February: My Month for Big Trips

Twas the Night Before Basic--The Plane Ride Was Rough

Forty-eight years ago this week, I was saying goodbye to my family and friends before flying to Basic Training on January 31, 1972.  The photo above is the drunk 18 year old who flew to Lackland Air Force Base, San Antonio, Texas, to get a serious haircut and begin training.  On February 1, I was shorn and dressed in green fatigues and getting my first instructions in marching.

Spring 1977 in a German woods on top of my tank

In 1975 I left the Air Force and re-enlisted in the Army. In February of 1979, I made the first of three trips from Rhein-Main Airbase in West Germany to Dover Air Base, Delaware.  I was getting out of the Army in November of 1979 and had to sign up for college at Penn State University. The round-trip to America on military flights was $20, plus $2 each way for the box lunch.  On these trips I flew three times on a C5A Galaxy, a plane so big it could carry a platoon of tanks inside.  It was so smooth that on one trip the Loadmaster woke me up after we landed. I slept through it.

C5A Galaxy transport plane

After active duty, I traveled only in North America until the late 90s.  In 1998 I got a job in communications that took me overseas every month until 2001 all over the world.  In February 1999, I made my first Round-the-World trip from America to France to Singapore, then Perth, Australia, Hong Kong, and back to America by way of Los Angeles.  

The night before deployment to Iraq

January 31, 2009, I had dinner in Harrisburg with my battalion before an early morning flight to Fort Sill, Oklahoma, and two months of training before deployment to Camp Adder, Iraq.  February 1 was the first flight on that long journey.  

Team Africa Rising

And now in the third decade of this century February is the month I will begin a five-week trip that will take me to more than a dozen countries on four continents and each hemisphere: northern, southern, eastern, and western.  I will be a few hundred miles south of the equator in Kigali, Rwanda.  There I will visit the memorial of the 1994 genocide and the professional cycling team that has been part of bringing the country back together.

Most of the trip will be in Asia and Europe.  I will meet my friend Cliff in Darmstadt then spend a week with him in Jerusalem. After that I will visit Georgia, Azerbijan and Armenia, followed by Athens and several Balkan states followed by Rwanda and then Germany again to visit Dachau and Flossenburg. The whole trip begins and ends with a 200-mile train ride from Lancaster to JFK airport and back, so I actually do travel in North America too. 

Re-Reading "The Prince" for the 10th Time: So Different Under Trump

Since 1980 I have read and re-read The Prince every four years. I have been delighted anew each year as I read his advice to rulers.  His central advice:

"A ruler must take power and keep power because without power the ruler can do nothing."

Until this year, reading Machiavelli was an act of cultural translation as well as being translated from 16th Century Italian.  I was reading advice to a monarch as a citizen of a republic.

That was then.

This year when I read The Prince I was reading as a citizen of a republic which is slouching slowly towards authoritarian government.

With Trump in office, I don't have to translate into democracy. His every instinct is authoritarian, so he grasps for power. He is limited only by his own willful ignorance and laziness.  But that limitation is glaring.

Machiavelli said the leader should constantly study war.  He recommends the leader go hunting to allow him to see his land up close and to know how it feels to live off the land.  Trump could not be farther from this advice. He is soft, delicate with no exposure to hardship, so some of the pathetic errors he makes would be remedied if he were not a physical and moral coward.

Trump wants to control and close the southern border.  If he spent time on the ground on that border, many of the issues would be clear to him.  The blazingly stupid foreign policy of abandoning the Kurds would not have happened if he were capable of exposing himself to hardship.

Thankfully, he is a gelatinous coward. Many of my worst predictions of what Trump would do have not come true, overwhelmed by Trump's own aversion to actual hardship.

Machiavelli says people are cowards and fools for the most part. They will swear loyalty to the leader when times are good and desert him when times are bad.

Trump knows and believes this. There are things Trump does exceedingly well because he knows he is talking to fools.  Machiavelli says the leader need not have actual religious faith, all that matters is the appearance. Despite bragging about breaking every commandment and being entitled to break every commandment, he draws thunderous applause from white Evangelical and conservative Catholic audiences.  The gaggle of millionaire televangelist that gather around to worship Trump declare Trump's true faith.

Machiavelli says that the leader must never use half measures. He must either pamper people or destroy them.  He also said if the leader has a choice either to be loved or feared, he should choose fear, because people will easily betray love but respect those who can hurt them. Within the Republican Party leadership, loyalty to Trump is based on fear of his twitter account.  In a party where the primary is the election, a Trump tweet can end the career of any red state Republican.

Another glaring Trump failure from Day One has been his inner circle. Machiavelli says we can judge the quality of a leader by the quality of his inner circle.  In this Trump is beyond pathetic.  Steve Bannon, Sebastian Gorka, Betsy DeVos, Rudy Giuliani, Kellyanne Conway, Roger Stone, Paul Manafort, Mike Flynn, the rogue's gallery is endless. Trump's deplorable quality is evident in those who surround him.

Chapter 23 of The Prince says the leader should avoid flatterers.  This advice is pathetically funny. The vile chief of flatterers Mike Pence leads the worship of the Dear Leader. Kissing Trump's dumpy rump is a requirement for continued service in the administration.

Machiavelli ends his little book discussing fate and luck.  America has been lucky for nearly two and a half centuries to avoid the incarnation of idiocy that is Trump, but now it's here. Trump has been lucky at every step of his improbable rise from failed casino owner to the Racist-in-Chief.  Can his luck hold? I wish him and his minions nothing but failure, but the odds are with an incumbent, so I will fight until he is out of office.  And I will look for other places to live that will accept Americans and re-read The Prince in 2024 from somewhere far away from Don Junior's 2024 campaign.

In the meantime, I am re-reading On Tyranny for how to handle the present.

The Line Between Good and Evil: A Confession

“The line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being,” says Aleksander Solzhenitsyn in his book The GULAG Archipelago.

Until this year I agreed with Solzhenitsyn, at least I believed I did. Then I read Not in God’sName: Confronting Religious Violence by Rabbi Jonathan Sacks. Sacks agrees with Solzhenitsyn. The line between good and evil cuts through each of us—until it doesn’t.

Sacks said seeing good and evil as an inner struggle is the mark of the major monotheistic religions. Other cultures put the line between good and evil at the at the border of their settlement, village, state, country—outside themselves. 

Sacks is well aware that even if the line between good and evil can cut through the heart of each person, the line easily moves outside.  Before I read Sacks’ book, I could have testified under oath that I agreed with Solzhenitsyn.  But Sacks showed me that my ideal was history, and probably had only existed in my better moments.

Since 2015, the site of every Trump Nuremberg Rally was certainly, in my view, a line between good and evil—inside evil, outside good.  Then after November 2016, the line between me and the 63 million Trump voters became the good and evil line.  I would not have asserted the claim at that moment, but it was true. 

I would ask, rhetorically, how anyone but a racist could vote for a Birther.  That’s not a question. Those who vote for a Birther are racists or are idiots who do not know they are racists. The march of Trump tweets and policies just made my belief deeper: the Muslim ban, attacking POWs, attacking Gold Star parents, saying Nazis are fine people, Trump’s whole Addams Family bouquet of hate, the bouquet of thorns without roses that define his character and his actions. 

And so to my confession. If I ever truly believed the line between good and evil cuts through every human heart, I don’t know.  The lists of community and personal sins of Yom Kippur confession are, to me, almost quaint. What do the Ten Commandments mean in a nation where the head of state brags about breaking those commandments, brags about being entitled to break those commandments, and is cheered by people who claim to be believers?

When the President backed by all of his cabinet and by his propaganda ministers at Fox News declares me and those I love and admire “enemies of the people” we live in a nation that officially says good is Us and bad is Them. In Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, Maoist China, Rwanda, and Serbia after Yugoslavia, people like me became Them.  And the record of those slaughtered says they did not know it or could not believe it.

German Jews after Kristallnacht thought Hitler could go no further. Tutsis in Rwanda in 1994 went to Easter services with Hutus. Starting the next week, the same Hutus slaughtered Tutsis in those Churches. The Russian Jewish émigré Masha Gessen says when a tyrant tells you what he is going to do, believe him.  Timothy Snyder says the same in his book OnTyranny. Trump has been calling the news media the enemy of the people since his campaign started. Sooner or later, journalists will be killed by people wanting Trump’s approval.  When that happens, the killing won’t stop with journalists.  There is no end to a list of enemies of the people: professors, protesters, comedians, the deep state, democrats, anyone who criticizes the Dear Leader.

I know Trump supporters who tell me they will defend The Constitution of the United States if Trump or anyone goes against it.  I think they are sincere.  But they are deluded. 

When Trump used his office to extort an ally for political gain, he could not have more thoroughly violated the Constitution, yet they defend the Dear Leader more fiercely. Those pathetic patriots will swallow every excuse Trump makes for every violation of The Constitution and cheer at his next Nuremberg Rally. 

I aspire to believe that the line between good and evil cuts through my heart, but for now, for as long as America is marching toward the end of democracy, I believe good and evil is Us and Them.  I want to see every Republican defeated and out of office beginning with Trump and McConnell and the Freedom Caucus. I want them utterly without power. 

When the government does not officially hate the people I admire most, when the government does not attack the weakest, when the government does not turn away refugees, in other words when the Republican Party is utterly out of power, maybe I can return to the view of Rabbi Sacks. But for now, I am going to do what every Jew in Germany should have done in 1933. I am going to assume that when the President will point at American citizens in public and call them the enemy of the people, that same President will soon point at me and say the same thing. 

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