Thursday, December 20, 2018

The Nothing - Updated

According to his Twitter header, Harold Pollack is a University of Chicago professor and fellow [at] the Century Foundation. Last night he shared some intriguing observations about Donald:
































Pollack responded to a reply, which is where I got the title of this post:



And this is what Heffernan wrote, back in April, 2017:

THIS is what makes my head spin: The president is not a moral figure in any idiom, any land, any culture, any subculture. I’m not talking about the liberal enlightenment that would make him want the country to take care of the poor and sick. I mean he has no Republican values either. He has no honor among thieves, no cosa nostra loyalty, no Southern code against cheating or lying, none of the openness of New York, rectitude of Boston, expressiveness and kindness of California, no evangelical family values, no Protestant work ethic. No Catholic moral seriousness, no sense of contrition or gratitude. No Jewish moral and intellectual precision, sense of history. He doesn’t care about the life of the mind OR the life of the senses. He is not mandarin, not committed to inquiry or justice, not hospitable. He is not proper. He is not a bon vivant who loves to eat, drink, laugh. 

 There’s nothing he would die for — not American values, obviously, but not the land of Russia or his wife or young son. He has some hollow success creeds from Norman Vincent Peale, but Peale was obsessed with fair-dealing and a Presbyterian pastor; Trump has no fairness or piety. He’s not sentimental; no affection for dogs or babies. No love for mothers, “the common man,” veterans. He has no sense of military valor, and is openly a coward about war. He would have sorely lacked the pagan beauty and capacity to fight required in ancient Greece. He doesn’t care about his wife or wives; he is a philanderer but he’s not a romantic hero with great love for women and sex. He commands loyalty and labor from his children not because he loves them, even; he seems almost to hate them — and if one of them slipped it would be terrifying. He does no philanthropy. 

 He doesn’t — in a more secular key — even seem to have a sense of his enlightened self-interest enough to shake Angela Merkel’s hand. Doesn’t even affect a love for the arts, like most rich New Yorkers. He doesn’t live and die by aesthetics and health practices like some fascists; he’s very ugly and barely mammalian. Am I missing an obscure moral system to which he so much as nods? Also are there other people, living or dead, like him?

 More than anything else I can remember reading, Pollack and Heffernan have captured the essence of Donald Trump. The emptiness, the vacuousness, the nothingness. There's just nothing there. 

 Saturday afternoon update. A heartwarming paragraph from an article at The Atlantic about Jim Mattis. What a contrast with the emptiness of Donald:

The story is told of Jim Mattis, when he was the commanding general at Quantico, relieving a young lance corporal on Christmas. The rest of that wintry day, those entering the front gate of the Marine base were startled to see that the sentry was a general, checking passes and waving cars through so that a young man could spend the holiday with his family. It is the kind of behavior animated by sentiments Donald Trump could not understand, and it reflected a kind of code by which he cannot live.

I also like this: Success in government is often measured less by the brilliant things one does than by the stupidities one prevents. By that standard, Mattis’s tenure as secretary of defense was a success.

Read the article here. 

 And how pathetic is this picture, tweeted out by Donald last night? He was supposed to go to Florida yesterday for 2+ weeks of vacation at Mar-a-Lago over the holidays. Instead, Melania and Barron went without him, leaving him alone in the oval office signing paperwork, looking forlorn and slightly vacant. Nothing. There's nothing there.   

Sunday morning, update #2, a tweet from yesterday. Melania and Barron are coming back, probably not happily.
Update #3, on Wednesday, December 26: I made the assumption that Barron would come back with his mother, but according to an article at the Daily Mail, he stayed in Florida with Ivanka and Don Jr. Read it here. And Harold Pollack has expanded his Twitter thoughts to an opinion column in the Washington Post. Read it here.

Update #4, on Sunday December 30. Apparently Melania has returned to Florida to be with Barron over the New Year holiday, leaving Donald alone at the White House. Read the Daily Mail story here. According to the Palm Beach Post, some of the swells in Palm Beach are not happy:

A source who had planned to attend the Mar-a-Lago New Year’s Eve party said Friday Palm Beach was abuzz with members and guests talking about their own plans to bail on the Trump family’s annual gala.

It’s unclear whether Mar-a-Lago will let people wiggle out of their tickets at this late date. But evidently, some club members and guests have no interest in paying extra-high ticket prices if the president will not be in attendance. Read that article here. 
Posted by at
Labels: , , , ,

No comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)