No the Mayor is not the police chief. He does have that bureau among "his" bureaus but there is a police chief. Recently the white female police chief stepped down and an African American police captain was drafted. I am not sure what he is going to do, but the police are a huge problem and the Mayor has never been able to control them (not this one, nor the one before him, nor the one before him...I have worked for City government for 13 years).
Ah yes he is the police commissioner. He also has the power to decide which commissioners are assigned which bureaus. He like the one before him took police on and you’re right that they are sort of rogue.
I think he has less but I don’t know that much about other cities. I do know that our commission style of government is very wacky and we don’t have a city manager function
I think this is correct. The hatred of their political opponents and the rage itself is now all that is important, not policies or fixes. I mean, there is no political benefit gained by gassing middle-aged moms in Portland. Nobody who isn’t already aboard the Rage Train is going to be persuaded to your side and normies will recoil in disgust.
Every once in a while I think about how 40% of the country still supports this moronic, racist Hitler-wannabe, and I have to sit down. I could see 20-30%, sure. We all know there are plenty of assholes out there. But *40%* is a scary number and gets scarier when you realize that on Election Day Trump will probably get up to 45% of the vote. Even assuming he loses and putting my natural cynicism aside, it makes me deeply concerned for the next 10-15 years. After that I don’t worry too much, the kids are (pretty) alright.
A not-insignificant part of that rage is the growing realization that, goddamnit!! the fucking liberals were right AGAIN!! The liberals said all these bad things were going to happen, and we said pfffft! what could those liberals know? But here we are, with reality once again rubbing our noses in Republican failure. Again. Like it always does.
Yep, I think for many it is precisely this. Leaving the militia men and deranged conspiracy theorists aside, it’s hard to look at this shambolic shitstorm and think Trump is doing an outstanding job. So doubling and tripling down becomes the less ego-bruising alternative. Plus, white supremacy is a helluva drug and the product Trump peddles is top shelf. It's about the only thing he’s good at.
Trump started his presidency with a dystopian vision of America in his inaugural speech. After 3 years of fascist initiatives, leavened with historic incompetence, he’s finishing with let-it-all-burn rage at all those who opposed him. And he doesn’t care how much he harms those who supported him.
"For one thing, Trump’s first big strongman show at Lafayette Park here in D.C. was a disaster for his approval rating."
Approval ratings are about to hit an event horizon beyond which they can't meaningfully drop more. Donnie's approval consists of the GOP base, GOP leaning voters, and twelve people who support whoever because they think their approval of the man is required to show respect for the office. Much more relevant at this point are polls of likely voters. And by definition -- likely voters -- I'd dare say there's undercounting of POC e.g. likely Dem voters. And now that I think about it, I'm sure the silent majority, deep in their hearts, really, really want to be rid of Donnie.
As for rage, sure. It's the theme of right wing media. Latching on to it during the 2016 primary was some sort of stroke of genius by Donnie. The other wannabes were pols who had to act statesman-like by definition. Donnie was free to excite the base, toss them the reddest of meat and generally pander like no respectable (such as it is) professional pol could or would. And those people want their anger reflected, which is to say, endorsed. (Of course, right wing populism's problem is that conservatives are opposed to all solutions to their legitimate problems.)
They didn’t even get their previous Wall. Incidentally, a couple we’ve known for thirty years, such close friends that they are the only non-blood relations at our Thanksgiving table, have been revealed since the Corona Crisis and the Black Lives Matter protests as rage-filled sputtering haters. There is absolutely no way to reason with them or even hold a civilized conversation — about ANYTHING. Their rage consumes them. Big sad frustrated sigh goes here
It's startling the extent to which rightwingers tune their whole being into what talking points their media is pushing any given day. No conservative in my circle of family & friends ever mentioned a wall, ever, until Trump was clinching the nomination. Then abruptly, every single one of them expressed fury that there was no wall, which we NEEDED, or the nation would be literally destroyed! So to recap: No wall is fine in June 2016, No wall means we are doomed in July 2016. It's shameless.
I think another reason for Trump's deployment of the secret police is tactical, yes, but that alone is giving him too much credit. Trump can't deal in abstraction. That's why so many of his dumb stunts include a visual element, like a Fourth of July parade that was going to include tanks, or why he always points to the map of red America, or just recently when there was an event on deregulation and he used two trucks and a crane to demonstrate some stupid point.
A virus, however, is abstract, in the sense that you can't see it, but you can see the results, which no matter how you cut it aren't good because people don't want to wear masks or social distance or stay home or fight for toilet paper. Robocops beating the shit out of college kids in hoodies? Nothing abstract about that at all. Which I think is one reason why Trump likes it.
This makes a lot of sense. When your personal identity is wrapped up in being a contrarian, and not only do none of your ideas work but you've failed once again when you're given the opportunity to make them work, all you've got left is nihilism.
Well, you could continue being a contrarian and renounce the ideas that led you to failure, but that would mean admitting you have a problem, and you can't have that, can you? Sad but true.
Why are there so many rageaholics in the USA? Well... even though I'm just a poor country boy I've had the opportunity to travel around the world quite a bit and have visited 5 of the 7 continents with various countries in each. I've also spent a lot of time in Oceania, which is an ocean and not a continent, but a lot of people still live there. I'm just saying I've been around a bit.
So I'm just gonna say something I've noticed.
Americans are the biggest fucking assholes on the planet. It's shameful. There's something about the USA that makes a significant portion of the people who grow up in it into complete assholes. I think it's another form of privilege - "hey, we're Americans, the greatest people ever!!! So fuck yah, we do we want motherfuckers!"
I'm moving to the South Pacific when I retire here in a few years. Fuck this joint. So far as I'm concerned it's been a racist, fascist pig hole my entire life. I spent 25 years running from the authorities just because I wanted to grow an unapproved plant. To me the fascism started with the war on (some) drugs (the ones the hippies and the minorities like). That was in 1972... I've never been a "proud" American - I just live here, pay my taxes and do my best to stay out of prison. I don't have to love it.
And indeed why should you? Godspeed, hope the world *lets* you escape this dump when the time comes, given their understandable fear of the contagion we spread!
It occurred to me a few years ago that this kind of resentment is seductive because it feels like self-respect, or at least a temporary simulation thereof. It's like a dying car battery that can't hold a charge. Give it a jump and it "works," but turn off the engine and it goes dead again.
Also, you have to admit that at least when you're angry, you feel alive--and it effectively distracts your from feelings or thoughts that any of your problems are the fault of you, your parents, or the political representatives you've voted for all your stupid, stupid life.
I think you touched on the true core - the rage is a way to not have to engage in self-reflection. Every time minorities make another step towards being fully a part of our nation (representation in media, changing the direction of the cultural conversation away from "whiteness" being seen as normal/baseline) the conservative whites lash back furiously. Because it means another set of assumptions that made them the natural, top-of-the-food-chain actor in the national narrative is crumbling. Recognizing that you had been making a LOT of assumptions about yourself is ... hard. Easier to rage that others are "taking" something that is rightfully yours (This is why the "special rights" or "quotas" arguments are so visceral for them - deep in their subconscious it is recognition that they themselves have been elevated artificially, or that they have pissed away their advantages.)
The good news is that each step forward does have an effect on the long term. The kids who understand things from the get go don't need to painfully re-evaluate it later. Old bigots die off. Look at Ferguson 2014 to now even. When people went on TV to talk about "systemic racism" it was pooh-poohed as academic mumbo-jumbo designed to hand-wave away African-Americans' terrible culture and lack of personal responsibility within it, i.e. they were saying African-Americans' problems were entirely their own and could be solved simply by being more deferential, bootsrapping and, you know, not doing some much criming in the first place. Not surprisingly, this 'solution' requires zero effort or change of mindset from white Amerca, other than maybe kicking in a few ore dollars to the beleaguered police departments trying to control these animals - er, help these communities deal with their crime wave, I mean.
But the new focus on the problem - revelations about how common police brutality is, how everyday police harassment is, the cycle of fines leading to warrants and warrants leading to priors and priors leading to probable cause, etc. - added structure to the 'systemic' argument, and you can see it in the reaction to George Floyd & the protests. Instead of what happened after Ferguson ("well, cops have to do what it takes to get these crazy black looters off the streets") people are appalled at what is rightly being seen as police rioting.
Ok now listen. It’s clearly insane that The Ghostbusters could have been women when it is well known they were 2 fellas and a gorilla. I mean, what next <sputter, sputter, gasp> a super hero movie starring a woman? Or one featuring a black man as a magically powered god of Asgard? At some point the madness must end!
Huh. The self-respect thing might be the answer I've been looking for... Because I've often wondered my real-life conservative family members prioritize staying angry.
For example, last week I got an email from a relative very upset that DiBlasio "used tax dollars to stir up hate." Apparently the city paid for "Black Lives Matter" to get painted on the street outside the Trump tower. So I asked, Were you upset when Pence used tax dollars to fly to, sit in briefly, and then walk out of a stadium when some football players knelt? He was not! Then I asked, Do you think BLM has a fair point that we should reform the police, or do you think BLM is a movement about hate? He picked reform! So relax, I said; DiBlasio didn't do anything to upset you. He painted a sign you agree with and paid for it in a way you approve of. I also pointed out **you don't live anywhere near New York** and if New Yorkers, who elected Bloomberg three times, don't like it, they'll handle it. So did he relax?
Somehow, friends, he became angrier. See, when he says BLM it's for [unspecified] reform, but when DiBlasio says it, it's out of hate. The Pence thing he decided to 100% ignore, except to mention that Kaerpernick committed the error of protesting "on foreign soil" (apparently he knelt in the UK?) and THAT made Kaepernick's protest offensive.
Anyway, my point is: They love to stay mad. You can point out exactly how according to their own principles, there's nothing to be mad at. But they will maneuver to do it, ignoring facts, rewriting history, ignoring things they said themselves just 2 minutes earlier. It is a way of pride and of mattering. A way to avoid the fact that you're only one of 300 million Americans and you're not President, so your stupid opinion isn't going to impact the nation at all. Being angry makes you clear-sighted, it must seem, like the last man on the ramparts of civilization, holding the whole shebang together because no one else will. (I bet the militias run themselves on that rhetoric, and the white nationalists.)
It also might be why the president is so crucial to them. Any president. To some extent there's transference going on. What *I* would do if *I* was in the White House (as I should have been). They take whatever man is in there personally. And they want to be angry, so -- it's Tan Suit Scandal if he's (D). Send the goons to Portland to assert yourself, if he's a fellow anger-monger (R).
It IS show business, which, now that I think of it, can be said to be the one field in which Trump was (for a while) unambiguously successful. Hence, maybe, his obsession with ratings and what "people say," how "no one has ever seen anything like it." To him, the important thing isn't to particularly accomplish anything, but to wow the audience and win its applause *for him.*
It surprised me how in the weeks of transition and early 2017, he appeared genuinely astonished by how much work he had to do behind the curtain, as it were. It gave me such a sinking feeling; like, oh, god, he really had no idea it was not a ceremonial position... He stood exposed as a clown who'd understood the presidency to have no more depth than a traveling medicine show. All you had to do to be good at the job was dazzle the people with what they wanted to hear! How was Obama always fucking that up?? He had no idea that Obama, or any previous president, was in meetings from dawn until bedtime, struggling through mountains of detail to try for the policy that would result in the fewest actual deaths. (He still does not grasp that, because other peoples' deaths are not quite real to him; he still, but fearfully now I think, defensively, treats it like a show.)
His shock during the transition was that all the Obama people expected him, Donald Trump, to LEARN THINGS!!! Donald J. Trump, the smartest man in the world!
His next shock was the revelation that he did not have actual dictatorial power. There were RULES and LAWS and all this bullshit. When all he wanted to do was give an order and have other people make it so.
Wow--can't believe I never connected this to Trump's business style before, but: I once worked at a modest, family-run business (about 15 employees) just as they hit the big time and scaled up (to about 100). They did a great job of hiring, renting a space, and so on -- but the family refused to grasp that you can't captain a 100-person ship with five big clients the same way you ran 15 people with one tiny client. The company collapsed, and I still remember during the mass layoff, the matriarch insisting it was The World that was wrong, not the family.
Can't remember where I heard it before, but the saying "the most dangerous real estate in the world is between Donald Trump and a camera" is how this whole administration has operated.
Showbiz is a common obsession among psychopaths. Some show-biz obsessives are very sweet and even smart. But I have met and maybe you have met bad people who love showbiz because it gives them the opportunity to make judgments on people they never met based not on their achievements -- which are usually measurable, so you can't rig them -- but on the intangibles of stardom. If you love Joan Fontaine and hate -- really hate -- Olivia De Havilland, who's to say you're wrong? Every psycho movie fan can be the Hedda Hopper or J.J. Hunsecker of his own private universe. Only somehow somebody make Trump the Hopper and Hunsecker of ours.
Thank you, Roy, for being a much more articulate, much more clever version of me. You give form to my intimations and this, in particular, was spot on!
Portland Oregon police have a long history of racism, brutality and misconduct. If any police agency deserves defunding it's that one.
True! My stepson was out there at the justice center for awhile- he showed us his rubber billet bruises (one was in the back)!
*bullet
No the Mayor is not the police chief. He does have that bureau among "his" bureaus but there is a police chief. Recently the white female police chief stepped down and an African American police captain was drafted. I am not sure what he is going to do, but the police are a huge problem and the Mayor has never been able to control them (not this one, nor the one before him, nor the one before him...I have worked for City government for 13 years).
Ah yes he is the police commissioner. He also has the power to decide which commissioners are assigned which bureaus. He like the one before him took police on and you’re right that they are sort of rogue.
I think he has less but I don’t know that much about other cities. I do know that our commission style of government is very wacky and we don’t have a city manager function
My money says townie Stephen King could kick Tucker’s entitled fag-bashing summering ass. And then write a good disturbing short story about it.
I think this is correct. The hatred of their political opponents and the rage itself is now all that is important, not policies or fixes. I mean, there is no political benefit gained by gassing middle-aged moms in Portland. Nobody who isn’t already aboard the Rage Train is going to be persuaded to your side and normies will recoil in disgust.
Every once in a while I think about how 40% of the country still supports this moronic, racist Hitler-wannabe, and I have to sit down. I could see 20-30%, sure. We all know there are plenty of assholes out there. But *40%* is a scary number and gets scarier when you realize that on Election Day Trump will probably get up to 45% of the vote. Even assuming he loses and putting my natural cynicism aside, it makes me deeply concerned for the next 10-15 years. After that I don’t worry too much, the kids are (pretty) alright.
A not-insignificant part of that rage is the growing realization that, goddamnit!! the fucking liberals were right AGAIN!! The liberals said all these bad things were going to happen, and we said pfffft! what could those liberals know? But here we are, with reality once again rubbing our noses in Republican failure. Again. Like it always does.
And that's just sooooo unfair!
Yep, I think for many it is precisely this. Leaving the militia men and deranged conspiracy theorists aside, it’s hard to look at this shambolic shitstorm and think Trump is doing an outstanding job. So doubling and tripling down becomes the less ego-bruising alternative. Plus, white supremacy is a helluva drug and the product Trump peddles is top shelf. It's about the only thing he’s good at.
The irony of right wing populism is that they hate and reject any/every solution.
Trump started his presidency with a dystopian vision of America in his inaugural speech. After 3 years of fascist initiatives, leavened with historic incompetence, he’s finishing with let-it-all-burn rage at all those who opposed him. And he doesn’t care how much he harms those who supported him.
Absolutely.
"For one thing, Trump’s first big strongman show at Lafayette Park here in D.C. was a disaster for his approval rating."
Approval ratings are about to hit an event horizon beyond which they can't meaningfully drop more. Donnie's approval consists of the GOP base, GOP leaning voters, and twelve people who support whoever because they think their approval of the man is required to show respect for the office. Much more relevant at this point are polls of likely voters. And by definition -- likely voters -- I'd dare say there's undercounting of POC e.g. likely Dem voters. And now that I think about it, I'm sure the silent majority, deep in their hearts, really, really want to be rid of Donnie.
As for rage, sure. It's the theme of right wing media. Latching on to it during the 2016 primary was some sort of stroke of genius by Donnie. The other wannabes were pols who had to act statesman-like by definition. Donnie was free to excite the base, toss them the reddest of meat and generally pander like no respectable (such as it is) professional pol could or would. And those people want their anger reflected, which is to say, endorsed. (Of course, right wing populism's problem is that conservatives are opposed to all solutions to their legitimate problems.)
They didn’t even get their previous Wall. Incidentally, a couple we’ve known for thirty years, such close friends that they are the only non-blood relations at our Thanksgiving table, have been revealed since the Corona Crisis and the Black Lives Matter protests as rage-filled sputtering haters. There is absolutely no way to reason with them or even hold a civilized conversation — about ANYTHING. Their rage consumes them. Big sad frustrated sigh goes here
Oops! Typo! That should read: “precious Wall,” not “previous Wall.” Now I’m sputtering with impotent rage
"Previous" will come true soon enough as I expect he'll try to wall off the cities next.
And it feels good, don't it?
Hah!!!! (Yup)
It's startling the extent to which rightwingers tune their whole being into what talking points their media is pushing any given day. No conservative in my circle of family & friends ever mentioned a wall, ever, until Trump was clinching the nomination. Then abruptly, every single one of them expressed fury that there was no wall, which we NEEDED, or the nation would be literally destroyed! So to recap: No wall is fine in June 2016, No wall means we are doomed in July 2016. It's shameless.
YES, 100% this Roy. Sublime
I made everything worse but don't blame me. What a campaign pitch.
I think another reason for Trump's deployment of the secret police is tactical, yes, but that alone is giving him too much credit. Trump can't deal in abstraction. That's why so many of his dumb stunts include a visual element, like a Fourth of July parade that was going to include tanks, or why he always points to the map of red America, or just recently when there was an event on deregulation and he used two trucks and a crane to demonstrate some stupid point.
A virus, however, is abstract, in the sense that you can't see it, but you can see the results, which no matter how you cut it aren't good because people don't want to wear masks or social distance or stay home or fight for toilet paper. Robocops beating the shit out of college kids in hoodies? Nothing abstract about that at all. Which I think is one reason why Trump likes it.
This makes a lot of sense. When your personal identity is wrapped up in being a contrarian, and not only do none of your ideas work but you've failed once again when you're given the opportunity to make them work, all you've got left is nihilism.
Well, you could continue being a contrarian and renounce the ideas that led you to failure, but that would mean admitting you have a problem, and you can't have that, can you? Sad but true.
Why are there so many rageaholics in the USA? Well... even though I'm just a poor country boy I've had the opportunity to travel around the world quite a bit and have visited 5 of the 7 continents with various countries in each. I've also spent a lot of time in Oceania, which is an ocean and not a continent, but a lot of people still live there. I'm just saying I've been around a bit.
So I'm just gonna say something I've noticed.
Americans are the biggest fucking assholes on the planet. It's shameful. There's something about the USA that makes a significant portion of the people who grow up in it into complete assholes. I think it's another form of privilege - "hey, we're Americans, the greatest people ever!!! So fuck yah, we do we want motherfuckers!"
I'm moving to the South Pacific when I retire here in a few years. Fuck this joint. So far as I'm concerned it's been a racist, fascist pig hole my entire life. I spent 25 years running from the authorities just because I wanted to grow an unapproved plant. To me the fascism started with the war on (some) drugs (the ones the hippies and the minorities like). That was in 1972... I've never been a "proud" American - I just live here, pay my taxes and do my best to stay out of prison. I don't have to love it.
And indeed why should you? Godspeed, hope the world *lets* you escape this dump when the time comes, given their understandable fear of the contagion we spread!
Hoping and praying for a vaccine or else you're right - I'm never getting out of this shithole.
It occurred to me a few years ago that this kind of resentment is seductive because it feels like self-respect, or at least a temporary simulation thereof. It's like a dying car battery that can't hold a charge. Give it a jump and it "works," but turn off the engine and it goes dead again.
Also, you have to admit that at least when you're angry, you feel alive--and it effectively distracts your from feelings or thoughts that any of your problems are the fault of you, your parents, or the political representatives you've voted for all your stupid, stupid life.
The car battery analogy is very good.
I think you touched on the true core - the rage is a way to not have to engage in self-reflection. Every time minorities make another step towards being fully a part of our nation (representation in media, changing the direction of the cultural conversation away from "whiteness" being seen as normal/baseline) the conservative whites lash back furiously. Because it means another set of assumptions that made them the natural, top-of-the-food-chain actor in the national narrative is crumbling. Recognizing that you had been making a LOT of assumptions about yourself is ... hard. Easier to rage that others are "taking" something that is rightfully yours (This is why the "special rights" or "quotas" arguments are so visceral for them - deep in their subconscious it is recognition that they themselves have been elevated artificially, or that they have pissed away their advantages.)
The good news is that each step forward does have an effect on the long term. The kids who understand things from the get go don't need to painfully re-evaluate it later. Old bigots die off. Look at Ferguson 2014 to now even. When people went on TV to talk about "systemic racism" it was pooh-poohed as academic mumbo-jumbo designed to hand-wave away African-Americans' terrible culture and lack of personal responsibility within it, i.e. they were saying African-Americans' problems were entirely their own and could be solved simply by being more deferential, bootsrapping and, you know, not doing some much criming in the first place. Not surprisingly, this 'solution' requires zero effort or change of mindset from white Amerca, other than maybe kicking in a few ore dollars to the beleaguered police departments trying to control these animals - er, help these communities deal with their crime wave, I mean.
But the new focus on the problem - revelations about how common police brutality is, how everyday police harassment is, the cycle of fines leading to warrants and warrants leading to priors and priors leading to probable cause, etc. - added structure to the 'systemic' argument, and you can see it in the reaction to George Floyd & the protests. Instead of what happened after Ferguson ("well, cops have to do what it takes to get these crazy black looters off the streets") people are appalled at what is rightly being seen as police rioting.
Ok now listen. It’s clearly insane that The Ghostbusters could have been women when it is well known they were 2 fellas and a gorilla. I mean, what next <sputter, sputter, gasp> a super hero movie starring a woman? Or one featuring a black man as a magically powered god of Asgard? At some point the madness must end!
Huh. The self-respect thing might be the answer I've been looking for... Because I've often wondered my real-life conservative family members prioritize staying angry.
For example, last week I got an email from a relative very upset that DiBlasio "used tax dollars to stir up hate." Apparently the city paid for "Black Lives Matter" to get painted on the street outside the Trump tower. So I asked, Were you upset when Pence used tax dollars to fly to, sit in briefly, and then walk out of a stadium when some football players knelt? He was not! Then I asked, Do you think BLM has a fair point that we should reform the police, or do you think BLM is a movement about hate? He picked reform! So relax, I said; DiBlasio didn't do anything to upset you. He painted a sign you agree with and paid for it in a way you approve of. I also pointed out **you don't live anywhere near New York** and if New Yorkers, who elected Bloomberg three times, don't like it, they'll handle it. So did he relax?
Somehow, friends, he became angrier. See, when he says BLM it's for [unspecified] reform, but when DiBlasio says it, it's out of hate. The Pence thing he decided to 100% ignore, except to mention that Kaerpernick committed the error of protesting "on foreign soil" (apparently he knelt in the UK?) and THAT made Kaepernick's protest offensive.
Anyway, my point is: They love to stay mad. You can point out exactly how according to their own principles, there's nothing to be mad at. But they will maneuver to do it, ignoring facts, rewriting history, ignoring things they said themselves just 2 minutes earlier. It is a way of pride and of mattering. A way to avoid the fact that you're only one of 300 million Americans and you're not President, so your stupid opinion isn't going to impact the nation at all. Being angry makes you clear-sighted, it must seem, like the last man on the ramparts of civilization, holding the whole shebang together because no one else will. (I bet the militias run themselves on that rhetoric, and the white nationalists.)
It also might be why the president is so crucial to them. Any president. To some extent there's transference going on. What *I* would do if *I* was in the White House (as I should have been). They take whatever man is in there personally. And they want to be angry, so -- it's Tan Suit Scandal if he's (D). Send the goons to Portland to assert yourself, if he's a fellow anger-monger (R).
It IS show business, which, now that I think of it, can be said to be the one field in which Trump was (for a while) unambiguously successful. Hence, maybe, his obsession with ratings and what "people say," how "no one has ever seen anything like it." To him, the important thing isn't to particularly accomplish anything, but to wow the audience and win its applause *for him.*
It surprised me how in the weeks of transition and early 2017, he appeared genuinely astonished by how much work he had to do behind the curtain, as it were. It gave me such a sinking feeling; like, oh, god, he really had no idea it was not a ceremonial position... He stood exposed as a clown who'd understood the presidency to have no more depth than a traveling medicine show. All you had to do to be good at the job was dazzle the people with what they wanted to hear! How was Obama always fucking that up?? He had no idea that Obama, or any previous president, was in meetings from dawn until bedtime, struggling through mountains of detail to try for the policy that would result in the fewest actual deaths. (He still does not grasp that, because other peoples' deaths are not quite real to him; he still, but fearfully now I think, defensively, treats it like a show.)
His shock during the transition was that all the Obama people expected him, Donald Trump, to LEARN THINGS!!! Donald J. Trump, the smartest man in the world!
His next shock was the revelation that he did not have actual dictatorial power. There were RULES and LAWS and all this bullshit. When all he wanted to do was give an order and have other people make it so.
Wow--can't believe I never connected this to Trump's business style before, but: I once worked at a modest, family-run business (about 15 employees) just as they hit the big time and scaled up (to about 100). They did a great job of hiring, renting a space, and so on -- but the family refused to grasp that you can't captain a 100-person ship with five big clients the same way you ran 15 people with one tiny client. The company collapsed, and I still remember during the mass layoff, the matriarch insisting it was The World that was wrong, not the family.
Can't remember where I heard it before, but the saying "the most dangerous real estate in the world is between Donald Trump and a camera" is how this whole administration has operated.
Showbiz is a common obsession among psychopaths. Some show-biz obsessives are very sweet and even smart. But I have met and maybe you have met bad people who love showbiz because it gives them the opportunity to make judgments on people they never met based not on their achievements -- which are usually measurable, so you can't rig them -- but on the intangibles of stardom. If you love Joan Fontaine and hate -- really hate -- Olivia De Havilland, who's to say you're wrong? Every psycho movie fan can be the Hedda Hopper or J.J. Hunsecker of his own private universe. Only somehow somebody make Trump the Hopper and Hunsecker of ours.
It bothers you because you feel loyalty and something for your home. A man like him feels nothing.
You're making me feel we're right.
I have difficulty empathizing with that. I *hate* being angry. It's not fun at all. It doesn't make me feel good. Just frustrated.
That's because you're a healthy, sane person. Show-off!
Well, I say, let's give them something to cry about.
Might as well face it, they’re addicted to rage.
Thank you, Roy, for being a much more articulate, much more clever version of me. You give form to my intimations and this, in particular, was spot on!