The FBI, like the queen of tidiness Marie Kondo, has a decluttering service. Who knew?
Apparently not Donald J. Trump, who had trouble letting go of Top Secret and Even More Secret materials taken from the White House, from which he was evicted by voters, the courts, Congress, the Electoral College and, for all I know, the Best Buy Geek Squad.
I still get worked up by the Sun King of Mar-a-Lago, our self-proclaimed president in exile. The original Soi Roleil, Louis XIV of France, was said to have proclaimed, “L’etat, c’est moi!” It means, according to people who paid attention in French class, “The state, it’s me.” I’m the boss, and I can do whatever I want.
But eventually historical people objected, “Blah-blah-blah, the rule of law, blah-blah-blah.” And now, technically, even a president has to follow the rules. I don’t know, maybe Trump planned to secretly sell intel on French President Emmanuel Macron to Russia, or perhaps the sale would have been entirely above board, on the Home Shopping Network.
Either way, he’s not supposed to have the stuff any more. This is where Marie Kondo could come in. She wrote The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up, and I can only wish she was with the FBI “fishing expedition’’ that may have caught a great white whale.
Or not. If a forgetful former president leaves nuclear codes behind in the john at Mar-a-Lago, who are we to quibble about technicalities? That’s the GOP’s view, and I know where they are coming from. Which is troubling.
Kondo would have advised the former president to touch each White House item and thank it for its service. Then he could let it go. The average person gets to keep the things that give them joy, but Trump seems joyful only when someone else is miserable, so I don’t know how that would work. And also: There’s the law.
With all this on my mind, I got to thinking about the clutter in my own basement. I have a standing invitation to the FBI to come and take anything it wants. All of it, really. They can have a go at the garage, too, warrant or no warrant.
The Smithsonian may want our unopened can of Tab, the pioneering American diet soda, that was already in the basement when we bought our West Lebanon bungalow in 1983. Tiny print on the side says it was canned under the authority of the Coca-Cola Company, in Nashua, N.H. There are also three unopened cans of sugarfied Coke, similarly historic. Although none were ever opened, there is almost no liquid remaining, which raises questions the FBI lab might find interesting.
I have previously disclosed in these pages the presence of a Proton 300 table radio from Taiwan, which may or may not have foreign policy implications. Also in storage is a handsome old Zenith, as American as baseball, apple pie and radio tubes, which it employs. It works and sounds pleasing, but the tuner drifts like a message bottle in the ocean.
The FBI is welcome to seize a half dozen or more old computers and laptops. Somewhere there is a Windows 3.1 specialist who could crack the codes. Any top-secret information would have had to fit on little floppy disks, so they likely couldn’t have held plans for world domination or anything on that scale.
We also have about 4,000 (by my wife Dede’s estimate) wires, cables, power supplies and assorted related things I kept because someday I might need them, but they eventually became outmoded or orphaned or, most likely, I forgot what they were. If they can help America in any way, I will be glad to see them go.
You might say this Trump business is serious stuff, but I am coping the only way I know how. I am thinking of happier things, like the Bob Johnson baseball glove in my basement that I wore in my Little League campaigns. The Baseball Almanac says he played from 1933 to 1945 and hit .296 for his career. Not bad. His nickname was Indian Bob; not good.
My baseball stats, sadly, are lost in history, though I have memories that grow more glorious and amusing by the year. Maybe it could have been like that for Mr. Trump, but he doesn’t seem to be able to let it go, not any of it, not now, not ever.
“Give it back, it’s not yours,” is one of the early lessons at Toddler University which we all attend. If you’re not the one and only Sun King, it’s as simple as that.
Dan Mackie lives in West Lebanon. He can be reached at dan.mackie@yahoo.com.
