July 21, 2014--Clown Car

I don't know if they're still doing this, but in my youth, a favorite moment during the Ringling Brothers, Barnum and Bailey circus was when a car smaller than a VW would trundled to the center of the center ring and slowly disgorge clown after clown after clown after clown. At least a dozen appeared to have been piled into that tiny vehicle. I guess this was the inspiration for Steven Sondheim's Bring in the Clowns.

Of course there was a trap door beneath where the car came to rest and the clowns scrambled up from below the circus floor. Think of this as a metaphor for what follows.

Though Ringling Brothers may have moved on to higher-tech stunts, the good news is that their own version of the clown car is beginning to trundle toward center stage in the Republican scramble for the 2016 presidential nomination.

Three GOP clowns were especially active last week--Chris Christie, thinking his troubles are either behind him or that potential voters in Iowa have not been tracking the Bridgegate scandal (or, what is in fact true for them, seeing it to be a scandal created by the liberal eastern-establishment media) plunged into adoring crowds who came out to see a genuine political celebrity (ironically a celebrity created as much by media-fed scandal as achievement) who was eager to show the Republican competition how a seemingly straight-talking, tell-it-like-it-is anti-Washington regular overweight guy looks and feels like in the flesh (double meaning intended).

It feels pretty good, the ever-modest Christie concluded, all smiles before heading back to New Jersey, praying that the various prosecutors and grand juries investigating the mess at the GW Bridge as well as other signs of corruption will not indict him before next November. My guess is they will, and that that will finally deflate him. In the meantime, he'll keep pressing the flesh. (Sorry, at times I can't restrain myself from being bad.)

Also getting into their clown gear were Rick Perry, who I believe is still governor of Texas, and Rand Paul, Ron's son, who I think is a senator though the last time he was seen in Washington was two years ago when he was sworn in. He's now a part of the Washington establishment, like it or not, and since politically being perceived that way is a ability, he is trying to figure out how to be both a senator and an anti-establishment, anti-governement figure though he is in fact a public employee and earns more than $200,000 a year in salary and generous benefits paid for by taxpayers whose taxes he wants to cut. Get it?

Only a clown could be that audacious. And then have you seen his hair-dye job and eye makeup? Right out of clown school. But there I go again being bad.

What is unusual so many months before the Iowa caucuses is for undeclared but for-certain candidates to attack each other directly, by name. This early in the game unannounced candidates have always talked in broad generalities while wandering around the country attempting to line up wealthy supporters while appearing to be above the fray and trying to act presidential.

But Rick Perry couldn't control himself. He went right after purported front-runner Rand Paul both by policy and name. Maybe he recalled that the last time around, assuming his memory is more intact this time--he had trouble during the debates remembering even his own talking points--perhaps he is acknowledging that that last-minute strategy didn't work. His front-runner status lasted about a week.

Though the problem may have been more him than his strategy, this time around he is working more on the strategy than the "him" part.

The governor showed up last week with a new pair of professorial-looking eye glasses. These are part of a strategy to look smart because, again in 2012, he both looked and sounded, how else to put this, dumb.

And he's even given up wearing cowboy boots. Another strategy to make him look serious. And maybe to appeal to women and independents who don't like to see too much testosterone in their presidents. Though God knows with John Kennedy, Bill Clinton, and FDR it flowed freely.

All Democrats. Hum.

Rick Perry, to show he knows the location of Russia and that he can't see it from his ranch, and is thus comfortable with foreign policy issues and therefore ready to move into the White House, but also to distinguish himself from the GOP frontrunner, attacked Rand Paul by name, calling him an "isolationist," "flat wrong," and "curiously blind" (recall the eyeglasses).

Very bold. But before the ink dried on reports about Perry's otherwise high-toned speech, Paul's people retaliated, calling Rick Perry "dead wrong," saying that though he is running around wearing "smart glasses" (not spiffy smart but the style of glasses that make you seem smart), "apparently his new glasses haven't altered his perception of the world or allowed him to see more clearly."

I call that hitting above the belt and not politically smart since so many voters need glasses not to make them look smart but to see. Though someone should check to see if Perry's have prescription lenses or are just window glass.

Now if we could only get Herman Cain wound up and ready to climb into that clown car how much fun would that be this hot summer where nothing else is going on. Except, of course Israel invading Gaza and Russians or Ukrainian rebels shooting down commercial airplanes.

August 7, 2013--Knight's Moves

Chess is a game; a passion; can be a way of life, an obsession; and, for those of us like me, who do not play seriously or well, it is about metaphors. 

The most obvious are the military ones--about conflict, attack, retreat, capture, defeat, unconditional surrender--while for me the most interesting are those about the rest of life.

I know all the moves. Though by this I am not speaking braggadociosly or metaphorically--that I smugly claim I know all the moves--rather I mean I know how each piece moves and some rules such as those about passed pawns and castling (the only play in which two pieces are moved simultaneously--if one is extra patient and does not move the king or one of the rooks and the spaces between them have been vacated, one is rewarded for that patience by being allowed to castle, to make a strategic and advantageous move--a life lesson in metaphor about the opportunities that accrue from restraint). 

But I do not have the mind nor the patience to do enough studying or playing to rise above the level at which I used to play as a young boy with my father, who took pleasure in regularly "mating" me (speak about metaphors!) in Guinness-Book-of-Records' time.

I was inspired to think again about chess after moving on to the second volume of James MacGregor Burns' excellent biography of Franklin Roosevelt, The Solider of Freedom. 

Writing about FDR's strategic style, Burns compared Roosevelt's moves to those of chess's knights and not to the king's, which is surprising since so many of FDR's opponents and haters claimed that he aspired to be an American monarch. 

Middling knight's moves are dramatically different from those permitted the all-important king's--one measly space at a time in any direction, though not into check, into peril. Burns compared Roosevelt not to a ruler but to the unpredictably eccentric knight, the sole piece that moves in two directions at the same time and with the sanction--again the only piece permitted to do so--in its asymmetrical, staggered way, to leap over other pieces, in all directions, over friend and foe alike, and over white as well as black pieces. 

Here from Burns, comparing FDR with Hitler--

Grounded in the security of doting parents, fixed home, social class, family traditions, Roosevelt could not easily gauge this product [Hitler] of social void and revolutionary turmoil. Hitler had lacked a home, but had found a new home in the Nazi party, in its ideas, and comradeship. Though Hitler knew how to use the carrot as well as the stick, he had become a terrible simplifier. While Roosevelt proceeded with a series of knights' moves, bypassing, overleaping, encircling, Hitler went right for his prey--opposition parties, Nazi dissidents, Jews, small nations.

But as quirkily strategic as knights may be, researching a bit, I learned that they are especially vulnerable to lowly pawns. Here, from something I turned up--

Since knights can easily be chased away by pawn moves, it is often advantageous for knights to be placed in holes [a square that a player cannot hold with his or her own pawn] in the enemy position as outposts--squares where they cannot be attacked by pawns. Such a knight on the fifth rank [there are eight ranks in total] is a strong asset, and one on the sixth may exercise as much power [as the usually much more powerful] rook. A knight at the edge or corner of the board controls fewer squares than one on the board's interior, thus the saying, "A knight on the rim is dim!"

Thinking and acting as a knight served FDR well as he confronted enemies domestic and foreign. For the rest of us just attempting to make it through life while pursuing happiness, thinking and acting more like knights--with their capacity to bypass, leap, and circle--sounds about right.