CSotD: The Sympathy Gap
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Mr. Fitz offers the only New Year's commentary you need, the Rosetta Strip for the past three months and likely for the next four years.
We've transcended "It is what it is" and are heavily into "It is whatever everybody says it is."
It's like a "Choose Your Own Adventure" book, only it's guided by some kind of zeitgeist which, in turn, is proclaimed rather than observed.
In other words, saying that it's a post-fact year makes it a fact, which he proves by insisting on it.
Well played.
I'm kinda burned out on New Year's. There are only so many "making resolutions you won't keep" gags and "falling asleep before midnight" gags, so you have to turn to the editorial cartoonists to find original concepts, like Trump as the New Year's baby, which only three-quarters of them drew.
Then they took the Christmas/New Year's week off, so there's been very little new ink to update and replace all those Trump-As-New-Year's-Baby cartoons.
Not that I'm against depicting Trump as a baby. The small-hands thing is based on a silly insult that pissed him off several years ago, but the fact that he responds to silly things by going nuts makes depicting him as a baby perfectly appropriate.
And Kevin Kallaugher captures his capacity for denial very well.
The idea of a narcissist doesn't, itself, cartoon well. I've seen one cartoon of Trump gazing, transfixed, into a pond, but there's nowhere to go from there.
However, depicting him as a toddler offers flexibility.
It's perfectly natural for a toddler to be narcissistic. Most of them outgrow it, and, if they don't, you can pack them off to military school, in hopes of curing them but, barring that, simply to let them be someone else's problem for 40-some weeks of the year.
But it's sadder, and scarier, than it is funny.
Trump combines an eight-year-old's appetite for "I know you are, but what am I?" debating style with the genuinely troubling subjective reality of a Jeff MacDonald or OJ Simpson, either of whom could easily pass a lie detector test proclaiming their innocence.
I'm convinced, for instance, that his repeated claims of having won a landslide are not deliberate falsehoods but a genuine belief that can't be shaken by the numbers indicating quite the opposite.
Nor is it surprising that he followed his father into commercial real estate, the ethics and transparency of which are well-captured in today's Barney and Clyde.
In the mid-80s, I wrote for a magazine on new residential construction that went to Realtors every other week, with charts showing homes within a certain price range, within a certain geographical area, with a certain number of bedrooms, etc.
At one point, my boss asked me to look into the potential for a magazine that would do the same thing for commercial real estate.
If I could consistently get that much laughter, I'd quit writing and go into stand-up.
My contacts in commercial real estate said, first of all, "hahahahaha," then explained that they would never, ever put in writing how many square feet of available space they had and what they thought it was worth.
There are no rules, no "consumer protections," in commercial real estate. It's all in, how you say, "The Art of the Deal."
The joke here is that Barney would never be that frank about things, not because he's purposefully dishonest, but because, to succeed in commercial development, you need to sincerely believe in yourself and your plan.
It helps to have that MacDonald/Simpson/Trump level of self-confidence in order to get potential partners, because people in the business will smell out a phony.
As the old joke goes, the trick is sincerity: If you can fake that, you've got it made.
And I wish I were joking.
Ditto with this Tom Toles cartoon: The joke is that the fat-cats promoting the overthrow of the Affordable Care Act are not this forthcoming, not because they are purposeful liars but because they genuinely can't see beyond their own self-interest.
When you ask them what they'll replace it with, they mumble something about figuring that out later, or they advance the utterly nonsensical idea of medical savings accounts, which presumes everyone has enough disposable income that they can squirrel away enough to buy an individual insurance policy.
It's not that they don't know what's happening on the street.
It's not even that they don't care.
They're genuinely incapable of getting it.
My "Flash Briefing" includes Bloomberg Views, a quick little column by various Bloomberg writers, and I was struck by this entry from Francis Wilkinson, because Trump's trolls are heavily invested in "They all do it" and his point is that Obama and Trump are dramatically, drastically different.
Wilkinson references this David Axelrod interview with the president, in which Axelrod asked about "the hole," the pathological, personal need that drives someone to seek the White House and which Obama seems to lack but that, Wilkinson notes, Trump has to an extent that dwarfs other presidents:
"No Drama" Obama has let countless slights, many of them racist and despicable, evaporate.
For Trump, however, every day is anchors away. His hole is larger and more conspicuous than any we have seen in a president. Nixon covered his rage and pain with expertise, ingenuity and hard work. Clinton, likewise, erected a scaffolding of policy diligence and political brilliance across the chasm.
Trump's incessant neediness is perhaps the only governing principle of his chaotic personality. But it's too vast and flamboyant to be camouflaged.
I'm not sure what the cure is, because even pathetic old Nixon never grasped why he was forced to resign.
Perhaps it simply means that you keep the pressure on other politicians in hopes of ferreting out, and inspiring, the ones who can rise from their own "holes" and recognize the common good.
I think Francis has it figured out.
Go Thou And Do Likewise
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