Trump - Going Off The Deep End: gagablog #162

I was going to turn off the TV when I noticed "What's Happening Now!" was the worst episode ever, the one where Raj takes over a little league team and goes crazy with it trying to "give them a winning attitude" and ruins it for everyone, Frankie feels like a losers and quits the team, and Raj admits he was wrong and says what he said about winning being all that matters is wrong, that what really matters is having fun. "No matter how bad something seems, there's always a way to find something funny in it," he just said. I realized it is a perfect model for what I wanted to say about Trump today - and about all of us. In Raj's case he is "set off" by the return of his high school bully, Buddy, played by Arsenio Hall, and he "got carried away trying to beat Buddy Carlson." It just ended and Raj gives the good coach his job back, then he tells them that two of Buddy's players were disqualified so they, the Ranger's, won, and he beat Buddy after all!

What does this have to do with Trump? It's a model of exactly where he is, now, where he has been his whole presidency - going off the deep end trying to "win", ruining everything for everyone, just like Raj, before he realizes how wrong he is. If you want to be sympathetic to Trump you can imagine how he must have been bullied in his life, to become such a bully, how much fun he must have missed out on to miss the point so badly, that it's all about having fun and doing good. You can imagine he is being bullied by Putin, and others, even now. So, like others who can't see a way out, a way to beat the bullies not at their own game, but with a better game, he became as big a bully as he can be - and it's not what we need. It's based upon overcompensating for feeling shame in life: Raj feels ashamed that Buddy bullied him so badly, and is back, bullying him again talking shit about the little league game. But in the end, after telling the kids there is humor even in the worst situations, when Buddy comes in to rub it in, the victory he thought he had, Raj wins by joking that he used to always give him noogie's and asks him to give him one, now - and all the kids are like "give me one, too!" They use humor to turn the tables on the bully and he gets uncomfortable and leaves before the reveal that his team also lost the game.

Trump could do the same thing, realize he is wrong and change course completely - I've always predicted that is the best course he could ever take, after doing so much wrong having a true Come to Jesus moment or whatever revelation or enlightenment it is for him so that he undoes it and goes good, instead. And lets the right folks take over. I did think it was a magical connection that "two" players on Buddy's team were "disqualified" for being too old and one thing I wanted to mention here, since I forgot yesterday, was that Michael Cohen, Trump's crooked lawyer, plead guilty last week and they are charging Trumps campaign manager and other Fixer Paul Manafort with breaking his deal and lying to them, all last week. But in Trump's case there are more than two being indicted, etc, but these "main two" were an interesting echo of those two "too old" teammates.

Trump's whole problem is that his ideas are too old, they don't work any more. Tariffs are from like Colonial times. He's just way stuck in old, wrong ways of thinking - greed and racism and sexism at the core, sure, but whole collections of bad ideas. Some recent examples: after he lost Congress and they idea that the Legislative Branch would finally do their part of checks and balances and investigate him, Trump said he could "play that game" better than the Democrats - and a few days later Stormy Daniel's lawyer was arrested for domestic violence charges. If that is true he should have been arrested but it just seemed, after Trump's comment, that this could be an example of him "using his power" to "play the game." He could be so corrupt that he sees everything against him as a ploy, that he can just do more corrupt things and "out-maneuver" them. But this just drives him further "off the deep end."

It's his "win at all costs" attitude that got him where he is today but he's not in a good place. He needs to learn the lesson that he is missing the point, taking all the fun out of it, and ruining it for everyone, by insisting it is all about winning. And he's only doing that because he's a bully giving into and playing the game of other bullies - the oil companies, the military, Putin, Hillary, etc.  You would think that, like Raj when Frankie quits, he would lose something he cares about, something bad would happen and put it in perspective, and he would wake up to the erroneous rage he is in. I guess he doesn't care about California - I really thought the fires there would teach him the error of his ways, even if the awful storms lately hadn't. But he's entrenched and basically needs the "whole team" to turn against him to realize he's wrong and change course. "The man is a bigot!" Nell just announced on Gimme a Break! and the dumb cop said the police don't condone those attitudes, their force is 12% black, 5% higher than the national average and they have two and a half Hispanic Latinos, or something. The blonde daughter says "there is no prejudice in Glenlawn - we have four Chinese restaurants." They get a representative to meet them, he mentions the whole rainbow of people they need to fight for opportunity for - but it turns out the employer wasn't racist after all - but he was sexist. After that the rep went off with him, to talk about a job offer - retiring from the Equal Employment office. They don't have any recourse so when the employers wife calls they tell her that the man went off to console some woman he rejected for a job, to get him in trouble with her, at least, for revenge. This symbolizes how, in an evil patriarchal system, maybe we can't get justice through the system but in clever ways around it.

I was thinking about calling this edition the "Not So Synchro" edition after five "Perfect Synchro" editions - I don't think I ever made my larger point, last time, that you can feel these magical connections with details within the world that remind you how everything is magical - but if you really get into the magic of the world it become more powerful, more fantastic and surprising - the more surprises you expect the bigger they get.

After I wrote yesterday's gagablog I got in the car to go to work and heard the news about the Trump administration having Canada arrest Meng Wanzhou, the CFO of Huawei, China's largest tech company, who is also the daughter of the company founder. To me this was a sign of one thing: Trump had recently claimed to work out deals to forestall the trade war he was starting with China but the follow-up information seemed to suggest he was lying or making it up. And I guess he thinks he can arrest people and use all his "power" to help "negotiate." China was immediately calling it a Hostage situation and that sounds about right, sounds like what we complain about Iran and North Korea doing, arresting people as bargaining chips for political contests.

But what if China arrests of kidnaps Ivanka? Will Trump realize the error of his ways or start dropping bombs or other dumb shit? He doesn't realize he is going Bowser, first, stealing a powerful woman and corporate royalty? This makes him the bad guy.

Why hasn't anyone arrested Mark Zuckerberg if we can just arrest powerful business folks, now? I'm not saying we shouldn't arrest them - but I don't recall any bankers going to jail after causing the financial collapse in 2008, for instance. It seems like the rarest stuff ever actually gets pinned on powerful business folks, since it seems like they, the corporations, "really" run the world - at least run all the systems that keep us all in their "control."

But they can overplay their hand - ignoring climate change, continuing to foment wars. Or just killing the wrong journalist in the wrong place like when the Saudi's killed Khashoggi in Turkey when Erdowan wants to take MBS down - and probably will. Why did they kill him? They felt like they were so powerful they could get away with it, like nothing could stop them or there would be no consequences - and so far they may feel like they are right.

But I have to point out that while I predicted the war in Syria would be the Last War in Earth History there are obviously more, especially in Yemen where the UN says 14 million people are on the brink of starvation making it the worst current humanitarian disaster in the world. But after they murdered Khashoggi and there was international attention on Saudi Arabia they are actually paying attention to their war with the Houthi rebels, backed by Iran, there in Yemen. It's no surprise they never made much news about it before - America has been selling them the weapons and refueling their airplanes with our ships there, apparently, for years, so it's Our War in Yemen, too, that has killed thousands and is about to starve millions - so of course we don't want to talk about it.

But after the killed that One person the tables start to turn, they can't just get the whole country to ignore our role in helping the Saudis fight a war in Yemen if we are asking Trump if he will cancel the arms sales, even if he says he won't - at least they have to ask and more people are exposed to what is going on. And we can force him to change his mind if we actually do things. I happened to see a clip of a Colbert show where he is addressing Trump's recent statement that he has no business dealings, personally, with Saudi Arabia so it is not for THOSE reasons that he won't cancel the arms sales to them - but Colbert showed a clip of him from a campaign rally where he brags that he does 40-50 million dollars in business with Saudi Arabia and they are so close, etc.

And his argument about why he won't stop the arms sales, that he is protecting jobs, is proven to be a lie, too. And the more people talk about it the more it can become clear that protecting 300 arms jobs, or 300 coal mining jobs, or any hundreds of any jobs of work that should have been obsolete decades ago is no reason to hold back  millions of green energy and new technology jobs.

Clinging to scraps of the past is no reason to hold back from the bounty of the future.

And that's all Trump ever does and he's ALWAYS gone off the deep end but he keeps going further. All I've seen so far in response is that the stocks are falling, again, which reminds me of a tweet when Obama was president that Trump sent saying he should resign because the DOW lost 2,000 in two days, which happened earlier this year, and I think I heard a week or so ago that recent drops had erased all the stock gains of the whole year.

I certainly wish and had hoped that all his blatant racism and misogyny and general threat to humanity and the planet would be enough to get everyone to oppose Trump and all he stood for - I thought this would be how he inadvertently helped us turn the corner to become a good and loving society. But it wasn't. Maybe in this culture of  - whatever you call it, following people on social media - we really don't care about "issues" or problems that seem "too big for individuals" and just trust our governments to take care of them - they've got us right where they want us, like that, and never have to improve anything if we don't hold them accountable. But even so, we DO care about individuals.

It reminds me that yesterday I heard on the radio, in NPR, an interview with an author of a biography of Rock Hudson. He mentioned that an expert who wrote a book on the history of AIDS said there were two eras, AIDS Before Rock Hudson and AIDS after Rock Hudson. When the news came out that this beloved star had AIDS it changed the "general perception" of AIDS - it changed the way the culture saw AIDS and its victims. Because before they were demonized or ignored, part of the full-throttle homophobia the culture promoted at that time. But then it broke through to people, through him. Important details include that Ronald Reagan ignored it for years and defunded research and programs to stop it, until Rock Hudson died and his friend Elizabeth Taylor became president of an AIDS organization and personally lobbied Reagan to address the issue until he finally did two years after Hudson died, bringing it to the national awareness in a new way and then funding was restored to address it, as well.

Thousands of people had died of AIDS before Rock Hudson but because of who he was - not that he is any more important than anyone else, just because of who he happened to be, his fate changed the fate of the world, and of whole communities.

Saudi Arabia and the Houthi rebels have killed thousands of people in Yemen - they've been off the deep end, there. But mad with power MBS went a step to far and killed Khashoggi - and Trump went another step too far continuing to support him in defiance of international consensus and American intelligence reports. Khashoggi isn't more important than all those other millions of people whose lives will be effected by his death - but it IS important that, in killing him, they may have to stop killing thousands of people in Yemen.

they went too far, off the deep end. "Donald Trump move over - Mary Jenkins is in the(...bank?)!" Mary just said on 227. She sold her cookie recipe for $15,000 but then found out Geraldine, what's his name, swindled her because he just sold the same recipe for $100,000. Pearl says "at least i was smart enough not to sell him my sponge cake."

AIDS went to far, when it killed Rock Hudson, if it wanted to Lay Low. Trump went too far, arresting Meng Wanzhou. You would think he would have gone too far when he locked up all those migrant kids, or sending the army to tear gas the kids and mothers and fathers and other folks on the border - but that was not "too far" for enough folks, I guess. Well now he's gone too far against China - and maybe "the whole world" still won't care - but I think this might be one of the final straws.

He went too far helping cover up the murder of Khashoggi  - MSB went too far and Trump went too far. Hopefully, the attention on Saudi Arabia, and consequently finally attention on the war in Yemen, may be the breaking point that ends the war: After two years they are finally holding peace talks, in a castle in Switzerland, I think, between Saudi Arabia and the Houthi rebels, this week. I don't know if there is a government of Yemen, if they are involved, or not. But the point is, that one person's fate can affect the fate of another whole country.

And arresting Meng Zhou is a classic example of abuse of power, overstepping your abilities, and going off the deep end. He just said "I guess the devil made me do it" which I think is an old catchphrase of his. Flip Wilson, that's his name! And the cookie recipe ultimately belonged to Famous Amos so their scam didn't get them the $100,000 after all.

Don't these world leaders watch TV? You don't "get it all" without losing it all by the end of the show - might as well have some dignity while folks are watching.

When he is already so far off the deep end it seems weird to talk about Trump going more off - but he does, and at some point it has to be "too much" lets hope its long before war or nuclear disaster. We can all feel relatively sane to not have that much power wrapped up in doing that much wrong and trying to justify it.

Yet we all have our own versions of Trump's problem: We Do have so much power, and a lot of it is wrapped up in wrong ways and justifying wrong ways  - I'm not going to imagine criticisms, just consult your conscience, you know what I mean. We can all be better by freeing our power from underserving (*undeserving, thanks, typo fairies) ideas and just becoming better, doing better things.

We can all rise up into the air, help others out of the surf, and even help others out of the deep end. And we can help ourselves out, too - recognize when we are serving some larger, but wrong, idea, like Raj and his insistence on winning.

Recognize that when we do wrong it is because we have been hurt and make mistakes going the wrong way about addressing it.

Trump thinks he is being "patriotic" or Nationalist but really he is just serving large, but wrong, ideas of racism and Super-Greed: protecting the unjust privileges of the rich at the expense of the rights and happiness of the People. Unfortunately this HAS been too much of America's identity - of our HISTORY, racism and greed, all along - but it is not part of our FUTURE. And while Trump fully represents the culmination of that evil side of America, the Ugly America, the Beautiful America, the one on the Dream, is the ideals that we have yet to live up to.

But we finally have the chance to live up to the dream, to shed this old shell. We need to rebrand after Trump has ruined our brand the way he does.

When your brand has become intimately associated with rape and kidnapping and murder and cover ups you just can't recover - but Trump is just the final expression of all that evil that was there all along but was never the whole story. That evil kept itself in power, kept itself at the top, but evil is always doomed to failure if it can't be redeemed. So Trump is the pinnacle, then we fall off and hopefully that whole mountain of crap crumbles away after he goes away or changes.

In the meantime we can realize that more is up to us than we are taught to think, that we can help ourselves out of the same overpowering, destructive ideas.

Find ways to have fun again, find the humor in bad things - we get so many great jokes making fun of Trump, making fun of ourselves and what we have become. Because we know it's not the Way, but remembering that we can also know how we can get back to it.

There was a news story yesterday about Madonna criticizing Gaga for something  - I didn't read it, but I will now and include any comment. But if it doesn't bear mentioning I'll just say that even if Trump, or anyone, seems to live their life off the deep end there is still a deeper end they can go off, that is too deep until even the biggest sea monster has to turn around and ask for help, to come back to the community and doing what is best for everyone.

Ok I guess it was the "100 people in a room and one of them..." comment and I can't decide if I should not mention it at all or write a whole edition about it - I was going to write about the commercials on Antenna TV in this episode but decided I will probably wait and do it another time, next time, even - just call it a Commercial Break. But yeah, I will talk about it then.

Thanks for reading, please share, comment, or whatever!

*Note - my spellsheck on Blogspot spells blonde without an "E" and some of the other highlights included Ivanka, Bowser, and Zuckerberg

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