Time to Get Up and Get Back

After all this time away, it's time to yawn, stretch, and wake up - -  wake everybody up.


At the beginning of all of this madness, in the summer and fall of last year, everybody (well, almost everybody: those who could think for themselves, as opposed to surrendering their thinkers (which is to say, their minds and their brains) to someone who was louder, who'd bought and paid for a platform that allowed himself to be heard, and who was and is so completely  devoid of filters and self-control that there just isn't anything he wouldn't and won't say and/or do for that moment's attention) thought that a blustery, snarly, crude guy had no real chance of making good on his threat to seek high national office.


How wrong we were! In a testament to the effects of irritation if not outright anger, on the part of a relatively few marginalized people who were and increasingly are susceptible to one of the great con jobs in recent history, a man who has parleyed his daddy-given money into an over-amped sound system has managed to stir up a huge (huge, I tell you! Very very beautiful, but huge)  number of people who, like wasps in a large nest, have been driven out (by the noise? By the gas?) and are buzzing around like - -  well, like wasps, biting and stinging everything they can that looks or seems to be not one of them.


This is a man who has lied pathologically (for example: every time he undertook to offer a "deal" to would-be investors, guaranteeing intelligent stewardship and decent returns, that was a lie. Every time he contracted with builders or suppliers for one of his too-many-to-count failed projects, promising them (as a normal businessman does and would do) that they'd get paid according to the terms of their agreement, that was a lie. Every time he had petitioned for bankruptcy protection, that was a manifestation of another lie. He has lied about things as simple as his father's place of birth; his wife's place of birth and name; his intention and commitment to release tax records, as everyone in the same political position does, these days; hell, even his  own personal worth (wildly overstated) ); he threatens violence to those who irritate or, worse yet, better him when speaking (admittedly, not too hard to do); and he makes up his own truth and his own reality as he goes along (the millions and millions of people who have told him that they "love" him; his friends in high places; even the numbers of jobs he's created, never mind his destruction of any jobs, when he pulls the plug on yet another failed and bankrupt venture.


Here's the scary thing: the people who most attach themselves to him, those who echo his shallow but high-volume roar, don't get that he's using them, badly, just as he used all of those thousands upon thousands of others whose businesses he destroyed, whom he ran into debt, and whom he intimidated into taking pennies on the dollars he owed them, upon pain of being sued by his sell-out shyster lawyers and spending years in court and thousands on fees for their own (real) attorneys if they didn't cave.


When he's gotten all he can from them, he'll pitch them just as he's pitched all the others. He'll leave them disillusioned and disenfranchised. Having absolutely no substance at all (in terms of administrative plans, system designs, familiarity with the realities of governance, and surely, not the slightest notion of international relations or, God forbid, diplomacy), he'll just walk away, chortling and laughing, thinking:

"I've done it again. Another major con by a guy from The Bronx."