Skip to main content

The Province of Ignorance

Ignoramus:  a person unacquainted with certain kinds of knowledge familiar to yourself, and having certain other kinds you know nothing about.  
--Ambrose Bierce


What Donald Trump does not know about government is more-or-less equal to what he knows about how to make money.  I am not sure he is a good businessman, given his record of bankruptcies and unpaid bills, but he does know how to acquire money.

What Mr. Trump does not know about being President of the United States is astounding, and it seems to be indelible.  That part of his brain where "We the People" is stored is a very small place.  It does not have many connections.

Although sometimes he seems to want some version of a "strong man" presidency--and that ought to scare the socks off us--it is probably more accurate to say that he sees being President as an opportunity for him to arrange things so that he can make more money.  It isn't about health care, or national parks, or burning coal and heating the atmosphere, or free trade.  It is about what will be good for Donald Trump, and what is good for Donald Trump is fame and fortune.

But he cannot even get that right.  He thinks that he ought to be able to issue a Presidential Order, and that it will be done.  Forget Congress!  Forget the Constitution!  Forget the Supreme Court!  Just do it!  He is ignorant about the processes of a democracy.

And, and the core of his voters are ignorant of how democratic governments work, too.  In fact, the hard knot of Trump supporters at the core of his rallies are ignorant of what it is to govern a nation, too.  They got what they wanted:  an ignoramus about what government is for, and how it does things (or does not do things).  Whatever else Donald Trump knows, he does not know much about governing a nation.  All he recognizes is how he can gain fame and fortune.

The headlines in every morning's newspapers are amazement at what he does not know about being President.

And he doesn't seem to learn.  He is invincibly ignorant.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Friends-- My step-father of 35 years died this morning. His name was Conrad Royksund. He was 86 years old. He was born into poverty on a farm near Puyallup, WA. He was the first member of his family to attend college and earned a PhD from the University of Chicago. He paid his way through all of that by fishing in Alaska. He spent his professional career as a college professor. I met him when I was just 3 years old and don't actually have any memories of my life befor e he was in it. He was intimidatingly smart, funny as hell, and worked his ass off. He taught me to meet people with kindness and decency until I was certain they could not be trusted. He taught me to meet ideas with carving knives until I was certain they could. I will remember him as one of the bravest, most curious, and funniest people I have ever met. He left this world with a satisfied mind. We are so grateful. Dan Hubbard
1 comment
Read more

The Sea is Rising

Let us just step back:  two hundred and fifty years ago, or so, the ships of England and Spain had drifted onto a whole new continent, as they saw it, from far north to a savagely cold south; pole to pole, as if there were such things. Millions of people already lived here, some of them still hunters and gatherers; some of them very wealthy, indeed!  Gold and silver stolen from the southern Americas funded Spanish and English dreams. There was land, lots of land, under starry skies above, rich land, and oil and coal and iron ore.  The whole western world learned how to build industries not on simple muscle power, but on steam and oil.  We farmed, too, of course.  All we needed was cheap labor--slave labor from Africa, mostly, so the ships came with slave labor.  Chinese labor built railroad beds where there had been rock cliffs. Europeans, long used to killing each other for good, religious reasons, brought their religious savagery with them. ...
Post a Comment
Read more

That's all we want: fairness! Not more guns and more war! Fairness!

The five police officers who were killed in Dallas are certainly not the officers who killed innocent citizens. There is more than enough tragedy to go around. "What is happening to our country?", Mari asked this morning. I had no answer.  We do have an answer.  We do not want to say it. There are lots of answers, all of them pertinent. We are a racist society, like most human societies. We are a society in the midst of enormous changes-- social, political, economic--and we do not know what to do about it. We are divided unsustainably into absurdly rich, and an enormous number of crumbling middle class families, and poor. We have guns everywhere; military guns, guns just for killing people, cheap guns, heroes carrying guns into churches and supermarkets, idiots who think guns ought to be allowed in bars and schools and ball games and beauty parlors and political rallies. Our political process is almost useless. There are good people in Congress, but there...
Post a Comment
Read more