Month: January 2017

What is it about Steve Bannon?  What is it about this slithering snake of a man, this fact-free fear monger, this red-jowled anarchist that he somehow has the one thing that nobody since that unscrupulous Queens slum-lord, Fred Trump, has had: the ear of The Donald?  Why Steve Bannon?

After all, Trump doesn’t listen to anyone else.  Everyone in Trump’s life, bimbos included, seems like they have to weather a spit-flecked tantrum or engage in routine bowing and supplication before he’ll bother to learn your name, or at least to go in front of the press and lie belligerently on His behalf.  The only way Kelly Ann Conway knew how to get Trump’s ear was by making sure her words ended up on Fox at 3 am, when she knew he’d be watching.  You don’t actually picture Trump listening to her; you picture him pouting when she tries to take away his phone.

I’m reminded of a crude joke told at a Trump roast by . . .  it had to be Jeff Ross.  I can’t tell this joke on a family blog (that is — because my family are likely the only ones reading it), but let’s just say the punch line had to do with Trump being the only person who could sexually arouse Trump.  It also seems to me as I think about it that the only person Trump listens to is probably Trump.

Except for Steve Bannon.  Bannon — who has recently been appointed to fill the Supreme Court vacancy left by the entire Supreme Court, who’ve all been reassigned to work as cocktail waiters in one of Trump’s casinos — is Trump’s political hit-man.  Now, I get it — every president has to have a hit-man.  Bush had Karl Rove.  Obama had Rahm Emmanuel.  Hillary Clinton had Anthony Weiner (self-inflicted hits).  These men were known for having political savvy, electoral influence, much-photographed genitalia, and the moral scrupulousness of carnivorous fish.  Next to Steve Bannon, these guys look like Malala.  Plants wither when Bannon enters a room.  College students demand safe spaces.  And — most curious of all — Donald Trump listens.  I guess that when your vision of modern America already resembles one of the “Saw” movies, the only person in the country who can tell you a terrifying enough bedtime story to keep you interested is probably Bannon.  He’s sort of like Darth Vader’s bad conscience.

This is doubly strange because –as I said — Donald Trump doesn’t really listen to anyone else.  In fact, I think the thing that bothers me most about Trump is that, for a man who says he speaks for the people, he is almost pathologically incapable of listening to them.  Listening is fundamentally an act of patience and of humility, and Donald Trump I believe actively campaigned against both qualities, calling them un-American, a “disgrace,” and unlikely to bring jobs back.

When was the last time Donald Trump ever mentioned a private citizen, unless it was to publicly berate her?  Barack Obama’s speeches were peppered with references to ordinary Americans.  His campaign stops were built around fish fries, diners, and rib joints.  His early days in the White House were often bookended by trips to Ben’s Chilli Bowl.  Back in 2009 a reporter asked the newly sworn-in president what he missed most about private life.  His answer: being able to listen to ordinary Americans outside the “bubble” of the Oval Office.  Every evening, President Obama read ten letters from normal Americans.

For all the messiah-worship of his 2008 campaign, Barack Obama was a public servant.  He’d worn out his shoes on the sidewalks of Chicago as a community organizer.  Later on he did the same thing as a state senator.  Neither job was glamorous.  But both afforded him the chance to get to know people with very different lives than his own.  These experiences shaped his time in the White House.  He learned how to listen to these people because he worked for them.

Donald Trump has never worked for anyone in his life.  That would show weakness.  And it was part of his appeal.  Nor was he a public servant.  This too was part of his appeal.  The enduring image of Donald Trump’s campaign is not of him shaking hands and talking with voters in real-life situations, but of him doing photo ops in airplane hangars in front of staged backdrops at his massive rallies.  He’s not a public servant listening to voters; he’s a celebrity meeting fans.  Unlike Barack Obama, Trump has very few of these real voters’ stories to guide his decision making in the Oval Office.  Because the only time he was listening to voters was when they were cheering for him.

But that’s how it is for a narcissist, isn’t it?  When your entire soul is a dark, sucking vortex that needs love, love, love all the time for me, me, me, there’s not a lot of space left over to listen to anyone else’s opinions.

We’ve all met these people before.  They’re self-centered enough that they can’t grasp that other people besides themselves have opinions or feelings.  It’s empathy that’s missing.  Not the far-left, Brown University, give-everyone-a-trigger-warning sort of empathy, but the Atticus Finch version: the simple ability to climb into another’s skin and see the world from his point of view.

Make no mistake, to be president you need to possess a massive ego.  You have to be self-confident almost beyond a normal person’s ability to comprehend.  But you also have to listen, and listening requires it’s own kind of confidence — the confidence to hear criticism, to allow the camera to focus on someone else for a moment.  No one would ever confuse Barack Obama with a back-slapping pol along the lines of Bill Clinton or even George W. Bush, but you always got the feeling that if you sat down and had a beer with him and talked to him about why you thought his educational policy was crap, he’d listen to what you had to say — even if he would probably counter with a menacing clarity.

With Trump, it’s not so much that he wouldn’t listen, it’s that he wouldn’t know how.  It’s not in his genetic make-up.  Listening and empathy both require a strength that Donald Trump does not possess.  He is good at reading people, at finding their weaknesses.  He can get the better of them.  But this isn’t really listening; it’s sizing people up.  And he can certainly listen to a crowd chant his name.  But saying that Donald Trump can “listen” to people simply because he can lap up their adoration is like saying a heroin addict is self-reliant because he can always find drugs.  Trump doesn’t listen.

Years ago, when I started teaching, I worked in a very poor school district where many students had inherited a legacy of academic failure.  Frustrated by their rude behavior and lack of interest, I developed a belief that neither they nor their families cared much about improving their lives.  How else, I thought, to explain their poor performance in school, their stubborn desire to remain what they were?  I was, in short, equal parts arrogant and ignorant.

But as I began doing the job of a public servant and interacting with these families, I learned that most of them shared goals for their children that were strikingly similar to my own: a better future, more opportunities, fulfillment and happiness.  In that work, I found myself taken aback at how lucky I’d been in my own life, and how baffled I’d be if I’d run into the obstacles many of my students’ families took for granted: disease, poverty, systemic racism, or simply not knowing the key that opens society’s doors.  My interactions with these children and families fundamentally changed my view of our society.  To me, this is what public service is all about: the ability to listen in order to understand that your fellow humans — whether they’re adversaries, or constituents, or the families in the community — are just that: fellow human beings, with stories of their own and points of view that are different from yours, but no less valid and no less worthy of being heard at the top.

But Donald Trump can’t do any of that.  Born rich, he’s never had practice listening to other people except to get the better of them.  

Seems to me that’s exactly what he has done.

Last week I had pinkeye.  Not just normal pinkeye, but double pinkeye: both eyes.  I looked like I’d been partying for four days straight with Tony Montana.  The medical name for pinkeye is conjunctivitis, which in Latin means, “your eyes look like junk.” You know it’s bad when the first thing your doctor says when he comes in is, “Wow, looking at you makes me want to wash my hands.” His fresh-faced Dartmouth intern had a look that said, “Umm, this doctor thing just got REAL.”

Pinkeye is not something you normally get as an adult.  I hadn’t had pinkeye since I was about nine and Donald Trump was just a friendly extra helping Kevin McCallister find the hotel lobby in “Home Alone II.” A lot of people get pinkeye when they’re young.  Here’s how it goes: first your eyes get red.  Then the school nurse reacts like you’ve contracted bubonic plague.  She politely informs you that you’ve been transferred to another school district (in Romania).  And then you get better after a few days.  It’s not a big deal — except to school nurses.  I swear, if you ever want to cause a riot at a school nurse convention, just walk into the room and yell, “I’ve got pinkeye!”

(You can also try saying loudly, “Oh, are you bleeding?  Don’t worry — I don’t need gloves.”)

How ironic then that I contracted my first case of pinkeye in about twenty-five years from a school nurse.  It was this past November and, finding myself having to inch my chair closer and closer to the TV just to make out the subtle visual distinction between such characters as Princess Leia and Chewbacca, I decided it was time to get my vision tested.  It just so happened that the nurses were overseeing a school-wide vision testing at the high school where I work, and were kind enough to allow me to duck in line and to put my eyes into the machine, where they were probably the 200th pair that day.  The next morning I woke up knowing that I didn’t need glasses, but looking like a walking advertisement for Visine.  Pinkeye.  I missed three days of work straight — a record for me.  Once it cleared up, I figured, “Hey, at least I’m done with pinkeye for, say, the rest of my life.”

I couldn’t have been more wrong if I’d been a pollster in Michigan.

Now there’s a weird thing that happens to teachers: our bodies know when vacation is coming up.  For weeks and weeks kids are getting sick around us — coughing, sneezing, touching door knobs, blowing their noses, handing in papers for us to grade that probably contain more germs than a New York City subway car.  Our classrooms are basically giant Petri dishes.  Somehow we manage to will our bodies to stay healthy — right up until vacation.  Then it’s like our bodies realize, “Hey, we can finally let our guard down.” And we get sick.

It happens to me every year, especially during February Break.  Every year I steel myself for it, but every year it happens anyway.

This Christmas Break was no different.  I tried.  The week before vacation, I coaxed a plus-sized bottle of sanitizing soap from the nurse’s office and spent the days leading up to break lathering myself up with the stuff.  I wiped every surface in my room with a set of bleach wipes before and after school.  I started operating the door knob with my shirt sleeve around my hand.  Your basic germaphobe behavior.  I basically turned into Bill Murray in “What About Bob?” I did everything short of hosing out the classroom in between periods.  I was NOT going to get sick.  Not this Christmas.

Well, I got sick this Christmas.  A few days later, anyway.  Ironically during the time when I was stuck home alone, I caught a virus that ripped through me like Grant through Richmond.  I passed the rest of the week — which I’d planned to spend skiing and drinking beer and just generally enjoying the novelty of being outside during daylight — confined to the couch and put through a spate of Lifetime movies, the most scarring of which was a thriller centered on a charming woman who was already on her third round of husband killing by the first commercial break.  Let’s just say if I’d had more energy I definitely would’ve relocated our entire knife collection to somewhere my wife would never find them (such as in my paddling gear).

Finally, a few days later, I’d clawed my way back up to health, feeling a little bit like the forest does after a wildfire.  In fact — in classic teacher fashion — I’d gotten well just in time to go back to work, which I did last Monday.  I figured that was the end of it: just another case of the body allowing work but denying fun.  Typical.

But a strange thing happened.  By that afternoon, my eyes were tearing up more often than John Boehner’s.  By the time I got home, my eyes looked like I’d been smoking dope with raft guides.  The next morning I took one look in the mirror and knew I’d better stay home — otherwise I’d break the record for “most students immediately switching English teachers in a single day.” Not to mention the poor school nurses, all of whom would probably have to be carted out after they heard the news that there was pink eye in their school.

I passed the next four days — a record number of work absences for me — in a variety of ways.  There were the trips to the doctor, the look on his face as he examined me that said, “Don’t act freaked out . . .  Don’t act freaked out . . . , ” the antibiotics that did not work.  Then there was the fact that looking into any sort of light felt like torture — sort of like Reince Priebus probably felt when the armed men made him stare into that lightbulb and repeat, “I will support Trump . . . ” I began insisting that all lights be turned out anywhere I was in the house, and I also began wearing sunglasses all the time, like some Hollywood diva.  

There was of course there was the inevitable guilt at missing four straight days of work.  This is no Mad Men-era workplace, when Don Draper goes out on long, boozy lunches that turn into two-week benders and no one asks any questions.  Anyone who is wired to be a teacher will understand: even though it makes no sense, you always feel just a little bit guilty when you’re absent.  It’s like you’re letting the kids down.  Then of course you come back a week later and the kids say, “Hey, were you out or something?” Public schools: they keep you humble.

Finally by last weekend I’d once again clawed back up to something approaching normal health, though I’ve spent the rest of the week looking worriedly back over my shoulder for the next illness chasing me.  It’s been four days and it hasn’t come yet.  Hopefully I’m all set on pinkeye now for about fifty years.  

In the meantime I’ll be scrubbing my hands and wiping down my classroom.  Because before you know it, it’ll be February Break.