Unpleasant Truths

With cable news and even real news addicted to All Trump All The Time, Americans have less and less information about what’s happening in the world.

How many Americans know, and are upset, that foreign policy no longer requires diplomacy — just guns, threats, diktats and official truths;

that science — how did this happen? — has become The Enemy;

that housing policy loves giving tax credits to landlords like Jared Kushner;

that civil rights policy is based upon defending the rights of the poor, oppressed class of white Christian men;

that economic policy keeps interest rates low, so Wells Fargo can pay practically nothing in interest while it fleeces its debtors;

that education policy is all about promoting charter schools and right-wing Christian religion;

that social policy is based on waging economic war on the poor and women;

that U.S. military policy is barely more than waging war on Muslim countries and training other countries, and our own, how to repress political opponents;

that environmental policy is about propping up polluting industries;

that the U.S. Supreme Court has a higher percentage of sexual harassers and abusers on it (22 percent) than — God help us — the average American town;

while Little Donnie plays the press like a banjo.

No one will rejoice more than I at the coming destruction of the Republican Party, under the tutelage of don john Drumpf. The Republican Party, above all in the Senate, has become little more than a bunch of wailing, wannabe Mussolinis.

And though Moscow Mitch McConnell and his connected Chinese wife may survive, politically, a few days longer than President Schlumpf: Would you trust anyone in this administration any farther than you could throw an out-of tune-piano uphill?

If you wasted two hours of your life, as I did, listening to don juanito’s (manitos de plomo) press conference on Wednesday, did you hear anyone but a spoiled brat?

A whiner? An ignorant, lying, rambling, annoying egotist?

Well, 2,500 years ago, Heraclitus said, “Character is Destiny.”

Heraclitus also said, “You cannot step into the same river twice.”

Then he stepped into a river and was eaten by a crocodile. Proving the rule.

And since we’re quoting old-timers, how about Marcus Aurelius:

“The happiness of your life depends upon the quality of your thoughts.”

No wonder President Schlumpf seems so unhappy all the time. It’s clear that his — for want of a better word — thoughts — revolve always and only around himself, circling in smaller and smaller circles around him, like water down a toilet bowl.

Marcus Aurelius, the last of the Roman Empire’s Five Good Emperors, also wrote:

“The best revenge is to be unlike him who performed the injury.”

“Reject your sense of injury and the injury itself disappears.”

“How much more grievous are the consequences of anger than the causes of it.”

“The object of life is not to be on the side of the majority, but to avoid finding oneself in the ranks of the insane.”

Marcus composed these aphorisms while waging a series of successful wars.

When’s the last time we had one of those?

Marcus was a Stoic. He preached the virtues of self-restraint, pursuit of virtue, and respect for others.

When’s the last time we had one of those?

Look: All of doña juanito’s problems are of his own making. He devoted his entire life to one goal: himself. And when he finally achieved the goal that all little boys — and now, little girls — were raised to believe that they too could achieve, if they studied and worked hard, he disgraced that office, and virtually everyone who agreed to work for him.

Little Donnie finally got the ultimate achievement he longed for: president of the United States. But because he is unlettered, and has no understanding of history or the law — except for how to cheat on his taxes — today he feels put-upon, by those awful Democrats, who, after all, are doing no more than Schlumpf has asked for all his life: Looking at him.

And who is he? A small, resentful, petty man, unfit for the office he holds, trashing the esteem in which the world used to hold the United States, day after day after day.

He was accurately described by Marcus Aurelius (121-180), quoting Epictetus (55?-135):

“You are a little soul, carrying about a corpse.”

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