Pearl Harbor

 Back when Trump staged his cowardly unprovoked sneak attack on Iran's navy—and most especially after the U.S. blew up an Iranian war ship with a torpedo, killing over a hundred people who were not legally at war with our country—the first thing I thought of was Pearl Harbor. 

"This is Trump's 'day of infamy!'" I thought. "He's doing to another country just what Japan did to us at Pearl Harbor!"

I thought the comparison would really own Trump and his supporters. Once they hear this analogy, they will have to re-consider. 

But then Trump went ahead and made the comparison himself. During his meeting with the Japanese prime minister this week, he was asked at one point why he didn't alert our allies (including Japan) before proceeding with his illegal war of aggression. 

The element of surprise, he replied—in so many words. Did Japan tell us ahead of time about Pearl Harbor? Talk about surprise! Who knows surprise like the Japanese? 

Okay, so Trump agrees that his attack on Iran was a craven act of unprovoked slaughter on the same order as the Japanese attack on the U.S. fleet in 1941. Got it. 

As always, then, any moral critique one can make against Trump turns out to be useless and redundant. Because Trump rejects the very premise of other-directed morality. To say he did an evil thing is no slight, in his book. 

So he's an evil narcissist whose most conspicuous trait is his complete indifference to human life. Got it. 

Oh, and he has the worst tin ear for diplomacy in presidential history. With this one weird and uncomfortable joke, Trump managed to torpedo decades of effort to heal the wounds in the U.S.-Japanese relationship left over from World War II and Hiroshima. 

Yet another reminder that we are being led as a nation by the mental equivalent of the drunken troglodytic Japanophobe in E.E. Cummings's "ygUduh":

yunnuhstan dem doidee

yguduh ged riduh...

And how about those 100-plus Iranian sailors who are now at the bottom of the ocean, much like our own sailors in 1941—"slain in brutish battle / though they have injured none"—to borrow a line from Thomas Hardy? 

The Wall Street Journal—no paragon in most circumstances of pacifist sentiment—ran a piece after the attack that described their innocuous activities touring around India in the days before their horrific sudden execution by American torpedo. 

The details are heartbreakingly humanizing, given what we know our country did to these men, without legal or moral rationale. 

The Journal reports: "one Dena sailor, speaking to an independent journalist, Samson Sagar, marveled at the flavor of biryani, an Indian rice dish he had sampled. 'So spicy!' the sailor said, covering his mouth."

Yes; quaint and curious war is, alright—as Thomas Hardy also said— 

  You shoot a fellow down

You'd treat if met where any bar is,

            Or help to half-a-crown.