The Hard Way
A man and a woman are out on a date. Over a candlelit dinner, he says to her: “I need to have sex with you. I’m going to get it. We can do this the easy way or the hard way. I don’t rule out raping you.”
Waiting for a punchline? It’s not a joke, just a direct analogy to what Donald Trump’s said about seizing Greenland. With the island, as with the date, any possibility of a consensual encounter’s now been destroyed; anything that happens, or doesn’t happen, will be shaped by the threat. Guy also pushes the check toward her, saying, “Here’s the tariff, you fucking bitch.” Girl realizes the other guy she’d been dating isn’t so bad after all.
The next day, the guy texts and clarifies, “I probably won’t get anything unless I decide to use excessive strength and force, where I’d be, frankly, unstoppable, but I won’t do that.” He demands another date to discuss the matter, saying he’ll “remember” if she turns him down.
There was a time I would’ve thought the US acquiring Greenland could be a good thing, if it were in keeping with public opinion there and with Denmark’s amenability. But now it’s clear to me it should never happen, as going forward it could only be a validation of coercion and megalomania. An AI-altered image posted by Trump, with the president and foreign leaders sitting around a map of not just Greenland but Canada and Venezuela annexed to the US, is a national disgrace, along with Trump’s insane assertion that not getting the Nobel Peace Prize justifies him in putting aside considerations of peace in dealing with allies.
I had a claustrophobic dream recently. Woke up and paced the house, something I’d do in anxiety attacks years ago, which I’d learned to replace by breathing exercises and a semblance of rational thought. Wasn’t so easy calming down this time. Knew that looking at my phone would be a bad idea, a glimpse into derangement, not just our president’s but that of people whose support for him is encrusted in willful ignorance. Friends of mine.
Spending considerable time on social media, especially X with its numerous fake users and algorithmic promotion of racism and misogyny, is unwise these days. I recently spoke to a fast-rising scientist I know whose social-media participation is negligible; I suggested this might be a secret to her success, and she replied it was for maintaining her sanity. I can’t entirely take that approach, as the serendipity of social media’s useful for journalists. But I’ve stepped up looking for and reading new and upcoming books, as a better use of time.
Recent review-copy request: The First Fascist: The Sensational Life and Dark Legacy of the Marquis de Morès, by Sergio Luzzatto (Harvard University Press, Feb. 10). I first thought I’d never heard of this person, then realized I’d read of him long ago in Edmund Morris’ great The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt. When the future president was a North Dakota rancher, he met the French aristocrat, there doing the same thing, and they became friends or frenemies. At one point, there was a rift, with Morès stating that if Roosevelt were his enemy, they should settle the matter directly, worrisome in that the Frenchman was an expert duelist while Roosevelt was near-sighted. T.R. wrote back that they weren’t enemies.
Settling matters with violence is a commonplace of history but something the US and other democratic nations had some success in limiting, in domestic politics and international relations alike, for some three-quarters of a century following World War II. I took a dark view of what a second Trump administration would be like, but it wasn’t nearly dark enough. Annexationist ambitions, along with the use of secret-police tactics within the U.S., were beyond my scenario-building. People who approve of such developments, or shrug them off, fail to appreciate that a government that’s not bound by functioning laws and rules, with a robust separation of powers, can do whatever it wants, to whomever it wants.