Occam’s Hostage: Seeking Simple Clarity Amid Trump’s Turmoil –

Satire-
By David Underhill –

MOBILE, Ala. – The Night Wolves patrol the perimeter of the school playground in a provincial Russian town beyond the Urals. This biker club has units scattered across the country and some abroad. Most are in larger cities. The Wolves don’t stay near the school all the time, but everybody knows they’re watching. They also survey other locations around the town.

Nobody asks why they do this or what they want. Because everybody knows they have some special bond with Vladimir Putin. A murky stream of money flows to them from the Kremlin for their motorcycles, clubhouses and projects. They sometimes function as an unofficial militia cavalry in shadowy struggles that serve the state. They occasionally parade as a ceremonial honor guard for Putin.

Only one person in the town knows why the Wolves are there. She arrived several years earlier from somewhere, moved into an apartment in one of the Soviet-era housing blocks, and took a secretarial job in the offices of the tractor factory, once a state enterprise, now part of an oligarch’s conglomerate. She speaks fluent Russian but with a lingering foreign accent, which remains a mystery. She goes dutifully through her daily routine but will not talk of where she came from or what brought her here.

This stoked an orgy of gossip about her camouflage of plainness. Her clothes are dowdy, her shoes flat and drab, her hair wound into a severe bun, her face void of makeup. But ignoring all that would reveal the essentials of a striking, statuesque beauty.

Somebody had noticed this because she held a child in her arms when she materialized in town. She raised him in normal ways and he did normal things—somewhat slacker student, star athlete pretenses on the playground, charmer and pursuer of girls.

The only peculiarity about this binary family is that they periodically vanish for weeks at a time. In the Soviet system factories regularly provided extended vacations — cruise ship tours, Black Sea resort stays, and such—for their workers. In the new Russia many of those benefits yielded to the scramble for survival. Although the cruise ships and seaside resorts remain, they are now populated by the oligarchs and their entourages.

So how does she still have a job in the offices of the tractor factory when she returns after several weeks of vacation? And wherever she goes with the boy to do whatever, how does she finance this on a secretary’s paycheck? The gossip mills grind away at these topics, especially when a few locals come back from a stint as maids in the Black Sea resorts and add grist.

They swear the secretary was there, being somebody else. She was Cinderella at the royal ball — the sparkling gown, the spike heeled crystal shoes, the long hair flowing from a silver tiara, the gold and diamond jewels. And the boy was panting after debutantes from Moscow and St. Petersburg summering at the beach. His long blond hair tousled with the wind, he roared around in a motorboat that he lacked the skills to handle well but he thought this would impress them.

When mother and son return they resume their ordinary lives, and these exotic reports begin to seem like a mirage. The Night Wolves also reappear around town. They routinely vanish when she does with the child and return when the pair does. Everybody knows this pattern but they never speak about it.

Dynastic Deeds

Basic history textbooks tell of dynastic alliances. Rulers arranged the marriage of siblings, young adult children and cousins with the kin of rival rulers. This seeded potential adversary regimes with family members who could help maintain peace or promote schemes, as circumstances might require.

Less often told, though it often happened, is the exchange of youngsters among rivals. Usually this was portrayed as an opportunity for education and cultural enrichment. A child would move into the court of a rival ruler for instruction by the subtle tutors there and for exposure to the ways of the world beyond his natal setting.

That was the formal, beneficent description of those arrangements. But these children were also hostages in all but name. Their presence within easy reach of their host made them a ready sacrifice if trouble arose between the country they had come to and the one they had come from. This kept the peace—or at least gave pause to reckless, impulsive rulers who knew their behavior could place their own children at risk.

Echoes of this practice continue. Within the past year as tensions ratcheted up in Korea, commentators were alert to any signs of the American military preparing to order the removal of spouses and children back to the homeland. Because everyone understood that with the vulnerable families present a war could not start, but with them gone the soldiers would be free to revert to butchering each other.

The same psychological dynamics would apply if one person had one child at risk abroad in a place where that person had much at stake. This might be business interests that could flourish or falter depending on the attitude of the child’s host. Or if this person were a ruler and the host were a rival ruler, the highest issues of national policy might be implicated. Or some combination of both concerns.

Then: That’s such a handsome, delightful child of yours staying with us. It would be a shame if something happened to him.

Shaving Away the Fluff

Occam’s Razor isn’t a precise mental tool. It’s just a handy rule of thumb that has stayed in use for centuries because it helps in grappling with tangled matters. It merely cautions against searching through multiple complex causes for explanations of events. Instead it urges a steady focus on the main, elementary things. In engineering KISS is a kindred principle: Keep It Simple, Stupid.

Apply Occam’s Razor to Donald Trump, and his false facade falls away. No, he isn’t a multi-billionaire self-made entrepreneur. He’s a trust fund baby who dined on daddy’s pablum from infancy onward. He’s a tax cheat who used government subsidy programs to enrich himself further. He’s a patriot with a flag pin in his lapel but with much of his money invested abroad and most of his branded products manufactured abroad. His global real estate operations reek with the stink of a gigantic money laundering machine. He’s a champion of the righteous who has led a sordid life. He’s a sexual predator who targets women for conquest. He’s a bullying sadist who delights in seeing others squirm and suffer at his command. He’s a glutton for the resources he can snatch for himself and his cronies, and he’s blind to the environmental consequences of this plunder. He’s a compulsive liar and fabulist, and his words are not worth the air used to utter them or the bytes used to Tweet them. Literally nothing he says can automatically be trusted as true.

After the razor work what’s left is a grasping savage who cares about nothing but himself and his wealth — with one exception.

Many observers have puzzled over this exception. He mocks and belittles his adversaries, domestic and foreign. A few get reprieves. He now has a pen pal crush on North Korea’s Kim Jong-un, who he earlier spurned as tyrannical Little Rocket Man — and may yet again. Israel’s prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu is exempt from Trumpian critique, but that is dictated by history, domestic politics and family ties.

The exception granted to Vladimir Putin is new, startling and not compelled by any geopolitical necessity. It was evident throughout Trump’s campaign for president and since. Although he readily, gleefully derided many foreign countries and their leaders including historic allies, he tempered his critiques of Russia and he never spoke ill of Putin. This became most visible at the July summit in Helsinki when Trump discarded the opinions of his own intelligence agencies and sided with Putin’s denials of election jiggering.

No Equivocation: Trump is a Traitor Against the United States and Should Be Arrested and Stopped…

That doesn’t trouble Trump’s Republican disciples. The Democrats sputter in anger and amazement. The commentators cannot account for his behavior. And nobody is able to explain it.

Fringe Benefits

Perhaps Occam’s Razor offers the solution. Trump’s promotion of beauty pageants in Russia must have generated many opportunities for him that could have resulted in a child. His multiple forays seeking business prospects among the oligarchs and their retinues must have been ripe with similar opportunities.

If he left a child behind in Russia, that would weigh on his heart. He may truly care nothing about anything in the world beyond himself. But a child is a fragment of the self, which would be worthy of care in some measure.

Putin doesn’t seem like the type who would refrain from taking advantage of such a situation. Nothing would need to be in writing, little would need to be said. Trump would comply with Putin’s wishes, and Putin would “protect” the child.

All of this is uncertain, none of it is likely ever to be proven. Its sole virtue is clarity and simplicity. With so much else that surrounds Trump being purposely obscure and snarled, this clear and simple analysis is refreshing.

And it might actually be true. Besides that the Tin Foil Hat Brigade should love it. It’s far more alluring than the fables of Hillary running a pedophile ring from the basement of a DC pizza parlor or the tedious concocted email scandal.

Trump’s Russian Love Child Held Hostage by Putin Under Eyes of His Personal Biker Gang!!!!

What a juicy tale. Could anything possibly top that?

Pat Bagley / Salt Lake Tribune