Can America return back through the looking glass?

This is your far-flung correspondent Ed Palm here once again with two topics for the price of one.

Topic the first. Move over, Alice. The United States of America has gone through the looking glass. Readers may recall that, in keeping with the nature of mirrors, Alice finds everything to be reversed on the other side of her looking glass. That’s our situation as well here in Trump’s America. Everything is reversed. Right is wrong, wrong is right. A case in point is what I recently heard a conservative pundit say on Sirius XM — that Trump’s critics are not nice people.

Okay. Guilty as charged. So how am I not nice by Trumpian standards? Let me list some of the ways:

I was raised to believe honesty is the best policy. Trump’s true believers excuse his thousands of selfserving lies, misrepresentations, and gross exaggerations as the means to a desirable end — one-man autocratic rule. I shudder at the thought.

I was likewise raised to believe it’s not nice to make fun of a person’s disability. And I consider name calling to be juvenile and disgraceful.

I still expect public officials to comport themselves with a degree of civility, decorum, and decency.

I cling to the hope that Democrats and Republican will commit themselves to compromise and cooperation. I think vilifying and vowing revenge against political enemies is uncalled for and un-American. I long to return to the days when both parties viewed one another as the loyal opposition and not mortal enemies.

There is no evidence the last presidential election was stolen. Hence, I don’t believe it was.

I was taught that conspiracies sooner or later unravel and that there are generally simpler explanations for events and developments we don’t like.

I can’t accept that a “deep state,” a secret cabal, is acting behind the scenes to control our government.

I just cannot make light of January 6, 2021. I still think it will go down in history as America’s second “day of infamy.” And Trump’s inaction on that day convinces me he meant it literally, and not metaphorically, when he said, “If you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.”

I can’t shake the Cold War conviction that Russia is our adversary and that no good would come of a Russian victory in Ukraine.

I consider diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives to be good things, and I believe reactionary efforts to suppress and even outlaw them will only lead to more racial strife. The opposite of diversity is division.

Along the same lines, it seems to me that to be “woke,” in the original, non-pejorative sense, is a good thing. The opposite is to be asleep and insensate to inequity, injustice, and oppression.

Call me unmanly, but I just can’t get behind patriarchy. I believe Roe v. Wade was the right call and that women are entitled to the same body autonomy as men.

Above all, I can’t shake the conviction that no one is above the law in America — not even the president of the United States. The Justice Department has not been weaponized against Donald Trump. All his legal problems are of his own doing. They’re the result of his undisciplined amoral, megalomaniacal, and narcissistic impulses.

I suppose what it all boils down to is a trait we Baby Boomers have in common. As I’ve written before, we were raised to believe “truth, justice, and the American way” was a redundant phrase. I’ve yet to outgrow the naïve idealism represented in that phrase. That’s why I’m just not MAGA nice. I’m hoping we will soon step back through Trump’s looking glass.

Topic the second. Only recently have I realized what the Israel-Hamas War is finally all about. Forget Netanyahu’s stated aim of eliminating Hamas as a fighting organization. He and his defense minister must realize that is never going to happen. Hamas may not be a multinational terrorist organization, but they share a radical Islamic ideology with like-minded organizations throughout the Middle East. More to the point, Israel may be able to kill the majority of Hamas fighters, but the Hamas cadre can slip across the border into Jordan — where it could recruit and reconstitute its strength. And given the way the war has inflamed the region, Hamas wouldn’t lack for volunteers.

This is not to make light of the October 7 Hamas attack on Israel. Roughly 1,200 Israelis died. The irony is that Israel has responded in just the way Hamas wanted them to. They have fallen into a trap right out of Mao’s playbook. The point is to get a superior force to overreact and respond with overwhelming, indiscriminate force that causes significant collateral damage. The point is to kill and displace innocent civilians, thereby alienating the populace.

And it’s working. As of March 15, Israel has killed almost 35,000 people in Gaza and injured nearly 75,000 more. I’m not alone in judging Israel to have lost the moral high ground.

What it all comes down to is the revenge ethic that passed into Mosaic Law from the Code of Hammurabi — “an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, a hand for a hand,” and so on. Note that this code authorizes titfor-tat revenge and not annihilation or even decimation. Do the math: 35,000 Gazans divided by 1,200 Israelis. Israel has avenged their losses 29 times over. Isn’t that revenge enough?

It’s time to call a halt to the madness and to negotiate a two-state solution. In the words of one of the bards of my generation, “All [I] am saying is give peace a chance.” Otherwise, the pundits will be quoting the Roman historian Tacitus: “They made a desert and called it peace.”