Thursday, August 4, 2016

An Unnumbered Philippic

We all want to be our own persons, free to go our own way and make our own mistakes right up until the moment we do. Then we start looking around for something or someone on which to blame everything. From scheduling debates on nights when the NFL is playing football through people with thick accents speaking in pain about their anger and loss to voicing fears about imaginary election manipulation that only the Illuminati could pull off. 

I know. You think this is merely another badly-veiled reading from the Book of Trump, this chapter entitled “Same Shuck, Different Jive.” But you’d be wrong only because you’re not seeing the scale and scope that is the reflection of Donald Trump in our own lives and hearts. Why else would he resonate with so many after offering so little in terms of actual ideas and impulses?

Each of us has our Trumpian moment: an Against All Odds (and at least some of the evens, too) instance where we fail despite our most gallant effort or succeed only because of our indomitable will. An I Am the Captain of My Fate, I Am the Master of My Soul Epiphany. And it doesn’t hurt to have a seven figure trust fund or inheritance. Don’t forget the bone spurs.

Everyone who is doing better than we are is a cheat and a scoundrel. And those less well-off than us? Well, they’re just lazy and stupid. The only ones around here who are real Americans are you and me. And Donald Trump, of course, our one, true and strong voice in the chaos of creation. And none of us will go back to the fourth sentence in this paragraph and correct it to “you and I” because that’s just what those effete elitists would do. And we’re on to them as we revel in the politics of resentment.

We may not count or count for much but by golly by gum we make up in empty-headed malevolence what we lack in thoughtful introspection.  Orwell’s Two Minutes Hate has nothing on us, except maybe an extra forty-five seconds. Remember, a river is easier to channel than to stop and no single drop of rain ever feels responsible for the flood that always follows.

-bill kenny 

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