Taking Time to Think about Trump, Obama and the Clintons

It’s not a dismissal of the value of impulse and intuition to hold that sometimes we just need time to think. In fact, it seems to me that respecting the need for time to think is a recognition of the value of impulse and intuition.

There has been a lot of early comment on the meaning of Donald Trump’s becoming President of the USA. None of it really “rang” for me during the first half year of his presidency, except for a few partial attempts. His own impulsive remarks are often self-contradictory, and so specific to certain contexts, that it just takes a long time to figure out their deeper, more universalistic meanings. The major corporate-news people have obviously been clueless, and others who pretended to understand what was going on, speaking with vehemence and superiority, were even more transparently empty.

So I imagine that you, as well as me, have felt a certain frustration, even despair, that you weren’t finding much outside insight to help you understand this remarkable event of Donald Trump becoming President of the U.S.A.

But I have been quite heartened recently by finding some speakers who are saying things that ring. Jimmy Dore and Thomas Frank are two that immediately come to mind but I see that there are others.

Here’s a sample of Dore:

The following is a good short sample of Frank but if you have an hour of time, try his book talk here which is comprehensive, articulate and fun.

It took me time to find them, because there have been so many others to consider who just did not get it. The establishment Democrats still have no grasp whatever, despite being “wicked smart” as Obama referred to his DNC head, Tom Perez, who followed his first choice of Debbie Wasserman Schultz.

It took a long time for most of us to realize that Barack Obama was a Great Betrayer. I think now of how the Nobel Prize people impulsively gave out a Peace Price to Obama even before he got started. But you may even have had a feeling from his Nobel acceptance speech that he was a betrayer, or when he surrounded himself with Rahm Emanuel, Larry Summers, Hillary Clinton, Timothy Geithner and Eric Holder – all really untrustworthy people themselves.

The Nobel Prize people did it quickly, because Obama’s words and win fit exactly with their own establishment assumptions about intellect and ideas they want to advance. I read Bob Dylan’s Nobel speech which has just become available. Dylan, another Great Betrayer, says nothing in that speech which is going to help anyone I know who is suffering, certainly not the people who are in deepest need.

The Viet-Nam war, and the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, are slowly being recognized as impulsive crimes.

It takes me such a long time to reflect that these things take far more time to appreciate than I had understood at first but it has to be that way!