glen/marcus -
My mantra in this context is: "we all got to be the way we are
somehow".
I can claim with seriousness that I *do* spend some of my empathy cycles, trying to grok WTF leads to a Donald Trump, and more to the point what leads to a Donald Trump at the head of our Executive Branch stumbling through his days of Fox&Friends and Twitter without having triggered *even more* disasters than it feels he has managed to exacerbate if not downright generate. My *empathy* kicks in when I try to sort out the various "but by the grace of god there go I" reflections each time I try to imagine what psychological gymnastics he must have gone through at each stage or inflection point in his life.
A study of his own children is probably a little easier than the
study of him, since they are busy forming at his knee (under his
thumb?) right now... His formation under the wing (and boot?) of
Fred Sr. (and Roy Cohn and Roger Stone and ???) is a little
obscured by time and a surely sqewed/muted record. Barron is
somewhat obscured from us, but when I do catch a glimpse of him or
hear a happy-story about him from one of the puff journalists, I
cringe a little whilst also wanting to imagine that he can
magically rise up and flip the whole precedent on it's head.
"Pull a Mowgli" or somesuch. From the similarly thin glimpses I
get of Melania, I don't get much sense that she is "helping" the
situation much, though she is surely buffering better than
Donald's mother was able to do. She (and others) seem to like to
observe that he is a "little Donald" which sounds rather tragic on
the face of it. I can't say I waste a *lot* of my energy on all
of this, but they do make an interesting pseudo-public study in
dysfunctional family dynamics... filling perhaps the same niche
of morbid fascination as the royal family provides for the
Anglophile/Commonwealth? I hear that Prince Harry has lost
another title over having endorsed Biden-Harris. I suspect
Meghan (at least) is muttering "good riddance" to that title.
I'm no fan of reality TV in most if not all of it's forms (I
think I managed to get a kick out of one Ice Road Truckers and one
Russian Guy Builds Log Cabin in Siberia episode/podcast but wasn't
compelled to return) but I will admit to being stimulated via
morbid fascination with the news-stream as Trump flops around in
public like the villain in a melodrama trying to hold the stage
for the entire last act as he dies dramatically. Trump seems to
have nothing in his portfolio but a string of ghastly public
failures where *he* slips out from under the crumbling building
just in time to go on to slap a fat T on another one and start
dismantling it from the foundation up like a hungry termite.
Reminds me a bit too much of that psychological thriller "Pacific
Heights" with Michael Keaton as a psychopathic Donald-type:
- Steve
A collection of people, who shall remain nameless, recently tried to shame me for objecting to their waste of empathy for poor lil ol Trump, in light of his infection. One argument went something like "His father was horrible." One primary argument went something like "empathy begets empathy". Empathy is not zero-sum. Etc. I started my objection to all this Trump-as-a-victim talk by listing several aspects of his CHARMED LIFE, like the fact that he's lucky enough to have lived to a ripe old age (when so many of us die young), he was born wealthy (when so many of us live our entire lives dirt poor), his stupid TV show was wildly successful (when so many of us are serial failures), his weaponized litigousness has benefited him throughout his life (when so many of us can't even afford a lawyer). Etc. All that *privilege* has been bestowed upon him. And it seems, to me, he's squandered it all. He reminds me of those pitiful pictures of Saddam Hussein in court and then prison and then dead. Oh boo-hoo, poor little dictator being mistreated. Such sentiments are not merely weird to me. If game theory and the success of simplistic tit-for-tat has taught us anything, it is that the algorithmic *depth* required to beat straightforward (poetic) "justice" is academically interesting, but pragmatically degenerate. So, no. I will not waste any of my finite lifetime feeling sorry for poor lil ol Trump, our Privilege Squanderer in Chief. If that magically limits my ability to empathize in some other context, so be it. If it implies that when I die pathetically, under some bridge, eating partial hamburgers from the Wendy's dumpster, my colleagues *rightly* avoid wasting their finite lifetimes feeling sorry for me, then I'm ready for that day. Like it or not, tu quoque is a fallacy.
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