Bureaucrats everywhere

The recent news that the Catholic church has come out against gluten-free wafers made me laugh. Putting my theologian hat on for a second: communion is not a magic ritual where you must get the material components right or the spell doesn't work. It's a reminder of your relationship with the all-powerful creator of the universe. Even if you accept the doctrine of transubstantiation (which I do not, even theoretically), a creator who routinely transforms bread into divine flesh is not going to be troubled by the exact gluten level.

If communion were required and there was no wine or bread, diet coke and twinkies would serve just as well. You would let the coke go flat though, to avoid distraction from the point of the ceremony. And it is this which makes gluten free communion host the right thing to do. If you were at an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting you might use water instead of wine; and if you were at a celiac's convention you would use gluten free bread. Because if the person taking communion fears what they are eating, they are not thinking about their relationship with God.

This is a key problem with organized religion. There is always someone who has to overthink what are often deeply ambiguous texts, which means they keep adding rules and restrictions that only make sense in their reading of the text. Whenever I see something like this I remember once again all the people who have fought and in some cases died for religious freedom. So that I can laugh, dash off a blog post disagreeing with it, and move on with my life - instead of struggling to find some way to handle an unnecessary rule while hiding my frustration with the hierarchy that created it.

I am not celiac, but I know people who are. Who wants to find themselves with a choice between making themselves sick or excluding themselves from a deeply important community ceremony? What do you do when some busybody inevitably pronounces that any resulting harm means God has rejected you?

Cardinal Sarah should find something more important to do with his life.

The Trump clown show

I must confess that I have been really enjoying the Trump presidency. This is not because he's been so much better than I expected him to be; and it's not because the Democrats have been really effective at opposing him. No, it's because he's been such a bumbling incompetent that he hasn't been able to get anything done. There's a whole slew of government appointments that require senate approval and are currently vacant. This is not because the senate is being obstructionist, it's because he just hasn't nominated anybody.

My assessment of Trump is that he didn't expect to be president; didn't plan to be president; didn't really want to be president; and didn't expect the presidency to be such hard work. To the extent that he wanted the job, he thought it was all public appearances, applause, and telling people what to do. He thought he could sort out all sorts of things (Middle East peace, healthcare) because he was a smart businessman and all the people who'd tried before were bumbling idiots. This is because Trump himself is a simplistic blowhard. He just wants to watch TV, play golf, and carp on Twitter.

Probably the best example of Trump incompetence has been the whole Russia saga. As far as I can see the Russians hacked Democrat campaign emails and put them on Wikileaks, flooded social media with pro-Trump trolls, and probed US voting systems (I have no idea whether that was practice, preparation for next time, or they planned to cast doubt on an expected Clinton win). None of that required any collusion with the Trump campaign. Talking to the Russians was never going to be anything other than a bad look; lying about the meetings they had was just going to make things worse. They seem to have gone out of their way to make it all look as bad as possible. Firing Comey (remember that?) was just a cherry on the sundae.

And this incompetence has consequences. You can argue that the Republican congress is doing its grisly work on health care under cover of the Trump disaster area. But what previous president would not have been out there arguing their case, twisting arms, convincing doubters, and using his office to promote the agenda? Trump could have been expected to be a persuasive campaigner - his whole presidency has been built on connecting to the people at rallies. But this is where his inability to make coherent arguments is coming to the fore. It's great to go out and just say what people want to hear and bask in the applause; it doesn't work when there are genuine hard decisions to be made.

Trump has still done some destructive things at home and abroad - defunding agencies and appointing people to departments who want them dismantled, repudiating agreements and weakening confidence in the US, but most of what he has actually achieved has been standard Republican fare. I worried that he would implement a Steve Bannon-approved agenda, but Bannon has been as unable to get Trump to do things as the rest of America. I expect most of the damage he does at home will be a combination of Republican policies and plain neglect; unless he can improve his administration's image by the end of 2018, the normal mid-term swing to the Democrats could just leave neglect as his strongest weapon.

Just to be contrarian, Trump could end up decisively avoiding the Thucididyes trap. Although he would at first glance seem like exactly the kind of aggressive, bullying idiot who would fall straight into it, Trump has made a series of decisions that seem designed to weaken America's overseas alliances and damage its prestige. Basically he has presented the US as a selfish, ill-informed and unreliable ally. This is at a key time when China's economic power is matching the US. Exactly when that will happen depends strongly on your definitions, but China's sheer size means it only has to roughly track US technological levels to be much, much bigger. The fight that the US and China could get into depends critically on each side thinking itself strong enough to have an advantage; if one side knows it will lose (or not win), there will be a backdown. If Trump weakens the US fast enough, it could get through that critical period before anyone has time to start anything.

So. Once again, the best we can hope for is that Trump is incompetent enough to limit the results of his own incompetence. I for one have little confidence that China would make an appealing global hegemon, and I hope that the damage Trump does will be limited by the public reaction to it.

In the meantime, I will keep watching as he engages in public ballistic podiatry. You have to take these small joys where you can.