Rosalita, Some Day

“Some day we’ll look back on all of this, and it will all seem funny.”   One of the many wise lyrics of Bruce Springsteen that comes to mind whenever all hell breaks loose and life is scary and we don’t know where all of this is headed.  Come out, tonight, Rosalita.  Yes, this is terrifying but someday we’ll laugh about all this.

So the Bromance between our President and Vladimir Putin continues to confound, cause stress and uncertainty, and generate multiple investigations that will dominate this Presidency for the foreseeable future.  Five or ten years from now, maybe we’ll be in a position to laugh about all of this.  Let’s hope so.

This morning conservative columnist Ross Douthat of the New York Times in an article entitled “The Manchurian Candidate?” asks us to not jump to conclusions about the Bromance.  He argues that perhaps all of what we are seeing is just inept bumbling of an arrogant and inexperienced group of unprepared businesspeople taking over the reins of government.  http://nyti.ms/2rb6cdm

From the film “The Manchurian Candidate”

As this Presidency consistently keeps me from doing my other work, I had to send in a comment to the article, which reads as follows:

“I agree that there is room for less sinister explanations that the worst-of-all-possible scenarios (which should not be ruled out). But one thing is absolutely clear in all of this: Putin and the Russians brilliantly recognized in Trump and his hustling, inexperienced campaign aides an opportunity to undermine the presumed future U.S. President (HRC, anti-Putin hawk) and to weaken and cause uncertainty in the NATO alliance.

Whether or not there was active collusion on the part of the Trump campaign, there undoubtedly was passive acquiescence in Russia’s attacks on the HRC campaign — Trump even encouraged it on live television. Wherever the investigations lead us, it is clear that the real winner in all of this is Putin. He has successfully — through Trump — undermined the NATO alliance, one of his key obsessions, as this gives him more freedom in the Eastern European sphere. And he has in the U.S. President a man who will not criticize Russia’s actions no matter how brazen or bizarre or even murderous.

We are in a bad spot. Putin is delighted. I hope we find our way out of this mess. It remains very unlikely that this White House will be at all helpful in that regard.”

The funny thing about time is that looking forward one can see so many different outcomes, and looking backward there is such clarity in how we got where we are.  But careful thinkers can see those inflection points, those moments when so many things might have turned out differently.  What if that fog on the East River had not held up the British Navy and allowed Washington’s troops to escape at the Battle of Brooklyn?  The “father of our country” would surely have been hanged and gone down in history as a traitor, and independence from Britain would have come decades later, allowing the North American continent to be divided up differently.  In other words, no U.S.  No fog that morning, no country as we know it.

What if Lincoln had not been assassinated?   What if that guy posted at his door at Ford’s Theatre had stayed on the job? Would the whole violent cycle of Impeachment, Reconstruction, Jim Crow and the White Backlash have been avoided, sparing us a century of racial strife?  Small things that made huge differences in world events…

So we can’t know where all this is headed and small things may turn out to be world-turning.  And yes, Rosalita, maybe someday we’ll look back on this and it will all seem funny.

But right now only one man is smiling.  And that man is Vladimir Putin.

https://www.google.com/#safe=active&q=someday+we’ll+look+back+on+this+and+it+will+all+seem+funny