“We won with poorly educated. I love the poorly educated.”
— Donald Trump, Donald Trump on Nevada win: CNN Video
I can understand why so many people voted for Trump & fell for his cheap, con man snow job but I can’t forgive them! What’s the old saying; Fool me once, shame on you but fool me twice & it’s shame on me?
This repulsive & repugnant cretin got away with duping his zombie fan club for four years & counting. Now that’s some really special kind or degree of stupid. And to purposely turn a blind eye to all the destructive & violent things Trump said & did means in my book that you should be right there in a jail cell rotting away for the rest of your life.
When he claimed during his campaign for office that he didn’t accept money from donors because he was financing his own campaign because; “I’m really rich,” I remembered Arnold Schwarzenegger & Ross Perot making the same basic argument & knew it was total bullshit immediately. No matter how rich a person is, it’s never or it’s rarely ever enough. There are an extremely few individuals who have managed to curb their appetites for the things the Rich & Famous covet.
Because we have become such a materialistic society—you can thank our advertising corporate overlords for a significant role in this—and because we are such an insecure nation, people believe they can get social approval if they drive fancy cars, wear expensive suits, etc.
Yes, for all our strutting around on the world stage proclaiming that we’re the badest & toughest mother fuckers on earth, we are far more fearful than most other nations. Just mention gun control & watch the scared little boys react.
And speaking of fear, this is a subject that I am sadly all too familiar with. My brother, sisters, & I all lived in a constant state of fear of being punished by the several husbands or boyfriends our mother let live with us. Additionally, I have what’s called a “lazy eye,” & if I played baseball, etc. for too long & strained my eyes, one eye turned inward like I was cross-eyed & I was teased horribly by the other kids.
Moreover, I worked at many different factory-type jobs in my late teens through my 20s & beyond and I absolutely hated it when an owner of the factory I was working in, would take a group of possible investors for a tour & they’d stop and observe me operating the machine I was assigned but wouldn’t bother to say hello or introduce me. I felt like a barnyard animal not even worthy of a modicum of courtesy.
My saving grace my whole life has been the world of books. And from the day my grandmother helped me get my first library card at the Salem Public Library across the street from Oregon’s capital, books became my closest friends & my security blanket. Whether I was hiding out from one of my mom’s abusive boyfriends or kids who were mocking me for being cross-eyed, books were always there for me like a dear friend.
I sensed we were poor as I grew up, but it didn’t really start to hit home until I was in high school & started going to parties. When I began to see how much nicer some people lived than we did, my class consciousness began to develop. And my awareness of my intelligence level didn’t really sink in until I was in my late 20s.
I believe that meeting my future wife & our living together was a major turning point in my life. I had also just met the wonderful subject of philosophy & it rocked my world. At last here was a subject that I could really sink my teeth into & I started moving to the front row of the classes I was taking.
For most of my life I had sat in the backrow hoping the teacher wouldn’t call on me for fear that I’d be wrong in my answer to whatever questioned I was asked. I loved learning but always wanted to be a silent partner. But when I found the confidence/courage to sit up front & participate in the class discussion, sometimes it was almost as if it were just me & the professor having a discussion and the other students were like furniture. And a handful of my teachers/professors in college were so inspiring that I’d go to their offices just to talk about the big picture i.e. college education, politics, philosophy, life, etc.
And this is when it dawned on me that I was/am an exceptional student or smarter than the average bear because I saw how few, if any, of my fellow students cared about the discussions. As one of my most inspiring teachers put it; “They just want to know what’s going to be on the test, memorize the answers, & forget about it.”
This teacher’s name was Mr. Garrot & he said to me; “Rob, don’t you think there comes a time to stop reading & to start writing?” I’ve shared my personal background with you because I want you to understand that when I fiercely criticize those Americans who were/are so stupid to believe in Trump, it’s not because I’m one of those elitists they hate but because I came from the same background as most of them & have many of the same feelings of inferiority, shame, guilt, etc.
I think this subject is even more personally enraging than it is for most people precisely because of where I came from? I have struggled for the past 40 years or more to awaken or spark an interest in learning in my relatives, friends, & strangers because the injustice, misery, suffering, violence, etc. that is a part of these millions of Americans’ lives gets my blood boiling & the very people who are so desperately in need of an intellectual enlightenment are often the ones most passionately against education.
My guess is that the majority of the blame for this hatred of education stems from their experiences in public school? Tragically for millions of Americans, they had harmful teachers who made their students’ lives a living Hell & therefore turned them off to learning for the rest of their lives.
So, when a flamboyant, confident sounding, & apparent billionaire takes their side & champions them, it’s mighty hard to resist the intoxication of his words & the emotions they bring up in people. Moreover, all the racist, misogynist, xenophobic, etc. trash that Trump talks only endears him even more in his Duck Dynasty crowd. They feel; “He tells it like it is,” “He’s one of us,” “He’s shaking up Washington & he’s gonna make real changes to help us.”
These people are like a drowning man clinging to a life preserver so no matter how little evidence there is of Trump fulfilling his promises to them, they will cling to him like they’d cling to a life preserver if drowning. And now that Trump’s reign of error & terror is coming to a close, we are left to try & clean up his wreckage.
In the field of psychology, they say that the most important first step in trying to overcome your problem is to acknowledge that it exists. I don’t believe we’re ever going to truly heal our seriously divided nation until we honestly grapple with the myriad issues that made such a human piece of scum like Trump appealing to those who voted for him.
I know that in this country where we have become accustomed to instant gratification i.e. short, simple answers to complex issues, this will probably go in one ear & out the other but again, teaching is my vocation & my love and is the other side of the coin of learning/knowledge. So, I will continue trying to heal the divide.
Speaking of healing, it just dawned on me that there is another parallel between Trump & Hitler i.e. after the horrors of the Nazi Holocaust & the heinous murder of millions of Jews, intellectuals, gypsies, homosexuals, etc., many have asked; How could the Good Germans have stood by why this was happening? I ask myself; how can the millions of Trump loyalists stand by as Trump purposely sabotaged our health care system, ignored the medical science regarding COVID-19, & watched as hundreds of thousands of Americans died needlessly from the virus?
By-the-way, roughly a third of the American public deny the Holocaust even happened! What percentage of these people do you think are Trump supporters? The key point here is that the cult of personality which is so strong in America gave us this shameless grifter & proves just how dangerous blind obedience to any one individual or personality can be. If the American public were better educated, they’d have learned this lesson from not only world history but American history as well.
Another critical lesson that history can teach us is that the “Church” has been trying & sometimes succeeding from the beginning of its existence to have absolute rule over the nations in which it had a foothold. And America’s “Christian” evangelicals/fundamentalists—not all of them of course but a sizable majority—backed Trump because his advisors knew how powerful a voting block they are & had him choose Pence as his running mate.
The stupid & the weak always seek a strong leader because they don’t want to think for themselves & because they aren’t able to. So, if a charlatan puts on a good enough show, they’ll jump faithfully in line & follow the leader like lemmings right off a cliff. And America has now lived & proved how wrong that old maxim; “What you don’t know can’t hurt you,” truly is.
In conclusion, the next Trump who comes along won’t be so stupid or crude and then we & the world will truly be fucked! So, the choice is ours, Enlightenment or Apocalypse, which side are you on?
—Rob DeLoss, Gold Beach, OR January 2, 2021
Addendum
It occurred to me that maybe I wasn’t clear enough in explaining what Trump said/did that made his believers proud? Trump has been carefully sculpting his public image & persona his whole life. He has lied about his “self-made” fortune, called in to radio shows in New York posing as someone else & asserting that Trump was far richer than he actually was.
If you’ll spend a short amount of time reading about his background, you’ll soon see that his “empire” was built on sand from the grains of tens, if not hundreds of thousands of lies. But to his willfully blind & ignorant herd, he’s a rich guy who thinks & speaks like they do i.e. hates & fears everyone who isn’t white & racist like they are. And most importantly, his Duck Dynasty Klan members love his constant bashing of anyone with more than a sixth grade education because many, if not most of his tribe, have felt stupid & inferior for most of their lives & here was the president of the United States telling them they were wronged & they should “beat the hell out of the fake news journalists & all his other critics.” They feel his words viscerally & are only too happy to physically beat the shit out of all Trump’s “enemies.”
The bitter truth & sad irony of this dark chapter in U.S. politics is the fact that Trump has tried his best for decades to become accepted by New York City’s elite but because of his rude, crude, lewd behavior & unbelievable stupidity, he has been rejected consistently. So, what we’ve witnessed is Trump’s revenge on the cultural & intellectual elite, but it has cost America & the world, a very great price!
What we truly need if we are to survive the wanna be dictators like Trump or the real ones like Putin, Bolsanaro, Duterte, etc.