The Troll in the White House

I grew up thinking that trolls were evil magical creatures who lived in Scandinavian caves. Perhaps I was influenced by Norwegian composer Edvard Grieg’s “In the Hall of the Mountain King,” when the central character Peer Gynt, in a dream-like fantasy, enters Dovregubbens Hall. The insistent music at that point is so distinctive and memorable that it cannot be mistaken for anything else in the repertoire.

A variety of trolls populate Nordic mythology and Scandinavian folklore, including:

— The Norwegian jötnar, the Ice Giants of old: some had multiple heads, deformed bodies, claws, and fangs. Norse trolls dwelled in mountains, caves, and sometimes under a bridge.

—The Three Billygoats Gruff of 19th century Norway that fooled the troll who lived under the bridge they needed to cross, and was ultimately annihilated by the billygoats as they took advantage of the insatiable appetite of most traditional trolls.

— The troll in the Norwegian story “The Boy Who Had an Eating Match With a Troll” who was fooled by a farmer’s son Askeladden in another eating match to self-destruct and thereby save the boy’s family from danger and from debt.

Most trolls also “apparently smell the blood of a Christian Man,” loathe daylight, and turn into stone when they are exposed to it as well as tossing stones as their means of combat.

In addition, trolls are abundant in C. S. Lewis’s “The Chronicles of Narnia” (the Trollshaws) and J. R. R. Tolkien’s legendarium “Middle-earth,” where the Midgard of Norse mythology or its equivalent is found.

More recently, friendly trolls are central to the stories in “Frozen” and the “Moomin” books of Finnish-Swedish writer and artist Tove Jansson.

So much for the role of the troll in music and folk legends.

The term troll has in recent times taken a turn for the worse, from stupid strange mountain cave creatures to Internet bots pretending to represent particular points of view but actually inserted into gullible readers’ inboxes to insidiously twist the readers’ perspectives on alt-right or other positions to politicians turning any subject that might reflect negatively on them into nasty, twisted attacks on others, generally in public with a large audience. With regard to the latter type of troll I am speaking, of course, of Donald Trump, current President of these United States, Troll in Chief.

Reporter Chris Cillizza of CNN captures the present unsavory use of trolling from the Oval Office and environs against other politicians by Trump when he says derogatory things about his opponents or imagined opponents in breathtakingly negative reality television terms and gestures.

Cillizza describes the Trump Trolling mechanism as follows:

“That Trump says those sorts of things—even in front of a red-meat-loving crowd like the NRA—is notable. It's hard to imagine Barack Obama or George W. Bush or, well, any other past president saying that kind of stuff about former opponents (and maybe future ones) in public. . . .

“What's more telling to me, however, is how Trump absolutely revels in the reaction he gets from taking these sorts of shots. Go back and watch the [NRA May 28th] video. . . . Notice how Trump, theatrically, lets the crowd soak in [his attack on Senator Elizabeth] Warren . . . and then begin to applaud. Right after he makes the comments about [Senator Ted] Cruz, there are a few excited gasps in the crowd.

“That reaction is what Trump lives for. He is one part performer, one part provocateur and one part politician—and probably in that order of importance. He likes to, in the parlance of the Internet, troll people—go after a point of perceived weakness or insecurity relentlessly and without remorse.

“[W]hen Trump has the chance to return to his natural state as troll-in-chief, he takes it. He loves the barbs, the reaction, the aftermath. It's what makes him go at some level, what he truly enjoys about politics. It's also when he is at his best, the closest representation of the person 60+ million people voted for—a brash, unapologetic pot-stirrer who doesn't care what anyone thinks of him.”

This is what scares the bejesus out of all of us, especially American allies who have observed and heard Trump troll just about every public person with whom he has come in contact, not to mention a goodly number of private citizens who just happened to have enabled Trump’s ability to rise to a nasty challenge where none was invited.

What was always nearly inconceivable in an American statesman or politician heretofore, the deliberate public attack on “enemies,” has become commonplace, i.e., the Troll in Chief as American President.

The Luddite With His Cellphone

The dictionary defines a Luddite as “a member of any of the bands of English workers who destroyed machinery, especially in cotton and woolen mills, that they believed was threatening their jobs (1811–1816).”

Luddites, then, are those individuals who fear changes wrought by new workplace and other technology, who consider their jobs and self-worth to be in jeopardy unless and until those changes are obliterated one way or another. The Industrial Revolution of the early 19th century had so frightened workers that normally law-abiding English millworkers violently protested against trends that they believed could seriously diminish or eliminate their families’ ability to survive financially.

Why use a machine to create product when a man could do it instead? the thinking went. Why permit a faster and superior man-made technology to assume one’s working chores?

Ultimately, Luddites found themselves being shot by mill owners, and eventually the Luddite movement was pretty well eliminated by the military. The resources of the reluctant workers were limited and they were ultimately overpowered by the armed forces of the Crown.

Today there are millions of American Luddites of varying degrees trying to come to grips with the fast pace of the technology of the last twenty or thirty years.

That is, we all know people who refuse to purchase or use cellphones, who will not learn to text, and who avoid computers altogether, disdaining the use of nearly universal email communication. Some of these people make do with alternate, simplified electronic communication such as faxes. Some still use typewriters. A few still rely on carbon paper copies rather than modern copiers. And a very few (very stubborn) individuals write virtually all communications by longhand.

My own daughter avoids writing anything, even a thank-you note, by cursive script, claiming that she was never taught to do this as a schoolchild (I beg to differ). But she is in fact very well-versed in electronic communications of all kinds, far better than I am.

Let’s face it: this is in considerable part a generational thing. Although some of the tech wizards today are near my senior citizen age, we are all familiar with the practically inborn ability of young people to pick up all manner of electronic communication seemingly without effort. No one under the age of 40 or 50 is unable to use electronic communications easily and routinely. It’s all they have ever known. (By contrast, I couldn’t give away an expensive electronic typewriter, a relic of the late 20th century; there simply were no takers.)

To be fair, some people—even after decades of communicating via an originally taught method—still manage to keep up, after a fashion, with the electronic age.

For example, my mother insisted that I set her up with a Mailstation email machine that permitted her to communicate electronically with her friends and family but did not otherwise connect to the Internet. I paid a monthly $10 EarthLink connectivity fee through her telephone line for the last ten years of her life. My offer to buy her an Apple laptop and teach her how to use it fell on deaf ears. Mom happily used the stripped-down Mailstation to keep in touch until her death in 2011 at the age of 92.

She wasn’t afraid of using a keyboard or learning the rudiments of electronic communication, but she rejected all the bells and whistles of a computer, any authentic computer.

The timing was perfect since Mailstation upgrades, parts, and new instruments were discontinued in 2012.

President Donald Trump, however, who has authority over the electronic communications of his administration and indeed, the nation (including military and other national security matters), has been openly scorning electronic messaging through a traditional computer, notebook, iPad, or other similar device. Instead, he has been using first an Android and then an iPhone to tap out Twitter messages to the Faithful among his supporters.

That is, the Luddite who is our nation’s chief executive and is sworn to protect and defend the Constitution if it is under attack (which it is by Russian and other foreign agents using a variety of electronic means) does not communicate messages in private by the use of email in spite of the efforts of various staff members to do this on his behalf.

As far as can be determined, the concepts of WordPerfect and Word (even OpenOffice, Google Docs, and the like) are foreign to The Donald, and his staff provides him with printed photocopies of electronic news items with important matters circled with sharpies.

This is technology that was developed at least half a century ago.

Moreover, and this is especially frightening, the Commander in Chief uses his cellphone on an unsecured line to discuss national security concerns with a variety of individuals, American and foreign, some few diplomatically cleared but most entirely uncleared, even through the office of his Chief of Staff John Kelly or the White House Communications Agency. 

These calls often occur in the White House personal quarters occupied by Trump and may be made during the late afternoon into the evening, the wee hours, and the early morning hours of the next day. It is the whim of Trump that dictates when and to whom and for how long such calls are made, not the security concerns of the nation.

Trump even makes many of these unsecured calls in his White House offices in the middle of the day, undeterred by the absence of any of his staff or the lack of knowledge of any of his technology employees. He appears to have no concerns about just who, located somewhere else in the world, and working for any number of hostile powers, is listening to, recording, and acting upon the information revealed in such calls. And a good number of these calls are being made to heads of state all over the globe, as well as to uncleared presidential cronies.

Moreover, the current occupant of the White House believes that couriers (real people with diplomatic pouches containing actual paper documents) safeguard communications better than encrypted electronic communications.

HE HAS NO IDEA. He doesn’t understand computers. And as one commentator remarked,

“[H]e seems to have disdain for anyone smarter or seemingly smarter than him, so he likely does not have many people near him who actually understand computers.

“I have worked under many managers like him. He knows the answers and will tolerate some discussion, but ultimately he will do what he does. Those kinds of managers are nearly impossible to teach new things to since at some point they will have to admit that their old way was wrong and they are very reluctant to admit they were wrong.”

Hence, the security of the United States in a world where France, the UK, NATO, Pakistan, India, North Korea, China, the Russian Federation, and potentially Iran all arguably have access to useable nuclear weapons is precariously violated by the U.S. president whose Luddite proclivities prevent him from learning how to use (secured) electronic communication or requiring that anyone communicating on his behalf do the same.

“Mommy, I’d rather do it myself.

“On my own time.

“In my own way.

“Without any help from anyone else.

“So take your electronic toys and clear out.

“Just leave me alone with my phone.

“Which I have learned to regard as my Best Friend.

“Donald Trump XXXXX”

How Can We Rewrite Emerging History in the Era of Trump?

I lived through Watergate when I was a law student. It was the defining event of that part of my education: the attempted break-in at DNC headquarters months before I began classes, the initial investigations, the summertime hearings on PBS during which White House employee Alexander Butterfield—mild-mannered and matter of fact—was asked the key question, i.e., whether Nixon taped his conversations, and the John Dean testimony identifying that famous “cancer on the presidency.”

Five of the burglars were pressured to keep quiet and plead guilty, Nixon’s top three assistants H. R. Haldeman, John Ehrlichman, and Attorney General John Mitchell were convicted of all criminal charges and served prison sentences, and after being ordered by the Supreme Court to turn over his surreptitious White House tapes, Nixon resigned rather than suffer the indignity (and loss of pension) of being formally impeached by the House and convicted by the Senate.

A number of other members of the Nixon administration also ended up in the slammer after trying to lie their way out of culpability.

I watched the final hearings of the Senate Judiciary Committee propelled by Chairman Democratic Senator Sam Irvin of North Carolina, who described himself as “just a country lawyer” but was, in truth, a wily and effective chairman aided by a team of prosecutors who had both the legal skills and a congressional majority to bore their way through the miasma of lies.

I also watched the denouement of the proceedings the following year on a television screen during a brief vacation on Martha’s Vineyard when Nixon made his desperate V-signs to the press and public as he paused after his resignation to take a helicopter from the White House lawn to transfer to a flight back to San Clemente.

The storyline was remarkable, at that juncture unique in American history, and ultimately understandable as all the pieces fell into place, with one member of Nixon’s staff after another facing a prison sentence for perjury, obstruction of justice, and a variety of other crimes.

Those of us who lived through this period are shaking our heads at the spate of events and new complications that continue to splat across cable news headlines in the Era of Trump. We know that Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s team surely has access to the details of these revelations and their underlying ramifications, but we’re having trouble wrapping our heads around all the permutations and combinations.

Mueller’s team is relentless, experienced, and zealous. In our hearts we know that ultimately it will reveal crimes still unknown to the public, virulent motivations, and schemes that shock the conscience. We are anxious to understand both the disreputable incentives and the banality of their execution by the greedy con artists making an execrable effort to conduct the business of the country to suit their own financial interests.

For honor is a concept better exemplified by the past than the frightening present with its reliance on personal profits, reality television show-runners, and their ilk.

New revelations are manifest daily by diligent reporters, determined counsel for injured parties, foreign investigators, and unnamed sources hiding in the shadows. Even the compromised Trump Department of Justice surprises us with some unexpected assistance.

This emerging era of social media, presidential tweets, boasting White House counsel, continually breaking news, international reverberations, global players engaging in treason, conspiracy, and bribery, porn stars, money laundering, and influence peddling by Trump’s fixer Michael Cohen is complicated, and unlike avid crossword puzzle aficionados, we are as yet unable to fill in all the blanks. Some of them remain empty in the huge tapestry of tips, partial answers, classified information, and suppositions supplied by a host of relators:

1. “Leakers” among the White House staff who find the current circumstances reprehensible. Another term for these staffers under siege is “brave” civil servants. Yet another might be foolhardy facilitators of a malignant chief executive.

2. Disgruntled and/or fired staffers who were ushered out of the Trump White House after being publicly exposed for one illegality or another, running afoul of Trump’s mixed messages, or simply reaching their limits of service to a madman.

3. A host of female informants who were sexually assaulted or abused by Trump over the years and are now asserting a variety of damage claims against the president.

4. Politicians with a genuine conscience vis-à-vis government service (or at least a hope of being reelected in November). It is often hard to tell these motives apart.

5. Bona fide public servants who have always trod the path of the greater good and rejected the siren call of self-aggrandizement.

What kind of patriot are you, dear reader? Will you be able to say in days to come that you resisted the sweeping forces of destruction and greed? And that you did your best to uphold the rule of law in the country we have made—for good or for bad—out of the revolutionary concepts of our founding fathers (and mothers)?

And, further, that you came forward to be counted and make a difference when it mattered most?

Let us rewrite our history books as we struggle against the insanity of these times and the ascendancy of a man whose instincts mirror those of the worst autocrats of history. We owe this to our children and grandchildren. We owe this to posterity. We owe this to the world.

The Glorious Rising Moon Over New York City

Earlier this week I drove out of Manhattan to return to the Borough of Queens, where I live.

What an evening . . . .

As I drove east through Central Park on the 79th Street Transverse Road and neared Fifth Avenue, I saw the rising moon, huge and yellow, suspended low in the sky just above the pavement precisely between tall buildings on both sides of 79th Street. That moon was absolutely stunning, caught in the air exactly balanced by the looming structures to its north and south.

Brightly lit canals and plateaus and the familiar features of the moon were easily visible. Dead volcanoes, impact craters, and lava flows that have been viewed by astronomers for centuries could be seen with the naked eye. Large dark regions known as Lunar Maria formed eons ago by molten rock were clearly identifiable. An “oceanus” could be seen plus the moon features that observers have named iacus, palus and sinus.

This was mesmerizing. (I could have easily had an accident. Texting has nothing on the moon.)

As I continued east, turning south on Park Avenue, continuing east again, turning south on Lexington Avenue, and turning east onto 59th Street, the moon was again visible, barely tucked into the sky between the towering facades on both sides of the street.

The full moon, huge and yellow, was inviting me to dream.

I kept looking around to exchange glances with some other driver or passenger, to share this remarkable phenomenon, but could not catch anyone else’s eye.

Surely I wasn’t the only person in the city that evening to see this stunning sky with the yellow disc balanced effortlessly between the apartment houses on the east-bound roads.

Driving east over the Queensborough Bridge, I emerged onto Queens Boulevard, still heading east or slightly northeast, with the brilliant moon rising slightly higher and off to my right about 20 degrees.

The moon remained my companion on the right most of the way back to Rego Park—my sentinel, my guide, my inspiration. I felt like singing to Lady Moon, like murmuring a love song.

In the Middle Ages, a lunatic could be described as a person acting under the influence of luna (Latin for moon), and through the centuries moons might be blamed for a variety of actions deemed madness or dangerous.

But this past week that old moon clearly evoked a night for lovers, even though I was alone. With the moon. With that great big glorious rising yellow moon over New York.

Let us recall the thoroughly romantic movie Moonstruck, and the reverence shown the moon in that film as it shone over New York Harbor, viz. “Cosmo’s moon” and “La bella luna!” Mix in a bit of Puccini's La bohème and the evening would have been complete. Magnifico.