12 April—The Civil War, a national calamity that divided the country but doesn’t equal the catastrophe brought about by Donald Trump’s incompetent, insane, malevolent presidency, began 165 years ago today as Confederate forces under Brigadier General Pierre Beauregard bombarded Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor, South Carolina, commanded by Major Robert Anderson.

Beauregard used some clever ordnance, including “hot shot”—red-hot cannonballs that set fire to Sumter’s wooden buildings. Miraculously, however, no one on either side was killed during the 34-hour bombardment. But during the 14 April ceremony in which Anderson surrendered to Beauregard a pile of cartridges exploded, killing a Union soldier instantly and mortally wounding another one, who died a few days later.

We won’t even speculate on the vast number of people—mostly innocent civilians—Trump’s narcissistic megalomania has killed.

Anyway, the Union officer who was second in command of Fort Sumter was Captain Abner Doubleday, the selfsame West Point grad who much later was credited with or accused of inventing baseball when he was 20 and living in Cooperstown, New York, but didn’t ever and at the time wasn’t. In fact, there’s no evidence that Doubleday ever played or had any interest in the American sport that’s actually British rounders on steroids.

And although Doubleday didn’t invent the San Francisco cable railway that still runs up and down the city’s notorious hills, he helped its inventor, Andrew Smith Hallidie, patent it and get the charter. And he retired as a major general in 1873 and published, among other things, two important works on the Civil War. As it happens, Abner Doubleday was a great-great-granduncle of Nelson Doubleday Jr, of the publishing house, who once owned the New York Mets.

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In non-news, Donald Trump’s terrific trio of skilled peacemakers on a weekend boys’ vacation in Islamabad, Pakistan—JD Vance, Jared Kushner, and Steve Witkoff—hasn’t made peace with Iran. Another day, another several million dollars of taxpayer money wasted. Of course, that’s only because, according to Vance, Iran refused to accept the “final and best offer” thrown in its face by the United States. The terrific trio isn’t calling it unconditional surrender, but that’s precisely what a take-it-or-leave-it treaty is.

The people of Iran clearly need and deserve to get rid of the corrupt incumbent theocratic totalitarian regime, but America’s corrupt incumbent quasi-theocratic totalitarian regime doesn’t have the smarts or finesse to get the job done . . .