The latest round in the fabulous adventures of Gaius Tiberius Trump is probably going to confuse, mystify, anger and amuse people for generations to come. Does the private behavior of a despot indicate anything on his ability to serve the commonality? Well, that's begging the question, ain't it....
I've been very bothered by the one thing made clear by the VP debate which is that we live in a society where we seem split into the fact-based, reality-grounded community versus the possibility-based, faith-grounded community. Or, as Lewis Black put it so well, the Idiotic versus the Psychotic. Trump's pretty obviously leading the Psychotic Legions; Hillary by default leading the new Idiots. Collectivists versus Anarchists, perhaps?
In the classic English film Whistle Down the Wind, set in mid-20th-century Lancashire, some children discover a fugitive sleeping in a barn whom they take to be Jesus and to whom they attribute magical powers. At one point one of the children, a stubborn little boy, voices the children’s growing doubts: “He’s just a fella.” There’s something poignant about this moment because it represents the sort of realization that all of us – those of us at any rate who share the common tendency to look for heroes and guides – have had from time to time. Such realizations are a part of growing up. Our parents are not all-knowing. Our much-loved teachers are flawed and fallible. Our political heroes turn out not to be quite as heroic or altruistic as advertised, our spiritual guides not quite as special as we thought. (Emphasis added)
I had a number of other things on my mind, and Mark's insights helped me get some sort of logical way to put the thing together. I'm not surprised by the uproar about Trump's "grab 'em by the pussy and their hearts will follow" nonsense; I am surprised that anyone else is surprised. This isn't any different from what people who were reasonably well informed on industries like gaming, or publishing or construction or that level of business already knew. What should be astonishing us is that it took these people -- a large number of them supposedly religious -- to wake up to how awful the man is, and not think well, he's a brutal ass, a bully, a misogynistic swine who's proud of it, so by transference he'll be a good president. As someone once said to me around a table in a room stinking of despair, cigarettes and bad, strong black coffee, " If you take a violent drunken abuser and just get him sober, you now have a hungover violent abuser..."
Trump's behavior reminds me of a Lewis Black character he described as " an ADHD eight year old whose favorite word is fuck and so he's my biggest fan." But, the selection and possible election of the Donald or the whole Hillary phenomenon is pretty astonishing in it's own right. Guy Clark described an incident that graphically portrays my feelings about this election cycle -- "It left 50 or 60 people sittin' on their cars, wonderin' what it's coming to and how it got this far..."
In this season of discontented scary clowns, these are my thoughts over at Vets. "Well, over time things got more crazy and less important until we have the current example of why Democracy may not allow you to have nice things…in your living room or in the back yard or in the White House. It’s continuing to get weirder, and now these people are just getting totally out of control."