Fevered and too-long, but – if you ask Scathing Online Schoolmarm – a wonderful final reckoning with Ted Cruz’s failure and Donald Trump’s success in Rolling Stone. Nervy, funny, relentless prose.
Trump cut through this sad remainder-bin collection of the indolent, the unappealing and the relentlessly, programmatically shitheaded like a burning chainsaw going through Country Crock. He recognized a fundamental weakness at the heart of this soft, oily collection of ersatz humanity: They can be undone by basic human contempt.
SOS likes the way the writer maintains, throughout his tireless evisceration of Cruz, a focus on the odd fact that the winner of the Republican presidential primary is the only candidate who is simply an immediately recognizable authentic human being. This doesn’t mean he’s nice. Human doesn’t mean humane. In fact, human rarely means humane.
Trump won because he basically didn’t give a fuck. Not about verbal pieties, campaign traditions, rudimentary gestures of respect or the orthodoxies of modern conservatism. Nothing.
May 5th, 2016 at 10:31AM
“Trump cut through this sad remainder-bin collection of the indolent, the unappealing and the relentlessly, programmatically shitheaded…” In particular, Trump gave the ultimate diss to the Bushes.
May 6th, 2016 at 3:16AM
SOS might like the writer’s focus, but if she were doing her job, she’d be telling us how awful the writing is.
The author’s choice of words is absolutely inept. It seems that he doesn’t quite know how to describe Trump supporters. “Remainder-bin” isn’t descriptive and isn’t a particularly nuanced way of looking at what he then tries to describe. He calls Trump voters indolent, but who supports Sanders if not the indolent. He then calls them unappealing. What’s unappealing about them? Hillary is unappealing to many and as best as I can tell she’s not a Trump supporter. But maybe the author knows something I don’t.
I’ve met Trump supporters and I don’t think a single one of them gave the impression of being “relentlessly, programmatically shitheaded,” On the other hand, I have only a vague idea of what the terms mean, so if the terms actually mean something there’s probably a better way to describe what the author thinks he’s describing. So we have all these descriptors and none of them says anything other than that the writer, who seems clueless about his faults, thinks he’a better human being than Trump supporters.
So bring back the real SOS. The one we have now lets too much get through.
May 6th, 2016 at 7:27AM
AYY: I should have made clearer that the passage is not describing Trump supporters; it’s describing his field of competitors for the Republican nomination.
May 6th, 2016 at 3:24PM
In my overwhelmingly Democrat area, there were reportedly a lot of Democrats who voted for Trump. I don’t know why. He’s a self-funded oligarch, his rhetoric’s a bit rascally, he’s doing the nationalist-populist boogie-woogie, he’s not scripted or focus-grouped. Should he become President, he may have a wider range of policy initiatives available to him than Hillary. He really doesn’t appeal to me much. (BTW-I’m a longtime Libertarian voter.)
May 8th, 2016 at 3:35AM
UD, If he meant Trump’s competitors, it’s even worse.