LOL whatever

Good comment from rm about what a lot of people are saying was the greatest wartime (or peacetime) speech any president has ever given:

Here’s that sense of unreality again. It still feels impossible on a deep level that such an individual can even exist, much less be the president. I feel sorry for young people who must feel that this is normal. I don’t know if it’s me or them that’s insane.

I’m not dragging Farley for doing this, because I do the same goddamned thing seventeen times a day, but his post just before the speech about how Trump was apparently going to announce the imminent end of the war made the mistake that almost literally everybody continues to make, which is to treat Trump’s words as if they mean something. They don’t. He could have announced that the United States had just signed a peace treaty with Iran and Israel and Russia and Ukraine and those penguins on the island that has an ISP address and is therefore a nation in the eyes of the White House, and that wouldn’t have meant a goddamned thing either. Maybe it happened, maybe it didn’t, but even if it did happen it STILL wouldn’t mean a goddamned thing because nothing this biological entity says or does means a goddamned thing, because he could do exactly the opposite thing a week or a day or an hour from now, and he wouldn’t care or maybe even notice that he promised he would or wouldn’t do whatever that was a week or a day or an hour earlier.

Donald Trump got elected president, twice so far, because people have become so easily bored, and so desperate for constant stimulation, that the election of this subliterate carnival barker with the morals of a pimp and the intellect of a dull normal junior high school bully was sufficiently entertaining to them to entice them into making this fundamentally insane choice.  Trump was entertaining to the voting public in the same way he was entertaining as the host of The Apprentice, which, crucially, allowed him to present himself to millions of television viewers as a “successful businessman.”  He was entertaining as the host of Wrestlemania, and as a constant gossip column item in New York in the 1980s, and in the pages of People magazine.  He wasn’t, as so many of his voters emphasized when asked about why they were voting for him, “a politician” – meaning, above all that he was amusing, rather than boring.

We can only hope that, in the words of Neil Postman’s prophetic polemic on the degradation of knowledge in the information age, we are not now in the process of amusing ourselves to death.

From The Triumph of Stupidity, forthcoming maybe (LOL whatever)