Donald Catches A Ball

When Dr. Fauci's pitch goes wide, who cares, right? He's still a world-class physician and scientist who has spent his entire life working to protect Americans from infectious diseases. (I first heard of him in 1986 when I read And The Band Plays On, Randy Shilts's history of the AIDS crisis.)

This guy, on the other hand... When Donald first became president I wondered here in the blog, why does this guy always look so awkward? (Not to mention that for all his tough guy bragging and blustering, Donald looks like a scared little boy.) Sitting in a chair, wearing White Tie, trying to do anything athletic, he almost can't function in his own skin. He can't do humanness right. It reminds me of a column LA Times opinion columnist Virginia Heffernan wrote about Donald 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?

It's the nothingness. There's just nothing there. (Click here to read more about the nothing of Donald.)