Wednesday, March 02, 2016

Closed Due to the Vulgar Talking Yam (An Occasional Series): Special Super Tuesday Edition

A guy I knew originally posted this parody Trump ad in 1999. Obviously, as yesterday showed, things have changed very little in the intervening years, and certainly not for the better.



I will now proceed to get drunk for the rest of the day. And you can read the rest of the ad over HERE in my absence.

Regular apolitical and peppy postings resume tomorrow.

6 comments:

Billy B said...

Good old t Rump. I see where Ross Doucheshat blamed Obama for t Rump in a recent column. Doucheshat is a little freaking worm. That is all.

Blue Ash Fan said...

Steve, shouldn't CPP be given an attribution for "Vulgar Talking Yam?" Just sayin'.

Mark said...

@Billy B -- Vince McMahon is more responsible for Donald Trump's campaign style than anyone else.

My longtime friend, Pat, gave me a book for my birthday last month, THE BEST AMERICAN ESSAYS (2015), and in this book is an essay by Isaiah Berlin, the great British political thinker who died almost twenty years ago, but more important, lived through most of the twentieth century. This Berlin essay, A MESSAGE TO THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY, first appeared in the NY Review of books in 2014, and was originally an acceptance speech that Berlin gave in 1994 upon receiving an academic award at the University of Toronto.

Last Sunday morning, Republican Donald Trump retweeted a quote from Benito Mussolini that appeared on a Gawker-created parody account. On NBC’s Meet The Press on Sunday, and referring to the tweet, Trump said, “It’s a very good quote. I didn’t know who said it, but what difference does it make if it was Mussolini or somebody else -- it’s a very good quote.”

Great. Just what we need. A Republican running for President unable to distinguish between parody and reality. By the way, this post is NOT a parody.

But back to Isaiah Berlin. Berlin, in his MESSAGE TO THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY essay describes the horrors of the twentieth century, and points to Hitler and Lenin and Stalin and Pol Pot and Mao, among others, all in the service of one simple Utopian idea, and explains, “If you are truly convinced that there is some solution to all human problems, that one can conceive an ideal society which men can reach if only they do what is necessary to attain it, then you and your followers must believe that no price can be too high to pay in order to open the gates of such a paradise. Only the stupid and malevolent will resist once certain simple truths are put to them. Those who resist must be persuaded; if they cannot be persuaded, laws must be passed to restrain them; if that does not work, then coercion, if need be violence, will inevitably have to be used -- if necessary, terror, slaughter. Lenin believed this after reading Das Kapital, and consistently taught that if a just, peaceful, happy, free, virtuous society could be created by the means he advocated, then the end justified any methods that needed to be used, literally any.”

Now Donald Trump is no Stalin. He’s barely a Republican. But we can’t elect as President one who fails to distinguish between reality and parody, great thoughts and Mussolini quotes, carnival barking and Presidential politics, and most important, a Republican form of democracy and corporate leadership. Know why? Because we’re always just this close from repeating some of the same mistakes we saw in the last century, and we need a President who, among other qualities, knows the difference between parody and reality, and by reality, I don’t mean reality TV, which is everything else but. And the interests of corporate leadership are only rarely consonant with those of a healthy republic.

I live in Brooklyn, and while Brooklyn is a lot nicer than it was as recently as 25 years ago, Brooklyn too is always just this close to falling back into many of the same problems it faced in the second half of the twentieth century. And Brooklyn's part of New York, and while I believe much of the country loathes New York, and especially New York City, most New Yorkers loathe Donald Trump. He's pretty transparent.

Billy B said...

Thanks Mark. Excellent points.

Anonymous said...

You libs will vote for anyone with a (D) after their name - even a lying sociopath like Hillary Clinton.

BG in Q said...

Anonymous said...

You libs will vote for anyone with a (D) after their name - even a lying sociopath like Hillary Clinton.


*YAWN*


Come back when you have some new material, 'kay?