Predictable as sunrise. It’s not too much to say Trump’s only signal successes were his TV show and winning the Presidential election. One event all but led to the other, and that says something about electoral politics that is still trying to come into focus (we haven’t yet construed the scaffolding for the building of the narrative we are going to use to understand to fit that one into our quasi-Christian secular civil religion of what the holy “Founding Fathers” left us before they were taken up into heaven).It's sort of wild that Truth Social just evaporated.
— Philip Bump (@pbump) March 31, 2022
Trump didn’t even succeed at being President. “Every little boy can be President” ran the lyrics we learned in elementary school (nor did it occur to any of us how exclusionary that song was). We never stopped to consider that, while that could be true, should it be? Now that we’ve faced that issue, we’re very disturbed to find we don’t have a good Constitutional answer. We aren’t even sure how to frame the issue. Is the Constitution supposed to serve power, or the people? We think we know the answer, but we’re wrong. And we don’t know how to establish a system, or even a valid story (v. the story we tell ourselves; well, that white people tell themselves), of how to achieve a government that serves us.
We never have; but here we are. Perplexed at the case of a man who could win the presidency, but still remain what he always was: a loser born on third base who thinks he hit a triple. Too many of us think he must have, too, else who are we, to have accepted such a man as our leader?
begs the question, are his followers just stupid? or are we?
ReplyDeleteYes.
DeleteI think baseball is too fast and complicated for Trump, he's always been more of a football guy.
ReplyDeleteI don't think we're stupid but we are lied to and gulled. I listened to the entire Rev. Jeremiah Wright sermon on 9-11 the other day and it struck me that what he did was not dissimilar to what Jeremiah the Prophet did, telling his society the unpleasant truth about itself in its period of crisis, which Brueggemann has called their 9-11. And what Jesus did when he preached about Elisha healing the foreigner of leprosy and the rains not falling on the Children of Israel, both of them getting the same kind of reaction that the Reverend did. I think it's an important sermon and one that will always be timely and unwelcomed.
“A man hears what he wants to hear, and disregards the rest.” Call it stupidity, call it gullibility, call us the victim of lies: the responsibility still falls on us. Too many people didn’t want to vote for Clinton but thought Trump couldn’t win because “the system” would save us from that disaster. So they shrugged off responsibility. Again.
DeleteBesides, accepting lies is easier than bearing the burden of the truth. How many people listened to Jeremiah?