With Trump, Let's Embrace the And-Both
He's both a craven, calculating grifter and an utter numbskull, and at the same time
It’s been a theme of mine for decades, but as a writer, I’ve really only addressed this issue in the past ten or 15 years. Too many people think in either-or or binary ways. Even the so-called smartest people among us tend to only consider issues from two points of view. Things are either good or bad, you can only love or hate, there’s only winning or losing. It’s so friggin’ annoying that so many humans think like, “it’s either cherry red, or midnight blue” kinds of ways about almost everything in life, like with Foreigner singer/songwriter Lou Gramm. Maybe that’s why so many nimrods refuse to acknowledge more than two genders or refuse to see the intersections between systemic oppressions and individual behaviors. It’s a wonder that World War II didn’t immediately turn into World War III, as the US and USSR went from friends to enemies without stopping at the frenemies stage.
The way mainstream media and most public intellectuals have described Trump as either an antichrist-like, evil and conniving wannabe dictator or as a drug-addled, aging, and blathering dumbass is endlessly infuriating. Trump is both. Period. You do not have to be an analytical wizard to read people and their weaknesses and then take advantage of them. You don’t need a bachelor’s degree from Fordham University or UPenn to bully your way to powerful positions or use people up better than humans drain batteries while using iPhones and Androids. You have to be the kind of person who doesn’t give a shit about anyone or anything other than themselves, who uses their self as the end-all and be-all for thinking through any issue or challenge.
I mean, Trump went against the advice of sycophant Tulsi Gabbard last week, his US Director of National Intelligence, the latter who had testified earlier this year that there was no evidence of Iran working to develop nuclear weapons. “I don't care what she said,” Trump frothed at reporters on Air Force One last week, just a day or so before sending USians to bomb potential nuclear sites in Iran. This wasn’t just a stupid fuckin’ move. This was a stupid fuckin’ move from a man who has never given a shit about human life, when in Iran or on I Street.
A BIG theme in Spinning Sage’s Gold is how we as a species — especially those of us who are Black, Indigenous, and Brown — can avoid the pitfalls of craven Western dumbasses like Trump.