The slow grind to find a working team to inaugurate Trump’s Presidency continues. So far he has twenty-two names, including thirteen of fifteen cabinet nominees. What a difference from Trudeau’s enthusiastic rush to realise his promises and made formula appointments, some at least that he must be regretting. Trump agonised for over a month before making the Secretary of State appointment, and for a time one thought he might pull an Obama and appoint Mitt Romney, an opponent. But the choice of Rex Tillerson, Exxon Mobil CEO, as Secretary

of State must seem as another round in the struggle with Obama, who has issued another threat to Russia, believing the CIA assertion, not backed yet by evidence that can win in court, that the Russians were hacking US Democratic and Republican computers, but stopped the latter to assist Trump. This is at best heuristic and not logical, but Obama believes it even as Putin demands proof. The American anti-Russia paranoia has become part of the country’s DNA, thoroughly set by seven decades of conflict, as exemplified in Mike Pompeo, Trump’s choice as CIA Director, that only radiation can make the change to correct the deadly mutation, which blinds the White House to the virtues of collaboration with Russia. But the Russians in turn will surely suspect any US moves to friendship as innately subversive, and rather treat them as a Trojan horse. Truth is, there is no democracy today and I doubt if there ever was one among the largest nations; certainly, none of the three major powers today has ever had one.
Meanwhile Mr Tillerson differs from your standard political hack, like Hillary Clinton, in that he has a good relationship with Russia and with Putin going back two decades to the time he worked there as Exxon’s chief of operations in the Caspian Sea, and more recently the company’s successful drilling in the Russian Arctic which Tillerson completed by engineering a stall in the US embargo against Russia, for its actions in Ukraine. Three years ago, Putin awarded him the Russian Federation’s Order of Friendship. Tillerson is a global player in a key industry and accepts climate change data, unlike his predecessor Lee Raymond, who denied them, condemned Kyoto and spent heavily to deny climate change. Hopefully Tillerson will not allow John Kerry’s labours for the environment to come to nought.
Obama’s indignation must seem very hollow to anyone even vaguely aware of American style of foreign relations. The USA, more than any other nation, perhaps in the history of the world, has interfered with other countries’ politics, elections and governments, almost from its origin. Its most recent victim is Brazil, and even now its corporations are geared to grab huge chunks of Brazilian business assets, while controlling the government that it acquired by intrigue with a cabal of corrupt Brazilian senators who were just short of a court trial. If the reason for Delma Roussel’s impeachment were to be applied to the US, I doubt that Obama or any of his predecessors would survive. It is no secret that the US-UK-European consortium has taken aim at the BRICS nations. The strong rhetoric against Russia and China are extensions of the attack and conquest of Brazil. BRICS must be aware that Brazil’s traitorous President Temer has been the conduit of information flow between Brazil and the US government. The others: Russia, China, India and South Africa must also have moles. It baffles me that nations with so much wealth must covet more of other nations’ assets even from the meanest. What’s become of the live and let live doctrine? Did any nation really practice this? I know that this is a recurring theme in Hinduism and runs through India’s Vaidic past.
Trump’s choices are so far what we expected: rich (total net worth reported as some $9.5 billion, exceeding the combined worth of 43 million of the poorest third of American households), ultra-conservative, hard-nosed, with little political-government experience. The reaction to Trump’s nominations has been strident, if not extreme, at both ends of the spectrum: most vocal and irrational being those of the far right who believe only their own narrow, ill-informed and chauvinistic views. Trump did tell the nation for a year that he will upend Washington, and so far he has few of its bureaucrats or experts in his crew. Even his choice, David Friedman, for Israeli ambassador seems to have been dredged up from some murky cesspit, and should be condemned.

Christmas shopping as a boy with my mother was to apply the arithmetic I was struggling to learn in school to what was taking place in the real world before me. My mother is the personality type that sets an objective, and then goes at it in a straight, unwavering line, similar to the way mathematics do not deviate from arriving at its final sum.
So, just as I was being taught two plus two make four, so was I learning from her example that to leave home was one value, to do Christmas shopping another, and to arrive at a number of exact purchases would be the unwavering, sum total.

She would cut a deal with me before we set out into the hustle and bustle as we made the long walk to the junction for a taxi heading to the thriving streets and its big stores in the south. Here was teeming activity, where accosting vendors sold items ranging from safety pins to lynchpins, apples to pineapples, and for my yearning eyes, mounds of sugary candies, none of which was in my mother’s plan as she strode from Point A to Point B.
She counseled me on my behaviour as we walked: “Now, you don’t want everything you put your big eye on. Do you hear me?”
My little hand would be encased in her firm fingers as she dragged me along. Where we walked were no sidewalks, and she was constantly on the alert for traffic approaching from behind. I swear my mother had the echo-location ability of a bat; more than that, it was beyond doubt in my mind this was located behind her head and highly-developed like a third eye, since I never made it out alive, and was always apprehended, following any foray into the snacks’ cupboards whenever her back was turned from the kitchen.
So whenever a huge truck approached us with its ominous, elephantine rumbling, she would bodily lift up my entire bony frame by the hand, up and out of the way with the swinging effortlessness of a ten-ton crane, away from the large wheels which were passing by a mere foot away from our feet.
Even as she lifted me away from danger, she was issuing a dire warning about the dangers from the punitive maternal hand should I not “behave properly”.
“I don’t want any bawling and crying in the store for this toy and that toy! Do you hear me?!” Truly, I believe my mother invented the interrobang; in fact, I believe this new punctuation mark that merges both the question mark and the exclamation first came into use in those years when I was a boy.
“I seeing other people children bawling and crying for toys in the store. ‘Pappy, I want this truck. Mammy, I want this dolly! Waah! Waah! Waah!’ I don’t want any bad behaviour from you when we’re in the store. I don’t want you bawling and crying like a goat with bellyache. Or you will really get bellyache when we come home! Do you hear me?!”
Each admonition was accompanied with a forceful squeeze on my hand. Back then I had many anxious moments I would grow up with my hands looking like tubes of toothpaste, misshapen and lumpy from being constantly squeezed at the centre. Today, I respectfully squeeze the bottom of the tube of toothpaste; and while my handshake is firm, it communicates peace with its greeting, not an overarching sense of power and control.
For a boy just starting to learn the rudiments of multiplication, to go Christmas shopping with my mother was to be swiftly lifted out of the wading pool of the two-times table and be tossed into the deep-end of the twelve-times and beyond. It was during times like these, standing among the very large array of toys in the department store, where I came to appreciate the infinite possibilities that could open up with the multiplication tables.
But this was in theory only. For while this brief trip had given me a glimpse into the infinite, for my mother any form of multiplication involving money triggered the genetic predilection for thrift, and so for her to do any arithmetic involving spending was to always arrive at the invariable sum total of the number one.
Said my mother, no doubt noticing how my eyes had widened to the size of manhole covers over the toy trucks, the gun-and-sacks, and the miniature cars lined up in the parking lot of the toy section: “You only want one dump truck, right?! Just this ‘One’, right?!” Even as she spoke, she chose. In the face of such an onslaught of magnanimity and generosity, I could only meekly nod my head at her fait accompli.
However, she had a softer side, which was for a soft ice-cream cone at Woolworths. For me, this stop for ice-cream on a hot December day was nothing but an infinite joy.
“I think your boy could use a second ice-cream cone,” the helpful, perceptive attendant said.
“One is plenty,” was the invariable reply.

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