Dear America,
I have been puzzling over what exactly makes Donald Trump's conduct such a mystery. He does the most unlikely, and frankly self-destructive things so unabashedly. The recurring theme in my attempts at analysis has been that he is just stupid, and that is still a possibility that I haven't ruled out. But there is something more...enigmatic about him. Stupidity wouldn't explain his overt seeming disinterest in what serves him well and more importantly, what doesn't. He is certainly smug, but that doesn't explain his persistent outbursts from which he has to backtrack later on. This business with twitter, for example, is a lesson that anyone who was a whole person would have learned by now, and that is what gave me the clue I needed. His problem isn't that he doesn't learn from his mistakes. The problem isn't that he doesn't care. Rather, the problem is that he is obtuse.
He cares because his ego is bruised every time the media point out the bizarre nature of his behavior. His ego would prevent him from repeating his mistakes if there weren't some other problem...some deficiency in him that permits him to ignore the bruises he has suffered and reform his conduct to avoid them. In fact, I have always said that he was a walking ego, but that isn't correct. He is a walking id. That is why he doesn't notice that others are offended by what he does and thus doesn't seem to know what is in his best interest. His reaction to everything in the world is spontaneous and oblivious. He wants what he wants, and he wants it now. It isn't just because he is arrogant. He just doesn't know that the rest of us are here. In his mind...his tiny little solipsistic mind...there isn't anyone else in the world, which is just a figment of his imagination in the first place. He thinks the world revolves around him because he has created the world in which he lives. He is the sun. He is God in his universe, and that removes all complexity from issues he faces.
So, when a football player kneels instead of saluting the flag during the national anthem, Trump doesn't care why. He superimposes a postulate he has accepted--a patriot blindly salutes the flag whenever asked, and blind patriotism is good--on the situation and condemns the football player and all those who have now joined him. But the underlying postulate never gets any scrutiny from our president. Someone taught him to believe in that kind of blind allegiance--probably his father, Fred--and that's the end of it. It never occurs to him that the flag is just a symbol of something else, and that the something else is what's important. In this case, Colin Kaepernick, the original football player protesting by "taking a knee" during the national anthem before each game, was protesting police brutality against African-Americans in particular as I understand it. Such brutality is certainly un-American, this being "the land of the free and the home of the brave" as the national anthem in question posits, and thus it is unpatriotic. But Trump never considered that underlying proposition. Postulates are unquestionable by their very nature...assumed to be true...so the mandate he learned vis-à-vis saluting the flag was his unimpeachable motive, fueled of course by the sanctimony of a man who screwed so many people in business but had the temerity to call Hillary Clinton "crooked Hillary" and got away with it. In this case however, the issue isn't whether he will get elected but what kind of a country we live in.
When I was a kid in high school, I used to stand for both the pledge of allegiance and the prayer we were required to say, but I said nothing. It wasn't because I didn't respect the United States, or even the flag. The flag, as a symbol, represented...represented...the principle that all men are created equal and entitled to the pursuit of life liberty and happiness. It symbolized my freedom to say what I thought with impunity, or for that matter, not to say what I didn't want to say. The fact is that when we salute the flag or put our hands over our hearts when the anthem plays, we don't do so out of principle. We do so because we want everyone else to see us doing it, which in and of itself is inimical to the principles for which they stand. Blind allegiance is not allegiance at all. It is capitulation, which is fine...unless it is capitulation to tyranny. And that, I'm afraid, is where we are headed, being led there by Donald Trump.
Your friend,
Mike
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