Wake up, open the laptop, and if Twitter is open (or the compulsion to open it kicks in as usual before good sense takes over) you get your daily reminder that the current president of the USA is the stupidest man ever to hold that office — and strongly favoured to be, by the end of his disastrous time in office, the worst president in our nation’s history.
Every morning.
Today we find that he made this claim in an interview with pretend-journalist Sean Hannity:
The country, we took it over, the last eight years they borrowed more than it did in the whole history of our country. So they borrowed More than $10 trillion. Right? We picked up $5.2 trillion just in the stock market. Possibly picked up the whole thing in terms of the first nine months. In terms of value. You can say in one sense, we are really increasing values and may be in the sense, we are reducing debt. We are very honored by it and very, very happy by what’s happening in Wall Street.
He can’t help but lie — and make elementary mistakes. He makes the mistakes because he’s catastrophically stupid, stupider than George W Bush; he lies because unlike Bush he has no moral compass, no sense of responsibility or service.
People don’t talk enough about his stupidity. I go on about it because it will matter long after he’s gone: he is conditioning tens of millions of gullible, scared people — many of them idiots themselves, but not all — to expect nothing from the office of the president but a kind of ongoing pro-wrestling schtick, devoid of higher thought (systemic thought, rational inquiry, self-correction). I believe this is in no small measure a resentful reaction to Obama, one of the great models of the ‘life of the mind’ in our lifetime, who for all his failings as a chief executive demonstrated the enormous moral value of debate, dialectic, curiosity.
Our current idiot president doesn’t believe in any of those things; he doesn’t think they’re possible. But while he seems to be devoid of empathy, and he’s too stupid to have any kind of rich inner life himself, he could understand his predecessor — he could understand those of us who love to think — if he had even a shred of imagination, moral or otherwise.
Have you seen the pictures of the bedroom he shared with his first wife, whom he betrayed with his second-wife-to-be? With all the money in the world, the best this idiot real-estate heir could come up with was to drape every square inch of the room in gold. That’s not a failure of taste, but of imagination: in this idiot’s mind, the best use of all that money was to see gold when he woke up, went to bed, and (according to her own sworn deposition) raped his wife.
Which is terrible — the raped-his-wife bit, I mean, I don’t care about the gold — but it all speaks to a deeper failure of imagination. He can’t comprehend systems: witness his ludicrous misunderstanding in the Hannity quote. He can’t imagine that the center of a system could be anywhere but the spot where he stands, and he definitely can’t imagine that a system might lack a center, that lawmaking in the USA might involve a public/private/secret apparatus vastly more complex than any he’s had to deal with in private life. He can’t conceive of decisions except in terms of their ‘optics,’ can’t understand history except as a just-so story about how he came to feel as he does today. His myopia is absolute, crippling, because he’s unable to know anything but what’s in front of him. Comey hurt my feelings, fire him. But that would have terrible cost. But that cost is in the future, which does not matter. (And why would it? Nothing I’ve done has ever mattered, really mattered, before.)
His moral failings, his intellectual failings, would be less crippling if he had any imagination at all — if, say, he could imagine Barack Obama as having had his own life with its own compromises and challenges and strokes of good fortune, having arrived at his position(s) honestly. Our idiot president doesn’t seem to have any principles at all; he sees the world as full of (1) people like him and (2) subjects because he can’t imagine any other world. He doesn’t read, he doesn’t study, might never have studied anything in any depth in his entire life. He just stares at the television waiting for them to talk about him, and now there’s an entire ‘news’ channel devoted not only to talking about his every utterance but to glorifying him as a world-historical agent of change, which he manifestly doesn’t understand but it must be pretty great because he keeps hearing his name over and over and over…
The USA is too vast (geographically, demographically, conceptually) for anyone to know all of it, so those charged with its care need vivid imaginations. He has none. For many reasons, this included, he is unfit to hold the office of the president.
wax banks 