Tilting at Windmills for Today, or The Quickest Path to Insignificance.

It has been a long time since I read Don Quixote. It was a true classic, although, anything written so long ago can be difficult. Still there was something charming, entrancing, almost magic in the delightful, delirious chase to an imagined past. There is a little Quixote in all of us, a little desire to be heroic, return to a greatness we may never have had.

Listening to Trump I can't help but think De Cervantes would have understood his calls to action. His need to slay dragons, his need to have songs written about him. His need to find monsters that don't really exist, because the real monsters are not so easily defeated.

Quixote was bound up in all the religious dogma of knighthood, and the manly requirements of the martial arts is a ridiculous mixture of comedy, and tragedy. Quixote actually believes he is destined to a life of knighthood, his greatness is ordained.  It isn't so damned funny, though, when it comes from a head of state. When you see the alliances so carefully established to protect the peace being cast aside in a careless act of foolish self delusion.

Certainly, Trump does not have the charm, or chivalry, and there is nothing even slightly amusing
about his confrontations with allies, and trading partners. In fact, the rhetoric is frightening, terrifying. Everything to him seems to be based on a zero sum accounting principle. Every gain in prestige or power for a subordinate, competitor, or head of state is automatically deducted from his accumulated wealth of self worth.

Like Quixote, he longs for a past that doesn't exist. "Make America Great Again," is not a slogan to him, it is an overreaching, all encompassing imperative.  And he sees himself as the Dragon Slayer in Chief. Any time you try to recreate something that never was, based on the memories that are fiction you end up with a distorted version of reality, a nightmarish world where decisions are based on belief, and desire rather than fact.

Of course, there are rumors, and allegations that Bannon is the real delusional knight, and Trump only the willing Pancho Sanza. It really makes little difference. Either way brings the same disturbing conclusion, the dissolution of the American Dream, and the birth of the tyrannical oligarchy based on the madness of sir Donald, de la Manhattan. And you don't have to wait for it to be made into a movie.

A new cast, but the same play.

Turns out the Democrats are just as divided, and contentious as the Republicans.  And it seems, according to sources, they deliberately sabotaged Bernie Sanders. In a unrelated article it seems to have been Russian Espionage that mined the rancid depths of the DNC servers. Because, it led the reader to believe, Putin admires Trump. Or, maybe he just hates Debbie Wasserman Schultz. It doesn't really matter who leaked the news or why, though.

I have wondered if the heads of the Republican Party are not wondering right now, "why didn't we think of that?" But, that is not really important either.  It is always a little disconcerting when so many people seem so surprised when they read of corruption and deceit in politics. Haven't they been paying attention?

It doesn't really matter, though. Hillary and Donald, act 1, scene 1 is playing across the big stage now. And that is the reality of life. It is not pretty, but the nation gets what the nation deserves.

The other day a young lady rang the doorbell at my house. She was campaigning for one of the presidential hopefuls. Bright, polite, and very charming, she asked what my biggest concern was regarding the next administration. I told her it was nuclear proliferation. She agreed it could be a problem, but was a little surprised by the choice.

This administration has approved funding for five new nuclear weapons, at a cost of nearly 1 trillion dollars. And this is a guy who was awarded the Noble Prize largely because of his stated goals of reducing the nuclear arsenal. It has not gone very well. The stockpiles are still there. In fact Obama has reduced them more slowly than any post cold war president.

Reading the speeches, and listening to the plans of Clinton and Trump offer little hope for reining in the madness that has become our Nuclear Policy. If we have enough weapons to destroy everybody, and possibly everything, isn't that enough? Do we need more? Apparently the short answer is "no, but we need better weapons, and lots of them."

We live in a world filled with madness, hate, bigotry. We are awash in terrible weapons of unimaginable destructive power. We can never use them. We can never eliminate them. And we keep telling ourselves that those two statements somehow make sense together. That we can control ourselves, and each other, enough to keep playing.

So, to you, my friends I end with the words of Leon Trotsky "The end may justify the means as long as there is something that justifies the end."