Llewellyn King: Attack of the giant pumpkins threatens civic life

Giant pumpkins are a clear and present danger, and we are not being told about it. Linus of the comic strip Peanuts no longer gives us the heads-up.

Consider in 1900, the largest pumpkin on record weighed in at a modest 400 pounds. Two men could lift it. That was the typical weight of obese pumpkins until 1980, the year after the accident at the Three Mile Island Nuclear Power Plant, when they started getting bigger, a trend that continues. Suspicious, eh?

Monster pumpkins this year are coming in at more than 2,000 pounds, with the American champion weighing a scale-busting 2,261.5 pounds. It was grown in Rhode Island.

But maybe there are bigger pumpkins lurking in the Amazon. The Swiss claim a bigger pumpkin, but they would, wouldn’t they?

In the world of Cucurbita maxima (Latin for big pumpkin), these monsters are fit for a pie for the Kardashian family. Have you noticed the Kardashians only seem to do three things: take selfies, conduct social media fights and eat? Just watch “Keeping Up with the Kardashians”: They are always eating. The family’s many crises are dealt with food. Did Kim go to Maxim’s when her jewels were stolen in Paris?

Actually, pumpkins are good-eating. Always sprinkle cinnamon on pumpkin. Cinnamon is to pumpkins what drawn butter is to lobster: It just belongs.

When I was a boy, I ate a lot of pumpkin and it was either mashed up with or without sugar. My brother and I liked the sugared version, while my father preferred his simply boiled.

But that was before people started growing pumpkins as big as elephants. What is the purpose of a 2,000-pound pumpkin? Do you need a chainsaw to cut it up? Who needs to cook with a vegetable that was brought in on a truck, held down by chains? Even the best-equipped kitchens do not have forklifts.

Worse, there is the way that pumpkins are taking over our politics.

The first politician to show their influence was John Boehner, the former speaker of the House, whose face kept turning pumpkin-orange before our startled gaze.

Now comes Donald Trump, clearly a man who has had sinister dealings with pumpkins: His orange hair is the giveaway. What do the pumpkins want? Can Trump deliver or will Hillary Clinton get the Pumpkin Party endorsement? Some of her pantsuits are already Hubbard squash-colored.

Halloween and Thanksgiving are when the pumpkins come to haunt us. Forget the witches, it is the gourds muscling in on our innocent festivals.

Yet all year in domestic gardens, U.S. Department of Agriculture research centers and in secret pumpkin patches, pumpkins are sucking up nutrients to grow bigger and bigger. Soon they will rival the Trump Tower and the Grand Coulee Dam.

What do they want? Why are they courting our celebrities, our politicians and corrupting our children? Oh, my gourd!

Be afraid, the pumpkins are on the loose for the next month.

Llewellyn King, based in Rhode Island and Washington, D.C., is a veteran publisher, editor, columnist and international business consultant. He is host and executive producer of White House Chronicle, on PBS.

Don Pesci: Understanding Trumpism

Many Republicans, most scornfully Kevin Williamson in National Review, find Donald Trump abhorrent because he is a Republican In Name Only (RINO). Mr. Trump seems to gravitate between the parties as circumstances dictate.

A Williamson piece on The Donald titled “Witless Ape Rides Escalator,” opens brusquely: “Donald Trump may be the man America needs. Having been through four bankruptcies, the ridiculous buffoon with the worst taste since Caligula is uniquely positioned to lead the most indebted organization in the history of the human race.”

Self-valuation sometimes rises to over-valuation. Mr. Trump, who claims whenever he mounts the political stump to be fabulously rich, values Trump Inc. at $8 billion. Others value Mr. Trump’s assets, the most expensive of which is the Trump brand, at about $4 billion, certainly not chump change.

For someone who has been conspicuously in the public eye during his meteoric rise to wealth and power, Mr. Trump has a remarkably thin political skin.  Some politicians, more used than Mr. Trump to the heat of political kitchens, are inclined to be less accommodating than others. Is it really necessary to observe the Reagan rule – speak not ill of other Republicans – when it is doubtful that a political opponent marching under the Republican banner might be an interloper? Mr. Trump, of course, gives as good as he gets – some would say with interest attached.

And it is this – the unscripted quality of Mr. Trump’s remarks on God and Man in the political universe – that endear him to frustrated anti-establishmentarian Republicans, the sort of people who would be inclined to vote against John Boehner as Speaker of the U.S. House; there is just now a move to replace Mr. Boehner with someone more fearsomely conservative.

Dave Bossie of Citizens United spoke for many conservatives when he said, “It was grassroots conservatives who put John Boehner in power, and we haven’t seen a positive conservative agenda for America as promised in the last several elections. Because of Boehner’s failure of leadership and a track record of broken promises, conservatives are ready for new leadership in the U.S. House now. Maybe newly empowered conservatives like Congressman Meadows will lead a revolt and finally take back the people’s House.”

Rep. Mark Meadows, of North Carolina. prepared a measure that would have removed Mr. Boehner as speaker. Mr. Boehner at first wanted the measure called immediately to embarrass Mr. Meadows. Mr. Boehner’s whips finding that support for their boss was shallow, the measure, which now will hang over Mr. Boehner’s head like a Damoclean Sword throughout the August recess, was not called for a vote.

Mr. Trump is the beneficiary of conservative frustration with Republican moderates in the Congress who will not move forward the conservative agenda. But that coin wears two faces. In 2016, the as yet unknown Republican nominee for president likely will be facing former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

The chatter just now is that Mrs. Clinton will have suffered by Election Day the death of a thousand cuts, mostly self-inflicted, but the memory of even recent times past is not very durable in the United States. Indeed, the Republican beef against Mr. Obama is that, a man of extraordinary rhetorical talents, he has been able to make the near past disappear before our eyes by conjuring up a bewitching but impossible future. Most Republicans feel that a win by Mrs. Clinton will result in an eight-year continuation of President  Obama’s ruinous reign. At the same time, it is true that the Republican Field BT (Before Trump) is extraordinarily talented.

To mention just one among many candidates, Carly Fiorina is, like Mr. Trump, a competent businesswoman and extraordinarily articulate. As a communicator, she has been compared favorably with Margaret Thatcher, a conservative revolutionist who, almost single handedly, changed  Britain from a socialist dystopia to a successful, economically competitive country. She did this by convincing the middle class in Britain that the socialists were bound sooner or later to run out of other people’s money.

Mr. Trump, whose real talent lies in advertising (mostly himself), is an ideological chameleon, full of a Babbit-like boosterism that occasionally may be mistaken for authenticity, quite like Mrs. Clinton, whom Mr. Trump has praised in the past.

God, it has been said, does not play dice with the universe. Neither should Republicans.

Don Pesci is a writer who lives in Vernon, Conn.