Nobel Prizes and Perfectionists

By Garrison Keillor, Garrison Keillor's Website

11 May 18

he Swedish Academy’s decision to not award the Nobel Prize in Literature this spring hit me hard, of course. I figured this would be my year and was counting on the cash prize of a cool million bucks. A man needs a little boost now and then. I know I do. People associate me with radio but I was also a Novelist — okay? Novels. With characters and dialogue. Lonely guys looking out rain-spattered windows at bare trees and wondering, “Who am I anyway?”

I did some of that last Saturday morning. I am married to a perfectionist, and so my faults are more clear to me than necessary. I am 75 years old, people. How many men of 75 are actively engaged in self-improvement? Are there rehab programs for us? Inspirational books aimed at us? No.

I was looking out a rain-spattered window, thinking long thoughts, when a wild turkey strolled into our backyard and onto the terrace as if he owned the place. My love and I live in the middle of a big city, but on the steep wooded slope behind us, raccoons live, and a fox, and wild turkeys who roost in the trees and grow very large because we’re all liberals around here and nobody has a shotgun to shoot them with.

The turkey stood preening himself ten feet away from me, unconcerned about trespassing, and it made me think about freedom, which I experienced for a few years in my childhood. We lived in the country where a boy could disappear into the woods and run around without adult supervision for most of the day. Believe it or not, we had no pagers or cellphones on us to allow our parents to keep close tabs. Kidnappers could’ve descended and taken us away, bound and gagged, in souped-up roadsters and demanded a ransom of a million in nonconsecutive bills. They didn’t because our parents didn’t have the dough. And my parents had other children. Spares. So we were safe, tearing around shooting cap pistols, waving our cowboy hats, and re-enacting white racist violence against native peoples in a way children would not be allowed to do today. When I see a pickup truck with NRA and Confederate flag bumper stickers on it, I see myself when I was eight. Been there.

And in this moment of reverie, my true love said to me, “You really need to do something about your desk.”

I don’t run a perfectionist desk. Like our president, I believe in the creative power of chaos. I thrive on confusion. And my wife is sort of the Washington Post in my life. I come out with a big pronouncement and she says, “But yesterday you told me —” etc.

Marriage to a perfectionist offers many benefits, don’t get me wrong. The kitchen is tidy, the rugs harmonize with the furniture, tools and other necessities are well organized so you don’t run around looking for toilet paper and find it stashed in the china closet.

On the other hand, there are moments when I realize I’m being observed as I perform some simple task such as pouring water out of a boot — she is watching to make sure I do it correctly. She goes through my wastebasket and extracts tiny recyclable things and shows them to me. She has carried on a long-running campaign to get me to take a daily walk at a brisk pace and thereby live longer so she can go on perfecting me into my eighties and nineties.

What I need at this point is a big burst of self-esteem and so I imagined the phone ringing and a Swede announcing that I — me — yours truly — not Philip Roth, not some unknown Lithuanian poet — had won the Nobel Prize in Literature.

And I would walk into the kitchen where the love of my life is standing by the refrigerator, and she’d say, “You left a full carton of milk sitting out on the counter and I don’t know how long it’s been sitting here, do you?” And I’d say, “We’re going to Stockholm this fall. We’ll fly first class. We need to buy some dress-up clothes. I won the Nobel Prize in Literature, Babe.”

This column is a mess and I know it. Very poorly organized. But if I were a Nobel laureate, you’d think it were a work of genius. You wouldn’t think, “Should that be ‘were’ or should it be ‘was?’” You’d think, “He won the Nobel, it must be ‘were.’” And so it is.

Will the US Go to War to Save Trump's Presidency?

By Marc Ash, Reader Supported News

11 May 18

t’s become fashionable and politically expedient in Washington to file the U.S. invasion of Iraq in the “mistake” bin. It’s the same bin the Vietnam War is filed in. The mistake label is most cruel to the millions of victims of those horrific campaigns.

Let the record be clear: neither act of genocide was by any stretch a mistake. Both the U.S. war on Vietnam and the U.S. invasion of Iraq were as premeditated and purposeful as they were detached from the consequences.

In the current context, it is instructive to take note of the rise of ISIS and the ongoing bloodbath in Syria. The two are connected, and both are direct consequences of the U.S. invasion of Iraq and the overthrow of the Iraqi government. Beyond the death and destruction, always underestimated by U.S. war planners, there is the devastating ripple effect of regional destabilization, which for the most part is entirely dismissed.

What is most significant at this juncture about the wanton act of U.S. aggression against Iraq is that the consequences still rage out of control some fifteen years after the very premeditated decision to invade and nearly a decade after power has slipped from the hands of the war’s architects.

In the summer of 2001, with his presidency less than a year old, George W. Bush and the Republicans faced a growing opposition that was reaching critical mass. Residual anger from the left over an election that was viewed as illegitimate was spreading to the political center, and the 2002 midterms looked grim for the GOP.

Out of public view, however, there was drama playing out in the nation’s capitol that would rock the world. Warnings that a major terrorist attack on U.S. soil was imminent were streaming into U.S. intelligence posts all over the world. Bush and his national security team were warned bluntly on August 6th by CIA director George Tenet. In his report entitled “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.,” Tenet predicted ominously: “The attacks will be spectacular.”

For reasons that are now the subject of voluminous analysis, conjecture, and conspiracy theories, Bush and his camp took no meaningful action. Thirty-six days later, on the morning of September 11, 2001, Bush’s political problem was canceled. He went in an instant from being an illegitimate president to being a “War President,” and overnight his popularity among Americans soared.

While Donald Trump’s administration bears little resemblance to that of George W. Bush, or any other previous presidential administration for that matter, he too struggles for legitimacy. The most apparent commonality is that both men ascended to the presidency despite losing the popular election.

Like Bush in 2001, Trump is in deep political trouble. Arguably even greater trouble than Bush. The perception that Trump has, or even might have, loyalties to an adversarial foreign power has set the stage for the most consequential investigation of a president since Watergate and perhaps ever.

That investigation, headed by former FBI director and now special counsel Robert S. Mueller III shows every indication of being in possession of damning criminal evidence, some of which has already led to formal criminal charges and guilty pleas. To say that Donald Trump is feeling the heat would be a fairly substantial understatement. This is a man who needs a game changer rather urgently.

Enter John Bolton and his dream of war with Iran.

War unites populations. Throughout history, ruthless and opportunistic leaders have used war or the threat of war, time and time again, to solidify their grip on power and neutralize domestic opposition. Newly ascendant national security advisor John Bolton understands this full well, and he has the ear of the commander in chief.

Bolton has been preaching war with Iran for decades. His arguments have never managed to sway a U.S. president sufficiently to commence bombing. Part of his sales pitch to Trump undoubtedly includes a forecast of the political benefits.

Political benefits are the only semi-coherent rationale for entering into an armed conflict with Iran even as the fires from Bush’s Iraq mistake still burn. In every other regard – from the perspective of U.S. and international security, the economy of America and its allies, and the environmental health of the planet – a U.S. military assault on Iran would be a guaranteed disaster of epic and, like the disaster in Iraq, lasting proportions.

Without question, if Donald Trump leads the U.S. to war against Iran it will be to save his presidency and in all likelihood his skin. The more important question is: knowing what we know now, will the American people and the military follow?

Marc Ash is the founder and former Executive Director of Truthout, and is now founder and Editor of Reader Supported News.

Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.