Time Isn’t Money, and Other Facts
I see a headline informing me that Donald Trump is giving a speech to Congress this evening (U.S. time), which I am told I can watch “live.” I am not even remotely tempted. First of all, I have a habit of not listening to Vladimir Putin’s official spokesmen, regardless of which language they happen to be butchering. Second, if you have endlessly mounting evidence that someone is an inveterate liar and blowhard, you would have to be an idiot to care what he happens to be saying today — especially when he is on script — except as further evidence of his scheming duplicity, which, as noted here over the past few days, has already reached a point beyond which there is nothing left to learn. Third, contrary to the old and very American (in the worst sense) saw, time is not money. Money can be recouped, invested at interest, or even lived without. Time cannot.
Trump, in one of his great nine-dimensional chess moves, is inviting Putin to mediate nuclear arms talks with Iran. In other words, America’s idol is playing tit for tat with his own idol, taking on the role of impartial (“I don’t want advantage”) middleman for peace between Russia and Ukraine — as though moral abstention were a righteous position to take in proposing to mediate between a brutal killer and his innocent intended victim — and likewise allowing Putin to take the identical role between himself and the mullahs. In other words, he is doubling down on the public relations victory that he has already handed Putin, not merely saving the KGB thug from the lowest ebb of isolation, economic rot, and military humiliation, but re-establishing him instantly as a legitimate and respectable player and strategic partner in achieving America’s own foreign policy interests. Three years into a war of annihilation against a sovereign nation that the U.S. has been (albeit weakly) supporting in its fight for survival, Putin is suddenly elevated to the role of moral equal (or better) to the elected president of the country he is seeking to obliterate, and indispensable facilitator of peace and global security in the Middle East. Trump is singlehandedly rescuing a major threat to world peace and freedom, and not only rescuing him from practical defeat, but normalizing his brutality and expansionist aggression through moral equivalency and personal advocacy.
By the way, although Trump cannot understand this, it is worth mentioning for the benefit of his many slavish adherents both within the administration and throughout America and the world, especially the ones among them who used to know this very clearly before they sold their souls to a cult of personality: Peace and freedom cannot be treated as separate goals unless one construes peace as consistent with the non-violent (i.e., completely subdued) condition of universal enslavement. On the standard Trump is promoting through all his words and deeds right now, North Korea ought to be judged as a society at peace. Trump is working hard to establish such peace on a global scale; peace not as the condition of stabilized freedom, but rather as the condition of unresisted tyranny.
