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Tuesday, May 2, 2017

Correspondence: Je suis avec vous

By Moristotle

Moristotle, that verse you wrote about Trump retreating “to private room to grab your pussy,” has anyone commented that the verse presumes the generalized reader, which includes men, to have a pussy?
    In fact, yes, everyone has a pussy – in the sense in which everyone, including men, can show their solidarity with women against pussy grabbers like Trump in the same way they supported the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo by declaring “Je suis Charlie!” when it was attacked by Islamist terrorists. To show their support for women against men like Trump & O’Reilly, they can declare, “J’ai un vagin!” or “J’ai la vulve!” Or, as Isaiah 41:10 and Matthew 28:20 put it, “I am with you.”


Some days I rise and shine, and some days I caffeinate and hope for the best!

I find that two opinions are always best, especially when one of them is mine.

Death, someone said, is peaceful; life is harder. “Living in the Trump Zone” [Paul Krugman, NY Times, April 28]. Excerpt:
Fans of old TV series may remember a classic “Twilight Zone” episode titled “It’s a Good Life.” It featured a small town terrorized by a 6-year-old who for some reason had monstrous superpowers, coupled with complete emotional immaturity. Everyone lived in constant fear, made worse by the need to pretend that everything was fine....
    And now you know what it must be like working in the Trump administration. Actually, it feels a bit like that just living in Trump’s America....
    ... the tax “plan” the administration released on Wednesday...bore no resemblance to what people normally mean when they talk about a tax plan....
    It’s clear the White House is proposing huge tax breaks for corporations and the wealthy, with the breaks especially big for people who can bypass regular personal taxes by channeling their income into tax-privileged businesses — people, for example, named Donald Trump....
    ...Why would the Treasury Department go along with this clown show?
    ...Every report from inside the White House conveys the impression that Trump is like a temperamental child, bored by details and easily frustrated when things don’t go his way; being an effective staffer seems to involve finding ways to make him feel good and take his mind off news that he feels makes him look bad.
    If he says he wants something, no matter how ridiculous, you say, “Yes, Mr. President!”; at most, you try to minimize the damage.
    Right now, by all accounts, the child-man in chief is in a snit over the prospect of news stories that review his first 100 days and conclude that he hasn’t achieved much if anything (because he hasn’t). So last week he announced the imminent release of something he could call a tax plan [which] left Treasury staff — who were nowhere near having a plan ready to go — “speechless.” But nobody dared tell him it couldn’t be done.... [read more]

How thick is the ice? “The Pond-Skater Presidency” [David Brooks, NY Times, April 28]. Excerpt:
...it is increasingly clear that everything about Trump is less substantial than it appears. Trump will be the last president who grew up entirely in the TV age, post-print but pre-internet. In the Trump mental framework, everything exists in segments and episodes. Ratings are the ultimate criteria of value.
    This means he is the master of the pseudo-event, the artificial happening that exists to generate TV coverage but leaves no lasting mark. This means that everything can change in an instant. Nothing is more weighty or complicated than can be covered in a three-minute news summary.....
    Trump’s tax plan is being treated as an actual plan, but it is just a sugar sculpture — 100 off-the-top-of-the-head words on a piece of paper, grappling with no hard issues and with no chance of passing in anything like the current form....
    Far from being a fighter, Trump tends to back off when his plans face resistance, like during this week’s budget showdown. He is the ultimate protean man. He’ll never be deep, because of his TV-shaped attention span, but the style of his superficiality is likely to change radically over the next few years.
    Don’t get me wrong. I wish we had a president who had actual convictions and knowledge, and who was interested in delivering real good to real Americans. But it’s hard to maintain outrage at a man who is a political pond skater — one of those little creatures that flit across the surface, sort of fascinating to watch, but have little effect as they go. [read more]

As I watched you pick up leaves this morning, I remembered reading your post yesterday, on the fifth anniversary of your retirement. Indeed, you must be retired. Who else has time to pick up leaves individually by hand?

Grateful for correspondence, Moristotle

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