CSotD: Rhapsody in the Rain
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Rain dampened, but did not discourage, demonstrators in White River Junction, where we lined the road through town and across the bridge into New Hampshire. The larger crowds were, naturally, in the larger cities, Montpelier and Burlington in Vermont and Concord, Manchester and Portsmouth in New Hampshire, but there were good turnouts even in the small towns.
While all age groups were present, if anything it skewed old, and I’d guess that, for a lot of people, it was their first demonstration. The Hands Off people are promising another, but I hope they save it for a particularly important date, because the fury expressed yesterday was cathartic, and repeats are hard to pull off.
Though, boy, you’ve got to give him credit: That Donald Trump sure knows how to turn out a crowd!
It’s kind of frightening to try to figure out what he’s going to pull off next to keep the flames burning, but he seems to enjoy even negative attention. Alice Roosevelt Longworth said of her father, Theodore, that he “always wanted to be the corpse at every funeral, the bride at every wedding and the baby at every christening,” though she had a talent for exaggeration.
But I’m not sure Trump wouldn’t really rather be in the coffin than be one of the six people carrying it.
What I am particularly sure of is that, like most celebrities and politicians, he’s surrounded by fawning courtiers who shower him with praise and assure him that those who oppose him are fools and crackpots not to be taken seriously.
The key to character is how much you can step aside and see things clearly. And, as in Espinoza’s cartoon, he will always find crowds cheering him, no matter how badly he is actually handling the duties of his office.
Assuming he really is handling those duties and not just making speeches and playing golf while others direct matters.
He’s not the great leader Lao-tzu had in mind, though he manages to fit both the other models listed by the Master.
Juxtaposition of the Day
Both Judge and Jones foresee a time when the luster will fade as the reality hits, though Judge spreads the discord around more. The people who were already dubious became discouraged quickly, while Jones predicts a disillusionment even by MAGA faithful.
However, while there may be plenty of people who voted for Trump and now regret it, the core group would follow him to Guyana and drink whatever he poured out for them. It may only be a cult of personality, not of religion, but it is a cult nonetheless.
They’ve been assured that the pain is temporary and necessary, and that the worst aspects are the fault of Sleepy Joe Biden, just as the windmill in Animal Farm collapsed because of sabotage by Snowball, not because of shoddy planning by Napoleon.
The view from overseas is not as rosy as that of the MAGA crowd, and Chappatte sees Dear Leader as sabotaging America by his alienation of the rest of the world.
Nor does Morland see Trump’s massive, illogical, indiscriminate tariff system as a boon to international trade. Note the location of this maelstrom: It is destroying ships of all nations, but primarily in relation to their trade with the United States. They will still be able to safely go from one to another, as long as they avoid the danger zone Dear Leader has set up.
That’s not to say that American trade won’t be missed. Trump’s trade war is already damaging the world economy, and despite how much the America First group hates globalism, it is the system upon which all our economies are built.
And, as Keyes suggests, it’s not as if the world is unaware of who has triggered this looming recession and possible depression.
Turner finds a bit of optimism to cling to, but there may be a shred of sarcasm in his hope for a break in climate change, as he does note in the margin that job losses are going to sting even if the resulting loss of trade is good for the environment.
Brown is more specific in declaring the trade war to be more of a disaster for the United States than for the announced targets of this misdirected offensive, or offensive misdirection. Take your pick; they both fit.
But he’s quite sure it won’t hurt the world nearly so much as it will hurt Americans, though if they start shutting down sweatshops in Bangladesh and India, there will be significant pain among those underpaid young people.
Trump’s tariffs are primarily destructive rather than aimed at any real problem in international trade, Emmerson insists, and why wouldn’t they be?
It’s clear that Trump does not possess the slightest idea of how tariffs even work. He seriously misunderstands what they are, what they can theoretically accomplish and, specifically, how they function in modern world trade.
Which is, as Jeremy Banx suggests, that they don’t work at all, except to inspire penguin jokes and, in this case, a desert island gag.
It is necessary for Americans to educate themselves and educate each other, Auchter says, but then points out another aspect of Dear Leader’s reign, which is to stifle dissent and smother information.
He references the kidnapping and disappearing of green card and visa holders who write discouraging things in student papers, but Auchter himself works for an NPR outlet and so is seeing up close the administration’s efforts to silence news outlets or bring them into compliance with Official Positions.
Not only are they attempting to defund public radio, which would increase the number of news deserts across the country, but they’re even shutting down Voice of America and other outlets that have been providing news to oppressed nations around the world.
One of which we are in grave danger of becoming.
As Matt Pritchett suggests, Dear Leader has succeeded in making himself the center of attention, not just in this country but throughout the world. The whole world is watching, because what choice have we got?
Rain, however, didn’t change the answer to “what choice have we got?”
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