Rex Tillerson, I have a modest proposal for you

When I was a child, we learned how to use grammar and punctuation properly. This educational practice has withered over the last half-century, and nothing suggests it will be revived.

We also learned how to respond to a nuclear attack — how to crouch under our desks, how to cover our heads, and how to remind each other not to look directly at the flash of the explosion. This educational practice also faded away over the last half-century. But now, with the intractable tensions with North Korea, it may be on its way toward restoration.

This reopens a lingering question: What were we to do next if our desks protected us from mortal injury?

Appraised by hindsight, our training in the survival of nuclear war was not over-supplied with practicality or wisdom. Memory is an unreliable instrument, but I seem to remember one additional training exercise: After we came out from under our desks, we were to run home as fast as we could in order to reunite with our families.

This peculiar assignment gave me one of my earliest opportunities to remark to myself, “The adults who are in charge of things may not be entirely up to the task.”

And yet, even with that unsettling recognition, I still had a mooring that children today do not have: I had reason to believe that important national leaders would conduct themselves as responsible people who were navigating on a planet of complexity with care and forethought. I believed that Dwight Eisenhower and John F. Kennedy were guided by a full recognition that they should avoid impulsive remarks and actions, since the use of nuclear weapons was a fearful prospect that required them to act with deliberation and caution.

And this brings me to a suggestion for Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, who seems to be at wit’s end and who might therefore be receptive to an innovative idea.

I want Secretary Tillerson to flatter President Donald Trump by urging him to accept the role — and to play it to the hilt — of a mature and responsible adult, designing his actions with forethought, avoiding inflammatory remarks when dealing with the leader of North Korea, and thereby making it possible again for American children to trust their elders.

There is abundant evidence that President Trump loves theatricality and performance. And, as Peter Baker of The New York Times rightly observed, he is “always on the hunt for new story lines.” Hence, there is real promise in persuading Tillerson to propose a “new story line” to the president: “You will be perfect in the role of the leader who steers this frightening standoff with North Korea to an outcome that does not involve nuclear weapons.”

Americans, Tillerson promised two months ago, “should sleep well at night,” undisturbed by fears of nuclear war. I hope that he has friends who keep up with columns in The Denver Post, and I hope he will see this idea as a way to give substance to that promise.

Trump may not, in actuality, be a president capable of protecting and sustaining the world in a crisis. But there is every reason to persuade him to play such a person on TV — and even on Twitter.

Patty Limerick is Colorado’s state historian and faculty director and chair of the Center of the American West at the University of Colorado.