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.