Home of the Brave

The Perfect Image of the Donald

When people are frightened, they want a strong man to protect them.  They want Daddy.  The appeal of the Donald has been said to be he is offering himself up as the strong man. "I'm a winner. Have been all my life."

What this really means is what 38% of likely Republican primary voters really want is to retreat into infantilism and magical thinking. 

Oh, I'm so frightened! Those bad ISIS scum are coming to get me. They kill 50, 100 at a time. 

We are a nation of 300 million.

They knock down two skyscrapers; we rebuild them.

ISIS thugs and lunatics can shoot off their small arms and throw their pipe bombs, and our thoughts and prayers go out and we finish our big Macs, go fill up our F150 gas tanks and go home and watch the football game.  
In Washington and New York, there are grown ups who worry about terrorists getting hold of a nuclear war head and making a dirty bomb or getting some Saran gas into the subways, the way some wackos once did in Japan, but even these horrors would not derail our economy or national well being. When you can bring down the two biggest sky scrapers in New York, kill thousands and see barely a hiccup in American functioning, you have to know, no network of small timers is really life threatening to the Republic.
In our parent's generation, in our grandparent's generation we faced two  separate nations, each with 60 million people, with guns and war planes and submarines, one of which managed to wipe out our entire Pacific fleet in a sneak attack.  Japanese raped and pillaged their  way across China, the Pacific islands right through the Philippines.  Japan was organized and capable of invasion. Germany did the same and worse on the other side of the planet. These were scary adversaries, capable of not just disrupting American life but of completely destroying it. 

We responded to that by putting our Japanese Americans in internment camps, which was a weak and cowardly thing to do, but apart from that, we did not stop going to movie theaters and we went to work, and continued life, knowing there were bad wolves out there hungering for our vital organs, but they were visible and we got organized to defeat them by pumping out 10,000 airplanes a month. 




We did not cower or quake or wail. Not like the people in those crowds who rally for Trump, who, it appears from what you can see on TV, to share certain characteristics:

1. They are frightened, cowardly people. Oh, you've got your skin head, big armed guys, but even these guys are basically cowards. They don't think of themselves as cowards, but they only have the courage to shout out their hate when they've got the big man on the stage giving them cover. They are afraid to live in the real world, so they create their own fantasy world in which Ronald Reagan was the great emancipator, and white, Christian Americans, the only legitimate Americans, a world where these losers "belong" and those they wish to push below them on the pecking order are losers and do not belong.



2. They are the losers of our ruthless economic  system. They are the high school drop outs, the jobless, the marginally employed, not the entrepreneurs or the winners the Donald talks about. On some level, they perceive they are losers and the Donald offers them the opportunity to revolt and join the winner class. As if. 




Now Donald's crowd wants  the school yard bully to protect them.  What sort of people are these? Lip quivering, knees knocking, afraid to live with danger? 


That's President Obama's big problem: He thinks he's talking to a nation of grown ups. The Donald understands who he's talking to.