On Killing Oneself

Kate Spade. Noted handbag and fashion designer. Was widely admired. Married and mother of a pre-teen daughter Frances, but dreaded an impending divorce. Lived in a Park Avenue residence. Had millions.

Committed suicide June 5th.

Anthony Bourdain. Remarkable chef, food lover and connoisseur, raconteur, adventurer, with a pre-teen daughter Ariane. Traveled all over the world, met everyone, filmed stories that began with food but morphed into human interest stories throughout the globe. Was known everywhere. Beat numerous addictions. Going through some “dark days.” Was widely admired. Had millions.

Committed suicide June 8th.

My grandfather Harry, always at odds with family members over jointly owned businesses, finally had a break with reality when he was in the early stages of a new start-up business with his two sons, and hung himself. In his basement. Leaving my grandmother to discover him and cut him down. I was 11 years old. The same age as Ariane Bourdain. I still hear my father shouting up the stairs early that morning as he rushed out of the house to get to my grandparents’ home.

My grandmother never recovered from the shock.

My brother Steven, feeling the strain of a long highway commute to work year after year, hopelessly wishing for a house in the country and a dog (was that so much to ask?), suffered a breakdown and quit his employment some years into his marriage, with two grown children. He took an overdose and nearly died in an emergency room.

He never resumed real employment for the last 15 or so years of his life, being diagnosed as obsessive-compulsive with explosive bouts of anger. In spite of these handicaps, he continued his love affair with classical music, and we shared experiences playing and singing the great compositions. But he never recovered his emotional and psychological balance, and died at his own request when he suffered severe graft v. host disease following a bone marrow transplant (from his twin sister) to cure leukemia. The leukemia went into permanent remission but my brother suffered greatly month after month and finally chose to refuse all nutrition and hydration and simply die to put an end to the pain.

Was this suicide? Perhaps. More likely, it was confronting the severity of his condition and choosing to end the agony.

We’ve all known family or friends who made a decision to exit this life voluntarily for a variety of reasons, and except in the case of irreversible severe illness, we wish we could somehow have made a difference. Leaving suddenly and decisively is the easy way out most of the time; sticking around and battling demons to a draw if not a victory takes courage and determination.

I wish all my readers the strength to do the latter, with help and love from family, friends, and if necessary, strangers on a suicide hot line. Whatever works.

You’ll be grateful in the morning when the sun rises, in the afternoon when the breezes blow, and in the evening when the stars come out. The world won’t give up on you if you don’t give up on it.

Keep giving to whoever you happen to encounter on your journey on this earth. Someone will always give back.

A Guide to the Pardon Power of the Emperor Donald

Sovereigns of old tended to bear a staff or baton as an emblem of authority, a scepter if you will. Such items were borne on high as a sign to the rabble to heed the power of the reigning monarch or suffer unpleasant consequences.

Hence, the king or emperor or princeling might wave such a staff or baton during his time sitting in court, or overseeing his lands, or instructing his people.

His authority was absolute, and the scepter tangible.

The Russian Tsar Ivan the Terrible even beat his son Ivan the prince to death with a scepter in 1581 when his son attempted to prevent his father from attacking his pregnant wife, who subsequently miscarried. A warning to all who disagree with the sovereign.

Imagine if you will the substitution of a mere power—an absolute power designed to flout established authority for real and imagined enemies—for a physical symbol of authority, a power with so far a reach that it could entice the most craven of enemies to lust after it.

I am referring to the presidential power to grant reprieves (commutations) and pardons for federal crimes vested in Article II, Section 2 of the Constitution, i.e.,

“[H]e shall have Power to grant Reprieves and Pardons for Offenses against the United States, except in Cases of Impeachment.”

Traditionally, such pardons are requested through a pardons office located within the DOJ Office of the Pardon Attorney. And, also traditionally, individuals are not eligible to request a presidential pardon until five years after completion of a sentence.

But these are not traditional times under the reign of Emperor Donald Trump.

Let us look at the pardons Trump has granted or is considering granting thus far during his short presidency, only two of which were actually requested through the DOJ Office of the Pardon Attorney:

JOE ARPAIO

— First up was former Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio, reviled for terrorizing Latinos in Arizona for decades, ordering that motorists be stopped for the “crime” of appearing to be illegal immigrants (many were not even Latino) and then reported to federal immigration authorities.

The sheriff also ran notorious outdoor prison camps that denied inhabitants the most basic rights and protections from the weather, both hot and cold. Some prisoners died in his care at a suspiciously high rate. Arpaio described his electrically fenced prison for Latinos as a “concentration camp.”

After Arpaio’s conviction for violating a federal court injunction against detaining anyone not suspected of a state or federal crime but prior to sentencing, less than a year ago, Trump ignored the established pardon system and gave Sheriff Joe a Get Out of Jail Free Card.

As a follow-up, the 85-year-old Arpaio is on the primary ballot for an August 28th Republican primary election for the U.S. Senate from Arizona. Put that in your pipe and smoke it.

SHOLOM RUBASHKIN

— Next is Sholom Rubashkin, the former chief executive of the country’s largest ultra-kosher slaughterhouse and meat packing plant (and the only one authorized by Israel's Orthodox rabbinate to export beef to Israel). Rubashkin had his sentence commuted by Trump late last year after being convicted of more than 80 counts of financial fraud in 2009 and serving eight years in prison. This followed a massive immigration raid on the family-owned facility in Iowa.

Rubashkin is a member of the Chabad-Lubavitch Hasidic sect of Judaism, centered in Brooklyn, a known power center to New York politicians seeking affirmation of their influence.

Rubashkin was convicted of profiting from the labor of hundreds of undocumented immigrants, including children, and had defrauded lenders of more than $26 million. After Rubashkin had been sentenced to 27 years in prison for bank fraud, Trump commuted his sentence on December 20, 2017.

There had been calls from a number of prominent politicians to commute the sentence—which was imposed for non-violent offenses—due to its length.

Rubashkin had contributed significant sums to Republican politicians over the years as well as lesser amounts to Democratic politicians, which appears to account for the keen political interest in his welfare.

Rubashkin and fellow company executives had been charged with a variety of offenses including conspiracy to harbor undocumented immigrants for profit and over 9,000 child labor law violations. The defendant had also laundered money through a secret bank account and falsified bank documents in order to continue borrowing additional sums.

Robert Teig, former assistant U.S. attorney from Iowa who helped prosecute Rubashkin, criticized the commutation of his sentence because of the defendant’s significant involvement in enabling illegal immigration. As described in The Washington Post,

“Authorities rounded up 389 undocumented immigrants, more than 20 of them minors, who described a long list of abhorrent working conditions, including 12-hour shifts without overtime pay and exposure to dangerous chemicals. A spokesman for a food workers union compared it to scenes from Upton Sinclair’s ‘The Jungle.’”

Hence, a virulently anti-immigrant president has commuted the sentence of an egregious and politically powerful expediter of illegal immigration and exploiter of the labor of hapless immigrants. This one appears to have hit home in spades.

KRISTIAN SAUCIER

— The third convicted person to benefit from the largesse of Donald Trump is Kristian Saucier, a former U.S. Navy sailor who took unauthorized cell photos of a nuclear reactor inside a U.S. submarine and was subsequently convicted of illegal possession and retention of national defense information. 

Earlier this year, Saucier’s crime was pardoned and Saucier's probation following his one-year sentence vacated by Donald Trump following submission by counsel of a request through the Justice Department’s Office of the Pardon Attorney.

SCOOTER LIBBY

— Moving right along, we get to I. Libby Lewis, Jr., more commonly known as “Scooter Libby,” who became embroiled in the public outing of CIA agent Valerie Plame prior to the onset of the deceptive lead-up to the Iraq war. Libby, who was Vice President Dick Cheney’s chief of staff during the early presidency of George W. Bush, had leaked the covert status of Plame to the press in response to a published column of Plame’s husband Ambassador Joe Wilson which indicated that he, Wilson, had been sent to Niger to investigate claims of Iraq’s resurgent effort to obtain nuclear materials and that, further, there were no then-existing WMDs.

As a result, Plame’s long and honorable career with the CIA cratered and the safety of Plame’s Agency contacts around the world was imperilled.

James Comey was then deputy attorney general, and he appointed prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald to handle the case. Libby was convicted in 2007 after a jury trial of four felony counts of perjury, lying to investigators, and obstruction of justice. Libby was subsequently sentenced to 30 months in prison, although the prison sentence was promptly commuted by President Bush, who refused to grant a full pardon.

Not to be deterred, Trump has now completed the process of legally exonerating a man who he clearly believes to be as much a victim of James Comey and “retribution politics” as he himself has purportedly become by granting Libby a full pardon at the request of his own very recent former counsel Victoria Toensing and her husband and law partner Joseph diGenova. Conflict of interest, anybody?

As Representative Adam B. Schiff, Democrat of California and Ranking Member of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, wrote on Twitter,

“This is the president’s way of sending a message to those implicated in the Russia investigation: You have my back and I’ll have yours.”

JACK JOHNSON

— Next on Trump’s list of pardoned felons is the first African-American heavyweight boxing champion Jack Johnson (the “Galveston Giant”), who was convicted in 1913 by an all-white jury (just five years after winning the championship) for violating the 1910 federal Mann Act prohibiting the transport of women across state lines for “immoral” purposes (in this case the prostitute Belle Schreiber).

Johnson had angered many people prior to that time as a result of

“his flamboyant lifestyle and open relationships with white women, including three [successive] marriages at a time when interracial marriage was outlawed in 36 of 46 states.”

Johnson’s career was ruined as a result of his conviction, and Johnson thereafter fled abroad for eight years to avoid imprisonment. He finally surrendered to U.S. authorities in 1920 and served ten months in jail.

Jack Johnson has just been pardoned posthumously by Donald Trump. As described by reporter Jessica Pliley, the pardon

“came 105 years too late [and] is not enough to address the scourge of racially motivated policing, or the entanglements of white supremacy and sexual regulation.”

The conviction was always considered a gross miscarriage of justice.

Johnson’s pardon was granted as a result of a telephone request to Trump by actor and film producer Sylvester Stallone—who plans to make a documentary about the boxing champion—and that pardon will probably be the least controversial and most deserved pardon granted by Trump.

Note that Stallone was asked by Trump if he would consider assuming the role of chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, but said that he would rather work with veterans.

The irony of an openly racist president pardoning a black sports champion for maintaining an interracial relationship is palpable.

In addition, that this long-overdue redress of a significant wrong resulted from a request by a Hollywood actor to our Reality Show president cannot be overlooked. If the heirs of Jack Johnson could not obtain a pardon for 105 years, why should a request from the star of the “Rocky” boxing films accomplish the trick almost overnight? Why, indeed.

DINESH D’SOUZA

— Moving right along, Trump has now pardoned prominent conservative provocateur and filmmaker Dinesh D’Souza (an elbow-throwing culture warrior like Trump), who was charged with making straw donations to New York State GOP Senate candidate Wendy Long in 2012, i.e., convincing others to donate to Long and then reimbursing them, evading federal contribution limitations on individual donations to any one candidate.

D’Souza pled guilty, and joined a cadre of egregious straw donors who have been identified and often prosecuted, including Democrats. Some straw donors have also been prosecuted under equivalent state law. The sentence D’Souza received was relatively light: five years of probation and eight months in a halfway house.

Why would Trump pardon this particular felon? No doubt because D’Souza was prosecuted by then-U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara in the Southern District of New York during the Obama administration. Recall that Bharara was publicly and summarily fired by Trump shortly after Trump took office, and has since become an occasional vocal critic of Trump. (And when he was pardoned, D’Souza Twittered a personal attack against his fellow Indian nemesis Bharara.)

It’s all personal in Donald Trump’s world. Tit for tat.

Finally, we come to two more intertwined probable sentence revisions on Trump’s Wish List:

MARTHA STEWART

— Style maven Martha Stewart was convicted in March 2004 of four counts of obstructing justice and lying to investigators concerning a stock trade she had made several years previously, along with her former stockbroker. Stewart served five months in jail.

The lead prosecutor for the Southern District of New York when Stewart was tried was none other than James Comey, not exactly Trump’s Best Friend.

In addition, “business tycoon” Stewart had previously appeared on “The Apprentice: Martha Stewart,” a reality game show and spin-off from the Trump series “The Apprentice.” The Stewart version of the show was far more professional and much less confrontational, and was shorn of the mean-spirited approach of the original Trump version.

Nevertheless, both the Comey involvement in Stewart’s conviction and Stewart’s appearances on a spin-off show from Donald Trump’s much ballyhooed original show make Stewart a probable shoo-in for a pardon.

ROD BLAGOJEVICH

— And last but not least, we get to the second sentence change being considered by our intrepid emperor president, a commutation of the sentence of “thoroughly corrupt” former Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich.

Sports fans will recall that Blagojevich attempted to auction off Barack Obama’s vacant U.S. Senate seat in Illinois to the highest bidder following the 2008 presidential election. There were apparently “bids” in excess of half a million bucks. The Governor also sought promises of campaign cash, as well as a cabinet post or ambassadorship in exchange for his Senate choice.

For starters, Blagojevich was impeached and removed from office by the Illinois legislature. Then he was tried and retried, and successfully convicted of a total of 17 charges of wire fraud, attempted extortion, and conspiracy to solicit bribes.

Ironically, “Blago” and his chief of staff had been wire-tapped, a claim that Trump has repeatedly (and falsely) made against the Obama administration. Just to round out the salient factors, Blagojevich appeared on Trump’s show Celebrity Apprentice when he was on trial in 2010. (Wouldn’t you just know it?)

As a result, Blagojevich is currently cooling his heels in a Colorado prison in the middle of a 14-year bribery and corruption convictions sentence. The Chicago U.S. Attorney who oversaw the federal prosecutions was, again, Patrick Fitzgerald, currently counsel for James Comey—the man at the top of the Trump Enemies List.

Trump must be salivating at the thought of smearing the name of Barack Obama in yet another context. The fact that President Obama played no part in the downfall of Rod Blagojevich is, of course, irrelevant, this being Trump Land.

So there you have it, so far. As John Kass of the Chicago Tribune has remarked,

“Trump dangling pardons as he himself is under investigation in the Mueller Russia collusion probe is full of theatrical drama. It’s fascinating in the way political intrigue among the powerful is always fascinating, like a game of thrones. It is the true pastime of Washington.

“And Washington is our modern Versailles, just as sick as the palace of the French royals but without the rouge and powdered wigs and countertenors.”

Are the newest pardons and proposed pardons an obvious sign to Mike Flynn, Paul Manafort, and Michael Cohen to Keep the Faith Until Daddy Can Spring You? A not-so-subtle request not to cooperate with Robert Mueller and his team no matter how bleak things appear to be?

Kass continues with his comparisons:

“Blagojevich is the kind of politician Trump knows only too well. During his campaign for president, Trump told us as much, said he knew how to buy them and sell them.

“Blago was for sale. People’s lives were ruined. A life was ended, Chris Kelly, Blagojevich’s fundraiser, killing himself in a dirty shack south of Chicago.”

As if the Emperor and Blago had considered the human costs. As if Trump ever will.

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”