The Fall of Michael Flynn

It is difficult for this former US military officer to summon any sympathy for General Michael Flynn. I do not know the man, but I do know to organizational culture of the professional military officer in which General Flynn served with honor and distinction for 33 years. We are supposed to put the nation first, over any political party, over any campaign or candidate. Yet, most of us had never heard of Michael Flynn until he led a frenzied convention hall in a chant of “Lock her up!”

General Flynn had led disciplined troops into battle during his career, but it is possible that the unbridled energy of a screaming mob in a political venue was something for which he was emotionally unprepared. It is possible that soaking up this energy further propelled him along a path to personal tragedy, a path which had begun with his removal as director of the Defense Intelligence Agency during the Obama administration, a path along which he became susceptible to Donald Trump’s long con and became briefly a major player in it.

Suddenly, having reached the height of his power and influence, Michael Flynn was pulled down. It should be remembered how short a time it was following his removal as National Security Advisor that he signaled his willingness to tell everything he knew to federal investigators, if only they would give him immunity. That was about the last we heard of him in the spring of 2017. A year and a half later, we now know that he did not received immunity, but he did get the next best offer: no prison time, no "Lock him up!"

That Michael Flynn will remain a free man is a startling measure of how fully and freely his has cooperated with the Office of the Special Counsel. He may have done so out of self-interest, but there is more to it than that. I suspect that in that sudden plunge from the pinnacle, the scales fell from his eyes and he remembered the professional military officer and guardian of the Constitution he had been for so many years. I would not be surprised, if General Flynn were to someday re-emerge into the public eye, that we would see a side of the man which few have ever seen. We would witness a sincerely penitent man, one who has long since come to realize how he allowed his bruised pride and a consuming anger to drive him on a course to self-destruction. I believe he would be the first to affirm that there is no excuse for his actions, but this may be the explanation.

Dumb as a Trump

Copyright © 2018 by Thomas Gangale
From the reports I have seen, Trump reads very little. He insists that memos be about a half-page, never more than one page. This leads me to wonder whether he is learning-disabled. More than lacking the interest or discipline to read, he may not be able to read very well. I have close family members who have these problems. It would certainly account for his small vocabulary, poor spelling, simplistic sentence structure, and repetitiveness. This may be one of the roots of his insecurity, indeed, the biggest and deepest one. Perhaps he has spent his whole life hiding this disability for fear that people will think he is stupid. In turn, this insecurity would explain why he often feels the need to claim that he is a genius (real geniuses don't have to make such claims, as their published work makes their genius obvious), and why he has such a penchant to put down other people as being stupid. To be fair, although I question whether he has an exceptionally high IQ, I doubt whether it is particularly low either. In my view, the people in Trump 's inner circle who have been quoted as calling him an idiot, a moron, et cetera, are off the mark.

People living with disabilities can learn to successfully compensate for them. I myself am a comparatively slow reader, but I have always enjoyed reading, and I compensate by having better retention than most people. I still remember snippets of things I read 50 years ago, whereas watching a video for a second time five years later is almost like watching it for the first time. My disabilities are mild; in any case, each of us acquires and retains information differently.

What I do question about Trump is whether he ever developed successful compensation strategies to overcome what might very well be severe learning disabilities. A 72-year-old man who finds it challenging to read a one-page memo clearly has failed in this regard; indeed, his compensation strategy is a spectacularly self-defeating one: running off at the mouth about how smart he is while doing little if anything to increase his knowledge. He projects the outward appearance of being too arrogant to learn anything, that he already knows everything he needs to know, and that he knows better than everyone else about most anything, which is bad enough. He is also talented at getting millions of people to believe that war is peace, freedom is slavery, and ignorance is strength, which is worse still. However, the worst of all may be that he secretly believes that he cannot learn anything and has long since given up, that he has a deep-seated compulsion to tell the world how great he is in order to conceal the shortcomings which feed his insecurities, a self-destructive feedback loop.

I take it that Bob Woodward entitled his new book "Fear" because the people around Trump live in fear of his irresponsible behavior and recklessness, and therefore the danger he presents to the republic; but the root of the fear is inside Trump himself. As much as he craves the spotlight, he fears the light being shone on his handicaps for all the world to discover, point fingers at, and ridicule: "Look at that poor, mentally-crippled, old man and the silly things he says! Ha ha ha! He's so funny, but isn't it... SAD!"

White Anxiety... Is There a Cure?

Copyright © 2018 by Thomas Gangale

White anxiety? Are you serious? Sounds like the title of an old Mel Brooks movie. Praise the lord and pass the Xanax.

Will someone please explain to me why I should give a damn about "massive demographic changes?" My great-grandfather came from Ireland as part of a "massive demographic change" which flooded the unskilled labor market and depressed wages, not to mention the "drinking and brawling" his people brought to this country. My grandfather came from Italy as part of a "massive demographic change" which flooded the unskilled labor market and depressed wages, not to mention the "noise and crime" his people brought to this country. Come to think of it, the native Americans of the Hudson Valley probably weren't too wild about my Dutch ancestors moving into their neighborhood in the 17th century.

If the America Laura Ingraham once knew and loved doesn't exist anymore, sucks to be her. She never really loved it because she never really knew it, what she thought she knew was just a sad, narrow-minded, WASP delusion.

The America I know and love does indeed exist. It is the America which is always changing, always re-inventing itself, always struggling to become more inclusive, always searching for new rights to be won, always striving to form a more perfect union. There was a time when the idea of an Irish American like Jack Kennedy running for president would have been unthinkable, or a Greek American like Michael Dukakis, or an Italian American like Mario Cuomo or Rick Santorum, or a Mexican American like Bill Richardson, or an African American like Barack Obama or Ben Carson, or a Cuban American like Ted Cruz or Marco Rubio. Does Laura Ingraham have a problem with the prospect of Nikki Haley, a South Asian who was born Nimrata Randhawa, running for president someday? Put that name on a lawn sign and tell me how white she is. The America I know and love welcomes the good and the hard-working from wherever they may come.

That is our strength. America can take whatever, Russia, China, Iran, North Korea, the Arab world, or any other would-be adversary may care to bring at us. Laura Ingraham may fear them; I don’t, because we are Russians, we are Chinese, we are Iranians, we are Koreans, we are Arabs. All of these angry lands have American branches in their family trees. That is what makes America an unstoppable force of history. We are the world. We will add your biological and technological distinctiveness to our own. Your culture will adapt to us. You will be assimilated. Resistance is futile.

And that goes for you, Laura.

A Launch Delayed

Today is the day I will finish correcting the proof of my latest book. So that I am not disturbed during the day, my mother has taken it upon herself to take my car to be serviced. However, she soon returned to the house to announce, "Your car won't start for me."

"The it probably won't start for me either."

"But you drive it, so you probably do something automatically without thinking that I don't know about."

The battery had been put back in my car a couple of days earlier after being up on blocks for three years. I pointed this out as I rose from my desk. "I'll see what I can do." I got into the car and I turned the ignition key; my car started right up.

"What did you do?"

"I turned the key."

"So did I."

"Perhaps not enough."

I returned to my room to resume work. My mother was back a few minutes later. "I can't release the hand brake."

"This is like 'Fawlty Towers.' Shall I beat the car with a shrub?"

"That's it! Put a bit of stick about!" That was from a different BBC series entirely. I marched out to my car once again.

"Have you made any progress on your book today?"

"Not in the last fifteen minutes!"

I seated myself in my car and released the hand brake.

"How did you do that?"

"I pushed the button."

"So did I."

"Perhaps not enough."

Leaving nothing to chance, I patiently remained outside to watch my mother slowly back my car our of its parking space and eventually drive away. It was now 8:25am. Whatever the rest of the day may have in store fills me with breathless anticipation.

She isn't even from Barcelona.

"¿Qué?"

Second Chance

I first saw Beka at a pet supply store in Strawberry in mid-March, about six weeks after we arrived in Sausalito. The Tongilava Pack had killed my oldest cat Dylan as soon as I had put him in my room with them. 'Ono had disappeared a couple of days later. I was still grieving for Dylan, my old hunting buddy, when I saw Beka. She had the same gray tabby pattern on the top of her head as Dylan and his brother Rhade, which brought me to tears. She was still in the store a couple of weeks later when I stopped by for more supplies. It was then that I was told that she was being sponsored at the store by a second-chance, no-kill animal shelter. Something else I had seen somewhere earlier that day had read "second chance," I forget what. I had a good, long cry in the car. I came home and told my mother about Beka. Initially she had been less than enthusiastic about my bringing four dogs and three cats into her house, but now she asked me if I wanted to bring Beka home. I was still shocked at how the Tongilava Pack had turned on Dylan, but I attributed that to their being stressed from the 24-hour trip and ending up in a strange place, and with 'Ono gone, Haisheng was now the only cat. Haisheng loved the dogs, especially Bette and Denzel, whom she would cuddle with and sometimes bathe, but that wasn't the same thing; she didn't have another cat to bather her. My mother said that Beka would be her early birthday present to me, so we drove to the store and brought Beka home.

After the experience of 'Ono disappearing, I determined to keep Beka in my room for several weeks to be sure that she knew that it was her new home. I allowed Haisheng to come and go as she pleased, but she never stayed out for more than a few minutes at a time. In May I learned that 'Ono was very much alive and showing up on a neighbor's security camera, and by the end of the month I trapped her. Again, I wanted to keep 'Ono in my room for several weeks before allowing her out again, so in time I decided that the Fourth of July would be Beka's and 'Ono's Independence Day.

During her eight days of freedom, Beka meowed loudly and trailed behind me every morning as I took the Tongilava pack to the backyard. I always closed the gate behind me, of course, before letting the pack off their leashes, and this also stopped Beka from following me into the yard. Yesterday, on the ninth day, Beka hopped the fence to bypass the gate, and too young, too trusting, she dropped down into the yard to follow me. There was no nearby cover for her, she was in the open and exposed. One of the dogs spooked her, she ran, and the pack gave chase. In seconds, Beka was fatally wounded, and she died with me standing over her at the hospital less than two hours later.
As I write this, Beka is on my bed. The dogs and cats sniff her cold, motionless body from time to time. We usually have a party in the morning; I hand-feed them treats as I call them by name before I let them out for the day. There is no party this morning. The dogs are subdued. Bette sits next to Beka, head hung down, looking away from me. They know that Beka is dead, they remember that they attacked her, and they sense that I am sad. How they correlate these facts in their wolf brains, I can only speculate. It is time to let them out and to greet the new day.

A Cat's Long, Strange Trip Across the Pacific

Ono Fainga'a was born in May 2015 in a feral cat colony in the Fanga 'o Pilolevu district of Nuku'alofa, the capital of the Kingdom of Tonga in the South Pacific. Ono is the number six in the Tongan language, as she was the sixth cat to be associated with the Fainga'a family of Longolongo.

Ono Fainga'a

Her close relative Nima (number five) had been removed from the same colony and given to the Fainga'a home in the Longolongo district of Nuku'alofa, and in July 2015 I removed Ono from the colony with the intention of reuniting her with Nima in Longolongo; however, she ended up staying in the Tongilalva house in Fanga with two other cats and four dogs.

The Tongilava Pack: Denzel, Jadzia, Roxanne, and Bette

Ono, Haisheng, and Dylan

All of these cats and dogs were flown to San Francisco on 1 February 2018, but three days later Ono escaped from her new residence in Sausalito. Weeks went by, and people assumed that a coyote had caught her. Then on 23 April there was a pile of feathers on the front doorstep. Could it be a message from Ono? She was known to be an excellent bird hunter in Tonga, and since dogs breed out of control and roam freely there, Ono had learned to avoid them, so it was possible that she had evaded the coyotes of Marin for three months. On 6 May a neighbor across the street reported that one of her security cameras had imaged a cat matching her description during the night: a gray cat with a white-tipped tail.

 

The Cat Owns the Night

The quest to bring Ono home began. On 8 May Marin Friends of Ferals provided a humane trap and a motion-activated camera. The camera imaged her near the trap on 11 May and on several nights thereafter, but then raccoons began visiting the trap, and within a few days a raccoon was caught in it. In the early morning hours of 18 May Ono ventured halfway into the trap for the first time. A raccoon was caught again that night.

Rocky Raccoon

Ono returned to the trap about an hour after nightfall on 20 May. The food was now positioned deep inside it, but not past the trigger plate. She sniffed around for awhile and left. Finally, a little while after 01:00 hours on 21 May she went all of the way into trap for the first time. She entered the trap three more times during the next four hours. It was now time to position the food where Ono would spring the trap. Just has she had done the night before, Ono came to the trap a little more than an hour after full darkness and was promptly trapped at 22:03 hours. After 106 days of enjoying the night life of Hurricane Gulch, Ono Fainga'a was home.

Ono Grounded After Being Out Way Past Curfew