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This morning I feel schizophrenic – though only under the secondary definition: “a state characterized by the coexistence of contradictory or incompatible elements.” Life this year inspires intense gratitude and satisfaction; but also frequent daily moments of hopelessness.

It's a beautiful, sunny morning in New Mexico. My wife and our cat and I are healthy. I've had a good morning, writing, and will play pickleball shortly. We live in a vibrant community where the city council cares about improving lives, even making our city walkable and bikeable! Our new community radio station is drawing a tremendous response, the soups at Mountain View Market Co+op are incredibly tasty and healthy, and the near-full moon above our mountains has been stunning. 

But we live in a desert, during a drought, and people keep planting waterhog pecan trees to sell pecans to China. 

Each morning's online Times Digest is full of statements and actions by the national government that are not only unwise and inconsistent but absurd and downright dangerous. Lacking an adult attention span, the Commander-in-Chief makes significant decisions on impulse, having seen something on TV or heard something from his most recent visitor. He childishly insists on a military parade military officials don't want. While staff saying they're still checking on the legalities, he announces he's going to jack up tariffs, sending even his Republican allies scrambling for cover and tanking the stock market. 

Donald Trump is politically schizophrenic: he strongly opposes chain visas, for example – in which folks get to live here because a relative has become a citizen. Like the case of Maria, a Mexican immigrant who worked as a model, married a rich guy, and got citizenship under the “Einstein Visa” program, even though she was a college dropout with no discernible intellectual or artistic accomplishments, then got her parents Guillermo and Hortencia legal residency. Oops! That was Melania, from Slovenia.

He strongly opposes gun control, and rescinds regulations keeping guns away from people officially declared incompetent; then he repeatedly says that mental health is the problem, not guns; then he proclaims we need gun control – until a “come-to-Jesus” meeting with a top NRA lobbyist. He's a fat old guy who ducked the draft when he was young but would rush into a school, unarmed, to defend students against a young man with an automatic weapon. He's so tough he can't stand up to Vladimir Putin. He's a nationalist who won't even instruct officials to confront known Russian interference in our elections. 

Still, we are so fortunate! We don't live in a war zone. Many of us have ample food and medical care, and we're working to extend those to others – along with better mental health care. Our community cares about tolerance, helping the less fortunate, and the arts. We have an international film festival, a farmers' market where committed farmers sell healthy food, and we're small enough to allow for real friendships and even pleasant conversations with people we disagree with. We're slowly housing the homeless. We have local businesses like the Shed, whose owners offer patrons tasty food and also help feed the poor. We have a fine symphony, and great local artists. And a Catholic bishop who washes Dreamers' feet. We have problems, but we're working on them. 

And those mountains!

So I'm grateful. But how deep and permanent are the wounds from experimenting with a clown in the Casa Blanca?

                                             -30-

[The above column appeared this morning, Sunday, 4 March 2018, in the Las Cruces Sun-News, as well as on the newspaper's website and KRWG's website.  A spoken version will air during the week on KRWG and on KTAL 201.5 FM.]

[Perhaps the clearest sign of White House absurdity this week, among many, was that in a week when Putin rattled sabers by announcing a super new weapon that could outsmart our defenses, Trump was up at 6 in the morning Tweeting a response . . . . to Alec Baldwin's Saturday Night Live imitations of him!   Can we really imagine any other U.S. President insecure enough to respond in public at all to someone's imitation of him, other than to appreciate it?  Let alone, to make it such a priority.  Aside from everything else, Trump should have learned enough from his showbiz experience to realize he's enhancing Baldwin's and SNL's audience.  I'm decades removed from the time I watched it regularly, but will start taping it or viewing skits on the Internet now because of Trump's reaction to them, and I doubt I'm the only one.

I hope someone at SNL is crafting a Baldwin skit in which Baldwin-Trump is up at six crafting tweets about Baldwin.  I envision advisors trying to interest him in various other matters, such as Putin's comments and the growing concern about Jared Kushner's incredibly deep conflicts of interest, while Trump (who's so childish that Baldwin ought always to have a teddy bear, or perhaps a Donald Trump doll, in his lap during skits) keeps jabbing ineffectively at Baldwin.]

[Rivaling that for absurdity are the about-face on guns and the apparent fact that Trump's trade war announcement, which even his allies say is the dumbest thing he's done so far, resulted from his frustration over Kushner's problems and other reverses, so he announced the trade wars in a snit fit -- even though the officials who should have been involved in any such decision had no idea he was going to announce such a thing.  It was under consideration -- and subject of great inner conflict in the Administration -- but not vetted as to legalities and implications.  As some staffer said, "Well, he won't be signing anything, because there's nothing to sign.  There's no paperwork."  Another great skit would be a version of Trump's late-night meeting with NRA representatives, after which his brief foray into gun-control advocacy ended quickly.]

[He did show up at the Gridiron event this year; and he or his writers had come up with some good lines.  If the White House and our relationships with allies and our credibility in the world and our security were not all in flames, that could have been fun.]