Thank God it’s Friday. 
 
This weekend, let’s all take a nice, refreshing break from seeing the North Korea summit as a disturbing victory for Kim Jong-un and reflect upon it as an arguably-even-more-disturbing victory for Xi Jinping. 
 
Having long sought a suspension of U.S.-South Korea military exercises that President Trump has now opted to suspend, China has gotten exactly what it wants out of the summit. 
 
Then again, by now, China must be used to getting exactly what it wants from the Trump administration. 
 
The bitter ironies of the Trump era are like a bowl of potato chips: you can’t stop at just one. So  I’m not sure where this ranks on the list of screeching, two-wheel U-turns made by the administration even as it is screaming “pedal to the metal, straight ahead!” But it’s got to be in the top five:
 
Having run in large part as a candidate who would halt the rise of demon China, Trump has done nothing but fuel it. 
 
Just a few Crayola-clear examples:
 
Trump rejected the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which was designed to check the economic power of China by organizing its neighbors into a counterweight. 
 
Yes, Bernie Sanders opposed TPP, and in the end Hillary Clinton pretended she did too – but even had a Trump opponent taken the same tack as Trump on this one item, he or she would not have done so in disastrously China-boosting combination with so many other things.
 
Trump pulled the U.S.  out of the Paris Accord – and governs, of course, at the behest of a group that would love to pull the U.S. out of the whole climate-change kit and caboodle. 
 
Talk about irony. This has allowed China, a country infamous for the black skies of Beijing, to seize the lead on environmental issues.  Wholly apart from the environment – and even from the growing economic activity generated by environmental concerns  – this spells real geopolitical trouble.  The Chinese regime perpetually strives for two aims: total authoritarian control at home, and prestige abroad. This has traditionally been a difficult balance for the Chinese to strike, but Team Trump has made it a whole lot easier. By ceding climate change, the U.S. has handed the Chinese the perfect opportunity to gain international status and influence without ceding a drop of domestic control. 
 
Nor is environmental science the only science that matters here – not by a very long shot. For reasons too irrational to be called “reasons,”  the U.S. has decided to treat brain drain as a national goal. Perpetually underfunding higher education; constantly placing long-term research at the mercy of short-term politics; hassling and harassing foreign-born scientists who want to study or work in the U.S. and thus hampering any collaborations they may undertake with their U.S. counterparts; demonizing intellectual elites as enemies of the average American rather than as catalysts for the employment of millions of average Americans…this country, as enthusiastically embodied by this administration, has chosen to make itself more and more hostile to science and scientists alike. Meanwhile, China is making itself more and more welcoming.  Back in February, the National Science Board predicted that Chinese investment in research and development would overtake U.S. investment by the end of 2018. On June 3, the Washington Post ran an article entitled “China Increasingly Challenges American Dominance of Science,” in which a Spanish-born, Yale-trained researcher gave a simple explanation for why he is currently Beijing-based: “Right now, China is the best place in the world to start your own laboratory.” Meanwhile, the White House has yet to so much as hire a science advisor, though one shudders to imagine whom they’d get.
 
Resource-poor China didn’t need Trump to push it toward resource-rich Africa, where it has been building commercial and political relationships for years. But the president’s signature blend of racism and isolationism do not exactly point that continent toward an American alternative. In the 1980's, the U.S. treated South Africa as a key ally, to the point of treating apartheid far too leniently for far too long. Today, China is the number one trading partner of South Africa, toward which the Trump administration has recently taken two actions:  slapped it with tariffs and threatened to cut aid. 
 
Meanwhile, the greatest Sinophile on earth could not object to an American president who brought all the aggregate strength of this nation and its allies  to bear  against such Chinese practices as dumping, intellectual piracy, and unfair labor practices.  Instead, this American president has turned his ire on Canada and the E.U. 
 
With all this, why bother mentioning Ivanka’s  patents or the bizarre coddling of ZTE? 
 
I don’t know if there is such a thing as a Chinese jig. But I do know that these days, Xi Jinping is doing it.
 
  
 
 

Recently, the Columbia Journalism Review was kind enough to ask what had become of me. Here's  my answer: 

https://www.cjr.org/special_report/leaving-journalism.php/


​

Enough about Samantha Bee. It’s Sally Field I want to scream at. 
 
Bee, of course, called  Ivanka Trump a “feckless cunt” on her t.v. show and the world exploded. She apologized, and unlike Roseanne Barr, she has made no move toward taking the apology back. Thus, unless you’re in the limitless-laceration-of-liberals club, the great Samantha sturm und drang should be well over. 
 
Field’s offense is much worse, yet it is not being treated as an offense at all. Field did not make a mistake by way of uttering a blindingly inappropriate aside in the course of a blisteringly accurate critique, as Bee did when slating Trump for posting a photo of herself coddling her own child as her father ordered asylum-seeking mothers to surrender theirs. 
 
It was solely in relation to that slur and the outrage it had generated that Field deliberately chose to tweet the following: 
 
I like Samantha Bee a lot, but she is flat wrong to call Ivanka a cunt. Cunts are powerful, beautiful, nurturing and honest.
 
Sickeningly, well over a quarter of a million people liked this remark on twitter.
 
In a week when the President of the United States is ignoring devastated Puerto Ricans, tariff-trashing baffled allies, and declaring himself king, it may seem ridiculously petty to bother calling out a tweet made by a celebrity with whose opinion of all things Trump I probably agree. But unless you share the right-wing dismissal of racial and sexual slander as plain old people-talk with which only politically-correct crybabies take issue, it’s anything but.  One either regards the language of human degradation as a signal poison in our politics, or one doesn’t. 
 
I do. 
 
I can’t believe I have to spell this out, but I will spell it out – and just this once, with queasy regret, I will do so without the customary hyphenates and symbol-strings -- %&$*?! --   which serve to make eye-batting little whimsies of concepts that are brutally, boundlessly ugly: 
 
Countries are not shitholes. Human beings are not animals. African-Americans are not apes. Kneeling football players are not SOB’s. Women are not cunts. And for crying out loud, no woman is too contemptible to be called a cunt.
 
Bee did not call Ivanka Trump a vagina or a uterus or a womb or something else that might be considered both a little anatomical for genteel discussion and “powerful, beautiful, nurturing and honest.” She called her a cunt, a term that exists purely to debase and dehumanize women. Sure, there are some academics who want to “reclaim” the word.  Leaving aside the small matter that women have never claimed that word in the first place, I am perfectly prepared to let those academics go off and debate whether women gain power by speaking the language of misogyny.  (Quick answer: They don’t. But there’s a seminar for everything.) I am also aware that there must be a place in the realms of art, entertainment and constitutionally-protected speech for every last word, including this one.
 
But  if and as such academic and artistic expressions cross into the political conversation, which requires at least a  basic level of respect for the dignity of all involved, they do become toxic.
 
So, for purposes of that political  discussion, let’s just keep “cunt” locked in a little taboo-box, shall we? 
 
Let’s at least consider the full implications of letting it out.
 
I do not have time left in this life to count the ways in which I object to the philosophies of Ben Carson and Clarence Thomas.  Is it now all right, in the course of expressing those objections, to call them “niggers?" Or, to follow Field's logic, to assert that they are not even good enough be called  niggers?
 
God, I hope not.
 
Given the degree to which the Trump administration is willing to throw LGBT  people under every bus that passes by, I am appalled to read  that Peter Thiel’s support for  the president  has simply turned to a “souring” that is “rumored,” rather than a disavowal that is deafening. Yet, would it not constitute a slur against all gay people to refer to him as a “faggot?” 
 
God, I hope so.
            
Sally, please. 
 
No mother takes her prepubescent daughter aside and says, “now, honey, this may feel embarrassing for you to talk about right now, but it’s actually a source of pride: you have breasts, you have ovaries, and you have a cunt. Nurture it well.” 
 
Certainly, no woman I can imagine enjoys being told that she is  a cunt, as if that is a wondrous thing to be called. 
 
And the noun is just the half of it. The verb is offensive too – something that ought to be painfully well understood by a woman who has kept on keepin’ on  from Gidget to Sybil to Norma Rae to Mary Todd Lincoln, with the Flying Nun thrown in for good measure. Surely no one can know better than this  feminist survivor of decades in  Hollywood how hard it has been -- and how hard it remains-- for women to get the distinction through the thick skull of society: Women have  breasts and legs and rear ends and reproductive organs. We are  people. 
 
This leaves us with the middle-schooler line of defense:  Trump fanatics do it. 
 
Yes, the reasoning goes, people whom we regard as hateful, destructive, ignorant and crazy tweet and post and cheer at rallies for and adorn their caps, tee-shirts, cars and coffee mugs with every vile, vicious, racist, sexist, homophobic slur imaginable and unimaginable.  So we can do it, too.
 
Stop. Just stop. That is not beating Donald Trump. It is becoming him. 
 
Don’t get me wrong. In my very strong opinion, Ivanka Trump is a complicit, craven, cowardly, probably-criminal creature of catastrophically cataclysmic corruption. But she is not a cunt, let alone some female life-form unworthy of the term.
 No one is. 
 No one.  
 
            

​ Hell seems to be making a habit of freezing over in Ireland.

On May 25, still fairly fresh from becoming, in 2015, the first country to legalize gay marriage by referendum, the overwhelmingly-Catholic nation voted roughly two-to-one to repeal the Eighth Amendment, the 1983 constitutional provision which bans abortion. 
 
If that lopsided result came as a surprise, the reactions to it have not.  Reproductive-rights activists are rejoicing. Anti-abortion activists are mourning. And, as usual when it comes to this issue, I am weaving back and forth between the two. I am willing to bet that many of those who voted in Ireland – where I lived from 2007 to 2015 – have been doing the same. Landslide or not, I doubt that the Irish people have suddenly fallen in love with abortion. Rather, they’ve come to know and loathe the consequences of outlawing it.
 
In this, they are treading a morality-reality line that, I think, millions of Americans are treading too, and that American activists on both sides need to consider if the U.S. is ever to achieve any measure of peace with this issue.
 
As it happens, it was through living in Ireland that I achieved some measure of peace with it myself.
 
Emotionally, morally, culturally, and instinctively, I have always been pro-life.  Yet, had I voted in Ireland, I would absolutely have voted “yes” to repealing that ban. There is nothing like living in a foreign country that forbids abortion to make a fence-sitter come down on the side of permitting it back home.
 
This is not because I have come to believe that abortion is a health care issue like any other. With all due respect to my many pro-choice friends who consider this whole issue a no-brainer, I will never come around to seeing abortion as the moral equivalent of a mammogram or colonoscopy. 
 
Nor can I manage the easy, “you-say-potato-I-say-potahto” sort of division between personal belief and public policy position that seems to come so easily to many others. To believe that human fetuses  are human beings is to find it impossible to be A-OK with the notion that their moms have the absolute right to kill them. That’s not idiocy or misogyny. It’s rationality. 
 
This, of course, leads to the question of how to allow for the fact that any pluralistic society is going to feature a variety of views as to when human life begins  – a question that I am going to lay aside, and not just because there is no good answer to it.  For me – and, I am willing to bet, for plenty of Irish “yes” voters – the issue of legalizing abortion or not comes down to a much simpler formulation:
 
If abortion kills people, banning abortion kills more people.
 
Many analysts have taken the Irish referendum as a sign that the power of Catholic church is on the decline in Irish society, while the power of women is on the rise. Both are undoubtedly true. But don’t forget a third, more prosaic factor: unlike their American cousins, the Irish have not been imagining, praying over, or speculating about this ban. They have been living with it.  They have seen for themselves that it has been a disaster. 
 
For decades now, the pro-choice movement has set forth two basic arguments: One, regarding abortion and everything else, women have the ultimate right to determine what they do with “their own bodies.” And two, as a strictly practical matter, the outlawing of abortion not only fails to curtail the practice, but both causes and correlates with all kinds of other problems. 
 
No matter how one feels about the first proposition, Ireland has turned out to be Exhibit A that Team Choice is absolutely right about the second. 
             
First, when abortion is illegal, women can and do die for no other reason than that abortion is illegal. This is not a pro-choice scare tactic. It is the truth – and not only in terms of those women who may feel driven to "back-alley" terminations. The case of Salvita Halappanavar seared the soul of Ireland, and it bloody well should roil the conscience of the world. 
 
Halappanavar was  a 31-year-old  Indian-born dentist who had emigrated to Galway with her husband and small child.  In 2012, some four months into her second pregnancy, she felt horrible back pain and sought help at University Hospital Galway, where she was told that she was in the process of having a miscarriage. She was also told that even though the pregnancy was hopeless, it could not be terminated so long as a fetal heartbeat could be detected. Her family begged for an abortion, but to no avail:  the well-trained, well-meaning medical personnel, working in a modern, Western hospital, were not willing to risk jail to save her. Seven days later, Halappanavar died of an utterly preventable blood infection – strictly and solely because it was illegal to prioritize her life over that of a child who had no chance of being born.
 
This case was singularly appalling. Equally compelling, in the aggregate, were the numerous real stories told by real people of the real danger into which this ban had placed real women:  the legal and logistical hurdles that women have had to jump through in order to end once-welcomed pregnancies that had turned on them. Contrary to pro-life lore, these were not people who were looking for some easy way out of some fetal unpleasantness. They were wanted-to-be parents searching for the safest, least-dreadful resolution to one tragic revelation or another, and being obliged to wait for the lawyers to weigh in on if, when and how that resolution could be effectuated. 
 
Clearly, whenever that scenario played out in Ireland, it was awful. If it were to play out in the U.S. it would also be ironic. It is, after all, the GOP that champions the pro-life cause. And it is a GOP article of faith that government interference automatically equals catastrophe.  Whether the context is the smallest business or the biggest idea, Republicans reflexively (and sometimes accurately) equate government involvement with sloth, delay, ineptitude, illogic. Yet, when it comes to pregnant women who may find themselves in dire straits, these same folks seem to have total faith that the government is suddenly going to become the soul of humane efficiency. Isn’t that odd?    
 
Second, even embracing the perspective that abortion is a pure, straight-up evil, the fact remains that banning abortion does not, in many cases, extinguish that evil. It offshores it. The Irish people are well acquainted with the fact that should one of their countrywomen face a pregnancy that is merely unwanted, as opposed to traumatic, she does not say “oh, that’s illegal, I guess I need to have the child and then either learn to love my little boo-boo or arrange an adoption.” She hops over to the U.K.   
 
Likewise, in the U.S., should the Supreme Court overturn Roe v. Wade and thus strip abortion of its constitutionally-protected status, unhappily-pregnant women would travel to the states that still allowed abortion, and failing that, to Mexico, Canada, and any number of other countries.  Thus, banning abortion would not end the slaughter of innocents, as my pro-life friends and family might put it. It would simply ensure that the slaughter occurred someplace else.  
 
Of course, one can argue that shooing murder abroad is better than tolerating it at home. But it doesn’t sound quite so heroic, does it?
 
Any abortion ban effectively applies only to those women who lack the wherewithal to skirt it: namely, the poor and those whose particular circumstances, from physical infirmity to abusive partners, might otherwise preclude them from traveling. In other words, the less able the woman to cope with the arrival of an unwanted child, the greater the odds that she would be forced to do just that.   
 
Now, in theory, a pro-life person could and would argue that it is worth saving the lives of any unborn children, whatever the circumstances of their availability to be saved; and that it is an especial disgrace to tolerate the killing of children on the grounds that they would be economically inconvenient or socially undesirable.  
 
If remotely serious about ushering that theory into practice, however, one would have to establish – or at the very least advocate for --  a society replete with caring, costly and sophisticated supports for such children and their parents.  
 
Here, the cases of  Ireland and the U.S. diverge. 
 
Ireland is by no means a utopia for struggling mothers and children. But there is a general consensus in favor of providing for them. By bizarre contrast, the American pro-life movement has tethered itself to an ideology that prides itself on providing for nobody.  
 
I’m not accusing Republicans of cruelty, but simply citing their philosophy: the less government, the fewer social programs, and above all, the lower taxes, the better. That’s a perfectly valid world view  – until it is twinned with a policy of obliging over half a million women annually to bear children they do not want but for whom they will be left to fend, at which point it becomes too weird for words. 
 
Just last year, in the original version of their tax bill, the Republicans in Congress actually tried to cut the tax credit for adoption. How can anyone possibly believe that, if their pro-life dreams come true,  they are going to find additional billions for the fetuses (and indeed zygotes, and  fertilized-but-yet-to-be-implanted eggs) they have required to become children?
 
Now customarily comes the cry that it isn’t the cold, hard government that would be called upon to care for such children. It’s warm, cuddly families and churches and charities….all of which would require even more massive government funding  and tax-empting than they receive now. 
 
Let me emphasize: I certainly know pro-life people who really walk their talk; who don’t just work against abortion, but for life. These people are heroes and angels and workhorses rolled into one. They don’t merely  donate diapers and cribs, but truly help pregnant women in crisis, sometimes to the point of fostering or adopting their children, who might well be drug addicted or developmentally challenged. The question isn’t whether such people exist. It’s where to find hundreds of thousands more of them every single year.
 
Given all of the above, it is impossible to square a genuinely pro-life moral position with any existent political option. Here’s the closest I can get:
 
I will never believe in abortion.

In part for that very reason, I believe in widely-accessible birth control and full, frank sex education from an appropriate age, which these days is about four. 
 
For that matter, I believe in plain old education. After years of spouting statistics that show the clear connection between higher levels of education and lower rates of poverty, mother-and-child mortality and all kinds of other horrors around the globe, I now find it sadly urgent to reassert that connection at home.
 
I believe in publicly funded health care, day care, pre-k, and all that Scandinavian-socialist-sounding stuff that conservatives equate with tyranny, but that struggling families often equate with the difference between doing OK and drowning.
 
The current crop of Republicans believe in none of this. 
 
Understand, I say “current crop” because I know that there are some moderates, feminists, libertarians and pragmatists still standing  in the GOP, and the last thing I want to do is  knock them down. But as for the right-wing ideologues who now control the party: their "plan" is to guarantee an increase in the number of unwanted pregnancies and then require that those pregnancies result in children, whom they will later vilify for failing to pull themselves up by bootstraps that these same jokers are working hard to abolish.  
 
Sometimes, I put all that together, and it makes me want to call the current crop of Republicans a lot of things.  
 
“Pro-life” is not one of them.