I don’t know where I am

Kind of between moods at the moment.

I know I am not exactly happy. I feel restless and irritable and like I want to scream and throw myself into battle. Or madness. Or hell. Whatever.

The point is, I feel like doing something crazy just to express the screaming gnawing seething id-rage  inside me that is desperately trying to claw its way to the surface so it can escape and run like the wind over the hills to far, far away.

So what is keeping it from doing so? Fear, of course. Fear is something the id can understand. Fear of losing what little sanity I retain. Fear of finally snapping like a dry twig and opening up the floodgates to all I have suppressed over the years.

And there’s ever so much of it.

So instead, I suppose I will lie down and wait for the feeling to pass. Like usual.

Made the mistake of checking my Facebook feed. Everyone freaking out over the US election. Um nope. Can not cope. Bye bye.

Wouldn’t it be weird if the Donald, by letting others do the hard stuff, ended up actually being a really good President? A lot of people will presumably be working very hard to get close to him and be (or own) the people who take those pesky Presidential burdens off his shoulders and keep his ego pumped up while making sure he doesn’t actually have to do anything or have the slightest bit of actual power.

It worked for Dubya. Granted, Dubya was dimwitted and childlike, whereas the Donald is senile and childlike, and thus far less predictable.

Basically, the Donald is Dubya if Dubya wasn’t basically a good-natured and well-intentioned, and with full (if compromised) intellectual capacity.

That could make him very dangerous. But I don’t think it will, because I feel like the Don will pass over the competency horizon between now and his inauguration day. By that, I mean he will pass between the phase of aging where people are angry and querulous and determined to make the world stop and listen to him into the age where people give up on the big world and concentrate on things like visits from children, board game tournaments, and trying to get an extra pudding.

In other words, when people pass through that last competency horizon, they regress to a child-like state and are willing to simply do what they are told as long as they get their little comforts and pleasures and their basic ego needs are met.

This is clearly what happened with Reagan. As his Alzheimer’s progressed, he became more simple-minded, and regressed to a childlike state where he was not at all concerned with the big picture, or even the medium picture. He left that all up to others, with largely disastrous results because when the leadership is soft and incompetent, the whole leadership structure is unstable because there is no competent leader to unite people in identity and purpose and that makes people very nervous and insecure.

And nervous and insecure people make very poor decisions, generally based on crass self-interest and half-baked ideology. They are too upset to really think things through, and when you have all these people pulling in different directions, the last thing on their minds is what is actually good for the people.

Only strong leadership can overcome petty personal politics. People really do need a strong leader in order to feel secure and relaxed. Authoritarian conservatives (and not just the fascists) are right about that.

They just have a very crude and emotion-based and primitive definition of “strong”, one that ignores the fact that strong leaders absolutely must demonstrate compassion and understanding as well as wisdom, judgment, patience, and benevolence.

Anyhow. The Donald is not going to be able to demonstrate that kind of leadership, which will disappoint his authoritarian fanbase. Being very low on specifics works great during an election as long as the people are angry (or whatever) enough not to be looking for policy answers, but once you are in power, people will expect you to do things, including but by no means limited to the things you said you were going to do, and if you don’t, they will be extremely pissed off.

So the Trumpening better have some way to convince people they don’t really want that wall he promised them, because there is no way it can actually happen.

I am more curious about his claims that he will put the boots to Wall Street. This is entirely doable for him. He’s never been part of the financial world anyhow, mostly because they never wanted him around because he is entirely the wrong kind of rich person for them,

They like people who are good at playing the respectability game where everyone tacitly agrees to keep up the facade of being solid citizens who are pillars of the community and exactly the sort of people you would trust with large amounts of money and power.

And they never, ever attract attention to themselves except in thoroughly respectable ways mostly consisting of public philanthropy in its various forms.

Trump is the exact opposite of that. So who knows, maybe he will reform Wall Street just to piss off people who never liked him or wanted him in their club anyway. People who might well remind Trump of his father, with whom I feel he has always had issues.

That’s pure intuition on my part, but I stand behind it.

And seeing as big business turned against him big time, I doubt he will feel any loyalty to them either. So who knows, maybe he will close a tax loophole or two.

That would certainly antagonize Fox News, assuming they are still the way the poor are sold to the rich with Roger Ailes gone.

I guess what I am really saying is that a Trump presidency might not be the nightmare holocaust we all fear it will be.

In some ways, it might actually be kind of okay.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

 

 

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