Wednesday, October 31, 2018

Short Circuit

I've circuited the country now. Twice. I've had nothing to say. Well, not here. I talk to lots of people, most of them Trumpsters. I like my tiny space, and I like to be on the move. I check in with the news, suspending my anxiety for the moment, letting my curiosity fly a bit. Verizon has followed my travels with a sufficient kind of "unlimited," so called, so I watch an occasional movie. I look forward to voting soon.

I get zero commentary on anything here, and don't really care to understand how to cultivate readership. (the bot commentary piles on itself, amplifying other robotic links just like the media does) I get paid a bit for a little translating I do, but just in case you think literacy in Chinese is worth anything, the pay amounts to $6/hour in an economy of full employment. They force a copy editor on me who makes $18 at least. It's a strange world, and I'm not saying that the copy editor isn't worth it and doesn't help. I think my pay has more to do with the evident fact that I'm the only translator who is not a youthful person residing in an Asian economy (even though that may be inside these United States). Copyeditors trend more American English, I'd say.

Maybe it's those Asian economies which rile up the Trumpsters about birthright citizenship. I see their point. I try not to pay attention to the media paying attention 24/7 to the antics of the Donald. I think they are more at fault than he is. I think the Clintons are more at fault than the media is, belonging as they do to that cabal of the wealthy and powerful that let him enter their circles, well, just because he's wealthy and apparently powerful. No matter the ill-begotten nature of his wealth.

Isn't there some constitutional protection against gaining entry by ill-begotten wealth, even if it was just because of a failure to prosecute in a timely fashion? Trump was plainly born to money, and has a sufficiently narcissistic personality to have used his entry to study the wealthy and powerful to his own advantage. He got no real respect, but he sure is having his revenge.

Why do we still look for truthiness?? That's not what he's about. Railing against Obama's birth was clearly a nearly instinctual play to get himself on our minds, and it worked brilliantly. His realm is the Kardashians, and of course social media friends him. That's why I've signed off, lonely though it might make me.

I don't know why the feelings of the something less than 50% of the electorate who voted him in aren't paid attention to. They feel left out of a game whose convolutions the press makes a hash of. It feels like they are being played for fools, and as a friend of mine says, they just want to poke a stick in the eye of the establishment whose players seem in on a rigged game. Educated people are scary from the point of view of a simple life.

Most of the people I meet are not scary haters. I'm sure I disagree with most of their religious and gender and gon-toting views, but by golly I seem to like them one-on-one. Well, alright when some rich person at the next table in a restaurant celebrating where I'm celebrating Mom's 90th with my daughter and ex goes on about how people getting public assistance just turn in their chits for drugs, I really do want to throttle the guy. There are those kinds of Trumpsters too. Only out for their own self-interest; he's their Man for sure.

If Trump can call most of how we live to question, then he will have been a force for good (nevermind that as a human being he's as near to zero as a man can get without conviction). We called him upon ourselves, and as the rest of the world sees clearly enough, he resembles us as we are. That's the ineluctable logic of the selection process. As a people, we are rather more like him than not.

I have at least as much hope for this dream of a nation of ours as I do for the future of our planet, Gaia. I learned the proper usage for that term over the weekend; as a replacement for "nature," because nature sets us apart. We are not equal to Gaia because we remain as subsumed as  the lowliest bacteria which started it all and will finish it too. Gaia makes her own ground, and we have made ourselves outsiders, and meaningless therefore.

Well, I have to try to read some Bruno laTour now, along with my Donna Haraway whose cyborg manifesto so lately discovered is among the harder reading I've ever done. Almost as hard as Deleuze. It's hard work getting to the bottom of things. I'm almost there.

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