When you -- against your own will, common sense and even the advice and "kindness of others"-- enter the Fourth Quarter, your Life Expectancy here in the USofA is 24 years ... 21 if the accidents of prenatal life have blessed you with male genitals. (Freud spoke of Phallic Narcissism ... I suppose all narcissistic inclinations do come with a price! Apparently, a penis costs 3 years.) By 70, you need only plan for 16+ and 14+ years of light lunches and Depends, respectively.
Lemme cheekily parse that just a bit more. If you're 70, now, you're most likely to live through 4 terms of Donald Trump as President, if you're a woman, and 3.5 terms of his prolonged leadership, if'n you're a man. Admittedly, that doesn't take into account the likelihood that sometime after "the Donald" declares himself the only fit person since Nero to lead America back to Greatness, our little experiment in Democracy may have itself become the recipient of the Darwin Award that prizes those evolutionary freaks who due to their own idiocy have removed themselves from the pool of future evolutions.
It should be said that the USA -- with its own Greatness and Exceptionalisms -- would, thereby, have become the first country on whom this honorary award has been bestowed. Up to now, it has been reserved for the likes of inventors who put wings on their Stetsons and fly off the Empire State Building, holding on to their hats, proudly proclaiming knowledge of a certain updraft due to come off the Hudson.
Kerrrr...splat!
Now, in fairness to His Towering Trumpness, I recall someone once offering up the notion that:
anyone who thinks themselves fit to lead the Free World ...
by the very virtue of that belief ... is not.
But there is a notable difference between the Trumpeter and most of the other candidates for President ... those nobleman and noblewomen who also claim competence in assuming a leadership role in the future of the soon-to-be (likely, in my lifetime!) 250 year old Republic that a bunch of whacked-out radicals put together believing that a Country could be created where Free Enterprise could be joined together with the Social Contract.
For, you see, Old Ladies and Gentlemen of the Last Quarter, the others -- by and large -- imagine that their programs and platforms are the moving parts that will lift America and Americans. In his Cult of Personality, Trump -- as he Tramps on Ben, Bernie, Carly, Chris, and Hillary; Jeb, Jim, and Joe; Lincoln, Marco, and Martin -- offers no real platform except his own Greatness and his charming ability to denigrate others. I don't want to leave out all the others that Trump depreciates ... the likes of Senator John McCain, Megyn Kelly, or President Obama ... but there are, indeed, too many, especially if one considers those Central Americans and Syrians who have sought comfort away from the poverty of wars in their countries and that are singled out by him to be seen as No-Goodniks.
Let me say that I am pretty confident that many of Trump's supporters are good people and are looking for a strong leader to take them out of their struggles and protect them from a Warlike World. Still, I am a little annoyed that I could go out, as well, under one of those leaders that the World has known in the past who say little more than:
I'll purge our ranks of the destructive minority!
I am the only one capable of returning us to the Greatness which is our Right!
And I -- and I, alone -- have the capacity to Throw Out the Bad
and to Provide Goodness to the Good by Virtue of my Own Greatness.
*********
Geez! I'm going with M to see a performance of Antigone, today ... For any who are yet to read/see this Sophoclean tragedy, I can do little but warn you:
Things don't always end well!
