Tuesday, January 24, 2017

"Who would have thought a good little girl like you could destroy my beautiful wickedness."

I pray/hope that whatever damage Trump causes doesn't outweigh the good he's doing by being so blatantly unlikable.
That is his greatest gift to those of us who want to resist him and his works:
He is disgusting like the giant slug Jabba the Hut, not seductive like Edward (the vampire who literally sparkles). That's a great aid to the resistance.

We Americans keep electing likable bad guys as president, like Reagan and George W. 

It's harder to work up resistance to someone who brews attractive hypnotic drugs, like the pretty poppies of the Wicked Witch of the West.
Along with complacency, fear and disgust are efficient political tools. Political manipulators are great at hyping (or even just making up) things that make your lip curl or your stomach go acid-y.

People & politics that want to be kind, understanding, and helpful can't utilize that political strategy. 
So this scary and icky guy is a boon to the center-left.
Trump is like a self-saucing pudding*: he makes his own puddle of ooze. 

A Full Bucket of Water
Of course there's a lot of paper- and footwork to wrangle free-roaming disgust into something effective.

From the New York Times:
"Todd Gitlin, a former president of Students for a Democratic Society and a scholar of political movements, noted that the civil rights and antiwar movements succeeded because of the organized networks that preceded and followed any single mass protest.
'The march on Washington in 1963 was the culmination of years of local activism, including civil disobedience, registering voters, protecting civil rights workers and voter education movements, he said. 'Organizations need to be ready to receive the protesters when they’re ready to take the next step. You need to be a full-service movement.'
"That effort, the [Women's March] organizers say, is already underway." 

Quote from John Waters, who knows something about utilizing disgust, from ^ 
www.buzzfeed.com/sbkasulke/john-waters-quotes-that-affirm-your-life-decisions
 ___________________

* I hadn't heard of self-saucing puddings until  I watched the Great British Bake-Off. They sound pretty great, but there's also something off-putting about food that oozes.

Still, I wouldn't say no if you made me these:
Paul Hollywood's Chocolate Volcanoes

5 comments:

ArtSparker said...

Americans will always favor the candidate with more charm (this was also true of our last president). Something to keep in mind for next time. Obama, of course, was not so much a Lovable Scamp as a guy with an actual sense of humor.



Frex said...

It's true, Americans do usually favor the candidate with more charm---that's part of what I find so baffling:
Trump has zero zip none.
But like I said, I think that could be to our advantage. No teflon president here!

Frex said...

P.S. Not that Hillary has much charm either, of course.
But Bernie did!

ArtSparker said...

But from what I've read, a lot of churchgoers, in particular, have taken great pleasure in "forgiving the sinner" when they voted, and I remember way back in the Spring a Female Trump supporter saying something about him being a bad boy (?) but "he's our bad boy".

Frex said...

SPARKER: Yeah, that sounds like my species.
I sometimes remind myself by quoting Star Trek: The One with the Whales to myself:

Spock: To hunt a species to extinction is not logical.
Dr. Gillian Taylor: Who ever said the human race was logical?

The species Spock's talking about is whales of course.