Politics

He was supposed to be a great maker of things, but he was mostly a breaker.

This is a brutal piece by Rebecca Solnit on the privilege and cravenness of Donald Trump. Should be read by all Americans.

With Trump the usual advice of “Follow the money.” doesn’t work because Congress refuses to force him to disclose his conflicts of interest. As enormous and material as those conflicts must be, I’m just going to focus on what I can see with my own eyes, the man’s apparent intent.

In his public life, Donald Trump has never done anything that did not personally and directly benefit him. Most of us, as we go through life, assemble a collection of acts that are variously self-serving and other-serving. This is the way of life. Normal life. With Trump, not so. Even his meager philanthropic acts are tainted with controversy. The man simply cannot act in sacrificial way. He is incurable.^[In a campaign event in Fort Dodge, Iowa on November 12, 2015, Trump claimed that rival Ben Carson was “pathological” and that “…if you’re pathological, there’s no cure for that, folks, okay? There’s no cure for that.” Since Trump’s own psychopathology is widely questioned, one wonders if he, too, is incurable. Given that narcissistic personality disorder is almost certainly among the potential diagnoses, he probably is incurable.]

In an effort to strip protesters of their legitimacy, Trump and Fox News claim that protesters are simply there because they’re paid by powerful oppositional interests. Never mind that Trump has no evidence for his claim; he has no evidence for practically anything that emerges from his loud mouth. What is more interesting to me is that if money delegitimizes authenticity then presumably we can use this effect to come to additional conclusions.

Someday, when I have time to burn, I’m going to write a Twitter bot that takes all of Trump’s vacuous tweets and translate them into Russian. It’ll look like this:

There’s something ludicrous about the idea of the Trump, who is distractible, impatient, and incurious being able to learn Russian, an incredibly difficult language.

On January 1, 2016 we packed up all our earthly goods and headed south to Canada. (Yes, it’s true. When you live in Minnesota, it’s possible to move south to Canada. Look at the map!) Having lived here for a little over a year, here are some thoughts about living here, in no particular order:

1. “Sorry” is more of a greeting than just an apology.
2. Canadians really are polite; but put them behind the wheel of a car and all bets are off.
3. Universal healthcare works. Americans love to go on and on about socialized medicine; but I’m here to tell you: it works.
4. Bumper stickers are rare here.
5. People don’t really talk politics. Well, they talk about U.S. politics.
6. Left turn arrows on traffic lights are rare. It makes for interesting moments when the light changes.
7. The electric utility is called “hydro”, which given the Greek origin of the word makes little sense until you realize that it stands for “hydroelectric.”
8. Youth music is well-supported - both through private and public funding.
9. State-church separation is fuzzier. For example, the Catholic school system is tax-payer funded. But only the Catholic schools. It has something to do with the Canadian Charter (a.k.a Constitution.) It was apparently some sort of historical compromise in the 1800’s.
10. Don’t order iced tea in Canada. It’s way too sweet.
11. As a practical matter, you can’t be elected Prime Minister unless you speak both English and French fluently. This is a really good thing.^[How many languages does Donald Trump speak fluently, for example?]
12. Speaking of politics, campaigns are time-limited to 6 weeks before an election. How cool is that?
13. Poutine sounds horrible, but it’s actually pretty good.

I’ve long suspected that Trump regards the arts as an unnecessary nuisance for losers and suckers. High art for this hollow man is the vacuous reality television that made him famous. Now in his Federal budget, Trump offers proof. He proposes the elimination of the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities.

This is a man with no soul.

But in the closing lines of her lyric poem “Renascence”, Edna St. Vincent Millay has a warning:

“The unexamined life is not worth living.” - Socrates

This year I decided to take a different approach to making New Year’s resolutions. Although many people make resolutions, less than 10% regard themselves as successful at achieving them.

I decided to overhaul the idea of New Year’s resolutions. Rather than committing to an entire year of change, I set up a schedule of 12 mini-resolutions in the form of experiments. My first experiment for the month of January was to work out daily. My February experiment was to determine whether avoiding the news and time-boxing my social media interactions would make me happier.

An interesting perspective on resisting Trump by focusing on policy and not personality:

“The Italian experience provides a blueprint for how to defeat Mr. Trump. Only two men in Italy have won an electoral competition against Mr. Berlusconi: Romano Prodi and the current prime minister, Matteo Renzi (albeit only in a 2014 European election). Both of them treated Mr. Berlusconi as an ordinary opponent. They focused on the issues, not on his character. In different ways, both of them are seen as outsiders, not as members of what in Italy is defined as the political caste.”

Since the election in the U.S., my wife and I have supported the ACLU, Planned Parenthood, and the Southern Poverty Law Center. So should you.

In internet speak, “to feed the troll” means to try to engage people online who are just trying to stir up discord for no other reason than to provoke people. Trolls are almost always insecure, psychologically-damaged people, if not full-blown psychopaths who lack the usual social barriers that most of us possess. Thus, a common piece of advice tossed about on the Internet is: “don’t feed the troll.” This is sound advice.