Dear America,
When I turned forty, I realized that even though I had considered myself an adult since about the time I graduated from college, I had made quite a few immature choices over the prior fifteen or twenty years. But I determined that as of the beginning of that decade, I had finally arrived at maturity. At that point I resolved that I would perform a retrospective on my life every ten years with the specific purpose of assessing my maturity since I had been so mistaken in my self-evaluation in the past. Well fifty came along with me thinking over the past decade that I was my fully matured, actualized self and I recognized in my decade's review that I had been no such thing over the past ten years, but I opined once again that I had finally become a fully developed adult. However, I recognized that the real test would be my sixty year review, which came soon enough. To my surprise, once again I was not satisfied with my level of maturity, and I certainly hadn't arrived at the sagacity I thought maturity surely entailed when I was fifty, but once again I felt that I had achieved the goal that I believe we should all strive for: the wisdom of age. But guess what I concluded when I reached seventy. Despite the confidence I had granted myself that I was at last fully mature at sixty, the ensuing decade made clear that I still hadn't reached the justified self-confidence in my maturity that adulthood entailed. Now I am approaching eighty, but I gave myself no pass on my level of sagacity when I assessed myself at seventy. On the occasion of that review of the previous decade, I took a major step toward my goal and reserved judgment, and as I sit here typing, I recognize that I have a little less than two years to achieve my goal.
I hadn't thought about those assessments until last week when I saw what Pete Hegseth and Jimmie Vance said in Europe. I admit that I had been previously aware of their bombast and their conceit of wisdom, but I assumed that ascension to high office might have humbled them and endowed them with at least the modicum of judgment required to understand that you don't have to let every thought you have fall out of your mouth. That assumption was unjustified. Hegseth started by addressing most of the grayed heads of Europe that they had no business expecting that Ukraine could become a NATO member and keep its territory. And then came Vance informing those same grayed heads that they didn't understand their own democracies, and that they had to allow a place at the decision making table for the reactionary political forces, like Germany's neo-Nazi AfD party, that were emerging in their nations, tacitly alluding to the MAGA constituency in this country as if their victory in one election was the equivalent of permanent hegemony. Both of them effectively bragging about their personal wisdom by presuming to cajole those to whom the people of Europe had entrusted their governance, rather than garnering some claim to the kind of prudence that "the people" of the countries of the world attribute to their leaders embarrassed us at home in America with their arrogance and presumptuousness. These two callow would-be political hotshots showed that the United States could no longer be relied upon for wise leadership, but rather had to be taken with a grain of salt, maybe such as might be distilled from the "Gulf of America." Between the spectacle that Donald Trump has rendered our presidency and Trump's delegation of the responsibilities of governmental leadership in our country--Musk at the DOGE and Bove III at the Justice Department, for example--these two presumptuous barely post-adolescent, callow whelps felt qualified to lecture men and women with multiple decades of responsibility in positions like theirs in their pasts. Hegseth and Vance went abroad and evinced the very qualities, the sanctimony for which Americans are reviled in much of the world, and rightly so. Who are we to tell the world what is right and what isn't when we are now deeply entrenched in an effort to show it that we don't know, and we're proud of it as well.
All of this is not bound to end well in my opinion. I believe that our economy will wax plutocratic and our government will become more and more oligarchic as time passes and as Trump purges the American beurocracy of all who disagree with him. And if people think inflation is a problem now, wait until the tariffs kick in and a trade world war starts in earnest. In the words of Bob Dylan, a hard rain's gonna fall, but don't blame me. I didn't vote for him.
Your friend,
Mike
When I turned forty, I realized that even though I had considered myself an adult since about the time I graduated from college, I had made quite a few immature choices over the prior fifteen or twenty years. But I determined that as of the beginning of that decade, I had finally arrived at maturity. At that point I resolved that I would perform a retrospective on my life every ten years with the specific purpose of assessing my maturity since I had been so mistaken in my self-evaluation in the past. Well fifty came along with me thinking over the past decade that I was my fully matured, actualized self and I recognized in my decade's review that I had been no such thing over the past ten years, but I opined once again that I had finally become a fully developed adult. However, I recognized that the real test would be my sixty year review, which came soon enough. To my surprise, once again I was not satisfied with my level of maturity, and I certainly hadn't arrived at the sagacity I thought maturity surely entailed when I was fifty, but once again I felt that I had achieved the goal that I believe we should all strive for: the wisdom of age. But guess what I concluded when I reached seventy. Despite the confidence I had granted myself that I was at last fully mature at sixty, the ensuing decade made clear that I still hadn't reached the justified self-confidence in my maturity that adulthood entailed. Now I am approaching eighty, but I gave myself no pass on my level of sagacity when I assessed myself at seventy. On the occasion of that review of the previous decade, I took a major step toward my goal and reserved judgment, and as I sit here typing, I recognize that I have a little less than two years to achieve my goal.
I hadn't thought about those assessments until last week when I saw what Pete Hegseth and Jimmie Vance said in Europe. I admit that I had been previously aware of their bombast and their conceit of wisdom, but I assumed that ascension to high office might have humbled them and endowed them with at least the modicum of judgment required to understand that you don't have to let every thought you have fall out of your mouth. That assumption was unjustified. Hegseth started by addressing most of the grayed heads of Europe that they had no business expecting that Ukraine could become a NATO member and keep its territory. And then came Vance informing those same grayed heads that they didn't understand their own democracies, and that they had to allow a place at the decision making table for the reactionary political forces, like Germany's neo-Nazi AfD party, that were emerging in their nations, tacitly alluding to the MAGA constituency in this country as if their victory in one election was the equivalent of permanent hegemony. Both of them effectively bragging about their personal wisdom by presuming to cajole those to whom the people of Europe had entrusted their governance, rather than garnering some claim to the kind of prudence that "the people" of the countries of the world attribute to their leaders embarrassed us at home in America with their arrogance and presumptuousness. These two callow would-be political hotshots showed that the United States could no longer be relied upon for wise leadership, but rather had to be taken with a grain of salt, maybe such as might be distilled from the "Gulf of America." Between the spectacle that Donald Trump has rendered our presidency and Trump's delegation of the responsibilities of governmental leadership in our country--Musk at the DOGE and Bove III at the Justice Department, for example--these two presumptuous barely post-adolescent, callow whelps felt qualified to lecture men and women with multiple decades of responsibility in positions like theirs in their pasts. Hegseth and Vance went abroad and evinced the very qualities, the sanctimony for which Americans are reviled in much of the world, and rightly so. Who are we to tell the world what is right and what isn't when we are now deeply entrenched in an effort to show it that we don't know, and we're proud of it as well.
All of this is not bound to end well in my opinion. I believe that our economy will wax plutocratic and our government will become more and more oligarchic as time passes and as Trump purges the American beurocracy of all who disagree with him. And if people think inflation is a problem now, wait until the tariffs kick in and a trade world war starts in earnest. In the words of Bob Dylan, a hard rain's gonna fall, but don't blame me. I didn't vote for him.
Your friend,
Mike
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