A Slovak physician calls me. She works at a hospital and has two kids and a husband with a short fuse, so she doesn’t have much time to follow politics. But she has seen Trump’s drubbing down of Zelensky and it’s triggered panic. Students start writing me it was a mistake for Zelensky to even meet with Trump. Of course Trump was going to browbeat him. It doesn’t help that Zelensky’s English is very poor. Unlike Putin he’s willing to meet with western leaders and speak English. It shows courage and humility, but it helps to put him in a weak position. His English is not even a full level B1. I saw him ask what the word ‘regret’ means. Regret has to be one of his dominant feelings right now.
It also doesn’t help that he is considerably shorter than Trump and Vance. Even though this shouldn’t matter at all, we humans, me included, are superficial, with brains still wired for surviving a nomadic life style surrounded by fierce predators and rivalling tribes out to smash our skull with a sharp stone, it is a factor at play here. From the moment they met Trump had the upperhand by making fun of Zelensky. He commented on the fact that Zelensky was wearing something more than his usual green T-shirt. To inspire as a war leader it’s a good idea to keep clothes modest. Robert E. Lee did it. Stonewall Jackson did it. Sherman and Grant did it. But when Lee went to meet Grant to surrender his army, he did put on his finest uniform.
As silly as it may be, on occasions such as this it all matters. I got more followers when my profile picture showed me in a tuxedo. Zuzana, the mother of Bruno, never talks about politics. She told the physician, a mutual friend, that she manages to not see anything that is happening in the world. Kind of an extraordinary accomplishment given that she has me in my life. Today she can hear a docu from 2020 on Hillary Clinton broadcasted throughout the house. She even commented that it sounded like it was well made.
To be clear, Zuzana makes the right choice here, I am the idiot who’s literally addicted to witnessing the world ruled by the loudest, proudest, but least informed and least moral ones. What should Zelensky have done? Everyone knows all of a sudden. Everyone would have been a better Zelensky. Everyone now has more brains than Zelensky. I think my opinion on Zelensky shouldn’t matter to you. What I would love to see is Trump talking to Israeli leaders EXACTLY as he talks to Zelensky. ‘I have allowed you to play mister Big Shot.’ A nasty part of me would love to see Trump denigrate Israeli leaders. I have so much disdain for them that I have decided to even refuse using their names from now on. The Palestinian babies they kill also go unnamed in the media. It’s only the Israeli babies they bomb that get named.
I have been following politics since my early childhood. My dad was into politics and I worshipped my dad, so that’s how the addiction started. If my dad had been into trading stocks, I’d be daily bombarding you with posts about stocks. What I want to say is: I have never seen anything like this. It’s terrible to watch, it’s painful to watch, but I like it. Why do I like it? Cause it’s honest, it’s transparent. I prefer this obvious arrogant use of power over the faux goodness of the Democrats. The Republican rabble likes it when a top dog humiliates an underdog. I am personally convinced that the Republican rabble would love to humiliate others, but they are too powerless to do so. So they love it when someone does it for them. It’s not just the Republicans that admire Trump for doing this. It’s also other powerless non-Americans with dreams of making others suffer.
The Dems are a little different. I wouldn’t call them rabble. I’d call them the duped dreamers. People who would like to believe that the world is nice and that their leaders are kind people who have everyone’s best interest at heart. Of course, the end result of a Democratic White House or a Republican White House is more or less the same. The US will only do what directly benefits the US in the short term and will use its power, its military and its endless stream of printable dollars for that. If it suits them they will talk of human rights and if it doesn’t suit them they deny that any human rights were violated. Under Biden Putin was bad for bombing some civilians, but Israeli leaders were good for pulverizing Gaza with 2 million defenseless civilians, half of them children.
Does all this worry me? Do I get panic attacks because of smelling World War III right round the corner? No, it doesn’t. It fascinates me. It frustrates me that a public that doesn’t understand itself elects leaders who represent only the richest. I see it like this: we live in fake democracies with the elusional of choice, then we feel powerless, powerless to influence world events, powerless in our personal lives, powerless in our city, powerless everywhere, and then we elect a supremely confident cult leader who is so bombastic in the way he wields power that we feel a little bit powerful through him or her. I still don’t think we’re about to have World War III. We will see more and more farcical, ridiculous, outrageous little events, feverisly magnified and exploited by the media for clicks. We will see the US resort more and more to economic blackmail to get what it wants. Its production capacity has been gutted, in part by decisions made by the Democrats, starting with Clinton (remember Nafta?), at least half of its citizens sees dropping bombs and killing people in other countries as a solution, and the other half blame the few percent who wanted a genuinely social democrat in the White House for all evils that befall us.
I wonder, probably like you, how to adapt my personal life to all burlesque theatre. I examine my own reactions and my own motivations. Like my disdain for the Democrats is very real, but it’s also rooted in the fact that I see them as proof that you can be dumb and have a college degree. This triggers me so much, because my father was a very intelligent man, but without a university degree, due to serious financial trouble his parents had. What makes me a bit arrogant is my impressions that most other people never seem to questions where their opinions are really coming from and why so many of us these days want to see certain other people crushed. My latent violence goes towards wanting to dismantle Israel. I think for very good, humanitarian reasons, but, you know, those who couldn’t care less when Palestinian children freeze to death in tents and blame their parents for the deaths of their own children, also think they represent the forces of light, not of evil, in this world. To get back to Zelensky. I imagine what he could have done differently.
The way he handled things afterwards… His wishy washy answers to reporters asking him about the meeting… Again, maybe it’s his limited English… If you’ve been following me a bit you may have noticed I got into the kabbalah recently. One of its lessons is: What you fear you will lose, you will indeed lose. Zelensky was clearly afraid going in and he was afraid after. He’s afraid to lose support. The kabbalah says that when you fear losing something you will lose it, because the universe wants to teach you to become more resourceful and to rise above yourself.
So perhaps it would have been better for Z to tell Trump to piss right off, to not even meet with him, and look for other ways to prop up his military. It would certainly have taken Trump by surprise. Trump and Vance had planned for precisely this kind of meeting and Zelensky handed it to them on a silver plate. Why? Cause he was acting out of fear and Trump hates weakness. He goes at you like a ravenous blood hound then. I found Trump to be really self-confident and in his element this time. Much more than before. Maybe because he now has a side-kick that is backing him up and obviously knows that to benefit from being allied to Trump is to be a tough talking sycophant.
Vance seems to function as a comfortable trampoline for Trump’s ego and he’s enjoying that role, it comes natural to him. I don’t want to take more of your time. By the time am done with this post a few other outrageous events will have happened and the opinion pieces, masturbatory exercises in wordsmithery, of which am also guilty, will keep raining and will keep finding readers who, like me, kind of half frustrated, half intoxicated by the horror, mildy enjoy our shock of how fast we are losing all human decency, intellectual depth and moral consistency.
We are obsessed with status, power, charisma, signs of dominance, superficial signs of superiority, scoring cheap dopamine and anything that can distract us from how unadequate we feel in a world with such an enormous gap between the few who seem to have it all and the majority of us plebeians. You can’t save the world from all this megalomania, but you can learn to protect yourself from the hunger pangs of your own ego. Zuzana, mother of Bruno and dedicated kindergarten teacher, realized that years ago.
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The Confessor 