Inauguration Day

When is this country most vulnerable? About the time on Inauguration Day when the president-elect puts his hand on the Bible and raises his right hand. I’m trying to imagine what could go wrong on this Inauguration Day, especially given the bellicosity of candidate and now President-elect Trump.

Trump has made a lot of noise about China. No problem. But then he doubled down by taking a congratulatory phone call from the president of Taiwan. A week later he doubled down again on that by saying the United States isn’t bound by the one-China policy, a policy that for decades says with a wink and a nod that there’s only one China and its capital is in Beijing.

China considers Taiwan a rogue state. It considers Taiwan part of China. Trump seems to have cast that aside. How might China react?

First, a time zone lesson. When it’s noon in Washington, it’s midnight in Beijing.

I solemnly swear …

If I were the president of China, I’d move an armada around Taiwan and at the stroke of midnight sail into its main port and declare that Taiwan is part of China, hands down. I’d have my missiles locked and loaded should there be resistance. In other words, I’d show Trump that there is a one-China policy.

But, wait, there’s more than just China.

The boy despot in North Korea is ready to show off his nuclear capability. What if he lobbed some missiles on South Korea? Even if the missiles are not nuclear, consider the reaction? Our current secretary of defense said on Meet the Press that the United States would shoot down any missile aimed at it or an ally. Well, South Korea’s an ally.

Are we going to go to war with China over Taiwan? Are we going to go to war with North Korea over South Korea?

…will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.

And where do you think the Russians will come down on all of this? Why, such a move by China alone would play into Putin’s hand. Throw in North Korea and it’s game on.

Of course, I hope none of this happens, but I do believe Trump is in addition to becoming the commander-in-chief may also become the enabler-in-chief.

Climbing Out of a Deep Hole

Hillbilly Elegy was on my Amazon wishlist for the paperback, which is scheduled for publication on May 30, 2017. But I kept hearing so many good things about it, especially that it was the Rosetta Stone to the last election, that I ordered the hard cover immediately and read it in short order.

 

The author, J.D. Vance, put me in the wrong frame of mind in his introduction when he wrote about working at the local tite factory to get money to go to Yale Law School. Why, he took on as much overtime as he could. Right there I loved the man’s work ethic. It’s one of his fellow workers who turned me off.

According to Vance, after the worker, 19, was hired, the manager offered his pregnant girlfriend a job as a clerical worker. As Vance put: “Both of them were terrible workers.” She missed every third day and he took long bathroom breaks. Eventually, both were fired, but the twist was that the male thought he had been wronged, not that he had wronged his employer.

I was only on page 7 and I already couldn’t figure out why anyone the author writes about would vote for Donald Trump. Clearly, the fired employees should have been loyal Democrats, what with the stereotype that that Democrats are the party that provides handouts to slackers. But as the book progresses, we learn that the unemployed and the shiftless believed Trump would restore the past.

Vance began life in Kentucky but his mother and one of her husbands/boyfriends moved him and his sister to Ohio. Fortunately, his maternal grandparents also made the move to a house nearby and technically they raised Vance. (He dedicates the book to them, and when you’re done reading, you realize why his mother, a drug addict, is not front and center. In the acknowledgements, she appears in a series of names as “Mom.” I had to look three times to find her.)

The short story is that Vance overcame the hillbilly culture, graduated from high school, was accepted at Ohio State, but joined the Marines instead, then after a four-year hitch went to OSU and then Yale Law School. What’s wrong with that story?

Simple. A lot of people don’t make it. And Vance recognizes that there by for the grace of his grandmother, some teachers (public and Ivy League), the Marine Corps, he might not have made it either. This is where the book shifts from a memoir to a thoughtful disquisition on life, on the haves and the have-nots, the ones who have pulled themselves up by their bootstraps and those who don’t even have boots.

Vance says that the government can’t fix the problems, and so you would not be surprised to learn that he is a Republican, although I don’t think his thinking is necessarily aligned with the modern Republican party, the party of the haves. He’s right that government can’t fix the problems, but given his public education and Marine service, he should realize that government can provide opportunities for those who want to get ahead.

All in all, a well told tale, although why those people voted for Trump is still beyond me.

Questionable commercials

Who doesn’t sit before a TV set and rant about something on the screen? This is my latest.

I’ve been ranting about two commercials lately and wondering if the companies behind them have thought them through.

Let’s start with Xfinity, my cable provider, which is running a commercial that begins with grandparents learning they are out of it because they don’t have wireless, etc., and the grandchildren are reluctantly visiting for the holidays.

So the grandparents quickly contact Xfinity and get up to speed in less than a minute. Family arrives and grandfather uses the remote to say “Merry Christmas, you filthy animals,” meaning the grandchildren.

What grandparent would ever say that to a grandchild? We hug our grandchildren when they visit and make sure they have all the passwords they need.

Whatever Xfinity Xecutive approved that commercial should be looking for a new job.

The other questionable commercial comes to us courtesy of Dodge. Two Dodge Durangos with evergreen trees tied to their roofs race through an urban street and then they stop at a red light. There we see that all of the trees’ needles are gone, an indication of how fast the cars were going.

But, wait, it gets better.

As we know from the start, the cars contain families and the commercial is overlaid with holiday music.

So Dodge is not only pushing unsafe driving, but with families in Durangos during the holidays.

Another executive who should be out of work.

My Designing Business

I call myself an editorial consultant and when asked what that means, I reply: “A variety of things.” For example, I’m a freelance writer and photographer; I’m a journalism expert in defamation cases; I used to be an online instructor; I restore old photographs; I manage my wife’s Etsy site; I’m a writing coach.

One thing I do for myself—but want to do for others as a business—is design books. I’ve designed a friend’s memoirs and a deceased editor’s story of his life, but I haven’t gained any traction with paying customers.

I’m glad to report that the dry spell has ended with the publication of Living and Loving, a collection of poems by Kathleen M. Quinn-Farber. I’ve designed longer books, but what made Kathleen’s challenging was that it’s poetry and text does not flow from page to page the way it does in a memoir. Rather, each page is an island unto itself. It’s requires more diligence.

After reading Kathleen’s poems, I suggested that the cover contain nothing more than the title and a long-stem rose. She concurred. I was about to buy one and photograph it when I asked my wife if she could paint one.

Well, it didn’t take Paulette long to produce one on her iPad. Yes, her iPad. While she does paint on the usual surfaces from time to time, she now creates most of her work on her iPad. In fact, she uses her iPad so much that when the new ones came out, she thought she’d get my old one and I’d get a new one. But I figured that the better definition in the new one was worthy of her, not me.

So we seem to be in business. We have something to show and now we’re just waiting for new clients. 

Never Kiss by the Garden Gate

Rod Nordland was a feisty and intrepid reporter going back to his days at the student newspaper at Penn State. In the meantime, he’s matured and gotten even better.

His latest is the story of Zakia and Ali, neighbors who fall in love and want to marry against all rules and customs of Afghan society and the Islamic religion. (Both are Muslims, but she's Sunni and he's Shia.) Women have no say in their lives. They are told what to wear. A woman’s father decides whom she will marry—and at what age. If a woman is raped, it’s her fault. For shaming her family, she can be stoned to death by her own father and brothers. Child brides are common.

Despite the book’s title, this is almost as much a book about Nordland’s role in trying to help the couple despite the fact that it means he sacrifices his journalistic neutrality, something he initially resists and does not do lightly when he finally slips on the slippery slope. Thanks to his initial story in his newspaper, The New York Times, money flows in to help the couple, and when that is not happening, Nordland provides some of his own. (A major donor is Miriam Adelson, wife of Sheldon, herself Jewish and assisting a Muslim couple.)

Woven within the story are historical examples of star-crossed lovers, including some from Afghanistan and a particular couple created by Shakespeare, although not with the same outcome. What I found particularly charming is that Nordland reports Ali’s changing ringtones, most of which are from love songs and poems. Given that Ali is illiterate, the ringtones create a bit of a mystery, and Nordland withholds explaining how Ali got them until toward the end of the story, a reward for continuing with a story that is so gripping, no reward is necessary.

Getting the couple out of the country is a challenge, and when they finally do flee to Tajikistan, they are fleeced by corrupt authorities who send them back to Afghanistan—penniless. In one of the more bizarre twists in the story is that Zakia and Ali are still in Afghanistan living with his family. I’m hoping they are safe, but given that families exact revenge even centuries after the original provocation, I don’t hold out much hope for the couple.

The only major criticism I have about the book is that after the epilogue, which is usually at the end of a book, Nordland continues for 50 more pages with two chapters about the conditions for women in Afghanistan. It’s all very interesting but it is an odd fit, as though Nordland was cleaning out his notebook. The story of Zakia and Ali needs no supporting chapters to tell us had bad conditions are for the women and girls of Afghanistan.

(Never kiss by the garden gate,

Because love is blind,

But the neighbors ain’t.)