Month: April 2017

When’s the last time you seriously worried about nuclear war?  If you happen to be a baby boomer like me, you might recall those nuclear bomb drills from grade school in the 1950’s and 1960’s.  They’d sound the siren and you’d dive under your desk and cover your head.  That’s because they figured even ten year-olds weren’t limber enough to bend over and kiss their asses goodbye.  It was the Cold War, and the US Strategic Air Command had B-52’s filled with hydrogen bombs  in the air 24/7, just as the Soviets had their ICBMs constantly on high alert, ready to launch at the turn of a key.  Nikita Kruschev vowed he would bury us and Dwight Eisenhower warned of the hegemony of the military-industrial complex.  There was a philosophy called MAD, “mutually assured destruction”, accepted as dogma by most of the generals and politicians of that era. The idea was that no one was crazy enough to use a nuke knowing that it would lead to the death of just about everyone on the planet, an extinction level event.  But we all knew things could go wrong.  An apprehensive nuclear cloud occupied the national zeitgeist on a daily basis, embodied in two brilliant films of that era, “Dr. Strangelove” and “Failsafe”.

It was in 1962 that it began to look like the nightmares might actually come true. The Soviets began placing nuclear armed missiles in Cuba, missiles that could be launched and hit US targets before our pilots would have time to pull their pants on.  There were plenty of generals and politicians and pundits who thought the only acceptable response was to nuke Cuba before the Soviets nuked us.  People were scared shitless.  It looked like a nuclear war might start at any moment. Fortunately, John F. Kennedy was president, and with his memories of World War II still fresh in his mind, he had no desire to see the planet in flames.  Rather than push the button, he blockaded Cuba and called the Soviet’s bluff.  Within a few weeks, the missiles were removed, and life returned to some semblance of normalcy.  Nuclear Armageddon was by no means off the table, but it moved back to the sub-basement of the national consciousness, where it has more or less remained for over fifty years.

Fast forward to 2017.  Donald J. Trump is president, and as Lloyd Bentsen might have said, “Mr. Trump, I knew Jack Kennedy.  You’re no Jack Kennedy”.  It turns out that Trump isn’t even George W. Bush.  Bush was no Rhodes scholar, but even when he was pushing fairy-tales about WMD’s and pouring untold billions into two pointless wars, no one, not even bleeding-heart liberals like me, thought he was dumb enough or crazy enough to toss a couple of nukes at Iraq or Afghanistan.  We all remained reasonably certain that we wouldn’t be awakened from sleep by a blinding flash, an ear-splitting boom,  and a mushroom cloud on the horizon.

That’s no longer true.  In the spirit of “just kill me now”, some of us might actually be hoping for the sweet relief of sudden death after nearly a hundred days of Trump. In 2017, MAD might more rightfully stand for Major Asshole Donald.  In just the last ten days, the man with the little hands, in an international pissing match, has lobbed a couple hundred million bucks worth of Tomahawk missiles at an empty airfield in Syria, dropped a MOAB, the Mother Of All Bombs, which might just as well be called a BDYES (biggest dick you’ve ever seen), on a couple dozen cave-dwelling ISIS schmucks in Afghanistan, and lost a whole fucking US aircraft carrier task force in the process of again waving his diminutive Donnie dingus at the North Koreans.  You’ve got Mike Pence, a guy who seriously sees the Book of Revelations not as a metaphor but as a blueprint, staring reproachfully across the Korean DMZ and saying that “the US sword stands ready”.  Rex Tillerson, our otherwise mute Secretary of State, warns that “nothing is off the table.”

We’ve never before had a president we believed could start a nuclear war in a fit of petulance and anger.  We’ve never before had a president who we believed didn’t have the intellectual depth to comprehend the grievous consequences of employing even one atomic bomb. We’ve never before had a president who had such a childish preoccupation with his weapons of war, or such a nonchalance about dealing death from a dinner table in South Florida. We do now.

I’m one of those pointy-headed elitist East-Coast liberals who apparently pissed people off enough in 2016 to cost Hillary Clinton the election and install the most manifestly incompetent and dangerous president in our history.  To be completely accurate, I’m not actually from the East-Coast. I was born and raised in Toledo, which used to be the punch line for a lot of jokes about places where you can find your cause of death officially listed as boredom.  But no one ever talks about commie pinko Midwest liberals, so I’ve self-aligned with all those disreputable New Yorkers and Bostonians.  Also, I tend to talk faster than most folks here, who can make short declarative sentences and simple right turns into major life epochs, so I’m often asked if I’m from New York, but I’m not. It’s just that I can make the leap from noun to verb to object without having to call a committee meeting.

I ended up in Bloomington, Indiana by employing a circuitous route through Chicago, Houston, Chicago again, then Champaign,  and finally home sweet home, where my wife and I raised our sons and have spent the biggest part of our adult lives.  At first I thought landing here involved angering the gods to the point where they didn’t need to send me to hell, but figured I’d gain significant benefit by some experience in purgatory.  It turns out I wasn’t completely wrong, but I couldn’t initially see the view of heaven from here, and the view is pretty spectacular.  The other side of that coin, the part that at times is hard to reconcile, is where the whole “Blue Guy in a Red State” comes in.

The people of Indiana are basically good decent folk who care about their homes and their children and each other.  They live for high school basketball and football, spend Memorial Day weekends with a quarter million like-minded people watching South American millionaires drive in circles at high speeds, and have an abiding love of pork products of all kinds.  They also overwhelmingly love their lord, Jesus.  Vice President Mike Pence, previously the governor of the Hoosier state, once famously declared, “I’m a Christian, a conservative, and a Republican…in that order.”

Therein lies some of my issues.  For one thing, I’m not just an elitist liberal, I’m an agnostic Jew (with occasional episodes of purely magical thinking).  When I first started as the radiologist at Greene County General Hospital, I seriously don’t think most of the people I encountered had ever seen an actual Jew before.  It took me a good year to convince them I wasn’t hiding horns under my buzz cut, and I didn’t sup on Christian babies at my evening meal.

It goes without saying that most Hoosiers enthusiastically pulled the lever for Donald J. Trump on November 8.  It was with considerable chagrin and not insignificant anger that I saw Trump’s clown-like face with a large red “Indiana” and a larger red check mark above it the very first thing when I tuned in to MSNBC that fateful night. Right there in the middle of the US map, was a big solid red Indiana…before even Mississsippi or Alabama weighed in .  And at the same time, I imagined myself as a tiny imperceptible point of blue just a bit south of state’s center on that map.

There you have it.  Blue Guy in a Red State.  I’ve got some stuff to say.  Stay tuned.

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