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He does tend to stir the creative imagination. Also really great writing. This, says Scathing Online Schoolmarm, is unbeatable. Highlights from a tightly organized, tonally controlled, brilliantly concise, little masterpiece:
no pollster left to lie to him
listened to the lethal quackery
harmful and bizarre
result of a country run by a crackpot
dereliction of duty, son.
fevered with viral hot spots.
Of late, Trump has been itching for a riot.
Nixon is a notch higher in the hell-scape
He’s Trump with a pious veneer
a timely bootlick.
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And see what he’s about in his final paragraph? See all the ys, all the ee sounds that come off the page? The writer knows how to make prose poetic, and therefore much more coherent and powerful.
But there’s another image, equally satisfying. Trump could play one last gambit in the dictator’s checklist and refuse to leave office on Jan. 20 — election or no election — as required by the Constitution. If he does this, a weary nation would be rewarded with a presidential perp walk, as Trump is escorted out of the White House and into infamy by the military police.
If you lack the alliteration, assonance, perfect-wordism, and tonal cool this writer enjoys in abundance, sorry. Not everybody gets the style goodies. But you can learn a lot by reading him carefully.
August 2nd, 2020 at 11:48AM
In “Economical Writing,” D. N. McCloskey compared the craft of writing with that of the master carpenter showing the novice how to cut it clean. Not enough dissertation supervisors, in his view, ever showed how to cut it clean.
As far as the substance of the argument, that’s more for Mr UD, isn’t it? It’s unlikely that Our President will abdicate in the manner of Lyndon Johnson, as the protestors who influenced him were the sort that would argue with, then vote for Democrats, or stay home. Those bits of the GOP establishment who hope for a restoration of Bipartisan Comity are still smarting over the Trumpian hostile takeover of the national party in 2016, and they are insufficiently attentive to the similar crackup coming in the Democrats (Mr Biden being a placeholder, we’ll see if the vice president is a regent, or if one of the factions has enough power.)
Batten the hatches for the storm mid-week, then comes a wild political fall.