A Contemplative Place of Mind

I spent a few hours last week re-centering myself. As the violent swirling mess that is the Trump White House continued to dominate the news cycles, and as Trump himself hammered away monosyllabically about the crooked and fake media, I threw myself into photography, my old profession and now an avocation consisting mainly of taking pictures of birds. But last week, I put the birds on hold and took up the cameras to pay homage to man and his family.

A few months ago, Julie, a dear friend, asked me to photograph the ceremony surrounding the interment of her husband, Air Force Colonel Owen Wormser, an American hero, at Arlington National Cemetery. To be asked was an honor, and to be there was to share in a tradition as old as the Republic.

I wish I had known Owen better, though over the past five years we had become friends who could josh each other in social media posts, and share family pictures of our children and dogs. To see him in the full spectrum of his life, you had to picture him in the cockpit of a fighter in combat over Vietnam and, at the same time, watch him play with his Portuguese Water Dogs Yagi and Sasha on the Eastern Shore of the Chesapeake Bay. Yin and Yang. An American warrior and a kind-hearted softie. He loved his community; he gave much to it. He loved his country; he stood firm on his principles to defend it. He loved his family; he gave all of himself to them. The best kind of hero. Such men and women are the strongest threads in the weave of our nation’s flag. 

Six black horses pulled the caisson bearing Owen’s stars-and-stripes-wrapped casket, clopping softly to the gravesite as several dozen family members and friends walked behind. Around us as we made our way up the hill were the ghosts of some of the more than 400,000 men and women whose service to country earned them, and their spouses, their allotted spaces in this beautiful cemetery. The light of the late winter sun brightened the granite-stitched hills, and cast grey-blue shadows into the cemetery’s hollows.   

The horses came to a halt on a gentle slope overlooking the graceful spires of the Air Force Memorial to the South, the Tomb of the Unknown to the West, and the Washington Monument across the Potomac to the East. Just down the hill from the gravesite was the cemetery’s columbarium, where my parents’ ashes are inurned. Like Owen, my father was a fighter pilot, and I’m sure the spirits of both men were enjoying the blue sky and sun-split clouds that arched over the cemetery.

The wind was a force to be reckoned with this day, and the airmen of the honor guard braced themselves to keep the American flag taut above the casket while the chaplain spoke kindly of the husband, father, grandfather, and patriot being laid to rest. The melancholy notes from a bagpipe strained to be heard above the gusts of wind, 21 rifle shots split the air, and Taps echoed across the cemetery.

The honor guard fought the stiff breeze as they prepared the flag, fold-over-fold, shaping it into a tri-cornered tribute of white stars on a blue field. An Air Force officer received the flag, turned, kneeled in front of Julie, and, with a few softly-spoken words of thanks from a grateful nation, passed Owen’s flag to her. 

Julie held the folded flag on her lap, her red-gloved hands caressing the stars. Next to her, a young girl who had cried inconsolably on the walk to the gravesite, sat quietly, taking in the final moments of the granddad she’d loved all her life. One of my photographs takes in the farewell tableau, family, friends, and honor guard gathered around the casket, shaded by an awning, while the sun, at the top of the picture, casts bright beams down upon the mourners.

This scene, with many variations, is repeated nearly 30 times a day, every day…almost 7,000 interments or inurnments at Arlington every year. But if you ask any family who has ever laid to rest a loved one at Arlington, they will tell you that the services performed by the honor guards, bands, buglers, and chaplains, were unique, unhurried, sensitive, and gracious. And so it was for Owen.

After the service, I took a long walk across the hallowed grounds. Just me and the spirits of the thousands of men and women who promised the ultimate sacrifice to defend our country against all enemies, foreign and domestic. From time to time I stopped to examine a headstone of a nineteen-year-old, or the headstones of a husband or wife or mother or father.

I visited the columbarium where my father's and mother's ashes are inurned. As I always do during my visits to see them, I touched their niche’s marble cover with its engraved names and birth and death years. Each time I do this, I want to make them come alive again, if just to whisper to me words of advice and comfort as my own calendar seems to accelerate, the pages turning over faster and faster, and time refuses to pause.

On these visits, I speak to my father, wishing him well, thanking him for raising a son who is trying hard to live up to his example. There is a small stone bench in front of their wall, and I sit down and remember them as they were at the top of their game, and I try hard not to recall the miseries of their final days. Death can be a blessing at such times…but it is still a loss for those left behind.

At this time of year, the cemetery gates close at five, and I realized I had less than an hour for a walk. I stood up, patted my parents’ niche one more time, and walked out of the columbarium to face the sacred fields and hills of the cemetery.

In front of me stretched the flat field of Section 60 where lie the soldiers of our most recent wars. In the distance stood the deep red sandstone and brick archway of the McClellan Gate, limned in the low sunlight. And beyond the gate, leading to the crest of the hill above the Tomb of the Unknown, the even formations of headstones rise and fall with the contours of the gentle knolls and soft valleys of eternal rest where my wife's parents are buried amidst a grove of trees not far from the Kennedy grave-site.

The setting sun illuminated so many of them—the young, the old, the pilots, the sailors, the grunts, the jarheads, the red tails, the tankers, the submariners, the cooks, the clerks, the doctors and nurses, the leaders and their troops, parents, sons, daughters, and husbands and wives—with a light so intense and warm that it refilled me with such pride for being a small part of a much greater whole.

I do love this country, and I love all who have given so much to make my walk in the cemetery such a powerful reaffirmation of our founding values. Feel free to disagree, but before you do, take the same walk.

If you are fortunate to live in the Washington, D.C., area, you have a place to go that will encourage you to put away most of your worries for a few hours. It is Arlington National Cemetery, a sacred place, profound, achingly beautiful, and unapologetically American. If you don’t live here, but your travels get you close, it is a necessary diversion from your route. 

Fake News? Really? We Are Not The Enemy

When I see or hear the phrase, “Fake News,” written or uttered by President Trump or his Fakers who seek to undermine the nation’s confidence in the news media and the men and women of the press, my anger rises to levels I’d really rather not have to deal with…and yet, it rises. From the advent of Alternative Facts, to the Bowling Green Massacre, to the Terrible Events of Friday Night in Sweden, to being Enemies of the American People, I’ve had just about enough from the Fakers.

My anger and disgust rise because I was a part of the news media from the day I began delivering the Cincinnati Enquirer to readers in Wilmington, Ohio, in 1961. I was 12 then, and within five years, I was a photographer and reporter for the Northern Virginia Sun in Arlington, Virginia. It was a small daily, but it blanketed a lot of territory. We covered everything from social events, high school sports, the police beat, and the riots that left large swaths of Washington, D.C. burning in the late 1960s.

None of what the Sun published was fake news. It was real, and it was valuable to our readers and to the Arlington community as a source of timely, informative, and, we hoped, respected information.

When I went off to college in Colorado, I landed a job as a reporter for the Longmont Daily Times-Call, in a (then) small town just north of Boulder. The Times-Call is an advocacy news journal, covering local town council meetings and raising awareness of the education, police, health, and human services needs of thousands of families in the region. The Times-Call was important to Longmont and the surrounding rural towns and farms farther out on the plains, because it was the source of agriculture news—notably reports on the beet crop so vital to the sugar factory that brought revenue to that part of the Front Range. Our farm news sections were always among the most popular and well-read. Nothing fake about the farm market report.

We helped one small community obtain a state grant for an ambulance to make sure rural patients could get to the hospitals in Boulder or Denver; we reported on a failing water purification plant, and made sure—through stories and pictures—the local authorities acted to repair the system and keep clean water running into rural homes and farms. It was all real news, nothing fake about any of our stories or pictures. Here is just one example of a “not fake” news story running recently in the Times-Call: “Longmont woman hopes her breast cancer journey prompts checkups by others.” Not Fake.

And I was just one of thousands of hometown, local news reporters across the country who covered dozens of beats and wrote hundreds of stories every week, every month, every year. Many of us climbed from those humble newsrooms, with typewriters and hot-lead presses, to larger journals in bigger cities, and we worked at our craft as computers replaced typewriters, and printing presses digitized. But while we grew with the times, learned new skills, adapted to a faster pace (and downsizing), one thing never changed: the news itself. It didn’t somehow transmogrify from real stories about real people living real lives, into fake news.

Cities still need clean water, and reporters write about that—it’s not fake news. Just ask the thousands of citizens of Flint, Michigan, if their local and regional news sources, like the Detroit News, are putting out fake news. No. They’ve been doggedly reporting on a major crisis because the news media, a free press, will not let up on local officials or the state or national government.

Down in Dothan, Alabama, Lance Griffin of the Dothan Eagle reported last week on the cost ($51,000) to clean up a local fuel spill. Now, $51,000 may not sound like a lot when compared to the national budget, but if you’re a taxpayer in Dothan, you want to know what’s going on with your money. The story was not fake news. It had an impact on the community.

The Fakers seem to forget, conveniently, how fact-based technology is helping keep people alive, and stories like this in the Lincoln, Nebraska Journal Star, “Technology and tenacity keep woman's heart beating,” are not fake.

The Cheyenne, Wyoming, Tribune Eagle just last week reported on a city council vote to approve affordable housing. That’s not fake news. It’s important news to the community.

When it comes to reporting stories about America’s places of worship and our big hearts that welcome so many people into our communities and homes, there is nothing fake about stories like this one about 181-year-old St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Franklin, Tennessee, as reported last week in Nashville’s Tennessean. The faith of the congregation at St. Paul’s—like the faith of congregations throughout the nation—is as real as the news stories that report on all their good work at home and around the world. Witness this story of faith in the Natchez Democrat. That’s Faith News. Not Fake News.

I could go on for pages citing local newspapers and reporters who deal in nothing but real news. Just run through these recent stories in the Louisville Courier-Journal; the Farmington (New Mexico) Daily-Times; or the Abilene Reporter-News. We don’t do fake. We can’t do fake. Reporters and their newspapers—print or digital—would not last a month if what they reported was untrue. America’s newspapers are having a hard enough time financially—they don’t need Trumped-up anger from the White House about fake news doing even more damage to their already battered spirits.

Some journalists have given more than battered spirits to the profession. They have given everything in the name of real news. Step away from your Fake News megaphones, Mr. Trump and all your Fakers, and read this report of the 1,230 journalists killed since 1992. There is nothing fake about their deaths in pursuit of the truth.

Major Sevenths

Major Sevenths

For Pop

I remember lying in my bed. Summer, 1954. I was five.  The Virginia night drifted through my room and carried with it the low-pitched thrum of newly emergent cicadas. Sounds from the backyard garden party mingled with quiet conversations from the floor below where my parents were having drinks with a few friends.  Little stick-on stars and planets and comets glowed pale green on the ceiling of my room, their phosphorescence competing with the shimmering flashes of light reflecting from the pool beneath my window.  The evening was fading to blue-black.

 

I was listening, sleepy-eared, to the muted laughs from the patio and the clinks of ice in tumblers as martinis were refreshed when my father came to the bedroom door, the click-flash of a Zippo lighter announcing his arrival.  He’d brought his guitar. 

“Can’t sleep?”

 “Nope, not too much.”

“Want me to close the window?”

“Uh unh. I like it open.”

“How about I just sit here with you for a bit?”

“That’d be nice.  Will you play a song?”

“A couple, if you’d like.”

“Yes, sir.”

My dad placed a small, square glass ashtray on nightstand and sat on the edge of my bed, his weight drawing me off-center.  He slipped the guitar strap over his neck and shoulder, carefully avoiding the cigarette dangling on the right side of his lower lip.  He spent a moment or two twisting the ivory-white tuning keys.  As he gently turned each key, I could sense the tension increasing or relaxing along the length of each glistening metal fiber. String by string, my father coaxed the guitar into tune.

From my angle in the bed, I studied my father’s left profile, limned by the hall light. In his world, he was young man, just 33, and on the rise in rank and position. In my world, he was just Pop, or Dad. Tall, lean, black hair, brown eyes, Roman nose, gifted with a warm smile and a genuine laugh. And never without a cigarette.

I watched wisps of exhaled smoke curl toward the ceiling as the sweet smell of heated tobacco drifted down across the bed.

  

My father fondled the cigarette with his thumb and index finger, took one last deep inhalation, and placed the Camel in an indentation in a corner of the ashtray.

“Okay, let’s see if we can make a noise with this.”

 He pulled the guitar close and leaned his head forward, eyeing the instrument’s neck, surveying the proper sites for his fingers to press the strings to the frets.  Satisfied with his starting position, he softly pulled one chord and then another and another from the taut metal strands. In sequence, he played a C, an A-minor, then an F, and finally a G.  The universal progression.

“Learn these, old buddy; maybe toss in a D and an E minor, and you’ll be the life of any party for at least a dozen good songs.”

Once he’d settled in with the guitar, my father began humming old songs, then whispersinging the tunes of his own youth and retelling the warrior ballads from the war he’d fought.  His fingers shaped little ditties about frogs on lily pads, and it ain't gonna rain no more, no more.  No more.  He sang one song I didn’t understand at all. For years, I only recalled the last three words of each verse, “…the foggy dew.” It was the most melodic of my dad’s repertoire, hills and valleys of notes, climbing and descending with the chord changes, but he did not give it full voice. Instead, he sang it so softly that most of what I remember was the quiet sadness of the music.

It is a song about the Irish rebellion, also known as the Easter Rising of 1916. Tired of being treated like second class citizens in an oft-maligned country, Irish rebels attempted to push back against British troops and lost badly. The song tells of the attack of the small band of determined fighters, and of their defeat under the big British guns in the foggy dew. But of course, I knew nothing of such things while I listened to my father in the gloaming of my room. And the chords, A minor, G, E minor, A minor, D minor, fit themselves in neat slots in my brain and locked themselves in. They stayed there, teasing me from behind the closed door of imperfect memory, a door I would unlock only after my father’s death.

Sometimes only chords came. He softly swept through a major seventh scale. Strummed slowly, the notes were on the sad side of mellow, and rose and fell like boats at a restless anchorage.  The major sevenths feel incomplete and unresolved to me; they have no beginnings or ends. They enter the heart like the cool precursor winds of fall that sweep unexpectedly into the middle of a summer day and depart just as suddenly. When those chilling breezes have gone, summer doesn’t feel the same; an end is coming.

Although the five-year-old me did not understand any of this—I heard only the soft strokes of my father’s thumb across the strings—the sounds from that evening would become the melancholy tones of my youth.

He ran through his simple repertoire, then stood up and propped the guitar on the side of the bed, its keys near my pillow.  I reached out to touch the tips of the strings, wound tightly about their key stems, and the sharp, clipped metal ends scritched across my fingertips.

 

My father pulled a pack of Camels from his shirt pocket, turned the pack on its side and tapped out one unfiltered cigarette.  He lit the new cigarette from the smoldering stub of the old one, walked out of the bedroom to the hall bathroom and flushed the dying butt in the toilet.  I listened to the gurgle of the water swirling away as my father came back.

The quiet of the room was startled by a peal of laughter from the party below spilling through the bedroom window. After a few lingering chuckles played themselves out, the room was still again.  My father laughed softly as if, even from this remove, he had shared in the poolside humor. 

“You know,” he said as much to himself as to me as he returned to his place by the bed, “there is something nice about that sound…a little laughter among friends.  Your mother is awfully good at that sort of thing.” 

The dull ember of the Camel suddenly blossomed bright rich red, and I heard my father exhale with a soft puff.  Stepping back a few feet from the bedside, my father tapped off a flake of ash and began to write in mid-air with a scarlet cursor.  He spelled my name in script, suspending a fiery rope of undulating cursive in the middle of the night-filled room.

I was entranced with his simple art of great arcs and inflowing and expanding spirals, dozens of flowers and polygons, and every letter of the alphabet. One image barely dimmed before a new one hovered in its place. Persistence of vision, the trick of the eye to “remember” an image, kept my room filled with vibrant red-orange streaks and dashes and dots.

  

As tobacco fire images swirled around me, I began to fade, fighting the night, losing to sleep.  My eyelids slowly descended like the curtain on a final scene – the stage lights dimming, the show at its end. From somewhere the covers were pulled about my shoulders and a soft goodnight was whispered from the hall.  Outside my window a night bird murmured and the patio door was pulled shut.

I remember that night probably better than any other night of my life, though more than 22,600 nights have come and gone over the intervening 62 years. It was the last night of feeling absolutely secure, of having unquestioned confidence in my father as a living god, capable of everything. It was also the last time I can place my mother in a happy context, without any intervening veil of doubt or curiosity about her motives or direction.  

That is not to say that the very next day everything fell apart. Hardly. I’m sure the next day was normal; the next evening may have been a replay of the one before. But that night, that night of stars on the ceiling, music in the air, and fiery nicotine script has held me in thrall for the unattainable perfection it came to represent: a Brigadoon of the heart, a safe haven. 

Trump's Steamroller Is Headed For The Media: We Won't Budge

General Michael Flynn’s resignation Monday night as Donald Trump’s National Security Advisor came as no surprise to anyone familiar with the ever-lengthening chain of events leading up to his announcement. More to the point, no one who knows even a smidgen about Washington’s political sphere and its symbiotic relationship with the media, came away from Flynn’s fall from grace with more than a shrug and an “I told you so.”

During a White House press conference the following day, press secretary Sean Spicer used the word “trust” dozens of times to describe what no longer existed between Mr. Trump and Gen. Flynn. When pressed by the media for additional details about Flynn’s resignation, Spicer suggested the media was following the wrong story, that the real story was about the leaks from the White House, and how government employees pass information to the media.

The problem for Trump and his people is that they are not—by choice—of the political sphere, and they do not understand, or want to understand, the symbiosis necessary to maintaining what is admittedly a delicate balance between an administration’s need to gather and process information vital to national security, and the media’s need to inform the public about actions related to the information. Information and inform. The core creatures of the symbiosis.

Two events during John F. Kennedy’s brief administration illustrates both sides of the symbiotic coin: The Bay of Pigs in 1961, and the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962.

When there is no symbiosis—no trust—between the White House and the media, a botched and ugly event like the Bay of Pigs gets uglier quickly, and the raft of dissembling stories that flowed from the White House (or the stories that were kept locked away), did nothing to inspire trust between the president and the media who reported on him. It also did nothing to bolster trust between Kennedy and other world leaders who looked on in amazement at the bolloxed operation.

When the symbiosis works, it looks something like the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, where President Kennedy, having been briefed on Cuba’s buildup of missiles capable of striking the United States, and, having been given several options of response, requested television time on the three major networks on Monday evening, October 22. In his address, Kennedy laid out what information he had—pictures and all—and what his response to Cuba and the Soviet Union would be. The president’s remarks were strong, focused, and reassuring, not only to Americans, but to other world leaders sitting on the edges of their seats:

“I call upon Chairman Khrushchev to halt and eliminate this clandestine, reckless, and provocative threat to world peace and to stable relations between our two nations. I call upon him further to abandon this course of world domination and join in an historic effort to end the perilous arms race and transform the history of man.”

Contrast President Kennedy’s remarks 55 years ago, to this statement from White House advisor Stephen Miller during a recent Sunday news show: “Our opponents, the media and the whole world will soon see as we begin to take further actions, that the powers of the president to protect our country are very substantial and will not be questioned.” And, of course, Donald Trump’s persistent disparagement of the media is incomparable to any past president’s relationship with the Fourth Estate.

No matter what demeaning words about the media spread from this White House, it’s very important to understand that the media gets no pass just for being the media. It is not enough to exist under the quasi-protection of the First Amendment, which, when read closely, says only that the “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press…”. A proscription against Congressional fiat does not, alone, imbue a reporter or a news organization with an inalienable, unfettered, right to write. It is the public’s opinion of the media that gives, or takes away, its power to publish.

Alexander Hamilton said it best when he wrote in Federalist 84, 

“What signifies a declaration, that ‘the liberty of the press shall be inviolably preserved'? What is the liberty of the press? Who can give it any definition which would not leave the utmost latitude for evasion? I hold it to be impracticable; and from this I infer, that its security, whatever fine declarations may be inserted in any constitution respecting it, must altogether depend on public opinion, and on the general spirit of the people and of the government. And here, after all, as is intimated upon another occasion, must we seek for the only solid basis of all our rights.”

Public trust in the media can be rendered ephemeral by a mere whiff of disbelief or government-instilled fear (real or manufactured). When we, as journalists, do not enjoy a large percentage of favorable ratings by the public for whom we write or broadcast, our freedom is vulnerable. We are vulnerable now to forces pressing on us from many directions, directions unimagined by the Founders or even journalists of 40 years ago. One instrument of those forces resides in the coat pocket of the Chief Executive—it is a cell phone linked to Twitter, which, in turn, is linked to millions of Americans who believe more in his incoming tweets than they do in all the words we write or speak against him. That is his steamroller, and he, his staff, and his followers are driving it straight for us.

I believe we must resist the desire to build a barricade and fight from its ramparts. We must, instead, stand firmly in front of the oncoming machine, reporting at every moment, never blinking, and let the public see what our freedom looks like when it is truly threatened. Remember a man, a tank, and Tiananmen Square.

This is our moment in the square.

[For this and all my columns appearing in Huffington, please go to:http://www.huffingtonpost.com/author/vaspeechwriter-960]

Trump And His Trio Of Sophists Cannot Divide Us From Our Australian Friends

I was embarrassed by the President’s remarks aimed toward perhaps our greatest friend and ally, remarks that betrayed nearly a century of an unalloyed partnership annealed in battlefield blood and national treasures.

There is a great danger inherent in loose talk by a world leader, and nowhere was that more on display than over the past few days as Donald Trump managed to berate not one, but two staunch U.S. allies—Mexico and Australia. Telling Mexico’s President Peña Nieto that his county’s military was not up to the task of policing its own criminals, and suggesting that American troops would do a better job, did nothing to salve the wound Trump keeps open to infection with his talk of a wall between our two countries
.
Not satisfied with his bullying of our friends to the very near south, Mr. Trump thought it appropriate to taunt Australia, our friends to the very far south and on the other side of the globe. With one call that had every possibility of a good outcome at the outset, Mr. Trump took a different path, insulting Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull by threatening—an empty threat, by the way—to undo an immigration agreement between the U.S. and Australia affecting the lives of 1,250 refugees whose only fault was wanting to avoid a sure death sentence in their home country. Mr. Trump, who told the Prime Minister that he was tired of the phone call, hung up abruptly, leaving Mr. Turnbull holding a silent phone 10,000 miles away.

Mr. Turnbull, to his credit, chose not to characterize the call as anything other than cordial and productive. Mr. Trump and his various spokespersons backpedaled a day later with faint praise for the prime minister, Australia, and Australians.

But the President cannot seem to let go of his propensity to needle and whine. At Thursday’s National Prayer Breakfast, President Trump repeated his always inappropriate attempt to shame the world community, by saying, just hours after insulting Prime Minister Turnbull, "It's time we're going to be a little tough folks. We're taken advantage of by every nation in the world virtually. It's not going to happen anymore. It's not going to happen anymore."

President Peña Nieto and Prime Minister Turnbull were not the only leaders affected by Mr. Trump’s rash and irresponsible comments from the Oval Office. Leaders in every foreign capital parsed Trump’s reported words and the attitude those words conveyed, and they made certain calculations based on their interpretation of the words and postures.
The carefully-aimed dispiriting word, like a poison arrow or hollow-point bullet or nuclear ballistic missile, cannot be recalled once launched at its target. It will fly unerringly to impact a vulnerable heart or an unsuspecting nation, and no matter how many kind words follow in its path, they cannot erase the damage done by that first, deadly round.
Quora respondent Marshall Glass put it succinctly when he said in his answer to the question at hand, “The repercussions of this rudeness only diminishes the character of the American citizen travelling across the world. You can imagine how people will laugh at your social immaturity for voting for a President of such poor etiquette on the worlds stage.”

All of which goes to show that words carry the values of the speaker, no matter who they come from, but especially when they’re uttered by a U.S. President. And they carry those values around the globe with the speed of the Internet.

In Plato on Rhetoric and Poetry, an academic paper published by Stanford University in 2003, there is a sentence that should cause us to look at the influences behind President Trump’s utterances: “We recall that Socrates was put to death in part because he was suspected of being a sophist, a clever rhetorician who twists words and makes the weaker argument into the stronger and teaches others to do the same.”

It would be wrong to label Trump a sophist because he is not a rhetorician in any sense of the word. One need only analyze any Trumpian sentence to know that he has difficulty with even the simplest placement of subjects, objects, and verbs. But those who control him, i.e., Steve Bannon, Mike Pence, and Michael Flynn, are well-practiced in the art of sophistry, and it is through Trump they speak. The “weaker” arguments posed by Trump’s liberal and centrist opponents were twisted by his triumvirate of hatred into stronger alt-right arguments based on fear, xenophobia, religious intolerance, and claims of imminent invasion by “radical Islamic terrorists.”

Now, an offhand remark, like President Ronald Reagan’s "My fellow Americans, I'm pleased to tell you today that I've signed legislation that will outlaw Russia forever. We begin bombing in five minutes." made during a National Public Radio (NPR) sound check in the Oval Office in 1984, was laughed off almost immediately because the public knew him, and they forgave the lapse—and even laughed with him. It should be noted the Internet and social media were not yet tools of mass communication and the light-speed dissemination of truth and lies, so the public had only the major media—print and television—for sources.

I don’t doubt that had Mr. Reagan’s remarks been subject to today’s fire hoses of information spew, memes ridiculing the president would have hit social media within seconds of the comment, and world leaders would be Tweeting furiously. As it was, there were editorials slamming Reagan for being too cavalier with such serious words, and the Soviets were not happy at all. As noted in Wikipedia, “The Soviet official news agency, TASS, condemned the joke, declaring ‘The USSR condemns this unprecedented and hostile attack by the US President’ and that ‘this kind of behavior is incompatible with the great responsibility borne by heads of nuclear states for the destinies of their own people and mankind’."

In December, 2008, just a month after his election, Barack Obama was still working at raising his public and world profile. He spoke at the Al Smith Dinner, and let everyone know just how lightly he took himself. He said, “Who is Barack Obama? Contrary to the rumors that you've heard, I was not born in a manger. I was actually born on Krypton and sent here by my father Jor-el to save the planet earth…If I had to name my greatest strength, I guess it would be my humility. Greatest weakness, it's possible that I'm a little too awesome.” Even his election opponent, Hillary Clinton, who was in the audience, had to laugh at such a light-hearted and self-deprecating remark.

But when the truly uncomfortable statements flow, like the “Did you do any fornicating?" remark by former President Nixon to interviewer David Frost in 1977, or Nixon’s more character-revealing line when he said, during the same series of Frost interviews, “I'm saying when the president does it, that means it's not illegal,” our impressions of the speaker are hardened and leave him no wiggle room for charity. Such is the case with Mr. Trump, whose shoot-from-the-lip phrases reveal him as little more than a selfish bully, intent on wielding his authority far beyond its Constitutional limits. As recently as Friday, February 3, President Trump laced into a federal jurist who had ruled against Mr. Trump’s immigration ban by referring to him as a “so-called judge.”

It would be impractical to try to list all the unsettling phrases, unkind, and downright dangerous, Mr. Trump uttered during his campaign (the word, “ban” does come to mind, as do the words and phrases “Loser,” “Crooked Hillary,” and “Lock her up”). It stands to reason that to many world leaders, President Trump’s “America First” theme (about which I wrote in a January Huffington column) during his inaugural address, was deeply troubling. I’m sure they looked forward to their first phone calls with Trump with some trepidation.
On one level, it’s easy to say we’re only human when it comes to figuring out what someone is saying versus what they really mean. We all interpret what we hear, how we hear it, and from whom we hear it. And by applying our own filters based on previous experiences with the speaker, we can usually determine if the person was just having a bad day, or was coming off an experience that shaped his or her comments.

Here’s an example: A loved one yells at us, uses uncommonly coarse language, or takes issue with something that would normally be inconsequential. If we are thoughtful and not over-reactive, we back up for a moment, figure out the conditions leading up to the outburst, determine the cause, and allow for the attitude and try to adjust to address their point of view. That’s a simplification, of course, but it’s an example of how local knowledge of a person can help us understand moments when someone we know well acts uncharacteristically, when they say or do things that are hurtful, ignorant, or untrue. In short, we cut them some slack because we know them.

The problem with Trump’s statements and posturing is that no one at whom he aims his vitriol or smarminess knows him at all. Not a single world leader has any real idea who Donald Trump is. Because he’s never held an elective or appointed office of national value, he’s never had to operate within the traditional norms of diplomatic conduct (not, it seems, as if he’d ever want to). He’d barely met Britain’s Prime Minister Theresa May, but judging from her body language as she stood next to Trump at their joint press conference, and given her remarks about the importance of NATO, of standing up to Russia, and her country’s commitment to immigrants (three issues Trump views differently, if not antithetically), it was clear at the time that whatever Trump said to her behind closed doors was not a message she embraced. And, in his home court, that is on Trump, not on May.
It is incumbent on any incoming American President to be clear and unequivocal in everything he or she says and does on the world stage—either in person or by phone (but not, dear God, by Tweet).

Donald Trump is essentially beginning a job interview with all other world leaders, and, like any job interview, his success or failure hangs on credibility. Bluster, ignorance, bullying, and the careless flinging of inappropriate words are sure turnoffs during any interview, and Prime Ministers Turnbull and May, along with President Peña Nieto, have already judged the job applicant based on incredibly poor interviews.