I hesitate to admit it, but searching for telltale signs of Donald Trump’s imminent demise, I squandered way too much time last weekend following threads on X as I obsessively pored over grainy telephoto shots and videos of that shambling wreck of a human being.
Oh, yay, his mouth is drooping, look his foot’s dragging, that’s hand’s bruised, his eyes unfocused, his speech slurred––unmistakable signs of life’s impending cessation! C’mon, Grim Reaper, get it on! Deport the bastard to that undiscovered country from whose bourne no traveler returns!
But alas and alack, on Tuesday Trump reappeared in his cartoon character’s red, white, and blue outfit flanked by toadies to announce that he’s transferring his sci-fi-ish Space Command from Colorado to Alabama because Colorado allows mail-in voting.
Why, you may wonder, would a lapsed Buddhist like I-and-I misdirect his karmic energy in wishing that a fellow human would cast off his mortal coil?
My answer is “duh.” Wouldn’t it have been peachy keen if Hitler had croaked before he implemented the Holocaust?[1]
Trump is evil. Yesterday, for example, wasting tax payer money and Defense Department jet fuel, he ordered a flyover to drown out the voices of ten of Epstein’s victims as they pleaded for Congress to expose the names of pedophiles to help appease the horrible wrongs they have suffered.
Trump’s flyover demonstrated peak bully behavior. Here’s an adjudicated rapist who has bragged that his celebrity status allows him to “grab pussies” and to enter beauty pageant dressing rooms to ogle teenaged contestants, etc., etc., etc. to lord his testosteronic power over the powerless.
Then immediately, after the press conference, he called the Epstein affair “a Democratic hoax.”
Oh, and the cowardice of the Republican Congress who have jilted the Founding Fathers for this putrid attention whore so they can cling to their power and its accompanying perks.
Perhaps these self-proclaimed Christians, these hollow men, like Mike Johnson, should pause for a moment from thumping their Bibles and open them to Mark 8:36:
For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?
Again, alas and alack.
[1] By the way, the Smithsonian has now closed an exhibit that showed how the US turned away Jewish refugees during WW2.
In the first quarter of the 21st Century, there was an imperial president so exceedingly fond of adulation that he appointed his cabinet officials based, not on experience and competence, but on their television chops and their talent for groveling and abasing themselves. This president cared nothing about the welfare of US citizens who weren’t millionaires but rather spent his days playing golf or monitoring his presence on television and social media.
For example, in the wee hours Wednesday last, as the Russian Ukrainian war raged and disease and starvation racked Gaza, the imperial president complained on his favorite social media platform that “There is a sick rumor going around that Fake News NBC extended the contract of one of the least talented Late Night television hosts out there, Seth Meyers [. . .] [who] has no Ratings, Talent, or Intelligence, and the Personality of an insecure child. So, why would Fake News NBC extend this dope’s contract. I don’t know, but I’ll definitely be finding out!!!”
So, he spent most of his days bragging about himself or castigating his enemies on his favorite platform, Truth Social, an Orwellian name if there ever was one! Unlike most presidents, who might devote their time in office analyzing budgets or conferring with world leaders, the imperial president squandered almost all of his time on Truth Social making preposterous claims like he’d reduce drug prices by 14,000%. Otherwise, when not posting on social media, at great expense to US taxpayers, he rode around golf courses, hopping on and off of carts, taking mulligan after mulligan.
But what the imperial president really loved the most were cabinet meetings where his obsequious department heads heaped upon him praise so hyperbolic that it might very well cause Kim Jong-un’s plump cheeks to blush.
For example, at the most recent cabinet meeting, Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer told the imperial president, referring to a three-story banner of his visage hanging from the facade of the Labor Department. “Mr. President, I invite you to see your big, beautiful face on a banner in front of the Department of Labor, because you are really the transformational president of the American worker.”
The Imperial President’s Big Beautiful Face
Not to be undone, the imperial president’s special envoy to the Middle East and Russia, Steve Witkoff, gushed, “There’s only one thing I wish for: that the Nobel committee finally gets its act together and realizes that you are the single finest candidate since the Nobel Peace, this Nobel award was ever talked about.”
Wow, the only thing that Witkoff wishes for isn’t world peace or a cure for cancer but that the imperial president, who famously fomented a riot on 6 January 2021, receives a prize for peace.
And although these cabinet ministers were every adept at praising their leader, they were also very inept at running their agencies. The Pentagon and the CDC were both in shambles, and many of the imperial president’s subjects were growing increasingly unhappy as farm workers were deported, crops rotted in the fields, and grocery prices continued to rise.
To make matters worse, the imperial president was not only mentally unwell, but he also suffered physical ailments. His “big, beautiful face” was in fact, despite the inch-thick orange make-up he wore, puffy and haggard, his ankles grotesquely swollen, and his hands bruised from IV punctures. If Labor Secretary Chavez-DeRemer were more honest, she might have very well called him “a fat, decrepit fuck.”
Many of his subjects speculated that the imperial president was suffering from dementia as well, as he obsessed about non-existent gigantic water faucets and, like Don Quixote himself, tilted at windmills. Increasingly, his observations devolved into rambles so disjointed that the reporters covering the president put their fingers in their ears so they wouldn’t have to quote him.
Although the president continues to rule, it seems that his days may be numbered, which is especially bad news for him because he can’t sue or denigrate Death, which is his favorite way of dealing with adversaries.
After the imperial president’s demise, what will become of his cabinet members is anyone’s guess.
I’ve been reading Ariel and Will Durant’s short collection of essays entitled Lessons of History, a remarkable condensation of 5,000 years of various civilizations’ modi operandi. The Durants organize their treatise according to twelve categories: History and the Earth, Biology and History, Race and History, Character and History, Morals and History, Economics and History, Socialism and History, Government and History, History and War, Growth and Decay, ending with the question: Is Progress Real?
Some of this seems dated, especially the chapter on race; however, I found the chapters on Economics and Socialism to be especially eye-opening. I’d really never considered the distribution of wealth in pre-industrial cultures, but as it turns out, the battle between oligarchs and peasants, the haves and have-nots, is as old as the pyramids, stretching from ancient Greece to China.
Here’s the last paragraph of their essay “Economics and History”:
We conclude that the concentration of wealth is natural and inevitable, and is periodically alleviated by violent or peaceful partial redistribution. In this view all economic history is the slow heartbeat of the social organism, a vast systole and diastole of concentrating wealth and compulsive recirculation.
In the United States, a country that doesn’t provide affordable healthcare for many of its citizens, the top 1% of households (or penthouseholds) control 30%, or about a third, of the country’s wealth. Counterintuitively, the working class overwhelmingly opted to elect billionaire Donald Trump who has joined forces with Elon Musk to continue the redistribution of wealth upward, threatening to cut social security and replace the ACA with something or another. There would seem to be no agitation among what used to be called the proletariat about the inequities of current wealth distribution. These voters eschewed Kamala Harris’s plans for free in-home care for the elderly and voted for even more tax cuts for the super wealthy.
But bam! (excuse the bad taste in diction) the murder of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson has generated a tsunami of vitriol from citizens who actually approve of the murder.[1] Often when a murderer somehow slips through the Orwellian ubiquity of surveillance cameras, on-line sleuths attempt to aid authorities in apprehending the assailant. However, according to the New York Times, “in a macabre turn, some people seem to be more interested in rooting for the gunman and thwarting the police’s efforts,” and “civilian efforts to find Mr. Thompson’s killer have appeared muted.”
In fact, a look alike contest based on surveillance photos of the murderer was held in Lower Manhattan yesterday, and the winner (see below) said he celebrated the killer’s action.
The words “deny, defend, depose,” which were etched on the bullet casings and are presumed to refer to insurance companies’ tactics in withholding benefits, have become a sort of rallying cry. According to the Times, a jacket similar to the one worn by the killer “is flying off the shelf.”
More from the Times: “Alex Goldenberg, a senior adviser at the Network Contagion Research Institute, which tracks online threats, said the internet rhetoric had left experts ‘pretty disturbed’ by the glorification of the murder of Brian Thompson and the ‘lionization of the shooter.’
““It’s being framed as some opening blow in a broader class war, which is very concerning as it heightens the threat environment for similar actors to engage in similar acts of violence,’ Mr. Goldenberg said.”
No doubt the murderer’s James-Bond-like ability to slip through the sieves of our contemporary spying-on-each-other network of cameras and microphones has something to do with his lionization.
Perhaps as I type this he is undergoing plastic surgery in some underground bunker.
[1] Presumedly even opponents of capital punishment are applauding the killing of this father of two.
Look, if you’ve ever been sucked into one of those social media video medical advertisements where some physician or chemist claims to have discovered a ridiculously easy way to detox the superfund-grade contamination of your liver without dieting or exercising or giving up your Jim Beam, you know you’re going to have to endure twenty plus minutes of tease before the secret is revealed that for $59.99 for can purchase a magical elixir, the great great great grandchild of 19th Century snake oil, and presto, no more liver problems.
But I’m not going to put you through that. I’m going to explain right away why Kamala Harris is going to win the presidency, maybe by a comfortable margin, and I wouldn’t be risking my stellar reputation as internet sage the weekend before the election if I were not positive.[1]
Let’s start unscientifically by plumbing the rich grotto of my intuition, a storehouse of data and sensations forming what the vulgar call “a gut feeling,” or what I’d prefer to call “an intestinal foreshadowing.”[2]
Okay, let’s get this show on the road.
Although I don’t believe that yard signs and crowd sizes are accurate predictors of election outcomes, this cycle seems somewhat different. At her rallies, Kamala’s audiences hang on her every word as she catalogues a future marked by communal problem solving whereas the less populous crowds at the Trump rallies tend to leave early during Trump’s interminable dystopian descriptions of mongrel hordes laying waste to municipalities or children exiting their school buses an entirely different gender than when they boarded in the morning. Any sane person who doesn’t reside inside the un-fun house of QAnon conspiracy theories knows that Trump is lying and/or delusional. Not a good look for someone entrusted with nuclear codes.
He offers no specific plans, but all the world’s and the nation’s ills will be solved, like the magic liver elixir, by his magical presence.
Slathered with orange make-up and topped with clownish platinum hair, like a cartoon character in the same clothes, he shambles around the nation in a haze that very well could be drug-induced. I mean who falls asleep during his own felony trial? At any rate, his campaign has devolved into a Roman circus where he cosplays fast food minimum wage earners or sanitary workers. Yesterday, the garbage truck driving in circles with Trump staring out the window seems an apt metaphor for the campaign’s final stages. It’s almost as if his staff wants him to lose.
He’s just out on the tarmac having someone drive him around in circles. Why do I feel like this will become the defining meme for his entire campaign? pic.twitter.com/WrESaWJ6cN
Segueing into a more data-driven arguments, early voting seems very promising for Kamala. Although Republicans have been voting early, unlike in 2020, the voters have tended to be elderly high propensity voters, and Jen O’Malley Dillion, Kalama’s campaign chair, says, “We feel really good about what we’re seeing out there.” Even in Nevada where early voting rural Republicans have established a red fire wall, Dillion says in the last two days in Clark County, a Democratic stronghold, “we’ve had higher turnout from young voters than we have at any other point in this cycle.” She adds, “We are seeing Republicans voting early, but these are Republicans that are going to vote no matter what. So what they’re doing is that they’re changing their mode of voting. They were going to vote on Election Day, now they’re voting early.” She also claims that in other states low propensity voters are voting Democratic early. Polls also show that undecided voters are more open to voting for Kamala, not to mention than more women than men are voting with reproductive rights being one of the major issues.
Then there’s the discrepancy in the ground games. The Democratics boast a well-trained, well-staffed group of dedicated, enthusiastic doorknockers, postcard writers, phone-callers and texters whereas the Republicans are relying on paid workers, mercenaries you might say, to attempt to get the undecided to vote.
In short, the Republicans are, like their Dear Leader, disorganized (cf. Trump’s stashing classified documents in his bathroom). In the last days of the campaign you have Mike Johnson promising to end Obamacare if Trump wins, you have Elon Musk predicting Trump’s slashing spending will create temporary economic hardship, and Nikki Haley trashing the campaign. I suspect that Kamala will win at least 10% of Republican voters and a majority of independents. After all, Dick Cheney and Karl Rove are voting for Kamala.
Lastly, the Democrats have several pathways to 270 electoral college votes, even if they were to lose Pennsylvania, which seems unlikely with a half-a-million pissed off Puerto Ricans living there.
Last, but certainly not least, the last three heart-breaking presidential loses in 2000, 2004, and 2016 featured wooden candidates incapable of warming the hearts of non-partisans. Obviously, Kamala is charismatic, out-Obama-ing Obama in my opinion.
Now that’s it. Excuse me while I check out some new promising dietary supplements. Cheers!
[1] Caveat: I’m not as positive that fawning Republican state legislatures and/or Speaker Mike Johnson will allow the certification of a Harris victory.
[2] Please note, I have now removed my tongue from my cheek.
Donald Trump has dubbed his rambling speeches “the weave,” claiming that if you connect the dots of his zigzags, a unified picture appears. So I thought I’d give it a try myself.
Here goes.
The other night, after suffering through a self-righteous, ill-informed screed from a Facebook follower, I found myself listening to Bob Dylan’s masterful protest song “Hurricane,” a cinematic narrative recounting the arrest and trial of Rubin Hurricane Carter, a boxer wrongly convicted of a triple homicide in 1966 in Patterson, New Jersey.
Meanwhile, far away in another part of town Rubin Carter and a couple of friends are drivin’ around Number one contender for the middleweight crown Had no idea what kinda shit was about to go down
When a cop pulled him over to the side of the road Just like the time before and the time before that In Paterson that’s just the way things go If you’re black you might as well not show up on the street ‘Less you want to draw the heat
Near the end of the song Dylan sings,
How can the life of such a man Be in the palm of some fool’s hand? To see him obviously framed Couldn’t help but make me feel ashamed to live in a land
Where justice is a game
Now all the criminals in their coats and their ties Are free to drink martinis and watch the sun rise While Rubin sits like Buddha in a ten-foot cell An innocent man in a living hell
As I was listening, the long gone idealism of the 60s came to mind. Dylan himself — and Joan Baez –performed at the March on Washington, sharing the stage with Martin Luther King. They heard firsthand the “I Have a Dream Speech.” They’re both still alive sixty-one years later.
In 1963, the American people considered communism the greatest threat to the nation’s sovereignty, and the Soviet Union was our greatest enemy whose spy agency the KGB eventually became the employer and training ground for Vladimir Putin, whom Donald Trump so idolizes, along with Kim Jong Un, the North Korean dictator.
According to Trump, outside forces like Russia and North Korea aren’t the greatest threat to American sovereignty; no, it’s “the enemy within,” American citizens, news organizations, and celebrities tarred with the paradoxical disapprobation “woke.” It’s Joe McCarthy redux, and McCarthy’s corrupt lawyer Roy Cohn was Donald Trump’s mentor.
Trump and his followers bring to mind WB Yeats’s lines from “The Second Coming”:
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Fueled by the fifth deadly sin wrath, these resentful white supremist faux Christian cultists seem to prefer a dictatorship of oligarchs to the teachings of their would-be Savoir who famously preached
Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.
Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy.
“As far as I am concerned,” she said and glared at him fiercely, Christ was just another D.P.”
Mrs. May to Father Flynn in Flannery O’Connor’s “The Displaced Person”
The most heartbreaking of all Flannery O’Connor’s stories, “The Displaced Person,” seems particularly poignant given the ban on Muslim refugees instated last weekend.[1] Set right after WW2, the story dramatizes the attempted assimilation of a Polish refugee into bigoted backwoods Georgia.
As David Griffith points out in his excellent essay on the story in The Paris Review:
O’Connor takes her title from the Displaced Persons Act, which, between 1948 and 1952, permitted the immigration of some four hundred thousand European refugees into the United States. President Truman signed the bill with “very great reluctance” for what he saw as its discriminatory policy toward Jews and Catholics: the Act stipulated that, in order to be eligible, one must have entered Germany, Italy, or Austria before December 22, 1945, which, according to Truman, ruled out 90 percent of the remaining Jewish people displaced by the war. Similarly excluded were the many Catholics who’d fled their largely Communist countries after the December 22 deadline.
“The bad points of the bill are numerous,” Truman wrote. “Together they form a pattern of discrimination and intolerance wholly inconsistent with the American sense of justice.” He called the decision to enforce the December 1945 deadline “inexplicable, except upon the abhorrent ground of intolerance.”
In the story, O’Connor’s displaced person’s work ethic so far exceeds that of the slothful, under-compensated blacks and whites who work on Mrs. May’s farm that he threatens their livelihoods. Worse than that, he violates Southern taboo of racial purity when tries to contract a marriage between a black field hand and his young Polish cousin languishing in a camp back home.
When an outraged Mrs. May confronts Mr. Guizac about the proposed interracial marriage — “You would bring [that] poor innocent child over here and try to marry her to a half-witted thieving black stinking nigger” — he says quite sensibly, “She no care black [. . .] She in camp three year.”
In the end, xenophobia and bigotry triumph over charity as the displaced person – the one good man to be found in that collection called A Good Man Is Hard to Find – is done away with.
She had felt her eyes and Mr. Shortley’s eyes and the Negro’s eyes come together in one look that froze in collusion forever, and she heard the little noise the Pole made as the tractor wheel broke his backbone.
* * *
Obviously, refugees rank as some of the planet’s most vulnerable souls, driven from their homelands — from their familiar cultures — into alien worlds of gibberish, incomprehensible mores, and worse.
The refugees turned away this weekend had undergone as much as 48 months of vetting from several agencies and pose virtually no terrorism threat whatsoever. No one from the banned countries has ever committed a terrorist attack on US soil – unlike citizens from Saudi Arabia, Lebanon, and Pakistan, who weren’t included in the ban, people from countries where Trump has business interests.
Imagine the refugees’ heartache after so much suffering, boarding a plane headed for their dreamed of destination, only to be turned away and sent on a long, long flight back to perdition.
Of course, it’s not surprising that the sadist Trump would shatter the hopes of the dispossessed to score political points. After all, as many have pointed out, he’s cruel, hosted a reality TV show in which he lovingly embraced the chance to humiliate people with the words “you’re fired.” No one would expect him to take refugees’ plights to heart.
On the other hand, you might think Paul Ryan, who embraces his Catholicism the way Steve Bannon does his booze, would take Jesus’s words more to heart. But Ryan has come out fully supporting the ban.
I’ll let Jesus – the ultimate Displaced Person – have the last say:
Blessed are the poor in spirit: for theirs is the kingdom of Heaven. (Matthew 5:3)
Blessed are those who mourn: for they will be comforted. (5:4)
Blessed are the meek: for they will inherit the earth. (5:5)
Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness: for they will be filled. (5:6)
Blessed are the merciful: for they will be shown mercy. (5:7)
Blessed are the pure in heart: for they will see God. (5:8)
Blessed are the peacemakers: for they will be called children of God. (5:9)
Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness sake: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. (5:10)
Blessed are you when others revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account. Rejoice and be glad, for your reward in heaven is great, for so they persecuted the prophets who were before you. .5:11-12
Oh, by the way, what was the percentage of evangelists’ votes Trump garnered?
[1] The Trump’s claim that it’s not a ban on Muslims rings hollow when the administration offers exemptions to Christians and Jews.
This is the time of year when I typically publish my annual “That Was the Year That Was” post, sashaying down memory lane reprising old chestnuts from the last 12 months in an egotistical attempt to drive up my hit totals before the new year. (This year’s total to date 23,358, but who’s counting?)
However, 2016 has been so horrible with the deaths of friends, the reoccurrence of Judy’s cancer, and the election of the Tangerine ManBaby™, I can’t summon the strength to revisit what has seemed the entire 14th Century [1] compressed into 366 dolorous days.
illustration from a Norwegian newspaper
Instead, I’m going to reprise a post from my all-but-defunct Late Empire Ruminations blog from 2011, back when Donald Trump was, according to Barbara Walters, merely one of the year’s “10 most fascinating people” (as opposed to a Mad Tweeter with access to nuclear weapons).
Anyway, Enjoy, and Merry Xmas/Happy Hanukkah/Wonderful Kwanzaa/ Super Saturnalia, etc.
Jean Paul Sartre’s existential hell of No Exit seems downright paradisal if you imagine the unspeakable horror of being trapped in an open boat with Barbara Walter’s 10 Most Fascinating People of 2011*, i.e., Herman Cain, Katy Perry, Eric Stonestreet and sitcom co-star Tyler Ferguson, the Kardashians, Simon Cowell, Derek Jeter, Amanda Knox, Pippa Middleton, Donald Trump, and the late Steve Jobs, who in this scenario would be cannibalized by the survivors.
One wonders if such an array of narcissists in such a small space might upset the delicate balance of matter v. anti-matter, their collective self-absorption sucking the entire universe into the insatiable black hole of their egos.
*For some odd reason BW deems the Kardashian sisters as one person and the duo of Stonestreet and Ferguson as one person as well (perhaps because they play a gay adoptive couple on television). Otherwise, we actually have 14 fascinating people.
Come to think of it, this idea would make one hell of a movie, if any investors out there are ready to kick in some capital and send it my way. Of course, the film will begin on the QE2 in the near future, our 14 fascinating cast members on their way to Iran to entertain occupying troops in the first term of the Gingrich Administration.* Unfortunately, killer drones attack the luxury liner, killing Derek Jeter and Pippa Middleton, perhaps the least egotistical of the fourteen.
*2016 note: Yipes, I wasn’t too far off.
As the survivors vie for attention (imagine the McLaughlin Group in full-throat contention), the electromagnetic force of their egos creates a black hole that sucks them to a new universe where they each form a separate planet (with its unique costuming) and the rest of the movie is devoted to their preparations for an intergalactic war that will put all six Star Wars movies to shame.
I mean, it’s like Open Water 2 meets Starship Troopers. Picture Donald Trump attempting to fit the cotton-candied parallelogram of his hair inside a space helmet or Amanda Knox skipping out on amassing an air force to go clubbing at the mos-eisley-cantina.
We’re talking boffo box office, investors. You know how to contact me.
[1] A few highlights from Century 14: the Great Famine of 1315-1317 kills millions in Europe, the Hundred Years’ War begins in 1367, the bubonic plague hits its peak in the years 1346-1353 reducing the world population an estimated 350-375 million. I know those plague death numbers sound unbelievable, even by Wikipedia standards.
This evening after a series of minor vexations – son sick, Gamecocks clobbered, eye invaded by wayward particle – I got to thinking about Horace Walpole’s observation that “[l]ife is a tragedy for those who feel, and a comedy for those who think.” I quote Walpole when I’m teaching tragedy and ask students to offer an interpretation.
It’s a hard question, hard to put the answer into words.
Of course, to address the question, you need context. For example, let’s examine the thinking/ feeling/comedy/tragedy conundrum from the perspective of Trump’s election.
(I know some of you may have supported Trump, perhaps because you feel immigrants are overrunning the country or that massive tax cuts will defy history and fuel an economic boom or that you consider Hillary Clinton/Barack Obama Satanic spawn or some/all of the above).
However, the [tautology alert] a priori premise in this thought experiment is that Trump is a vulgarian with authoritarian tendencies whose boorish pronouncements during the campaign have eroded codes of civility and whose total lack of a sense-of-history and intellectual curiosity make his election as leader of the free world very, very unfortunate.
Not to mention his pathological avariciousness.
Democritus
Okay, let’s bring in the cynical pre-Socratic philosopher Democritus, aka “the laughing philosopher.”
Seneca claimed that Democritus, whom he called “the Mocker,” laughingly held human beings in disdain, modeling a detached amusement at the foibles of the masses. In temperament think Bill Maier as opposed to Louis Black.
If human folly is laughable, this election might very well provoke Democritus to guffawing at this turn of events:
A swindler and pathological liar who pleads guilty to fraud a week after the election and who referred to his opponent as “Crooked Hillary” with the help of Fox News and Russian hackers (not to mention the New York Times) convinces a majority populace that he’s “more trustworthy” than she.
[cue laugh track]
Coal miners in Kentucky counties who have decreased their uninsured rate by almost twenty percent vote 93% to 6% for a man who wants to abolish the estate tax.
[cue laugh track]
Thinkers like Democritus take the long view. Human folly is essentially history’s major motif. Thinkers are familiar with not only Huck Finn’s the “Duke and the Dolphin” but have read Swift and Shakespeare and perhaps Horace and Juvenal.
In their view, only incredibly naïve pollyannas would expect their generation to be less prone to foolishness than their forebears. Most of humankind is purblind, always have been, always will be.
After all, anyone reading this will be literally dead in 80 years. So what if the American Experiment fails? So what if Arizona once again boasts a view of the Pacific? Letting the little people decide was a very, very bad idea.
Just desserts.
By the way, should I add that this view might be considered elitist?
Heraclitus
Heraclitus, on the other hand, aka the “weeping philosopher,” was a feeler, invested in the here and now. So what if Swift’s view of Yahoos was essentially correct? Those yahoos who voted for Trump in Kentucky lives will not get any better but actually worse: they will lose that recently acquired insurance, babies will die, and those promised coal mining jobs ain’t coming back ever. Once again, they’ve been lied to.
How horrible, Heraclitus laments, that such chicanery is so rewarded. A spoiled, 70-year-old adolescent tweets preposterous lies and pays no apparent price for his dishonesty and in the mean time transforms the Founding Fathers’ republican democracy into an authoritarian kleptocracy!
People are real, not abstractions to be mocked. Pain is real.
In fact, sorry. My eye is killing me. I got to sign off.
Last Tuesday, lots of low information voters stood in the relatively short lines where white people vote and cast their ballots for Donald Trump because they’re sick of Washington DC and wanted to take a sledge-hammer to the status quo.
These people are unaware that not much got done in Washington under Obama (except for saving the economy and adding 20 million to the ranks of the insured) because the Republican Congress thwarted his every move. Mitch McConnell infamously announced right from the get-go, i.e. right after Obama’s first inauguration, that his goal was to make sure that Obama would be a one-term president.
Well, these low info whites are going to get their way now because things are about to get done in Washington – the Affordable Care Act will be repealed, massive tax cuts signed into law, environmental protections gutted, banks deregulated – sis-boom-bah!
Perhaps because Trump’s gruff plain speech echoed their thoughts and expressed their prejudices, they figured he would give a shit about them and get those factories humming again, but, of course, all Donald Trump cares about is Donald Trump, and certainly his polices aren’t going to help those disaffected Michiganders and Ohioans; indeed, they’ll make their lives even less lavish. No doubt, these pissed off citizens don’t know that Trump literally defecates in gold-plated toilets. They couldn’t see that he’s the great-great grandson of the charlatan who sold their great-great grandfathers that snake oil.
Trey Lott and the lobbyists, on the other hand, will do right well as deficits rise like volcanoes, necessitating drastic cuts in non-military spending in subsequent years. The real irony, though, is that after the election, it’s not Republican Party that is, to quote Matthew Yglesias, “a smoldering heap,” but the Democratic Party instead.
Although Abe Lincoln’s famous statement, “You can fool all the people some of the time and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time,” might very well be true, it’s also true that you can “fool a whole lot of people a lot of the time — over and over again.”
You Do Hoodoo 