Before We Debate Mr. Trump, Let's Contemplate the Context

When someone suggested we debate Donald Trump’s impact, I contemplated the context for that discussion.

The context includes truths we duck. That, to much of nature, humanity is the scourge of the earth, having killed off numerous species. Euro-Christian humans are the worst. Their Torah-Bible-Koran, as generally translated, tells ‘em the earth and animals are theirs to use and abuse – and they do. Everywhere, they’ve decimated indigenous peoples who generally believed more in living in harmony with nature, not trampling it. Our greed and carelessness now guarantee our grandchildren and their descendants a very inferior life.

A second context: the wealthiest of us have long controlled and abused the poorest. (Lighter-skinned folks have abused darker-skinned folks, too.) By any measure, wealth was very concentrated in a few hands in the late 19^th Century. Early 20^th Century progressives, the 1930s Depression, and the 1960s brought that obscene inequality down a little by the 1970s. Then, a reaction set in, bringing even worse inequality. The highest marginal income tax rates declined from 91% (1950) to 37%. The U.S. middle and lower classes got squeezed. And told it was the fault of welfare cheats.

A third point: charging “that sounds Communist!” meant little even when the Soviet Union and the Peoples Republic of China were our sworn enemies. Pure socialism probably hasn’t been tried, except in Kerala; and pure capitalism demonstrably fails. Major efforts at communism have ended in dictatorships. The Chinese periodically had to add in more personal and economic freedoms – “Let a Thousand Flowers Bloom!” but curtailed those when freedom annoyed the rulers. The U.S. has had to soften capitalism with pensions, fairer laws, worker’s comp, and even welfare – and regulations that protect workers’ health and even the environment we all share. Even so, we’re extreme: every other advanced nation has public health care, but we retain a dysfunctional private system. Our CEOs make 300 times a worker’s annual salary, not the 40-50x common in several of our allies. There’s lots of room between 300x and socialism.

We’ve also developed a dominant two-party electoral system that ultimately doesn’t serve us too well.

In that context, none of it Donald Trump’s fault, let’s consider his impact.

Claiming scientific facts are “a hoax” and joining Yemen and Libya as the only countries rejecting Paris Agreement on mitigating climate craziness, Mr. Trump is not going to help improve our descendants’ air, water, or temperatures. Denying the need to shift to electric cars lets China get way ahead of us in development we’ll gave to ape.

Lowering taxes for the wealthiest while cutting SNAP, scholarships, and health assistance, and destroying the Education Department probably won’t help diminish our obscene inequality.

Finally, gutting our professional and apolitical civil service system, our inspectors-general, and semi-independent Department of Justice, and mistreating legal immigrants who have anti-Trump materials on their computers, won’t enhance our efforts at democracy or true prosperity. Decisions made to protect the ruler’s ego don’t gain us the world’s cooperation, inspire our troops, or help us be the innovators who create the Next Big Thing.

He may get the Washington footballers to be “the Redskins” again, and bully the news media into submission, and maybe even stymie a welfare cheat; but your great-grandkids, sweltering and struggling to breathe, or sneaking across our northern border, won’t honor you for failing to shout “No!” Neither will veterans and folks with limited incomes and less than perfect health.

                                      – 30 – 

 

[The above column appeared Sunday, 27 July, 2025, in the Las Cruces Sun-News, and on the newspaper's website and the KRWG website (under Local Viewpoints). A shortened and sharpened radio commentary version of this Sunday column will air during the week on KRWG (90.1 FM) and on KTAL-LP (101.5 FM / http://www.lccommunityradio.org/). That website also contains station show archives.]

[ The point I probably don’t make in there is that the U.S. despite all we learned in civics classes, did a lot of harm to a lot of the world, and to a lot of nature, before Donald Trump took things to their logical conclusion. He’s a con man; but just as the con man turns people’s own greed against them, or sometimes their charity, Trump has material to work with. People are angry. Our rulers are adept at masking the reasons for the conditions that cause that anger. In our south or 1930s Germany, it’s the N’s or the Jews; later it’s the welfare cheats, not the reduction of rich folks’ and corporate taxes to less than half the rates we had in the prosperous 1950s. And it’s those immigrants! And folks with unconventional genders.

The principle of Trump’s success hasn’t changed: people are angry; Trump is angry; he bellows and people think he’s angry about the same things that bother them; but, in fact, he’s profiting from those. But he didn’t create the conditions that are troubling people.]

[Bottom line: if you’re Putin or the People’s Republic of China, Trump is probably pretty convenient for you. If you’re someone hoping the U.S. will deteriorate, and/or NATO blow up, he’s pretty helpful. If you like the paralytic partisanship we and our Congress our suffering, he didn’t create that but sure keeps it going. Perhaps if you’re Nature, and want the destructive human race curbed, maybe decimated, maybe he’s a funny kind of help for you, by refusing to focus on cooperation or our long-term survival needs, because, like a baby, he’s mesmerized by the glittering baubles life is waving in front of his crib.]

The Dalai Lama Turns 90

Forty years ago, I stood in the Dalai Lama’s bedroom contemplating a cup with a skull carved above it, which he drank from as a child, so that he would be always aware of death’s imminence.

He had left that bedroom in 1959, aged 14, to avoid having the Chinese capture him and make him sing the government’s praises, abusing Tibetans’ passionate Buddhist faith to weaken Tibetan resentment over the Chinese invasion in 1959. He escaped to Dharamshala, India. One moving morning, after witnessing a sky burial, I climbed to the top of a hill behind Serra Monastery, one of the three most important monasteries around Lhasa, where a man who lived up there showed me religious items that the Chinese had destroyed during the Cultural Revolution. He unrolled them from a dusty bag as if they were treasures.

Tibetans revered the Dalai Lama. In Lhasa, giving someone a picture of the Dalai Lama was one of the biggest kindnesses a visitor could do.

He, and other tulkus, are believed to be reincarnations of important Buddhist lamas. After a death, signs lead religious leaders to a home, and a child who might be such a reincarnation. They observe the child. Sometimes he seems to recognize someone who was close to the dead lama. Often they’ll spread on the floor before him several things, some shiny and appealing, and when he selects a less appealing article that belonged to the dead lama, as if it were familiar, that is also a sign.

We feared then that when he died the Chinese would appoint his “successor,” from some family they controlled. Tibetan Buddhist leaders would search as usual for his tulku, necessarily among Tibetans in India, but the Chinese would beat them to the punch.

Four decades have passed. Wandering around China, I was moved by Hong Kong folks’ justified fears that when the PRC recovered Hong Kong from the British, in 1997, the Chinese promises of semi-autonomy would be like dust on the wind. Tibetans mostly resented Chinese rule. At the time, I studied carefully what I could see on the ground, but also befriended China’s leading English-language apologist for its invasion. Mao, having liberated much of China from bondage, sought to do the same for Tibetans, and considered religion, as Marx had said, the opiate of the people, a mechanism by which aristocrats kept the ordinary people under control. That’s often true, but the Tibetans loved their religion with a humility and passion of which I was always in awe. Imagine folks making pilgrimages to Lhasa from their rural homes, across land not unlike New Mexico’s, and pausing, every three steps, to prostrate themselves flat on their bellies, as they did when circumamulatingg the Jokhang Temple in Lhasa. And the Chinese, as the U.S. did with surviving members of indigenous tribes, wanted also to turn the Tibetans into imitation Han-Chinese. It’s called “progress.”

The Dalai Lama lives the “loving kindness” he advocates. He knows all religions, but remains quirky, funny, and warmly informal with everyone. As he says, "A tree can make ten thousand matches, but a single match can burn ten thousand trees.”

Recently he turned 90. His longevity has frustrated Chinese plans. The Chinese are rubbing their hands in anticipation now. In July, he confirmed his plan to be reincarnated, with his non-profit trust locating his successor. Sadly, we will see dual – and dueling – Dalai Lamas.

                                                         -- 30 –

 [The above column appeared Sunday, 20 July, 2025, in the Las Cruces Sun-News, and on the newspaper's website and the KRWG website (under Local Viewpoints). A shortened and sharpened radio commentary version of this Sunday column will air during the week on KRWG (90.1 FM) and on KTAL-LP (101.5 FM / http://www.lccommunityradio.org/). That website also contains station show archives.]

For me, traveling in Tibet was a marvel. Nearly died of illness at one point, but learned a lot.

For you, probably the best book introducing you to the 14^th Dalai Lama is Pico Iyer’s The Open Road: the Global Journey of the Fourteenth Dalai Lama. Iyer is both a noted travel writer and a longtime friend of the Dalai Lama.

Bakground Tibet stuff, or Tibetan Buddhist stuff? I loved The Way of the White Clouds, which I read while traveling there. The writer was a German, a Buddhist but initially a bit of a skeptic about Tibetan Buddism – until he met the tulku of a lama he’d known personally, and the kid recognized him. Anyway, I recall enjoying that and also Alexandra David-Neel’s My Journey to Lhasa. I also recently read a biography of Patrul Rinpoche that I really liked, that really gave one the flavor of the faith.  And humility!  Typical of him, walking the countryside to a town where he was to speak, he fell in with a poor old woman, and traveled with her, and she treated him like a beggar-servant.  He said nothing of who he was, and made no complaint.  She, on her way to hear him in that town, was rather startled when she arrived.   

For any person who is grieving, I would recommend The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying. When my mother died I gave a copy to my father, a militant atheist, and he ended up greatly appreciating it. For someone seeking a fine introduction to Buddhism and the Buddha’s life, you might try _______’s . I read it decades ago and again within the last few years. Thich Nhat Hanh’s Old Path White Clouds: Walking in the Footsteps of the Buddha. I think of it more as a novel based on the Buddha’s life than as a historical biography, because it mixes historical accuracy with good storytelling.

A favorite shot of the Potala -- from the Banak Shol

 

Tibetan at Norbu Linka w DL pic

Doubt the DL would approve flag or soldier at Potala

The Potala -- Note name of bar in foreground

This last image is incredibly moving for me.  The photo backdrop of the home with a TV near Guilin or Yang Shuo was Chinese vision of perfection, favorite Chinese scenery and a nice place with a TV.  It was among five or six photo-backdrops at which Chinese tourists could have their pictures taken -- and, to me, rather unpleasant, as a sign of the Chinese transforming the Potala, which was both the DL's home and the seat of the Tibetan government before the Chinese came, into a tawdry tourist attraction.  The Tibetan passing on the bicycle, pausing to regard this, was irresistible as an image -- but what he was thinking I can't know.

All these photos were shot in 1985 or 1987, and are copyright Peter Goodman

Our [illegal] road to Lhasa included a stop at this nomad camp

 

Flood Tragedy -- and U.S. Government Tragedy

As Mr. Dylan pointed out, you don’t need to be a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.

Texas suffered a terrible tragedy: torrential rains, exacerbated by an exceptional conjunction of slow-moving storms, caused destructive flooding that killed 100 people, including kids at a Christian summer camp right where two rivers meet.

That’s heartbreaking. Everyone’s sympathies go out to folks there, particularly parents and siblings of dead children.

Sympathy doesn’t mean ignoring causes. Empathy should impel us all to contemplate why this happened, so violently, and how we might improve our future.

Many wondered how the National Weather Service performed, after slews of DOGE-inspired firings, particularly of experts. It seems to have done well, predicting heavy rain and floods. The viciousness of the storm, and exact rainfall, couldn’t have been predicted precisely, but NWS warned appropriately. But the Warning Coordination Meteorologist, responsible for making damned sure those messages were heard and heeded, then coordinate with local officials, had been “bought out” in the DOGE madness, leaving the position vacant. Yeah, maybe Texas officials should do their jobs and folks living by rivers should watch for warnings; but the hundred dead folks and their families might have favored paying a WCM to ensure warnings were heard and understood.

Of course, Trump plans to have wealthy private pals take over our weather predicting. Less “government.” Huge profits for his pals, whom we’ll pay to do what government did. If some summer camp wants the most accurate weather data, well, that might be too expensive.

The flood’s root cause? Most all reputable scientists agree that we’re experiencing what I’ll term “climate craziness,” because it’s more serious and dangerous than “climate change” suggests and its symptoms include more than greater global heat. Climate craziness is serious. We can no longer prevent it. Experts differ on how much we can mitigate the disaster. It threatens to make many places uninhabitably warm and kill vulnerable people. Our greed and carelessness have caused or greatly magnified it. More and higher floods, bigger wildfires, and and increasingly violent storms, are facts of life.

Mr. Trump claims it’s a Chinese or Democratic “hoax.”

Trump is demonstrably wrong. Many Texans voted to reinstall him in the Casa Blanca. He’s abusing their faith.

It should matter to them that he’s ignoring forces that are killing their children and will make lives miserable for their grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

Seas are rising, glaciers melting, temperatures consistently higher, and these forces compound to cause much of what we’re suffering. Mr. Trump is in denial. (Of course, for decades, denying climate change and minimizing its significance have kept many politicians of both parties in office.

Mr. Trump is cutting government efforts to prevent or predict disasters, thus hindering preparations for the extreme weather he refuses to cooperate with the rest of the world in trying to mitigate. He’s cutting FEMA, which passed out post-disaster bandaids. As Ruidoso folks can testify, those “bandaids” help tremendously when someone’s lost everything in a flood. Washington is also cutting off health benefits for millions of people whose health might get hammered by wildfire smoke, higher temperatures, and/or pollution. (We need to save money to cut rich folks’ taxes.) Our government is also easing regulations, so’s corporations can do what they do more freely and maximize both profit and poisons.

If my kid had died this month, in a flood, with that context, I think I’d notice the connection.

                                                        – 30 –

 

[The above column appeared Sunday, 13 July, 2025, in the Las Cruces Sun-News, and on the newspaper’s website (sub nom "Trump's Cuts Hinder Extreme Weather Preparedness" ) and the KRWG website (under Local Viewpoints). A shortened and sharpened radio commentary version of this Sunday column will air during the week on KRWG (90.1 FM) and on KTAL-LP (101.5 FM / http://www.lccommunityradio.org/). That website also contains station show archives.]

[Remarkably, one MAGA Congresswoman from Georgia tried to claim the tragic Guadalupe River flooding was “fake news,” eventually backing up to the weird statement that the damage was real but the weather fake, apparently under the impression that cloud-seeding (which is mostly ineffective) was the explanation, not the conditions the experts all spoke of. I wonder how that sat with the two Congressfolk (one from Texas, one from Georgia) whose daughters were at that Christian Camp, though fortunately they both survived. The anti-science theme of Trump’s COVID nonsense and Robert Kennedy’s anti-vax machinations continues.]

Feeling Compassion for a Beleaguered Child Who Got Older

Watering tomatoes this morning, I glanced up and watched Foxy watch me. We inherited Foxy, a red-heeler mix, from a woman my wife was helping through her last years of life. Foxy had had a hard life, but blossomed here. Although initially she distrusted male humans, and I worried she’d be a pain, we’ve come to love each other.

That’s a simple experience Donald Trump has never had. He seems never to have had a pet. Well, what could the pet do for him? (What he could do for a dog or cat is a question that wouldn’t occur to him.)

Later, during a break from writing, the internet played a bit of Jason Carter’s memorial speech about his grandfather, Jimmy. Loved the part about hanging zip-lock bags up to dry for re-use. My wife has us doing that, too. And the Carters being small-town folks who never forgot who they were. A cutaway showed Donald Trump, scowling, then the Bidens and others laughing at the laugh lines.

I felt sorry again for Mr. Trump. He was raised by a Father obsessed with making more money. Donald and his siblings learned to compete for money and status, not to love. Or give.

Next, the Internet showed me Robin Williams, in Good Will Hunting, released twenty-five years ago, making that great speech telling the young genius, Will, that although Will could write a book on Michelangelo, he can’t tell us how the Sistine Chapel smells, or how it feels to look up at that marvelous ceiling; and that while he’s memorized Shakespeare’s love sonnets, he has never loved enough to be vulnerable, never loved a woman “so much she can level you with a glance,” or sat in her hospital room during her last months.

Some people know those feelings. Others avoid them. I don’t envy you, Donald. I envy men who stayed married to and loving a single woman all their adult lives, raising children the best they could to be loving, caring, confident, honest folks. Men who showed a steadiness neither you nor I ever did. You touched women without permission – the sign of a man who needs to bully women, not one seeking love, or even sex. Seduction takes a gentler mode.

Sorry, Donald. We’re 79 this year. I’m sorry your life has been so limited by your fear of real feelings, real friendship, love, or the sensation of wandering alone into a new country, having no common language with the folks there, humble as a baby in their culture, but smiling while they laugh at you. You’ve never been writing and suddenly teared up because your fictional characters lost a child or learned some painful truth. Have you ever truly loved a woman, as more than a status symbol, sexual release, or appropriate decoration for a life designed to impress folks?

I’m nobody. But when I die, if I’m able to reflect, I won’t regret having so few worldly accomplishments. I’ll regret moments I chickened out, didn’t ask the hard question, didn’t provide a kindness, I could have, didn’t go deeper into the Peruvian jungle, the Tibetan mountains, or the mind of a character, or didn’t love enough.

I’m sorry your father and mother didn’t teach you love and integrity, and exemplify those. I took all that for granted, mostly rebelled, and only later appreciated – and had time to tell them I appreciated – what they gave me.

                                     – 30 –

 [This is an odd and personal column. It illustrates how, in so many quiet moments in our pleasant personal lives, Mr. Trump and the dangers he and his confederates pose to the republic can suddenly insert themselves. But it takes a more human look at him. By the way, this is a sensible discussion of Trump's psyche by a man who has written a book on the subject. See also his nice, Mary Trump’s book, Too Much and Never Enough. ]

[Posting a link on Facebook to this site, mentioning compassion for Donald Trump, and recognizing how odd that likely sounds, I felt I should add: 1 Nothing in this column excuses or justifies any of his personal or political bad conduct, though it may help explain something. 2. Compassion for Donald Trump will sound particularly weird to folks who hate him.  However, would you really like to be stuck inside his head -- to BE Donald Trump, with all his inner pain that he's trying to get back at the world for?  How would that FEEL?] 

[ A point that deserves elaboration: as a young lawyer, I had an experience that taught me a lot. When I summered at a huge San Francisco firm, and later accepted employment there, a young lawyer was particularly prominent. Despite his relative youth, he spoke with a certain authority. The partners thought highly of him. And after I was employed there, we were acquaintances, though not particularly close. Over the course of a year or two, I formed close relationships with various young women employed there; and three different women, a Mexican-American secretary, a receptionist who was also an artist; and a woman who worked in document-processing, each told me privately that Carter [no, not his real name] had hit on them sexually in rather appalling ways. The secretary [a tough young lady who, when I once carped about her wearing nail polish, looked me sternly in the eye and said, “When I picked fruit in the fields beside my parents, it made a mess of my hands and nails, and I swore I’d get out of there, and I’ll wear nail polish whether you like it or not.”] seemed sweet and deferential, and probably Catholic, and he called her into his office to see the sunset and asked, “Don’t I deserve a kiss for that?”; the receptionist, he commented on her mammaries; and I forget how he came on to the third lady; but in each case, he was talking to a woman of lower status at the law firm and who likely seemed to him likely to be intimidated, or; in each case, he insulted her or seemed almost threatening; but none of these “advances” were designed to lead to an affair. He was a very smart fellow; I’m sure that, had he wanted to talk someone into an affair, he knew how to do it; but he was simply being pointlessly cruel and domineering. (Eventually, complaints on the subject reached the firm’s leading partners, and led them to suggest he go practice law somewhere else.) In the same way, Mr. Trump’s conduct is designed to bully, not to generate love or even satisfy lust. It’s a need he has to reassure us (and himself) that he matters.]