Keillor writes: "It's the scariest and hairiest election of this old man's
life, and I pore over the polls and the electoral maps."
Garrison Keillor. (photo: Wisconsin Public Radio)
Donald Trump Is Four Centuries Too Late
By Garrison Keillor, The Washington Post
13 October 16
This was the week the man,
Changed his mind about mass deportation.
There will not be a total ban
Of Muslims, only extreme filtration.
And the week the nominee was unhorsed
By a revelatory video that hit
And the New York Times was forced
To print words that were not fit.
He was 59 and talking about his great luck
With women who were celebrity-struck
And how he was free to be a schmuck -
A cartoon, a strutting, squawking Donald Duck.
A role model, but for what role?
The Joker? Darth Vader?
A black hole?
Maybe the Terminator.
The man is a 70-year-old adolescent,
A playboy, a teen queen, a juvie.
Take him away, give him a suppressant,
Roll the credits, end of the movie.
It's the scariest and hairiest election of this old man's life, and I pore
over the polls and the electoral maps. One day Iowa is red, the next day
blue. Hillary Clinton pulls ahead in Pennsylvania, Donald Trump in Ohio.
Tiny New Hampshire, more like a county than a state, comes to prominence.
Other democracies miss out on the excitement because they forgot to include
an electoral college, which got a bad rap in 2000 but which makes a national
election a series of local ones. Democrats win the West Coast and Northeast
and chunks of the Midwest, the GOP takes the Bible Belt and the Wild West,
and they go marauding for the swing states. This year, Mr. Trump has
succeeded in turning a number of reliably Republican states into swing
states. Remarkable.
But there comes a time when a man must take a break before his brain turns
to jelly and so I flew to London for a few days, and I ignored the plunge of
the pound amid the nonsense of Brexit and the general political chaos -
sorry, not my problem! - and simply walked around on sunny autumn days
through the mazes of streets and alleys where modern office towers have been
planted among Georgian and Victorian grandeur, where you get a wad of pounds
from an ATM with your American cash card and stroll around the corner and
there is Gough Square and Dr. Samuel Johnson's little brick townhouse where
he slaved to make the first great dictionary of English. I took a picture of
it with my phone and posted it on Facebook.
Dr. Johnson said, "No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money," and
his house is a stone's throw from Grub Street, where hacks and scriveners
hung out in the taverns, scribbling satire, polemics, poesy, political
screeds, for measly pay, a band of misfits held in low esteem like the
strumpets in the doorways. Nowadays, this crowd has found a happy home on
the Internet, but back when writing was all on paper, a man could be
pilloried for offending the wrong prince or duke. Your arms and neck were
locked in a wooden brace and people threw rotten eggs and dead fish at you.
Daniel Defoe was thus punished for satirizing the church and its treatment
of dissenters. He was a pen for hire who served both Whigs and Tories, and
his view of politics was succinct: "All men would be tyrants if they could."
In other words, you're all alike, liberals, conservatives, whoever, only out
for power. It must've given him great pleasure to go off and write "Robinson
Crusoe," and imagine a peaceful hermit on a desert island.
Mr. Trump would have enjoyed the 17th century, the tumult, the divine right
of kings, the suppression of Parliament. Vituperation was normal discourse,
the idea of privileged sexual aggression was common in high places, money
flowed freely, rich men commissioned great monuments to themselves. He was
in excellent form on Sunday night, strutting, stalking, words and phrases
flowing out of him like water from a hose - "disaster" and "horrible" over
and over - and if you put him on Grub Street in 1650, he'd be magnificent in
his great swirling robes, surrounded by courtiers and sycophants, ranting
against the Puritans, supporting the monarchy, smiting his enemies. The
problem in 2016 is that most of what he says is a lie. Nobody learns
anything from lies. The country is not in crisis. The government is not a
disaster; it is a culture of process and law and organization that is alien
to him. The Syrian refugee will quickly know more about this country than
the man in the triplex penthouse. It would have been better if, instead of
running for president and wasting everyone's time, he'd just sat down and
written a novel.
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Garrison Keillor. (photo: Wisconsin Public Radio)
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/donald-trump-is-four-centuries-too-l
ate/2016/10/11/a1e86e02-8fec-11e6-9c85-ac42097b8cc0_story.html?hpid=hp_no-na
me_opinion-card-c%3Ahomepage%2Fstory&utm_term=.72f18729b7adhttps://www.washi
ngtonpost.com/opinions/donald-trump-is-four-centuries-too-late/2016/10/11/a1
e86e02-8fec-11e6-9c85-ac42097b8cc0_story.html?hpid=hp_no-name_opinion-card-c
%3Ahomepage%2Fstory&utm_term=.72f18729b7ad
Donald Trump Is Four Centuries Too Late
By Garrison Keillor, The Washington Post
13 October 16
his was the week the man,
Changed his mind about mass deportation.
There will not be a total ban
Of Muslims, only extreme filtration.
And the week the nominee was unhorsed
By a revelatory video that hit
And the New York Times was forced
To print words that were not fit.
He was 59 and talking about his great luck
With women who were celebrity-struck
And how he was free to be a schmuck -
A cartoon, a strutting, squawking Donald Duck.
A role model, but for what role?
The Joker? Darth Vader?
A black hole?
Maybe the Terminator.
The man is a 70-year-old adolescent,
A playboy, a teen queen, a juvie.
Take him away, give him a suppressant,
Roll the credits, end of the movie.
It's the scariest and hairiest election of this old man's life, and I pore
over the polls and the electoral maps. One day Iowa is red, the next day
blue. Hillary Clinton pulls ahead in Pennsylvania, Donald Trump in Ohio.
Tiny New Hampshire, more like a county than a state, comes to prominence.
Other democracies miss out on the excitement because they forgot to include
an electoral college, which got a bad rap in 2000 but which makes a national
election a series of local ones. Democrats win the West Coast and Northeast
and chunks of the Midwest, the GOP takes the Bible Belt and the Wild West,
and they go marauding for the swing states. This year, Mr. Trump has
succeeded in turning a number of reliably Republican states into swing
states. Remarkable.
But there comes a time when a man must take a break before his brain turns
to jelly and so I flew to London for a few days, and I ignored the plunge of
the pound amid the nonsense of Brexit and the general political chaos -
sorry, not my problem! - and simply walked around on sunny autumn days
through the mazes of streets and alleys where modern office towers have been
planted among Georgian and Victorian grandeur, where you get a wad of pounds
from an ATM with your American cash card and stroll around the corner and
there is Gough Square and Dr. Samuel Johnson's little brick townhouse where
he slaved to make the first great dictionary of English. I took a picture of
it with my phone and posted it on Facebook.
Dr. Johnson said, "No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money," and
his house is a stone's throw from Grub Street, where hacks and scriveners
hung out in the taverns, scribbling satire, polemics, poesy, political
screeds, for measly pay, a band of misfits held in low esteem like the
strumpets in the doorways. Nowadays, this crowd has found a happy home on
the Internet, but back when writing was all on paper, a man could be
pilloried for offending the wrong prince or duke. Your arms and neck were
locked in a wooden brace and people threw rotten eggs and dead fish at you.
Daniel Defoe was thus punished for satirizing the church and its treatment
of dissenters. He was a pen for hire who served both Whigs and Tories, and
his view of politics was succinct: "All men would be tyrants if they could."
In other words, you're all alike, liberals, conservatives, whoever, only out
for power. It must've given him great pleasure to go off and write "Robinson
Crusoe," and imagine a peaceful hermit on a desert island.
Mr. Trump would have enjoyed the 17th century, the tumult, the divine right
of kings, the suppression of Parliament. Vituperation was normal discourse,
the idea of privileged sexual aggression was common in high places, money
flowed freely, rich men commissioned great monuments to themselves. He was
in excellent form on Sunday night, strutting, stalking, words and phrases
flowing out of him like water from a hose - "disaster" and "horrible" over
and over - and if you put him on Grub Street in 1650, he'd be magnificent in
his great swirling robes, surrounded by courtiers and sycophants, ranting
against the Puritans, supporting the monarchy, smiting his enemies. The
problem in 2016 is that most of what he says is a lie. Nobody learns
anything from lies. The country is not in crisis. The government is not a
disaster; it is a culture of process and law and organization that is alien
to him. The Syrian refugee will quickly know more about this country than
the man in the triplex penthouse. It would have been better if, instead of
running for president and wasting everyone's time, he'd just sat down and
written a novel.
http://e-max.it/posizionamento-siti-web/socialize
http://e-max.it/posizionamento-siti-web/socialize
