The world is NOT his oyster.....OR...are we making it so?

Tantrum after tantrum after tantrum!

It really doesn’t matter which “other” is behind the tantrum, the “actor” at the centre of each melodrama is the same.

Such behaviour would be ejected from the most tolerant and compassionate day care, or nursery school. It would also be “expelled” from the most liberal pre-school. And the neighbours of the recalcitrant one would long ago have called in Children’s Services, appalled at the persistent “acting out” of the little monster.

If this little demon ever made it to an elementary school (only private ones with exceptionally high fees need apply) the first day on the playground, this demon would find his face handed to him on a platter. Several months ago, David Letterman publicly commented that, if this creature were running a fast food outlet, he would long ago have been fired.

Naturally, no one would welcome the position of headmaster in that hypothetical “elite” private school that might have taken the chance to admit him. The oscillating tension between the filthy lucre flowing into the coffers of the school and the predictable chaos that will inevitably ensue immediately after admission would be the hurdle facing the man….and it would have to be a man, because no headmistress, even of a co-educational school, would be dumb or devious enough to sign off on the application for admission.

And yet…..

The same behaviour that would not qualify as acceptable, honourable or even tolerable in any of the above scenarios seems quite OK for the Republican members of Congress, excepting a mere handful.

In the early years, most parents and neighbours and Early Childhood Educators would dub this kind of “acting out” as gross “attention seeking”….verging on compulsive and clearly inflicting mayhem on every child and classroom within earshot. They would be writing reports that recommended psychiatric intervention, family counselling and hopefully, sharing their impressions with any other institution that found the miscreant on their doorstep seeking admission.

If this “kid” played on the same forward line with, you would know he would never pass the puck….and then, if and when he accidentally scored a goal, he would blow his hubris-horn so loud, it would erase all the sweat-ordour in the locker room.

If this “kid” played baseball, he would learn everything there is to know about batting and nothing about what it either means, or the skills to accomplish defending his team. And, again, when the occasional home-run would pop off his bat, his “I’m just terrific!” boasts would suck all the oxygen out of the dug-out.

In the school band, he would demand the biggest and the loudest instrument, like a trombone or even a tuba, whichever is easier to learn the most quickly and requires less practice time, and then when he blew a wrong note, or set his own tempo and rhythm, he would merely fluff it off as another piece of magical improvisation, the likes of which ‘we’ would never have heard before.

If he were a team member in a fast food outlet, he would have “better” procedures than those generated by decades of research and experience, and would demand that ‘his way’ be adopted, justifying it as a way to increase profits or reduce costs, without giving a nano-second’s thought to how it might impede the growth and development of both the business and the people working in it.

In college, he would lead student protests against any expectation that students should pick up their garbage in the cafeteria or in their dorm, “because there are janitors who are paid to do that”…and, not so incidentally, there would be others, sadly, who would cheer him on in his twisted, perverted and megalomaniacal bullying, as an object of the projections of their own inoperative bully archetype, born out of both profound inferiority and even more profound exaggerated compensation.

In college, too, if he deigned to go out to the pub or bar, he would studiously avoid alcohol, and would concentrate on his over-riding compulsive desire/need for attracting women, initiating and honing ‘pick-up’ lines that would flow like a seductive and slimy aphrodisiac over all the innocent women, still learning how to detect the difference between an authentic male overture and one that belongs in the gutter of all of their lives.

On the rare occasion when he might dare to enter a religious sanctuary, he would glad-hand with all of his family’s “friends,” taking note of all of the attractive women in the congregation and in the choir, for future reference, sing lustily, read dramatically (if in soto voce) and preen himself, in the mode of the sanctimonious peacock who already knows he is “slated” for a prominent “place” in heaven and can’t understand why all these people can’t see his truth.

Secure in the conviction that his perception of the universe, one in which all others are enemies to be subdued, tricked, deceived and eventually decimated, believing that every situation is a zero-sum game in which “I” have to win, and therefore all others must lose, this twisted mind and spirit, mired in the slough of his own lies, deceptions and hubris, has already sentenced himself and everything and everyone he encounters to a predictable and tragic outcome….paradoxically while conveniently evaluating each and every “battle” as another epaulet for his own shoulder.

Of course, no such life could ever escape the inevitable pursuit by those left in the detritus of his jet-stream, through the courts, through the ostracizing and abandonment that accompanies his chosen lane on the freeway, and even through the occasional deliberate and calculated collision….and here is where this personality (there is no character here worthy of the name) truly shines. By being able to afford the most imaginative and deceptive legal operatives, and by learning the loopholes and the multiple gaps and nuances of the legal language in all criminal and civil codes, and by manipulating the public disclosure of each conflict in a deliberate delaying strategy he slips through many entanglements. Dependent on the human condition of short memories, and a kind of detachment that refuses to engage fully with such thugs, hardly even believing that they could really exist and operate as they do (most of us only peripherally conscious of the twists and turns of the screws of the mob), as well as a bare “highlight” awareness of the few details in any case that is not our own, he has figured out how to “create a life” that is modelled on the celluloid of Hollywood….mostly smoke and mirrors in an artistic attempt to entertain.

And having surmised that all we want ( or more likely deserve!) is bread and circuses, and having determined that he can dispense a few crumbs of both, enough to placate the masses, on whose persistent eulogies and hymns to his “greatness” he literally depends, like a starved child who has no centre, he buys a retinue of sycophants whose desperation equals or surpasses his own moral, spiritual, ethical and social bankruptcy.

 And together they parade their own version of the ‘triumph of the will” complete with  caged babies, encamped children, dispossessed mothers and fathers, artificial and exaggerated “boundaries” of a nation (to compensate for their own complete absence of personal boundaries), conflicts that are both real and imagined at the same time, (keeping others off balance is the only way to secure and maintain absolute control of any situation), friends that only survive as long as  they accept and act out their prescribed sycophantic roles, and a whole range of middle-of-the-road enemies (fabricated as in the media, the educators, the clergy and the health care practitioners) who want only the best for the ordinary people, and do not and will not buy in to the caricature of themselves as “extra’s in his movie. 

And yet….

Somehow this human specimen apparently passed through elementary, secondary school and then college….albeit a highly “right” wing business school, Wharton.

Has the United States of America sunk so low as to first elect and then to permit this man to continue to occupy the Oval Office? And it is not just a single, or even a small number of glaring nefarious episodes, personal, professional, financial, legal and even constitutional that cry out begging the question. We could never have imagined that at least three former First Ladies, as well as the current First Lady have all cried out against the latest “interpretation” of the rules/law resulting in the incarceration of thousands of young children. We could never have imagined the guilty pleas, the indictments, the court cases and the desperate measures that apparently characterize the “modus operandi” of the campaign for the White House.

Those of us who live outside the borders of America have often commented that everything within America is for sale. The last two years have confirmed that, indeed, it is not only the usual commodification of all things American that we are witnessing; now it includes the very office in which he sits.

We always knew that in most elections in the west money changed hands plying people for votes or for campaign favours. John F. Kennedy reportedly had deep ties to the mob, implicating such public figures as Frank Sinatra. What we now know, and still hope is not true, is that the very soul of America is on the market as a commodity for sale. And the price is absolute, complete and unsullied loyalty to the tyrant. Anyone who does not subscribe and submit to the religion of the Oval Office KOOLAID is dispensible, and dangerous,  in the mastermind in charge.

And where is the hope in that scenario?