There is something cathartic about creating an effigy to contain all of the things we don’t like about ourselves. Whenever a group becomes irritated by a person and feels the need to create an effigy, there must be something about that person that reflects their deepest fears about themselves.
Trump is not popular in Britain and a young Englishman recently used some colourful language on Quora to explain why. Since it was deleted by the Quora moderators after it began to go viral, I’ll go ahead and post it here in its entirety. It is difficult to maintain forums on the internet for emotional and controversial political content because it isn’t the sort of content to which advertisers would like to atttach themselves.
Trump lacks certain qualities which the British traditionally esteem. For instance, he has no class, no charm, no coolness, no credibility, no compassion, no wit, no warmth, no wisdom, no subtlety, no sensitivity, no self-awareness, no humility, no honour and no grace – all qualities, funnily enough, with which his predecessor Mr. Obama was generously blessed. So for us, the stark contrast does rather throw Trump’s limitations into embarrassingly sharp relief. Plus, we like a laugh. And while Trump may be laughable, he has never once said anything wry, witty or even faintly amusing – not once, ever.
I don’t say that rhetorically, I mean it quite literally: not once, not ever. And that fact is particularly disturbing to the British sensibility – for us, to lack humour is almost inhuman. But with Trump, it’s a fact. He doesn’t even seem to understand what a joke is – his idea of a joke is a crass comment, an illiterate insult, a casual act of cruelty. Trump is a troll.
And like all trolls, he is never funny and he never laughs; he only crows or jeers. And scarily, he doesn’t just talk in crude, witless insults – he actually thinks in them. His mind is a simple bot-like algorithm of petty prejudices and knee-jerk nastiness. There is never any under-layer of irony, complexity, nuance or depth. It’s all surface. Some Americans might see this as refreshingly upfront. Well, we don’t. We see it as having no inner world, no soul. And in Britain we traditionally side with David, not Goliath. All our heroes are plucky underdogs: Robin Hood, Dick Whittington, Oliver Twist. Trump is neither plucky, nor an underdog. He is the exact opposite of that. He’s not even a spoiled rich-boy, or a greedy fat-cat. He’s more a fat white slug. A Jabba the Hutt of privilege. And worse, he is that most unforgivable of all things to the British: a bully. That is, except when he is among bullies; then he suddenly transforms into a snivelling sidekick instead. There are unspoken rules to this stuff – the Queensberry rules of basic decency – and he breaks them all. He punches downwards – which a gentleman should, would, could never do – and every blow he aims is below the belt. He particularly likes to kick the vulnerable or voiceless – and he kicks them when they are down. So the fact that a significant minority – perhaps a third – of Americans look at what he does, listen to what he says, and then think ‘Yeah, he seems like my kind of guy’ is a matter of some confusion and no little distress to British people, given that: Americans are supposed to be nicer than us, and mostly are.
I’ll pause here to interject something. The Trump movement isn’t about aspirations to elitism, it is about vengeance against an urban middle class that is betraying the working class by outsourcing their industries. His followers love tackiness because they know it is tacky and they know that aspirational liberals hate tackiness. This young Englishman doesn’t seem to get it. Trump is a gigantic middle finger to guys like him who just don’t get it. I’ll elaborate on this after the rant is over.
You don’t need a particularly keen eye for detail to spot a few flaws in the man. This last point is what especially confuses and dismays British people, and many other people too; his faults seem pretty bloody hard to miss. After all, it’s impossible to read a single tweet, or hear him speak a sentence or two, without staring deep into the abyss. He turns being artless into an art form; He is a Picasso of pettiness; a Shakespeare of shit. His faults are fractal: even his flaws have flaws, and so on ad infinitum. God knows there have always been stupid people in the world, and plenty of nasty people too. But rarely has stupidity been so nasty, or nastiness so stupid. He makes Nixon look trustworthy and George W look smart. In fact, if Frankenstein decided to make a monster assembled entirely from human flaws – he would make a Trump. And a remorseful Doctor Frankenstein would clutch out big clumpfuls of hair and scream in anguish: ‘My God… what… have… I… created? If being a twat was a TV show, Trump would be the boxed set.”
British person’s rant about Trump
Am I a fan of what Trump has done – especially with regard to vulnerable immigrants? Hell no. But I view him as a natural product of the system and I find this rant rather funny because it wails over Trump’s lack of self-awareness while displaying no self-awareness whatsoever.
This is the reason that when I see British people dancing around a giant, Trump-baby-balloon-effigy, I conclude that they are afraid they themselves are a bunch of privileged, jeering, humorless, dishonest, incompetent, infantile, soulless phonies who are driven by narcissistic impulses. They would rather be authentic, liberal, and cool like Obama, but they can’t be because they’ve been raised to worship facades and hate the gritty, honest stupidity of the sorts of people who elected Trump.
Unlike Trump, they don’t understand how to control those sorts of people and it drives them nuts. Trump is a master of this form of manipulation because he understands that people who have been miseducated by the system to do things that are not in their interest tend to develop a degree of meta-intelligence about the system. I write meta because their knowledge isn’t something they feel comfortable putting into words, but they understand it well enough. Trump’s voters knew they were being poisoned with addictive, corporate products and that the system was screwing them, so they threw a wrench in it — a perfect, orange wrench who appreciates the irony of ordering a thousand Big Macs to the White House while perfectly playing the role of idiot-President.
Trump is (probably knowingly) serving as a living lesson that this is the leadership you get when you poison a population in an effort to reduce crime. Many factors have gone into crime reduction in past decades including
- increased policing and encarceration
- the end of the crack epidemic in the mid-1990’s
- removal of environmental lead
- antidepressants
- cell phones to record criminal activity
- demographics (more old people)
- entertainment access
but I think the main reason for crime reduction is increased access to video games, Hollywood, entertainment, and junk food. Would be criminals today are couch potatoes who’ve been lobotomized by powerfully addictive corporate products.
Do those who’ve profited from these conditions feel any guilt? Probably not. They are safe and smug in their secluded homes while the children of the poisoned ones are still hypnotized by the system that is enslaving them. They are still hopeful that Elizabeth Warren will ride to their rescue and cancel their student debts.
I’m not worried that Trump will last forever. The fear and rage will subside as demographic balance shifts. Meanwhile, the children of the poisoned ones are being told to learn to code and further estrange themselves from the means of production — but they are eagerly buying a lie. As far as I can tell, there are no plans to educate these children. Instead, they plan to feed them the illusion of friends, connectivity, and productivity through video game platforms like Twitch.
The people building these platforms may think that they are preventing crime, but childhood neglect is not cured with fake violence — and didn’t that summer camp mass murderer from Sweden serve as a counter-example to this logic? I think these kids need some inspiring teachers and books that help them put their changing world in perspective. Even a brain-damaged teacher can still teach if she has good materials, but when I look online at the physics education materials – I see very uneven quality and a completely lost meta-narrative that causes the students to confuse literal and figurative concepts.
These children of poisoned parents may need longer to grow up, but I do not think that the problem is genetics – as fans of Idiocracy like to believe.
One of the lies that serves the elite is the mythology of IQ and genetics. It is all in the genes, I was told. To a certain extent, this is true, but it is only a fragment of a much larger picture in which there is far more variation within a given population than there is between populations. My father’s side had giant craniums, absurd memories, and a tendency to get depressed when their minds began to argue with themselves. My mother’s side had a can-do attitude and focus on the task at hand. They both scored similarly on standardized tests. I’ve seen this division in my own family as well in that two of my kids have my head shape and one of my kids has my husband’s head shape. Our thinking styles diverge along similar lines. My husband is more short-term, task-oriented and his long-term memory is terrible while I am more imaginative and my long-term memory is good. You might be able to guess who does better in a classroom environment.
Genetics aside, I think that if you take the world’s smartest person and place him or her in a noisy or poisonous environment, he or she will turn into a regular, old stupid person. Even if nutrition was worse in the past and the Flynn effect is real, the opposite of the Flynn effect is also real.
Modern nutrition, education, and distraction can poison your brain.
While trying to pass all of the tests and jump through all of the hoops, you can fill your mind with so much stuff that it can’t think anymore. Add internet games and entertainment to the mix and all hope is lost. Too much stimulation and food can make a person just as dumb as too little stimulation and food.
Think of Euler, Newton, and Gauss sitting in their quiet studies with no distraction other than a small library and then think of today’s pop scientists bouncing from hotel to conference room to airport to ipad and ask yourself how smart it is possible for them to be.
The smart people are those who have found a way to create a quiet space to think.
On the other hand, smartness today seems to be defined by specialization and this is often quite different from what I would call intelligence. Early humans had larger brains than modern humans because they had to be more multipurpose and devote a lot of their resources to remembering where to find food and how to fight their enemies.
Modern humans have domesticated themselves and evolved to be more like trusting, specialized, cogs in a large civilization. Similarly, wolves are smarter than dogs in terms of solving puzzles, but dogs are better at reading humans’ faces.
With this in mind, what does the ranting young Englishman mean when he evaluates Trump’s intelligence? It certainly took a certain type of intelligence to do what Trump did, hypnotizing a large fraction of the electorate. Yet to maintain the value of the system in which he was indoctrinated, the young Englishman understands that Trump must be made into an effigy and destroyed as a warning to anyone who refuses to conform to their historically-based, yet somewhat arbitrary standards of good taste and decorum.
Please don’t interpret that I like Trump or his style. I just like analyzing how people function.
With that disclaimer, I will conclude this post. What follows are some notes for the novel I’m working on.
…………
There is something slightly Trumpian about Mr. Randall, the antithero of the novel I’m working on and when I write about him, I imagine that I am capturing all of a real man’s bad qualities so that his image in real life can be good and he can see himself as good.
It is a baptism of sorts — or an inverse of Oscar Wilde’s Portrait of Dorian Grey.
I think that if you quarantine all of the bad within a fictional realm, it is easier to be good in the real world.
Oscar Wilde thought that the opposite was true and that it is necessary for appearances to reflect the full history of a person, otherwise they will feel free to act as a wolf in sheep’s clothing.
I don’t, of course, make Mr. Randall all bad. In many ways, he is a parody of a typical cinematic hero.
If you haven’t read any of my previous posts on the world building or character development I’m working on for my present novel, Mr. Randall is an ex-gigolo, pimp secret-agent. He has lived a double life as a husband and father and he isn’t that young anymore. I picture him as a cross between Larry David of Curb Your Enthusiasm and 007. He is very charming and personable, but then he suddenly does something so awful that it makes your head spin. Below are a few new excerpts.
….
After I’d put the kids to bed, I went downstairs to sweep the kitchen and he was there, just returned from some mischief, I’m sure. Neither of us knew how close we wanted to get to one another, but we knew we didn’t want to get too far away.
The broom was behaving strangely. The bristles were soft and long like human hair. I swished them across the floor and felt that something wasn’t right. I felt like I’d been drugged. The long, black human hair swishing across my floor made me think of the women he employed. His wife had also once been a prostitute. They’d gotten together because they had that in common.
“We keep running away from one another, but it isn’t working.”
“We’re running in circles.”
“Orbiting.”
….
I was looking through the website on which he advertised his merchandise and was having a hard time avoiding the feelings of jealousy over the pretty faces.
“Why did you hire her? She is not conventionally attractive. She looks like a man to me.”
“She has some… exotic flavor. Some of my clients like variety.”
“You are the equivalent of a gourmand who specializes in dumpsters.”
“Waste not, want not. I think they would object to being called dumpsters.”
“I apologize. Isn’t there another way for these people to feel useful. One that isn’t so dangerous and degrading?”
“Unloved people need a way to express themselves and men express themselves through their sexuality. I’ve taken on the role of limiting the danger and degredation. It is better that they hire a professional than abuse their child.”
“But what about the one who was murdered?”
“If one of my employees gets hurt, it is my job to exact punishment on the perpetrator. I enjoy that part of the job a bit too much sometimes.”
“So you are a hero, not a pimp.”
“It is how I prefer to see myself.”
“And when you recruit a young woman from out of town and get her set up with a hair stylist, an apartment, and some new, sexy underwear, you aren’t enabling her to get hurt?”
“I try to provide an upgrade. It is up to her to take the next step up or down. If she is addicted to drugs, the next step is usually down. That is why I try to avoid drug users. Most pimps try to get women hooked so that it is easier to control them.”
“It must be tough being such a great guy.”
“I try to err on the side of being as good as possible. That isn’t always possible.”
“Metametaethics. You’re like a cattle rustler who is vegan except for cows.”
“To err is human. To moo is bovine.”
……
He is grossed out by old women to a pathological degree, such that he literally retches when he gets too close to one and smells their perfume. They are like his kryptonite. They take him back to his days as a gigolo in a post-traumatic fashion. Grey haired vaginas terrify him.
His boss was really abusive of him back then.
“No, not her again. She insisted on a bunch of ass play and it got really weird.”
“That’s fine. You can set limits.”
“I think I should visit a doctor. There was something very unclean about it.”
“Look I set up an advertisement for you. We need to branch out and cover more territory.”
“You put my picture in the paper? I look like a whore.”
“Mmm.”
“Does that say: no limits?”
“Your six o’clock just arrived.”
“She looks like she is 80.”
“She’s 60 something, but the years have not been kind.”
“Hunched back. Lipstick on crooked, yellow teeth.”
“Just take the pill I gave you, close your eyes, and think of the queen. Oh, don’t forget. She’s paying extra for you to pretend that you like it. She is Sammy Corleone’s wife, so don’t mess it up. We need that contact.”
….
I was looking at his old photo album and there were a lot of photos of him with older women. They’d paid him for his attention, apparently.
“You did that.. professionally… and the government paid you?”
“The women paid me too. Oh the things I did for the queen. The wives of powerful men will tell you everything once you’ve gotten into their knickers.”
“And how did you get into their knickers?”
“Mrs. Anders, I didn’t recognize you with your clothes on! Oh, Mrs. Smith, what a nice little nothing you’ve almost put on. I approve.”
“I see. It is getting late. I need to finish dressing.”
“Oh, please don’t. Not on my account.”
“Stop! I don’t like it when you tickle me. Who was that man we saw yesterday at the market? The one you steered us away from. Did you know him?”
“Not socially. His name is Fred, he kills people.”
She doesn’t know yet that he was often tasked with killing the women he slept with after he’d gotten the required information out of them. They were usually playing both sides of the game and in over their heads.
Mr. Randall wants to save his soul. He is the city he is from. He was once raped when he was 25. It was so painful that he vomited and he can’t erase the image of the man who raped him smiling, or rather sneering, at him. It made him never want to feel weak and helpless ever again. He doesn’t even like it when women are sexually aggressive. Then he meets his future wife and can suddenly see a different life for himself than the one by which he’d always felt enslaved. His dream of a small palace filled with treasures, tucked away in a foreign land suddenly looked empty and childish.
Alone with beauty, you lack humor. You need the clowns. You need the dream. Send in the clowns. Sequestered in a palace as the rest of the world drowns, there is only hope that it will be reborn. Maybe next year.
He thought that by getting as much power as the man who had raped him, he would feel safe and happy, but he realizes that the man who raped him was trapped by forces even more powerful than what had tomented him for his whole life. The man who had raped him is trapped in his castle, as in a hall of mirrors, unable to distinguish between himself and others, lashing out at others in an attempt to heal himself. When Mr. Randall forgives him and forgives himself, he becomes good.
He doesn’t require an effigy to purify himself. The need for an effigy or scapegoat is a primitive, childish illusion.
The last link to my chain of notes is here.
……………………
The image in the header is from an underwater sculpture park in Grenada. I believe the park owns the images.
Kirsten Hacker 
Donald is too easy of a target to be sure, and there is little enjoyment for me in reading him being bashed. I say he cannot help being a cruel evil perverted malignant narcissistic moron, HE JUST CAN’T HELP IT! He’s got a mental disorder, and should be either pitied or quarantined so that whatever it is he is infected with doesn’t spread. Saying that, on my blog is a description of my RPG game I’m designing: GO MAGA! Help Trump Take Over the World!
Oh yeah, I also agree about the scourge of time-wasting culture and unhealthy everything. Yes, I do, I’m serious, but it is also hilarious from a historical perspective.
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