On Donald Trump and Humiliation

Or: Green is the New Orange

Donald Trump is a disaster in terms of running the country and the world (unless you’re a Trump), but he does have some remarkable skills. For instance, he is a past master in the art of humiliation, which he employs both for the sadistic pleasure it gives him, and as a tool for subjugating rivals and opponents. There are many examples we could give, but the most striking one for me is the humiliation he has inflicted on JD Vance.

On September 19, 2022, Trump appeared—apparently uninvited—at a rally in Ohio organized by Vance’s campaign for the U.S. senate. At that rally, in Vance’s presence, he gave a speech—or rather, his customary extemporaneous ramble—during which he declared that “J.D. is kissing my ass, he wants my support so bad.”

J.D. Vance, a Marine Corps veteran who had previously described the draft-dodging Trump as “America’s Hitler,” could have become a legendary hero for all eternity by just stepping up to the microphone and saying something like, “we Ohioans don’t kiss anyone’s ass. If that’s the price of your support, we don’t want it.” Or he could have used saltier language, since Trump started it, so to speak. But he stood by, reacting with nothing stronger than a nervous grin.

I don’t know how Vance can look himself in the mirror every morning, but he hasn’t shown any signs of regret or even just introspection about what his choices have been. I guess it all worked out in…the end. The man is now vice-president of the United States of America. For a best-selling memoirist and U.S. Senator, that position would seem to be a step down, except as a solid rung on his own ladder to the presidency. I can’t think of any other reason why an intelligent person would care to have labial contact with the Trumpian glutes. But I don’t think Vance’s association with Trump will enhance his solo political career, any more than it has helped Rudy Giuliani, Mike Pence, Jeff Sessions, Kristi Noem, or anyone else. In one way or another, those people have all become walking jokes. Meanwhile Trump’s political and financial star keeps rising. (I don’t feel any particular comfort in the press’s constant reminders that his poll numbers are supposedly dropping.)

Trump’s adroit use of humiliation as a political and personal tool inform how I think about Trump’s obsession with putting his own name, signature, and/or likeness on public buildings, institutions, and now U.S. currency. There is a commemorative coin in the works. Now the man who killed the Harriet Tubman twenty-dollar bill wants to create a new $250 note (for the sesquicentennial, get it?) with his own face on it. That would actually be illegal unless Congress changes the law which prohibits the likeness of a living person from appearing on our currency. But this president’s skills include a ruthless ability to do what he wants on the flimsiest legal pretexts (see: tariffs) until the Supreme Courts rules otherwise (or doesn’t).

The $250 bill and the “commemorative” coin serve two purposes: most obviously, they project Trump’s power and glory. But also, it is a pointed way of humiliating the American people. It’s our money, with his face on it, whether we like it or, or want it, or not. The glowering image on the bill is based on a presidential portrait that in turn is based on Trump’s mug shot at the Fulton County, Georgia Sheriff’s office, taken when President Trump was indicted for illegally pressuring the Georgia Secretary of State to flip Georgia’s electoral votes in the 2020 presidential election, and thus flip the election itself. The indictment was dropped after Trump was legitimately re-elected in 2024. The bill thus represents Trump’s disdain for conforming to laws which restrict his use of power, while graphically demonstrating his own absolute authority. The quarter-grand bill thus sits neatly at the intersection of money, power, and injustice.

But its purpose would be better served if it showed a different part of Trump’s anatomy. That’s the point, after all: to rub our faces in it.

10 Things that are keeping me up at night

Trump won’t last forever. But who/what comes next?

Will the economy actually implode, making my savings worthless and forcing me to un-retire and get a job delivering chicken wings to Bitcoin billionaires? 

And if so, what if drones are already delivering the wings?

Have I already seen my last movie in a movie theater?

50 years from now will the Gaza Strip still be an open-air concentration camp?

Why has Kim Jong-Un been so quiet lately?

Ukraine, Sudan

Is Brie going away forever?

Should I have fish for dinner tomorrow because I’ll live longer and better or should I eat a bratwurst because let’s face it I’m gonna go sooner or later anyway and it’s a solid fact that I would really really enjoy a grilled brat with kraut, mustard, and onions and a foaming stein of beer right now.

Is my legacy to the world going to be a few cutesy lists like this?

Tortilla Man: A Memory of Pre-“Woke” Texas

Sometime in the early 1970’s my mother took me to a show put on by the drama department at North Texas State University (now the University of North Texas) in Denton. It was a “Story of Texas” type revue, a collection of skits that were supposed to entertain and educate the audience about the history of our state. I would have been maybe 12 years old.

The show was a forgettable affair. But there was one skit that I recall, and if it weren’t for that skit, I’m sure I would have forgotten the show entirely. A young Latino student in a resplendent mariachi costume delivered a one- or two-minute-long monologue on “the tortilla.” It was meant to celebrate the ingenuity of the Mexican people.

(For the record, what is now the state of Texas was for several hundred years a part of the Spanish colonial empire, and then, after the Mexican war of independence, a part of the republic of Mexico. It was taken over after a revolt led largely by North American settlers who were motivated by a desire to expand slavery into the territory, at a time when slavery was already outlawed in Mexico.)

I remember this particular part of the show for two reasons. Firstly, it was easily the best bit. It was short, lively, and funny (punchline: “You don’t need knives and forks, and when you’re finished, you eat the plate!”), a polished performance by an enthusiastic performer. When it ended the audience gave it resounding applause.

But I think I also remember it for another reason. Even at that age I vaguely understood that something very wrong was going on.

The memory of that routine has haunted me over the years. Now, I imagine the decision to include that skit as being made by a couple of faculty members. The discussion was something like this:

Drama professor 1: You know, this show is about Texas history and culture. I was thinking maybe we should include something about the Mexicans.

Drama professor 2: Yeah, they play such a vital role!

DP1: Maybe something about food…

DP2: That’s a great idea! Everybody loves Mexican food! How about…a tribute to the tortilla?

DP1: Yes, aren’t tortillas great?!

DP2: And I just realized, that will give [insert name of Latino drama student here] something to do! I was wondering how we were going to fit him in….

The wildly enthusiastic applause this skit received also has a dark side in my imagination. I think it was tinged with relief. Here was the audience’s opportunity to show that it respected the Mexican people and appreciated their contributions to our great state, without acknowledging any of the awful, unjust atrocities inflicted on Mexican communities after the Texas revolution and eventual annexation of Texas.

Like everyone of my generation there are aspects of pre-Internet, pre-Governor Bush Texas that I am nostalgic for (like Ann Richards). But the pre-“woke” racism, even, or especially, the condescending, self-satisfied kind, is not one of them.

In Which I Study Someone’s Beautiful Ass in Service of My Art

I’ve been trying to master the the graphic arts over the past few months. Recently my brother, the novelist Jonathan Eaton, sent me a photograph of a philosophical-looking donkey, in a pasture bordered by mesquite trees, he saw on a trip to north Texas. I decided to practice my skills, such as they are, in different media, by drawing and painting the fellow.

I used oil pastels for the first attempt. Not successful in my opinion. The colors are gorgeous (a big reason I like the pastels) but details are clumsy or absent. The ear shadow across the animal’s muzzle is ham-handed.

Next I tried the same thing in colored pencil. The medium lends itself to conveying the animal’s hairy, fuzzy qualities. Several problems, though: the colors appear bland and washed out. Also, though I began with a graphite pencil sketch that I thought looked pretty good, now I see that the upper half of the donkey’s head is elongated. From a distance it looks more like a wild boar. But I can’t erase and rework colored pencil.

Next I decided to try something new for me: on outline in felt-tip pen filled in with watercolor:

Ok, now I feel like I’m getting somewhere. The sky is unintentionally blotchy (I’m still having problems with my washes). Also I have a better feel now for the shape of the creature’s head.

What’s next…charcoal? I think I could do a great pencil sketch of this fellow. Nah…I have stared at this ass for long enough already.

Suffer the Children

I remember when I first heard Charlie Kirk’s statement that the death of children in school shootings was the unfortunate but necessary cost of the second amendment. The thought that occurred to me at the time was that that would make the second amendment the most expensive amendment of them all. I can’t think of any other that we so regularly sacrifice our children to.

Having been shown the one altar, I began to recognize so many, many others. I read about children getting sick unto death, because they weren’t vaccinated against preventable diseases. Politicians, and often even the parents of these children, believe that this is the terrible, but inescapable, cost of keeping the government out of decisions that God gave a child’s parents, and only their parents, the right to make.

Next altar, the Epstein files. Trump reportedly stated that his reluctance to release the files was because “friends of mine will get hurt.” Let’s take him at his word (I know, I know). No one wants their friends to get hurt, and if the cost of protecting your friends is to turn a blind eye to the sexual abuse of minors, what choice do you have?

Then there are the children injured or killed in horrific ways by Israel’s military actions in Gaza—the sad but unavoidable toll of the never-ending war against terrorism.

Then there are the schoolgirls killed by the U.S. and Israeli attack on Iran. Undoubtedly, many more children will need to pay up as the war drags on.

Will we ever hear Trump, or Hegseth, or Rubio, or Miller, or anyone in the current administration say about some policy decision, that it’s off the table, because too many children will die?

In fact, is there anything at all that this administration actually values less than the lives of children?

A Real Laugh Riot

If you follow me on Facebook, you know I like to draw and post political cartoons (as opposed to posting other people’s cartoons, which seems to be a common thing now). If you haven’t, here’s a gallery of my recent efforts, starting from around the time we started blowing up open motorboats on the high seas, along with any crew and, it turns out, survivors.

What’s the point? Well, as the authorities keep telling us, “if you see something, say something.” And I’ve been seeing a lot lately. At least I’ll be able to look back on these times (if I live long enough) and tell myself, “I said something.” And if you agree, please do share this.

For what it’s worth (maybe nothing) I created these without any help from AI (pretty obviously), although I did digitally enhance the sharpness of some of these images.

I drew the Hegseth portrait after revelations that the U.S. military had deliberately killed survivors of a boat strike who were in the water.

I was tempted to have Trump telling the survivors in the water, “Kiss my hairy…” as a reference to Nelson’s reputed last words, but I suspected no one would get it…

This cartoon and the next were related to Trump confiscating Venezuelan oil tankers.

I drew this after reading how persistent Trump voters remain in their support even after acknowledging his disastrous leadership

The next two came to me after Trump’s takeover, renaming, and then closing of the Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts in DC.

The next three were spurred by the horrible killings in Minneapolis, and the ludicrous smearing of the victims as ‘domestic terrorists’ by Trump and his cabinet

And on it goes…

There…do we feel better now?

Anatomy of a Self Portrait

I’ve recently taken up watercolor painting. A couple of weeks ago I completed a self portrait which came out a bit clumsy looking, then executed a somewhat better portrait of an indulgent friend (thanks RK!). I decided to try portraying myself a second time, and this time to document my progress over the course of the 4 days, on and off, it took me. I hope you find it interesting.

Here’s the so-called reference I’ll be drawing from:

Reference photo
After several erased and redrawn heads, eyes, noses and lips, a sketch I’m happy with
I tape down the edges of the paper to an old cutting board and outline the parts I want to leave unpainted in yellow
I lay a thin wash of yellow on the face. First mistake: the brush was a little ‘dirty,’ as you can see.
I lay a thin diluted wash of red over the yellow. Feelings of despair. I seem to have a blotchy mess. Maybe all I’ve done is to ruin a promising pencil sketch.
I use small brushes to color the mouth, eyes, and whatever those little pink things at the corners of the eyes are called.
Always keeping an eye on the photo I add some reddish highlights to the face. Hmm, this guy is starting to look familiar.
Let’s add the shadows around the nose, and the sides of the face
Shading added around the eyes. Adds a scowl effect I didn’t intend.
Add shading under the nose and mouth. Also a thin watery glaze of the shadow color across the eyes so they’re less spectrally white
Using the end of a flat, pretty dry brush I dab on a beard
Add mustache and eyebrows the same way. Darken the upper lip a little. I definitely know this guy.
Add hair. Definitely looking less brutal.
Add throat. Used wet on wet wash. Worked unexpectedly well, I was able to sort of sculpt the shape of the throat with the wet paint. But I had dipped the brush in the wrong puddle. It looks like a color head on a black and white neck.
I glaze over the throat with a brown tone, looks a bit better
Used wet paper again to fill in the shirt. Came out pretty blotchy. Can I be honest? I’m pleased with the result so far but I’m getting a little tired of this project.
Add a little collar detail, t shirt collar, and shadow on the shoulders.
Add a background, a wet wash of cerulean fading away from top left to bottom right. You know what, I think I’m done.
Peel off the tape and sign and date. What do you think? I believe I’ve actually improved on the original. A low bar, I know!

Read the New Translation of Luigi Pirandello’s short story “Ignare” / “Oblivious”

I’ve been lucky enough to be one of the translators participating in the Pirandello Society of America’s ambitious project to eventually provide English versions of every one of the 300 or so short stories written by the master. The latest one from me is a translation of Pirandello’s grim account of the aftermath of a barbaric assault on a Catholic mission, “Ignare,” or, “Oblivious.” (“Ignare” literally means the ignorant, unknowing, unaware, naïve, or oblivious ones.) You can read it here. Enjoy.

While you’re there I encourage you to check out other stories by Pirandello, translated by me as well as others. It is truly a labor of love on all our parts.

My thanks to Lisa Sarti and Michael Subialka of the PSA for driving this project and for their attention to and suggestions for my translation, and to their reader Nicole Trigg for her suggestions and corrections as well, and also to the Pirandello scholar Daniela Bini for her reading and suggestions.

On High School P.E. and Fake Scholarship

In my Denton, Texas high school years, not belonging to an actual sports team, I had to endure, along with the other losers, something called “Physical Education,” taught by an instructor who was burdened with the task as a condition of their real job, coaching football. In my sophomore year that instructor was the beloved Coach Collins, for whom a high-school football stadium was later named. This would have been the 1974-1975 school year.

There was a physical aspect to Physical Education. On any given day we might be issued a badminton racket, or directed to run around a field. But I would say the educational element was basically absent.

But one day we were instructed to “write a report” on some sport. I don’t know why. It was probably a state requirement. What this meant in practice was that you went to the school library, looked up the entry for, say, “basketball” in the World Book Encyclopedia (which was basically the same as the Encyclopedia Britannica, except for idiots), and copied a page or so of text by hand onto a sheet of paper. Then on the appointed date you’d stand up in front of the other kids and read “your” “report.”

But it occurred to me that this was all a charade. No one was really interested in whether or not we actually did research, or in learning something. So I decided to just make something up, and have some fun with it.

And going through a box of old letters and scribblings some fifty years later, I found my “report” (thanks, Mom!). Here it is, in its entirety.

Basketball was started in 1897 by William Johnson, son of a cantaloupe plantation owner. While tossing one of his father’s fruit [sic] into a wastepaper basket, suddenly the idea of what is now basketball popped into his head. Although he was soon punished by an angry father, his friends started a now popular game. Five years later a plastic ball was substituted for the cantaloupe, because constant dribbling made it rather soggy and hard to handle, and also made it taste bad. It was also rather expensive, as that particular species of fruit was fairly rare at that time. Two years later, in 1904, a basket, with no bottom, was substituted for the wastebasket, thus freeing the latter for trash.

But the really basic origins of basketballs go back much further than this. Descriptions on walls of ancient Mayan temples reveal a ball-through loop rite for fertility. It had many sexual implications, and one historian hints that “It was a sort of primitive girlie show.”[1] [Yes, I included an actual (bogus) footnote.] The basketball itself (which was not named a “basketball” until its incorporation into that sport in 1902) has had many other earlier uses. Many prominent historians contend that it was not a pumpkin that Cinderella’s famed fairy godmother changed into a coach (despite popular belief) but what is now called a basketball. The coach she rode in she thus named a basketball coach. The social gathering she went to was also called a basket-ball, as the fashions of the time dictated that all dancers dance veiled in fine, net-like baskets.

[1] Nightclubs through the ages, vol. 1 pg. [illegible] by John Sorcy.

I did in fact get up in front of the class and read the above. I made no outward indication that it was satirical. I think I was a little nervous. No one laughed, no one cracked a smile. I don’t think anyone was really listening. I was the egghead of the class, it was totally expected that I would actually go to the trouble of doing serious research and come up with a long (or at least longer than necessary) paper. In fact, I think I heard another kid who hadn’t even bothered to consult World Book quote my report in his completely improvised lecture later on in the hour. I was a trusted source, after all.

Coach Collins was in the audience too, of course. What did he think? Well, you can see from the photo the grade he assigned it. If he thought anything funny was going on…he never let on.

America the Ridiculous

Once upon a time, or rather, several times from 1995 to 2011, Italy had a prime minister named Silvio Berlusconi. He was a preposterous choice as leader for a modern democratic nation. Immensely wealthy, right wing, nationalist, buffoonish, corrupt to the gills. He privately admitted that he had entered politics mainly to stay out of jail. He had already cornered the Italian private media sector, turning it into a personal propaganda machine. He became infamous for arranging sex parties that included underage girls.

But there was a silver lining to Silvio, at least for us Americans: he was Italian.  He fit nicely into several American stereotypes of Italians: the corrupt politician, the easy-going Latin lover, the large-living playboy. Jon Stewart had a brilliant skit on The Daily Show that skewered not only Berlusconi, who had been recently charged with statutory rape, but those tired stereotypes as well. Olivia Munn, for example, played an imaginary mother to Berlusconi. Dressed in a black shawl, Munn wrung her hands and pleaded to the camera, “My son, he’s a good-a boy! He no rape-a no statue!”

Oh, weren’t those the days, when American moral superiority felt so…superior! If America is still exceptional today, it’s only…exceptionally ridiculous.

What else can you say about a man who is delighted quite literally by bright, shiny trinkets? A man who pleases himself by naming public monuments after himself? A man who publicly proclaims himself to be a smarter military tactician than any general, who changes public health policy because he’s smarter than the scientists? A man who saw the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, and reacted by planning a bigger, “better” one for himself, in our nation’s capital?  (He literally has a Napoleon complex!) You would have to call that man ridiculous, a buffoon, a clown. And we Americans chose him, of our own free will, to be the one to take charge of us, twice. And that makes us even more ridiculous than him.

There are much worse things one can do besides behaving like a clown…and Donald Trump is doing all of them, too. But what I want to discuss here is the shame, the humiliation, the embarrassment we feel or should feel for ourselves and our country. It’s deeply embarrassing to be an American right now. God forbid I find myself trying to have a serious debate about anything with someone from, say, Denmark. Or France. Or Ukraine. Or Italy. I don’t know if I could even look them in the face right now. I feel so…ridiculous!

And I have to say, the late Berlusconi is looking better every day. True, he was a corrupt megalomaniac and a sexual predator. But (and I am not an expert on Berlusconi; I invite my Italian friends to correct me) I do not recall that Signor Silvio ever blew up helpless crews of small motorboats in the Mediterranean, or sent the Italian army to put down peaceful protests by brute force, or used the Italian criminal justice system to wage war on his political opponents, or renamed Constantine’s Arch to “Arch of Silvio”, or made himself the director of La Scala. Or tried to annex Malta. Or changed maps of the Mediterranean to label it “Mare Italiano.” We should be so lucky!

Like many of you, I am horrified and frightened by the man leading our country and the thought of what he might do next. I have no good answer to a foreigner who asks, “why?” I am also deeply embarrassed. I can only hope that some if his less diehard supporters are at least starting to feel the same way.

We’re All Domestic Terrorists Now

Yesterday afternoon I found out I could be a domestic terrorist. Reader, so could you.

My discovery came from watching a clip of Kristi Noem, the person in charge of the safety and security of the United States and its people, describe a woman named Renee Nicole Good as having committed “domestic terrorism.” Noem explains that Good was “trying to kill” a police officer with the vehicle she was driving, as part of a “coordinated” nationwide scheme to “train” terrorists to “run over” anyone who gets in their way as they “try to disrupt peace and public safety.” Noem declares that she will prosecute such acts as terrorism, although in Good’s case it’s hard to see how that will happen, since she’s already been executed.

Good, a 37 year-old poet and mother of 3, including a 6 year old child, would seem to make an unlikely terrorist. She was an unarmed U.S. citizen, was not a criminal, and was not being sought by authorities.

Federal officials have accused her of “weaponizing” her own vehicle in order to kill ICE officers. I invite you to watch the videos taken at the scene here, and come to your own conclusion about that.

It appears to me that Good was not remotely trying to run over anyone, or even trying to scare an officer with her vehicle. It looks like she was deliberately trying to avoid hitting anyone.  In any event, no one was struck by her car, and she was shot at even after the officer who opened fire was out of her path. She may be guilty of deliberately blocking the street with her car, and of making the dumb (and probably panicky) mistake of trying to drive away from ICE officers shouting at her to “get out of the fucking car.” And she’s guilty of being in the wrong place at the wrong time: her hometown, on a Wednesday afternoon.

But it’s permanent “opposite day” in this country, where the vigilantes who injured police officers In Washington, D.C. on January 6, 2021, are “patriots” and (until they were all pardoned by President Trump) “hostages,” and a peaceful citizen like Renee Nicole Good is a “domestic terrorist.” Evidently anyone in this country or in this hemisphere might be a “terrorist,” either for the purposes of justifying their murder before the fact (as with alleged drug smugglers in the Caribbean) or afterwards (as with Ms. Good).

No actual terrorism required.