No bottom

I was ready to write a lighthearted piece about that radio masterpiece The Goon Show because yesterday's events reminded me of an episode from 1956, "The MacReekie Rising of '74."  I found it on YouTube and listened to it again and sure enough, there's a reference to weaponized soup (Brown Windsor, actually).  It's a response to a Scottish siege of the Tower of London with the Scots firing porridge -- classic Spike Milligan absurdity.  Good fun, a little racist, wouldn't make it on today's BBC but come on, weaponized soup.

 Then Jeffrey Goldberg wrote this, and the Atlantic published it, and Rachel Maddow read parts of it, incredulously, on her show.  We knew Trump had contempt for John McCain for presuming to debate him, and for Captain Humayun Khan because his parents were at the 2016 Democratic convention, but it was still possible to interpret that as the way he constantly lashes out at anyone who opposes him.  Now we know of his utter contempt for the very concept of military service, a job for "losers" and "suckers."  It wasn't the weather that kept him away from Aisne-Marne American cemetery, it was the same corrosive contempt; he couldn't understand why the Marines buried there died fighting against Germany (possibly thinking it was already under Nazi rule).  He threatened Donald Junior with loss of inheritance if he joined the army; too bad, it might have made a man of him.  He hated George H.W. Bush, who was neither captured nor killed, simply because his plane was shot down.  Sucker.

In a passage that will be studied by psychopathologists, Goldberg describes how Trump stood at the grave of Lieutenant Robert Kelly in Arlington and said, "I don't get it.  What was in it for them?"  The response of Lieutenant Kelly's father, General John Kelly, is not recorded, but he subsequently accepted the job of running Trump's White House so --- I don't know, make of that what you can.  If people who work for Trump are not damaged when they start, they sure leave that way.

I started with a cultural artifact and I return to one:  the end of The Godfather.  Michael has just joined the Marines and Sonny angrily demands to know how he could be so dumb as to fight for strangers.  It's the gangster faith:  the Family is the only organization to which you owe loyalty.  Trump is the one-man Corleone Family.  How did we ever produce anything so vile?