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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsTrump, the MSM pile on and "Great Men"
There is a certain amount of rather amusing handwringing going on amongst some journos. They don't want to appear as if they aren't "evenhanded" in covering him. It's amusing because, as Chris Como admitted, they built him up during the primary.
Yes, the MSM is piling on and good say I. Damn right they should be covering him accurately instead of playing the crowd along the procession of the naked king flaunting his invisible attire.
Trump is a strong man. He's unhinged. He's devoid of empathy and compassion. He isn't just flawed; he's dangerously flawed.
He's been exposing himself; and the MSM and everyone else damned well should be helping him along with that- exposing him for the threat he is to the world.
E.M. Forster- who as many here know, is one of my heroes, wrote about the strong man; he called this creature the "great man".
<snip>
In search of a refuge, we may perhaps turn to hero-worship.
But here we shall get no help, in my opinion. Hero-worship is a
dangerous vice, and one of the minor merits of a democracy is
that it does not encourage it, or produce that unmanageable type
of citizen known as the Great Man. It produces instead different
kinds of small men - a much finer achievement. But people who
cannot get interested in the variety of life, and cannot make up
their own minds, get discontented over this, and they long for a
hero to bow down before and to follow blindly. It is significant
that a hero is an integral part of the authoritarian stock-in-trade
today. An efficiency-regime cannot be run without a few heroes
stuck about it to carry off the dullness - much as plums have to
be put into a bad pudding to make it palatable. One hero at the
top and a smaller one each side of him is a favourite arrangement,
and the timid and the bored are comforted by the trinity, and,
bowing down, feel exalted and strengthened.
No, I distrust Great Men. They produce a desert of uniformity
around them and often a pool of blood too, and I always feel a
little man's pleasure when they come a cropper. Every now and
then one reads in the newspapers some such statement as: "The
coup d'etat appears to have failed, and Admiral Toma's where-
abouts is at present unknown." Admiral Toma had probably
every qualification for being a Great Man - an iron will, personal
magnetism, dash, flair, sexlessness - but fate was against him, so
he retires to unknown whereabouts instead of parading history
with his peers. He fails with a completeness which no artist and
no lover can experience, because with them the process of crea-
tion is itself an achievement, whereas with him the only possible
achievement is success.
<snip>
http://spichtinger.net/otexts/believe.html
This essay, "What I Believe", is a treasure and I guarantee you won't regret reading it.
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annabanana
(52,791 posts)cali
(114,904 posts)While there is plenty of reason to fear a President Trump, even citizen Trump is a real and present danger to society. The GOP presidential nominee has a long personal record of aggression, cruelty and violence, even against those closest to him, that proves he’s a threat in any capacity.
Were he not the son of a millionaire and instead, say, a poor or black kid of any class, Trump’s violent streak, visible early on, would likely have branded him a problem child headed for a troubled adulthood. At the age of 7 or 8, by his own account, Trump physically attacked an adult instructor at his school. "In the second grade I actually gave a teacher a black eye,” he stated in the 1987 book The Art of the Deal. “I punched my music teacher because I didn't think he knew anything about music and I almost got expelled." Trump has said he is “not proud,” of the incident; nonetheless, he cites it as “clear evidence that even early on I had a tendency to stand up and make my opinions known in a very forceful way.”
Such flashes of senseless violence were common for Trump as a child. Dennis Burnham, who grew up in Trump’s childhood neighborhood, told the Washington Post, “Donald was known to be a bully. I was a little kid, and my parents didn’t want me beaten up.” Burnham says as a baby, his mother once briefly left him in a playpen in the backyard, which faced the Trump grounds, and shortly thereafter, returned to catch Trump—four years older than her son—throwing rocks at the baby. “She saw Donald standing at the fence using the playpen for target practice,” Burnham told the newspaper.
Trump himself has implied there are numerous unrecounted examples of his juvenile brutishness, unwittingly revealing that he has long reveled in violence. “I always loved to fight,” Trump told Michael D’Antonio, author of The Truth About Trumpand Never Enough: Donald Trump and the Pursuit of Success. “All types of fights, including physical.” Steve Nachtigall, a New Jersey-based doctor who lived near Trump as a child, recounted watching Trump and his friends jump another kid and beat him up. “It’s kind of like a little video snippet that remains in my brain because I think it was so unusual and terrifying at that age,” Nachtigall said. “He was a loudmouth bully.” Other childhood neighbors told the Post that Trump hated to lose, and “could erupt in anger, pummeling another boy or smashing a baseball bat if he made an out.”
By Trump’s own reckoning, this early proclivity toward violence and bullying—currently on prominent, frightening display in his campaign—remains fundamental to who he is. “When I look at myself in the first grade and I look at myself now, I’m basically the same,” Trump told biographer D’Antonio. “The temperament is not all that different.”
<snip>
read:http://www.alternet.org/election-2016/donald-trump-menace-american-society-presidential-candidate-or-not
Gabi Hayes
(28,795 posts)we know what miserable, murderous creatures his other sons have turned out to be.....one of them has been touted as a mayoral candidate for NYC!!!
that's almost as funny as who's going to prep his daddy for the debates
