Monday, September 19, 2022

Two Old Men Muttering To Each Other

There was (is, still) a thread on my local NextDoor complaining about the lack of shopping carts at a specific grocery store location, a discussion that devolved into allegations that flatbed trucks roam that neighborhood under cover of darkness and take the carts en masse to scrap dealers for the scrap value (which a) would be nil, b) would involve those dealers in theft, but never mind, the conspiracy/explanation is all) and included something about homeless people with unopened beer cans standing on the sidewalk as cars go by (hand to God!).

Typical use of NextDoor, IOW.  A handful of old people (or prematurely old) complaining about the world around them because what else do they have to do?  I don't mean to condemn them, because society is very good at discarding people for whom it thinks it has no use.  But they sound just like Trump and Voight here: speaking empty generalities as they complain about the world around them.  I saw a Twitter thread on Trump's repitition of words ('word salad,' Rupar calls it here) as a sign of dementia or just lack of coherence.* Someone else breathlessly asserted such repitition was another mark of the tyrant, repeating words like a mantra (apparently) until the masses are hypnotized.

Or bored, as the half-full auditorium in Ohio was the other night.

But Trump's words are completely empty.  "Something" has to be done, "it" has to "be fixed."  No referents, no proposals, no content; just droning complaints about....what?  In "The Wild Ones" a news reporter approaches Marlon Brando and asks "What are you rebelling against?"  Brando answers:  "Whadda ya got?" It's a clever line in the movie; in real life, it's Trump muttering to Voight.  What has to be fixed?  "Everything."  How? "By fixing it right!"  Or, in Voight's words, returning "the greatness the Founding Fathers left us."  Does he mean the country where only white male landowners could vote, and blacks were 3/5's of a person?  Probably not, but the statement is so vacuous it could literally mean anything.

And this is the person who is "dangerous" and of whom we must be afraid.

I'll just leave this right here:
*Belatedly found it: More of the same as above, really.
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