking. Iran has agreed to return to the talks on its nuclear program. Is this simply deception, or is a hard frozen position melting? Even some members of the Syrian opposition are no longer ruling out talks with the brutal Assad regime.

Is common sense actually starting to bloom? I don’t know about you, but I’m convinced something is going on. Spring is a hard season not to like.