Willis's Wisdom For a Woebegone World
PARIS — Beyond the bullying and buffoonery, Donald Trump is fast reshaping the United States into his own cruel, greed-driven image. Americans have only months left to snap awake and pitchfork their delusional despot into history.
By now, anyone who enables his ambitions without the excuse of cognitive impairment is complicit. Hillary Clinton's impolitic "basket of deplorables" remark was premature. A decade later, it is a tepid understatement.
That "shining city on a hill" Ronald Reagan exalted is darkening fast. The Soviet empire had collapsed. China was in turmoil. India was a poor backwater. Today, they are united to muscle aside America's hegemony a year before its 250th anniversary.
I'm just 82, with only 70 years of watching nature turn hostile as dictators and zealots veer toward nuclear terrorism if not doomsday war. But nonagenarians with sharp memories ought to scare the crap out of anyone who takes the time to listen.
Consider my poet pal Willis Barnstone, now 97. We met during Argentina's dirty war in the 1970s. Plainclothes police grabbed people off the streets on mere suspicion of whatever and locked them away in secret, or worse, with no judicial niceties.
He was there to translate Jorge Borges, who later remarked: “Four of the best things in America are Walt Whitman’s Leaves, Herman Melville’s Whale, the sonnets of Willis Barnstone’s Secret Reader, and my daily Corn Flakes."
Willis had just been in China during the Cultural Revolution. He saw how power, as Mao said, comes out of the barrel of a gun. Without sustained popular resistance, mass indoctrination of cowed people comes next.
His prodigious works take in most everything from antiquity to last week. He witnessed Franco's fascism in Spain. He saw Hitler in action, then was the second civilian visitor to Auschwitz after allied forces broke open its doors.
At his Greek wife's family home, he experienced bitter civil war, replaced in 1945 with booming prosperity in Greece because of America's Marshall Plan. And then more military rule, which pro-democracy resistance overcame.
Having also seen better angels in the human condition, Willis remains upbeat and quick to laugh. Unless someone mentions Trump. He knows that malignant narcissism is incurable. It only gets steadily worse.
His 80-somethingth book, recently published, is "African Bestiary: Tails of Survival." Its 301 whimsical paintings set among poetic prose came together on a bank of Apple monitors and a keyboard he plays like a grand piano.
Being Willis, he depicts fauna that travel on four legs, slither, fly, crawl or walk upright. The book is truffled with such creatures as an apolitical elephant, a blue wildebeest, a pair of unicorns, Shakespeare, Baudelaire, Nabokov and Jack Kerouac.
More on him below. First, my own glint-eyed look at how lived experience by enlightened elders is so vital today to young people who must undo the mess earlier generations are leaving behind.
Trump got away scot-free with siccing a murderous mob on America's Reichstag, intent on hanging a vice president who refused to shred the Constitution. Armed thugs he pardoned as heroes now help his cronies and cultists overthrow democracy.
Even if he were not so corrupt and preternaturally duplicitous, look at the unlawful edicts and illiterate "truths" he thumbs at 3 a.m. on his personal network aimed only at his faithful. The man belongs under supervised care, not in the Oval Office.
His sociopathic, unhinged outrages pile up by the hour, dismissive of human misery and basic rights. He alienates essential allies while inciting authoritarians to stamp out fundamental values America once championed.
His demand for a Nobel is laughable. He has instigated wars but ended none. His foreign policy is aimed almost entirely at enriching himself and his billionaire backers.
After so much news media hype in Alaska, he fawned over Putin and effectively abandoned Ukraine. Later, Putin kowtowed to Xi Jinping at the Shanghai Cooperation summit. So did Narendra Modi of India, furious at Trump's 50 percent tariffs.
Then Putin and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, Trump's "little rocket man," flanked Xi at a chilling parade of space-age military might. It marked the 80th anniversary of Japan's surrender in World War II. In fact, it was a middle finger directed at America.
China revealed its version of the B2 Stealth bomber. Unmanned, its targeting needs none of the pilot skills Trump exulted after his Iran assault. It rolled out a 30-foot underwater drone, laser air defenses and ICBMs that travel five times faster than sound.
If America weighs in to protect Taiwan, BBC's security analyst Frank Gardner said, China "can send quite a lot of U.S. ships to the bottom of the Western Pacific."
Leaders of half the world's population now support China's intention to replace the United States as the dominant global power, with harsh repression on anything that smacks of dissent.
One example among myriads is enough to define Donald Trump.
He says "a lot of people" — his idea of qualified sources — want him to be a dictator. If he stops crime, he says, Americans will let him do anything he wants. This is flaming horseshit and yet so many people only wring their hands and acquiesce.
Crime, endemic to all societies since forever, spiked in America during the Covid pandemic Trump let run wild for his selfish purposes. Then it waned in most urban areas, except for mass shootings linked largely to overheated political discourse.
Migrants are not the problem. Most people eager to start a new life stay within the law. Asylum seekers want to escape violence, not cause it. Immigrants do essential unskilled scutwork. Entrepreneurs among them provide countless new jobs for Americans.
Trump's attack dogs, led by Stephen Miller and Tom Homan, target Home Depot parking lots, church environs, housing blocks and city streets to meet quotas. Some smash car windows to make arrests. Argentine government goons did not wear masks.
At home, the challenge is clear. Well-trained police working with psychologists need to confront serious offenders. More cops on the beat curb petty crime. Confronting gangs requires professional skills. Targeted welfare reduces theft by the desperate.
But Trump needs showy theatrics for the gullible. The Posse Comitatus Act allows the military to act domestically only during a national emergency. He refused to declare one on Jan. 6. Now he simply invents them whenever blue states annoy him.
After terrorizing Washington, he wants combat troops, including trigger-happy 18-year-olds in Armageddon gear, to patrol Chicago with armored columns and gunboats offshore in Lake Michigan.
He claims Chicago is more dangerous than Afghanistan. In fact, murders and armed robberies decreased by 35 percent in a year since July 2024.
The greater challenge is across a wider world. Trump gives free rein to Benjamin Netanyahu along with Putin so he can profit from their war crimes. He courts authoritarians while alienating crucial allies. And few Americans take note.
Many young voters refused to vote for Kamala Harris, saying Biden did too little to stop the Gaza onslaught. Yet despite Republican and ultra-Zionist resistance, Biden pushed hard for a Palestinian state, opened relief corridors and prevented wider regional war.
The Washington Post revealed what they got instead. Trump's 38-page plan envisions a Mediterranean Riviera in Gaza. Palestinians would receive a pittance to abandon their homeland for such places as South Sudan, wracked with conflict and hunger.
For most of a riveting podcast, Bulwark publisher Sarah Longwell asked smart questions of former FBI general counsel Andrew Weissmann, who backstopped the Mueller Report, an uncommon expert on U.S. law at every level.
Weissmann is hopeful judges and jurors can hold the line. Prosecutors joke that grand juries would indict a ham sandwich, he said, because the evidentiary bar is so low. That is changing. When a Washington man threw a Subway sandwich at a Robocop, jurors laughed it off. The felony assault charge meant a possible eight-year prison term.
But Republicans only need rig elections without canceling them, he said. Russia, like most authoritarian countries, also have constitutions that guarantee fair balloting and an independent judiciary. Without popular pushback, they are just words on paper.
Attorney General Pam Bondi, he said, is Trump's advocate, not the peoples'. Across the board, cabinet members, top aides and military commanders are chosen for blind loyalty and fired abruptly for questioning his iron whims.
Longwell made the crucial point: "Authoritarianism ultimately wins because people can't be bothered to get off the mat." But at the end, after brief mentions of the world beyond America, she excoriated what she called Biden's ineffectual dithering.
I've written so much about Biden, I sound like a PR flack. Credibility for evenhanded reporting matters to me. He is hardly without faults. But consider what he managed as a law-abiding president thwarted at every turn by a hostile Congress.
There is no fixed measure for "aging out." Everyone slows down with time. Statesmen, like admirals of a fleet, steer away from troubled waters with wisdom, foresight and judgment. Younger hands scamper up the rigging.
Biden and Trump, both old, allow voters the advantage of comparing their pasts. That alone should disqualify a lifelong reprobate who views public service as a license to steal.
Longwell, an articulate, enlightened Republican, began a career of lobbying and political activism in 2002. Yet today's existential crises transcend America's inside baseball. What matters now is a nuanced worldview.
Trump left Biden the worst mess I've ever seen a president leave behind. He finally dropped his drink-bleach lunacy to fund Operation Warp Speed. But when his base resisted the vaccine, he saw political advantage in turning against it.
Biden had to beg and bribe people to get shots. Americans kept dying. When the death toll during his four years passed the total under Trump, Republicans blamed him for the pandemic. And so much else.
As The Economist pronounced, Biden's post-Covid recovery was "the envy of the world." He confronted conflicts Trump's folly triggered. He reenergized NATO and made it stronger. Congress voted billions for alternative energy, job creation and infrastructure.
I watched him as a senator in the 1970s. At times, he leaned too far to compromise. He cut short the Anita Hill hearings, inflicting America with Clarence Thomas. He tilted toward Delaware-based corporations. He was often brash in his Ray-Bans and hot cars.
Then later, I covered some of his trips abroad. As a sidekick vice president, he handled much of Barack Obama's diplomacy and economic policy. He listened carefully to others and took decisions that made sense in the moment.
That's the thing about age. Politicians who believe practice makes permanent can end up as cranky old fools. Those who learn from mistakes earn respect for integrity. Allies and adversaries alike take them seriously.
One morning in 2016, I talked to a teenager ready for his first election. He was beyond brilliant, raised by a pair of the most decent people I know, a graduate of the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, which at the time was all over the news.
Neo-Nazis stormed through town chanting, "Jews will not replace us." Trump saw "good people and both sides." Biden decided to run again. I am convinced that was neither arrogance nor power lust.
He had lost one son and was struggling to help his other one come back from drug-addled depravity. But he was well-placed to lead a wayward nation off the rocks until a fresh new face could run in 2024.
When I asked that young man about Biden, his lip curled. His face reflected pity for my own dumb old guy malarky, and I changed the subject.
As Biden says, he is better at policy than politics. White House messaging was badly handled after Jen Psaki left to join MSNBC. Still, his limited press briefings answered tough questions, unlike Trump's nonstop fact-free self praise.
Had Trump accepted defeat, Biden could have made way an early Democratic convention. But the world was in too much turmoil to gamble on an untested newcomer. A lot of people disagreed. My response was always, Give me a name.
Chief executive of a democratic superpower committed to decency in a hostile world bristling with nuclear weapons is no job for amateurs.
Biden listened to an effective cabinet and top aides who struggled against Republicans stonewalls on Ukraine, the Middle East, climate and much else. If reelected, he could have stepped aside. Kamala Harris was ready for the job.
In that CNN "debate," with Trump spewing absurd distortions on a split screen, uncorrected by moderators. After that, Biden was toast. Overprepared with facts, he froze in what us old guys know as passing senior moments. That is not dementia.
This is now history, of course, and too many Americans today think history doesn't matter. And so, back to Willis Barnstone.
In his early 80s, Willis brought Sarah Handler, his new China-scholar wife, to my olive grove in Provence. I began a piece:
"Right, that guy with the elfin twinkle and halo of silver curls tangoing on the patio just authored the most significant English-language Bible since King James’ version back in 1611. This surprises no one who knows Willis Barnstone, polyglot poet and wise man to the world. The Restored New Testament, at 1,480 pages, is his 58th (or so) tome."
Barnstone works in Chinese, Spanish, French and Greek — modern and ancient. He is intimate with Hebrew, Aramaic, and Coptic derivations.
After Columbia and the Sorbonne in Paris, he was graduated from Yale with a Ph.D. Eventually, he settled in Bloomington at Indiana University where is he distinguished professor emeritus of comparative literature, Spanish and a few other disciplines.
Hardly retired, he is working on three new books.
On my trips to the Bay Area, our friend Phil Cousineau and I make a pilgrimage to his little Oakland hideaway with books stacked to the ceiling and walls covered in pictures. One shows Babe Ruth tousling young Willis's hair, a frontpage in the New York Post.
Phil is also prolific polymath, whose books include "Soul: An Archaeology—Readings from Socrates to Ray Charles." Mostly we sit for hours on end listening to Willis, forgetting lunch waiting on the stove. Writing this, I asked for his thoughts.
These days, he replied, it is hard to distinguish "the good news, the real news, the news that stays news," and he recalled a line from Ezra Pound: "We were put here on earth to make things." Then he elaborated:
"Not just theorize or pontificate, but to make things...A poet makes things, words, pages, books, out of experience plus perception, and in the finest cases, heart. Willis is all three: well-read, well-traveled, well-companioned, and then he takes the next step of transmuting all he sees and feels into the Third Thing, a book, a lecture, a watercolor.
"And he is relentless about it. Maybe that's why we vibrate like a kettle drum when we read and look over Willis' books: we are transported."
The Bestiary is all smiles. Willis's timeless Auschwitz poem is not. It is attached below, with an explanatory note to me. He signed it Vevel, the name his grandparents used, and Bornstein, the name his Jewish father changed to do business in Boston.
Willis has survived tuberculosis, pneumonia and serious falls, but he and Sarah still exercise to music and take brisk walks. When I struggle to keep up, he yells at me for continuing to smoke my pipes.
That gets to a final thought. American health care is ungodly expensive for those without insurance, but it is world class. Trump crippled the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention during his first term. Biden restored it as the global gold standard.
Look now. As someone noted ruefully, the F in RFK, Jr. stands for Frankenstein. Among all the harm Trump is causing to medical research, vaccine development and monitoring microbes on the loose, we old guys think about gerontology.
A world hurtling into a perilous future needs its Barnstones to stick around and bolster hope. But when witchdoctor quackery pushes aside medical science, lives are cut short. And censoring elders' wisdom is like torching the ancient library in Alexandria.
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Washington Post on Trump's Gaza plan