Target of Opportunity

Sometimes politics is pure melodrama. I don't mean just how we feel about it, but in a literal way, a stage performance removed from the minute-to-minute action of our workaday lives by the mediating abstraction of the delivery systems through which we take in increasingly stupid information in increasingly stupid amounts. As horrifying as the last seven months or so have been, I'm trying to bake a decent banana bread or get my Excel sheet columns to reconcile or watch adult men get ready to practice for an exhibition game ahead of actual football. So there's a lot going on, that's number one.

Number two, how much can one really afford to pay actual attention, even if we wanted to? We already know that anxiety makes it so we can't understand words or recognize people clearly. So even trying to focus on what's going on is going to be an exercise in futility. And besides, when the positions of the president of the United States include things like "more police brutality" and "let's actively make sure fewer people have health care," attempting to wrap one's head around that kind of moral and societal nihilist surrender is a recognized detriment to basic mental hygiene. Supporters of his will tell you proudly that they like him because he's not a politician. That's actually true. He's more of a proximate cause of acute medical distress. Like norovirus, only with more resultant shit.

It's easier, safer and saner, then, to see him and his administration out of the corner of one's eye or maybe through a pinhole cut in a piece of cardboard like they way one would look at an eclipse to spare oneself permanent corneal damage; in an actively chosen unfocused blurriness where he can fade into the background like the vague outline of a panto villain in too much makeup and an obvious wig. The one good thing I will say about Trump is it's easier to dismiss him as a clown and go about my day since he insists on not only acting but dressing the part. That's commitment to a bit.

When it gets really hard, though, is when he gets right up in your face, twirling his big fake black mustache and cackling his cackle about blowing up not just one particularly blow-up-able corner of the world but the very specific corner of the world you maybe just put one of your offspring on an airplane toward.

Look, I bought my oldest boy a ticket to Japan as a graduation present when he finished high school in June. It seemed like a great idea since his aunt/my sister lives there, so he'd have a safe place to stay, for free. Maybe take in a ballgame, try the sushi, trundle up a sacred mountain, do... something related to Pokemon probably, I don't know. Japanese-y stuff. Back then it was a little sketchy, but in the last week or so, our own Beloved Leader started rubbing his tiny military boner in the direction of the country that keeps sending ballistic missile tests directly into the Sea of the Country I Just Sent My Kid To.

And yes, I know the actual threat right now is to Guam, but come on, how many people would actually notice? Are you 100% sure Guam wasn't nuked two weeks ago? Hell, that's how long it took anyone to notice the FBI raided Paul Manafort's house and that's a story people have been paying SUPER CLOSE ATTENTION TO for, like, a while.

No, Japan seems like a flashier target. My only real comfort is that in order to get the Chinese involved on their side, North Korea would have to convince the world that our side struck them first, which means some made-up incident along the DMZ with South Korea. Do I wish anyone in South Korea any actual harm? My god, of course not. But if it's down to them or my kid, I think they'd give me these two weeks' grace period to wish them ill, so long as I promise to feel really bad about it.

If it helps, my son is an American white male adult. It's the default thing we're all supposed to worry about the most anyway.