Trump the Swashbuckler

Everybody loves a pirate. Pirates don't live by the rules. Au contraire. Pirates break the rules. They run those pirate flags, the skull and crossbones, to put fear in the hearts of the average people, the good people, the law abiders. Trump don't need no laws. Even now at the head of the government he shows no inclination to follow the laws. And he gets everybody's attention. Because everybody, right and left wing, love a guy who has no fear of the system.

Trump became the System, the Establishment, but he breaks more laws while in the highest office in the land than Jesse James and Clyde Barker combined. Everybody loves an outlaw. Even Trump's adversaries have an admiration, a secret appreciation, for one or two of his crazy behaviors. He fires James Comey and calls him a "nut job." And he tells the Russians all about it! He hires an anti-environmentalist to lead the Environmental Protection Agency and Betsy DeVos, an enemy of the public schools, to be head of the Department of Education. Those two choices bugged me. But, I get a secret kick out of Trump's embrace of the Russians. I know people like to say "We Americans hate the Russians, because they are evil and we are good." I do not buy that viewpoint.

Strangely, the right wing, alt-right guys took a hankering to Vladimir Putin a while back. I guess they liked some of his aggressiveness, and his tough stance on the Chechens and some of his "traditional values"-- including rejection of gay culture. Apparently being a homosexual is a dangerous pursuit in Russia and that's an unfortunate state of affairs. I understand the Russian economy in not strong, oil production being their greatest source of wealth, and that's an odd state of affairs for a country that has explored space-- even getting Sputnik, Muttnik and Yuri Gargarin up in space  and circling the globe prior to the United States finally getting John Glenn up into the wild, blue yonder and around the globe. So they're smart people, an advanced society... but not making great inroads in the global economy at the moment.

But Trump has embraced the Russians, despite the tradition of American conservatives to demonize the Russians. And the liberal/left wing of the American politics agree with the conservatives on that point. All claim the Russians are earthly versions of Darth Vader. This feels like a repeat of the Cold War. For awhile we had an altered view-- as symbolized the the image we had of Russian women.

Russian women went through a make-over in the American psyche. Russian females were stereotyped by America during the Cold War. We were presented a caricature, Russian women were masculine bureaucrats, Olympic athletes lacking in estrogen or peasant women with babushkas wrapped around their heads. That changed around the 1990s and suddenly Russian women were considered Playboy magazine-style babes, the kind that keep their boyfriends warm at night. Kate McKinnon, from Saturday Night Live (SNL) does a great send-up of the crafty Russian peasant woman, living on bread and potatoes, a reminder of their earlier stereotype.

I like Trump's irreverence on the subject of Russia. He seems to admire Russians, regardless of the political repercussions. And, step back from the emotions for a moment.... if the Russians were smart enough to control the outcome of the 2016 American presidential election just by tapping on computer keyboards and generating wild stories about Hillary Clinton-- maybe they are the worthy of our respect. That's blasphemy, I know, and everybody gets holier than thou about protecting American democracy from the likes of evil Russians.

Something other than Russians is transforming American democracy. It's not the Russians. The social network, the instant, electronic media environment, has changed the playing field. The system seems to be imploding. The Republican and Democrats are like the Bloods and the Crips, the two Los Angeles street gangs, and in both worlds the colors red and blue are used to identify the adversaries.

There is gridlock in our political system-- and the divisions extend beyond the Congress out into the streets. The Trump supporters hate the Never Trump crowd and vice-versa. And Trump defies political party-- seems to stand above it. So political parties may be a thing of the past-- and the two-party political system that has defined our democracy may be on the ropes.

Trump the Pirate is endlessly frustrating like an egregious child who refuses to do what the Establishment, the media and polite society would prefer him to do. The man is a pirate-- and everybody loves a pirate, but only for a little while-- and only in the abstract. As we get to know Trump better he seems like less fun. But for now he's keeping us all entertained. Arrrrggggh!

From Russia With Love

“President John F. Kennedy had named Fleming's novel From Russia with Love among his ten favorite books of all time in Life magazine,^[4] producers Broccoli and Saltzman chose this as the follow-up to (James) Bond's cinematic debut in Dr. No. From Russia with Love was the last film President Kennedy saw at the White House on 20 November 1963 before going to Dallas.”

(Wikipedia)

The film From Russia With Love (1963) came out at the height of the Cold War. I didn’t know about the John Kennedy connection until today while reading the Wikipedia article. But the movie is an indication of where the average American stood on the subject of Russian culture. The Cold War propaganda fed to American kids at the time was best exemplified by the character Rosa Klebb, the ugly Russian spy who attempts to kill James Bond with a poisoned toe-spike.

The image of Russia offered to us featured a vast, colorless, inhumane Communist gulag filled with unattractive women and brutal men and totally lacking in consumer goods—except shoes with spikes in the toes.

And now we have learned that Russian women are hot—the beneficiaries of a fantastic make-over, historically speaking.

Vladimir Putin is depicted as something akin to the harsh Communist bureaucrats, very utilitarian and single-minded in his quest for world domination. We are always reminded he began adult life as a KGB agent. The more things change, the more they stay the same.

The new twist is Donald Trump, the American president, having a pro-Putin stance. This twists America’s psyche into knots. The ugly women are now the pretty women? The bad guys are now the good guys? Or, are Russians still the bad guys—only now they may have been clever enough to have influenced an American election.

If a bunch of Russian hackers had the skill to get Donald Trump elected American president—everyone should be hiring them for their next project. Trump may have been the biggest underdog in Presidential history. Now he’s President. He’s keeping everybody engaged with his unpredictability, his erratic tweeting and his disregard to proper Presidential behavior. And added to his unpredictability, he refuses to say negative things about Putin and the Russians. Does that mean he colluded with the Russians? Not so sure about that. I can’t picture Trump cooperating with anybody.

But here’s a twist—two of Trump’s wives have been of Slovak-style background. Ivana Trump married Donald way back in 1977, long before the fall of the Berlin Wall. She must be celebrated by Trump for her contribution of their daughter Ivanka, the light of Donald’s life. Mother Ivana was born in Czechoslovakia and attended University in Prague. She’s really Czech! What a Czech… check her out!

Melania Trump, Trump’s present wife and First Lady of the United States, was born in Slovenia, part of Yugoslavia at the time. She went to school in Ljubljana and that’s not in Kansas. Melania speaks 6 languages--English, French, Italian, German, Serbo-Croatian, and her native Slovene. She loves fancy clothes, no doubt, as a former model.

So, Donald Trump showed some open-minded freedom in his choice of mates and has a carnal connection to the part of world once firmly in the embrace of Soviet Russia, as part of the Iron Curtain countries. Trump’s women have been Russian—esque, maybe not actual Russian but certainly from the Soviet suburbs, and that part of the world has been good to him. The American press (media) never considers a man’s basic drives, sex and procreation, when understanding Donald’s Trump’s fondness for people from the cooler climes, just east of Europe.

And Ivanka will sell you all kinds of fancy shoes, but none with spikes coming out of the toes.