I am not proud of this post as it sort of rambles. I promise to do better.
What is any community? Whether a town, city, state, or nation; it is a group of individuals that come together. Not necessarily for the common good, but for their own self-interest. I cannot capture and kill that wooly mammoth by myself, I wish that I didn’t, but I need some help.
In that situation, one is expected to or is forced to share in the hunt.
There are laws and there are norms. Again, when one obeys a law or a norm it is in the belief, that I will benefit only if the community thrive.. Now, there is in economics a concept, “The Tragedy of the Commons.” an economic theory that describes how individuals acting in their own self-interest can deplete a shared resource, or “commons”, to the detriment of society.
In this monologue, I am going to twist and mangle this concept for my own purposes. Firstly, this might be better understood as freeloading. Some people will say that I do not have to help with the capture and killing of the mammoth, but I might be able to partake of the feast afterwards. Unfortunately, if enough people act in this fashion, there will be no feasting. (Tragedy)
Sometimes norms are more important than laws. There are no official ways to act at an intersection with four stop signs. Yet somehow, we successfully navigate that situation every day. Occasionally, some unaccountable self-entitled self-interested individual disregards the “norm”. The community survives and life goes on. However, we are all self-interested, yet we acknowledge that all going through the stop sign at the same time would not be beneficial to me. It is best for me not to be in an accident. The unaccountable entitled one counts on the other community members to respect the norms in order for him to disregard them.
This leads me to the President Elect. I was born and raised in the greater metropolitan area around New York City. Therefore, I grew up with Donald Trump always in the background. Whether it was on Howard Stern or in the tabloids, he was always promoting himself. Sometimes as himself and sometimes as John Barron and other times he would pay other people. Then as now, he was unashamedly a racist, a misogynist, a coward, …None of these is against the law. Unfortunately, he was never held accountable for his inappropriateness and offensiveness. He was a rich playboy. Rich playboys are never held accountable. If the community is lucky, they get their money from their daddies, and they go their merry way. Donald Trump though, was different. It was not enough for him to be unaccountable for his rich playboy lifestyle. He had a need to prove to his daddy that he was important. He built and bankrupted casinos. (It takes incredible skill to bankrupt a casino. A casino is virtually a printing press for making money). Even in this, daddy needed to bail him out. In the process he did not pay many of his contractors, vendors, or workers. All the while extolling the fact that, even though all the people who worked for and around him suffered, he walked away unscathed. His lies about his wealth and his developer’s prowess are legendary. Was he ever held accountable for his lies? No.
Being a rich playboy and a perfect developer was not enough. He yearned for attention. He came onto the national stage, not for his business acumen, but for being a nasty businessman on The Apprentice. Americans like nothing more than to see somebody else being humiliated. A perfect venue for the unaccountable rich playboy racist, misogynist to become more famous. He was now a celebrity. As he said on the Access Hollywood tape, a celebrity can grab a woman by the pussy, and nobody cares. He was not only an unaccountable playboy and unaccountable businessman but now an unaccountable celebrity. As it turned out, neither being a rich playboy and a Television celebrity wasn’t enough. His ego wasn’t satisfied. He needed more. Despite having none of the background, knowledge, intelligence, or qualifications he decided that he deserved to become the President of the United States.
Please note that up until this point in his life the rich playboy, now a celebrity, had never done anything. In his ventures, he only risked other people’s money, never his own. The American public was in awe of this giant. “We the People” are all held accountable for our actions in some way. Here though, was a god. Who else but a god could be so unaccountable for his entire life. So, they elected him in 2016.
His administration failed, so he was not re-elected in 2020. This god apparently was fallible, accountable. Unfortunately, Americans have a short memory. They had more important things to do than follow the antics of Donald Trump. Therefore, he has had four years to recreate the fantasy and recreate it he did.
The run up to the recent election demonstrated how the unaccountable Donald Trump is merely a carnival barker. Little of what he says is true. Roy Cohen taught Trump that the boring truth is no match for a fantastical lie.
It seems that Donald Trump does have a superpower. As long as he is only talking: talking trash, spewing lies, insulting people, demeaning people, disrespecting war heroes and the military… he has no accountability, he is a god. When Donald Trump actually does something, as his first term demonstrated, he is recognized as a failure.