Trump out of his element as president
Some late-evening text messaging with my son last week focused on a question I had never pondered.
Which is more difficult to explain to a 4-year-old: puns or procreation?
My son had just attempted the former in the course of the evening’s bedtime routine with his children. I congratulated him on performing admirable preparatory exercises ahead of the inevitable day when his turn came to have “the talk.”
In the exchange that followed, we agreed that while it may be harder to initiate the conversation about sex, the subtleties and mechanics of clever punning make sex seem almost simple.
Fresh from binge-watching World Cup matches for the past month, I later had the thought that puns (and perhaps procreation) have much in common with offside and handball calls on a soccer field. I have yet to meet anyone who can clearly explain the offside rule with all its nuances, but nearly everyone on the field or in the stands believes they know an offside violation when they see it — or don’t when their side gets flagged.
One would think handball calls are easier, but as the world witnessed when the referee called a handball on Croatia and awarded France a penalty kick after a player clearly deflected the ball with his hand in the championship match July 15, some saw a handball, some quite angrily did not.
“Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana.” Could you explain to a 4-year-old what makes that funny? Even if you could, by the time you interpreted the metaphor in the first sentence and the difference between “flies” as a verb in the first sentence and a noun in the second, the child, eyes glazed over, will have fled back into the realm of things concrete, like Legos, while you lecture on about punning theory.
Patiently read a child 20 simple puns — Why do fish live in saltwater? Because pepper makes them sneeze! How do you fix a broken tomato? With tomato paste! — and soon the youngster will begin creating his or her own.
Punning is a game. The best way to learn it is to play.
Much of the world has watched with a measure of unease as another game, the highstakes verbal strategizing known as statecraft, played out in recent days. Most everyone but President Donald Trump wonders what rules and principles he followed as he berated our NATO allies, denounced the European Union as our “foes,” blamed our current tensions with Russia on the foolishness of the United States and confessed more faith in Vladimir Putin’s denial than in our intelligence agencies’ allegations that Russia has meddled nefariously in our elections.
Despite hedging slightly in response to furious blowback, the president has withdrawn none of these points.
Some see all this as evidence that Trump has conspired somehow with Russia and Putin, or that Russia has extortion-worthy dirt on Trump. Some wonder whether our president sweettalks Putin because he covets his dictatorial authority. Most, however, whether detractors or members of his political base, assume we have merely witnessed more of Trump being Trump — diplomatically unorthodox, shooting from the hip, deliberately creating uncertainty, ignoring all counsel but his own.
The simplest explanation? We chose as captain a player who doesn’t truly understand the game. Trump knows games, but not the one we need a president to play. If for some reason we picked a baseball manager to referee a World Cup game, the game would become a joke. Which is pretty much what we find ourselves inhabiting at the moment.
Like a bad pun, it’s not funny.