A great goon won and kind of dumped on me and my country. (It’s a remnant from philosophy show-and-tell, a truly exaggerated enterprise.)

I never dump back. I hope his coming losses help him become a better entrepreneur and public intellectual. Or I wish him savvier gurus.

Planet Earth is Maoist hell — ringed with grassy estates where that guy or better you and I can tiptoe or fall further to get beyond our laughter. Gracious and conservatively dressed, we also choose to move comfortably, absorbed in desire to sleep with any clown in a storm, anybody great.
But a lot of these crises pass. Today and in a future of interdependence I write him out of our poem.

— 11/09/16