By Sid Schwab / Herald Columnist
San Francisco is where I learned the art and craft, the calling and commitment to life as a surgeon.
Except for a detour to Southeast Asia arranged by my draft board, we lived there for seven years. Time for fun was scant, but we did manage, thanks to a couple of surgery professors and their heavy-keeled sailboats, a couple of exhilarating sailings on the Bay. We got close to Alcatraz Island, the occupation of which by American Indians was still going on, but the first time we took a tour was many years later, when, on a return visit, our young son announced he wanted to.
It was impressive. Among other niceties was a self-guided audio tour, voiced by prisoners and guards who’d been there. “Now go down ‘Broadway’ and stop in front of cell 120 … Me and Mugsy was in here when we wasn’t in solitary.” Stuff like that. Sounds of yelling and taunting, clatter of silverware. Eerie, but impactful.
As part of the National Park Service, Alcatraz brings in over $60 million in tourism revenue a year. With characteristic brilliance aforethought, His Majesty has revealed plans to resurrect it as a prison. Because, doncha know, he’s tough on crime. (Not his and his family’s (New Republic: tinyurl.com/crimefam4u), but there’s only so much crime a guy can tough on.)
A recent retrofitting of the dock cost around $36 million. Refurbishing and modernizing the buildings to current prison standards would be huge. Not to mention future operating costs for an island accessible only by boat, three times that of other prisons, which was among the reasons for shutting it down. Might that money be better spent reinstating Trump’s reckless funding cuts to life-saving medical research, or consumer protections, or Medicaid? But, as always, his reasons were succinct and thoughtful (X: tinyurl.com/4therock).
That’s Donald “I can do whatever I want” Trump for you. Like announcing 100 percent tariffs on movies made outside the U.S. Out of which (or whose) orifice did he pull that one? How it’ll work, he didn’t reveal. Movies, he may not know, don’t come through ports to be unloaded by cranes. Add a buck to each ticket, maybe. What’s next? Getting Mexico to pay for walls around hurricanes?
But it’s no joke. With our Republican-controlled Congress, formerly eager to investigate government corruption but now strangely silent, producing no legislation at all while ignoring Trump’s usurpful, authoritarian acts, everything that’s happened since he took office has been by executive order. While not all are illegal, most amount to vindictive punishment of the vulnerable or those he perceives as enemies. Or sad ego-trips, like taking over the Kennedy Center, replacing the board of the Holocaust Museum, or renaming bodies of water, geological formations, and holidays. Plus lustful leers at Canada, Greenland and the Panama Canal.
The authority for Trump’s nasty orders was available to preceding presidents, too, though none were granted immunity for the illegal ones, as the wise men of our Supreme Court did for him. (The women are wiser.) But, until Trump, everyone who’s held that office, even, for some of his time, Richard Nixon, had enough respect for the presidency and the law to recall the oath to which they swore.
Not Trump. As stated last weekend on NBC’s “Meet The Press,” he isn’t sure he’s obligated to abide by our Constitution at all (Financial Express: tinyurl.com/no2thelaw), assuming he knows what’s in it. “I don’t know. I’m not a lawyer.” It’s up to “his” lawyers to tell him, he said. Pam Bondi, Kash Patel, sycophantically prostrate protectors of the law. Who made a nauseating show of braggadocio after arresting a judge in her courtroom, intended to intimidate all judges into ignoring his lawbreaking, assuming what the judge did was, in fact, illegal. One minute it’s, “I run the world,” next minute he’s a helpless tabula rasa who knows nothing (Bulwark: tinyurl.com/2nonothing).
Nor will he get pushback from Republicans in Congress, who’ve said only this: (YouTube: tinyurl.com/theyspeak2u). Scores of judges from both parties have spoken up, forcefully, though (tinyurl.com/no2intimidate). Not that Team Trump cares. Probably loving it (YouTube: tinyurl.com/lovingit4u).
Megalomaniac. Sociopath. Narcissist. Pathological liar. Based on direct observation, all of those terms have been applied to the person who, when he’s not golfing, occupies the Oval Office long enough to display yet another executive order, showily adorned with his ventricular-tachycardia-mimicking signature (Medanta: tinyurl.com/vtach4u), offering nothing for anyone but himself. Plus, as he plans drastic cuts to military leadership and intelligence services, Vladimir Putin and all who wish us ill.
If Trump cared about country over self, which he doesn’t, instead of focusing on prisons foreign and domestic, movies, forcedly reverential parades, and honoring convicted seditionists, he’d attend to problems his mindless firings have created; like the fiasco at Newark’s airport, a major hub for access to New York City (Esquire: tinyurl.com/sayno2EWR). We used it a couple of months ago. Not again. Not till Trump lays down his Sharpie and does something beneficial or thought-out for a change.
Email Sid Schwab at columnsid@gmail.com.
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