Wild Spiders

 At most news out of the Trump administration, I feel only a kind of impersonal disgust, revulsion, contempt or indignation. 

The current crisis over Greenland, though, is one of those times in the Trump era (and there have been a few before) when I have felt something closer to actual panic. 

These are the moments when you realize we are not led merely by a cruel and incompetent man—but by a kind of Hitlerian maniac, who would destroy the whole world and everything in it just to impose his arbitrary will on others. 

Trump himself admitted in a text message to the Norwegian prime minister that he no longer feels obliged to consider the interests of world peace, since he didn't get the Nobel Peace Prize he wanted. 

He is evidently a man of such bottomless infantile narcissism that he essentially admits he's willing to ignite World War III just to punish a non-governmental committee in Norway for a perceived slight. 

"Waaaa, I didn't get the present I wanted for my birthday party, so now I get to destroy the human race and all future generations to punish you all!"

Here is a U.S. president who threatens routinely to torpedo the entire world economy in order to force our own longstanding allies to accede to his baseless, irrational demands. 

Europe doesn't want to let him steal their sovereign territory? Tariffs!

France doesn't care to join his "Board of Peace," which has already dropped the pretext of having anything to do with rebuilding Gaza and become an all-purpose bid to create a new, Trump-centric world order? Tariffs again!

And if I'm panicking at the spectacle—just think what the completely innocent and unoffending people of Greenland must be going through right now—who ask for nothing more than just to be left alone in peace!

Many of them are apparently already debating whether to flee the country or stay and fight in the event of an unprovoked U.S. invasion. 

Some are already having to contemplate leaving their elderly parents behind. 

Trump has raised the specter of actual armed confrontation between nuclear powers—and for nothing! For an attempt to steal land that the U.S. military already has territorial access to, and which belongs to our own treaty allies!

This is the same level of existential threat as the Cuban Missile Crisis, except now it's our own government that has provoked it, and for even less geo-strategic cause.

And there's nothing to be done! Can the world survive the three more years it will take for this man's term in office to expire? Can it survive even to the midterms? 

I thought of those Greenlanders trying to figure out how to save their elderly parents. I thought of my own parents in Florida—would we flee, if war came? Where would we go? Who would take us? Canada can't be too happy with Americans right now either...

A father's no shield

for his child.

We are like a lot of wild

spiders crying together,

but without tears. 

—as Robert Lowell wrote of the terrifying nuclear confrontations of the 1960s that risked armageddon. And here we are again.

Except that we are the ones now making all the threats—and we're doing it against our own friends, who fought and bled for us in Afghanistan!

The madness of it! The disgrace!