Fear Him? Baloney.

Hello. We’ll be getting to Trump and baloney by and by, through a back alley.

I live in a modest inner-city neighborhood in Northeast D.C. It has back alleys.

The nabe has got mixed cultures, mixed ethnicities, mixed lifestyles. There’s a group of young men who seem to spend most of their waking hours in the street, playing dominoes. They’re fiercely competitive dominators, or whatever you call domino players. They’re driven to compete and excel. They laugh a lot. I like them.

In the neighborhood is also a woman who is a doctor, a professor of medicine, and a National Guardsman. This is a decidedly liberal enclave, but there is at least one staunchly Republican couple whom the neighborhood accepts, ungrudgingly, resignedly, the way a horse accepts flies. It is a neighborhood of benefactors and urban scavengers. When someone has some still-nice things they want to get rid of — furniture, kitchen appliances, flatware, children’s clothes — they leave them in front of their houses, and they are inevitably gone by morning.

Every year or two, a tableau springs up overnight, at the base of a tree — an impromptu memorial, usually to the death of a young man by violence; it’s a pile of empty brandy bottles, the expensive kind. The funky liquor store nearby has been sold, to be replaced by condos. The convenience store now has bulletproof glass.

Halloween is a big deal in this neighborhood. Children from elsewhere are brought here on the day, because the people are loving and generous. A professional conservator of trees lives here, and a professional photographer, and a street cat who answers to three different names from three different people, because that’s how he gets uninterrupted food donations, and there is one house that screams.

The screams come from inside with alarming regularity. A man curses and threatens. He stalks out, screaming. He stalks back in, screaming. He does not have good anger management. He once threw a rock through his front window. The police are called to this house from time to time. Things get said in muffled tones, and the police leave, and the screaming abates for a while.

We’re going to come back to Trump, I promise.

I have recently become aware that someone is pilfering from my backyard garbage can, which is located, like everyone else’s garbage can, in the alley behind our houses. The thieves are not stealing my garbage. They are stealing space for my garbage by putting their garbage in my garbage can. It’s no big problem unless I then can’t fill my can, which has happened more than once.

I cannot prove this but I am pretty sure I know in which house the flagrant space-thieves live. And that’s where things get complicated.

If it were any other house in the neighborhood, I would know exactly what to do. I would knock politely on a door, explain the problem, say that I understood that sometimes garbage gets out of hand, and there are no good solutions, and that this is no great matter and not their fault, but could they possibly ….

And we would work it out amiably. It is an amiable neighborhood.

But this particular house contains someone with an incendiary temper, no sense of proportion and an apparent flash point at which violence occurs. Once I am identified as an accuser, what might befall me or my partner? Their strife could become our strife. If I enlisted the help of authorities, or even their landlord, that might be an accelerant on a dumpster fire.

And so I have decided to retreat into meekness. At some small personal inconvenience, and with a certain sense of shame, I have decided to keep my garbage can inside my yard until pickup time on pickup day.

Discretion, they say, is the better part of valor. Maybe sometimes it is. Maybe sometimes it is the better part of timidity.

Which brings me to Donald Trump, and you.

I have noticed something since November 5. Increasingly, when many of you are sending in a question or observation or anecdote for The Gene Pool — an entry that, even vaguely, might be interpreted as less than fully respectful of Trump or his lieutenants or his millions of minions, you are asking to remain anonymous, and you often specify why: You don’t want the crazies, or the Chief Crazy, to know who you are and somehow, some way, punish you for your temerity.

The subject matters of these entries have been as seemingly anodyne as White House Christmas decorations, the cabinet picks, the general dangers of autocracy, Trump’s clothing choices, the tragicomical amorality of the GOP. etc. You are nobody of particular public note. You are likely not an “influencer.” The Gene Pool is read only by 7,000 people a day.

I understand your hesitancy. It is prudent, if just a bit overcautious. These are, alas, times that militate for caution. I don’t disrespect you for that. But it worries me. I hate it.

I don’t hate it the way I hate the spinelessness recently shown by some in the mainstream media. I don’t hate it the way I hate the bootlicking decision not to endorse a presidential candidate made by The Washington Post leadership — an outrage that cost them 250,000 paid subscribers, earned them the quiet, sullen enmity of their own staff, and which birthed, ahem, on these pages,

I don’t hate it the way I hate the actions of the top management of the Los Angeles Times, which also failed to endorse a presidential candidate. This week, the paper’s publisher stunningly told his editors that he wants to personally approve headlines on opinion articles, and pledged to install an inhuman, AI-driven “bias meter” to gauge which articles that his writers produced might be slanted leftward. This is a degree of managerial interference unheard of in major newspapers with any sort of editorial dignity. According to media critic Oliver Darcy, the owner is “using the newspaper as an apparent vehicle to appeal to Donald Trump.”

Those cowardly corporate decisions infuriate me. But readers’ fear of personal vengeance by Trump in a way concerns me more, because of what it implies, and how insidious it is. It implies that Trump has begun to enter our minds by controlling our fears. To the extent he succeeds he’s becoming Orwell’s Big Brother, Huxley’s Mustapha Mond.

So. I should point out right about here that “Discretion is the the better part of valor” was uttered by Falstaff in Henry IV, to justify his own cowardice on the battlefield. You know? Shakespeare did not intended it to mean what it has come to mean in a half millennium’s retelling: prudent wisdom.

Listen, Trump beat Kamala Harris, but he did not beat you and me, not until we start altering who we are and how we think and how we live, because of him. He is unfortunately the authority temporarily in power, but he is also our employee for the next four years, nothing more or less. Speak truth to power. Don’t stop.

Decline the baloney.

Maybe we should all take a clue from a certain garrulous subset of readers, the scruffy denizens of The Invitational. Their names are always attached to what they write, and they haven’t surrendered an inch. They haven’t been cowed. They are fearless, even though they have a long, inexpungible trail of evidence “against” them. Their satire has been as cynical and caustic and funny as always. More so, I think, because they’re also angry. If you spit on them, they’ll sizzle.

The anger is good.

Sizzle. Please.

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Speaking of

Did you see that the newspaper’s acting executive editor, Matt Murray, yesterday killed an article about how one of the most respected, even beloved, top editors at the Post, Matea Gold, was leaving for a job at the New York Times. Potentially embarrassing! Murray informed staff that from now on the paper would not be writing ANY stories about themselves.

Interesting, Matt. So I take it The Post won’t be writing about it if they win a few Pulitzer Prizes this year?

Oh … you will?

So I guess it’s just negative, embarrassing stories about The Post that you won’t be writing about? Gotcha.

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Finally, The Assassin. The Gene Pool has taken the international lead in covering this story for days now, but now we proudly hand it over to the mainstream media to tie up pesky loose ends. I will say that after Luigi Mangione was captured, our Emergency Gene Poll yesterday gave four possible motives; the vast majority of you decided it was that he had been personally screwed by United Health Care. Tragically, it is beginning to look like we didn’t supply, as an option, the best option: He appears to be a rabid ideologue, like Kaczynski.

Today’s Gene Pool Gene Poll:

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Okay, we have reached the Real Time segment of The Gene Pool, in which we seek your questions and observations and anecdotes, and I try to respond to them in real time. Today’s Qs and O’s and A’s largely are about the assassin, and also my call for examples where flirting hurt you or someone you know. Please submit more of these things right here:

Also, your humble correspondent reports that he is getting very little sleep these days and sure could use some pocket money for coffee, or Xanax, or maybe just hookers and blow. If you are financially able, please consider becoming a paid subscriber. It’s only $4.15 a month. I’d sure appreciate it.

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On to the show.

Q: And the health insurance CEO who made millions by putting profits over people? What's his bodycount? Is that not evil? Is that not revolting?

A: It is. But let’s follow this down to its logical conclusion, okay? What you are talking about is vigilante justice, which is very much an anarchic “tear it all down” philosophy like the one that delivered unto us … Donald Trump. I don’t really want to live in a country in which justice and great matters of state and governance are left to be decided by coups, assassinations, and disparate “principles” of vengeance. That’s a mark of those unstable, y’know, shithole countries.

Q: Americans love righteous vigilantes….Batman, Reacher, The Equalizer, the Death Wish guy. Real anti-heroes like the ones you highlighted and others stoke the same anti-establishment sympathies that animate many Trump supporters. Woody Guthrie, the quintessential troubadour of authentic Americana, wrote and sang a tribute to the hoodlum Pretty Boy Floyd in which he clearly drew the moral equivalency between a man who robs with a six-gun and one who robs with a fountain pen. I’m sure there are many otherwise meek, law abiding citizens out there who were hoping this CEO assassin would go all D. B. Cooper on law enforcement’s collective ass and disappears into the mist of legend.

A: Okay, first off, yes, Guthrie’s song has one of the greatest lines in all of folk music:

Yes, as through this world I've wandered

I've seen lots of funny men;

Some will rob you with a six-gun,

And some with a fountain pen.

So there is that. However, let’s just say that folk songs sometimes get a lot wrong, in the interests of a compelling narrative. William Zanzinger did not kill poor Hattie Carroll with a blow from a cane that he twirled on his diamond ring finger… He yelled at her cruelly and tapped her on the shoulder with his cane. She walked into the kitchen, sat down and had a heart attack. The final, devastating line in the song: “the judge handed down for penalty and repentance, to William Zanzinger… a six-month sentence” was kinda stupid. In truth, Zanzinger was a horrible person, but six months was about what his crime deserved.

Hurricane Carter may well have been guilty; Dylan omitted several inculpatory facts about Carter, including that he had savagely beaten his girlfriend in the weeks he was out between his two trials.

That’s the thing about historical songs: They have two responsibilities, one of which is to be compelling.

The major lasting legend about Pretty Boy Floyd was sanctified in the Guthrie song: that he paid the mortgages of farmers about to lose their land. It is very unlikely that he ever did that, according to historians. There might be some truth in the parallel claim that when he robbed a bank he sometimes burned farmers’ mortgage documents so the bank would not be able to foreclose – Pretty Boy certainly claimed that and encouraged it to spread as rumors. However, there is a problem: The official record of a mortgage is not the one the bank holds, it is what is written down in a courthouse, by officials such as the Recorder of Deeds. If P.B.F. did burn the mortgages, it likely helped no one. But it burnished his legend.

Just know this: Pretty Boy had a gold watch. He had filed a nick in it for each of the ten people he killed.

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TIMELY TIP: If you’re reading this on an email: Just click on the headline in the email and it will deliver you to the full column online. Keep refreshing the screen to see the new questions and answers that appear as I regularly update the post.

Q: The fascination with this new mystery assassin reminds me more of D.B. Cooper in that it's the mystery behind his act and his getaway that attracts a certain amount of awe and (in some) even sex appeal. I never realized the Boston marathon bombers ever drew that kind of interest in some people. I thought the horrific wounds they inflicted on innocent bystanders made them scumbags in the public eye from the outset. But what do I know? I'm a straight male and wouldn't think of any of these rogues in your gallery as particularly handsome. I admit that I did think Squeaky Fromme was cute in some early photos, but I'm just a few years too young to really associate her with the horrors of the Manson family or the attempt on President Ford.

A: Each of them was handsome for his time. Booth was literally a leading man!

You know who was REALLY handsome? Lewis Powell, a Lincoln conspirator who was hanged.

Do you think HE’s handsome?

Q: I assume, being that this is "The Gene Pool," interspecies flirtation is not only acceptable but encouraged. Yes, truth be told, I fell in love with a neighborhood dog.

Let's call him "Fido." Fido was a mix of something or other and, not much to look at, I suppose, but he exuded personality. At least to me. Thing was, too large a part of that personality was devoted to avoiding or ignoring me. I would manage to find myself outside doing make-work at times Fido was likely to be walked by. His owner was friendly enough, but Fido would sit with his head turned away, his sight resolutely fixed on some distant unseeable object while I made small and still smaller talk. An attempt to coax a reaction, let alone some affection, with yet another squeaky toy was met with a doggy sigh that said all too clearly, "Look pal, I'm not interested, Can't take a hint? How about a half-dozen hints?" Even managed to wrangle a dog sitting gig. This was met with the doggy equivalent of an eyeroll, "You again?!"

By this time even the people at PetSmart were starting to get suspicious. Then, I got my own revenge pooch. Let's call her "Bathsheba." Okay, okay, "Kiki." Suddenly, I'm Fido's bestie. In fact, I now can't get rid of him. I'd find his owner trying to get him to move along and stop barking on my driveway. To make a long and sad story of unrequited love shorter, the two became virtually inseparable at the local dog park and when not in Kiki's company, I was told, Fido, was listless and just not his usual judgmental self. The last I saw of Fido and Kiki was when they were forced to stop by for a courtesy farewell, on their way to another part of the country in the back of station wagon. I hope they were happy.

A: Is this is as beautiful and complex as I think? I am thinking you gave Kiki away for the sake of her and Fido’s love? I demand that you send another message to confirm this is true. And include your name, which I will not publish unless you authorize it. No followup from you, and I will apologize for printing this, in the next Gene Pool.

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Q: Is there any actual data that suggests sympathy for the shooter is owing to his looks? Or is this just a convenient media narrative? There seemed to be sympathy for his actions before a clear picture of him was published. – Jonathan Paul

A: That is in fact a fair question; the general media has been reporting a general fascination with his looks. I disappeared into the Web swamp on this, and I confirm this. I didn’t include some online things… Such as this one, from a Reddit user.

(Translate, under pic of suspect); “Can they release his height? Cut? Uncut? Hairy?”

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Q: And the suspected assassin is a Penn alum, too. So proud of my alma mater to have given us the President-elect, his daughter, Ivanka, "the first daughter!!!" (her actual words during a White House kerfuffle), the soon-to- be co- President, Elon Musk. And all those hyphens. I'm sure he's not the first killer to have graduated from dear old Penn. –

Richard Pawlak, Penn '75, Lawrenceville, NJ

A: SO IS MY DAUGHTER, MOLLY. After I informed her and my son-in-law of the educational background of the suspect, he began looking at his wife real suspicious-like. “YOU are kinda dissatisfied with the insurance industry…”

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Q: It was 1967, the first day of the new school year and I was a junior. I spied the new girl in the hall and she was smokin hot, though we didn’t say things like that then. I took the opportunity during the scrum that was common during changing classes to gently, but unmistakably, place my hand on her bottom. She turned and gave me what I could only describe as a quizzical look. Turns out we were both heading into Spanish class. But she was the teacher. – M. Morgan

A: Thank you. Did you not realize, even back in your callow youth, that you had crossed the line from flirting into something extremely obnoxious? Even for back then?

Q: Finally, I'm a member of a minority group. I was torn in the poll between the Ivy League school and McDonald's, but settled on the latter. I attended a big public institution in the midwest, so I don't have first-hand Ivy League knowledge, but I thought "Luigi" was an unlikely name for an Ivy Leaguer. However, McDonald's is not the choice I would expect from a rabid anti-establishment type guy. I mean, isn't it Trump's favorite restaurant?

A: He might like Trump, for all we know.

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Q: Brian Thompson might have killed thousands more people than Pretty Boy Floyd, through his greed. I shall not mourn for him, nor will I speak ill of his killer, even if he’d turned out to be a contract killer.

A: “Might have” is interesting. So, um, should we have had someone take out the head of Ford when the company’s Pintos were exploding on contact? Cool? Boeing’s bosses today? Hire somebody to waste ‘em? All okay? You want to live in that country?

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–Q: I think the appropriate response is more like "I don't condone murder AND." (Like in improv, I guess!) Murder is wrong, AND the response to this killing should be a major wake-up call not only to the insurance industry but to the large percentage of our elected officials who seem unable to see beyond the 'murican ideal (and large donations!) of a private health insurance industry. Shooting a man in the back is cowardly and should not be celebrated, AND using an AI-driven algorithm to deny health care to people who've paid insurance premiums to jack up your shareholder profits is both cowardly and also amorally greedy. The shooter is wrong AND the victim does not seem to have been a very good person. Etc.

A: This sums my feelings up exactly.

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This is Gene. I am calling us down. PLEASE keep sending in Qs and O’s And A’s. I will respond on Thursday.