Orangey's the New Cat

   My partner and I live in a studio apartment. It is too small for a cat, because there's no place to put the--how do I put this delicately?--shit box. Anyway, the bathroom itself is not much bigger than a medium-sized litter tray. For now, we dream of a palatial future, where nooks and crannies hide cat trays and a furry beast gambols merrily.
   In the meantime, we have a sort of training-wheels cat. She is a feral tabby who makes her home in the driveway area shared by the two apartment buildings next to ours. A man in one building told me that the cat showed up years ago. He began to feed her, and she stuck around.
   The cat has pretty green eyes and fur of an orange-brown hue. The man and his young daughter named her, for obvious reasons, "Orangey." (My partner  and I, for perhaps equally obvious reasons--oh, those kooky gays!--slang-dub her "Orgy.") Another neighbor, who lives in the second building at the top of a set of wooden steps, also feeds Orangey. "I began giving her wet food," she told me recently, "and now she'll hover outside the screen door and wait to be fed."
   This is just about the total extent of Orangey's human socialization, however. Oh, she'll laze on a step in the sun, her eyelids at half mast, her body a slouched mass. But the moment she hears a sound the ears perk, the eyes widen--and she darts off the step and into the safety of the overhung parking spot. (The second neighbor has placed a cat bed and small scratching post there.) Human touch is anathema; it seems she'd rather be clawed by a competitor cat than be petted by a human.
   She is not the only feral cat to feel that way, according to a "The Lion in Your Living Room," a fifty-minute cat-themed documentary my partner and I recently streamed on Netflix. In a segment on feral felines, the film notes their aversion to human touch, even when they've been rescued and given a home and steady food. Some take years to adjust to the simplest caress.

   But then, as a rule, cats often appear aloof. This drives many dog people to distraction. Dogs are gregarious-seeming and well-socialized. They appear to manifest all the best traits of people: loyal, affable, uncomplicated, companionable. This is true, to a greater or lesser extent, of their guardians, too, although, given human complexity, to say it is always the case is a stretch.
   Still, many of these people can't see the point of keeping a cat as a pet. Where's the fun in an animal that doesn't affirm, with every whimper and tail wag, that you are the single most important being in the whole, wide world?
   It may be overstating things to say that dog people are extroverts and cat people introverts. But maybe not. Dogs are outward; cats are inward. Only an inward person can understand the true beauty of an animal which actually requires work to understand, and which, to a large extent, is beyond training. By their very nature, cats demand of humans a kind of blasé curiosity mingled with resigned acceptance. Cats are not going to do your bidding, at least on your terms and in your time frame. You might as well just let go of all demands and dig how awesome they are.
   In other words, bow down to King and Queen Cat.

   It has taken me many patient months to get to the point at which Orangey, sitting on the neighbor's stair, won't bolt when she sees me. I've learned to call her name before I appear to her. I approach slowly and coo to her soothingly.
   I knew I was getting somewhere with her sometime last summer. As I coo'd softly over the fence, her bright green eyes went from saucer-wide fear orbs to slowly-blinking satisfied slits. She had accepted my presence. I suspect she now considers my scent non-threatening.
   One day recently I prepared to bike around town to do errands. Descending my stairs en route to the garage, I spied Orangey sunning on the usual stair. I decided to see how close I could get to her. I rode into the neighboring apartments' parking area and stopped roughly fifteen feet from the cat. I dismounted, laid the bike on the ground, sat down. Orangey didn't flinch; her eyes stayed soft. I talked to her for a bit, and then slowly climbed back on my bike and pedaled away. I considered the event a victory of sorts.

   Life, as Madonna so astutely observed back in 1989, is a mystery. (Everyone, she added, must stand alone, but don't tell that to dog people). The biggest mystery of this mysterious journey is what lies beyond it, when ashes return to ashes and dust to dust, and the spirit floats free of mortal and material bonds.
   People adjust to life's unpredictability in a host of ways. To some, it is cheering to be in the company of like-minded souls; this wards off the unconscious terror of the coming void (if indeed a void is what awaits us). Among these types, it would stand to reason, are dog lovers.
   For others, contemplation of the mystery is one of the joys of the mysterious journey, and contemplation requires solitude. Among these, I would submit, is where you find your cat lovers.
   Oh, there are exceptions which prove the rule, and there may not even be a rule. But if you're given to contemplating the mystery of life and what's beyond it, what better companion than a cat, herself a mysterious piece of the wild veldt right there on the bedspread?
 
   Something of a breakthrough happened today, after I'd finished writing most of this piece.
   Having seen Orangey sitting on her step while on my way to the recycling bins, I called her name as I walked back up my stairs. Peeking over the fence separating our properties, I noticed that she'd left the stair and was standing in the overhung garage.
   I hailed her once more--and she meowed.
   That's right. For the first time, Orangey replied. (Cats, "The Lion in Your Living Room" noted--as have other cat documentaries I've watched--mainly use meows to communicate with humans, not with others of their ilk.)
   Orangey then flopped to the concrete and rolled back and forth on her spine. Her legs flailed gaily and her face was a mask of bliss (or so it seemed to me). There was joy in the land, not least because the conversation was now two-way.

   And so the mystery of Orangey, and of the life she and I and my partner and all of us lead, rolls on. I may not solve the mysteries--not completely, anyway--but I know the answers await if I'm patient. One could do worse than to be satisfied with slow and steady progress.
   Or, as Orangey might put it, "Meow."
   And you can put that in your pipe and smoke it. Or, if you prefer, you can scoop it into the toilet and flush it on down.
 

The Tall Tails We Tell

   When I lived in San Francisco, I did so in the company of two of the best cats to ever grace the planet, and I say that absolutely free of bias.
   Their names, Dash and Comma, were a writer's joke, one to which I'm pretty sure Dash never took kindly. Then again, she didn't take kindly to much of anything. She was a classic cat: aloof, diffident, haughty-seeming, anti-social. I was her sole human, and she took to me fiercely. But the world at large to her seemed suspicious, a sentiment she expressed by spending the bulk of her time staring daggers.
   Comma, by contrast, was practically a dog: he loved everything and everyone, no matter their size, shape, scent or social status. Comma would greet me at the door, sit in my lap when I read on the sofa, curl up under the covers with me when it was time to drift off to sleep. We had long conversations--my end was long on multi-syllabic flights of fancy, his on meows--and generally comported ourselves as the best of friends.

   Dash came to me in the late eighties via a roommate. He brought her home as a kitten and promptly named her Asha, after a goddess. I just tried to find information online about this goddess, and came up blank. Maybe my roommate only thought Asha was a goddess; it was the pre-internet days. Anyway, in late-eighties San Francisco, anyone could believe anything about anything, and often did.
   A year later, the roommate moved out. He offered me the opportunity to keep Asha; if I didn't, he said, he'd find a place for her with friends. Given that I was home a lot as a freelance writer and he was out at a job all day, I'd rather bonded with Asha. After all, I was the guy who fed her, which definitely elevated me in her discerning estimation.
   So I agreed to keep her on. I promptly renamed her Dash, and we became fast friends--as fast friends as Dash would let anyone become, especially someone who'd changed her name from that of a goddess (?) to that of a punctuation mark, and an underused punctuation mark at that.

   Five years later, I accepted an office job. Thus, I left Dash alone all day and sometimes into the night. A friend--who, with his roommate, had two cats--suggested I get a pal for Dash, and I agreed.
   One day I went down to Animal Care and Control, where animals not snapped up by potential guardians will be euthanized, and searched the cages. Presently, I came across a skinny little year-old thing with large pointy ears and soulful, not to say sad, brown eyes. He had a cold; he sneezed a lot, which was, I'm sorry, adorable.
   I took him to a play room outfitted with a carpeted climbing structure and a bench. I placed him  him on the opposite side of the room, and sat on the bench. He walked over and hopped up. Next, I placed him at the top of the climbing structure, and again sat down. He scrambled down, walked over, hopped up, and sat next to me.
   This suggested that he'd been socialized by humans; I thought him a great fit. Anyway, his coloring was almost exactly like Dash's; it was like I was getting a matched set, and what self-respecting gay man doesn't appreciate the occasional matched set?

   I learned from a vet that it'd be best to introduce Comma slowly into the household--which, let's face it, was Dash's household; to her, I was merely a convenient feeding station. I kept Comma in the kitchen for a couple of days, the door closed. Dash sniffed under the door, hissed, and basically behaved as would any five-year-old who suddenly had a younger brother.
   On the third day, I picked up Comma and walked into the living room. Dash stared daggers. I lowered Comma to the floor, and Dash slowly approached. There was some diffident hissing and whatnot, but in the main Dash began to practice a sort of resigned acceptance. Comma loved Dash; Dash tolerated Comma. To me they were both adorable, blessed with distinct personalities and enough fur that extraneous bits of it became fixtures on my jackets and slacks and sofa and desk.
   The cats and I--and a rotating cast of boyfriends--spent eight delightful years together. Then, shortly after the 9/11 attacks, Dash, aged eleven, fell ill. After a few heart-breaking and tear-stained days, my then-partner and I decided to put her down.
   I maintain that humans place fewer conditions on animals than on other humans. The love we feel for our animals is pure, strong, deep. Losing a beloved animal tears a hole in time and space and even in the soul, not to overstate the case. It was with a great deal of grief that Comma, my partner and I bid Dash adieu.

   After waiting a decent period, my partner and I decided to find Comma another pal. At a different Animal Care and Control site, we discovered a tortoise-shell kitten, a tiny handful of fur. We brought her home and named her Ellipsis. (God bless that partner's forbearance, never mind Ellipsis'.)
   We didn't wait long to introduce her to Comma, who--and you saw this coming, didn't you?--loved her. You know those calendars with photos of cats sleeping curled up together, or licking each other's fur, or gamboling happily? Yeah. That. Our household was a constant Hallmark cat card; the level of cute was so pronounced that I feared we'd wind up in, if not as, a Disney movie.
   Alas, even Disney movies have their dark spots. Although Comma and Ellipsis got on famously and loved living together, my partner and I, in due course, did not. After four years together we dissolved our relationship. He took Ellipsis; I kept Comma.
   I wound up spending seven more blissful years with that genius of a cat. I'm in the habit of occasionally offering guidance and solace to people who request it. When someone arrived at my apartment, Comma would greet them like some kind of fur-ball receptionist and lead them to the big, green, comfortable chair. He'd then hop up on the sofa next to me and go to sleep. In this way, he'd model admirable calm in the face of life's vicissitudes; this notion was not entirely lost on the folks I was attempting to assist.

   Indeed, cats teach us many valuable lessons; here are some of them, in no particular order:

   1. Sleep a lot between hunts.
   Cats are predators. They hunt--if only, in the case of Dash and Comma, for kibble and the occasional fur brushing. These finely tuned animals know enough not to stint on rest; they sleep between sixteen and eighteen hours per day. Not that we should necessarily emulate the quantity of sleep, but the quality of it? Let me put it this way: naps are good.

   2. Then sleep some more.
   See above.

   3. When angry, arch your back, hiss, and flash your claws.
   This is especially useful when "discussing" your relationship with your partner.

   4. Flatter those who feed you.
   Translated for the workplace: be nice to your boss. If you don't, he may ban you from the snack room.

   5. Have a sense of humor.
   Ha ha. Just kidding. Cats have no sense of humor whatever. That's why they're such perfect pets for poets.
   And actors.
   And--yes, fine--writers.

   6. We are all animals, underneath the fur. 
   Or, in the case of humans, underneath the belief that reality television is the apotheosis of human achievement.

   7. Nothing is forever.

   This last came as no shock to me. I knew Comma's life in those final years would one day end. When he became ill with kidney disease in 2010, there followed six heart-wrenching months of decay, ending in the decision to put him down. No sorrow hath a writer like that of a Comma dropped.
   Since then, I have been cat free. It's nice not to have to scoop poop-crusted litter and lint-roll fur from my clothes. But I miss having cats.
   One day, my current partner and I will bring home a cat, we've decided. Until then, we have a sort of interim local beast--but let's leave that for a future post.





 
 

Get On the Love Train

    These are the times that try men's souls (and women's, and children's, and pets', and plants', and those of just about every other sentient form of life on the planet), and we would do well, in the face of global rage and tyranny ascendant, to examine how to cope with whatever the hell it is that's going on.
   Let's start with a simple premise, one with which you may or may not agree. It is a spiritual axiom that there are but two true emotions: love and--no, not hate, but rather, fear.
   There are only love and fear.
   Fear engenders so-called "negative" characteristics: intolerance, impatience, cruelty, unfair judgment, criticism, and so on. It also generates troubling emotions: rage, despair, disgust, hatred. From love, on the other hand, arise such life-affirming characteristics as kindness, comity, cooperation, compassion, and empathy, and such uplifting emotions as  joy, a sense of well-being, and so on.
   For most of us, fear arises quickly, but love--practicing love, engaging in loving action--requires cultivation.
   Fear, of course, is a built-in human (and animal) survival mechanism. If we hadn't had a natural fear of tigers in the days when we lived in caves, we'd all have been eaten, and the human race would have died out. In the same way, if I'm crossing the street and see a truck bearing down on me, fear will cause me to flee. If I get out of the way in time, I'll go on living. Indeed, it is not just a fearful act, but also a loving one, to jump out of the way of the truck: if I go on living, the people who love and depend on me will still have me in their lives, and the truck driver won't live with a human life on his/her conscience, never mind suffering the consequences of human laws that might put him/her behind bars, away from loved ones, for years.
   It is said that fear contracts, while love expands. Fear results in tribalism, a desire to see ourselves and our beliefs mirrored in those around us, and a suspicion of those who are unlike us. Love, on the other hand, inspires in us the capacity to see beyond the tribal perimeter, to become curious even about those things which challenge our valued perceptions and cherished beliefs. To cultivate genuine curiosity is a loving act: feeling interest in things and people beyond our personal world is the beginning point of human sophistication, of humanism itself. Seeing past the tribe, coming to see the entire human race as one's broad-based family--that's seeing with the eyes of love.
   There is a powerful rage arising across the globe at the moment. It is manifesting in populist and nativist political movements: Donald Trump's rise to power in America (and with it, the rise of the nationalist right), the Brexit vote in England, right-wing National Front party president Marine LePen's presence in France, the May election of right-wing Phillipine President Rodrigo Duterte, and the ongoing attempts of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan to systematically silence his country's remaining free press. Behind rage there is always fear; the fears driving this Zeitgeist shift have to do with elements both pragmatic (economic) and existential (refugee crises, the looming effects of climate change). We as a race are aware, even if we don't consciously admit it, that, just as democracy in America is fragile and subject to decay, so our days on the planet may be numbered, the very existence of the human race itself in doubt.
   This is a hell of a thing to contemplate. The greatest fear most of us experience is that of our own mortality. The fact of one day perishing is more than most of us can bear. As biological organisms, we are hard-wired to live, so to think about one day not living goes against our deepest instincts. It is arguable that most of the human race's greatest achievements arise from a life-affirming reaction against mortality: first food and shelter, then clothing for warmth, then the safety of the tribe, then better food and prettier shelter and nicer clothes, and pretty soon you have, for example, Trump Tower, alas.
   The second greatest fear, for many of us, is of physical pain; the third, the death and/or pain of those we love and/or depend on. All three of these fears are so powerful, especially if left unexamined in our lives, that they can unconsciously drive everything we do, from flipping off the guy trying to edge into our lane to smashing the laptop which boots up wrong.
   The first step to overcoming fear, then, is to look at the deepest ones we harbor--death, pain, losing loved ones or seeing them in agony--and accept that they are likely one day to occur. That's a fact of life. We will die. We will hurt. Those we love will hurt and die.
   But acceptance doesn't mean approval or acquiescence; it just means seeing things as they are, without mental rationalizations, and accepting the truth of them. Then we can begin to shift ourselves and/or our circumstances to better fit life's unfolding reality, rather than hiding from it or trying to hammer it into some image we have of how it should be.
   The next step is to have compassion for ourselves and our foibles--including our fears. Practicing compassion doesn't mean condoning aberrant acts; it means practicing love in the face of those acts. If we can love ourselves even when we do something wrong, we're on the road to loving others when they cross lines. Enlightened spiritual masters feel the same compassion for a murderer or a rapist that they do for someone who uses a handicapped-parking placard when they're not really handicapped. All aberrant acts arise from fear, and the enlightened soul feels deep compassion for anyone living in fear's dark cave.
   After that, we begin to cultivate love for ourselves, which presently becomes love for others--including those beyond our immediate "tribe" (family, friendship circle, social media "friends" and followers, etc.). I would suggest that love is a constant, like air; like and dislike, on the other hand, are inconstant, like weather. It is in confusing love with like/dislike that we are perhaps most deluded. We'll say, "Oh, I love Frank; he's really funny," and then turn around and say, "I hate Mike; what an asshole." That second statement is a delusion; we don't "hate" Mike, but, rather, we fear him. Remember? There's only love and fear; fear generates hate, not vice versa. Anyway, if we don't fear Mike, but rather feel disturbed by him, it means we dislike him, not that we hate him.
   To begin to distinguish between love and like/dislike, it's useful to examine the ways in which we think. The mind is a wonderful tool, but it is prone to delusion. We think we know more than we do, or we think that something we know is incontrovertibly true when it turns out, later, to be proved entirely false. One useful way to examine our thinking is in the practice of meditation. In sitting (or walking) quietly, and attending to the chatter of the mind, we begin to see the pattern of our thoughts. We do this not as actors compelled by thoughts, but as observers of them. If there is an "I" who can observe "my" thoughts, then "I" must not be my thoughts. Once that distinction becomes clear, we begin to practice pausing when heightened thoughts cross our minds, really examining whether the thoughts are true, and then proceeding accordingly.
   Like and dislike are narratives of the mind, whereas love is a constant of what, for want of better term, we can call the heart. The mind confuses like and dislike for love; the heart, on the other hand, knows. Think of some being, human or animal, that you really love. You notice the feeling in your body, the smile on your face? Now, let me ask you: do you always like that being? We love our pets, but we may not like them when they scratch the furniture or poop in the salad. We love our parents, but we may not always like how they act or what they say. Same with our kids, partners, friends, colleagues. Trouble arises when, in a moment of dislike, we confuse it for hate. We discover a new way of relating to others when we cultivate the idea that we always love them, but occasionally may not like something they say or do.
   This same paradigm can be applied to the idea of hope. What if, rather than indulging in the idea of hopelessness, we instead accept hope, like love, as the constant, and make optimism and pessimism the variables? When things look darkest, in our own lives and/or across the land, we tend to feel "hopeless." But what if, instead, we tried to cultivate hope as ever-present, and acknowledged instead that we felt momentarily pessimistic? What if, in other times--when we get a promotion, a good night's sleep, a filling meal, a kind word from a friend--we agreed that we feel optimistic? Optimism and pessimism are two sides of the same coin, and the coin is marked "delusion"; they are tricks of the mind. The constant is hope, and any constant, as we've seen, has to be cultivated--which means made conscious, and then practiced.
   In the same way, a sort of grounded realism, resistant to whipsawing mental narratives or emotional states, can be cultivated as a psychologically healthy approach to life. Cynicism and idealism come and go; similar to like/dislike and optimism/pessimism, they are tricks of the mind, weather states that arise and pass away. It is easy to be cynical, to give up hope in humanity and in life; but a cynic is just a disappointed idealist, and idealism, although a fine motivating factor, is a delusion if it denies reality. Better, in the end, to develop a taste for grounded realism, based on factual evidence and reasonable deduction.
   The next time you feel cynical about the state of the nation, remember love. The next time you fear the outcome of an election, remember love. The next time you don't like someone, remember love. The next time you feel pessimistic about the human race, remember love. Love is as hard-wired into us as fear is, but it takes some work to feel and to find and to believe in and to practice it. But better to believe in love, and to search for it, than give in to despair, don't you think?
   Just ask the guy lurking high up in Trump Tower, the guy whose campaign for the highest office in the land spread fear like wildfire. It got him what he seemed to want; he won. But did he really win?

   


 

Swamp Gas

   During the run-up to the presidential election, Donald J. Trump claimed that he was free from outside political or financial influence because he used his own money to fund his campaign. The claim resonated with working- and middle-class voters disgusted by perceived corruption in politics, and Trump's supporters hailed him as an outsider--if not one of them, a fantasy version of them.
   Trump further promised an administration primed to "drain the swamp"--to rid Washington of lobbyist and dark-money corruption. His supporters voted for him because they believed him to be perfectly positioned to clean up governmental fiscal misconduct.
   Ah, how quickly die the dreams of the dispossessed. Recent reports reveal that Trump's transition team is staffed with lobbyists, and his future administration is likely to be peopled with Wall Street-street friendly types, prompting Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders to excoriate him Tuesday.
   "What we are now beginning to see is what I feared," Sanders said on a call with reporters, "and that is that what Mr. Trump was saying to get votes turns out not what he intends to do as president of the United States."
   Massachussets Senator Elizabeth Warren echoed Sanders' sentiments in a speech the same day, at the Wall Street Journal's CEO Council conference, in Washington, D. C.: "[Voters] do not want corporate executives to be the ones who are calling the shots in Washington. What Donald Trump is doing is that he's putting together a team that is full of lobbyists--the kind of people he actually ran against.
   The Washington Post noted yesterday, of Trump's transition team, that "the prominence of established Washington figures and wealthy donors comes as a jarring contrast to Trump's unequivocal rhetoric on the campaign trail when he decried inside-the-Beltway denizens as 'corrupt.'"
   Today, Politico reports that the Trump administration likely will restore Wall Street power in a way not seen in generations. Candidates for Treasury Secretary include Goldman Sachs banker Steve Mnuchin and JP Morgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimond. The odious Stephen K. Bannon, Trump's chief strategist, is as former Goldman Sachs man. Billionaire investor Wilbur Ross may wind up in Trump's Commerce Department.
   Politico reporter Ben White's piece quotes Manhattan College Wall Street historian Charles Geisst as saying, "You would have to go back to the 1920 to see so much Wall Street influence coming to Washington. Geisst calls it "the most dramatic turnaround one could imagine."
   Although Trump crowed on the trail about funding his campaign, he eventually received donations from several conservative figures, the Post reported. They included Las Vegas billionaire casino magnate Sheldon Adelson ($11.2M); former World Wrestling Entertainment, Inc. president and CEO Linda McMahon ($6M); billionaire hedge fund co-CEO Robert Mercer ($3.4M); and Arkansas poultry executive Ronald Cameron ($2.9M). At least three hundred and thirty other supporters contributed a hundred thousand dollars or more to Trump's campaign, to the Republican National Committee, and/or to pro-Trump super-PACs.
   Key staffers on Trump's transition team, according to the Post, include hedge fund co-CEO Rebekah Mercer, daughter of Robert; Mnuchin; former Goldman Sachs banker and current co-manager of an investment firm Anthony Scaramucci; and Peter Thiel, billionaire venture capitalist and founder of PayPal. Oklahoma oil and gas billionaire Harold Hamm, a policy advisor to Trump's campaign, is being considered for a Cabinet position.

   The Post also noted that "[t]he transition team, which is scrambling to make 4,000 political appointments in less than three months, has welcomed lobbyists' involvement and expertise, according to people familiar with the operation." Those offering advice include J. Steven Hart, Chairman and CEO of William and Jensen, a prominent lobbying firm; energy lobbyist Michael McKenna, who is overseeing Energy Department planning; and, Ray Washburne, a Dallas financier overseeing Commerce Department planning .

   During the campaign, Trump brilliantly flattered his disenfranchised supporters into believing he understood their anger, even as he stoked their fears. He simultaneously pit them against the press and the media, aka the Fourth Estate, watchdog of the people in a democracy, and against the government that, at its best, is meant to take care of them and the infrastructure around them. These Machiavellian divide-and-conquer actions created in Trump's supporters an absolute reliance on him (Quoth Trump: "I alone can fix it").
   The early signals emerging from the transition seem a huge middle finger up to those same supporters. It'll be interesting to see the length of the leash they give him. They're a raucous bunch. Then again, they're a powerless bunch, too. They may be just another subset of Americans in history who have voted against their own financial self-interest in the hopes of finally catching a break under the broken umbrella of the so-called American Dream.

Day of the Jackal

   After last week's post-election malaise, anxiety once again arises about the prospect of a Donald J. Trump presidency. Yes, the devil we know is better than the devil we don't, but the devil we have is so unknown, even to himself, that he might as well exist in negative space. The campaign revealed Trump to be a man of tyrannical tendencies, and although recently he risibly walked back some of his most egregious campaign promises, only the terminally deluded would hope for sanity from a plainly unbalanced man.
  Since the election, the Southern Poverty Law Center, which monitors hate groups, has counted no less than three hundred incidents of election-related hate crimes and violence. The captain of a United Airlines flight from San Francisco to Puerta Vallarta had to calm passengers after a man in a “camo cap” told an African-American woman that he was “glad" he kept his guns, causing the woman to cry. Vandals spray-painted a swastika, an anti-gay slur, and “Heil Trump” on the side of an Episcopal church in Indiana. In its most recent annual report, the FBI marked a "sharp spike" in hate crimes; those against Muslims rose sixty-seven percent between 2014 an 2015.
   Astonishingly, not to say hypocritically, Trump himself seems surprised by the violence. In a "60 Minutes" interview with correspondent Leslie Stahl, broadcast Sunday, he urged his supporters to “stop” their violent actions. It is a measure of the man’s incapacity for self-reflection—or reflection of any kind—that he should be startled by the savagery some of his supporters have shown. If you spend a year encouraging violence at large rallies, and then win the contest, how can it seem odd that your victory would embolden the more barbaric, and mentally disturbed, amongst your legions? It is to his dubious credit that Trump tried to put the kibosh on the brutality, but more than being too little too late, it’s so not of a piece with his pre-election rhetoric that the volte face actually gives the philistines cover to keep doing what they’re doing.

   But Trump may have bigger things on his mind, such as--well, that he will soon be the President of the United States, and he and his team evidently have little idea about what that entails.
   The New York Times reported today that staff shakeups have stalled Trump's already messy transition. It is hardly encouraging that Trump's team expressed surprise, last week, that President Obama's staff would not remain in White House after Jan. 20. (Note to novices: the incoming president entirely staffs the White House, and appoints roughly four thousand federal posts.) Reports suggest that the group has no clue about what it means to run the federal government--and they have roughly sixty-five days to figure it out. In a Washington Post opinion piece today, former State Department counselor and avowed "Never-Trumper" Eliot Cohen wrote, "The president-elect is surrounding himself with mediocrities whose chief qualification seems to be unquestioning loyalty," adding, "By all accounts, [Trump's] ignorance, and that of his entourage, about the executive branch is fathomless."
   Little wonder, then, that in post-election photos last week, Trump himself appeared miserable and frightened.  

   Early cabinet appointments certainly give pause. Trump and his people are culling from a group of career clowns: names floated for key positions include those of Sarah Palin, who was too bored to finish her term as governor of Alaska; John Bolton, a United Nations-hating extremist from the George W. Bush administration; and former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, a close Trump confidant and loose cannon. And there’s little doubt that between the coal and oil lobbies, any hope for a continuing if slow turn on climate change is now foregone.
   Trump appointed Republican National Committee chairman Reince Priebus as his chief of staff, a sop to establishment Republicans (and perhaps to potentially jittery stock markets). By way of ballast, he made the odious Stephen K. Bannon his chief strategist and senior counselor. In August, Bannon, who appears physically if not temperamentally Falstaffian, left his post as executive chairman at Breitbart.com, the extreme-right website he ran after the death of its founder, Andrew Breitbart, to serve as chief executive officer of the Trump campaign. Conflict of interest questions sprout like mushrooms: does Bannon still have editorial ties to Breitbart—thereby making it, in the future, the press organ of the White House? Does he own stock in the company? Likely we shall never know; like Trump, he’s secretive about his finances.
   Whatever else it does, Bannon's appointment makes what was once fringe—conspiracy theories, blatant racism, ethnonationalism, fact-free nativism—mainstream, and in the highest office in the land. If there is a hope that Trump’s reportedly conflict-intensive management style--he pits  underlings against each other to stir conflict and spark ideas--will benefit the country at large, well, it seems a slim-to-none one. Per Cohen, in the Post, "They will turn on each other. No band of brothers this: rather the permanent campaign as waged by triumphalist rabble-rousers and demagogues, abetted by people out of their depth and unfit for the jobs they will hold, gripped by grievance, resentment and lurking insecurity. Their mistakes—because there will be mistakes—will be exceptional."

   Yet more worrying are reports that Trump spoke by phone Monday with with Russian Federation President Vladimir Putin. The two leaders talked about opening up a Russian-U.S. dialogue, a notion that is anathema to intelligence experts and politicians across the spectrum. (Trade and diplomatic relations between the countries have degenerated in the wake of Russia's recent annexation of Crimea and intervention in the Syrian civil war.) Talking Points Memo reported in the summer that Trump, reeling from debt and blackballed by U.S. banks, relies on money from oligarchs close to Putin, and that Russian money flowed to Trump's campaign. It is no surprise, then, that Trump praised Putin during the campaign as a "great leader."
   And that's not all. Paul Manafort stepped aside as Trump's campaign manager last summer in the wake of news reports revealing his consulting ties to Russian politicians (he supported a pro-Putin candidate). The Russian government maintained contact with the Trump campaign "entourage," according to Russian deputy foreign minister Sergei A. Ryabkov. In July, U.S. intelligence agencies had "high confidence" that Russian intelligence had hacked computer servers of the Democratic National Committee. It was hardly mysterious, if nonetheless galling, that caches of emails from that hack wound up dribbled into the public sphere by Wikileaks in the weeks leading up to the election.

   One continues to puzzle, perhaps uselessly, over the question of how people could have voted for Trump.
   Hillary Clinton is an able and sober politician, and might have made a fine president. But she was the wrong candidate for the moment: too much corruption “baggage,” too wonky, not inspiring enough. During the primaries, Bernie Sanders had the Zeitgeist momentum on the left. If he’d won the nomination, he might have been able to upend Trump by offering sensible policies to working Americans aching for a sane choice. The air went out of the balloon after Clinton clinched the nomination; Trump had energy behind him. 

   There are other complicated and complicating factors in this election (I'm looking at you, FBI director James Comey), but none of them eclipse, or fully explain, the phenomenon of Trump himself: a serial sexual predator, failed businessman and reality television star; a self-aggrandizer with no evident capacity for empathy; a smoke-and-mirrors con man; and on and on and on. That we have reached a point in American politics at which a candidate for the land’s highest office not only wasn’t sunk by any one of the racist, demagogic things Trump said, but indeed was not sunk by any of them, is bewildering in the extreme.

   It is of little comfort that Trump didn’t win the popular vote, and that the election was so close. (Is anyone surprised that the dependably peevish Trump recently complained, on his beloved Twitter, about losing the popular vote?) He won, and will govern, and even he doesn’t know what that really means.
   It is as if we, as a people, have called a bird-watcher to fix the clogged toilet when an experienced plumber would have been best for the job. Or, to flip the script, it’s as if someone who'd spent his life in a relatively low-paying public service job, who had never worked in the business sector, was suddenly appointed CEO of the world’s largest multi-billion-dollar corporation—and had two months not just to learn the business, but to learn about business itself.
   Trump is experientially unqualified and temperamentally unfit to serve as President, and yet here he is, and here, alas, are we.