the fashion maven I ain't

From behind these wrinkled eyelids, a couple of fashion observations for these times ... just from where I sit:

-- The propensity of women-circa-40 to expose the flesh between hip/belly button and vulva -- a statement made by many of their much younger and perhaps sexier ilk -- seems to be waning.
Likewise, the all-tits-all-the-time decolletage is giving way to higher neck lines. Mind you, I'm a tit guy as much as the next heterosexual, but a little originality never hurt. What's sexy is what's covered. What is uncovered is just uncovered. Fuck "modesty" -- I'm talking about class.

-- Among men, what I think of as "fruit suits" continue in vogue -- suits that seem to be about two sizes too small ... tight ... and topped off by a swirly, hip hairdo. Everyone looks younger and more energetic. No one asks, "Who made this shit up?"

The human form is lovely. Is there some reason to allow underemployed designers to uglify it? That question is above my pay grade.

does Donald Trump have any friends?

Seriously, just for a moment:

Does Donald Trump have any friends?

As his tea leaves display themselves in my eyes, he is a man who views every person as a possible transaction. But, without rancor, does he have any friends? I'm not interested in breathy psychobabble or seething diatribes ... just in the ordinary sense: Does he have any friends?

If so, who are they?

If not, what do you call a man who has no friends?

I know that sociopaths (and I think Trump is one of them) tend to end up with a lot of the chips on the table, but is it even possible for them to have friends? If Donald Trump has no friends, what does that say about the straw-man enemies he builds up and then burns down in tantrum-esque style?

But never mind my bias. Does Donald Trump have any friends? A friend is someone with whom the warts-and-all are present; bias is conceded; weakness acknowledged ... and not much is made of it: Those issues have been worked through. Everything is open ... with a friend... a couple of people, feet up, disentangling the wiles and woes of the world....

Seriously, does Donald Trump have any friends?

small stories, big picture

In a time when the Liar-in-Chief -- the man who never met a lie he might not embrace nor espoused a truth he would defend -- has thrown a spanner into the worldwide mix [Brexit, a migrant caravan knocking from Mexico on U.S. doors, wild fires in California with a smoky pall stretching to New York, corruption, collusion, lies, etc.], it is perhaps understandable that individuals like me might back up (should I used the word "cower?") into lesser, more graspable, more individualized formats.

Such a story, one that Donald Trump has not yet turned to his personal advantage, is the tale of the come-to-Jesus Christian slain on an island that was off-limits by law to outsiders. John Allen Chau, 27, traveled where he was prohibited in order to spread the word of God. He was "killed by North Sentinel islanders who apparently shot him with arrows when he trespassed on the isolated island in the Bay of Bengal."

Is someone any less an asshole because s/he and s/he alone decides what is more important?  Why is it that smarm-fed Christians cannot seem to even consider the short and sweet, "your Jesus? My ass!"

A sense of virtue is something Donald Trump asserts without palpable evidence, but that doesn't mean he's the only one: It seems that anyone can contract the virtuous-intentions-are-equal-to-virtuous-outcome bug: If it's for Jesus, it's OK to break the law and exercise your ignorance gene.

Still, Chau's story is a relief, somehow -- a bit of humanity writ clear. It's a story far easier to ingest and digest than the Dust Bowl of confusions and prevarications Trump offers. A bit of clear sailing before a return to the storm. A one-man story ... yes, I can dig it.


I like small stories as we circle around the glug-glug drain.

reminders for those of a certain age

Passed along in email:

farewell to a Russian general

Sic transit General Igor Korobov, 62, former head of Russia's military intelligence directorate [GRU] and, like his predecessor [58], was heaped with post-mortem praise Thursday after an early death ... and also in the wake of a lot of Western derision linked to one killing and another. Korobov: A "long illness" dontcha know.

It is hard not to think that you might want to be careful when you carry out the orders of your handlers ... you may be next. Vladimir Putin, it will be recalled, was once head of Russia's version of the CIA, and he was not happy with Korobov and the opprobrium occasioned on Korobov's watch.

Britain has accused the GRU of attempting to poison former Russian spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter with a nerve agent, the Netherlands has accused it of trying to hack the global chemical weapons watchdog, and U.S. intelligence agencies say it tried to hack the 2016 presidential election.
Russia denies all those allegations.

And you thought working for Donald Trump was hard!

happy Thanksgiving

For reasons I cannot divine, the coffee this morning is blissfully strong -- a real thank-you on this Thanksgiving day. Is there anything better than a right-cross cup of coffee, caffeinated to the hilt? Maybe so, but this morning's coffee ain't no turkey.

Wife and two sons are out the door, headed for the New Jersey arm of the family clan. Air is cold. Coffee is strong.

Happy Thanksgiving.

Yesterday, en route to the doctor's office, there were hundreds of people lined up on a nearby street that is generally a pretty-breezy thoroughfare.

I asked my wife, who was driving me, about it. It was the fact that the first legal-sale marijuana emporium had opened a day earlier, she explained. "Check the license plates." And sure enough, most of the parked cars, owned, presumptively, by the endless line, came from states other than Massachusetts. Based on the throng, you'd think marijuana were hard to get around here and that the floodgates had been thrown open.

An end to Prohibition redux.

Soma ... home for the holidays.

law banning female mutilation thrown out

A federal judge in Detroit on Tuesday declared unconstitutional a US law banning female genital mutilation, and also dismissed several charges against two doctors and others in the first US criminal case of its kind.
US district judge Bernard Friedman said Congress lacked authority under the commerce clause to adopt the 1996 law, and that the power to outlaw female genital mutilation, or FGM, belonged to individual states. “As despicable as this practice may be, it is essentially a criminal assault,” Friedman wrote.

the face of artificial intelligence?

Ivanka Trump

Mark Zuckerberg

Can I be forgiven the jolt I felt this morning when I realized that as Japan et al try to put a human face on its artificial intelligence doo-dads (vacuum cleaners, ticket sellers, and other robotic assemblages), the human face has already met them more than halfway and provided human physiognomies that have already morphed into the precincts of AI?

So clean, so perfect, so downright, uh, credible ... and that doesn't begin to mention the infallible factor. It seems to me that the population of robo-robos is growing apace ... or is that just my dwindling capacity to see? It's like the automotive industry that can't stop mimicking what the other car company is doing. We -- the Royal We, dontcha know -- call it gutless 'originality.'

And Ivanka and Mark are just two. Skim the photos of any number of bright lights ... music, movies, politics, porn, royalty.... Is it any wonder the world might turn to Duck Nation? Take a look.

Donald Trump -- bought and paid for

Donald Trump has proved himself worthy of the payoffs from Saudi Arabia. His willingness to defend the surgically premeditated murder of sometimes-Washington-Post-columnist Jamal Khashoggi is, is, is so abhorrent that I can offer only the least inflaming news story I can find. Fuck the free-press argument! A man murdered in all but the light of day! In a diplomatic setting. And the U.S. finds it acceptable as a matter of policy? Yes, we kill people all the time in the name of wealth and humvees and the rest of it but this one is so slimy.
Trump's political backers are covered in shame as well... you know, the ones, Republican and Democrat, who will condemn the murder and find a way towards their own re-election. Why has not one of these wily politicians found a legislative means to remove Trump even if it means his or her own removal?

I want to spit!

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President Donald Trump vowed on Tuesday to remain a “steadfast partner” of Saudi Arabia despite saying that Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman may have known about the plan to murder dissident journalist Jamal Khashoggi last month.
Defying intense pressure from U.S. lawmakers to impose tougher sanctions on Saudi Arabia, Trump also said he would not cancel military contracts with the kingdom, claiming it would be a “foolish” move that would only benefit Russia and China. ...
Democratic and Republican lawmakers have urged Trump to drop his support for MbS over the Khashoggi case, but the president has been reluctant.
Trump said on Tuesday that both Saudi Arabia’s King Salman and MbS “vigorously deny any knowledge of the planning or execution of the murder,” and that the truth may never be known.
He also stressed that Saudi Arabia, a major oil producer, is an important business partner and a “great ally” in the fight against Iranian power in the Middle East.

Here's an Associated Press story.

dog-, cat-,snake-, horse-, wolf, elephant-whisperer

Bexit is high on Europe's shiver-worry agenda.
A migrant caravan may be stalled at Tijuana with Donald Trump trying to make political hay.
Israel may continue its righteous response to Palestinian protesters with less-than-lethal weapons (slingshots and pocket knives) with live-round counterstrike.
No-fooling-around starvation mounts in Yemen and displacement in Syria.
The U.S. aids and abets where it can, providing arms to all in need.
Yes, there are links. No, I am disinclined to hook 'em all up.

But then there is the matter of pet psychics.

Realizing she had abruptly developed the ability to communicate with animals, Plotzker expanded her existing psychic business to cater to pets.
Fifteen or so years later, business is booming, Plotzker tells me. Dogs and cats make up the bulk of her clientele, but she’s spoken to snakes, horses, wolves and the elephants at Tampa zoo....
She charges $100 for a half-hour session and has no shortage of customers. People seek her help to find lost animals, fix behavioural problems, diagnose illnesses, and communicate with pets who have passed away. (Yes, she also speaks to dead animals.)

Compared to the insanities of the world, pet psychics strike me as somehow soothingly sane. If someone loves something or someone, there is a desire to move closer to the beloved. Love is, ipso facto, insane, so by that stringing of thought, pet psychics become calming ... almost ... you might say... sane. Read the article ... now restate your oh-so-kool skepticism.

I enjoy supporting chosen sanities, however insane they may be. Wait! Did that come out as sane as I'd planned it?

Oh well.

merry Christmas from Donald Trump

Passed along in email:

authoritarianism per john oliver

Passed along in email:

a privilege to weep

It is a privilege to cry for something.

Last night, perhaps two stories up
Along the soot-blacked beams of the el,
A single blue-white square,
Perfect to the point of weeping,
Injected itself, as yet unbruised
By next-guy's signatures:
"405" had not yet taken an over-writing turn --
An abstemious purity ... it was to weep.
With joy.

Later, the TV news happened to display
The self-same blue-white square
Serendipitously ... still untouched, still
Wrackingly perfect and again it was
To weep
With sorrow.

Perhaps I just like to weep
Or am riddled by my privileges.

********

Just a little morning fiction. Made of whole cloth.

scrambled catastrophes

Samuel Johnson

The U.S. president was peddling himself in the midst of fire-ravaged California yesterday/Saturday ... which was enough impetus for me today to flee into lesser catastrophes less tainted with bullshit overload.

“Here, in this retirement home of language once inhabited by Charles Dickens and Oscar Wilde, these gems of the English language will soon be forgotten unless we make an effort to use them at least once a day. Otherwise, they could become extinct within a generation.”

“Among these words are such corkers as juggins, fizgig, hobbledehoy and condiddle.” Also apparently-endangered are [defenestrate, caterwaul, crapulence, amanuensis, pettifogging, trollop, vamoose, lickspittle and conk, according to the Guardian column. Right or wrong, at least it's an honest concern. [Boldface added]

Also in the email inbox this morning was yet another wail that so feckless a commander-in-chief should be in charge -- or even part of -- the national conversation.

I wonder whether Democrats, who are currently unemployed as they try to find an agenda they can stand behind, would consider passing a bill that would require the chief executive (or any other politician or pundit) to issue supporting evidence every time s/he refers to "fake news" or resorts to criticizing individuals or programs as a means of burnishing his own (unstated and unsupported) truth... as when the president dissed the fire-prevention measures before California was so badly hurt.

It is hard not to sympathize with California resident and once-Trump-supporter Kirk Ellsworth and his take on a Trump visit to Ellsworth's savaged environment:

When asked about the president’s visit to the area, Kirk Ellsworth, whose adult children lost their homes in the fire, shook his head in disgust.
“My kids lost everything. I voted for him – and now? He can kiss my red ass,” Ellsworth said. “What he said was ridiculous. It hurts my heart. A lot of us voted for him and he [talks] down to us?”

Is it any wonder that a mook like me flees into lesser catastrophes?

babbling and bumbling

Flummoxed like a newly-landed fish on a dock -- my mind returns again and again to the previous post about the Mexican townspeople who burned a couple of men because the crowd believed the pair had been responsible for the kidnapping of local children ... but no one checked to see if the information was/were true ... which it wasn't. I simply cannot find a way out of the maelstrom of confusion that wraps around me and denies some facile entry point.

It simply eludes my every effort. It is horror without edges. Democracy and mob rule. We're right because we say we're right ... but we're wrong. Laudable intentions gone awry ... yet not really awry: The horror was there all along. Each time I come near this flaming story, it laughs at me and burns my face off.

I had been leery of group-think -- the downside of the sociability of human beings -- but here was something that proved the point I was making. And yet I didn't want to be right. I wanted to be wrong and the goodness of good intentions to be unsullied. And it wasn't unsullied.

As ever, I was not so much afraid of being wrong. I was afraid to be right. Being right felt so lonely.

All those ballyhooed majorities beset by a very dark shadow. The MeToo movement. The priestly pedophiles. Those wounded by arrogance ... they deserved support and their tormentors deserved excoriation to a degree that disallowed finding out the facts: A pox on all their houses! Let the politicians be swept from office based on evidence that was so long ago in the making. Did they deserve it? I wouldn't be surprised, but did anyone check -- I mean really check?

The story of the burning men put me face-to-face with a renewed recognition that this shit and the reaction to it was all mine. What I did with it was mine ... and lord knows I didn't want it. How much nicer if the intentions of the group of accusers were easy-peasy correct. I too like to go shoulder to shoulder with those whose agreement I might lay claim to.

Oh well. Take your medicine. I think I'll watch a little unassailably agreeable TV. This too shall pass .... but at the moment it flops on the dock, dying and calling out in that death. Is there an app for all this confusion? I am responsible and at the moment I am no match for it. How much nicer to find a cozy throng in which to put my faith.

Forget this post.





 

farts 'n' darts

Gary Anderson

The world of professional darts has been rocked by two players accusing each other of repeatedly breaking wind during a match.
Gary Anderson of Scotland and the Dutchman Wesley Harms blamed each other for “rotten” farts during their clash in the Gland Slam of Darts.

Anderson, who has twice been the world champion, won the match 10-2 to earn a place in the quarter-finals of the competition. But in a post-match interview Harms said his poor form was due to Anderson breaking wind on stage and leaving a “fragrant smell”.

two men incinerated in wake of what's-app rumor

Passed along in email: The price of fake news writ large:

A host of mobile phones were raised aloft to capture the moment Ricardo and Alberto were set on fire

Rumours of child abductors spread through WhatsApp in a small town in Mexico. The rumours were fake, but a mob burned two men to death before anyone checked.

New Zealand vocabulary primer

Oh my aching Aunt Fannie!

New Zealand high school students have demanded examiners ignore that they don’t know what the word “trivial” means, after it appeared in a final-year exam and left many confused.
Some students who took the year 13 history exam claimed the “unfamiliar word” was too hard, and the exam should now be marked according to each student’s different understanding and interpretation of “trivial”.
The exam asked for students to write an essay on whether they agreed with a quote from Julius Caesar which reads: “Events of importance are the result of trivial causes”....
According to NZQA 6,300 students were enrolled to sit the exam and the authority had received 13 complaints regarding it.

I cannot fully express the sense of "gobsmacked" I felt when reading this small story.

When I was a kid (seven or eight years old), comic books sometimes had advertisements on the back cover that invited those inclined to "use a new word ten times in a day and it is yours." Vocabulary lessons ... there's something to be said for them... and it ain't trivial.

fire and ice

White, white snow.
White, white silence.

Four or five inches clothe bushes and lawns this morning. A municipal snowplow has created the first barricade of the season at the end of the driveway. And in the Wishful Weather department, it would have been nice if the snow had hit fire-battered California where over 600 people are still missing after the latest inferno. Instead, men and women in white jump suits sift and shift the rubble. The jumpsuits are sometimes marked "coroner." Donald Trump is still president. Given the tragedy, it might be nice if he weren't: Ego, not sympathy or caring, is his strong suit.

In what may or may not be lesser news, the Pentagon -- the U.S. agency once simply called the War Department before some well-coiffed bureaucrat re-purposed the scene with "Department of Defense" et al -- has reportedly failed its first-ever audit.

No one expected anything other than failure, you will be relieved to hear .....

It's winter. Winter brings snow.
The white silence will no doubt enfold the d'oh Pentagon results.

parsing Trump's lies

An email friend passed along this interview with a linguist who parses the lies Donald Trump loves to spread ... and what to do about it.

a small phantasm

Today, for no reason I can figure outside a general fragility, I imagine:

Death comes, of a morning, to sit in my lap while I smoke and drink coffee. We chat amicably in an unspoken language that is akin to water burbling in a shallow, flowing river -- each small sound resounding, across the small waves, and harmonizing with yet another across the way.

He sits in my lap, light as a ring of exhaled tobacco smoke, and we talk. I worry that if I die, he will be lonely. It's obviously a ridiculous worry since he already keeps company with a majority of others ... he will not be lonely ... and yet I worry. There is no friction between us. Everything is light and bubbly and fair.

As light as smoke, sitting in my lap for a morning chat. He is as comfortably situated in my lap as once my baby children were -- hammocked in the crook of my right arm -- and yet requiring no rock-and-murmuring. He is whole and grown and burbling as I too burble. Does he fret, I wonder, that he might die and leave me lonely? I want to reassure him that there is no need to worry.

We chortle and bubble and harmonize and time passes as I smoke and sip coffee.

a mantle of irresponsibility

A strange and intrusive sense of irresponsibility has filled my lens since yesterday. I simply don't want to be responsible for things like doctor appointments, chores, cooking....

My whole life, I have probably done more than most to be responsible in little and large matters. Probably to a fault. But now... well, if it's that damned important, let it come to me. Let the phlebotomist make an appointment and come to my house rather than the other way around.

It's not an easy shift. A whispering sense of guilt exists. But I persist and, in flashing moments, I feel relief. What if they had a war and no one showed up? what if there were a responsibility and I simply didn't meet it? Childish, perhaps, but notice how relaxed kids can be.

Let's see how well it works after what preceded it worked, I guess, moderately but never perfectly, well. I am unwilling to allow others discomfort and yet, I suppose, that may be what I am, ipso facto, doing. Well, in the words of the poet, "fuck it."

boob wars

How the push-up bra fell flat: the rise of quiet cleavage

Profits are plunging at Victoria’s Secret as a proudly bra-less look takes hold. The most fashionable boobs are now no longer in your face

Don't worry, gents -- if it's anything like men's ties, the flat and the globulicious will return as sure as narrow and thin ties. There is only so much you can do with a limited subject matter. How designers can imagine they have anything 'original' to say beats the socks off of me.

embracing the holy and perfect

Do not embrace what is holy and perfect
Without first enfolding what is rash and ugly.

Do not embrace what is rash and ugly
Without first enfolding what is holy and perfect.

Besides being fortune-cookie cute, this is pretty important.

Should we consider inaugurating the word "enswoon" in the English language?

and lo, there was snow

Pinpricks of white dotted the street spaces this morning. I wasn't sure whether it were some random ash from a nearby wood stove. But that proved wrong as the whiteness accumulated here and there on the shingles of visible roofs.

And lo
There was snow -- the first I have seen this year.

a sense of class

Talked with my older son this morning. He had been to his woman-friend's-parents housewarming in Georgia and was... was... was, if I am any judge, was flummoxed by how "the other half lives." On the surface, the whole affair might be written off with the word "money," but money never quite tells the whole story.

Yes, there are those who have more money than I.
Yes, there are the bourgeois elite rich who flong their monied dongs... buying into some imagined 'couth.'

But also, there are those with money who simply don't know how to act differently and have been weaned on winters in Gstaad. It is this lot with whom it is hard to communicate. After all, that is the world they grew up in. Mansions are not mansions, they are houses. Servants are not servants, they are part of the furniture. And 12 bathrooms is hardly a peculiar number.

If that's the way you grew up, what else might you know ... or, more precisely, how much would you not know? Working-class sabre-rattling and speeches about "equality" bounce off such a world as oil bubbles away from water.

It may sound like -- or indeed be -- presumptuousness that guides the assessment of those with gobs of wealth, but I think my son fell for the fallacy I too have fallen for: If it has two arms, two legs and a head, it's likely to be human, the kind of human I can interact with comfortably. But the fact is, I can't. Calling on or calling out a genetically-engineered rich person is probably as hard as calling on or calling out genetically-engineered less-well-off person... sorry, I don't speak Urdu.

I too have felt that life-on-Mars feeling my son expressed to me as he described the party. Luckily, he said, the caterers were available for a little conversation. But that doesn't change the weird disconnect that, on first encountering the recognition, can rise up and leave you confused. You half expect that if someone has reached a pinnacle, they must necessarily know the ladder rungs that preceded the peak. But this is patently false. Better is the observation once made of U.S. President George Bush: "He was born on third base imagining he had hit a triple."

 

Afghanistan: Pause and reflect

KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) — When U.S. forces and their Afghan allies rode into Kabul in November 2001 they were greeted as liberators. But after 17 years of war, the Taliban have retaken half the country, security is worse than it’s ever been, and many Afghans place the blame squarely on the Americans.
The United States has lost more than 2,400 soldiers in its longest war, and has spent more than $900 billion on everything from military operations to the construction of roads, bridges and power plants. Three U.S. presidents have pledged to bring peace to Afghanistan, either by adding or withdrawing troops, by engaging the Taliban or shunning them. Last year, the U.S. dropped the “mother of all bombs” on a cave complex.
None of it has worked. After years of frustration, Afghanistan is rife with conspiracy theories, including the idea that Americans didn’t stumble into a forever war, but planned one all along....

The entire article was a nice wrap, I thought.

And, perhaps as a fitting PS, there was this AP article about training Ukrainian children:

KIEV, Ukraine (AP) — The campers, some clad in combat fatigues, carefully aim their assault rifles. Their instructor offers advice: Don’t think of your target as a human being. [emphasis added]. So when these boys and girls shoot, they will shoot to kill.
Most are in their teens, but some are as young as 8 years old.

latest bed-time soporific

Last night I grabbed a book from the other room with an eye to a little pre-sleep reading: The book I grabbed was "Born on a Blue Day: Inside the Extraordinary Mind of an Autistic Savant" by Daniel Tammet.

I thought from the title it might be one of those touchy-feely 'girl books,' as my mind insists on labeling certain 'oh-so-sensitive' stories or soliloquies. Generally I give such books a pass, but hell, I just wanted to go to sleep, so I began reading it ... and found it strangely entrancing.

I only read seven or eight pages out of 225 and felt in that short span gently transported to a simple-yet-intense realm. The author seemed to be straightforward in a way that would not behoove another story-teller. Stories generally need friction of some sort but this was just straight as a string and, I felt without any particular proof, somehow sexless. It was both light and engaging and I was damned if I could figure out why. It was just very, very nice.

The author is just talking and I enjoy listening. In fact I enjoyed listening quite a lot. He didn't whine or stir up the kind of friction another writer might feel compelled to manufacture. He just talked. I was not entirely sure of my footing on the "Alzheimers" or "asperger syndrome" link-ups, but that realm or focus sort of faded as a point of concern. An Illness Reprise was not what I was after. Reading was like listening at the edge of a burbling river or brook -- no need to do anything but relax and enjoy and be rinsed.

Who knows what the rest of the book will bring, but it was nice to come up against what felt like
an entirely new, never-met-before, glad-to-meet-you format.

It felt somehow brand new and finding something brand new at 78, is a bit odd and a bit wonderful.

ditty from the past

From the days-of-yore skein:

I eat me peas with honey,
I've done it all me life.
It makes them taste so funny, but
It keeps them on me knife.

if I were a member of the Washington press corps

Thought it might turn into a newspaper column, but it's too wishy-washy....
******

I suspect I am not alone in sympathizing with the supporters of Donald Trump who, from time to time, are seen uttering on TV some version of, “Yeah, we know he didn’t say that, but we know what he means.” Trump's angry and we’re angry – we get it.

Even the news media are wont to put their shoulder to this wheel as they ever-so-delicately try to unpack from Trump’s ungrounded outbursts and observations some rational meaning and direction. Promoting what they claim to disdain.

Yes, I am accusing the news media – which is between a rock and a hard place – of colluding to some extent with those whose hero currently sits on the presidential throne.

But like a lot of other Americans lately, I suspect what once might have been a rational or quasi-rational train of thought when it came to the issues of the day has descended into a quagmire of what-if’s.

It’s a throwback to the times when moms and dads read bed-bound children fairy tales and those children imagined … what if I were the prince or princess?

What would things be like if I belonged to the Washington press corps? What would I do? How would I react? What would I ask? Would I be decorous and polite? Would I call out what needed to be called out?

Would I name a lot of fancy names to prove I knew which famous buttons to push, which credibility to claim? As a former five-year newspaper reporter and 20-year stint in newspaper editing, I am a nobody on the great fame rainbow. But still – isn’t that like the rest of us great unwashed who sit around wondering what-if and getting progressively angrier?

What I would do/ask as a member of the White House press corps ranges from the impossible to the implausible, but since that’s what a Trump ascendancy has handed us … well, why not?

If I were a member of the White House press corps, the first thing I would do would be to try to galvanize the entire corps – a group that prides itself on protecting and informing the electorate – into boycotting the next official press briefing. En masse. Is that electorate served by the current press-briefing format? Would it be less well served if such a conclave simply failed to materialize?

This suggestion is clearly implausible. No media outlet would have the nerve. The man behind the news media’s green curtain is someone whose interest in democracy and the electorate relies on income. And if nothing happens, where’s the income?

But then there are the questions – however impossible – that might be asked.

1.   Mr. President, would you define “democracy” in terms of what it is and what good it might be to the United States?

2.   Mr. President, you have been voluble on the topic of “fake news.” Would you give a few examples of news that was not fake and in what way listeners might verify its truth?

3.   Is there a point of view you might not agree with and yet nevertheless be willing to engage?

4.   Do you consider yourself a responsible person? Based on what evidence?

There are others, but as I reread this thing, I realize it is going no where. I had thought it might be a newspaper column, but it’s too wussy for the big boys and too boring for the little ones.

I really would like it if the use of the word “democracy” were disallowed except in the mouths of those willing and able to define it in context.

That goes for everyone.