[FRIAM] Trump as a victim

[Frank Wimberly]

I feel empathy and sympathy for the little baby Donald before the remote
mother and the overweening father made their imprint on him.

---
Frank C. Wimberly
140 Calle Ojo Feliz,
Santa Fe, NM 87505

505 670-9918
Santa Fe, NM

On Wed, Oct 7, 2020, 9:38 AM Marcus Daniels <marcus at snoutfarm.com> wrote:

> Empathy requires attention and time, and anyone else is a better use of
> it.   Quoting from Utopia, "What you have you done today to earn your place
> in this big crowded world of ours?"
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com> On Behalf Of u?l? ???
> Sent: Wednesday, October 7, 2020 5:54 AM
> To: FriAM <friam at redfish.com>
> Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Trump as a victim
>
> A collection of people, who shall remain nameless, recently tried to shame
> me for objecting to their waste of empathy for poor lil ol Trump, in light
> of his infection. One argument went something like "His father was
> horrible." One primary argument went something like "empathy begets
> empathy". Empathy is not zero-sum. Etc.
>
> I started my objection to all this Trump-as-a-victim talk by listing
> several aspects of his CHARMED LIFE, like the fact that he's lucky enough
> to have lived to a ripe old age (when so many of us die young), he was born
> wealthy (when so many of us live our entire lives dirt poor), his stupid TV
> show was wildly successful (when so many of us are serial failures), his
> weaponized litigousness has benefited him throughout his life (when so many
> of us can't even afford a lawyer). Etc.
>
> All that *privilege* has been bestowed upon him. And it seems, to me, he's
> squandered it all. He reminds me of those pitiful pictures of Saddam
> Hussein in court and then prison and then dead. Oh boo-hoo, poor little
> dictator being mistreated. Such sentiments are not merely weird to me. If
> game theory and the success of simplistic tit-for-tat has taught us
> anything, it is that the algorithmic *depth* required to beat
> straightforward (poetic) "justice" is academically interesting, but
> pragmatically degenerate.
>
> So, no. I will not waste any of my finite lifetime feeling sorry for poor
> lil ol Trump, our Privilege Squanderer in Chief. If that magically limits
> my ability to empathize in some other context, so be it. If it implies that
> when I die pathetically, under some bridge, eating partial hamburgers from
> the Wendy's dumpster, my colleagues *rightly* avoid wasting their finite
> lifetimes feeling sorry for me, then I'm ready for that day. Like it or
> not, tu quoque is a fallacy.
>
> --
> ↙↙↙ uǝlƃ
>
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