Category Archives: Writing

Analysis: Trump and the True Meaning of ‘Idiot’

A Quinnipiac University poll asked participants for a word that came to mind when they thought of Donald Trump: The No. 1 response was “idiot”.

To access this New York Times article hold ctrl key and click on icon.

Analysis

  • Idiot in modern understanding describes a person who lacks intelligence but it’s original meaning is more appropriate when applying a word to Trump.
    • An idiot in ancient Greece depended on the public for his existence, contributing nothing to it, concerned only with self.
    • Being uninvolved with the community but taking benefits from it, the idiot contributed to both his own demise and also the slow deterioration of society.
    • The idiot does not communicate with the community, he talks only for and to himself.
    • The idiot in ancient Greece existed as prepubescent (not transitioned to public life), parasitic, and self-idiomatic (a language only understood by him).
  • Idiot today means low intelligence thanks to the usurping of the term by early IQ test “Ableists” (characterizes persons as defined by their disabilities and as inferior to the non-disabled).
    • As a consequence of this IQ classification, idiots aren’t able to vote in Kentucky, Mississippi, New Mexico and Ohio.
    • Keeping idiots off the voters roles was meant to accomplish both self and social preservation.
    • The more power the non-community participating idiot is given the more danger he is to the public.

The choice of the word idiot as an attribution of our president, its current meaning inaccurate, seems to be historically accurate. Just as four states still prevent what are defined as modern day idiots from voting, our country should prevent ancient day idiots from running for public office.  The deterioration of community might not survive the administration of our current idiot.

Review: Lincoln Transformed Depression thru Lit

Rather than bury his melancholy, he resurrected it.

My review and summary of a blog on BetterLivingThroughBeowulf.Com

Lincoln Transformed Depression thru Lit

What was Lincoln’s source of strength?  His life as president fraught with rage and ridicule.  His wife an unstable and hostile companion.  His mental state a constant siege of depression and fear.  Seemly imprisoned by his mental illness, he found a source of succor in literature.  Lincoln’s life unfolded in three parts: fear, engagement, and transcendence.  Lifting himself up from the question of whether he could live, he decided how he would live.

The trials of his life became his weapons in war.  His personal suffering prepared him for the nation’s suffering and did not let it overwhelm him as it did so many.  Knowing what he knew, of optimism he was suspect.  With his essential purpose always in focus, his vision for our nation governed his work.  The discipline of his early adult life had tempered a fortitude which endured disappointments.  Lincoln’s ingrained strength of purpose prepared him to engage his own awful fear and doubt and triumph.

Literature both prepared him for life’s process and encouraged him to cope.  Rather than bury his melancholy, he resurrected it.  Reading, reciting, and composing poetry that examined themes of death, despair, and human futility, brought comfort to a man who so often sat alone in a place where his only companions were those dark themes.   Lincoln’s single secret achievement of finding a therapy for his incurable malady gives him yet another dimension of greatness. In the depression of key author’s, Lincoln related:

Lord Byron’s: Sorrow is Knowledge: they who know the most
Must mourn the deepest o’er the fatal truth. 

What is it (melancholy) but the telescope of truth?

Lincoln read Poe because it was gloomy.  The Raven, an emblem of the poet’s melancholy, poeticizes both Poe’s determination to be rational with the prospect of a never-to-leave madness.

Lincoln related best to Shakespeare’s Macbeth.  His ambition and existential doubts resonated and were forces in both his objectives and his melancholy.  The grasp of literature held Lincoln back from shallow optimism and prevented him from falling into deep despair.  He knew that devils and angels battled within all of us and he believed that the better angels of our nature would triumph.  He believed in this nation and its ability remain united when challenged.

Review: Watching McConnell Destroy Healthcare

Who would you say is more like Satan, Trump or McConnell?

Watching McConnell Destroy Healthcare

At first blush, this question brings to mind my oft quoted line from King Lear: The Prince of Darkness is a gentleman.  If the question were rephrased to Who would you say is more like a gentleman?  The query becomes more palatable but far from digestible.  This blog raises the question of personal motive over devil’s intent by the “gentleman” McConnell.

Robin Bates paints parallels here.  With Democrats as God and healthcare as Adam, he seems to state that Adam/healthcare can’t be saved because of some implausible Justice.  McConnell’s determined revenge against Obama sacrifices innocents and achieves payback.  In the scale of Justice there is balance but it can hardly be discerned when weighing revenge against the body/bodies pile(d) in the green of Eden or the morgue of St. Somewhere.

Our current unbounded government is likened to the Hell of John Milton’s Paradise Lost.  Though Satan has nothing personal against Adam, he rationalizes the carnage as just business.  And so, it is with McConnell.  Cloaking his malice in “public reason” and “honor”, Mitch characterizes his stealthy proceedings on the GOP Senate AHCA as “promise keeping” and ignores the collateral damage (the suffering of innocents) that the promise promises (i.e. repealing Obamacare).   How can one recognize Satan?  Look to the savvy gentleman to your right.

Review: Naomi Klein’s No Is Not Enough

The hour calls for optimism; we’ll save pessimism for better times.

John Semley reviews Naomi Klein’s latest leftie lament No is Not Enough.  Semley begins his review by characterizing Michael Bloomberg’s offer to fund U.S.’s financial commitment to United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change as mega-billionaire salvation.  He further metaphor’s Bloomberg, likening him to a firefighter saving a cat in a tall tree.  Then further depicts Bloomberg vs Trump as behemoths in a Japanese monster movie battling each other with briefcases.  Somewhere down below his third paragraph is Naomi Klein, pinned in by metaphors, lost in the sea of panicked little people scurrying for safety.

Finally, we find Naomi, disparaging elite liberals as saviors and advocating grassroots push back for meaningful change.  Populist uprising must be met and pushed back with grassroots movements on the green field of political advocacy.  The reviewer decides the Ms. Klein’s slim offering is a place for anyone to start to make sense of Trump and Trumpism.  Naomi describes a culture that grants indecent impunity to the ultrarich because it is consumed with winning and dominance.  As we have seen with articles of anti-Trump pundits and late-night hosts, the author prescribes making our president look like a puppet (Bannon, Putin).  This tactic and other such bating has proved, in some instances, deliriously successful.

Naomi Klein, with her holy trinity of of contemporary progressive-leftie doctrine (2000’s No Logo, 2007’s The Shock Doctrine and 2014’s This Changes Everything), preaches that major crises precipitate political change, both good and bad.  People unite to build a better world or disband and feel sorry for themselves in a Trump world.  A point that may be missed in John Semley review of Naomi Klein’s No is Not Enough lies in the final quote from Belgian cartoonist Jean-Claude Servais:

The hour calls for optimism; we’ll save pessimism for better times.

Note the word hour…optimism has a shelf-life, seize it before it spoils.

Better Living Through Beowulf – June 2017

Be Afraid of Trump’s Fear of Being Mocked

We all know the feeling of being laughed at but we don’t always feel the need to take action to stop it.  Getting back at someone who doesn’t care about the relationship only sets you back with the people who observe the abuse. Trump left the Paris Accord not because it hurt Americans but because its members hurt his feelings by laughing at him. When mockery of a cruel person occurs, the unimaginable insecurity becomes animated. A man’s obsessions bear out in his behavior before they act out in his vengeance. Obsessions build reputations which must be upheld. What is the horrifying story that applies to Trump’s obsession over mockery? Someone refused him and he was permanently embarrassed. He was put on the spot by someone and returned with nothing. Since the time of the laugh, he has determined to stop the laughter no matter what. Stopping a President is a kind of death wish.

Bob Dylan, Gifted Storyteller

Blowin’ In the Wind

A literary education gives principles, sensibilities and an informed view of the world. You can recognize when crazy men are taking over the world and the rest of us are on their doomed voyage.  In the end you can see yourself at sea, floating on a coffin, all quiet, and you are reluctant to that honor.  Literature influenced song writing by listening to early folk singers.  Listening to early folk picks up vernacular and folk lingo became the only vocabulary.  Once you loved the world, now you witness all the suffering of mankind.  Nature doesn’t notice but you are changed forever.  Death is blowin’ in the wind and to honor the dead shades the horror of it.  It is preferable to live a life of struggle than stay eternal in death’s place.  Better to tell many long stories of simple struggle, and sing the wisdom of a shunned pacifist.

Genesis: Story Truth, Not Happening Truth June 11, 2017

 Reducing religion to science reduces its understanding…

I recoil when someone begins dissecting Genesis with a scientists’ scalpel or a fundamentalist fillet, this article helped me uncoil. Poetry allows wonder to be expressed. Scientific analysis of religion diminishes wonder. Fundamentalists of both religion and science attack wonder with a deaf ear to its poetry. Story truth repeatedly reveals itself to a true thinker, while scientists seek only a single revelation. Scientism’s faith excludes wonder and therefore wisdom escapes it. The most important truths never translate into facts, expressing religion and poetry in inexpressible symbols … emblematic of wonder. Poetry rings insufficiently literal to fundamentalists of both religion and scientism, but brings pleasure to those sensitive to its insufficiencies.

Better Living Through Beowulf – May 2017

Below are a couple of summaries of articles Robin Bates wrote for his BLTB blog in May:

Ivanka Doesn’t Understand “Beloved”

May 10, 2017

Ivanka Doesn’t Understand “Beloved”

The author seeks to reason how Ivanka’s book, Women Who Work, takes a misapplied quote from Toni Morrison’s book Beloved subjectively interprets this quote:

Freeing yourself was one thing; claiming ownership of that freed self was another.

The protagonist in Morrison’s book is raped and beaten before killing her own baby in order to escape slavery.  Ms. Trump uses the quote to describe women her enslave themselves to pleasing everybody.  The beef the author has with Ivanka’s blandity curating Toni’s masterpiece is quoted from a book review where the reviewer observes that the quotation seems to falsely equates the scars of a business women’s busy work with the scars of slavery.  Inappropriate to say the least.

Robin Bates, who wrote the article, says that if Ivanka had actually read the article, he would give here some leeway.  After all, her father has expressed interest in her sexually, and a particular scenario in Beloved might render her a pathway out of that troubling conundrum.  Clearly, Bates believes, she hasn’t read the book and merely misappropriates the quotation for her own purpose in her own pursuit of wealth.  The quote may be relatable to her as something she already knows but that is where it stops.  She doesn’t take it deeper, where it is supposed to take her, outside of herself and to a more understanding and wise self.  Knowing more about oneself and understanding what an author intended is the hidden value in a quote, a book, an authorship.

Women Who Work is not literature because it merely recirculates platitudes from a position of entitlement and its author listens neither to authors misquoted nor women who work.

Trump’s Latest Queen of Hearts Beheading

May 11, 2017

For anyone who remembers Watergate and seeks a better analogy to the Comey firing, look no further than Lewis Carroll and his deeply fascinating and subtly suggestive Alice in Wonderland.

In Robin Bates daily blog, he relates the Comey firing to Lewis Carroll’s Queen of Hearts.  Trump is firing anyone who threatens to investigate him while giving a reason which is obviously not the reason.  In Alice in Wonderland the Queen of Hearts, playing croquet, is screaming Off with his/her head once a minute when displeased until there is no one left.  The croquet scene is related to Nixon and Watergate, which is in turn related to Trump and Putingate.

The article suggests that NSA head McMaster might be next to be separated from his head.  That the Comey firing was a hot example of punishment first – rationale later.  And that the country needs the GOP to stand up to Trump the way that Alice stands up to the Queen.  Trump is no more dangerous than a slick pack of cards.  Grow a spine before this bad dream becomes a living nightmare.

 

Ode to an Ogre

He resents his benefactor, yet takes every advantage of him.  Ingratitude is the word but he sees it as someone showing off when a benefit given requires any inconvenience on his part.  Pointing out every fault, flaw and misspoken word on another’s part, that person is demonized as a distraction from his own faults, flaws and ill-spoken words.  Sometimes benefactors behave badly, but mostly they benefit.  Takers stay in the shadows and only expose their bad behavior when they take a reprehensible position as their greed is exposed.

He is dissatisfied because all of his shenanigans to take more than he deserves from those he should be taking care of isn’t fulfilling.  He will never have enough.  Only the knowledge that he has taken too much will enlighten him.  So, not hiding from the ones he should be showering with benefits, stepping up and out to provide benefits so that he doesn’t need a benefactor, becoming the man he was intended to be, being generous when he has nothing to give, are the things that are missing in his life.

The things he selfishly keeps for himself become valueless.  In time, he will probably have more, but it will not be enough.  In time, he will lose something more precious than the things he has acquired through stealth.  One day he will be scared of dying among many possessions and no one to love.  The wife and children he had to love and didn’t will be the lost opportunity that gives him the hollow feeling of loss, even with them physically present.  Happiness will elude him even as he pursues it through accumulation and separation.  As the growing discrepancy between his take and his give widens, so will his dissatisfaction and others disappointment.

Donald Trump Is Gaslighting America – my notes

Lauren Duca wrote this article in Teen Vogue December 10, 2016.

http://www.teenvogue.com/story/donald-trump-is-gaslighting-america

Here are my notes on that article.

The CIA determined that Russia intervened in our election.

President-elect Donald Trump dismissed the story as if it were a piece of fake news.

“The election ended in one of the biggest Electoral College victories in history.

The President-elect’s attempt to undermine the American people’s access to [a foreign government’s interference in our election] undermines the very foundation upon which this country was built

Trump won the Presidency by gas light.

His rise to power has awakened a force of bigotry by condoning and encouraging hatred, but also by normalizing deception.

Civil rights are now on trial.

We must regain control of the truth.

Listen to “Duel of the Fates.

“Gas lighting” is someone causing another to question reality.

Doubting whether one’s perspective can be trusted, cling to a single shred of evidence, hold one’s conviction, and free oneself from captor’s control.

To gas light is to psychologically manipulate a person to the point where they question their own sanity.

He swore off the lies of politicians but contradicted himself, without bothering to conceal his conflicts.

He lied to us over and over again, and spun them into evidence of bias.

At the hands of Trump, facts have become interchangeable with opinions, blinding us into arguing amongst ourselves, as our very reality is called into question.

Long list of Trump’s lies:

  1. Trump saying that he watched thousands of people cheering on 9/11 in Jersey City
  2. Mexican government forces immigrants into the U.S.
  3. “30 or 34 million” immigrants in this country
  4. he never supported the Iraq War
  5. that the unemployment rate is as high as “42 percent”
  6. the U.S. is the highest taxed country in the world
  7. that crime is on the rise

The gas lighting part comes in when the fictions are disputed by the media, and Trump:

  • doubles down on his lies
  • paints himself as a victim of unfair coverage
  • threatens to revoke access.

Trump has repeatedly attempted to undermine the press:

  • The well-respected publications as the New York Times.
  • He has disseminated a wealth of unsubstantiated attacks on the media
  • Baseless tweets

Trump’s gas lighting was manipulative, a deliberate attempt to destabilize journalism as a check government.

Everyone living under Trump:

  • Radical progressives
  • Hardline Republicans
  • Jill Stein’s weird cousin.

The President of the United States cannot be lying to the American electorate with zero accountability.

The threat of deception is not a partisan issue.

Trump took advantage of the things that divide this country…while lying his way to the Oval Office.

The good news about this boiling frog scenario is that we’re not boiling yet.

Trump is not going to stop playing with the burner…

Stop pretending it’s always been so hot in here.

Empower ourselves:

  1. Insist on fact-checking every Trump statement you read
  2. If you find factual inaccuracies in an article, send an email to the editor
  3. Explain how things should have been clearer.
  4. Inform yourself what outlets are trustworthy and which aren’t.
  5. Seek out a browser extension that flags misleading sites or print out a list of fake outlets
  6. Do a thorough search before believing the agenda Trump distributes on Twitter.
  7. Refuse to accept information simply because it is fed to you

If facts become a point of debate, the very definition of freedom will be called into question.

It will be far easier to take on Trump’s words when there is no question of what he’s said

We all must insist on that level of transparency.

Ugliness to untangle:

  • Whether our President can be an admitted sexual predator
  • Figure out how to stop him from threatening the sovereignty of an entire religion.

It’s incredible that any of those things could seem like a distraction from a greater peril, or be only the cherry-picked issues in a seemingly unending list of gaffes, but the gaslights are flickering.

Remember the thing that binds this pig-headed hydra together.

We have nothing without the truth.

How do I love thee Trumpery? Let me count the ways.

As a candidate, Trump’s gas lighting was manipulative, as President-elect it is a deliberate attempt to destabilize journalism as a check on the power of government. Many Republican members of Congress have made a Faustian bargain with Donald Trump. For they were thieves not only of wages but of honor. To their purpose they could quote not only Scripture but Jefferson.  Where are these references coming from?  What do they mean?  Who said them?  My head is swimming from the rhetoric that is pouring forth.  I love to search out literary quotes.  Historical references make my day.  Magnificent or horrid metaphors light my fire.  What meaning is hidden from me in today’s quizzical quotes and histrionic headlines?

Thanksgiving 2016

When the Egyptian farmers completed harvesting their corn, they used to cry and pretend to be a grief-stricken. This was done to mislead the spirits of which they believed lived in the corn. The farmers had the fear that the spirits might become angry when they cut down the corn on which the spirits used to live.

Hops Festival:
The month of February and March is the time for the harvesting of Hops. Hops are dried in kilns, bleached with sulphur dioxide and pressed into bales. About 90% of Australia’s hops are used for making beer.

Nubaigai is the harvest festival held in Lithuania. In Lithuania, the Thanksgiving tradition involves the creation of a Boba which is then wrapped around the worker who bound the last sheaf.

The harvest wreath is then carried in a plate covered with a white linen cloth. As the procession moves on, people who reaped sing an old song which represents how they rescued the crop from a huge bison that tried to devour it.

1963 – U.S. President Kennedy was assassinated while riding in a motorcade in Dallas, TX. Texas Governor John B. Connally was also seriously wounded. Vice-President Lyndon B. Johnson was inaugurated as the 36th U.S. President.

The story began in 1614 when a band of English explorers sailed home to  England with a ship full of Patuxet Indians bound for slavery. They left behind smallpox which virtually wiped out those who had escaped.  By the time the Pilgrims arrived in Massachusetts Bay they found only one living Patuxet Indian, a man named Squanto who had survived slavery in England and knew their language.  He taught them to grow corn and to fish, and negotiated a peace treaty between the Pilgrims and the Wampanoag Nation. At the end of their first year, the Pilgrims held a great feast honoring Squanto and the Wampanoags. 

If you are really thankful, what do you do? You share. W. Clement Stone

5 Ways to Talk to Your Pro-Trump Family on Thanksgiving

1) Arm yourself with facts, but convey emotion with personal stories.

2) Ask open-ended questions and listen to their responses.

3) If they’re misinformed, question their sources.

4) Channel your inner Hillary.

5) Don’t argue to win.

What is your favorite comment or quote about the election, results or candidates?

She’s a professional matchmaker.

“I had one man that refused to continue to date a lady that voted for Trump. I have heard of countless conflicts with dates because of the election. It’s been so bad I’ve decided not to set up any more dates till next week,” Rose said Thursday.

What a shame. Donald Trump will be remembered as the man who decimated the Republican Party and gave us crooked Hillary as our next president.