The Great Evangelical President

He may be right. He's lied so often that it's hard to trust anything he's saying. But let's just say he's right about the way he and his Secretary of War are running operations in Central America, picking off boats along the shore like fish in a barrel. Let's just say that each of these blasted boats were loaded to the gills with drugs. Let's just say that their pay for their grunt work in the drug trade is being picked up by someone or another in these United States. . . let's just say it's all true and Hegseth isn't the creep he presents himself to be. Let's just call them all saints.

I don't care. There's still every reason to believe that Donald E. Trump has been the most heinous American President in the whole line of succession. We've never, ever had someone in the Oval Office who's even hinted at outright hate the way the Orange man has and does. Yesterday, it was the Somalians, especially those from Minnesota: “We could go one way or the other, and we’re going to go the wrong way if we keep taking in garbage into our country.” 

We've never had a Chief of State who called an entire ethnic group of people "garbage." But as long as he'd delivered that madness, he figured, well, katy, bar the door. He went after Rep. Ilhan Omar, a Somali American congresswoman, duly elected, a “fraud” who “shouldn’t be allowed to be a congresswoman.”

All of this just yesterday from evangelical Christianity's President, a jerk who called the mayor of Minneapolis "a fool" for being proud of the state's considerable Somali population. 

Great guy. 

Oh, yeah--and on another track, Trump decided, for reasons all his own, to pardon the former President of Honduras, who was in prison here having been convicted of running drugs--cocaine--from his own oval office. Convicted. Tried and convicted--and Trump frees him when he spends a quarter-million every time he blows up a boat in the Caribbean for doing--if we believe our President--what former President Juan Orlando Hernández was not just accused, but convicted of doing out of his own back door. 

Does that make any sense?

And then there's this--a note from JoAnne Van Engen, who's lived in Honduras for the last 25 years of her life, and, with the ASJ makes it a habit to run in the face of political corruption. 

Trusted poling showed Honduras's Liberal party with a ten-point lead over the National party candidate, with the government candidate a distant third. 

Here's part of her report on that nation's Presidential election, held a week or so ago:

That lead was erased when President Trump tweeted his support of Asfura last Wednesday, warning Hondurans that the US would withdraw all support if Asfura did not win. Many worried Hondurans decided to switch their vote to Asfura. Twenty-four hours later, President Trump tweeted that he would pardon Honduras’ ex-president, Juan Orlando Hernandez who had been convicted of drug trafficking in the US and was serving a long sentence in a US federal prison. (Juan Orlando was released from prison today).

Aside from the kind of meddling that has created "the ugly American," Trump pardons a convicted, crooked pol who dealt in cocaine smuggling in a fashion that makes those little boats look like a computer game. 

Does that make any sense? Only in Trump's orbit, which is--thank goodness--growing smaller every week. 

Train Dreams

It doesn't take long into Train Dreams to realize that you've found your way into something that isn't what it seems.  You're thinking maybe a "western"?--after all, the cinematography moves lazily through settings that are respected, even loved by whoever is holding the camera. But Train Dreams is not a "western," if by the term we mean something mean and snarly about cowboys and/or Indians. 

It's not just local color, a regional piece, either, although it stops and stays with a mountain community in the mountain-range Idaho or Montana maybe. Train Dreams isn't political, as such--it doesn't try to wrack up points for rugged individualism or some bygone patriotic spirit. Trump wouldn't like it--it's not MAGA, but then it's not anti-MAGA either. It doesn't fuss with politics.

Train Dreams is one man's story. He happens to depend upon the construction of the western railroad to gain a living, to gain a life, although his heart is quite blessedly hundreds of miles away with a loving wife and baby.

Tragedy strikes, as it was almost bound to. It's a story, after all, and it has a conflict--nothing less than death itself; and when death happens the movie is all about anguish and sadness and an endless world of grief. 

But there's no woman-in-waiting, no substitute for a woman he loved and the child the two of them brought into the world. There's only loneliness and the struggle this wilderness man puts up to do little more than hope for some magical return that never happens. 

Train Dreams is about him, but it's also about us, not some cartoon version of us but us, inside and out. It doesn't move like movies, so don't expect it to. It's only secondarily about a man who suffers; it's primarily about what it means to be human. It's about grief and hope and life itself, and all of that doesn't come nicely packaged for Christmas. It can be hard to watch, but it's also mesmerizing because we want to know about him and we want to know about us.

It's a beautiful film and, right now at least, its unlike anything else you'll see on the screen in the family room.

It's beautiful, and you can watch it sometime soon on Netflix. Just look for Train Dreams. Right now, there's nothing else like it. It's just beautiful.

Resort and Country Club

Let me be out with it--I know I risk a really bad joke by saying it this way, but I'm going to do it anyway. Getting from the stone monument beside the road (from Litchfield, MN, go east on Hwy. 12 to 9 south to County Road 18, then east for three miles where you'll find the monument on the south side of the road.) --like I say, getting from the monument where Little Crow was killed from, say, Spicer, MN, the gateway to "up-north" Minnesota, wouldn't take all that long, as the crow flies, as they say. I know, I know!--that's an impossibly bad  joke because neither of us is a crow. What I'm saying is, getting to the monument is something of a chore, especially if you're accustomed to life on the square, as it exists through most of the rural Upper Midwest. "As the crow flies" it wouldn't take long, but neither of us is a crow.

Nor  was Little Crow. What I'm saying is, getting to that lonesome monument from just north of Spicer is a trick, believe me. It's not easy getting around all those lakes--county trunks like pick-up sticks trying desperately to stay out of the water. It's not close. Not at all close--maybe an hour, even as the crow flies.

But we're not talking about crows here, we're talking about a Native headman whose people looked to him for leadership when they really needed him, when they were starving, when they were helpless victims of crooked government agents who knew darn well that taking a job with an Indian agency meant making a fairly cushy living. 

If you're thinking war paint and tom-toms, don't. When Little Crow went to church with the missionaries, he wore a suit-and-tie, as if he were a good Presbyterian, which, after a fashion, he was. And when his starving people asked him to general their uprising against the endless swarm of immigrants moving into the lakes region, Little Crow, to his credit, told his people they didn't stand a chance in hell of stopping the flow because there were so many more of them--and more a'coming--than there were Dakota warriors.

But he'd do it, he told them, even though it was a fool's errand, which it was. For about a month, the Dakota War of 1862 was sheer horror, hundreds of newly-arrived homesteaders blindly attacked and slaughtered unmercifully. But soon enough, just as Little Crow had prophesied, the whites were simply too many and too strong, even though legions of Minnesotans were somewhere down South fighting to preserve the Union. 

When it was over, hundreds on both sides were dead and the cause of peace in the brand new state of Minnesota was ruptured, not to be repaired for hateful decades. 

Little Crow lit out north to Canada, but then, just a year later, he'd returned to the  homeland and was out picking raspberries with his son when a white farmer and his son spotted the two of them, then tangled a bit before Little Crow, headman of the Wahpakute Dakota, was felled by a bullet right there at said highway marker, where you can read the story for yourself. It's not pretty.

What was left of Little Crow was prize booty for a time, in the throes of the blood lust created by what-seemed senseless killing of so many homesteaders. Parts of his body, literally, were celebrated in town picnics. 

What little remains of it is buried respectfully in the Riverview Cemetery, Flandreau, South Dakota, where his gravestone stands with dignity in a circle of his people. 

I'm bringing all of that up because just a month ago or so we stayed at a place just north of Spicer, a well-kept resort on a golf course that prides itself in being a joy, a place called--I'm not making this up--Little Crow Resort and Country Club. I'm serious. 

You can always tell something of the age of a motel by the bathroom fixtures. Little Crow Resort is no longer brand new, but the course looked fastidiously groomed. It's a pretty place. Friendly staff, too, believe me, small-town folks. 

I asked the  woman behind the desk if she had any idea where the name of the place came from--"Little Crow Resort and Country Club." Was it a nearby lake maybe?--there are, after all, dozens of them.

"Oh, shoot," she said, searching the room behind me and over my shoulder. "The boss isn't here right now--he knows about stuff like that."

I smiled and thanked her for an especially good breakfast. 

Like I say, as the crow flies, maybe a half hour away from the place the old chief died. A good bit longer if you drive.