Can all the mice shed their fear and bell THIS cat? and soon?

The Wall Street Journal reporter asked a poignant question of Prime Minister, Marc Carney, in Washington yesterday…..To what extent can and do you trust that the administration is negotiating in good faith?  Or words to that effect….and Carney’s answer, ‘that will become clear’…..

The media frenzy, using detailed, precise questions looking for literal, microscopic answers in order then to parse their ‘meaning’ as if they were holding a feather up on a golf course to determine the direction of the wind, is, among other things, an exercise in self-demotion.

Even Rachel Maddow’s persistent, accurate and deep dive into the various protests around the country, while useful in the cause of potentially generating more of such protests, is another of the ‘headline’ frenzy of anxiety, skepticism, anger and disbelief.

Having twisted the media into a frenetic, obsessive-compulsive turmoil, both intellectually and professionally, trump has succeeded in capturing media time, without spending a dime. And the reporters, while anything but fake news, are impaled in the image of the uroborus snake, with its head in its tail, going round and round the same circle it has been trained and experienced to dig.

All of the media training, and all of the professional expertise and creative and courageous questioning fail in this current American political theatre.

Inductive reasoning proceeds from the fine details to a conclusion. Deductive reasoning proceeds, inversely, from the conclusion to the fine details. And, while both are necessary, in order to serve a wide and diverse audience, many of whom have either turned off or become so apathetic and hopeless they are no longer paying attention. Even the Democrats have fallen into the trap of perceiving, and strategizing around the micro-details. Last evening, on her inaugural show, The Briefing with Jen Psaki, Pete Buttigieg exhorted the Democratic party to begin to address the issues of cost of living, in order to demonstrate that the party has heard, and actually listened to the complaints and the needs of ordinary people.

Well…the literal, empirical, data compilation, necessary for a legal trial, in order to convince the judge and/or jury of the culpability of the accused, is consuming both needed energy and political capital that is needed for the larger, more existential and deepening crisis. Professors Like Ruth Ben Gihat at NYU, and Timothy Snider at Yale and Jason Stanley formerly of Yale and now of the University of Toronto need far more air time, on both sides of the 49^th parallel. Along with retired judge Michael Luttig, and emeritus professor of Law at Harvard, Lawrence Tribe, Conservative lawyer George Conway among others, need to be saturating the air waves with their substantive, principled, arguments that, taken together can and may eventually weave a net of both public opinion and activism, both political and legal, that just might be able to ensnare this orange buffoon.

The usual principle of constitutional separation of powers, underscored by the media and the courts, and historically by the Congress as well is insufficient to tackle and untie this gordion knot of an administration that defies all laws and conventions in favour of the despotic and anarchic will of the president. The media’s hourly wringing of hands, as purveyors of what is effectively a Greek tragedy of epic proportions, even incentivized by legal and historical and fascist scholars is also not adequate to the monumental, and growing task of dismantling this papier maché movie set of a government.

Ethereal, effemeral, deceitful, dishonest, destabilizing, untrustworthy, unpredictable and also lethal in so many ways, this government has, like under-sea submarines torpedoed the world economy, the world order of the past 75-80 years, and has set human lives so on edge that physical, emotional, economic, political and intellectual health and well-being, of everyone on the planet, outside of the crazed far-right thugs, ostensibly in order to provide absolute power to those very thugs.

Human health is under direct and indirect threat by the very department of Health and Human services designed and deployed to protect and enhance human health.

The oversight and substantial funding of the education of the most impoverished children in American has been eviscerated, by the very department established and deployed to sustain and support that endeavour.

The strength, stability, and sustainability of NATO, the most effective and long-lasting defense alliance in history, is being undermined both overtly and covertly, by the numbskulls appointed to lead and grow and direct the American cohort of this organization.

The specific, constitutionally-assigned powers and priorities of Congress have been trashed by the very Republican elected members of both the House and the Senate, in their headlong mass sycophantic craze, like teens rushing and trampling the stage of a rock concert, as each hollow-man/woman besought by the hysteria seeks either direct favour or the avoidance of a direct ‘political-assassination-bomb’ ordered, and then of course, denied, by the president…..whose blind insecurity tolerates nary a word, or even a scowl or frown of criticism, protest or intolerance.

If this person who has been elected to the Oval Office were a member of a family, that family would already have conducted a penetrating intervention, as if the family member needed help. If this were a chief executive of a major corporation, the board will already, long ago fired him without bonus or pension or investment certificates. If this were a professor in a respectable university, his academic credentials would long ago have been revoked, based on nothing more than plagiarism, falsifying evidence, corrupting his students and fleecing the budget of whatever department he might have worked in.

If this were a military general, doubtless, his peers and subordinates would have court-martialed him long ago, even if it took a mutiny to accomplish the removal.

If this were a commercial airline pilot, he would never have passed the flight exam, and would have been turfed from the program,….and don’t get me started on the premise of his serving as an air-trafffic controller…..Yikes!

Dave Leterman snidely notes that he would be fired if he had already been hired to manage a Dairy Queen….who can or would dispute that?

Eviction, insurrection, impeachment, Constitutional Amendment 25, street mutiny in each and every city simultaneously, nothing seems to be either capable or surmountable to finally prohibit this political, theatrical, chameleon Houdini from escaping his self-designed entrapments, and wrestling him finally into silence, impotence, the very state from which he is obsessively-compulsively racing every moment of every day….just ask his niece, if you don’t believe this scribe.

The phrase ‘belling the cat’ comes from a fable about mice who decide to attach a bell to a cat’s neck to warn them of its approach, but none of them are willing to risk the danger.

If the whole communication, legal, corporate, academic, voter army of people, institutions, banks and Wall Street, including those totally empty digital mice are not either aware or willing to shed the fear that the mice in the fable could not shed, and re-think their personal, professional and patriotic identities, in order to serve something far larger than any one of them, the united states of america (no caps because the reputation of the nation has been so besmirched, capitals are no longer warranted)…..then…..

The whole world is watching….and the whole world is already paying the devastating and potentially lethal priceS…..and there are so many ways to measure the cost of this tragedy!