CSotD: Obsessions, Promises, Threats
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Matson gets mileage out of Dear Leader’s obsession over windmills, melding it with his obsession over Obama, though neither have much real-world impact on him.
The Obama thing likely stems from the fact that spreading birther lies elevated him from regional blowhard and reality TV figure into national politics. Perhaps under stress, he falls back on things that worked for him in the past.
Trump embodies the political wisecrack “If you want to know what he thinks, find out who he talked to last.”
Oil companies pour millions of dollars into political races, overwhelmingly for Republicans, which may help nail down Trump’s support in Congress, but it’s chump change compared to what he’s ringing out of media and colleges, or earning by profiteering from his presidency.
Still, he’s more likely to spend time with petroleum company officers than with representatives of the Sierra Club, so the last person he talked to likely hates windmills and loves the smell of burning diesel in the morning.
Luckovich offers the opinion that Dear Leader is wonderfully open-minded but not in the way that welcomes new ideas, or any ideas at all.
Fran Lebowitz wrote “Donald Trump is a stupid man’s idea of a smart person, a poor man’s idea of a rich man, and a weak man’s idea of a strong man,” and his connections with pro-wrestling feed into the posing and puffery that WWE fans embrace.
Whether he’s doing it by nature or as part of a plan isn’t relevant, but Trump is an example of the fact that it’s possible to be very clever without being very smart.
It’s something of a mystery how he got through a business major at a renowned business school without learning how tariffs work or the nature of a trade imbalance, but it is undeniable that he knows how to pluck the right strings to enchant his fan base.
Blower uses the windmill obsession to compare him to Don Quixote, a madman famous for having tilted with a windmill under the impression that it was a giant who needed vanquishing.
Don Quixote is revered as a romantic figure, though perhaps the main thing the Knight Errant and the Knight Arrant have in common is that Quixote kept getting beaten to a pulp, but, like a character in a Warner Brothers cartoon, was back with all his teeth and no bruises in the next chapter.
Donald Quixote has a similar ability to rebound as well as a similar portfolio of insane misapprehensions and adventures that mostly take place in his own mind.
Keir Starmer as Sancho Panza is a nice touch.
Donald Quixote also has a tendency to proclaim his own heroism, and, unlike the Don — whose high-flown braggadocio earned him ridicule and abuse — he has a mystical power to impose it and to make a significant number of people believe in him.
Though not Stephen Camley or the crowds of protestors he encountered on his taxpayer-funded trip to visit his golf courses in what the inhabitants still call “Scotland.”
There are, however, beginning to be cracks in his standing with Americans. He painted a picture of a land beset with millions of immigrant drug-dealers, gang members, rapists, murderers and lunatics, and his adoring public was eager to see the villains expelled.
But as Fell points out, it is becoming clear that the people being rounded up by the secret police and deported without court hearings include large numbers of innocent victims, including many who were not undocumented but in compliance with immigration law.
As Katie Phang said of one immigrant seized and branded illegal:
We hear this a lot from Republicans, “Oh, well, they came here illegally.” He went to a port of entry. He made an appointment, showed up for that appointment, had a future court hearing scheduled, and was also applying for Temporary Protected Status (TPS). What more was he supposed to do?
The result of ICE grabbing people guilty, at most, of a misdemeanor for not checking in and filling out forms upon entry, is a loss of hard-working people who form the backbone of farm labor. Mind you, there are ways of legally hiring foreign labor, but going to a fully-legal system would increase food prices, and the Republicans ran on a pledge to reduce the cost of living, including the price of eggs and other groceries.
And farmworkers are only one loss, along with construction workers, hospitality workers, lawn care people, babysitters and housekeepers and a flood of other people we depend on, and who, by the way, pay taxes but, if they aren’t in legal compliance, can’t get all the benefits those taxes pay for.
The immigration abuses are coming to light now, but the changes to Medicaid and SNAP will likely take longer to hit.
Aside from people no longer eligible, and aside from the work requirements that assume a large number of people are needlessly unemployed, the new rules require people to update their forms every six months, which means going through the burdensome process of documenting your finances over and over and over again.
Perhaps the legislators who instituted this reform think poor people can just hand the paperwork off to their accountants and have their personal staff handle the hassle.
Or maybe they just want to hassle people into giving up.
A major move that may mostly be of concern to white-collar America is the war on universities.
I don’t know that the bribes being demanded from schools will truly raise tuition, though it may hamper in-house financial aid packages, but the requirements being imposed as part of the extortion will seriously lower the point of going to four-year colleges.
College should be a chance to learn how to think for yourself, to bat around ideas with classmates and professors, with backup from the writings of people with solid theories you can either embrace or reject.
But the administration is attempting to force colleges to add courses in right-thinking and acceptance of proper ideas, while dropping courses that are outside the Official Catechism.
This could save people money by making it pointless to attend a university, except for the chance to spend four years establishing contacts you can exploit after graduation.
Making official what has too often been true.
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