Casus Belli

Dangerous Carbs

Photo by Rachel Loughman on Unsplash

It pains me slightly to be so cliché. To invoke the butterfly effect like everybody and his sister. But the casus belli was perhaps that very dangerous carbohydrate, mashed potatoes. Though typically maligned for adding pounds to the midsection or for inducing a post Thanksgiving feast logy-ness, a clump of mashed potatoes on 5 year old DJT’s head (Trump family lore per Trump’s niece Mary L. Trump) and the resulting hilarity at the little boy’s expense, seems to have set the table for an exceedingly thin-skinned President, one who cannot tolerate any friction. We can never know for sure if this was DJT’s first public humiliation, but he was so young at the time that it is easy to believe that he had never been embarrassed previously. So a bowl of mashed potatoes, dumped on his little head by his father, a strange way for his father to chastise young DJT for teasing DJT’s younger brother at the dinner table. Mashed potatoes, it seems, thicken the midsection but thin the skin.

And in the way that it is easy to draw lines of causation after the fact, our President’s fragile ego, perhaps stemming from a small portion of mashed potatoes briefly adorning his scalp, can so little tolerate dissent and mockery (in relation to the nickname “TACO”, Trump Always Chickens Out) that he has embroiled us in a war without an adequate assessment of our adversary’s capacity to endure hardship. In mariner’s terms; our right of way by tonnage is trumped by Iran’s right of way of having such an unseaworthy vessel that they appreciate little to lose in engaging us. So the casus belli? Perhaps, in part, mashed potatoes.