Let's Shake On It!

The simple handshake is a standard greeting in American culture, derived from a European practice that goes back at least to ancient Greece. I say, “simple,” but the act of shaking hands is often not simple at all.

I have always been fascinated by the secret handshakes by which members of various sub rosa societies may recognize one another. I worked with a man in the early 1980s who was a Mason of a fairly high order of magnitude. He was a member of one of the more serious-minded and tradition based historical Masonic orders, as opposed to the more common “masonic lodges,” which should more properly be called drinking clubs. This man was a fine poster-child for freemasonry, embodying all of its better characteristics. He told me of a time when he visited Australia with a group of manufacturing engineers on some kind of work related trip. Upon landing, they were met at the airport by several men from the Australian company that they would be working with. Shaking hands all around, he was alerted to the fact that one of the Australians was a fellow Mason. Later on that evening, they exchanged the coded secret words to insure that the handshake had not been a coincidence. Thereafter, they were bound to assist each other as brothers. Fascinating.

Perhaps it’s better to say that shaking hands is never really as simple as the nature of the act implies. A handshake always betrays personal information, and we are always judged by the nature and quality of our handshake. Along with a reading of facial expressions, there is a lot that may be learned in a short time. Fear may be noticed in a fight-or-flight response. Aggression and sociability are frequently displayed. Real affection is possible. But if you are not lucky, some men will attempt to dominate you with their handshake.

Yes, I’m winding this around to Donald Trump, as so often happens on this blog. I’ll get to that in a moment.

There are the bone crushers, a disturbingly large group with many sub-categories. Some are just glad-hands who don’t know their own strength. Of these, there are many that you can educate. I attended law school with a big, strong young Texan from a farm/oil community in West Texas. He could turn coal into diamonds with his hands, and evidently a powerful handshake was the norm in his milieu growing up. When I explained to him that he was killing me, he was genuinely grateful to hear it, and he modified his handshake permanently so as not to cause further offense. He thanked me again a few years later, because he had been glad to go forth into the legal community with a socially acceptable handshake, and not have to learn the hard way.

Others of this type do know their own strength, and they enjoy using it on every man that they meet. You can tell them that you have a bit of arthritis, so please take it easy, but they think that’s funny somehow and go on hurting you.

HELPFUL TIP: if you know, or suspect, that a man that you are about to shake hands with is a bone-crusher, seize his hand powerfully by the fingers before he has a chance to get his death-grip on you. Unless he is a trained martial artist, he will be helpless.

Then there are the guys who hold on tight and never let go. Now we’re moving on to Donald Trump territory.

By now there is a visual record of hundreds of Trump handshakes from the last two years, and it is disturbing. Trump is a dominator; man, woman, boy, or girl, he will try his best to dominate and frighten you with his wrestling-like handshake maneuvers. First he jerks your hand towards his right side so hard that you almost bump into his ample waistline. Then he pushes back and forth like a baseball umpire calling strikes. Then he turns his hand palm up, squeezing and jerking your hand the entire time. Often this procedure seems to go on forever. Mr. Abe of Japan was obviously confused and embarrassed by this kind of rough handling. Mr. Macron of France seemed almost amused, and attempted to turn the tables on Trump the next time they met. I’ll wager that there are many in the diplomatic community who have resolved never to shake hands with Trump again, and it is a certainty that Trump’s handshake is a popular topic of diplomatic conversation.

Yes, our unfortunate president treats everyone he meets as though they were air-conditioning contractors from Philadelphia. His attempt to dominate them with his handshake is part of his intention to bully them and cheat them. The effort begins immediately with the first handshake.

This is symptomatic of a larger problem with Trump. He seems to crave the approval of certain classes of people, such as the high society types in New York, Washington politicians, and the Hollywood upper crust. He almost seems to wish that people in general liked him. And yet he himself does not seem to like anyone, much less love anyone.

His children are virtual strangers to him; he famously ignored them all until they were university age. After that, the children of his first marriage seem to have gotten some attention from him, but the nature and extent of that attention is a matter for specialists, and I will not express an opinion. Poor Tiffany seems to have been born on the shit-list. She has always been, and remains, a non-entity. Trump ignores Barron whenever they appear together.  Regarding children in general, Trump seems ill at ease. At this year’s Halloween gathering at the White House, Trump reached out and touched their little hands gingerly, as though he were afraid to catch an infection.

Of his ex-wives, he seems to get along with Ivana in some shallow way. Marla Maples, on the other hand, fled after their brief marriage to California and has not been seen or heard from since. That’s Tiffany’s mom. They share a life in the shadows. There’s a story there, but we will not hear it during Donald’s lifetime. Marla wrote a book for a major publisher about ten years ago, but publication was mysteriously cancelled “by mutual decision” at the last minute. Melania seems by turns pleased with the attention that she’s getting and annoyed to be in a room with Trump. Luckily for her, she maintains what for her and Trump passes for good looks, that medically enhanced, mega-statuesque quality that exists in relation to the truly beautiful as donuts exist in relation to the truly delicious. I can’t imagine that they talk together that much. She has future-ex-wife written all over her.

Of his friends, well, Trump does not appear to have any friends. In fact, he does not appear ever to have had any friends at all. There are no old friends from Jamaica; no old school chums from Fordham or Wharton. It’s possible that Trump’s only friend in history was his mentor, Roy Cohn. How sad would that be?

It is often said that Trump loves only himself, but my hunch is that the opposite is true. He hates everybody, including himself.

Oh, woe is the country that finishes its brief existence in the spotlight with a misanthrope like this for a president. Politicians and other paid professional optimists will say that America remains the Shining City on the Hill, and that it will take more than Donald Trump to bring us low! That’s what they get paid to say. But if we are being honest, we will admit that the arc our greatness turned downwards about thirty years ago, and Trump’s presidency is only steepening the decline. There’s time left, so enjoy it while you can. Don’t spend down your savings just yet, but diversifying your holdings might be a good idea. Think about including domestic and foreign property, precious metals and stones (with physical possession), and a basket of the more reliable foreign currencies.  I no longer trust our politicians with the fate of the dollar, stocks, or bonds. If you have no holdings to diversify, and especially if you are over forty-five years old, might I suggest learning woodcraft, hunting, and gathering.

And if you somehow get stuck meeting the Donald, don’t shake his hand. Use any excuse, tell him you have the flu, tell him you just jerked off a dog, spit in your hand, anything. You’ll thank me after you watch him yanking the other suckers around the room.  

Why Is Donald Trump President?

History’s chain of causation is often ambiguous or obscure, but let’s hold this thing up to the light.

Al Gore won the election of 2000, but it was stolen from him by unscrupulous men backed by a partisan political Supreme Court. Absent Ralph Nader it wouldn’t have been close enough to steal. If Al Gore had been sworn in as president, according to the law and the will of the American people, Donald J. Trump would never have become more than the ridiculous celebrity con-man that he was up to the first week in November, 2016. He would never have had the chance to become the ridiculous celebrity con-man president that he is today.  

With George W. Bush safely installed in the White House, all of the terrible dominoes started to fall. The pointless, ill-advised wars, the ridiculous and unnecessary tax cuts for the rich, the irresponsible fear mongering after 9-11, the extravagant recklessness of the banking community, the near fatal crashing of the American economy, and the world’s economy. With Al Gore in the White House, none of that happens, or at least nowhere near as dramatically.

If the aughts had been characterized by a reasonable foreign policy and a responsible fiscal policy, the election of 2008 would have been a relatively sedate affair. In that atmosphere, there would be no reason to reach so desperately for the change that Barack Obama represented. George W. set the stage for Obama. And no Obama, no Trump. Trump is the response of America’s irretrievably racist and bigoted majority to a black president. Yeah, I said it. It’s a “majority” because I’m including the people who would never talk about it in a million years. The hidden racists. The Trump voters, with a thousand excuses why they’re not racists at all, and a thousand reasonable lies for why they voted for Trump. Those racists, those bigots.

So I’m blaming the national tragedy that is Donald J. Trump on:

1.   The Supreme Court;

2.   Governor John Bush* et al;

3.   Ralph Nader; and

4.   Those fucking chads.

That’s in no particular order.

But that was then (W.), and this is now (Trump). And we’re stuck with it. If W. was an almost endearing, lazy-minded fool, Trump is a laughing hyena in a fat suit.

*I’m not calling that asshole “Jeb.” The man’s name is John Ellis Bush. You can look it up. He wants it kept a secret for some reason. In my experience, when people go by an alias, it’s usually because the police are after them for something. 

A Modest Proposal To Reduce The Cost Of The Border Wall, Which We Totally Need, Because The Whole Thing Is A Catastrophe

After months of wondering whether such a thing were even possible, it appears that Donald Trump is the President of the United States and that he has proposed a budget that includes a couple of billion dollars to start building that wall between the U.S. and Mexico. Many of us were sure that he would let the matter quietly die, because: 1) the utility of the wall would be dubious at best; 2) the wall would be preposterously expensive; and 3) of course Mexico would not pay for it. None of this, however, seems to bother our fearless president. He has always been brave with other people’s money.

There are problems. For one thing, our border with Mexico is very, very long, like two-thousand miles or something. No one knew that it was so long! For another thing, a lot of the necessary land belongs to people that we more-or-less get along with, like American citizens and friendly Indians. We’d have to obtain it somehow. Also, some of the land for the wall is not contoured conveniently, i.e., there are significant changes in grade that would complicate construction enormously. Not to worry, though, there are work-arounds that would go a long way to solving these problems.

It must be noted that the country of Mexico tappers inward as you go south from the border. The border itself is the widest spot in Mexico by far. If I may be permitted to offer a suggestion, and I do hope that you will indulge me, why not formulate a new border and build the wall where it would be more convenient to do so? Say, across the Tropic of Cancer or thereabouts? The breadth of Mexico is more manageable there, only four or five hundred miles.

Building the wall there would have many advantages beyond simplifying the construction of the wall. It would increase the land mass of the United States considerably. It would, in fact, increase the mass of “California Land,” because the area that would become American would include all of Baja California. This could be the selling-point for the entire project. Who would say no to more of California? And more of Southern California at that! (Redwoods are nice, but almost no one really goes there.)

DISCLAIMER: Don’t be holding this shit against me. This here is satire.

It must be acknowledged that this plan would bring problems of its own, but nothing that would be too troublesome, considering all of the benefits. The whole plan would actually be of a piece with the shared history of our two countries. After all, it wouldn’t be the first time that we reduced the area of Mexico by one-half by force of arms, simply because we wanted something (California, mostly). Mexico is low-hanging fruit! Aren’t we all happy now that the states of Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, California, Nevada, Utah, Colorado and parts of Wyoming and Kansas are part of our glorious U.S.A.? (See, Mexican-American War, 1846-1848.) Upon reflection, I guess we can’t take credit for Texas, because the Texans had already stolen most of Texas fair and square. But the rest of it, certainly, we Americans stole that. (Thanks, President Polk!) History could repeat itself. What has happened can happen again.

Mexico would still be a rather large country, and they would be keeping their capital city, all of their big touristy spots and almost all of their oil production. (Although they would be losing their natural gas.) They might be better off without the northern part of the country. It’s just a desert full of gangsters anyway. With a little bit of luck all around, most of the gangsters would get lost in the scuffle. There would be plenty of room left down south for all of the displaced Mexicans. Oh, yes, displaced. They certainly couldn’t remain in those new American states. If we left them there, what would be the point? Besides, voters these days wouldn’t stand for such a generous immigration program. We would need the open space anyway, to accommodate new immigrants who displayed the appropriate level of merit. Maybe we could let the Mexican doctors stay.

The many Americans who currently live in Northern Mexico because they can’t afford to live in the U.S. anymore would have to decide whether to follow the actual Mexicans in their trek southwards or to try to make a go of it in new American states. But really, no one has ever cared about them, and that probably won’t change any time soon, so no one need consider them in the planning of the operation. A certain number of friendly-fire accidents can be tolerated.

“But Fred,” I hear you thinking, “what about all of the mountains?” Be assured that I did consult a relief map, and the mountains in central Mexico are not a surprise to me. You will notice, however, that right around the Tropic of Cancer the mountains thin out a bit, so there’s that. There are some mountains in any route that the wall could take. Allow me, while I am speaking freely, to suggest a separate work-around for mountains that could work out nicely.

I recall long ago reading a proposal to use radioactive materials to create an impenetrable barrier at a border. Was that in connection with Korea? Vietnam? I forget now. The idea was to put plugs of highly radioactive material in some sort of pattern at intervals that would render the area deadly in a short time. You would need one hundred Sieverts or something, throw in some extra, enough to cause incapacity almost immediately and death within minutes. This would have the additional advantage of reducing the length of the wall by many miles! Public opinion should tolerate the radiation itself very well. The area would be many hundreds of miles south of the existing border, in land that would recently have been Mexico.

And, you say, it would be a war! War is bad! But if we must have a war, and it’s beginning to appear that we must have a war, why don’t we have a war that is close to home for a change? Why don’t we have a war with clear objectives that would deliver clear benefits? Mexico is very attractive as a target for military aggression. The savings in logistics alone would be colossal, and Mexico’s lack of military potential would keep casualties down, on our side anyway. The first Mexican-American War was a relatively low cost, low casualty operation that yielded spectacular results.

Greater minds than mine will be required to hammer out the details, but now is clearly a time when we are being encouraged to think big. Our current ruling junta virtually demands it! Our bold new chief executive is a man of action, and I wouldn’t put anything past our revolutionary 115^th Congress. Pursue your best interest, and Devil take the hindmost! That doctrine, now completely operational, applies not only to individuals, but also to the country at large.

Be all that you can be, America! And be another 400,000 square miles of Mexico, too! Given the new reality that we are living with, I’m sure that you’ll agree that this proposal has become reasonable. 

H. Ross Perot: Businessman And Presidential Wannabe

Harry Truman was a dry-goods store owner and Jimmy Carter had the family peanut farm, but neither of them ran for office based on their business skills. Of the others, there was one actor and quite a few professional politicians. (I’m limiting my search group to presidents in my lifetime.) Three candidates stressed their business experience and promised to bring those skills to running the government. That would be George W. Bush, Donald J. Trump and H. Ross Perot.

(I’m leaving out Willard Romney. Most of his resume was business related, but it was not the kind of experience that anyone would want voters to even know about, much less consider, being all robber-baron stuff.)

The funny part is that the two men in that small group who actually won the presidency were awful businessmen. W. Bush’s resume included several business failures that lost a lot of money for other people but from which he was curiously bailed out, plus a few downright shady deals (The Texas Rangers episode), and even included allegations of insider trading. Not a lot of textbook success there. D. J. Trump talks a good game, but his own record is full of bankruptcies, defaults and the stiffing of partners and vendors. The Donald received a few curious bailouts himself (like his dad buying millions of dollars’ worth of chips to help him meet payroll in Atlantic City). Neither of those fellows seems to have been very successful at running businesses at all.

The one who was demonstrably a wild business success was H. Ross Perot, and he is the only one of the three to fail in his bid for the presidency.

Being a third-party candidate hurt his chances, but he made a historically great show from that status. He got 19% of the popular vote in 1992 (19,741,065 votes). (Zero electoral votes, although he did win majorities in many individual counties.)*

Perot, unlike those other two clowns, was a business wiz. Everything he touched turned to gold. He was a graduate of Annapolis, the U. S. Naval Academy. As a salesman for IBM he made his quota for the year within a month or so and decided that he could do all that and more if he were on his own. This was the early 1960s. Perot started Electric Data Systems and it was a winner. In 1984 he sold that company to General Motors for two point four billion dollars ($2,400,000,000.) In 1988 he started Perot Systems Corporation. That company was sold to Dell Computers in 2009 for three point nine billion dollars ($3,900,000,000).

It’s safe to say that Henry Ross Perot was the best businessman ever to run for the presidency.

They say, though, that running the country is not like running a business, and it’s true. It’s totally different, is what it is. If you are running a country, you cannot default on loans just to achieve some strategic advantage. You cannot declare bankruptcy just to put pressure on creditors. And then there are the things that you can do, such as printing money and borrowing at low interest. It’s totally different.

W. Bush, and now Trump, only proved that business experience not only does not help, but also is very likely to make matters worse.

What would Mr. Perot have done in office? 

His platform included:

1.   Balance the Federal budget;

2.   He opposed NAFTA (he came up with the quote, “that giant sucking sound that you hear is jobs moving to Mexico;”

3.   He opposed gun control;

4.   End job outsourcing (i.e., shipping jobs overseas); and

5.   Reduce the deficit by imposing a gasoline tax and cutting Social Security.

That looks an awful lot like Donald Trump’s professed goals. It’s a program without a chance of working. In fact, it’s a program that will do more harm than good. So I guess that even H. Ross Perot, the genuine business success, would also have failed to run the government better than mere politicians.

Incidentally, H. Ross Perot is alive as of this writing. In 2015, he was listed as the 129^th richest man in America, with $4 billion dollars. He was an odd bird, but likeable, in his way. I wish him well.

*Which major party candidate was assisted by the votes that went to Perot? That’s about as clear as mud. Perot’s votes seem to have come from all points of the political compass, so you can’t say that he took conservative votes away from George H. W. Bush. Perot’s votes came mostly from the middle-class, so the votes of the rich and the poor went to their respective natural beneficiaries. I’m no expert, and I haven’t made an exhaustive study of it, but it appears likely that Clinton won in spite of Perot, and not because of him.