One of the worst pieces of advice I ever followed was that I should throw a piece of spaghetti at a wall to test whether it was done. Looking back, I realized the person who told me this was either playing a practical joke or was the victim of someone else’s joke.
All that throwing spaghetti at the wall accomplishes is a waste of food and a mess on the wall. It is so much easier to just bite a piece of spaghetti to see if it is as soft as you want it. Whether spaghetti sticks to the wall has nothing to do with its consistency or flavor.
Of course, this is where we get the expression “throw it at the wall and see what sticks.” It means trying every option all at once and seeing what works. So far, that seems to be a pretty good description of Donald Trump’s presidency.
I’m sure that Trump (or at least the people who have his ear) have an overarching goal for what the Unites States will look like by the end of his term. How close can they come to achieving that goal? No one really knows, but the approach they’ve chosen doesn’t take a narrow focus on a few big changes they would need to make. Instead, they are trying to change everything at once.
The approach has a couple of advantages for them. While not everything will stick, they don’t have to strategize and negotiate and see if individual changes will work. If enough of their actions survive, or at least tie up the opposition in court battles and such for long enough, they will be able to move ahead with their vision. In addition, the more far-fetched proposals (such as reopening Alcatraz as a functioning prison) take attention away from the more serious aspects of their work. Their opponents have a harder time focusing their opposition since there are so many things to track.
A friend once told me that a chair is more important to a lion tamer than a whip. I don’t know if that’s true, but the reasoning was that the whip can’t do anything beyond making noise. It can scare a lion, but a scared lion can be a very dangerous lion. The chair, on the other hand, can confuse. When the lion tamer points the chair legs at the lion and moves the chair slightly, the lion isn’t sure which of the legs to focus on. It is too busy trying to decide what to look at to do anything else. I think Trump’s approach to governing shares that same basic approach.
So, considering Trump’s approach to governing, would he be a good lion tamer or a world-class chef? I don’t know. And that’s exactly the point. By asking the question, I take my eye off the important changes that his administration is making and start worrying about minor details. Just like those who spend time arguing that it would be ridiculous to reopen Alcatraz, I am distracted by some of the chair legs and don’t know what to do in response.
by Marti Maltby, Director Peace House Community – A Place to Belong
This article originally appeared in “The Alley,” the newspaper for the Phillips neighborhood of Minneapolis.
Photo Credit: Freepik