I Was Alive

Trump tried to fire Mueller last summer.  What does that mean?  I must have read fifteen different analyses as to what this amounted to this morning.  Surely, they all suggest, the special prosecutor must surely have some thing that the administration does not want exposed to the light of day.   We can now say with certainty, they unanimously opine, that when Trump told the press he wasn’t even thinking about firing Mueller he was not telling the truth.  And while lying to the press is not a crime, lying under oath is.  One article suggested a comparison to Nixon and it provided the link to a BBC special, which included a clip of the second, Watergate, special prosecutor, the Texan, Mr. Leon Jaworski discussing the moment of truth when he heard the tapes and heard that Tricky Dicky was counselling his team to perjure themselves. 

And that cold, winter scene there in the Washington of 1974, that showed the special prosecutor stepping into a car that had an old fashion dial-phone in the back seat seemed so remarkably far away.  I was alive.  I could name one hundred remarkable things that happened that year that are not so far away, the music of that year, the international relations from 1974 and certainly many of the things that occurred in my own life.  And yet it may as well have been a World War II news real, for all the distance it simultaneously spoke of. 

We won’t have tapes this time.  We may not even have a conviction.  But I’m sure there were many, many people, perhaps a majority of people in America at that time, who wondered if the U.S. system could survive such a scandal.  It did. If it was hard but not impossible to find redeeming qualities in Nixon it is, by comparison, simply impossible to find anything particularly redeeming about having this huckster lie to us with abandon.  And of course, this will all look quaint one day, when people read about Trump's “tweets” and the very word will feel like the stone age and the urgency of this problem for which we don't yet know the answer, will be fondly regarded, with time, as quaint. 

Home from the gym.  It’s the weekend but everyone still needs to get up.  It’s the college weekend event for parents at school and we are now running late.  I saw my daughter's counsellor a few moments ago, walking out of the gym in my big orange coat and skimpy gym shorts.  "I know.  We’re coming."  Back home my wife is suddenly frantic.  “Well, go take a shower, then.”  I get mine done downstairs.   Everyone piles in the car, and soon we’re learning about “Hidden Gems” and “What Do U.S. Colleges Really Look For?”  I assume I know it all heading over and fortunately, I don’t.   Another gripping unknown that will be hard to remember as anything other than fate, in some time yet to come. 

Saturday , 01/27/18