It has become a sad truth that head­lines, shouts of “Break­ing News” and screen crawls deliv­er just enough news to make it appear to all but the most curi­ous that a sto­ry has been told, there­by leav­ing the bit­ter vetch they her­ald untasted.

Grandiose schemes with­out sub­stance hold cen­ter stage while suf­fer­ing and pom­pos­i­ty grind on. Self-pro­claimed Chris­tians cite their beliefs as a way to dis­guise racism and intol­er­ance. Vax-anti-vax argu­ments rage on even as once-con­quered dis­eases are slip­ping back like thieves in the night.
Top of this week’s list is Pres­i­dent Don­ald Trump’s for­mal inau­gu­ra­tion, com­plete with (of course) gold gav­el, of  his “Board of Peace” to fix Gaza.
As is his wont and forte, Trump spent more time on brag­gado­cio than substance.
As the New York Times summed it up: “He told tall tales. Cracked old jokes. Got peo­ple to pay mon­ey into some­thing he’s named after him­self. Hyped up his wife’s movie. Trashed his ene­mies. Aired famil­iar griev­ances. Con­grat­u­lat­ed himself.“
U.S. peace efforts in the Mid­dle East and Ukraine are spear­head­ed by Steve Witkoff and Jared Kush­n­er, both of whom are busi­ness­men. Top-lev­el diplo­mats, for whom nego­ti­a­tion is a well-honed skill, are con­spic­u­ous by their absence, in and of itself a head­line about the end game Trump is play­ing that requires seri­ous flesh­ing out to be accept­able news.
With typ­i­cal hyper­bole, Trump claimed most nations were “onside”. That “most” adds up to lit­tle more than a dozen, none of them seri­ous con­tenders for a minor human­i­tar­i­an, nev­er mind peace award, was writ­ten off with: “Some are play­ing a lit­tle cute. Doesn’t work. You can’t play cute with me.”
Unsaid but obvi­ous is that key nations have no desire to play with some­one who quit the World Health Organ­i­sa­tion (WHO) and is now propos­ing a body to replace it (no doubt with Trump in the name).
Does any­one need an organ­i­sa­tion spear­head­ed by a nation con­duct­ing slash and burn of some of the world’s lead­ing med­ical research uni­ver­si­ties for polit­i­cal rea­sons, and is allow­ing the return of dis­eases that had been elim­i­nat­ed, includ­ing measles?

              GUESS WHO’S ONSIDE

Prob­a­bly beyond mere mor­tal under­stand­ing, in spite of Trump hav­ing by word and doc­u­ment­ed deed bro­ken most of the Ten Com­mand­ments, in Jan­u­ary a Pew Research Cen­ter sur­vey found that 69 per­cent of white evan­gel­i­cals approve of how he’s han­dling his job as pres­i­dent and 58 per­cent sup­port all or most of his plans and policies.
In a sign that the U.S. polit­i­cal sys­tem being for sale to the high­est bid­ders needs seri­ous exam­i­na­tion, the tech news web­site The Verge reported that Ope­nAI founder Greg Brock­man gave $25-mil­lion to a Trump Super­PAC, the lat­est in a string of dona­tions from tech  bil­lion­aires, when the Trump admin­is­tra­tion is press­ing  to “aggres­sive­ly back the AI indus­try and defang state-lev­el reg­u­la­tions that com­pa­nies like Ope­nAI have large­ly opposed.”
And while that’s going  on, Israel is chip­ping and when­ev­er they can,  chop­ping away at the West Bank in defi­ance of agree­ments, inter­na­tion­al law and the sup­port and good­will of friends who have stood by them far longer than they deserve.
The Israeli mon­i­tor­ing and lob­by­ing group Peace Now reports that a new Israeli hous­ing plan effec­tive­ly “… entails the estab­lish­ment of a new neigh­bor­hood of Jerusalem, expand­ing the city for the first time since 1967 into the West Bank.”
That’s on top of the under-report­ed, nev­er mind head­lined news of the vio­lence right wing Israeli set­tlers are wreak­ing on Pales­tini­ans in the occu­pied West Bank.

                             IF THE HAT FITS

In March 1977,  I watched Niko­lai Pod­gorny, the then Chair­man of the Prae­sid­i­um of the Supreme Sovi­et, step off a plane on an offi­cial vis­it to Zam­bia, and put his hat on back­wards to review an hon­our guard.
Nobody told him to turn it around, which made me won­der at the time whether it was because of the per­ceived pow­er and influ­ence of the then Sovi­et Union, an exam­ple the inher­ent polite­ness of Zam­bians towards guests, or an imp­ish minor vic­to­ry over Sovi­et arro­gance in Africa.
It’s easy (and fair) to see Trump as the embod­i­ment of  the sub­ject of Hans Chris­t­ian Anderson’s fairy­tale “The Emperor’s New Clothes”, in which nar­cis­sism and lick-spit­tle advis­ers allowed a pair of grifters to delude the pro­tag­o­nist into think­ing he’s the finest-dressed man in the world, when he is actu­al­ly stark naked.
But on clos­er look, I can’t help but think of would-be Emper­or Don­ald as the dod­der­er who made the head­lines with his hat on backwards.

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