Trump v. Hatshepsut

Hatshepsut (photo:Postdlf)

Much has been made of Hillary Clinton being the first American president, but lest we over value this achievement let’s remember the famous Hatshepsut who was the second woman Pharaoh. You can view her in the Met’s Egyptian wing and before her there was Sobekneferu. In modern times we have of course had Golda Meir, Israel’s fifth prime minister, Margaret Thatcher, Angela Merkell, the chancellor of Germany and Britain's current prime minister, Theresa May. Whether Helen of Troy was a political figure or figurehead remains to be seen, but she certainly would qualify as being one of Hegel’s figures of World Historical importance, having caused The Trojan War. And how would some of these famous woman leaders have fared against Donald Trump in a debate? Imagine Trump facing off against Hatshepsut. Even though you can’t get a good handle on a piece of stone, you get the feeling that the famous Egyptian pharaoh was unmoving and imperturbable. Would Trump have dared to accuse her of not having the "stamina" for the job? Her steely gaze would undoubtedly have shaken the billionaire real estate developer’s resolve. How would Trump have handled Meir who is not exactly what you’d call a babe, when she began to rattle him with her prodigious intelligence? Would he have attacked her appearance? And then there’s Margaret Thatcher whose character was played by Meryl Streep. She was hardly a slouch and by the way who should  play Hillary in the movie version of the life of our first female president and who Trump, Robert Redford--due to the hairdo?

Hillary Sucks

“Hillary sucks but not like Monica,” was apparently one of the tee shirts that was being sold at the Republican convention. It’s a free country and no one is going to get too far with a liability suit, particular public figures. What would the charge actually be anyway? When you say someone sucks it generally means that you don’t approve of them and that's not something for which any jury is going to offer an award. Sucking of course can also refer to oral sex, but is it really libelous to accuse either Hillary or Monica Lewinsky of having oral sex? Oral sex was up until 2003 still illegal in many states but in Lawrence v. Texas the Supreme Court ruled against sodomy laws. So saying that someone sucks is not accusing them of an illegal act. In fact to say that a woman or man sucks in our current climate is generally considered to be flattering as it means that they would make an excellent sexual partner. Those people whose opposition to Hillary Clinton is reflected in the former meaning of the word would in fact probably not go along with the notion that Hillary sucks like Monica since that would be too flattering to her and as for Monica the latter use of the term is just like adding another notch to her belt. So what is all the fuss about? Using two meanings of the word "sucks" in a sentence that contains the name of the Democratic nominee for president and the woman with whom her husband cheated on her is clever and the writer may be applauded for his or her turn of phrase. But at the end of the day, is anyone going to wear this shirt?

Outsourcing Your Eleemosynary Impulses

What would Donald Trump think about the idea of outsourcing volunteer work to China? Let’s say I really wanted to help Hillary Clinton get elected. I didn’t like her, but I feared and hated Trump. On the other hand I hated politics, which seemed alternately futile and boring, especially when it came to knocking on doors in swing states like Pennsylvania where these contests tend to be particularly hard fought. What would Donald Trump think about my hiring one of those phone banks in New Delhi, the ones you pick up when you’re have a technical problem with the OS of your computer? What would he think about acquiring visas for a small town in China, who you'd pay to fly over to Philadelphia and then send out on the campaign trail to make sure that Democrats who might have been indecisive would finally pull the lever for HC? There's supposed to be nothing more satisfying than selflessly helping others, like the Syrian refugees. The Times recently ran a story about Canadian families who have adopted some of these unfortunates ("Refugees Encounter a Foreign Word: Welcome," NYT, 6/30/16). But let’s say you don’t feel like it. How about hiring some Canadians of your own to do the job? Is that as magnanimous or charitable as doing it yourself? What would Donald Trump think about this? Would he think it would be taking valuable voter registration work out of the hands of qualified Americans, who would be deprived of an outlet for their eelymosynary instincts?

The Donald is a Quack

No one is going to solve the problems of the world and Obama is the one not to do it. He is our resident mortician. He’a smart and humane, the perfect candidate to wheel in the corpses, to console the living. The problems the planet faces are bigger than any one person and the only thing to be suspicious of is those who would propose a cure. Quack cures will only make the sickness worse. Obama is a realist and relativist and he’s totally on target in refusing to refer to radical Islam, which will only flame new fires  (“Obama Slams ‘Yapping” Over ‘Radical Islam’ andTerrorism," NPR, 6/14/16). Hopefully, if she is elected Hillary Clinton will follow in President Obama's path. Moliere wrote a play about a quack preacher called Tartuffe. Trump is our Tartuffe, but there are others who whose platforms are based on big and unfulfillable promises. It's important to remember that with a few significant exceptions (The New Deal was one) radical solutions to radical problems have tended to be the province of despots. Despair produces windmill chasing and the history of the Twentieth Century is rife with millenarian solutions that have been the product of tragic conditions. The North Korean State is a case study in radical problem solving as were the platforms of Pol Pot, Idi Amin, and Hitler and Mussolini before them.  When you pay a condolence call, you don’t lecture, you listen. We’re sitting in shit, waiting for the next self-proclaimed prophet of Armageddon to elicit vengeance with automatic weapons or worse. This is an era that requires the services of the stoic and the statesman,  not  firebrands who’re going to set the world on fire.

Creative Destruction Redux

Why are the presidential candidates employing such negative tactics and back biting and acting in such un-presidential ways? Donald Trump has been singled out, but similar accusations have been made against Ted Cruz and on the Democratic side both Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton (one of the most recent being the trading of insults about qualifications,"Bernie Sanders: Hillary Clinton is not 'qualified' to be president,"CNN, 4/7/16). The complaint amongst those who expect something more out of frontrunners in an election is that the candidates are not talking about the issues. But actually the answer to the phenomenon of shining a negative spotlight on an opponent might be found in Austrian born economist Joseph Schumpeter’s theory of “creative destruction,” as described in his classic Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy. Schumpeter believed that capitalism required “the perennial gale of Creative Destruction.” In order to build you have to get rid of the dead wood.  Planned obsolescence is, in essence, a form of institutionalized "creative destruction" in which a manufacturer knowingly creates something with a relatively short half-life. So if you're wondering why the candidates are belaboring the negative traits of their opponents, instead of concentrating on proposals for a new order, which will set things right, the answer may lie in the idea that progress can’t occur until the slate is wiped clean. When critics of Bernie Sanders say he has no real plan about what to do about the problems of the Middle East, the answer might be that new policies will only be implemented when the old ones are done away with and foreign policy becomes a tabula rasa.