Obscene Jester

"Mr. Met's Obscene Gesture Makes Crazy Season Even Crazier."
                                                          N.Y. Times


Mr. Met gave fans the finger?
On this let us not linger.
Yes, he has a big head,
But he’s not brain dead.
And furthermore, unlike Trump,
He doesn’t fire the ump.

Post Trump Stress Disorder

Melania Trump's colorful, $51,500 jacket

       As is generally known the acronym PTSD stands for Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. I saw recently online the christening of Pre-Traumatic Stress Disorder, the need for which arose because we have as president of the United States a mentally unhinged man who illustrates vividly the expression "there is no there there." We wait from day to day to wake up and read what crazy thing the unpredictable Trump has said or done the day before. So perhaps we should speak of both a Post and Pre-Trump Stress Disorder. Trump recently impulsively went on a European  extended tour to distract from the encroaching calamity surrounding the goings-on and "gonnections" (to work in the Great Gatsby) of his White House adviser  and son-in-law Jared Kushner, who is the husband of Trump's daughter Ivanka. The issue with Jared, or one of the issues, is his possible political and/or financial collusion with the Russians. In spite of the fact that Trump visited the scowling Pope to sponge on the Pontiff's piety, Trump's trip did nothing to quell the Jared Kushner controversy, which might lead eventually to Trump's impeachment or resignation.

       It is not just Trump and Kushner who keep us wondering what the New York Times will be reporting next about Trump et al. Trump's wife Milania's mania for clothes, and her frequent changes of expensive costumes,  provides grist for the media mill. The minx's colorful puffy jacket alone, which looks like a giddy eskimo getup, caused a sensation. It reportedly cost in excess of $50,000 in spite of not having a scintilla of mink, let alone an inch of chinchilla. There were reports early on that early on in her career Milania had been a high-priced prostitute, but the press respectfully, perhaps out of deference to the oval office, refrained from repeating that rumor. But what male politician has not had to be a high-priced prostitute in his rise to higher office, at the same time keeping any cross dressing jackets and Weinerish sexting tendencies in check?

Tie-less in Gaza

Et tu, McCain?

The above photo of independent-minded Senator John McCain suggests the big tie addiction is pervasive in all wings of the Republican Party from President Donald Trump down to the crotch. 

Trump's bald-faced tie

Airhead Trump as president is a painful reminder of just how far red-state America has come down in the world. We don’t need Freud to remind us of the psychological compulsion of males to over-compensate. The big tie is a conspicuous phallic symbol and for a man with Trump's little hands, a convenient distraction from his frumpy persona, his amorphous personality, and his egregious asininity. Trump is the WASP wimp, the doofus dickhead who introduced the Nu (as in “nu?”) Deal to the White House.

                               Woody Allen, tie-less in Gaza

Not just Republicans but politicians generally are adopting a policy of speaking proudly and wearing a big tie, trying to persuade the American public through nonverbal communication that they are a big prick not a little schmuck. Schmuck is a Yiddish slang word for penis. Schmuck was the linguistic result of the Jewish male’s extended, wandering,  pre-Israel schlemiel period of stateless existence. Woody Allen is the eternally tie-less in Gaza incarnation of the schlemiel, of the nebbish nonentity. Oh, but how nicer it would be to see him in the White House rather than the WASP putz Trump.

                          

Trump: Ticking Cardiac Time Bomb

Senior citizen jogging

A news report over the weekend reminded us what is generally well known even if often ignored. Exercise is good for our overall health and increases longevity. A 1995 study of Harvard alumni showed that vigorous exercise by men at least two days a week significantly increased their longevity. The life expectancy in the U.S. in 2012, rounded off, was 79 years, which I found hard to believe. In 1935, the first year of Social Security, when I was two years old, the average age for Americans was only 61, and that was back when Americans got much more exercise walking because they were in vehicles a lot less.

The exercise issue is especially relevant because the president of the United States, Donald Trump, apparently does not exercise vigorously at all unless you count, as he does,  all those speeches in which he gets apopletically exercised ranting  against his critics on the left. Don’t expect a treadmill or any other exercise equipment in the Oval Office during his tenure, unless it is there just for the sake of appearances or for photo ops. The most exercise Trump gets is with his mouth, eating and jawing. Maybe that’s why he was called  a “zaftig blowhard” in Esquire magazine.

The fact Trump is the oldest president ever elected for the first time to the highest office might mean that exercise is not quite as important as these studies suggest. After all, he reached 70 without much sweat. Why couldn’t he live into his eighties or even nineties?  Why shouldn’t he continue to chow down at his favorite eateries, McDonald’s and KFC?  Because there is another more likely explanation for his longevity and that is he is pressing his luck. He is an overweight ticking cardiac time bomb close to exploding. If his diet and eating habits, like his lack of exercise are not good—as the statistics suggest— the odds of his finishing his four-year term are not good either.

Trump and the Colonel: Finger Licking Good

According not only to himself but to the golf editor of the New Yorker, Trump does play one sport and he plays it fairly well, namely golf. That golf is the least strenuous of the major sports may be why Trump first took it up. He plays in the scads of profitable, top-rated golf courses he owns in a number of countries on both sides of the Atlantic. But he doesn’t look the part of a good golfer. The same New Yorker golf editor, who played eighteen holes with Trump on one of his golf courses, mistook him when he first saw him for an attendant, not the Donald himself. The only photo of Trump the golfer I have seen makes him look like a paunchy duffer in the rough.

Donald Trump: Paunchy duffer in the rough

While the legions of Trump haters might hope he croaks before long, the immediate effects of his death could be bad for the nation’s health. His cabinet appointments of elderly extremely wealthy rightwing often overweight businessmen  increases the chances of a rough transition to a new administration if Trump should have a fatal heart attack. For the most part, his cabinet appointees  are not philanthropic do-gooders. They did not become billionaires by helping with the greening of America. The only greening of America they have done is financially, in their own backyards. The transition to a Mike Pence administration therefore could be accompanied  by  more jockeying for position than a crowded field at the Kentucky Derby. And not just jockeying for position but backstabbing too. Steve Bannon, a leader of the alt-right, was Trump’s campaign manager. Bannon is the  former chair of Breitbart News, which the Guardian called a clearinghouse for hate groups of all kinds. Impeachment is one reason Trump might not finish his term, and a coup d’état has been mentioned as another possible reason. What role Bannon might play in this night of the long knives scenario is anybody’s guess.  But the idea that such things couldn’t happen in the U.S. is being heard less and the proposition that it could happen here is heard more. Sinclair Lewis’s 1935 novel It Can’t Happen Here is relevant today because a coup d’état does take place in it.

Trump’s ruddy complexion is something of a puzzle. Just as he has an over-the-top hairpiece, he also appears to have a sunlamp tan complexion. The whiteness around his eyes might be explained by the sunglasses he might wear to protect his eyes from harmful sunlamp rays. If the self-appointed psychoanalysts are right, he may suffer from pathological narcissism, in which case the hairpiece and sunlamp would be the tools not of ignorance but of vanity. The famous pronouncement, sometimes mistakenly attributed to Shakespeare, “Vanity, thy name is woman,” perhaps should be brought up to date:  “Vanity, thy name is Trump.” Trump’s wife Melania, the allegedly former high-priced call girl,  may be the Marie Antoinette in this nightmarish scenario. Marie's apocryphal  injunction about the poor was, “Let them eat cake.” Melania's injunction could be, "Let them eat jewels" because she appeared on the cover of the Mexican edition of Vanity Fair pretending to eat not cake but a bowl of jewels. Her husband, now president has begun to keep his campaign pledge of building a wall between the U.S. and Mexico. Some pundits predict the wall won't make much difference. It will be a Mexican standoff. Meanwhile the cardiac time bomb keeps ticking.

Melania Pretending to Eat Bowl of Jewels

Kasich Wins with Crossover Vote?

Screen showing the 35% Democrat-Independent crossover vote

      Perhaps the biggest late night revelation about Ohio’s Republican and Democratic primary elections yesterday, Tuesday, March 15th, was the unprecedented number of Democratic and Independent voters who crossed over to cast their ballots in the Ohio Republican primary. Exit interviews by MSNBC reporters revealed that a large number of these crossover voters wanted to stop Ohio  Republicans from making Donald Trump their nominee in the upcoming presidential election. The way they accomplished this was by casting their ballots for John Kasich, the Republican governor of Ohio. There was nothing illegal about this crossover voting. Ohio laws permit it. All’s fair in love, war, and Ohio presidential primaries.  But the results of it were that the Democrats and Independents had effectively prevented Republicans from nominating Trump as  their candidate in next November’s presidential election. They were using Kasich as their stalking horse against the heavily favored Trump. Would Kasich have won Ohio’s primary without the support of the crossover voters who made up 35% of the voters in that primary? Since Kasich beat Trump by 11%, it appears Trump probably would have won the Ohio primary if it were not for the crossover Democratic and Independent voters.

      There is not likely to be much protest at this subversion of the democratic process because Trump has been increasingly depicted by the Republican elite and most of the media as a rabble rousing  fascist bully, if not the incarnation of evil itself. So those crossover voters could be considered as heroes for having prevented Trump from taking a prohibitive delegate lead in the primary voting. That is certainly the way Kasich characterized himself in his victory speech last night, as a homespun hero who saved the Republican Party and perhaps the nation from disaster. A closer analysis of the crossover vote may prove that it did not make a decisive difference in the Republican primary. Or Trump may end up as the Republican nominee in spite of Kasich’s victory in the primary. But Kasich’s win makes Trump’s nomination that much more unlikely, especially in view of the tremendous support Kasich is likely to get, and is already getting,  from the Republican elite and the media.

      Is Kasich the answer to the anti-Trumpists' prayers? I personally find Kasich frequently wallowing in his self-righteous, humble, mailman son’s origins insufferable and his claims for the Ohio miracle vastly over-hyped. Fracking may have more to do with Ohio’s relative prosperity than whatever gods may be backing Kasich. In the New York Times (5 March 2016) my favorite pundit, the Nobel prize winner Paul Krugman, wrote a column with the caustic, alliterative title “The Kasich Con.” And in Solon (10 Feb. 2016) Amanda Marcotte wrote, “Kasich is being held out as the ‘compassionate’ alternative to Trump, but in most ways, he’s nearly as bad.” It seems hard to believe that anybody could be as bad as Trump is depicted, but I suppose the con artist Kasich is bad enough. And isn’t con artists what nine out of ten politicians are?