Making Sense of What's What


Welcome to Making Sense of What's What!!!


This blog is devoted to addressing those issues which impact our daily lives. Political, educational, relational and transitional issues are all grist for the mill. Life is personal and my need is to personally share with you those things and issues that impact me and others of us as we move through our daily experiences.

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Wednesday, August 31, 2016

For Trump, By Losing, He Wins

It has been an ongoing suspicion of mine that Donald Trump’s candidacy for President is nothing more than a con job being played out on the American people. When you look at the kinds of outrageous things that he has said to get a rise out of audiences, his doing nothing strategically or logistically that would assure him of having a successful nation wide campaign, and his being delusional enough to think that he can get away with such assurances as “believe me, I’m good at making deals,” what are we to believe? The idea that he is an innovator and is breaking the existing mold for a candidate for national office is a part of the con that the media reinforces.

 While he is his most entertaining self when he spontaneously makes outrageous statements such as “John McCain is a loser,” or that “Hillary Clinton is a bigot,” or “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, okay, and I wouldn’t lose any voters, okay” these are examples of his reckless, disregarding free form way of approaching life. His words and behaviors bring out the worst in certain segments of the public and cast a pall of decadence over our whole political process. 

 He also has a reoccurring tendency to play the victim card as a way of his not taking responsibility for the consequences of his words and behavior. He has said on more than one occasion, that the election “is rigged against me,” and that “the media is against me.” Such statements give him a needed face saving way out of losing the election.

No serious candidate who is committed to running for President thinks in terms of losing the race two months before the election. He has already suggested that if he loses the election, he will go back to a nice life and make tons of money, while poor Hillary will be dealing with issue after issue and only making $400,000 a year.

Trump seems to be all about the excitement and rush of the conquest and the reactions of the crowd and not about the responsibility, commitment, and privilege of governing a nation. In his world, it is all about “me” and not about we.  In truth, if he were to win the election, he would be pouring himself into a straight jacket of required expectations and behaviors that run counter to who he is.

In Trumps world, by his doing things that ensure his losing the election, blaming his defeat on the “rigged elections” and “negative media coverage” and not having to pour himself into a straight jacket of required expectations and behaviors, he would actually be a winner. 



Wednesday, July 6, 2016

Why Has The Media Not Trumped Trump?


Donald Trump, in the words of conservative Washington Post columnist  Michael Gerson, “is unfit to be President of the United States.” What led Gerson to voice this view of Trump?  On the world stage for all to see, Trump’s vile, ruthless, mocking, racist, misogynous, xenophobic, ignorance laden, scene stealing, freakish reality show assertions might be, in part, what Gerson is referring to. Trump is also a major source of concern for others, as well, including members of the G.O.P.

The crudeness with which Trump speaks of women’s bodily processes and physical appearances, the vulgarity inferred references he makes about his hand size in relation to his penis size all have to do with this perception of Trumps unworthiness to have his finger on the button that, if pressed, could lead to the existingtion large swaths of the human race. His defense of his sparing with Sen. Marco Rubio about the relationship between hand and penis size was that “ Rubio started it.”

Such behavior and assertions on Trump’s part have led to the conclusion of one linguist that Trump is functioning on the level of a fifth grader in the manner in which he expresses himself both in word usage and in his thought processing.  And from the perspective of this mental health practitioner, Trump is functioning at the fifth grade level in emotional maturity.  Certainly his reaction to “Rubio started it”…confirms this observation. Such is the state of conservative Republican Presidential Politics in 2016.

Then again, we have numerous psychiatrists asserting that Trump, is a classic narcissist.  What is a narcissist and how appropriate is it to have a narcissist in the Oval Office?  Narcissism is defined by the Mayo Clinic as a “a mental disorder in which people have an inflated sense of their own importance, a deep need for admiration and a lack of empathy for others.  But, behind this mask of ultra-confidence, lies a fragile self esteem that’s vulnerable to the slightest criticism.”  Again we have seen that when Trump is criticized, his response is to attack his critic mercilessly.

In one tellingly painful interview with the Washington Post Editorial Staff, Trump in addition to often times demonstrating fragmented thinking, all but pleaded that he is an intelligent person.  He stated that his uncle was smart, and that he got good grades in school, so he must be smart. 

In this same interview he pleaded that his hands are not small and went on to give examples of how normal his hands are.  Reading these statements and listening to the audio from the interview with this human being brought about a sense of sadness and compassion on my part. He seems like someone who, while aware of what he is doing in order to get the attention he craves, he is like the emperor without clothes in terms of how his behavior is perceived by others. His instinctive response is about winning and the conquest. Should he win, his “trust me, I’m good at that…” won’t be good enough and he will have to put up with policies and others who will frustrate him to no end. In the larger scheme of things, his fragile self-esteem and his immaturity are something that cannot be glossed over in his quest to the Presidency.

So, who would support this person?  There are, those who are frustrated because of the game playing gridlock in the Congress.  There are those who are mad that their needs are not being addressed.  There are those who are angered by the financial disparity between those on Wall Street and those on Main Street, or the feigned appropriateness to be politically correct.  And yet, in many instances, these are the very same people who have elected those to Congress who have done nothing, who have supported opposing everything the Obama Administration has proposed. This cadre of voters are, sadly, reaping what they have sown.

Many of Trump’s supporters seem to be functioning on a fifth grade level, themselves.  For many, Trump’s appeal is an expression of the shadow side of the American consciousness, that he is not politically correct, and that he will say and do anything.  Some of his supporters believe that this kind of unscripted unpredictability might actually lead to some kind of worthwhile change in what is going on in Washington and in our interactions with others around the world. This “thought process,” if it can be called that, seems to be what would happen if…  For the fifth grade child, let’s see how long it takes for the fire department to respond to a false alarm?  Or, as adults functioning on a fifth grade level, what would happen if Trump threatened Putin with bombing Moscow if the two were to get into a peeing contest with one another?  The emergence of ignorance on the political stage, allows for and encourages the emergence of ignorance on the part of people who are attracted to such a spectacle. 

And who has relished in this unreal candidacy?  Donald Trump’s candidacy would be seen as the freak show that it is, had it not been for the likes of NPR, and other news and media outlets not showcasing, often as a nightly lead story his every crude, vile, sexist, unpredictable utterance and behavior. Our Fourth Estate has provided this fifth grader with the world stage that has allowed for his emergence as a candidate for the Presidency of the United States. 

Why would these folks do this?  Media folks would say that Trump is necessary to report about because his candidacy is what is happening.  It is also necessary because such outrageousness brings eyes to the newsprint and the television screens. The only mature media group in the this regard was Huffington Post who stated that if you want to follow the Trump Parade, look for it in the Entertainment section. 

 It is imperative that our Fourth Estate functions to preserve our political process with integrity, educated insight and the courage to speak truth to power and to call a fraud a fraud.  How would Edward R. Morrow, the legendary C.B.S. newsman who took on and dismantled Joseph McCarty in the 1950s, respond to a Donald Trump?  What about Walter Cronkite, Tom Brokaw or McNeal and Lehrer and others of their ilk say about the way the media has been conducting itself in relation to a freakish reality show like Trump’s candidacy to become President of the United States?

Sadly, today, the media often creates misleading narratives in the United States.  We deserve better than what we have been getting from those entrusted with providing us with the facts, perspective and truthful dialogue about what’s what.

Jim Farwell
farwelljs@yahoo.com