Analogy is wrong
Dear editor:
One of my teachers handed back a paper remarking: “It’s good to get an essay like this one, so bad that it suggests a throat slit from side to side. There isn’t any question about the diagnosis.”
Dr. Sternberg’s letter (Friday, Aug. 10, 2018) would have pleased my teacher.
The analogy is wrong. A politician’s public manners are part of the job. He or she may have to deal with other politicians of varying temperament, from varied cultures, with different concerns and responsibilities. To be effective, the politician must consider those others. A mechanic, or a doctor, need not pay much attention to the client, but a mayor, a senator and surely a president must to avoid misunderstanding, rancor and, often, failure.
The president, however, is arrogant to our NATO allies, foolish in his insistence on building a wall experts say will not prevent illegal immigration, insensitive in his failure to negotiate with the Mexican president before repeatedly vowing to make Mexico pay for the wall, cruel in his disregard for children separated from their parents, and the list goes on.
It may be reasonable to ask whether Mr. Trump is stupid or a borderline psychotic or a narcissistic megalomaniac. He must be one or several to make such world-threatening blunders as rejecting the Paris Accords in the face of scientific agreement about the present and mounting danger climate change poses. His false claim that North Korea is on its way to dismantling its nuclear arsenal, which his own advisers deny, is frightening to anyone familiar with Hiroshima and Nagasaki. His cozying up to dictators such as Putin and Duterte suggests he would like to be a dictator himself, and he is well on his way thanks to his blind-to-reality apologists.
He relies on lies and bravado in semiliterate tweets and contradicts himself repeatedly without shame, as, for example, when he claims that his inauguration crowd was larger than Obama’s or the Women’s March or that millions of illegal immigrants voted for Hillary, demonstrably false as anyone other than a zealot recognizes.
He makes outrageous, un-American statements, for example, that fascists such as the white supremacists in Charlottesville were comparable to the civil rights protesters — that they included “good people, too.” He flaunts his ignorance of and contempt for law and morality, as his numerous bankruptcies and unpaid debts showed, along with his racial slurs and rabble-rousing calls for jailing Hillary and the execution of five innocent young men in the Central Park rape case.
As for the good doctor’s bugaboo “pro-Christianity,” let me remind him that Jefferson’s phrase, “Wall of separation between church and state,” codifies what is implicit in the Constitution, as the Supreme Court has repeatedly affirmed. (He might also note that Jefferson did not expect Mexico to pay for his “wall.”)
As Pliny said (but in Latin): “Cobbler, stick to thy last.” Clearly, logic, empathy and the ability to discriminate between vainglory and serious discourse tax Dr. Sternberg’s capacity. His diatribe should have found a home in the Dead Letter Office. Stuart Jay Silverman Hot Springs