They're All Criminals

When you've been where I've been for the last few weeks (grave illness, surgery, etc.--can it really just be weeks?), you hope to come out of it with a deeper, richer, fuller perspective, or at the very least, with the benefit of, as Dr. Johnson put it, a mind that has been "concentrated."So what do I see? I see that the human propensity for abstraction, combined with language, gives us the capability of philosophy and technology and civilization and art-making, but at the same time blinds us to the obvious and makes us stupider than our fellow non-speaking, un-contemplative mammals. Dogs and cats, for better or for worse, know who they like and who they don't, and who is potentially threatening. They can't tell you why, and they're often wrong, but they react. They can't necessarily see or name forests, but they can certainly recognize trees.Humans vest way more credence in forests than they should. This is the essence of cognitive dissonance reduction and the engine of conspiracy theory, but it is also a factor in basic human nature.How can I put this? If you stripped Trump of all the abstract qualities that have been attached to him ("billionaire deal maker," "populist politician," "master of Twitter," "hero to forgotten working class whites," "commander in chief," "target of the deep state," "racist," "fascist") all that would be left is a big, loud, alternatively clownish or bullying man of questionable intelligence in a loosely cut suit, incessantly bellowing about himself. From all appearances, certainly from a dog or cat's perspective, he is entirely about appetite and self-regard, whether he is screwing a porn star without a condom while his bought-and-paid-for wife sits at home with her anchor baby, or locking up refugees' children in cages.If you looked at Manafort from a dog or a cat's perspective three years ago, you saw an amoral factotum of dictators; an international criminal who was way over his head in his personal life (buying $20,000 snakeskin jackets to make his mistress think he is younger and cooler and richer than he is) and his professional life ('borrowing' millions from Russian gangsters and then coming up short). Clearly he grabbed hold of Trump's campaign as an opportunity to "get whole" with the people who were threatening to murder him--we have that in his own words. If you looked at Lewandowski, you saw a nasty ex-cop with a short fuse and an eye for the easy opportunity, who couldn't hold himself back from striking a Breitbart reporter, stealing campaign money (remember the fake advertising agency he set up? no one else seems to either), or landing a CNN deal as an official Trump apologist.And three years later, that's still pretty much the whole story. The Trump campaign was filled with crooks, not least the candidate himself; everyone in the Trump presidency is either a crook, a scoundrel, an enabler, or a tool. All this talk about ideology and racism, all of this hand-wringing about norms and the Constitution--but what it all comes down to, what it has ALWAYS come down to, is simple human depravity, in all its many flavors and varieties, Our problem is that we dress it up as something much grander.