R-e-s-p-e-c-t!

No, John Bolton’s Libya model – where the dictator agrees to give up a nuclear arms program in exchange for accepting his rule only to be deposed a few years later with help from those who pledged to leave him in power – was not the way to convince Kim Jong-Un to give up his nukes. And trust me, as much as Kim wants more money in his totalitarian state, no Mr. Trump, opening up American-driven economic opportunity – even a McDonalds in Pyongyang – isn’t the big prize in his eyes. The imminent on-again-off-again-but-now-back-on-again direct Trump/Kim meeting in Singapore has two autocrats trying to move the other where he just doesn’t want to go.

The Americans want Kim to surrender his existing nuclear warheads (estimated at 20 to 70), tear apart his capacity to make more and allow inspectors free access to verify wherever and whenever they choose, but nukes be gone! We would accord the North some economic benefits and probably agree to denuclearize the Korean Peninsula and perhaps our nuclear weapons in nearby countries (e.g., Japan). Kim wants to be recognized as a world statesman in a nation with full nuclear weapons, ready to take his place with the other nuclear nations to negotiate a global movement to denuclearize. He’ll give up his nukes as part of a global movement to denuclearize. He may agree to stop testing, but he already has those weapons ready if he needs them.

“‘The common mistake is to assume when the North Koreans talk about denuclearization of the Korean peninsula, they’re talking about giving up all their weapons,’ said Victor Cha, who headed Asian affairs in the National Security Council under President George W. Bush and who took part in nuclear talks with North Korea at the time.

“‘It’s not really the way we look at it, which is ‘Crate it up and take it out,’ ‘ said Cha, who now heads the Korea program at the nonpartisan Center for Strategic and International Studies.

“Rather, he said, North Koreans view denuclearization as a long-term aspiration, the way Americans talk of someday abolishing nuclear weapons from the globe. North Korea has a long list of other grievances, and could demand the removal of U.S. troops, or even the U.S. nuclear umbrella, from South Korea.

“‘It’s an endless list,’ said Michael Green, another veteran of Bush-era negotiations with North Korea. ‘They will keep adding to the list of things we have to do in order for them to denuclearize until the cows come home.’”

“Most experts say Pyongyang wants to be recognized as a full-fledged nuclear power with the weapons it has, but with global obligations, much as then-isolated communist China’s nuclear arms program ultimately was accepted after President Nixon’s historic visit to Beijing in 1972.” Los Angeles Times, June 3^rd.

Indeed, it’s a common argument among rising nuclear powers. What justifies the United States and the West, then Russia and China, having nuclear weapons and then to decide the future right of other nations to have such weapons. Israel. India. Pakistan. North Korea… and perhaps Iran someday (I suspect sooner now that the US has pulled out of the six party nuclear accord that contained Iran’s nuclear program). What gives “you, America, the right” to tell the world who does or does not have the right to have a nuclear capacity? Why does America even get to protest… the only nation ever to deploy a nuclear weapon (two in fact) against an enemy… civilian targets with devastating effect?

Could Trump pull off a complete denuclearization of North Korea? It is possible, but experts see a long process and that to be practical, the results (if there are any) may be to start with less. Whatever the outcome, this is probably going to be a drawn-out process that could take years. But so far, Kim Jong-un has played Donald Trump like a fiddle. Kim appears reasonable. He has China on his side again. He got a place on the world stage without making a single concession, including a face-to-face with his arch enemy, the President of the United States. He’s already worked out a modus vivendi to South Korea’s President Moon, right under Trump’s nose… without Trump. And what have we got for our troubles so far… Exactly.

I’m Peter Dekom, and global diplomacy and “The Art of the Deal” are absolutely unrelated skill-sets.

Reunion

So it was time for my big 50^th Yale reunion, and I was filled with so many feelings over those four short days. Courses for alumni in emotional intelligence and biodiversity. An interview to our class with classmate George W Bush. We were one of the last two all-male undergraduate classes at that university. Lots of stories from privileged wealth and those with luxurious retirements (a word that makes me cringe), those who are still struggling, remembering those who died (from casualties during the Vietnam War to nature’s cruel attrition) including wives and children… and gathering a snapshot of how Yale fits into the current chaotic world around us.

I was gratified to see very little support for, and lots of rather passionate criticism of, Donald Trump and his deeply negative impact on the status of the presidency. Even among conservatives, his mendacious style and complete inability to tolerate a free and open press were troublesome. In a class where the dominant professions were concentrated heavily in four fields – law, medicine, finance and academia – the consistency of negative conversation about Donald Trump was everywhere.

Even stalwart ultra-conservatives, happy that corporate America is doing better than it ever has (at least in market valuation) and that unemployment is particularly low, there was a very uneasy feeling about the immediate future. About the almost certain negative economic impact of the new trade wars and a rather surprising acknowledgement of how shallow the jobs picture (and the underlying median real wage rates) really is and how our overall economic picture unravels quickly when you look at the underlying forces at work here and around the world. While many are enjoying the benefits of the tax reform act, they easily acknowledge that there will be a longer-term price to pay… as many in finance relocate from NYC (with high and mostly undeductible state taxes) to their second homes in low or no income tax states.

While I still hold George W Bush (who ignored his father’s advice on the subject) responsible for literally handing Iraq into Iran’s firm grip (the regional Shiite cabal) by deposing (Sunni) Saddam Hussein, escalating destabilization in the Middle East by quantum leaps for decades to come, his sentiments on Donald Trump and current GOP policies was refreshing. While he tried to avoid naming Donald Trump specifically, he often slipped up.

It’s pretty clear that W deeply dislikes Trump: “I didn’t vote for him.” He feels the United States now has a heartless foreign and domestic policy, dislikes Trump’s slam on immigrants, thinks Trump should support a critical free press as a democratic necessity, feels that Trump should have given up tweeting the day he was elected (noting that such continuing tweets seriously erode the stature of the office), believes that trade wars can create very deep economic decline and that isolationism and go-it-alone international initiatives will severely harm America’s power and influence for decades to come. Interesting. But we also learned a bit about how our students are impacted by an overly-competitive world.

The hard statistics presented in some of those academic classes offered to alumni were eye-opening, along with parallel conversations with a few of the undergrads still at the university after classes and exams had passed. Research tells us that 40% of America’s undergraduates will seek serious mental health counseling at some critical time in their undergraduate years. The primary emotive words elicited from college students today about school include “stress,” “anxiety,” “exhaustion” and “loneliness.” They are overwhelmed, many to the point of being unable to do much of anything. The academic stress extends down into high school, at least among children aiming for the better colleges, but when many schools try and lighten the load of high schoolers getting 4-5 hours of sleep on average, parents often complain that their kids will not be able to compete to get into good schools.

Anecdotally, my conversations with some of those undergrad hold-overs (many to work on our reunion) were equally revealing. Half a century ago, just about everyone intended to continue their educations into some form of graduate or professional school. But talking to sophomores and juniors today, that thought was no longer uniformly ubiquitous. Young men and women even in vigorous math or scientific disciplines were often at a loss at their post-undergraduate plans. Career paths and further education.

One obviously mega-gifted young woman from Brooklyn, New York City – majoring in “computer sciences in the arts” – explained why she needed to expand beyond a major purely focused on comp-sci. For every hour of comp-sci class (and generally there are three class hours per week in each course), there were 15 hours of writing code… which if you take two or more comp-sci courses creates “life impossible.” So she needed to dilute that schedule demand. Even as Yale’s newly focused faculty on emotional intelligence and more humanistic educational goals is considered a leader in that field, Yale College imposes schedules and course requirements that cut deeply into any possibility of reducing that stress and anxiety. Will they get that together? One would hope.

And on the other end of hope – true hopelessness among those whose lives did not embrace schooling and skills – was the experience of an orthopedic surgeon who worked out of a major university hospital in the Sacramento, California area. He has been deluged with young people – whom he described as absolutely unemployable and seriously physically and mentally damaged – by the drug addiction they use to escape their reality. His description of the young men and women he treats, bodies and bones seriously and permanently decimated by addictions to crystal meth, was staggeringly sad. It rekindled my own readings about those once-highly-paid blue collar workers (particularly in the coal mines) who have lost their jobs and will never, never get them back despite pledges to the contrary from Donald Trump. Wherever that job loss is heavy, so rise the addiction rates to OxyContin, meth and fentanyl-laced heroin. The other America. Trump’s America.

While I enjoyed seeing old friends and talking about old times, the reunion clearly reflected the confusion and chaos of the world around us. There was so much more sadness and frustration than joy at the legacy our generation seems to have left to the generations behind us. We were once among the best and the brightest. Where did we go wrong? How did we get here? And can the rising generations take over and fix our mess?

I’m Peter Dekom, and I look back on my own life and think how I might have made things just a tiny bit different if I had become more socially and politically active earlier in my career.

Heartlessness

If you examine the words “America First,” you have to go back to the times before and after World War I. Leaders, from purported liberal humanist Woodrow Wilson to conservative hardliner Warren Harding, to understand that this phrase and those leaders particularly stood for one thing: white supremacy. “America First” has a very clear and unambiguous meaning throughout modern American history.

The Ku Klux Klan has pretty much faded from existence until in 1915/16, when the film Birth of a Nation glorified the Klan, and both Democrats and Republicans then began their quest to reverse the slow movement post-Civil War assimilation of African-Americans into mainstream America. It was never easy for black Americans. Jim Crow laws abounded. Blacks who pressed their rights were often found hanging from nearby trees (right on up to the middle of the 20^th century), the perpetrators never pursued. Wilson reversed the policy of allowing African-Americans to hold federal civil service jobs. By 1925, a reinvigorated Klan marched proudly and openly down Constitution Avenue in our nation’s capital (see above).

The white evangelical movement that stands solidly behind Donald Trump today knows exactly what those words mean. Under a misguided view of “law and order,” they stand behind numerous blue on black “shoot first” killings of black Americans, have no problem with ICE’s rounding up undocumented “brown” aliens regardless of any criminal activity, separating them from their children, all detained separately waiting for heavily backlogged immigration courts, most for months on end (some for years) under AG Jeff Sessions’ “zero tolerance” policy.

Some evangelical pastors have called for their flock to bring their guns to worship services, telling them that God intended for them to use those weapons to protect themselves and their way of life. Indeed, the zeal of these evangelicals’ mistaken belief in an expansive interpretation of the Second Amendment borders on a religious experience, many also believing that their right to bear arms is a God-given right reflected in our Constitution. So what if the Bible bans the elevation of icons – like guns – to effective worship.

Having been raised as a white protestant myself, Episcopal not evangelical, I continue to be aghast at any person who believes themselves to be a good “Christian” holding any of the above values, much less believing that they are God-ordained or supported. The New Testament, which is reflective of values in many other faiths, was a reaction to the harsh “eye for an eye” proscriptive message of the Old Testament. Effectively a “book of Jesus,” the New Testament is a rather deep and passionate cry for tolerance, brotherly love, forgiveness, charity and peace.

There is no cry to take up the sword. There is no free pass for those who inflict cruelty for any reason. There is no mandate to exclude. There is no requirement that charity can only be extended to those who share the same beliefs. There are no walls to be built to protect selfish interests and deny those in desperate need. Instead, Christians are admonished to forgive, help those in need, “turn the other cheek” and not sit in judgment of others. Nothing brings home the notion of forgiveness and tolerance like this New Testament passage from John 8:1-11:

Early in the morning He came again to the temple. All the people came to Him, and He sat down and taught them. The scribes and the Pharisees brought a woman who had been caught in adultery, and placing her in the midst they said to Him, ‘Teacher, this woman has been caught in the act of adultery.  Now in the Law, Moses commanded us to stone such women. So what do you say?’ This they said to test Him, that they might have some charge to bring against Him. Jesus bent down and wrote with his finger on the ground.  And as they continued to ask Him, He stood up and said to them, ‘Let him who is without sin among you be the first to throw a stone at her.’ And once more He bent down and wrote on the ground.  But when they heard it, they went away one by one, beginning with the older ones, and Jesus was left alone with the woman standing before Him.

I am deeply disappointed in those evangelical pastors (and of course their followers), championing candidates and public officials with rather clear moral short-comings (ranging from inappropriate sexual contact with minors, serial adultery to abusing the public trust through lying and corruption), believing that God has anything to do with any purported right to bear arms, preaching intolerance, bigotry and commanding their flocks to act as judge, jury and themselves charged to mete out punishment. Hiding behind a sacred text to stand for what seems to me to be the direct opposite of the message of the New Testament is incomprehensible to me.

I am not sure how this can be accomplished, but for each and every American – whether Christian, Jew, Muslim, Hindu, any other faith or those with their own spiritual or non-religiously based moral code – I ask them to reach deep within and explain to themselves how their own beliefs and actions fare under a true interpretation of their own moral dictates. I do not believe that the majority of those guided by such a moral code can justify any of the above intolerant beliefs upon such a personal inquiry.

I’m Peter Dekom, and aside from the moral questions raised above, I am not sure how the American form of democracy (majority rule while protecting minority rights) can sustain with the growing notion that heartlessness is the new, Trump-sanctioned core American value.