CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

FARCHRIST TALES

BOOK THREE:

THE UNDERGOD

It was a slow night at The Quarter Pony when Nog Shortwhiskers walked into my life. I remember seeing him for the first time, before I knew who he was and what kind of friends we would become. He was dressed like no other dwarf I had ever seen, and his beard was trimmed short like no other dwarf I had ever heard of. I could tell he was something special, but when he came up to me and asked in his clandestine way if I had ever heard of a man called Roy Stonerow, my curiosity jumped up and tried to look over the head of caution, who was standing, as usual, in front of him. From that moment on, Nog never stopped surprising me. Whether it was news that he had known my grandfather or that he had purchased a leather jerkin for me to wear on our first expedition south, everything he did or told me was done out of the part of his heart he most often denied having. I’ll never forget him and, wherever he may be right now, I hope he has plenty of ale.

+ + +

Time passed. Days turned into weeks and Brisbane found himself getting tangled deeper and deeper into the society of the Clan of the Red Eye. The very next day after his horrible dream, Ternosh began meeting with him to teach and instruct him in the worship of Gruumsh One-Eye and in the practice of orkish magic. It could be said Brisbane learned more about the orkish religion than he wanted to. Over the course of time, nearly all of his questions were answered, some of them more graphically than he might have wished.

Early on, he learned all about the orkish vision of the afterlife. It seemed when an ork died, one of two things would happen to him. The newly deceased would stand before Gruumsh One-Eye himself and the god would look over the ork’s life, intent on deciding if he had spent it in proper devotion to his god and his mission. If the ork had been faithful and had waged enough war against Gruumsh’s enemies, He-Who-Watches would induct the ork into his heavenly army and for all time he would do battle against deceased members of the other races. If the ork was found to be lacking in his duties, Gruumsh would crush him under the heel of his mighty foot, thus ending the ork’s existence permanently.

Brisbane found this unusual mythology to be nearly horrific in its implications. The greatest prize an ork could receive was recruitment into the eternal army of their god, where the battle and war that made up their earthly lives would go on for all time, every casualty springing back to fight another day. This was what the orks looked forward to, what they lived their lives in anticipation for. Ternosh did not have to tell him Gruumsh’s army won every battle it fought. That would be axiomatic. It would hardly be heaven for the orks if their enemies continued to kill them in death. In Brisbane’s mind, it was the ultimate expression of red-faced vengeance. Orks lived their lives on Gruumsh’s vengeance, so was it any surprise they lived their deaths on it, too? You lousy humans, you may defeat us when you’re alive, but just wait until you die. Then we’ll really get you.

Brisbane, however, could not afford to take such a light view of it while he was among the orks. To them, this was serious business. It was their god and their religion, and Brisbane knew those were two things you did not pick on if you liked where your nose was placed. He found himself forced to go along with the belief, always on his toes to prevent himself from accidentally ridiculing it or letting his true feelings show. Brisbane believed in Gruumsh One-Eye no more than he believed in Grecolus, but he had to remember Ternosh and the others believed in Gruumsh, and that they believed their god had sent Brisbane among them for some hidden purpose. As long as he stayed here, he was going to have to play that part.

Just how long would he be here? This thought did not occur to him much over the busy weeks, but every once and a while, when he was left alone, it would come to his mind and he would turn it over a few times. The best answer he could come up with was that he was not sure. Originally, the plan had been just long enough to get Angelika and get out, but some things had changed since then.

Regardless of what he had said, Brisbane was surer than ever Ternosh was not going to let him leave. In the beginning, when Ternosh first brought Brisbane out of his cage to take his place in the clan, the Grumak had given him the chance to flee if he wanted to. Then, he had stayed, intent on retrieving Angelika before he left, but even if he had taken the opportunity and left, Ternosh still would not have let him go. If Brisbane had tried to leave, it would have proven to Ternosh that the Demosk had been wrong, and Ternosh would have killed him for wearing the sign of a Grumak. So Brisbane’s only chance then had been to stay, whether he had any reason to or not.

And so Brisbane found himself among the upper class of the clan, treading lightly and biding his time until he could find Angelika. Then, surprisingly, he had found her in the chamber of the pug-trolang right before his combat with Wister. He could have taken her that night and tried to slip out of the camp with her, but knowing what he learned in the following weeks, he was glad he hadn’t tried it.

Tornestor had said Angelika had been given as a gift to Gruumsh One-Eye and, as it turned out, that was not something to be taken lightly in orkish culture. If Brisbane had taken her, and anyone had seen him with her, the whole of the clan would have risen up against him. It was a very serious matter. No one in the klatru had been able to draw Angelika from her scabbard, not even the great Tornestor, and it was concluded the blade had to be enchanted. In the orkish definition of the word, enchanted meant Angelika belonged to Gruumsh and no one else was allowed to touch her. Brisbane wasn’t sure if anyone remembered that Vrak had taken Angelika from him (i.e., she was his), but he wasn’t too keen on reminding them under the circumstances.

So Brisbane did not know when he would be able to leave the clan, if ever. He didn’t want to leave until he got Angelika back, which the orks wouldn’t let him do, and the orks wouldn’t let him go until he did this mysterious job the Demosk had spoken of, and Brisbane didn’t know what that was. The situation did not exactly glisten with hope.

Brisbane could only continue to bide his time, gathering information and waiting for something to happen that would help him out of this mess. He found out what the Demosk really was or, more precisely, what Ternosh believed the Demosk to be. The answer was really not that surprising, given what Brisbane had seen and what he had learned about the orkish afterlife. The Demosk was nothing more than a high-ranking officer in the army of Gruumsh One-Eye that Ternosh could call up from the great beyond for advice and orders. The apparition had no eyes because it had no power to “see” the material world, but it could sense it in a way that went beyond sight. It was very important for the Demosk to witness all masokoms in the pug-trolang for Gruumsh was very interested in the power structures in all his clans. Supposedly, after Brisbane had defeated Wister, the Demosk had gone back to report the change to his god. Ternosh told him he had certainly gained some respect in the eye of Gruumsh One-Eye.

Brisbane thought it was a lot of hogwash, but again he did not let his true feelings show. He was sure the Demosk was just a result of Ternosh’s magic coupled with the hallucinogenic effects of that strange incense smoke. The drug in the smoke made people hallucinate and Ternosh’s magic shaped what they saw. When he asked about the incense, Ternosh told Brisbane it had magical properties and was needed to complete the spell that brought the Demosk’s image into their world. It shaped itself out of the smoke. Without it, the Demosk would not be able to take form. Brisbane mentioned off the cuff that the smoke kind of made him dizzy, but Ternosh acted like he didn’t know what the human was talking about.

As the weeks rolled on, Brisbane did not seem to get anywhere as far as acceptance into the clan. Ternosh treated him with civility, and Smurch fawned over him—although Brisbane had gotten the half-ork to call him Gil in closed quarters—but nearly everyone else in the clan avoided him like a leper. His defeat of Wister in the pug-trolang may have made them think twice about razzing him, but none of them were leaping over each other to become his friend. It was not that Brisbane really wanted or expected their friendship, it just seemed like they went out of their way to avoid him. The whole time he spent among them, he did not have a single conversation with anyone beside Ternosh or Smurch that lasted more than thirty seconds.

Smurch did his best to get Brisbane mainstreamed, but although he could teach his master all about orkish society, the half-ork couldn’t push him all the way into it. Regardless of what the Demosk had said about him, Brisbane remained an outcast for the whole time he spent among the orks of the Red Eye.

One day, in the middle of one of his many lessons on orkish religion and magic, Ternosh shifted gears and began to talk about Brisbane’s place in the clan.

“Brisbane,” the Grumak said painfully. “As a member of the klatru, you have a right you have not yet taken advantage of.”

Brisbane thought about the way he was now allowed to bathe regularly. “Oh? Which one is that?”

Ternosh did not answer right away. “The right of mating.”

Brisbane pretended he didn’t hear the Grumak. “The right of what?”

“The right of mating,” Ternosh repeated. “Any time you wish, you may go into the settlement and select a female to take back to your chamber. There, you can, well…mate with her.”

Brisbane’s head filled with visions of the ork females, with their small pig-features, their hairy bodies, and their large breasts. The thought of mating with one of them did not exactly excite him, but he could not help wondering what it would be like. The way these orks treated their females was barbaric. None of them had names, none of them were allowed to participate in the wondrous afterlife the orks believed in—they were not warriors, after all—and now it seemed that any upper class male could demand sex from them anytime he wanted. Brisbane thought about what it would be like if his culture had the same practices. Choosing any woman you met and ordering her to mate with you. It was certainly an uncivilized practice, but it did have a definite, if impossible, thrill tied to it.

“Unless she is wearing a red arm band, of course.”

Brisbane had not been listening to the Grumak. “What?”

“You cannot choose a female who is wearing a red arm band. As long as she wears it she belongs to the clan chief. Tornestor has a couple of favorites.”

“No offense, Ternosh,” Brisbane said. “But the female of your race is not exactly my type.”

The Grumak nodded. “Understandable. Personally, I find human females unattractive, although there are a few grugan who would disagree with me. I believe your servant is of mixed descent.”

Brisbane was suddenly sorry he had shut off that avenue because he just realized it would have given him an excuse to learn a way from his chamber, through the maze of tunnels, and to the surface. But what a price he would have to pay for such knowledge. A sudden inspiration swept him and he had to fight to keep his voice calm.

“What about the prisoners?” Brisbane asked, trying to add a sly twist to his voice.

Ternosh sobered. “What do you mean?”

“Well,” Brisbane said. “There are some females among them, aren’t there? Human females?”

“Ah, I see what you’re driving at,” the Grumak said. “I don’t know. That may not be the best idea.”

“Why not?”

Ternosh pondered for a moment. “Well, I guess it would be all right, so long as you didn’t get attached to any of them. Or didn’t expect children from them.”

Brisbane did not know what the Grumak was talking about, but Ternosh soon explained it to him. The sole reason the orks would occasionally capture a human and keep them locked up in a cage was that in the worship of Gruumsh One-Eye, a monthly sacrifice of blood was required. Ternosh calmly explained the kind of blood that pleased He-Who-Watches the most was the blood of his enemies.

The information sickened Brisbane but he kept his cool about it, still clinging to the hope that through this he would be able to obtain a reason to learn a way to the surface. The imprisonment and slaughter of his fellow man was a terrible thing, but Brisbane had to watch out for his own hide first.

And so, that night, when Ternosh had finished with his lessons, Brisbane asked Smurch to lead him to the surface, so he could choose a female prisoner for his right of mating. He, as usual, got no argument from the half-ork, and soon he was being led away from his chamber, carefully memorizing every twist and turn his servant took.

As it turned out, it wasn’t all that complicated. The path was fairly direct, once you realized the caves seemed to have been dug out in large sections, maze-like within, but connected to each other with single, straight corridors. Upon entering one section, all you had to do was find the exit, usually located somewhere roughly opposite the entrance, and then move onto the next section. He saw a few orks along the way, some klatru, but most of them servants, and none of them stopped Brisbane to ask where he was going. He should have realized this. They all avoided him anyway. He probably could have done this earlier without any reason and no one would have questioned him. It seemed his outcast standing had pluses as well as minuses.

Soon, he and Smurch emerged from the cave and stepped out into the sunlight. It was a warm day and off in the distance Brisbane could see the ork women and children going about their business apart from the males. Before him stood the circus wagons with their prisoners and the usual gaggle of black-armored orks. Brisbane recognized Vrak among them and was surprised to see the ork come over to speak to him.

“He wants to know if there is anything he can do for you, Grum Brisbane,” Smurch said, translating the ork’s orkish.

Anytime one of the klatru had needed to speak to him, they had used the common tongue of his kind. Brisbane was appreciative of this, but he wanted to learn orkish anyway. Smurch had been giving him lessons in his private chamber, but so far it had been slow going. Brisbane had caught maybe a third of the words Vrak had used.

“Tell him no,” Brisbane said as regally as possible. “I wish to be left alone.”

Smurch did so and Vrak quietly went back to his lower class companions. Brisbane did his best to ignore them and went over to stand before the circus wagons.

For the first since he had been captured, he got a good look at the other humans the orks had taken prisoner. Pale and thin, they reminded him more of ghosts than of human beings. There were three of them, two men and a woman, all in separate cages in a line next to the one Brisbane had been in. They stared back at him with open eyes that had seen their own deaths countless times and had cried all the tears they were ever going to cry. Their eyes were simply waiting, waiting for Brisbane to do something, or waiting for the first of the month to roll around, when one of them would be sacrificed to a god they did not believe in. To them, it did not matter which.

The men had probably been merchants, still wearing the simple clothes of the working class. But the woman was something different entirely. Her clothes, now torn and dirty, were obviously once elegant and beautiful. It seemed to have once been a long dress, cinched together at the waist and once a pristine shade of white. Now, ripped and soiled with the muck of imprisonment, it did little to cover her dirty legs and bony shoulders. With something akin to shock, Brisbane realized it had once been a wedding dress.

Suddenly, her eyes shifted and widened as if she had noticed Brisbane for the first time. She came forward to the bars and reached an arm through as far as it would go. She worked her mouth up and down a few times but no sound came out.

Brisbane was unsure if this had been such a good idea. The woman looked so pathetic, beaten and abused in a cage like some disobedient animal. The wedding dress, that’s what bothered him the most. He could see the whole scene playing out in his mind like a vision of history. The woman and her new husband traveling on the road, traveling to a new life together, when suddenly out of the hills rise a marauding band of ugly orks. They attack ruthlessly and the groom, out of mixed emotions of love and duty and passion, is slain in the doomed protection of his bride. The orks take the woman and force her back to their settlement, here to this cage, and treat her to nothing but prison rations, violent rape, and a promise of sacrificial death. Brisbane could not take this woman back to his chamber under any pretense. He felt bad enough just exposing himself to her, a human like herself, in her eyes, in league with her captors.

“Human,” the woman said, finally finding her voice. “You are human. Who are you? Help me, please, help me.”

Smurch stepped up. “Does this one please you, Grum Brisbane? Shall I have her taken to your chamber?”

Brisbane took the woman’s hand which she had thrust through the bars. “What’s your name?” he asked her softly.

“Amanda. My name is Amanda.”

“Grum Brisbane?”

Brisbane dropped the woman’s hand and stepped away from her cage. Slowly, he felt control slipping away from him.

Amanda tried to push her hand closer to Brisbane. “No, don’t go. Help me, please. Dear Grecolus, I’ll do anything you want.”

“Grum Brisbane?” Smurch asked hesitantly. “What do you desire?”

Brisbane tried to force his heart back down into his chest. “Nothing, Jack,” he heard himself saying. “Let’s get out of here.”

He began to move toward the cave mouth and Smurch fell into step behind him. “But what about your right of mating?” the half-ork asked. “Do you want the female or not?”

“I’ve changed my mind,” Brisbane said through gritted teeth. “Now, drop it.”

“Yes, Grum Brisbane.”

And Smurch did drop it. Brisbane never heard the half-ork mention the subject again, but that did not keep it from his mind. For days afterward he thought about it constantly. What was he doing here anyway? Living among these orks, patiently waiting for an opportunity to steal his sword back while innocent people like Amanda—

Amanda, could her name really be Amanda?

—and the merchants, people wholly like himself, suffered in misery and awaited only their own deaths? He began to wonder if one night he just shouldn’t break the prisoners out of their cages and try a desperate escape with them through the sleeping ork settlement. Assuredly, not all of them would make it, but at least it was a better chance than the one they faced now.

To Brisbane, this is what it all boiled down to. Without his help, the prisoners had no chance to survive their imprisonment. But if he did help them escape, he would have no chance to retrieve Angelika and his life. He had to decide which was more important, the lives of his fellow man or his own wants and desires. Put bluntly like that, it was hard not to run up and try to free as many prisoners as he could, but there were many subtle persuasions that kept him from doing just that. He was confused and needed someone to talk to in order to resolve the problem. But he didn’t think he could trust anyone in the clan with the nature of the question he was debating, not even Smurch.

In the end, desperate for some kind of guidance, he consulted the only friend he seemed to have in the area. Late at night, lying silently in his bed, he opened his mind to Angelika.

Angelika? Are you there?

—Yes,— came the instant response, sweet and strongly persuasive in the darkness. —Yes, I am here, young Brisbane. What troubles you this night?—

It’s the prisoners. The orks plan to sacrifice them to their god.

—I know.—

How can we allow that? Are they not innocents?

—They are, but you must not rush things, Brisbane. Things are going well. You have the potential to destroy much evil here. And soon you will win me back.—

But I may be able to rescue them.

—You will not,— Angelika said. —Their fates have been set. If you try to escape with them, you will all be killed. It will profit you nothing.—

Angelika, how can you know these things?

—I know.—

Yes, Brisbane thought, but how do you know?

—I know. That path leads to despair. You must remain patient and strong. Our vengeance is certain only if you do so.—

But what about the prisoners?

—Their plight cannot be helped. But know their sacrifice will allow us to wreak unbridled vengeance against these demons of Damaleous. Their deaths will add fuel to our fire and sweeten the taste of our victory.—

Then they will die?

—Their bodies will die, yes. But hearken, Grecolus has already prepared their place in the heavens.—

He has? Brisbane thought.

—He has.—

Brisbane had to be satisfied with that solace and, for a while, it was sufficient. He stayed below ground, each day following the tunnels to the surface to be sure he knew the route, but never actually leaving the confines of the orkish lair. He found it strangely easy not to think during his busy days about what was going to happen to the prisoners, but when he was left alone at night, the subject nearly filled his thoughts. He could only keep it at bay by remembering what Angelika had said. Not what she had said about the blessed afterlife of the prisoners, for he knew that was garbage, but what she had said about their deaths. He could not save them but at least he would not let their deaths go unavenged.

Brisbane did not yet realize that as a Grum in the Clan of the Red Eye, a minor priest in the religion of Gruumsh One-Eye, when the time came to sacrifice the blood of one of the prisoners, he would have to assist Grumak Ternosh in the bloodletting.

+ + +

This post appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.

True Crimes and Misdemeanors by Jeffrey Toobin

This should have been two books. The first section, as advertised in the book's subtitle, “The Investigation of Donald Trump,” is the story of Robert Mueller’s investigation and resulting report on the collusion between Russia and the Trump campaign and administration. The second section, which seems rushed and very much like a tack-on, is about Trump’s first impeachment for asking Ukraine to collude with his second campaign for president. I can see how that lens might tie the two sections together, but then why not use a subtitle that makes that connection clear? “Donald Trump and His Attempts to Collude with Foreign Governments?” Maybe that’s not as catchy?

I picked up just a few items of interest as I went through it.

Hillary’s Emails

Both as a candidate and as president, Trump frequently accused [Hillary] Clinton of deleting the emails after they were subpoenaed. In fact, shortly after she left her position as secretary of state, her aides went through her emails, which totaled about sixty thousand, and found approximately half were work related and half were personal. The half that were related to her job as secretary of state were turned over to the State Department and ultimately to investigators. The other half were deleted. This all happened before she was subpoenaed.

This is actually a parenthetical comment in Toobin’s text, but it seems to give away the whole game. There apparently weren’t any missing emails -- 30,000 or otherwise. They were all either turned over to the State Department or deleted.

If You’re Listening

This references the Russian intelligence service, the GRU, hacking into U.S. political and governmental institutions, something that is regularly monitored by the U.S. Department of Justice.

The data showed that some unusual things happened on July 27, 2016. As a rule, the GRU operatives made their hacking rounds during regular business hours, but they worked late on July 27. What were they doing? On that date, the GRU opened new fronts in its data war on Hillary Clinton. First, they started spear phishing at new targets -- accounts at a domain hosted by a third-party provider used by Clinton’s personal office. In addition, they targeted more spear-phishing attacks at seventy-six email addresses at the domain for the Clinton campaign. So [DOJ prosecutor Rush] Atkinson wondered, why this burst of activity? And why these targets in particular? Why then?

The prosecutor started noodling around on the internet. What was so special about July 27? What else happened on that day? Where was Donald Trump? As it turned out, he was at his golf club in Doral, Florida. He had a press conference that morning. What did he say? “Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing,” Trump said, referring to emails Clinton had deleted from the private account she had used when she was secretary of state. “I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press.”

Wait. What?

Atkinson started looking at the timing and time zones. Trump’s press conference started at 10:30 a.m. eastern time. That was toward the end of the working day in Moscow, where the GRU hacking units were located. He checked. He double-checked. But the times lined up. It was possible Russia was listening and took up Trump’s invitation right away.

Yes. I guess they were listening.

The Narcissist and His Thrall

I found this anecdote about Michael Cohen, Trump’s erstwhile lawyer and fixer, revealing.

In the decade before Trump became president, Cohen used intimidation, threats, and bluster to do his bidding. He frequently dealt with the press. On one oft-recounted occasion, Tim Mak, then a reporter for The Daily Beast, asked Cohen about the allegation by Trump’s first wife, Ivana, which she later recanted, that Trump had raped her. Cohen told Mak, “I’m warning you, tread very fucking lightly, because what I’m going to do to you is going to be fucking disgusting.” Cohen earned a reputation for extreme devotion, even sycophancy, toward Trump, who repaid him, on occasion, with disdain. In 2009, when Trump was dissatisfied with Cohen’s performance, he cut his salary from $400,000 per year to $200,000. (Two years later, he restored the salary.) Notwithstanding the slights, Cohen remained loyal to Trump. As he told me, “I actually enjoyed him, interestingly enough. When he’s good, he’s great. When he’s horrible, he’s the worst human being on the planet. I mean it. He has no heart and no soul when he’s mean.”

It is, in so many ways, indicative of the narcissist and the people who willingly enthrall themselves to them. Please, please love me. 

Gnarled, Legalistic Prose

Let me end on this.

Still, that left Mueller with a dilemma. There was clear evidence that Trump did commit crimes. What should Mueller say about that? He decided to lay out the evidence but reach no conclusion about it. This judgment was announced in what became the most famous (and infamous) paragraph of the Mueller Report:

“Because we determined not to make a traditional prosecutorial judgment, we did not draw ultimate conclusions about the President’s conduct. The evidence we obtained about the President’s actions and intent presents difficult issues that would need to be resolved if we were making a traditional prosecutorial judgment. At the same time, if we had confidence after a thorough investigation of the facts that the President clearly did not commit obstruction of justice, we would so state. Based on the facts and the applicable legal standards, we are unable to reach that judgment. Accordingly, while this report does not conclude that the President committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him.”

It takes multiple readings to make sense of the gnarled, legalistic prose of this paragraph. We can investigate the President, but we can’t prosecute the President. If our investigation determined that he was in the clear, we’d say that -- but we’re not saying that. Nor are we saying that he’s guilty of anything. So we’re not saying he’s guilty -- but we’re not saying he’s innocent, either. Basically.

Nothing in Mueller’s mandate required him to reach such a baffling and inconclusive conclusion about the most important issue before him. He was a prosecutor. A prosecutor’s job is to determine whether the evidence is sufficient to bring cases. In this unique situation, the OLC opinion prohibited Mueller from actually bringing a case, but Mueller gave Trump an unnecessary second benefit from the OLC opinion. The first benefit was not prosecuting him; that was mandatory. But the second benefit was not even saying whether the evidence supported a prosecution; that was simply a gift to Trump. In Mueller’s reasoning, a federal prosecutor could neither prosecute the president nor say whether he should be prosecuted, which in this case placed Trump effectively above the law. And Mueller expressed this tortured, overthought conclusion in such confusing language that most mortals could not understand what he had done at all. Sadly, the bewildering denouement undermined the extraordinary, meticulous, and fair-minded work of his staff in building the obstruction of justice case against Trump in the first place.

Mueller’s compromise had another ill effect. Because the language in the report was so complicated and difficult to parse, it opened the door for his work to be misrepresented by partisans acting in bad faith -- like, for example, the attorney general of the United States.

I remember those days. It was painful to watch -- Mueller speaking before Congress in words, if anything, even more convoluted than those contained in his report. He was a patsy, evidently not up to the moment that history had placed before him. It reminds me very much of the saying that it is the good men who end up doing the most harm in the world.

+ + +

This post appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.

FDR: The War President by Kenneth S. Davis

This post was originally published on a now-retired blog that I maintained from roughly 2005 to 2013. As a result, there may be some references that seem out of date. 

+ + + 

This is the fifth volume of a huge, multi-volume biography of FDR. It covers the years 1940-1943, and the saddest thing about it is that the author died near the end of writing it—which means that the series will never be finished.

It’s a good read. Scholarly and tedious in some places, but absolutely fascinating when viewed through the prism of today. FDR’s war against fascism and GWB’s war against terror, and the political climates they existed and exist in, are fascinating to compare with one another. Imagine today’s Congress giving GWB the power to loan battleships to Pakistan so they could use them to fight against Iraq. Imagine there being a strike at Ford Motor Company and GWB sending the U.S. Army in to break it up so the workers could go start making bullets and bombs. Imagine John Kerry saying that he fought hard against GWB because he thought he’d make a better president than him, but that GWB won and he was going to support him in this war effort, and would go on a global tour demonstrating to our allies and enemies alike that our political parties are unified at home. Here are some more interesting tidbits:

Thus the swirl and tangle of events, problems, and challenges through which Roosevelt must pick his way and to which his responses are and will be shaped by his sense of himself, of his own innate and adherent capacities. On this morning of rare passivity his self-felt identity is in some respects no larger, no more formidable, than the one his intellectual critics ascribe to him in their moments of severest censure. He completes his breakfast. He puts aside the newspapers. He rises from his bed (he must have help to do so), dresses himself (he must have help to do so), then rides his wheelchair down into the library living room to begin the (for him) relatively meager activities of the day. And as he does this his consciousness of self, within which his awareness of physical dependency upon the strong arms of other men may be somewhat sharper than usual, has nothing in it of the conqueror’s egotistical willfulness. Indeed, against the massive challenges he faces, he measures exceeding small, far smaller than others do, the powers he can wield—the innate powers (of mind, of will) granted him by almighty God, plus the powers that are his by virtue of his high office—and is reaffirmed in his conviction that he cannot actually dominate even immediate events of major importance, much less change the direction or set the course of world history. He can only nudge here, tug there, prod at this point, brake at that one—he can only cautiously encourage the energies of change or, if the impendent change is of the foundations of the present American domestic order, discourage them—as he attempts to guide the turbulent torrent of event, upon which he is otherwise and in general borne irresistibly, toward what he perceives or conceives to be God’s goals.

Such perceptions or conceptions are, for him, highly tentative. They derive from and depend upon information that is imperfect and uncertain—information he obtains, for the most part, not through a thoughtful study of subject matter, but through three kinds of prayer. Two of these are objective, impersonal, almost devoid of religious feeling. One of the two might even be deemed empirically “scientific” insofar as it consists of various kinds of poll taking, various ways of defining the nature and measuring the strength of public opinion on specific issues—this on the tacit assumption that the will of the majority is the will of God. The other of the two is a species of teleological gambling, essentially superstitious—a kind of betting aimed at achieving not material prizes, but signs of divine approval or disapproval of something he contemplates doing. For instance, he may assign to this or that small happening a large significance, saying to himself that if the trivial event occurs within an immediate time span (the next minutes, perhaps, or before he can count to ten), it means that God approved what he has considered doing; if it does not occur, God disapproves. Or he may see as a sign of divine approval or disapproval his luck at cards when he plays poker or, as he does far more frequently, Miss Milliken, a game of solitaire of which he is fond.

The third kind of prayer, however, is truly religious insofar as it is intensely subjective, profoundly emotional, imbued with a sense of awe and personal dependency; and it is this prayerfulness, which is in perfect accord with his somber nostalgic mood on this gray wintry morning, that he now employs, or by which he is now caught up. He looks backward into time. Seeking stability, permanence, eternality, amid or underlying the unceasing flow of eventful change, he contemplates or (more accurately) feels his way into the past—his own individual personal past as well as the historic past of this little Hudson River town in which he grew up. And he does find permanence there. The past presents itself to the remembering mind as a completed reality wherein one can see how events conform to one another, are fitted together through the operations of casual efficacy, this thing happening because that thing does and in turn causing something else, shaping a structure from whose order the contemplative observer may learn something of the workings of God’s mind, something of the nature of God’s will. The lessons thus learned are highly qualified, however. Roosevelt knows well that the past never exactly repeats itself, is therefore no mirror of the future into which he can look for precise instructions as to what he should now do. He realizes through his feeling self that the past as persistent memory is the very stuff or substance of the living flowing present through which it extends, as an ongoing but continuously changing pattern of event, into anticipated, apprehended future time. This is the mainstream flow of the world, this the felt essence of his profound conservatism. And on this morning of gray melancholy, he in his present self and the boy he remembers himself to have been here at Hyde Park—also between this Georgian mansion that is now his one true home and the smaller, more modest Victorian house in which he was born; and between the town of Hyde Park today and the Hyde Park of distant and receding yesterdays. By this awareness his sore and weary spirit is somehow soothed and refreshed, his optimistic faith restored.

First, how about that prose, huh? Second, how about that insight into the mind of a historical figure. Reading this makes me think that this Kenneth Davis could become FDR if he wanted to, could get into the wheelchair, put on the glasses, clamp his teeth down on the cigarette holder, and become Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

I also like what this passage says about being a leader, about how a leader’s power is confined to nudging, tugging, prodding, and braking. Because, boy, that is sure what it feels like for me. But what strikes me most about this passage is the way FDR, the leader of the free world at one of that world’s most critical turning points, allowed his mind to be swayed and decisions to be made by cryptic messages he thought he was receiving from God while he played solitaire. The weight of the world teetering on a precarious fulcrum and there he is, looking for answers in the turn of the next random card. GWB would probably be proud.

There’s a one page summary in the FDR book about the sinking of the Bismarck which is one of the things I stumble across in history books sometimes that I immediately want to know more about. I therefore ordered a copy of Sink the Bismarck! By C. S. Forester, evidently the authoritative expert on the subject.

As a “man of action,” Hopkins, like Roosevelt, was the opposite of ideological, and like Roosevelt, he thereby avoided a typical fallacy of the ideological mind, namely, the conclusion that what people do (history, that is) is wholly determined by forces—economic, in Marx; organismic in Spengler; Christian in Toynbee—that are themselves ahistorical and beyond human control. In both Hopkins’s and Roosevelt’s conviction, if more vividly in Roosevelt’s than in Hopkins’s, human beings were by God’s will free to choose; though they worked out God’s grand design, they must do so through the anguish of personal choice, guided by such signs of His will as He permitted them, human freedom being integral to God’s design. But in eschewing both ideology and the quest for fundamental causes, Hopkins, like Roosevelt, also eschewed coherence and fundamental consistency in his dealings with current event. The whole of his mental concern was with the event itself, and about this he asked questions of “what” and “how” to the virtual exclusion of “why.”

This passage is a lot like the whole book. I find it interesting as hell but I’m uncertain as to what it exactly means.

He presented his proposals to Congress on April 27, as a seven-point “economic stabilization program.” Each of the points, in his statement of it, was preceded by the phrase “to keep the cost of living from spiraling upward.” They were: 1) heavy taxation to “keep personal and corporate profits at a reasonable rate, the word ‘reasonable’ being defined at a low level”; 2) price ceilings, including “ceilings on rents for dwellings in all areas affected by war industries”; 3) wage controls (“we must stabilize the remuneration received by individuals for their work”); 4) stabilization of “prices received by growers for the products of their lands”; 5) increased purchase of war bonds by “all citizens” to prevent their using war-increased earnings “to buy articles which are not essential”; 6) strict rationing “of all essential commodities of which there is a scarcity”; 7) discouragement of credit and installment buying joined with encouragement of “the paying off of debts, mortgages, and other obligations.”

Can you believe this? Can you imagine GWB proposing this to help finance the war against terrorism? Roosevelt later defined the “low level” he would keep everyone’s income at after taxes as $25,000. That’s 1942 dollars. Today that would be $282,812.50. Okay, I guess that’s not that bad.

+ + +

This post appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

FARCHRIST TALES

BOOK THREE:

THE UNDERGOD

The day my mother died was the saddest day of my life and, at the time, I couldn’t believe there would be any sadder for as long as I lived. In this, as in so many other things I believed when I was young, time would eventually prove me wrong. I remember so many things about that day. I remember how sickly and pained she looked right before she died and how healthy and peaceful she looked right after. I remember Otis placing a death shroud over her body, careful not to let any of his tears fall onto it and stain the fabric. I remember the crude dinner Otis heated up for us that night and I remember thinking that even in the midst of death, we were still alive and we still needed to eat. I remember the prayer Otis and I offered up for her soul and I remember almost believing it was being heard by an understanding god, for if ever there was a prayer that deserved to be heard, it was that one. But I guess what I remember the most was looking up to see she had died while my head had been turned and feeling an almost overwhelming sense of relief. Relief that her pain had finally ended followed by dreadful sorrow because mine was just beginning.

+ + +

When Brisbane turned down the short side passage leading to his chamber he found Smurch lying in the small cubbyhole beneath the lit torch. The half-ork quickly scrambled to his feet as his master approached.

“Grum Brisbane,” Smurch said, standing at attention. “May I congratulate you on your victory in the pug-trolang?”

He was in no mood for Smurch’s formality. “Listen, Jack,” he said. “If you want to congratulate me, go right ahead. But make sure you call me Gil when you do it. The next time you call me Grum Brisbane when we’re alone, I’m going to punch you right in the nose.”

He did not wait for Smurch to react. He went into his chamber and let the curtain fall over the portal. He flung himself down on the mattress that was to be his bed and closed his eyes.

“Congratulations, Gil,” he heard Smurch say from beyond the curtain.

Brisbane smiled. “Thank you, Jack.”

He heard Smurch crawl back into his cubbyhole and he buried himself under some of the blankets and pelts, eager to get some sleep and forget about everything he had been through that day. But, as usual, when sleep was the most desired, it proved the slowest in coming. Brisbane’s mind swirled with thoughts about what he had seen and done that day, and no matter how hard he tried to sweep them aside, they flowed back to the center of his thoughts and kept him from drifting off to sleep.

For the first time in a while he thought about the other prisoners, the other humans, that the orks kept in the circus wagons on the surface. Brisbane had been kept alive because they had thought he might be a Grumak, but why did the orks keep their other prisoners alive? He remembered Shortwhiskers saying orks ate humans, but the meat they had at dinner had obviously been beef. Maybe they only ate people on special occasions, or when their food supply ran short. Everything the orks had they seemed to steal from others. Brisbane was not sure if they produced anything on their own or what it was they did with the other prisoners, but as a new member of the klatru, he had the feeling he would soon find out.

He thought about the way he had momentarily escaped from his cage the night before. This still puzzled him greatly. Supposedly, Ternosh had cast a spell of anti-magic over the wagon and yet, Brisbane had worked his cantrip to magically turn the tumblers in the padlock. He did not know what to make of this. There were too many possibilities and he did not have enough information. Ternosh could have not really been able to cast such a spell and he merely told Brisbane he could to trick him into not trying to escape. But why would they bother with the subterfuge? If they wanted to keep him from casting spells, they could have kept him bound and gagged like Vrak had on the journey to the ork settlement. Ternosh may actually have that kind of power, but for some reason, the spell didn’t work right. But what could cause such a failure? Brisbane had no idea. In the few examples he had seen, Brisbane could tell orkish magic was far different from any kind of magic Roystnof had taught him. He couldn’t even tell how it worked, how could he tell what went wrong with it? Or maybe Ternosh’s spell had worked as promised, but it did not include things outside his cage. Brisbane decided this was a silly line of thought. What kind of sense did it make to cast an anti-magic spell on an area if a wizard inside could magically affect things outside that area? If Roystnof had been out in the cage, he could have sat calmly in the anti-magic shell and magically set every ork in the camp on fire. All Brisbane could really be sure of was that Ternosh had appeared to have cast a spell and, for whatever reason, it did not keep him in his cage.

He thought about the Demosk, the eyeless apparition that Ternosh had twice conjured up in Brisbane’s presence. The first time, when Ternosh had fed it some of his blood to see if it contained the bane of Gruumsh One-Eye, Brisbane might have believed it was a hallucinogenic effect of the incense smoke on his brain, but after seeing it again in the pug-trolang, he felt he could be sure it was some kind of magical manifestation. There hadn’t been as much smoke in the pit, most of it had stayed up in the gallery, and his head had remained reasonably clear. Unless the drug in the smoke was incredibly potent, which he didn’t think it was, the second appearance of the Demosk could not have been a hallucination. So what was it? Brisbane hated to admit it, but it sure seemed like some kind of spirit from the afterlife that Ternosh consulted with on important decisions. He would much rather believe it was a creation of the Grumak’s magic, for with this explanation, he could retain his belief that there was no such thing as an afterlife. Roystnof had taught him that dead meant dead, but it would seem the orks, like most others in the world, didn’t choose to believe that. It was much like the demon Brisbane had encountered with his friends in the basement of the shrine. Most people believed it was a creature summoned from one of the nine hells by some evil wizard in service to his high lord Damaleous. Roystnof had told him such a monster was a creation of the wizard’s magic, something that did not exist anywhere before the invocation of the spell. As with Ternosh’s anti-magic spell, Brisbane thought he would have to learn much more about orkish magic before he would be able to discern the truth about the Demosk.

He thought about the orkish notion of an afterlife. Smurch had told him much about orkish life and religion, but he had said little about what they believed happened to the soul after death. He remembered Wister saying something about the army of Gruumsh One-Eye before Brisbane plunged his sword into the ork’s heart. Was this their vision of the heavens, service in an army of the dead led by their god? Given the violent and combat-minded structure of their creation and their society, Brisbane would not be surprised to find this to be the truth. But if, after death, each orkish soul was enlisted in an army, he wondered just who that army would be fighting. And how could an army of the dead possibly be defeated?

He thought about Wister and the hatred the ork had felt for Brisbane just because he was human. I will not share my position with a human, he had said with a conviction that he took to his death. What kind of madness was this? Brisbane wondered how many other orks would have done the same thing in Wister’s shoes. He was still convinced he had done the right thing in not shying away from the challenge and he hoped his defeat of Wister would keep some of the others off his back, but there was still something about the situation that bothered him. Ternosh had said his Demosk—and implied that Gruumsh One-Eye himself—had said Brisbane was to be treated like any other member of the clan, and even though Tornestor had allowed the masokom to take place on the basis of that argument, Wister had not treated him like any other ork. If Brisbane had been an ork, born with red eyes and raised to be a Grumak, Wister would not have put up a fuss. It wasn’t that he didn’t want to share his position as Grum, it was that he didn’t want to share his position as Grum with a human. This distinction may have eluded Tornestor’s logic, but Brisbane didn’t think so. He believed Tornestor, and everyone at that banquet table, had known Wister’s masokom violated the orders of Ternosh’s Demosk, and they had allowed it to carry through anyway. If they hated humans so much they would ignore the will of their god as handed down by their high priest, Brisbane could expect nothing but trouble ahead for him.

He thought about the orkish customs of the masokom and the pug-trolang. If this was the way they resolved all arguments in the klatru, trial by combat in a circular pit, Brisbane could see why the Clan of the Red Eye never materialized as a serious threat against the power of the Farchrist Empire. It was a wonder they could pull off as many raids against merchant wagons as they did with their upper class constantly fighting amongst themselves. Still, Brisbane could not deny there was something honorable about the way they treated their customs. Here was a society where the ultimate measure of a man was his skill in combat. The finest warrior was clan chief and he reigned until someone came along who could beat him. It was a system where each knew where he stood in relation to his comrades and the only political maneuverings and disagreements came with the issuing of a challenge and the clanging of steel. It was a system Brisbane was going to have to respect and be wary of if he ever expected to leave with Angelika and his life.

Finally, before he fell asleep, he thought about his sword, Angelika. His attitude toward her had shifted slightly in his battle with Wister, but he could not deny he still wanted her back. He wasn’t sure what had changed, but Angelika’s voice seemed to have a lesser effect on him than it had when he had first received her. For one wild moment, he thought perhaps this was because she was getting ready to leave him for another, but he quickly pushed such a horrible thought aside. Hadn’t she said there was no one here who was his equal in combat? Who then would she be leaving him for? No, that couldn’t be the answer. It was just that, for a moment there, Angelika had seemed so…seemed so…wrong? Could that be it? She was wrong? She had told him that standing before him in the pug-trolang was an evil creature that had to be vanquished, but when Brisbane looked closely, all he saw was Wister. He did not see a demon from the nine hells. He saw a man whose pride had been hurt and who was fighting back in the only way he knew how. But Angelika had always sounded so right before, and Brisbane knew when he fought with her in his hands, these things made so much more sense. Maybe he was just upset because she was so close to him and he couldn’t use her. Yes, that must have been it. The kill didn’t feel right because instead of Angelika, he had to use that clumsy sword with the dull blade. That was not the weapon of a warrior.

All these thoughts danced in and out of Brisbane’s head as he drifted off towards sleep. They surely did not come in the neat order they have been presented here. He was really much too tired for such logical thought processes. Instead, they developed from bits and pieces of memory and cogitation, slowly lulling him off to sleep and affecting his dreams.

The longest dream he had that night took place in the banquet chamber of the orks, with the entire klatru gathered around for the nightly draknel. But Brisbane was not at his normal spot beside Ternosh. He was surprised to find himself entering the chamber from the portal Tornestor had used, and when he did, he had two orks with red stripes on their sleeves walking behind him. He looked down at himself and he saw a red sash cutting across his black uniform like an open wound.

The orks at the table all got to their feet. “All hail, Sumak Brisbaner!” they chanted in unison.

He had become clan chief in this dream. He did not know how it had happened, but it was true nonetheless. And he was surprised to find out it felt good to be the Sumak. He watched his dream-self stride to the table and take his seat. He was the only one who had a chair to sit in and he was the only one who had a three-syllable name. Brisbaner. He liked the sound of that.

The orks around the table sat respectfully after Brisbane had taken his seat. He clapped his hands twice to bring the servants carrying their food into the chamber. In response, a single servant entered the room and meekly came over to Brisbane with empty arms. It was Smurch.

“Where is the food for our draknel?” Brisbane bellowed at the half-ork, his voice sounding a lot like Tornestor’s.

Smurch quickly prostrated himself on the floor. “The kitchens are empty, Sumak Brisbaner. There’s no food to be found. I swear it.”

Brisbane rose to his feet and he kicked Smurch. “I told you never to let supplies run this low without telling me. We could have planned another raid. Now we’ll have to eat one of the prisoners.”

Brisbane was surprised to hear these words coming out of his mouth, but in the context of the dream, they flowed naturally. He was the Sumak and he had the power to do as he wished. If he wanted to dine on human flesh, then by Gruumsh, human flesh it would be.

“Which one will it be, Sumak Brisbaner?” Smurch asked him. “Shall I pick the fattest one?”

“No!” Brisbane exploded. “You couldn’t pick the worm out of an apple. I will do it myself.”

“Yes, Sumak Brisbaner.”

With that, Brisbane quickly turned and left the chamber. Smurch scrambled to his feet and dutifully followed him. Brisbane made his way through the endless series of tunnels and passageways with a determination that shocked his sleeping self. Of course, this was a dream and as Sumak, he would know his way around the underground maze. He thought for a moment to try and keep track of where the dream Brisbane was going in case, against odds and logic, it turned out to be the true route out of the caves. Dreams were subconscious processes after all, and maybe his subconscious remembered all the twists and turns when his conscious mind couldn’t. It was worth a try, but there were too many changes which Brisbane couldn’t keep track of in his slumbering state. Besides, this part of the dream seemed long and drawn out, as if he was walking grimly through the corridors for hours, always sure of where he was going but never quite getting there. Brisbane gave up paying attention to the route his dream self was taking and settled back to see what would happen next.

And, as if that was what the dream had been waiting for, Brisbane suddenly found himself emerging from the cave mouth out into the sunshine of the ork settlement. A group of lower class orks sat around a dead campfire on his right, quickly rising to their feet when they saw their clan chief, and on his left was the line of circus wagons. Brisbane stepped up to the cages with Smurch behind his left shoulder.

“A very fine selection, Sumak Brisbaner,” Smurch said. “Any one of them would make a fine feast.”

Brisbane looked at the prisoners and instead of seeing the thin faces he had glimpsed when Vrak had first brought him into the camp, he saw the faces of his friends, the ones he had left on the mountain top overlooking the forgotten temple of Grecolus. Shortwhiskers, Stargazer, Roystnof, and even Dantrius, they were all there in separate cages, looking at him with accusing eyes.

“Yes,” he heard himself say. “They do make one hell of a smorgasbord. This is going to be a difficult decision.”

He began to walk down the line, examining his friends on the basis of their edibility. Again, he was shocked a little at the turn the dream had taken, but it was just a dream after all, and everything he did seemed somehow right and proper. The first person he examined was Shortwhiskers.

“Gil,” the dwarf said. “What are you doing? Let me out of this cage.”

Brisbane turned dispassionately to his servant. “Smurch, didn’t we have dwarf last week?”

“Yes, Sumak Brisbaner.”

Brisbane moved onto the next cage. This one contained Illzeezad Dantrius.

“Brisbane!” the mage spat. “Let me out of this cage, you bastard. I’ll tear your heart out!”

He smiled cruelly at Dantrius. “As much as I would like to see you roasted, Weasel, I’m afraid you are too skinny to provide much of a meal for my men. Smurch?”

The half-ork stepped up. “Yes, Sumak Brisbaner?”

“Make sure this prisoner gets double rations from now on. Maybe he’ll be fat enough for next week.”

“Yes, Sumak Brisbaner.” Smurch stepped back.

Brisbane’s stomach began to roll as he watched the dream progress. For the first time he began to wonder just what kind of dream this was supposed to be. The person in the next cage was Stargazer.

“Gil!” she cried. “What kind of madness is this? Stop it! Please, dear Grecolus, let it stop.”

Brisbane looked her over carefully. Her face had been beaten and there were bruises on her arms and legs. Her clothes were in tatters and she did the best she could to cover her nudity.

Brisbane called for his servant’s attention again. “Has anyone been at this woman?” he asked.

“I think so, Sumak Brisbaner.”

“They raped me, Gil,” Stargazer said, “Three of them. Three of those monsters raped me.” Her voice was hollow and echoed with shame.

Brisbane ignored her. “The fools have damaged her pretty face,” he said to the half-ork. “Tell them to leave her alone. When her wounds have healed, I might want her for myself.”

He began to grow very uncomfortable with the turn this dream was taking. Why didn’t he recognize his friends? What kind of monster had he become? In his bed, he began to toss about and quietly moan out. The last cage he came to held Roystnof prisoner.

“Gil,” the wizard said calmly. “Don't you recognize any of us? Let us out of here. It’s Roy, Gil.”

Brisbane looked blankly at Roystnof. “I guess this one will have to do, Smurch. Get some help.”

The half-ork went over to the burned out campfire and recruited three other orks to help him.

“Gil, stop it,” Roystnof said, his voice rising. “It’s Roy. What’s the matter with you?”

The dream Brisbane stepped back and let the orks come forward and open Roystnof’s cage. They began to wrestle the wizard down to the floor of the wagon and then they produced a rope and began to tie his feet together and his hands behind his back.

“Gil!” Roystnof was shouting. “Have you gone mad? Let me go!”

Brisbane watched in horror as the orks strung Roystnof up by the feet from one of the top crossbars of his cage. He listened in horror as he heard Roystnof and the others cry out for him to help, but was amazed to find his dream self standing aloof and ignoring their pleas. He did not like this dream at all and he began to fight his way back to consciousness. But he seemed trapped in it, and it was not until one of the orks pulled out a gleaming knife and slit Roystnof’s throat, cutting deep into the tendons and cartilage and spurting vividly red blood all over his face and the ground beneath him, that Brisbane was able to jerk himself awake.

He must have cried out, for moments later the curtain to his chamber was pulled back and the figure of Smurch could be seen in the portal.

“Grum Brisbane, are you all right?”

Brisbane was so worked up he didn’t notice the formal address. “I’m fine,” he said, panting. “It was just a bad dream.” Already the details were fleeing from his mind.

“Can I get you anything?”

He shook his head, trying to swallow some of the dryness out of his mouth. “No, thank you. I’m fine. Go back to bed.”

The curtain dropped shut again and Brisbane laid back on his makeshift bed. He tried to recall what had horrified him so, but most of the dream was gone from his memory. All he could really remember was the blood. A lot of blood.

In the morning, he would not even remember that.

+ + +

This post appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.

Unmaking the Presidency by Susan Hennessey and Benjamin Wittes

This is a book written by lawyers. Sometimes that’s a bad thing, but in this case it is a very good thing, as it really takes a pair of lawyers like Hennessey and Wittes to carve out the controlling language of what the American presidency has been and what it may be becoming.

Let’s start here, with what I take to be their central thesis:

Most of all, Trump proposes a presidency that elevates the expressive and personal dimensions of the office over everything else. It is one in which the institutional office and the personality of the occupant are almost entirely merged -- merged in their interests, in their impulses, in their finances, and in their public character. In elevating the expressive, vanity-plate dimensions of the office and making it a personal vehicle for the public self-expression of the officeholder, he proposes sublimating nearly all other traditional features of the presidency: its management functions; its expectation of good-faith execution of law; its expectation of ethical conduct, truthfulness, and service. This vision of the presidency thus unsurprisingly produces a genuinely novel set of deployments of the executive’s traditional powers, ones that are profoundly different from those of prior presidents.

Arthur Schlesinger wrote about the rise of the Imperial Presidency. Hennessey and Wittes are writing about the rise of the Expressive Presidency. A presidency that is dedicated not to “faithfully executing” the powers of the office, but to using those powers to support and express the person holding the office. It’s a very different world than the one we’re used to.

The Oath

And the troubles begin at the very beginning -- on inauguration day when this new expressive president takes the oath of office.

The political scientist Edward Corwin, in his book ‘The President: Office and Powers, 1787-1984,’ described the coronation oath of the English kings “from which the President’s oath is lineally descended,” saying that “its purpose, definitely, was to put the King’s conscience in bonds to the law.” The early constitutional treatise writer Justice Joseph Story considered the purpose of the oath so obvious that he began his one-paragraph discussion of it by saying that there “is little need of commentary upon this clause” because “no man can well doubt the propriety of placing a president of the United States under to most solemn obligations to preserve, protect, and defend the constitution.” Story described the oath as actively cultivating virtue in a president, “creat[ing] upon his conscience a deep sense of duty, but an appeal, at once in the presence of God and man, to the most sacred and solemn sanctions, which can operate upon the human mind.”

In a recent law review article about the original meaning of the oath and the take care clause, the legal scholars Andrew Kent, Ethan Leib, and Jed Shugerman note that the promise of faithful execution in the clauses was commonly associated at the time of the founding with “true, honest, diligent, due, skillful, careful, good faith, and impartial execution of the law or office.” The oath, they write, is thus a promise on the part of presidents “to exercise their power only when it is motivated in the public interest rather than in their private self-interest, consistent with fiduciary obligation in the private law.”

This is all important background to the essential point of the authors in this section.

The problem is that the oath works only when the president actually means it. It instills a sense of duty only when the oath’s words and the solemn occasion of its delivery matters to the president and when others recognize that he means it. What if the person swearing is the sort of person who cannot credibly swear an oath?

More to the point -- did Trump “mean it” when he took this oath? The authors take us back to that inauguration day in 2017, and provide us with plenty of doubt that not only didn’t he, but that he probably couldn’t.

Return for a moment to the strange scene on the dais at Trump’s inauguration. Even in this unusually fractured period of American politics, the day offered a rare show of bipartisanship: Democrats and Republicans sat there united both in their shared commitment to the peaceful transition of power and -- we suspect, but cannot prove -- also in a profound unease about the man who raised his right hand before them. It’s true that around the country, tens of millions of Trump voters delighted in his inauguration. But there was still an undeniable anxiety etched on the faces of many people on that dais about whether this was a man capable of solemnly swearing anything, let alone swearing to “faithfully execute” something like the office of the presidency. It wasn’t just the Democrats. House Speaker Paul Ryan managed a weak smile but tightly gripped the arm of his wife, Janna. Past him, Senator John Cornyn and Representative Kevin McCarthy, both of whom should have been witnessing a moment of Republican triumph, gazed on somberly. Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell frowned, even more than usual, and appeared to wish he were anywhere else.

Pinning down the precise defect in Trump’s oath is impossible. Indeed, the claim that there is a defect is inherently unprovable. One cannot know what was in Trump’s heart as he said the words the Constitution prescribes. No public opinion experts polled anyone on public faith in President Trump’s oath. Very few of the many Americans who fear or hate Trump frame their suspicions, either intellectually or emotionally, in terms of doubt as to the integrity of his oath.

Moreover, the history of hating a president, and of suspecting his illegitimacy in office, is old. A great many voters -- including Trump himself -- harbored deep enough questions about Obama’s legitimacy to doubt his American birth. Many Democrats did not believe that George W. Bush was legitimate in office because he had prevailed in the 2000 election only after the intervention of the Supreme Court. And that contested election, in turn, reran aspects of the earlier contested election of 1876 between Rutherford B. Hayes and Samuel Tilden -- one that left a mark of illegitimacy on Hayes’s presidency. Most famously, it was an earlier presidential election and impending inauguration that triggered the South’s secession from the Union in 1861.

The defect in Trump’s oath was certainly not technical. Presidents have flubbed their oaths before. Herbert Hoover swore to “maintain” the Constitution rather than protect it; Nixon inserted an “and” that didn’t belong. At Obama’s first inauguration, Chief Justice Roberts fumbled his role, resulting in the new president swearing to “execute faithfully” rather than “faithfully execute” the office; the fastidious Roberts re-administered the oath the next day to be safe. For his part, Trump said all the right words -- prompted by the chief justice, surrounded by his family, congressional leadership, and justices of the Supreme Court -- and he did so without faltering or ad-libbing. He shook Obama’s hand afterward, as one would expect. He observed all the niceties. Yet an unformed question tugged at the back of millions of minds even as he did so: Is this a man capable of being faithful to anything? Does he even know what it means to preserve, protect, and defend something other than himself?

The authors don’t think so, and neither do I, and they go on to cite example after example of people in Trump’s inner orbit not trusting him at his word, of documenting their interactions with him in order to preserve a true record of their encounters, rather than what Trump would inevitable say about them later.

The sense of something being wrong was, we submit, rooted in what James Comey would later call “the nature of the person.” Comey would use this phrase before the Senate Intelligence Committee in an attempt to explain why he had felt compelled to memorialize his first interaction with Trump in writing. Senator Mark Warner asked Comey what it was about the interaction with the president-elect that made him so keen to write down the details right away, typing the memo out on a laptop in an FBI car as he was being driven away from Trump Tower. Comey’s response is worth considering in relation to the oath Trump would swear two weeks after their meeting:

“I was alone with the president of the United States, or the president-elect, soon to be president … I was talking about matters that touch on the FBI’s core responsibility, and that relate to the president, president-elect personally. And then the nature of the person. I was honestly concerned he might lie about the nature of our meeting, and so I thought it really important to document.”

Consider Comey’s invocation of “the nature of the person.” He means, of course, that Trump is the sort of person one does not trust. And Comey was not alone. In the days following Comey’s firing, his successor -- Andrew McCabe -- also memorialized his conversations with Trump, later writing that he “wrote memos about my interactions with President Trump for the same reason that Comey did: to have a contemporaneous record of conversation with a person who cannot be trusted.” It matters if a person swearing the presidential oath is so lacking in civic virtue and trustworthiness that an officer of the government feels compelled to document conversations with him -- and that the desirability of doing so is so self-explanatory that it can be justified by a mere reference to “the nature of the person” with whom he is dealing.

All of this, to my way of thinking, invites a larger question that the authors never fully address. If the “nature of the person” who is the president can prevent that person from taking the oath of office in good faith -- and more pointedly, if everyone recognizes that this expressive president is exactly that kind of person -- then can that person actually BE the president of the United States? Constitutionally speaking, of course, Donald Trump was the president of the United States. The Electoral College took care of that. But if he didn’t mean it when he said the words of the oath of office, as a matter of legal philosophy, did the office of the presidency actually reside in him?

There are so many problems that stem from this initial premise regarding the oath of office. Much later in the book, when the authors are talking about Trump’s giving security clearance to his son-in-law Jared Kushner, despite Kushner’s inability to pass the necessary background checks, they make this observation.

Then, suddenly, in May 2018, Kushner was granted a full top secret clearance. Everything was aboveboard, the White House insisted. Sources “familiar with the matter” made a point of telling the major papers that the permanent clearance was “granted by career White House and intelligence officials after the completion of his FBI background check.” These sources even pointed to the observance of this rigid process as vindication, evidence that Kushner was no longer any kind of focus of the special counsel’s investigation and that it should clear any suspicion regarding his conduct. Kushner’s lawyer, Abbe Lowell, underscored the point in a statement that Kushner’s “application was properly submitted, reviewed by numerous career officials and underwent the normal process.”

But none of that was true. The process hadn’t cleared Kushner; it had concluded that he posed too great a threat. It took nearly a year before the public learned not only that Trump had personally intervened -- in the face of contrary recommendations at the highest levels -- to order that Kushner be given a clearance but also that the administration had been lying to the public about it ever since. The administration’s response? Counselor to the president Kellyanne Conway went on Fox News and declared that while the White House wouldn’t discuss security clearances, “I will tell you the president has the absolute right to do what was described.”

It was the equivalent of a child’s taunt, but Conway was at some level correct. Just as he’d been able to pardon Arpaio, just as he had the power to take away Brennan’s clearance, the president did have the authority to overrule his own staff and the intelligence community to grant his son-in-law access to the nation’s most consequential secrets. For that matter, he also has an absolute right to give a security clearance to Kim Jong Un or Chinese leader Xi Jinping or Ayatollah Khamenei in Iran if he feels so inclined. What went unaddressed in Conway’s response is that “can” is not the same as “should,” though the only mechanism the founders had for distinguishing between the two -- the oath of office -- has to be felt as a burden by the president in order to do its work of distinguishing. If the president doesn’t feel some difference between self-dealing and working on behalf of the public interest, if she experiences her powers as monarchical prerogatives there for personal grandeur and benefit, the distinction between what she may do and what she ought to do becomes one without meaningful difference.

See how dangerous this idea of a president “not meaning it” when he takes the oath of office can be? In a world in which the president makes no distinction between what is good for him and what is good for the country -- there is no power in the world that can stop him from acting. Again, I ask, can such a person actually BE the president of the United States?

Bad At His Job

But put that idea aside for the moment. It’s probably too esoteric to even make basic sense. There were many other things wrong with the expressive nature of this president -- and one of the most fundamental was that it made him simply bad at the job of being president. As an expressive president, Trump acted like authority and execution resided entirely with him, rarely, if ever, coordinating his decisions and actions with the vast bureaucracy he had at his command. The authors illustrate this in their description of Trump’s “Muslim travel ban,” an action he tried to take very early in his presidency designed to prevent people from certain countries from entering the United States.

The chaos the travel ban unleashed outside the administration reflected a certain chaos within the administration that had produced it. Normally, a major presidential action in the national security realm that affects the lives of millions of people and the security of the country at large involves a complex process within the government. An action like the travel ban affects many different agencies with different interests. The Department of Homeland Security mans the ports of entry. The State Department issues visas and has to respond to the diplomatic fallout from countries that don’t want their citizens banned from entering the United States -- not to mention the negative backlash from Muslim countries that perceive such an action as discriminatory with respect to Islam. One would expect consultation with the intelligence agencies as to whether a ban is even necessary -- and, if so, how broadly it should sweep, against which countries it should be directed, and on what sort of people it should focus. If the goal is to protect national security, one would presumably want to hear from the folks who have insight into which kinds of people do and do not pose threats to national security. It turned out that the military had important dogs in this fight too: people who had helped U.S. forces in Iraq, to whom the military had promised shelter, were suddenly barred from entering the country. And, of course, the Justice Department has to consider the legality of any major federal action to make sure it can survive the legal challenges that have to be anticipated.

This is all entirely reasonable -- especially if a president wants to actually do things successfully. And it is really what the executive branch is designed to do.

This sort of complex integration of different governmental entities is why the executive branch developed the so-called interagency process, a system of coordination and discussion between the federal agencies, at escalating levels of authority, designed to unify and deconflict policy and make sure all of the different agencies’ concerns are accounted for and addressed. The goal is ultimately to tee up policy decisions for a president adequately informed of the costs and benefits of different courses -- and, in order to preserve presidential time and focus, to resolve matters between agencies that do not require presidential involvement at lower levels.

Process is hard to love. It slows things down. It is frustrating to people who want action. No one votes for process. All presidents have chafed at and sidestepped it to some degree. But all presidents have been forced to rely on it too. This is because the executive branch is, in reality, a network of giant bureaucracies, not just a person who wants to express herself. 

Let’s just stop there for emphasis. The executive branch IS a network of bureaucracies, not just a person. Trump, of course, called those bureaucracies the “deep state,” and complained about how it was working against him. But he and them were part of the same thing, both essential parts of the executive branch. After all…

Some kind of system has to make sure that these bureaucracies are not working at cross-purposes and that the president gets the information she needs in order to act wisely. In the preparation of the travel ban, there was as little process as the modern presidency has seen on a major decision. Consultation with the Justice Department was limited to a facial review of the order’s text for obvious illegality. The Homeland Security Department was briefed only shortly before the ban was released. Neother the military nor the intelligence community was meaningfully consulted.

If the president had consulted with those agencies, the executive order would have looked quite different. It would have applied to fewer groups of people for shorter periods of time; its language would have been cleansed of the lingering hints of racial and religious animus; and it would have contained safety valves in the forms of carve-outs and discretionary exemptions. In other words, it would have been less like what Trump said he wanted: “a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States.” For many of the president’s supporters, this would have been far less satisfying, and they surely would have viewed such an outcome as the kind of business-as-usual watering down of campaign promises delivered by regular politicians. They didn’t want that.

No, they didn’t. But they, like Trump, didn’t get what they wanted. And they didn’t get it because this expressive president worked outside the system, forcing his expressive will and his expressive will only into the process. As the authors note:

The irony is that Trump regularly pays a huge price for this vision of the presidency. Mostly it’s a price in effectiveness. The travel ban debacle turned out to be a kind of template. Time after time, traditional processes have simply vanished, to the detriment of the administration’s ability to carry out the president’s own objectives in a timely, efficient, and coherent manner.

Set aside whether what Trump wanted to do was a good thing or a bad thing. As a practical matter, he wasn’t able to execute on his own objectives -- and that made him bad at his job.

The Deep State

In this regard, the “deep state” was a real thing -- as there were officials in a number of executive branch departments who came to work at cross purposes with President Trump, who, in a number of high-profile Twitter battles, became frequently referred to as the “toddler-in-chief.”

But a funny thing happened on the way to a restoration of the Hamiltonian presidency in Trump’s image (i.e., that of the unitary executive): the executive branch’s unity dissolved visibly before the public’s eye. And as the toddler-in-chief thread showed, in important respects, the president ceased to be at the helm of the executive branch and instead became its mascot. Trump was proposing such a massive and radical change that the rest of the executive branch could not simply continue with business as usual; it had to adapt -- and resist. Its response was in equal parts understandable and destructive of important constitutional norms.

Trump’s supporters were fairly outraged when the executive branch opposed the president -- after all, he is the president and represents the highest expression of executive authority that exists. But what is often overlooked is how dumb and counterfactual Trump’s executive mandates were.

The disuniting of the executive under Trump began immediately on his assumption of the presidency. Recall again that incident in which he was so incensed by the National Park Service crowd size retweet that on his first full day in office, he personally called the acting National Park Service director to demand that the agency produce photos to support Trump’s claim that his crowds were larger. Indeed, an “urgent directive” went to thousands of people at the U.S. Department of the Interior that “all bureaus and the department have been directed by incoming administration to shut down Twitter platforms immediately until further notice.” Despite the potential impact on emergency communications, officials were permitted to reactivate department Twitter accounts only once messages of atonement -- apologizing for the “accidental” retweet -- had been posted.

That’s right. Stop tweeting things I don’t like. This was the era when alternate, unofficial Twitter accounts were created so that “bureaucrats” could continue to communicate with the public matters important to their agency missions, despite the toddler-in-chief in the White House. I, myself, remember following the “alt-NPS” account for a while.

Ironically, it was not the apology or the discipling of the wayward agency that had a lasting impact. It was the defiance and contradiction of the president by subordinate officers who quickly stopped bothering to retract or to apologize when they strayed.

The Official Voice

Much of this behavior of the “wayward agencies” is attributable less to a conscious desire to thwart the president’s intentions and more to a befuddlement over exactly what the president’s intentions were.

A final exceptional feature of Trump’s rhetoric that operates in tandem with this media ecosystem is his mantra-like repetition of specific phrases -- “Witch Hunt,” “Make America Great Again,” “Build the Wall,” “No Collusion,” “No Obstruction,” “I have nothing to do with Russia,” “It’s a disgrace” -- both in tweets and in speeches, and specifically the repetition of these memes in lieu of argumentation. Trump never made or developed an argument against Robert Mueller’s investigation nor made a reasoned case against the suggestion that there was something untoward in his campaign’s relationship with Russian operatives, for example. He simply repeated key phrases and let others fill in the gaps. These phrases come to represent the terms of the argument that others -- Hannity, Lou Dobbs, Mark Meadows, and Jim Jordan, for example -- will make in his place. Trump himself, instead of making the argument, simply announces the articles of faith around which others have to navigate in building it. His political allies could then criticize Mueller however they wanted and develop the argument against the prosecutor in any number of fashions, as long as they hit -- or at least didn’t contradict -- these key points: Trump didn’t do anything wrong with respect to Russia, however things might appear; he didn’t corruptly seek to impede the investigation of his conduct; and the investigation against him was an unfair effort to damage him and his presidency.

In this environment, it is extremely difficult to understand what it is the president wants, as the “official voice” of his office is practically non-existent. There is a lot of discussion about whether this represents a conscious strategy on Trump’s part -- a clever ploy to keep his opponents off base and his options always open -- or whether this is reactive output of a disordered mind. The authors leave little doubt about what they think.

Indeed, Trump’s lies about intelligence are generally not of a strategic nature, designed to support some policy objective or conceal some short-term operation that publicity may put at risk. They are like his other lies -- self-serving matters of momentary convenience that may deny intelligence, make it up, or mischaracterize it. And they are often less about the intelligence itself than about the agencies responsible for it. When he tweets something that is plausible on its face but lacks public evidence to support, it is impossible to know if he is disclosing sensitive government information or if he just watched a segment on Fox & Friends. Moreover, his policy lies are generally not attempts to persuade the country to follow him on a particular policy course; they are more often simple self-promoting bluster.

On occasion, he has also lied about factual matters by way of creating space for his policies. One of the present authors spent a year litigating a Freedom of Information Act request in an attempt to prove false a single line about immigrants and terrorism and Justice Department statistics in Trump’s February 2017 speech to a joint session of Congress. The line was designed to gin up public fear of immigration and thus generate support for his travel ban executive order. But this sort of lie is actually the expectation, not the rule. Far more often, Trump’s lies serve no policy purpose. They are bloviating swagger and nothing else. In this sense, Trump not only depletes the reserve of trust and presumption of good faith in the presidency; he creates a presidency truly based on the Frankfurtian concept of bullshit. He is the politician of Swift’s precise description -- you “will find yourself equally deceived whether you believe or not.”

And that’s exactly the point. If you want people to take you seriously, or to understand you clearly, don’t lie to them. And when lies become understood as the bedrock of the “official voice” of the presidency, we are moving into very dangerous ground.

This is Trump’s radical proposed revision to the traditional presidency: not only that the president doesn’t need to be honest, but that he can be known to everyone as a “fucking liar” -- not an occasional liar, not a calculating liar, but a pervasive, constant liar and bullshitter on all subjects at all times. What would this revision mean in the long term for the presidency? In the broadest sense, nobody knows, because nobody knows how deeply such leadership will erode public confidence in the possibility of government -- indeed, to what extent it will erode public belief in objective truth itself. Presidents are, among other things, modelers of public beliefs and aspirations politically. Does having a president who is a bullshitter change the public’s sense of truth over time? The point of Trump’s lies is not to convince the public that he can be believed, but rather to convince people that no one can be believed.

I would make a minor quibble here. It is not the point of Trump’s lies, but rather the result -- since I don’t think that even this is a conscious strategy. And that’s partly what makes it so dangerous. Conscious strategy can be thwarted, can be resisted. But in doing what he does, and in us doing what we do in reaction, there is no consciousness, instead it is the subconscious interplay of the narcissist and his followers. It is part of the slippery slope toward despotism, and once begun, there is little that can be consciously done to retard its progress.

A Culture of Ethics

One other point that is worth illuminating on how the authors see Trump changing the very nature of the presidency.

A culture of ethics is a fragile thing. It begins with the law, but it doesn’t end there. The space the law leaves for self-dealing and graft, either by choice or because of the nature of the presidential office, is vast. And if the president makes a decision to exploit that space rather than prudentially protecting it -- to push every line rather than drawing lines that set confidence-building boundaries, to dare the public rather than reassuring the public -- the law will not substitute for political pushback as a remedy. The culture of ethics will decay. The decay begins at the head and spreads downward. If the president doesn’t actually divest, why should anyone else? If the president’s children aren’t punished for ethical violations, why shouldn’t others break the same rules with impunity? If cabinet officials keep their jobs despite scandals, why should those serving beneath them fear losing their own?

They’re talking here about Trump’s refusal to divest from his private business concerns and even to use the office of the presidency for his personal profit. Like so much of what Trump does -- he just does it, and no one seems to hold him accountable.

Thus far, Trump’s bet has paid off to an astonishing degree. Nobody has taken up his dares. Congress has done little, though it may be beginning to stir. The courts, limited by the slow pace of litigation and legitimate substantive and procedural legal barriers to action, offer little short-term relief. So far, anyway, the only real pushback has come from prosecutors and state attorneys general who have probed the conduct of his campaign and foundation. And it has come from a dogged and relentless press, which has accomplished a great deal of disclosure -- disclosure that, in turn, gives rise to the possibility of political response. As other billionaires eye the presidency, it’s not hard to imagine them following the example of minimal ethical compliance and preserving their business entanglements. Contrary to former OGE director Shaub’s admonition, as far as some very rich people were concerned, divestment has, in fact, been too high a price to pay for the presidency. Now, it seems, it doesn’t need to be paid after all. As Trump has set the presidency to protecting his personal business interests and dared the polity to stop him, the polity has responded with a shrug. Perhaps a disgusted shrug, but a shrug nonetheless.

The point about future billionaires now running for president because they no longer need to divest themselves of their businesses really hit home for me. That is not a world I want to live in.

The authors wrote in 2020 -- and now I am writing in 2024. And although Trump is facing a whole bevy of legal challenges and court cases -- none of them have anything to do with the way he used the office of the president for his private inurement. Future billionaires with presidential aspirations: take note.

+ + +

This post appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.