Archive for July, 2024

Un-Salesman

Wednesday, July 31st, 2024

The more I listen to Trump, the more I realize he is not a master salesman after all. He is an extremely competent salesman. He is better at selling things than I would be. He is much better than most. But among his talents, contrary to popular opinion, selling things is not his peak performance.

He really finds his groove un-selling things. Listing the reasons not to buy the other guy’s stuff. It’s like watching Winter by Antonio Vivaldi performed by a virtuoso. It’s like a vortex-confluence of raw natural born talent, lessons learned over years and years of doing it, and an earnest love and joy of actually doing it. You just want to bottle the performance and put a cork on top. Living greatness.

But after the atmosphere built up by the contagious enthusiasm has come and gone, and the tent has been dismantled and a good night’s sleep has restored sobriety — the core message remains. It’s not a druggy high. It’s durable logic and common sense. It’s truth. Everything he says, once you examine it objectively with patience for the details, is true. It’s only shocking or novel in some way because some people have become hooked on deceptiveness and duplicity. The conflict comes from people who are the problem. Like the villagers who’ve become accustomed to pretending the Emperor is wearing fine clothes, and their churlish attitude against the little boy who points out he’s actually naked.

Trump takes great delight in being that little boy. He’s not like me, or any of the other little boys who mutter dejectedly under our breath “Here we go again…” before pointing out there are no clothes. Trump could wax lyrically about how there are no clothes, morning noon and night, and with gusto.

He’s thoroughly enjoying himself, and his joy is contagious. He was clearly born for this role. The question is…does it do the country any good?

And the answer is — Hell yes. Like a man dying of thirst needs a glass of water. We’ve gotten punch-drunk on pretending the Emperor has clothes. And then we’ve done it a zillion more times. And then made a national pastime out of it. And then kept it up for a couple more generations.

If anybody’s embarrassed by someone else doing the un-selling, that means the un-selling is overdue. It’s the ointment stinging all the worse because the infection set in before you could get it applied.

July Recap

Wednesday, July 31st, 2024

Put this month into a time capsule. You could do a lot worse.

Going into it I had some concerns already. How things shook out, is interesting, and that’s an understatement. As of the nation’s birthday, our incumbent p-Resident was beset with the task of picking up pieces of his own viability following the June 27 debate. It was historic. The first presidential debate in my lifetime where both sides weren’t insisting “Yeah, my guy totally won.” Trump cleaned Biden’s clock without even half trying. Donors insisted Biden drop out, suspending nearly $100 in cash. But nothing doing. Joe’s in it for the long haul!

Then…June 13, a date which will live in infamy. Trump came inches from death — actually a fraction of an inch. As minuscule a degree of separation as you can measure across time, and space. His noggin was supposed to explode in a gory mess with us all watching it live. Miracle it didn’t happen.

Also, our home coffee pot didn’t like the electrical juice supplied at the hotel where we were celebrating my birthday. I had a bit of an un-birthday there, coming out of it cornered, with a desperate problem to be solved, heading into it with a working coffee pot. Kind of backward of how birthdays are supposed to work, but also a reminder to be grateful for your relatively small problems when it seems like life’s out to get you. No one shot at us that weekend.

But then, with the month not nearly half spent, things only started to get strange.

The Director of the Secret Service did about as bad a job managing the resulting public relations debacle, as she had done actually running the Secret Service and preventing this thing from happening. Can’t put an agent on a sloped roof? Really? The Trump campaign should stop holding rallies outdoors? That’s even more historically significant than the assassination attempt itself, or at least, it would be if it stood. Free speech for political candidates only inside auditoriums, following the 2024 Trump assassination attempt. Would that have worked for both sides, or just one? There’s a heady question for you.

Trump proceeded to pick J.D. Vance as his running mate, and with his new martyr status, Biden had a tougher and tougher time closing up that post-debate poll gap, which from here on out only widened. By the following weekend he finally withdrew from the race and threw his support behind his Vice President Kamala Harris.

Diversity, Equity or Inclusion, or DEI. Our modern name for “affirmative action,” the practice of wholly abandoning the previous goal of a color-blind society, specifically looking at immutable characteristics in hiring and promotions, discriminating in the opposite direction. Indefensible, but somehow, the way we do things. People were already talking about it with the Secret Service director, both a beneficiary and implementer of DEI, who around this time resigned. And now the democrat standard bearer was Vice President Harris, who had no reason to be where she was, apart from DEI.

When you’re a DEI beneficiary you benefit from a lot more than just getting hired. The wind is at your back. Headlines started to lie, routinely, frequently, and with great gusto as if they were in competition with each other. Harris raised millions of dollars in a single day. Ha! More like, the previously mentioned millions of dollars were released, the condition of getting rid of Joe, having been met. Hey, News, you’re supposed to be telling us what’s going on in the world. Why you lyin’?

With a hundred days left to the election, or less than that, and only having just settled on who they’re going to run, the democrats were left in a bind. A weird bind. So they settled on solving it for themselves with exactly that word: weird. But this is the age of YouTube and people don’t need to intercept memos or plant bugs in conference rooms to find evidence of the coordination. They can tell just by listening, recording and reviewing. The democrats, supposedly the party of the forgotten and downtrodden, the last vestige of proper representation for those not sufficiently fortunate to populate the respected center of polite society and relegated to the fringes…are now obsessed with properly ostracizing anyone who’s “weird.” Everything is weird. Weird all the time. He’s weird, she’s weird, that’s weird.

Overnight, they’ve become a political party constituted from the Mean Girls who won’t let you sit at their table at lunch. Snooty elitist pricks. They’ve become what they’re supposed to hate.

Sorry to say, I’m heading out of the month with more intense gradations of the concerns I had going into it. I’m worried about courage. A nation where courage decisively dominates, wouldn’t have these problems. We wouldn’t have DEI, which to this straight white boy, looks like little more than a consequence of people failing to say “No, shut up, that’s ridiculous” at the opportune time. Why can’t reverse-discrimination at least work its way up through the ranks, painstakingly, one ladder run at a time like everyone else? How come it has to start out at the very top, receiving all this deference to authority it doesn’t deserve to have?

It makes everybody underneath, or at, look like clowns, total buffoons. And it does this over and over again. But because it’s at the top, you’re not allowed to notice. “So-and-so got the job because of DEI” is something you’re not allowed to say.

It’s significant, or else it isn’t. If it isn’t, we shouldn’t bother with it. It costs resources and makes people in weighty positions look ridiculous.

If it is, and it’s met the goal by way of someone getting a job they wouldn’t have gotten otherwise…we ought to be allowed to say so. It shouldn’t be the DEI advocates stopping us from pointing out the one benefit that can be perceived and then noticed as a result of its presence.

So it changes the outcome, or else it doesn’t. It has to be one or the other. It can’t be both.

It Runs, and It Doesn’t Run

Thursday, July 4th, 2024

Last car I had to get rid of, was & was not mobile. The CarMax guy asked the question, the tow truck driver asked the question, everybody had to ask and I had to offer this Schrodinger’s-Cat answer of “yes and no.”

There was a crack in the outer wall of the engine block where the water pump was supposed to be affixed. So if your intent was to move the car from one parking lot space to another under its own power, it worked fine. If your vision was for anything of a longer and more useful term than that, then realistically the whole car was finished. This was a total.

If you worked hard at being foolish, you could say: Why get rid of it? It runs fine. Look, it’s going five, ten minutes…this obviously means it’ll go on forever. Drive it to work, go shopping, whatever. But if you live in the real world, that doesn’t work. It’s stupid.

My nightmare is that this is might be a suitable analogy for the United States of America whose birthday we celebrate today. We do all these things that cause overheating. Sophists seek to overhaul our culture along with our system of government, constantly. Their argument is “You know I’m wrong, and I know you know, and you know I know you know…but I’m going to win because I’ll scare people into thinking they’re racists sexists and bigots if they don’t agree with me.”

It must work. It’s worked before. Like moving my Honda Civic from parking lot space A to parking lot space B. Things get a little toasty but it works, right?

If you’ve got a brain in your head though, you know this doesn’t work. If you’ve got a brain in your head, you know this is a total. Time for the car to go. Car no longer among us. Car gone. Car doesn’t know it yet, but it’s dead. Dead car rolling.

I hope to heaven my analogy doesn’t work that way.

But I don’t know. I’m seeing an awful lot of overheating. On purpose. By some very smug people. And I’m seeing it often, like nobody who matters knows any other way to do it. It’s become the Modus Operandi by default, the way we’re gonna do it until & unless some other strategy emerges: Figure out who our enemy is, and then piss ’em off on purpose.

The engine runs, but the cooling system is broken.

Can you really keep it rolling?