The Kate Steinle verdict

Jose Ines Garcia Zarate was found not guilty of not just first- or second-degree murder, but even of manslaughter, in the death of Kate Steinle. He was convicted solely of being a felon in possession of a firearm.

I don't hold with the demonization of illegal immigrants that Trump rode to the White House, but Garcia Zarate doesn't push my pity buttons. He is a serial illegal crosser of the border and whether or not the gun went off accidentally, he was responsible because he shouldn't have been here in the first place and he sure as hell shouldn't have gone anywhere near a gun.

I didn't follow the trial but I was surprised that the prosecution asked for first-degree murder, as even to me, who only saw the initial news coverage of the shooting, it seemed clear Garcia Zarate wasn't aiming at Steinle. I agree with one legal analyst who blasted the prosecution for overplaying its hand: by demanding too much the prosecution may have left the jury no opportunity to deliver a verdict of, say, voluntary manslaughter. I can't otherwise understand this fiasco.

Garcia Zarate might not have aimed at Kate Steinle but in my mind he killed her. Even if you buy the defense argument that it was all an accident, it was an accident that never should have happened because Garcia Zarate was not supposed to be in the country. No matter what else his attorneys say, they can't get around that stubborn fact.

Garcia Zarate has not struck me as a genius but he should understand how lucky a break he has caught. He'd better not push his luck by entering this country ever again.

The unexpected opportunity Trump has opened

We're not quite at the end of the year yet but I thought it was a good time to think about where the U.S. is as a country, and what the presidency of Donald Trump has meant for us.

If you voted for Trump because you wanted him to enact certain policies, I think you have to ask yourself not just whether he has enacted those policies, but whether he has showed any interest in enacting them, or whether he has been effective at arguing for them.

He has done high-profile speeches and press conferences touting his intention of boosting the coal industry and thereby saving jobs, and indeed restoring lost jobs in that industry. If you work in the coal industry and you don't own a coal company, has his presidency helped you?

He promised to repeal the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, better known as Obamacare. Obviously he couldn't do that singlehandedly: Congress had to pass legislation that he could sign into law, and Congress famously failed to enact such legislation despite trying repeatedly during 2017. Did Trump help those efforts?

He repeatedly proclaimed his intention of ending immigration of Muslims during the campaign. He has issued multiple executive orders trying to do just that, and multiple federal judges have ruled against those orders. At least some of those judges cited Trump's campaign speeches and his tweets after becoming president as evidence of his animus to justify blocking those executive orders. The Supreme Court overruled some of those lower-court rulings to give partial effect to one of those executive orders. That counts as at least a partial victory for him. But was he helpful to this effort?

I think you're getting my point here. If you wanted Trump to bring your concerns front and center, he may have done that: he is a master at drawing public attention. But has he actually been helpful at addressing those concerns?

It's possible to blame any number of other people and institutions for Trump not accomplishing more than he has. But look back on his time in the presidency and ask yourself: has he done a really good job of advancing your concerns?

If you have concerns about his effectiveness as an advocate, you should consider the present moment an unrecognized opportunity.

Fair-minded opponents of Trump (and yes, they exist) are coming around to the idea that his electoral victory was a rebuke to the existing political order. It wasn't just Democrats, but Republicans too, who ignored you who propelled Trump to the White House. A pox on both your houses, your votes said. Some of you probably felt that he was a flawed messenger, but Americans have a long history of voting for the lesser of two evils and hoping for the best.

Now, acknowledging all of this, do you think he's doing a good enough job actually getting the rest of us to listen to your legitimate concerns?

You have an historic opportunity here to force a real and productive conversation on where the country is going and why you feel left out. But Trump is a terrible spokesman for you. He doesn't inspire anybody to listen.

If you think that as a country we can work together to arrive at solutions that are more positive, that work for a lot of us, is Trump really the best guy to make that happen? Don't you think that your legitimate concerns about your own lives deserve a spokesman (or spokeswoman) who not only genuinely shares them (which I doubt Trump does) but who makes the rest of us respect those concerns by making us respect him?

Where harassment is concerned, take nothing for granted

The New York Times finally ran the piece I'd been expecting somebody to run: "Men at Work Wonder if They Overstepped with Women, Too".

If there's one thing any man who claims to be aware of the possibility of sexual harassment in the workplace should know, it's that even the wokest man needs to do a gut check periodically.

We all fall into behavioral ruts and stop paying attention to how we're acting when we're comfortable. That's not a bad thing: to be on eggshells all the time would drive us insane. But it's precisely when we're comfortable, when we think all's right in our little corner of the world, that we can fail to see that something's wrong.

We don't see it because we're comfortable and we assume all's well. And that's the problem.

After quoting a number of men who wonder if they are behaving appropriately, or might have behaved badly in the past without knowing it, the piece pivots to men who aren't worried. One company founder queried his female employees:

“I came into the office and said, ‘Hey, guys, I’ve got a question for you: This sexual harassment stuff, all these things, do you guys ever worry it’s going to happen here?’” Mr. Lencioni, 52, recalled. “And they were like: ‘No, because we know you. We know who you are.’”

Maybe the women in that office were being perfectly truthful. However, if men should have learned anything from the recent spate of harassment stories coming to light, it's that the harassed party often doesn't feel that he or she can afford to speak up: the power dynamics of the work environment make them fear for their jobs and even livelihoods. The higher up the man who's asking is, the more likely people will think they need to tell him what he wants to hear.

Other men said they had not talked about workplace harassment with anyone because they already knew what they needed to know. “This is a liberal town,” said Philip Rontell, a real estate agent in Walnut Creek, Calif., who added that he supported the #MeToo campaign. “We all already know this stuff.”

No offense to Mr. Rontell but that is possibly the dumbest attitude one can have. If as a man you think you already know everything you need to know about harassment, you are part of the problem.

The number of reports of harassment by high-profile men in different vocations is only the tip of the iceberg: I'm certain of that. That kind of behavior afflicts high-status men because to an extent every man has enhanced status in this culture. You may think you are despised by the world but if you are male, a woman in the same circumstances has it worse than you do.

Even if you are a paragon of equal-mindedness and proper behavior, you need to be on guard because male privilege is baked into this society's morés.

Businesses need to have systems that allow employees to report harassment, and those systems need to respond promptly and equitably. Yes, it's a giant headache for managment and it's open to abuse — but can you honestly say that not taking proactive steps to discourage harassment is a reasonable response to what we've been seeing these past few months? Indeed, if you consider the Catholic Church's horrific sexual-abuse outrage (made infinitely worse by the Church's attempt to hide it), we've known about institutionally-facilitated abuses for decades.

As a man you don't have to walk on eggshells all the time but you — we — can't afford to be complacent, either. We have a giant blind spot that our culture permits us to ignore too often. That has to end — and the first step, as always, is to admit we have a problem.

The child-man shames us all

Children should be seen and not heard. That was a behavioral edict from my childhood that I, like every child, resented. It was a counterproductive rule, too, as it tended to squelch kids who were wise enough to see that the emperor had no clothes but who were raised to respect their parents.

Still, I wish we could apply that dictate to the child-man in the White House.

I'm not sure which is worse, his instinctive bullying of those he can bully with impunity or his colossal, unfailingly astonishing ignorance. At the moment, I give the edge to the latter following a report in the Japan Times headlined, "Trump said 'samurai' Japan should have shot down overflying North Korean missiles".

U.S. President Donald Trump has said Japan should have shot down the North Korean missiles that flew over the country before landing in the Pacific Ocean earlier this year, diplomatic sources have said, despite the difficulties and potential ramifications of doing so.

...

The U.S. president said he could not understand why a country of samurai warriors did not shoot down the missiles, the sources said.

It's understandable that defense technology wasn't something he followed in his private life as a licenser of his own name and professional foulmouthed braggart, but once he became president defense technology became part of his job. Nobody expects him to repair the systems if they break down but he goddamned well should have checked what those systems could do before shooting off his mouth about them. (News flash for DJT: it ain't easy to shoot down ballistic missiles. Ask anybody who worked on Reagan's "Star Wars" program in the '80s.)

Nor can any of us, as private citizens, be expected to know other cultures intimately, though I think it would serve us well if we did. Again, though, a president has a responsibility to learn enough about them that he doesn't insult them or make asinine assumptions about them. Trump sounds like he thinks Japan is still stuck in its feudal era hundreds of years ago. I wager his idea of Japanese culture comes from Hollywood's warmed-over efforts to depict historical Japan. How else could he have missed Japan's decades-long efforts to renounce (or more accurately, to ignore) the fanatical militarism, not to mention racism, that led it to commit atrocities before and during World War II? How else could he have missed the U.S.'s historic efforts to get that war's aggressors to stand down and embrace pacifism not merely as an ideal but as a core element of their modern national characters?

No country is summed up by its leader: she or he represents only some of that nation's multiple facets. In the case of the U.S., I regret to say that Trump is sadly representative of some of our most woefully ignorant and belligerent citizens.

However, on behalf of the majority of voters who did not choose him in the last election, I offer an apology for our impossibly ignorant, boorish, and reckless chief executive. He is a sadly exemplary distillation of much that is awful in the U.S.-American character: arrogance, boastfulness, hostility to rational thought, xenophobia. His ignorance will result in more ethnic and cultural slurs being uttered before his time on our national and international stage is up.

But I call on you, our fellow humans who live in other nations, to remember that however badly he may slander you, we are subject to his rule.

You might wish we would rise up and overthrow him. Some of us might even wish that, too. That, though, would be a betrayal of our principles of self-rule. In fact, that would be a final act of submission to Trump, who embodies the dead-end principle of strongman rule. We can't let him undo our national character, which was forged in opposition to monomaniacal self-interest and arbitrary rule.

The price of holding fast to our principles of self-rule, however, is endless embarrassment about the child-man who cannot comprehend the job he isn't doing.