On thePlayground

As I write this, the kids are arguing about Special Investigator Mueller's report on whether Donald Trump or his gang colluded with Russia during the 2016 presidential election. The argument will certainly grow into a playground brawl, and would perhaps best be used as an X-Files mini-series. The Truth, we are told, is out there. (We just don't like it, so there must be a conspiracy.)

Trump is saying that he has been exonerated, an interesting choice of words for someone who, as Mueller has revealed, has run his campaign and his business surrounded by crooks and thugs who will keep a casting director busy for months when the movie, God Father IV and V and maybe VI, depending on how things play out between Donnie Jr. and Jared Kushner play out, is made.

But I view the findings not as an exoneration for Donald Trump, but as a failure. Collusion means playing together. Certainly Trump has wanted to play with Vladimir Putin, who is the best example of a right-Hegelian Romantic Great Man on the playground this decade. He is the sort of man that Donald Trump wants to be, with military parades and fanfares and people standing at attention. Certainly little Donnie wants to play with Vlad, to be his friend. (Little Donnie wants to be friends with all the best dictators, the biggest bullies and aspiring bullies, on the playground, including Rodrigo Duterte, Kim Jong-un, King Salman, Jair Bolsonaro, and Benjamin Netanyahu. (If he knew more about Nicolas Maduro, he would like him, too. Trump really should listen to more briefings from his staff, rather than going with his admittedly ample gut.)  Had Trump been president during the thirties, I suspect that he would be bragging about his close relationships with Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini and Joseph Stalin.

But, sadly for Trump, Putin will play him, as did Kim and Salman, but not play with him. Why would anyone want to be friends with anyone who so easily turns on his friends as Donald Trump has done? Besides, Trump is not interested in colluding with Russia. He knows, it seems, very little about Russia, except that it's big. Again, he avoids his advisers and briefings and goes with his gut, and in his gut he admires Putin. If Putin were the dictator of Mexico, Mexico would be great again in the gut of Trump.


Sadly for the rest of us, Trump is not the only one who is dazzled by the right-Hegelian Great Man whom Thomas Carlyle presented as the only possibility for our meagre lives to have meaning and excitement. Both Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders campaigned--and continue to campaign--as the only one who can save us from our situation, which they insist is a crisis. Hillary Clinton, too, wanted to be a Great Man, campaigning as our Champion like some Joan of Arc in tweed. Many people, it seems, are more willing to be told that they are living in a crisis which needs a great solution rather than to consider the situation in which they are living as something which can be understood and used for our great advantage.

Nor, sadly, is Donald Trump the first american president who wants to be a Great Man and to play with other Great Men. Franklin Roosevelt's special friendship with Uncle Joe cost the people of eastern Europe dearly, as could yet be the case were Trump to develop his friendship with Putin.

Fortunately for those of us who prefer not to go off to fight the wars of our Leader, who prefer to post photographs of our grandchildren and our pets on Facebook, a platform developed by men and women working to bring us together rather than to divide us, using smartphones made in China and dependent on international trade, Trump, too, will pass. Fortunately, he is a buffoon more than a Great Man. He must be taken seriously only because the voters of the United States have given him the keys to the White House for a while. But the voters of the United States are a fickle bunch, and the next president might not want to play the same game of bullies. Uncle Joe found Harry Truman much less obliging than he had found FDR. (No one else seems to have recognized the ephemeral nature of US leadership and used it to his advantage so well as Kim.)

I can't end my little post-script to the Mueller's tale without noting one other sad and fortunate situation in which this playground fight is taking place. Sadly, it is the increasingly obvious that the men and women behind the green curtain are making themselves irrelevant.  Given what seems to be immense power, the 'leaders' of the United States use it almost entirely to accuse each other of low crimes and misdemeanors rather than to guide the country through the biggest changes that have ever happened in human history. Fortunately, human intelligence is not confined to a central agency.

That grandeur of humanity, the creativity which has in times past been called the image of God, 'will flame out, like shining from shook foil;/It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil/Crushed.'

So, I say, let the Great Men (and Women) have their squabbles and parades and accusations. Don't blame me. I voted for Sergey Brin, a Russian. In fact, I wrote this essay on an app I bought from the Google Playstore.