In defense of honorable

      My late mother, the former Carmela Casullo, whose family came from a dirt-poor southern Italian town in Puglia, instilled in me her sense of fairness with one word: honorable.

      “That wouldn’t be honorable,” she’d say. Or: “You have to do what’s honorable.”

      Even though I only was in grammar school, I knew that the word came fraught with more meaning than mere “right” or “wrong.”

      In Italian, it’s ‘Onorevole’ (‘Own-oh-RAY-vo-lay’), one of the highest compliments, meaning among other things: just, principled, respectable.

      Funny how her simple code for living has stayed with me for more than seven decades.

      Funny, too, how I thought of it again after our supposed president shamelessly, traitorously—and, of course, dishonorably—stabbed the president of Ukraine in the back, cut off military aid to his country and literally sided with almost everything Russian dictator Vladimir Putin has to say about the awful war that Putin—not Zelensky—started.

      Then Tuesday night, in a blathering orgy of self-adulation, Trump wasted the country’s time in another cavalcade of lies, glossing over the economic and personal torment caused by his reckless sundering of the federal government at the hands of the unelected man-boy Elon Musk, and economic policies that bode disaster.

      Republicans in the House chamber predictably whooped and hollered (though many privately are shitting themselves over what will happen to them if and when the economy goes further south, especially in a trade war, that Trump mindlessly seems to welcome.)

      In the Democratic response, Elissa Slotkin, a 48-year-old first term senator from Michigan, put it bluntly: the president’s actions and his agenda would make life more expensive for every American, especially those who can least afford it. (In this she echoed James Carville’s prescient advice to Bill Clinton, ‘It’s the economy, stupid.’)

      “Your premiums and prescriptions will cost more, because the math on his proposals doesn’t work without him going after your health care,” she said. She noted that “Elon Musk just called Social Security the biggest Ponzi scheme of all time.”

      Describing the evening, New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg said: “Democrats shouldn’t have shown up at all, but if they were going to be there, noisy protest made more sense than holding up dumb little paddles. There’s nothing dignified about quietly playing the foil to an autocratic thug gloating about stripping America for parts.”

      Put another way, perhaps more noisy protest would have been more honorable.