[FRIAM] Trump as a victim

[Steve Smith]

Nick -

I agree that empathy is a bit spontaneous and emergent for me.   But I
*can* cultivate or subdue it somewhat.   This is one of the roles of my
*morbid fascination*, which is to *allow* me to cultivate empathy were
my first impulse is revulsion or vengeance. 

Your image of Trump on Trial *does* trigger memories of the way Saddam
Hussein was pictured at HIS trials.

I fear this is not that likely to ever emerge, I don't think we have the
moral courage as a country to face our own rotten parts...  I could be
wrong, and I want to hope we can face our own (deep) failures in some
way similar to what Rwanda and/or South Africa and even Post WWII
Germany was forced to (by circumstance?) after their darkest years.   I
don't know that we have sunk low enough yet TO be forced into that.  
And my instincts make it really hard for me to root for the kinds of
disasters I think Dave and Marcus both flirt with (though I understand
that kind of collapse may be the most efficient path to any kind of
sweeping (and deep) recovery).

I was raised on the movie version of "Lobo" (shown in my classroom every
year of elementary school?) rather than "the Terror of Corrumpaw"
original.   I think that version Lobo was a more empathetic character,
because Disney?  I didn't know until I looked it up that the movie *was*
derived/inspired by Seton's version.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Legend_of_Lobo

- Steve

> Glen,
>
>  
>
> I don't think of empathy as something that you gin up; it either
> happens to you, or it doesn't.  And then you decide what you want to
> do with your empathy.  As a child, perhaps,, did you ever read any of
> Ernest Thompson Seton's (no relative) */Lives of the Hunted/*?  The
> wolf, terror of the Corrumpaw (?), wily killer of sheep, evader of
> traps, lies before you in a cage, wounded and helpless.  You feel
> empathy.  And so you kill it.  Anybody who tells you that you /should/
> feel empathy lacks empathy for your lack of empathy.  I WILL feel
> empathy for Trump when he's tried.   I dread those trials.  In fact,
> even watching him twist and lie and twist and lie, watching him
> contort, makes me queasy inside, like  watching a man tortured.  But
> empathy, like rage, is just another emotion, and needs, like all
> emotions, to be tempered with reason. 
>
>  
>
> Nick
>
>  
>
> Nicholas Thompson
>
> Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology
>
> Clark University
>
> ThompNickSon2 at gmail.com
>
> https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/
>
>  
>
>  
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com> On Behalf Of u?l? ???
> Sent: Wednesday, October 7, 2020 6:54 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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