For the first time in his controversial tenure, the Justice Department
has penned a document accusing President Trump of directing his lawyer
to commit campaign felony crimes by paying hush money
to Stormy Daniels and Karen McDougal to prevent them from talking
publicly about affairs they had with The Donald soon after
his youngest child was born, secret payments made to help him win
the 2016 election. Trump has answered Justice by tweeting that there
are no “smocking guns,” perhaps hoping to distract people
with his poor ability to read or spell. Meanwhile, the four-star generals
Trump had picked to supposedly provide stability to his original cabinet
have all resigned out of some last-minute regrets for being
associated with a mean-spirited pathological liar, even if they didn’t
seem to regret helping to engineer a war in Iraq waged on a big WMD lie.
And now, as legal commentators on TV say that, if Trump wasn’t
President, he would already be in a courtroom facing criminal charges,
Trump is finding it difficult to talk anyone in his circle into taking
the newly opened Chief of Staff job, since previous job seekers
seem to prefer the thought of spending time with their original families
rather than the new families they would have to make in prison.
Under Trump, climate change charges forward unchecked, more industrial
pollution is dumped daily into America’s lakes and rivers, oil pipelines
are built to leak across sacred lands, a new generation of mini-nukes
adds another layer of threat to human survival, immigrant infants and toddlers
are separated from parents and placed into building-block handcuffs and jails.
And still, 40% of Americans seem to support Trump no matter what he does,
as if he was a baseball team they had chosen and will continue to root for,
as a fan, throughout their lives, no matter how badly the team is playing
this year nor how nasty the players have started to behave. This is a president
who has grown up, according to his biographers, with unbreakable ties
to American and Russian mobs, when storefront U.S. banks stopped lending
his shady businesses money. And now dozens of his old acquaintances
are having to choose between singing free to the feds, or remaining loyal
and silent for years in a padded cell. In truth, almost all of our presidents
in recent decades have committed war crimes worthy of rebuke and impeachment
in a more just world–from illegal wars both overt and covert, to remote-control
drone bombing of innocents half a globe away. But we have arrived at the day
that Prince sang about when the doves cry, that Dylan sang about when
something is happening here, but you don’t know what it is, do you, Mr. Trump?
Researchers report the climate is mutating even faster than expected
and will not be able to house human life for many more centuries without major
changes in energy cradles and policies. Which scientific researchers should I call
to report that I have just seen flashes of dark matter and dark energy light up
in rainbow colors above my computer screen? Is there a reputable medical
journal where I can publish an article, one hundred years too late, about a theory
that I’ve developed on how to cure the deadly 1919 flu? It’s difficult to explain
my theory in the kind of poems most poets are writing these days–but using
advanced mathematics, digital microscopes, and gatherings of people and
polar bears, I think the creative equations describe a Green New Deal
and improved capabilities of quacks and quarks on an inter-galactic scale.
Eliot Katz
12/18