Zen and the Art of Monster Management
PARIS — Almeria took four days to limp up the Seine to the boatyard last year. She just blasted back home in two. At 15 knots, less than school-zone speed limits, I kicked back with a pipe and a pile of books for a 100-mile voyage that spanned 2,000 years.
There were moments. A rib-bruising fall through a hatch slowed me down on the ropes. We again encountered the Auxerrois, a working barge that saved us on the trip up last year and nearly sank us on the way down. Lockkeepers declared a surprise strike.
Still, my old wooden boat is back at its mooring in the heart of Paris after a major refit, ready for another century afloat. In fact, as things look today, Almeria may outlive us all. I wish that was only literary license.
We dumbass humans are losing our wondrous world at breakneck speed, heedless of universal truths dating to Antiquity.
For an hour on the first morning two of us stood in the bow peering into fog so thick it blotted out the water beneath us, let alone obstacles ahead. As the current carried us along, I reflected on the rudderless big raft we all share with no one charting our course.
French rivers carried Caesar's legions through Gaul to England from their ex-republic that fell from the weight of hubristic empire. Vikings plundered along their banks, then assorted armies came and went, dispatched by despots with imperial obsessions.
Robert Persig's 1974 bestseller, "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance," was about teaching his son values during an odyssey on two wheels. It was a metaphor about savoring life's joys while doing what is essential to smooth the rough parts.
"When you want to hurry something," he wrote, "that means you no longer care about it and want to get on to other things." You need to stop, focus on a problem or resolve it, or you'll end up somewhere stuck by the side of a road.
River trips intensify his lessons. When shit happens, as it always does, you can't pull over and call a guy with a trailer. Today, our challenge is an American president running roughshod on an overheated planet fast headed toward the rocks.
Donald Trump is stark raving mad or just acting like it, surrounded by the worst sort of people that the old Greeks warned would challenge humanity's better side. We need an updated handbook: Zen and the Art of Monster Management.
In six months, Trump's family has likely diverted more of the nation's wealth than Mobutu Sese Seko or Ferdinand Marcos did over decades. He wages war, not peace. Yet he says the "Democrat Party" is Satanic: evil, corrupt and bent on destroying America.
He has yet to shoot anyone on Fifth Avenue, but he is responsible for needless deaths in the millions, starting with Covid denial and now by cruelly shutting off desperately needed foreign aid.
Aristotle had it right. Most people are basically good but caught up in daily lives. Others driven by greed, power or zealotry know what they want and how to get it. They succeed when those good people do not stand up to resist. And not enough do.
I'll get back to our river saga. But first, the backdrop. America cannot reverse course until enough voters consider how and why things have gone so wrong.
Founders focused on history spent 11 years drafting a flawed Constitution. Women were secondary. When John Adams' wife told him, "All men would be tyrants if they could," he replied: "Madame, I cannot but laugh." Blacks were seen as not quite human.
But the first two amendments got it right. Colonists fought off a despotic king and clergy. People could say most anything as loudly as a voice could carry or write whatever a flatbed press could print. They could worship anything or nothing.
The right to bear arms allowed militiamen to keep a muzzle-loader handy in case the British or homegrown insurgents stormed the Capitol. Families settling new territory could hunt for dinner.
The outmoded Electoral College was a failsafe against what we face today. Ill-informed voters were prey to snake-oil conmen. Trusted electors in each state were meant to protect the people's will. Now it skews democracy.
Lies that spread at the speed of light "flood the zone" with shit. Too many voters think like computer algorithms to lump complexity into absurd generalities. Authoritarians backed by big money with new technologies can easily prevail.
Elections come down to a choice between two imperfect candidates. Republicans vote in lockstep. Democrats are all over place. What matters is decency, competence and the integrity to put the public over personal agendas.
In the demagogies Donald Trump aches to emulate, voting is a sham. Dictators follow a standard playbook: muzzle the media; alarm the ignorant with a bogus Other; coopt the moneyed class; arm thugs to silence critics by force.
Americans only need to read, think and do what they can to energize the apathetic while enlightening the unaware. Republicans work hard to suppress or rig voting. A thundering turnout is essential.
This is no longer about parties. From every indication I see, my best guess is that 2026 elections will likely be America's last chance to save its own democracy and continue its crucial role in leading a wider world toward sensible sustainability.
Remember Horst Wessel, the 22-year-old Nazi paramilitary volunteer killed by two communists in 1930. Goebbels made him a martyr, stirring reaction against "enemies of the people." What next if a rogue president declares martial law?
Before reaching for a hemlock sour, consider the upside that three men in a boat saw cruising past cathedrals, castles and crumbling ruins dating from the 800s. This is too good a world to let end as T. S. Elliot feared, not with a bang but a whimper.
Aristotle would have loved drinking Burgundy red with Jean-François Clement and Brian Latham. Brian, a Brit who ran a hotel barge on which David Rockefeller poured him whiskeys, knows French waterways like his bathtub. "Jeff," is a big-hearted mechanic, a miracle man with a magic van.
In a 1988 book on France titled "Mission to Civilize," I summed up the cross-channel cultures: an Englishmen apologizes when he steps on your foot; a Frenchmen berates you when he steps on yours. I've since learned more nuance.
The corollary is that exceptions who prove the rule are world-class good guys. The port engine and gearbox died during Covid, left unattended too long. No one could fix it. Desperate, I cast a wide net and came up with Jeff.
He found stripped gears, clapped-out pistons, cracked water conduits. I despaired. Jeff grinned. "What?" he said, "give up at the first little obstacle?" After heroic machine work at his Burgundy shop and a scavenger hunt for parts, Almeria was a movable beast. At Evans Marine in Migennes, he managed to extract an engine and rebuild it.
We struggled upriver before the Olympics last year. Bureaucrats eager to clean up the Seine ordered moored boats to connect to Paris sewers. Imagine filtering a cup of water in a fetid pond. At times their system backed up to literally flood the zone with shit.
The Seine is a little cleaner at Paris. But a vast river network still brings enough toxic waste, spilled diesel, animal dung and other pollutants to keep most river-savvy people from dipping a toe into it outside of a few monitored places.
We set out back then with a faltering engine against strong currents. Each of us thought someone had checked the fuel level. No one did. As we neared barges waiting for a lock to open after indeterminate repairs, we went dead in the water.
With our last drops, we tied up alongside the Auxerrois, serendipitous luck. Brian knew the owners. The amiable captain sold us enough to reach a pump run by a grumpy guy who agreed to overcharge us after finishing his long Sunday lunch.
Coming back, we happened upon the Auxerrois in a lock on the same stretch of the river. As the gates closed, the captain goosed his throttle, slamming our freshly repaired teak hull into the stone wall. Brian, uncharacteristically pissed, went for a visit.
It was a different skipper, new to the barge and worried about keeping up with the faster peniche ahead of him. That turned out to be a blessing. In a convoy, we breezed through every lock toward Paris without the usual long waits.
For two days, I put aside my phone and listened to VHF chatter. News could wait. So could everything else. Coming up the Yonne, we were in a different place, in a different time, at every bend in the river.
For long stretches, I was Bogart on the African Queen, steaming past jungle on both banks. At Pont-sur-Yonne, I saw remains of the stone bridge blown up in 1814 to stop Austrians troops during yet another war for no reason.
At Sens, an imposing cathedral built in the 1100s overlooks the Yonne, then equivalent to today's A6 autoroute. Near Paris, modern-day Thoreaus live off the grid on rusting barges, with motorboats to occasionally shop and socialize.
Upon reentering the real world, I saw how successfully Trump's blustering bullshit has shoved aside nearly every one of those checks and balances that underpin a 250-year-old democracy once admired across the world.
Force yourself to watch all two-plus hours of that military conclave in Quantico, Virginia. A link is attached. Anyone not impelled to protect their own offspring's future, and everyone else's, ought to seek help.
An exchange (also attached) between the Bulwark's Tim Miller and Tom Nichols, The Atlantic's military maven, puts the threat in perspective.
Nichols says a little-known procedure makes nuclear codes horrifyingly dangerous. They were designed to signal Moscow that no bickering among aides can delay a strike once triggered by a president. Trump could blow Earth off course at will.
He recalls what Richard Nixon once told two congressmen: within 20 minutes, he could annihilate 100 million people. That was a long time ago, but the process has not been modernized. These days, Russia or China would retaliate with worse.
Pete Hegseth, who earlier this year as Fox News weekend host did a goofy bit falling off a skateboard, brought generals and admirals from active duty around the world to lecture them on how to be warriors. He is now Secretary of War, no longer Defense.
Elliot Cohen on Bulwark caught the irony. An ex-major with limited combat experience harangued top-ranking officers who combined 25,000 years of accumulated military service.
A puffed-up toy soldier told them the military is not for "fatties" or facial hair. He ordered all ranks from the top down to do tough daily workouts. And then an obese commander-in-chief shuffled in, eyes focused on the floor.
Trump's disjointed boasts were even less coherent than his recent hour at the U.N. General Assembly, but at one point he riveted officers' attention. He told them to train for urban warfare abroad by assaulting Portland as if were Pyongyang.
Generals reined in Trump during his first term. When U.S. intelligence showed China feared an imminent nuclear strike, Gen. Mark Milley, the Joint Chiefs chairman, assured its top general there was no threat. After Jan. 6, 2021, he called again to say America remained "100 percent steady."
Trump later tweeted those acts were "so egregious that, in times gone by, the punishment would have been DEATH.” In January, he stripped Milley of his security clearance and guard detail as prosecutors investigate him.
Milley describes Trump as "fascist to the core," the most dangerous man ever. "We do not take an oath to a country, a tribe or a religion," he said at a farewell ceremony. "We do not take an oath to a king, or a queen, to a tyrant or dictator and we don’t take an oath to a wannabe dictator."
Later, he said to Norah O'Donnell on CBS what most of those officers were likely thinking at Quantico:
"The American people can take it to the bank, that all of us, every single one of us, from private to general, are loyal to that Constitution and will never turn our back on it no matter what...
“If we’re willing to die for that document, if we’re willing to deploy to combat, if we’re willing to lose an arm, a leg, an eye, to protect and support and defend that document and protect the American people, then we are willing to live for it, too.”
In a second term, Trump aims to drive off ranking officers who respect the Posse Comitatus Act that forbids the military from policing Americans at home.
Portland defines him. When Oregon's governor told him there was no cause for troops, he said he heard differently on television. Despite every sort of situation report and intelligence assessment, he goes to the non-news network where he found Hegseth.
The guardrails are gone. At nomination hearings, FBI Director Kash Patel feigned respect for Congress, which approved him despite evasive answers and blatant untruths.
Later, called to account for FBI overreach, he spewed venomous insults at Sen. Adam Schiff of California and refused to answer direct questions from other Democrats.
Just this week, Attorney General Pam Bondi did the same. Her response to Senate Judiciary Committee questions about weaponizing the Justice Department was, as the New York Times described: simple and brutal; attacks, not answers.
Sen. Richard Durbin of Illinois, the committee's top Democrat, pressed her about sending troops to Chicago over the governor's objections. “I wish you loved Chicago as much as you hate President Trump,” she retorted.
Supreme Court justices are meant to rise above politics, with integrity beyond reproach and no hint of personal gain. Just consider Trump's hot mic remark to John Roberts on March 5: "Thank you again. Won't forget it."
French rivers are dotted with castles dating from the 800s to the 1800s. For all the comparisons to Hitler or Mussolini, Trump and his kin seem closer to a comic-book version of Cesare Borgia, the model for Machiavelli's "The Prince."
Aboard Almeria, I laughed ruefully reading "L'Heure Des Predateurs," Predator Time, a brief book in French by Giuliano da Empoli. He is one of those brilliant Italian international statesmen who whisper wisdom in heads of states' ears.
He describes America's democracy today as 10 percent "West Wing" and 20 percent "House of Cards." The rest is "Veep" — farcical yet drop-dead serious. Despite a Mussolini glower and Hitler's Big Lie approach, Trump evokes 16th century Florence.
"From the Borgians' point of view," Da Empoli wrote, "wokeism is blessed bread, the ideal carburant to run their chaos machines." Trump doesn't need to read or listen. His tactic is a barrage of unexpected outrageous actions that keep everyone guessing.
In the 1500s, plots and political intrigue were dizzyingly complex. That is not necessary today with an Internet and nonstop poison on TV. The trick is to heap favors on people until it is advantageous to, if now only figuratively, knife them in the back.
Borgia did in a brother who stood in his way. He committed atrocities in connivence with his sister, Lucrezia, a villainous femme fatale. Trump has a Cesare Jr. and another son to help with his dirty work, exploiting the peasantry without a hint of shame.
After 40 years, I plan to sell Almeria to a new skipper who appreciates her. I'll be traveling more in an imperiled world and in the incredible shrinking democracy where my family found refugee from Russian despotism a century ago. Reporters report.
I am headed now to the Bayeux-Calvados War Correspondents Prizes to hobnob with some of them. And I'm taking along the last lesson I learned aboard my noble old boat.
A proper nation is an enclosed lake. People within it know its depths and shallows. They keep watch on what is happening beyond its shores. Historical memory matters.
But America is now a river. People notice only what floats when they are looking. When the current brings something new, that is forgotten. Faithless leaders simply reinvent reality for their own purposes. When in power, they rewrite history.
A lockkeeper on the Yonne whose Vietnamese family found refuge in France made the point. "I just don't understand it," he told me. "How can Americans elect a convicted felon and just forget all the terrible things he has done?"
————