A brilliant little essay that doesn’t even mention his name.
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As Trump’s campaign collapses into one long lost weekend, more and more observers zoom out and get literary.
There’s something both grotesque and bracing about the confrontation between Clinton, with her disciplined professionalism, and Trump, with his increasingly frenzied assertions of male prerogative. Like the female protagonist of a quest narrative — or, perhaps, of a dystopian fantasy — Clinton has made it through all her challenges to face the bull-headed Minotaur of sexism at the end of the maze.
October 16th, 2016 at 12:24PM
Yes, the disciplined professionalism of Hillary and her coven. So disciplined, they put the country up for sale and then cackled about it on unsecure e-mail. These disciplined professionals, by their own admission the smartest people who have ever lived, are of course completely compromised now. Vlad, the ayatollahs, the Chicoms, the Norks, et al. will sit on the juiciest bits and cash them in at the appropriate times–and cash them in, they will.
UD, you have inveighed for years here about Wall Street and Goldman Sachs. We now have confirmation (not that any was really needed, of course) that the very entities our tinhorn tyrannunculus, the godlet Obama, shook his tiny fist at during the campaign dictated his cabinet choices. Did they perhaps provide the Puppet-in-Chief a full-height mirror to strut in front of or a new set of golf irons to keep him distracted while they determined his policies? No doubt we will find out soon. Their new gal Friday, Cruella de Hille, will unquestionably prove just as compliant, although her durability is in question. Not even the nightly seances featuring the spirits of Eleanor Roosevelt, the Wicked Witch of the West, and the goddess Gaia, held between the increasingly frequent infusions of whatever icker flows through the tangled veins of such a creature, may serve to keep her lying smoothly. Can Wall Street hire enough discreet young women to sate Billigula, the Satyr-in-Chief, and keep him out of the headlines? Can even Goldman Sachs discover sufficient sinecures to satisfy the grasping Chelsea and her bumbling husband Marc “The Greek” Mezvinsky? Will a less horny husbeard be found for Huma than the Weener?
October 16th, 2016 at 1:25PM
Whew!
Well, tp, let me say this. The entire cast of grotesques you evoke seems to me to have far more humanity and intelligence than the grotesque the Republican voters came up with for their candidate. I’ll go with them, even though plenty of them are capable of being cynical and mercenary and in all sorts of other ways can fall short of the virtue I would prefer to see in my leaders.
Even with Clinton’s self-serving statements to Goldman Sachs thrown in (I notice that no one in the press seems to find much in them to get excited about) I don’t hesitate for a moment to support her.
And as you know, my inveighing was primarily about her ridiculous speaking fees. I’ve complained very little about the hypocrisy of her trying to be for some audiences a champion of the little people hurt by banks like GS and for others a rah rah booster of said banks. I care less about what a politician who (naturally) panders to whatever her audience happens to be says; I care more about her policies. These seem to me in the case of Clinton to be solid.
October 16th, 2016 at 1:38PM
I think our species has a relatively short shelf life, based on obvious design defects. Glorious at our best, unspeakably horrible at our worst, we are simply inadequate most of the time. It seems likely that the weather will kill us one way or another, or nucs burn us to a crisp. Still the main question is for whom does the worst start: us, our kids, our grand kids etc. The right pandemic might just be our only hope. And just possibly it might all be avoided, meaning postponed by an order or two of magnitude. Even if I were to largely agree with you about Hillary, and I don’t, avoiding a megalomaniacal presidency under Trump would likely adjust the timeline favorably, if slightly. It’s worth it to consider whether your hatred of Hillary (perhaps partially justified) will cause you to act, and counsel actions, against your own best interests and those of all of us, however fleeting the difference may turn out to be. Personally I think that HRC is a tough American politician, at times greedy and others benevolent, who now would like to be remembered for a progressive agenda during her presidency.
October 17th, 2016 at 12:27AM
As the wingnut night grows thicker
misogyny grows ever sicker.
tp warns us not to pick ’er,
Hill’s as slick as Bill, nay, slicker!
But I for one would love to sic ’er
on those who misspell ichor icker.
October 17th, 2016 at 7:31AM
I will be crushed if Hillary loses, UD. My new popcorn popper and the 50 lb. sack of popcorn I laid in can hardly wait until the Baby Boomer Left manages to put Hillary Milhous Clinton into the White House.
And Doc—I know how to spell ichor. Think hard about this one. The blood of the gods and the juice that powers insects is quite different from the noxious brew that animates the Rodhamstein Creature.
October 17th, 2016 at 7:47AM
I think it is time for some escapism — to slowly reread Notes toward a Supreme Fiction. Can I turn my electronics off for a while? We’ll see.
October 17th, 2016 at 8:35AM
But, first, and, I promise, last for a while, let me leave a little beauty — necessarily someone else’s — Wallace Stevens’. I hope everyone thinks hard and makes the last effort to do whatever you conclude is right: vote, contribute, volunteer. And I hope you also find some of the mental space and joy you had before this worst of many bad chapters in recent American politics.
Notes
“From this the poem springs: that we live in a place
That is not our own and, much more, not ourselves
And hard it is in spite of blazoned days
An Ordinary Evening in New Haven
“The less legible meanings of sounds, the little reds
Not often realized, the lighter words In the heavy drum of speech, the inner men
Behind the outer shields, the sheets of music In the strokes of thunder, dead candles at the window
When day comes, fire-foams in the motions of the sea,
Flickings from finikin to fine finikin
And the general fidget from busts of Constantine To photographs of the late president, Mr. Blank,
These are the edgings and inchings of final form,
The swarming activities of the formulae
Of statement, directly and indirectly getting at,
Like an evening evoking the spectrum of violet,
A philosopher practicing scales on his piano,
A woman writing a note and tearing it up.
It is not in the premise that reality Is a solid.
It may be a shade that traverses
A dust, a force that traverses a shade.”