HOW TO NOT WIN A NOBEL PEACE PRIZE

Here's an interesting list of non-white, non-Americans for you.

Juan Manuel Santos.  Liu Xiabo.  Kailash Satyarthi.  Mala Yousafzai.  Barack Obama.  (Surely many still believe that Mr. Obama is a foreign-born Muslim)

What do these folks have in common besides being potentially unwelcome here?

They all won the Nobel Peace prize.   

This group of not-like-us people was awarded the prize for things like a resolute effort to bring a country’s more than 50-year-long civil to an end, the struggle against the suppression of children and young people and for for the right of all children to education and, in Mr. Obama’s case, for his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples.  He won it during his first term.

Just a week or so ago Trump said that “everyone thinks” that he should get the prize for the big time art of the deal that he was about to make with North Korea. (It should be noted that during Mr. Obama’s tenure, he was ravaged by Fox News for even considering talking to Kim Jung Un).

The subtext of Trump’s throw away comment was simple: if Obama could get a Nobel Prize so could he. Irving Berlin, I believe wrote a song in “Annie Get Your Gun” that directly addressed this belief.  Not to worry.  Thanks to John Bolton’s saying publicly that the paradigm for the peace talks was how we dealt with that whole pesky Muammar al-Gaddafi problem,  the entire Kim Jung Un summit talks were flushed right down the diplomatic toilet.  Within hours the North Koreans called Pence, a “political dummy.”

By being flippant about the Nobel Prize, Trump minimized the value of it by making it appear that it was no biggie to get.  And by pretending to be humble about it, he was suggesting that his most vocal supporters should begin the campaign for him to win it.   

Trump is not unlike those old school shlocky entertainers who the great Martin Short deftly mimics when he rubbery ambles out on stage in character and slyly signals to the audience that they should shower him with love and applause, that he doesn’t deserve.

Every single day some part of our lives is minimized or mocked by Trump simply because deep down inside he knows that he has accidentally taken the con to heights that even he didn’t seem possible.  He belittles whatever is too complicated for him to understand.  Science. Politics.  Women. Diplomacy. The Presidency itself.

If this was all about a local political scandal it would make the news.  But on this level, it’s become, like the circus that it is, the biggest show on earth.

We have sent in the clowns.  

Don’t you love the farce?  Isn’t he rich?  Isn’t Pence queer?

And yes, he is losing his timing this late in his career.

Because he is haunted day and night by his staggering inability to achieve virtually anything but wave, big boy salute, John-John style, while boarding or exiting a chopper or stare directly into a solar eclipse, the way that he stays afloat is by making everyone in his orbit feel spectacularly aware of their own vulnerabilities which he can target and/or manipulate at will (because it mirrors his own) threatening to expose them if they don’t play ball with him.

Beneath all that is the reality that he has failed at everything.  

He has failed at marriage (his current fiasco has probably driven his wife to the hospital for mental exhaustion, I mean marriage failure, I mean kidney problems)

He has failed in construction.  

He has failed in any business venture that he has ever touched, from fake universities to mail order steaks to his clothing line.   He failed to get the popular vote and only got to become president by lying, cheating and colluding with not just Russia but with the Saudis to name a few.

Because this is how the Don Corleone Trump family does business.   They make you a low ball offer that you cannot refuse and if you do, they grab what they can and justify it by claiming that they are just taking what they are entitled to.   

That is nothing more than trust fund baby thug thinking.  It may not be the olive oil business, but Don Jr, sure has hell slathers so much oil in his hair that he could be a walking advertisement for it.

How does Trump’s ego survive?  By gaming the system so he can still win by losing.  He is at his core if there is one, a smug, self-entitled brat who got what he wanted by having the best coke, the hottest women and a mentor in Roy Cohn.  Even Caligula didn’t have such a good resume.

And who supports him?  Two extremely different factions.   

In one corner are the biggest losers in America who, since they have not been loved or rescued by the government or the lottery, believe that the only way to get what they want, like their idol, is to storm the gates and take what they want armed with the weapons of racism.  Oh.  And Jesus.  Jesus apparently is full-on sanctioning this behavior that is preached on Sundays and ignored for the rest of the week.  They are also scared to death of anything that threatens the very life that has not been working on their behalf for decades. The emergence of same-sex marriage alone is enough to cause a Miss Scarlett red hissy fit.  

After all, Tara still needs its slaves and the masters need their guns to keep them in line.

The other group that loves the Trump is the 1% the Pirates of the Caribbean Off-Shore Accounts, who have already been lavishly rewarded with a tax bill that only benefited them.  In turn, the GOP gets an unlimitted cash flow that will continue to sponser their loathsome and self-centered pursuits.

The whole concept of patriotism has become as deformed as a Notre Dame hunchback.  

Today, patriotism is defined by your getting what you want or feel that you deserve by any means necessary simply because you are an American where your right to bear military grade weapons is far more important than the slaughter of Sandy Hook toddlers,  innocent churchgoers, Vegas revelers and high school kids.

And this from a group that despises abortion because it is murder.

We live with this kind of distorted duplicity because our American reality is so unbearable that to take it on would take a kind of giant Viagra pill the size of a Mt. Rushmore head.

So 40% of America takes the rope-a-dope hits, ignores its outsized weaknesses, accepts their impotence as every day war wounds and watches Fox News for the very same reason that Trump ogles and grabs underage beauty pageant contestant.

It makes them powerful.  Justified.  Agreed with.

It is a sad truth that the only way that we will come together is by a terrorist attack.   

Because immediately following the collapse of a pair of twin towers or a bomb blast at a Boston marathon, we are suddenly shocked back into the dimension of real life.

But then we “heal” and get back to the business of being assholes.

We only see edited clips or heard brief sound bytes of selected-for-us reality.  Back in the sixties, we watched body bags being air shipped from Vietnam every single night on the nightly news which along with the release of the Ellsberg papers finally galvanizedd us to take our destiny into our own hands and in the end, we the people, took down a vile Despot.

The internet that I am writing on right now, is also a culprit.  It’s no different than when TV came into our lives and we suddenly found ourselves mesmerized by it for endless hours at a time.

It is making us even more passive-aggressive.  Lazy.  Ineffectual.  It is displacing our passion.  Rerouting our sexuality and in the end, removing love from our daily intake menu.

It is turning us all into Trump and that is why we all despise him so much.  He is us at our nightmarish worst.

So what is the remedy for all this? Is there a remedy for all this?

The answer is most definitely and emphatically yes.

It is my belief that we all need to disengage ourselves from the addiction that we have for breaking news and immediate gratification.  We also need to take a large pollo mallet to the “buy-now” click button.

We need to fortify our starving undernourished souls.  We need to feed and enrich instead of depleting.

We need to leave this Walled-in Pond world of ours and go out on life-fueled, exploratory expeditions.

Consider, for example, taking a rocket ship blast-ride back in time from the launch pad of a wonderful museum to visit other role model worthy civilizations where you can float quietly past the art and statues while you fully immerse yourself in the beauty and power of once upon a time.  

In the name of a trendy tomorrow, we choose to dismiss the past, with the casual wave of a Queen of England’s hand, instead of searching for the long lost treasure chest of life that is overflowing with the dubbloons of thoughts and ideas.  Real art, unlike us, lives forever.  Perhaps we should take the time to figure out why.

We need to sit and linger in bookstores, to sit amongst the holy spirits of authors who had the courage to document their close to the skin truth.   You don’t need to read every book that you see.  Just walking past those stocked and stacked shelves show a certain amount of recognition and respect.  It is no different than a walk of remembrance and reflection in a populated cemetery.  There are stories buried deep in there too.

We need desperately to be seduced by the etherael beauty of language.  

We need to take long walks with our dogs, who are secretly walking us, simply because they love us THAT much.  

We need to listen to great music that moves us to burst spontaneously into song in elevators and in aisles of CVS like a civlization of possessed and belting Patti Lapones.

We need to see plays. 

Dance with imaginary lovers.  Meditate.  Exercise.  Take a yoga class and work with our limitations rather than fight against them. Go on trips, even if it’s down a street that you have never been down before.  See movies that are about the human heart instead of explosions or the inevitiblity of dystopia.

Join groups of any kind.   Life is best when acknowledging the circles that keep us alive and spinning.  Wise men and women since the dawn of time have known that.

Share.  

Be generrous without being asked for a hand-out first.

Modern times, as Chaplin forewarned us, is nothing more than jacked up evolution which is taking us faster and further than we ever need to be.   A ride on a carousel is not any better when it accelerates past the speed limit.  Rogers and Hammerstein surely got that.

Be the nicest person on the road instead of believing that anyone who cuts you off is your mortal enemy who must be severly punished.

Learn the names of dry cleaners, supermarket baggers, and barristas and greet them every day because the reward will be a certain and immediate level of friendship.

Look, despite their impossible shine, no new Apple phone or ipad or watch (and I have them all) is going to be anything  more than the toys that we all secretly still crave, the big oversized babies that we are.

When I was young, in the sixties, the future was something that we were dreamy about.   We went to Worlds Fairs which felt like we were on a Jules Verne journey to Someday,

At night, we would listen to impossibly romantic songs that were full of longing and never once included the word “bitch.”   

We stared deeply into the crystal ball of late night skies and actively tried to create star maps that would lead us towards our the horizon of our fate.

Less was done for us.  

We were simply not yet as Siri and Alexa automated as we are now.

The future was ours to screw up.

It was something that was tangible, buildable, piece by loving piece as simple and interactive as Lincoln logs. It was not something that was sent to us year after year by the latest tech fad companies whose churches we attend far more frequently than we do our houses of faith.

We need to take a long look back like the natural anthropologists that we are in order to find the strength and value which we are giving away every single day. By the hour. By the minute.  By the second.

John McCain is dying and he has become, as a result, a deeply reflective man, who is trying to assess his life, while trying to leave us with some kind of lasting, Jurassic Park sized imprint.  Like most of us, he was seduced by power and made some really bad decisions and political choices.

And now he is trying to sweep the minefields and create some kind of clearing for us to land on.

My heartfelt suggestion to you is to not wait until your time is up.

Live fully instead of believing that you are empty.

Breathe deeply and often.

Laugh with a delight like a baby delighted by a solid round of peek-a-boo.

Enjoy the moment.

And you will by example alone, make a huge difference.

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