[FRIAM] Trump as a victim

[Steve Smith]

glen/marcus -

My mantra in this context is:  "we all got to be the way we are
somehow".   

I can claim with seriousness that I *do* spend some of my empathy
cycles, trying to grok WTF leads to a Donald Trump, and more to the
point what leads to a Donald Trump at the head of our Executive Branch
stumbling through his days of Fox&Friends and Twitter without having
triggered *even more* disasters than it feels he has managed to
exacerbate if not downright generate.   My *empathy* kicks in when I try
to sort out the various "but by the grace of god there go I" reflections
each time I try to imagine what psychological gymnastics he must have
gone through at each stage or inflection point in his life.

A study of his own children is probably a little easier than the study
of him, since they are busy forming at his knee (under his thumb?) right
now... His formation under the wing (and boot?) of Fred Sr. (and Roy
Cohn and Roger Stone and ???) is a little obscured by time and a surely
sqewed/muted record.   Barron is somewhat obscured from us, but when I
do catch a glimpse of him or hear a happy-story about him from one of
the puff journalists, I cringe a little whilst also wanting to imagine
that he can magically rise up and flip the whole precedent on it's
head.  "Pull a Mowgli" or somesuch.  From the similarly thin glimpses I
get of Melania, I don't get much sense that she is "helping" the
situation much, though she is surely buffering better than Donald's
mother was able to do.  She (and others) seem to like to observe that he
is a "little Donald" which sounds rather tragic on the face of it.    I
can't say I waste a *lot* of my energy on all of this, but they do make
an interesting pseudo-public study in dysfunctional family dynamics...  
filling perhaps the same niche of morbid fascination as the royal family
provides for the Anglophile/Commonwealth?    I hear that Prince Harry
has lost another title over having endorsed Biden-Harris.   I suspect
Meghan (at least) is muttering "good riddance" to that title.

I'm no fan of reality TV in most if not all of it's forms (I think I
managed to get a kick out of one Ice Road Truckers and one Russian Guy
Builds Log Cabin in Siberia episode/podcast but wasn't compelled to
return) but I will admit to being stimulated via morbid fascination with
the news-stream as Trump flops around in public like the villain in a
melodrama trying to hold the stage for the entire last act as he dies
dramatically.    Trump seems to have nothing in his portfolio but a
string of ghastly public failures where *he* slips out from under the
crumbling building just in time to go on to slap a fat T on another one
and start dismantling it from the foundation up like a hungry termite. 

Reminds me a bit too much of that psychological thriller "Pacific
Heights" with Michael Keaton as a psychopathic Donald-type:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacific_Heights_(film)

- Steve


On 10/7/20 6:53 AM, uǝlƃ ↙↙↙ wrote:
> 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.
>
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