With America’s third largest health insurer pulling out of the Obamacare insurance exchange in 11 states – the argument has never been clearer for Single Payer.
Friends,
Donald Trump never actually wanted to be President of the United States. I know this for a fact. I’m not going to say how I know it. I’m not saying that Trump and I shared the same agent or lawyer or stylist or, if we did, that that would have anything to do with anything. And I’m certainly not saying that I ever overheard anything at those agencies or in the hallways of NBC or anywhere else. But there are certain people reading this right now, they know who they are, and they know that every word in the following paragraphs actually happened.
Trump was unhappy with his deal as host and star of his hit NBC show, “The Apprentice” (and “The Celebrity Apprentice”). Simply put, he wanted more money. He had floated the idea before of possibly running for president in the hopes that the attention from that would make his negotiating position stronger. But he knew, as the self-proclaimed king of the dealmakers, that saying you’re going to do something is bupkus — DOING it is what makes the bastards sit up and pay attention.
Trump had begun talking to other networks about moving his show. This was another way to get leverage — the fear of losing him to someone else — and when he “quietly” met with the head of one of those networks, and word got around, his hand was strengthened. He knew then that it was time to play his Big Card.
He decided to run for President.
Of course he wouldn’t really have to RUN for President — just make the announcement, hold a few mega-rallies that would be packed with tens of thousands of fans, and wait for the first opinion polls to come in showing him — what else! — in first place! And then he would get whatever deal he wanted, worth millions more than what he was currently being paid.
So, on June 16th of last year, he rode down his golden escalator and opened his mouth. With no campaign staff, no 50-state campaign infrastructure — neither of which he needed because, remember, this wasn’t going to be a real campaign — and with no prepared script, he went off the rails at his kick-off press conference, calling Mexicans “rapists” and “drug dealers” and pledging to build a wall to keep them all out. Jaws in the room were agape. His comments were so offensive, NBC, far from offering him a bigger paycheck, immediately fired him with this terse statement: “Due to the recent derogatory statements by Donald Trump regarding immigrants, NBCUniversal is ending its business relationship with Mr. Trump.” NBC said it was also canceling the beauty pageants owned by Trump: Miss USA and Miss Universe. BOOM.
Trump was stunned. So much for the art of the deal. He never expected this, but he stuck to his plan anyway to increase his “value” in the eyes of the other networks by showing them how many millions of Americans wanted Him to be their Leader. He knew, of course (and the people he trusted also told him) that there was no way he was actually going to win many (if any) of the primaries, and he certainly would not become the Republican nominee, and NEVER would he EVER be the President of the United States. Of course not! Nor would he want to be! The job of being President is WORK and BORING and you have to live in the GHETTO of Washington, DC, in a SMALL 200-yr. old house that’s damp and dreary and has only TWO floors! A “second floor” is not a penthouse! But none of this was a worry, as “Trump for President” was only a ruse that was going to last a few months.
And then something happened. And to be honest, if it happened to you, you might have reacted the same way. Trump, to his own surprise, ignited the country, especially among people who were the opposite of billionaires. He went straight to #1 in the polls of Republican voters. Up to 30,000 boisterous supporters started showing up to his rallies. TV ate it up. He became the first American celebrity to be able to book himself on any show he wanted to be on — and then NOT show up to the studio! From “Face the Nation” to “The Today Show” to Anderson Cooper, he was able to simply phone in and they’d put him on the air live. He could’ve been sitting on his golden toilet in Trump Tower for all we knew –and the media had no problem with any of that. In fact, CBS head Les Moonves famously admitted that Trump was very good for TV ratings and selling ads — music to the ears the NBC-spurned narcissist.
Trump fell in love with himself all over again, and he soon forgot his mission to get a good deal for a TV show. A TV show? Are you kldding – that’s for losers like Chris Harrison, whoever that is (host of “The Bachelorette”). He was no longer king of the dealmakers — he was King of the World! His tiniest musings would be discussed and dissected everywhere by everybody for days, weeks, months! THAT never happened on “The Apprentice”! Host a TV show? He was the star of EVERY TV SHOW — and, soon, winning nearly every primary!
And then… you can see the moment it finally dawned on him… that “Oh shit!” revelation: “I’m actually going to be the Republican nominee — and my rich beautiful life is f#*@ing over!” It was the night he won the New Jersey primary. The headline on TIME.com was, “Donald Trump’s Subdued Victory Speech After Winning New Jersey.” Instead of it being one of his loud, brash speeches, it was downright depressing. No energy, no happiness, just the realization that now he was going to have to go through with this stunt that he started. It was no longer going to be performance art. He was going to have to go to work.
Soon, though, his karma caught up with him. Calling Mexicans “rapists” should have disqualified him on Day One (or for saying Obama wasn’t born here, as he did in 2011). No, it took 13 months of racist, sexist, stupid comments before he finally undid himself with the trifecta of attacking the family of a slain soldier, ridiculing the Purple Heart and suggesting that the pro-gun crowd assassinate Hillary Clinton. By this past weekend, the look on his face said it all — “I hate this! I want my show back!” But it was too late. He was damaged goods, his brand beyond repair, a worldwide laughing stock — and worse, a soon-to-be loser.
But, let me throw out another theory, one that assumes that Trump isn’t as dumb or crazy as he looks. Maybe the meltdown of the past three weeks was no accident. Maybe it’s all part of his new strategy to get the hell out of a race he never intended to see through to its end anyway. Because, unless he is just “crazy,” the only explanation for the unusual ramping up, day after day, of one disgustingly reckless statement after another is that he’s doing it consciously (or subconsciously) so that he’ll have to bow out or blame “others” for forcing him out. Many now are sensing the end game here because they know Trump seriously doesn’t want to do the actual job — and, most importantly, he cannot and WILL NOT suffer through being officially and legally declared a loser — LOSER! — on the night of November 8th.
Trust me, I’ve met the guy. Spent an afternoon with him. He would rather invite the Clintons AND the Obamas to his next wedding than have that scarlet letter (“L”) branded on his forehead seconds after the last polls have closed on that night, the evening of the final episode of the permanently cancelled Donald Trump Shit-Show.
Postscript:
Don, if you’re reading this, do it soon. Give your pathetic party a chance to pick up the pieces and nominate Ryan or Romney so they can be the ones to lose the White House, the Senate, the House and yes, praise Jesus and the Notorious RBG, the Supreme Court. Don’t be too hard on yourself. You’re only the logical conclusion to a party that has lived off the currency of racism and bigotry and fellating the 1% for decades, and now their Trump has come home to roost.
A must see speech by Dr. Cornel West given at the Green Party Convention in Houston, Texas.
By Madison S. Hughes (06.05.2013)
God is dead!
“Being ‘a Nietzschean’ is no more possible than following someone else’s orders
to be free! After all, it was Nietzsche himself who insisted that ‘Those who
understand me, understand that I can have no disciples’” (Soccio, 477).
This essay will embrace Nietzsche’s philosophy because he proposed that God is dead, life is meaningless, and fate trumps faith. Ultimately, he provided an alternative philosophy of life that is life affirming. The philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) has many distracters, for a myriad of reasons. Undoubtedly, most of those in opposition to Nietzsche’s philosophy base their objections on a misperceived threat to their firmly indoctrinated religious beliefs. While this essay may not dissuade those distracters from their religious beliefs, for that is not its purpose, it may help clarify a few of their misperceptions. To illustrate, we begin with one of philosophy’s most contentious, yet misunderstood quotes.
Nietzsche first proposed that God is dead in his 1882 book The Gay Science when he declared,
‘God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him.’ By this Nietzsche means that society no longer has a use for God; the belief does not in any way help the survival of the species, rather it hinders. (Jackson 56)
Clearly we cannot hold Nietzsche solely responsible for God’s death, nay; Nietzsche was more like a messenger. “Nietzsche claimed he was the first to have “discovered” the death of God. In part, he meant that the idea of God has lost its full creative force, its full power” (Soccio, 468). Recall that Nietzsche witnessed the world through the great transformation of a rural agrarian society rapidly morphing into vast urban sprawls caused by the industrial revolution. He was born less than fifty years after great minds of the scientific revolution nearly liberated humanity from the clench of the Church in the 17th and 18th centuries. While Nietzsche and other great minds of his day could see the dethronement of God before their eyes,
[t]he full extent of the dethronement of God is not yet felt by the great masses, who still believe that they believe in God. Yet if we dig deep into our own psyches, Nietzsche prophesied, we will discover that we no longer have ultimate faith in God: Our true faith is in scientific and technological progress. (468)
“And even though some of us may sense that the old religions are dead and dying, [many] remain unable to face the consequences of life without God” (469).
While the conviction of Supernatural belief provides many with inner comfort, the external Cosmos is not privy to such conviction, and, like it or not, the universe lacks objective meaning and purpose. “Copernicus and Galileo had forever changed our sense of scale: The earth is a tiny, virtually invisible speck in a massive, purposeless universe. ‘What are we doing when we unchained the earth from the sun’” (469)? What’s more, “Darwin had forever altered our sense of ourselves as God’s special creation. The new image of merely human beings is ignoble: We are but one species among millions struggling to survive, descendants of some primordial ooze” (469). These astronomic, and evolutionary biological discoveries led many to a great sense of emptiness.
According to Nietzsche, the death of God leads to nihilism. From the Latin word for ‘nothing,’ nihilism refers to the belief that the universe lacks objective meaning and purpose. . . . Nietzsche predicted that nihilism would be the wave of the future (our present). He predicted that as more and more people perceive religious values to be empty and science as having no meaning or purpose to offer us, a sense of emptiness would initially prevail: It all amounts to nothing. Life is a cosmic accident. There is no Supernatural order; no divinely or rationally ordained goal. (470)
One must be careful not to mistake Nietzsche as a nihilist. He is saying that both Supernatural belief, and superficial values imposed by the Church have proven only to shackle humanity’s mind, and as time goes on will be shown to be fatuous. Nietzsche, like his pessimistic predecessor, Arthur Schopenhauer, had a great appreciation for the aesthetics. Many of us agree, and are quite comfortable with the fact, that the universe lacks objective meaning and purpose; however, the masses are not so content with these facts, and most require faith and external authority to get them through the human condition. Nietzsche offers a viable alternative approach to life for those seeking meaning in a postmodern world.
In the infancy of humanity, the benighted masses relied on faith to provide solace for the unexplainable and uncomfortable realities of the human condition. Humankind has evolved from its insipid infancy to the adolescent age of postmodernism. However, this maturity is not without its price, for it requires that we, as individuals, now take individual responsibility for our own existence. Nietzsche expressed this transition from faith to fate when he stated:
In the absence of God . . . we must redeem ourselves with the sacred Yes to life expressed through amor fati, the love of our specific fate expressed as joyous affirmation and delight that everything is exactly as and what it is. (476)
In his 1882 comment titled “For the New Year,” Nietzsche expressed amor fati quite eloquently when he penned,
Amor fati: may that be my love from now on! I want to wage war against the ugly. I do not want to accuse, I do not want even to accuse the accusers. May looking away be my only form of negation! And, in all: I want to be at all times hereafter only an affirmer. (478)
“Nietzsche saw nihilism as a positive affirmation of life, to be freed of the burden of hope in an afterlife, in salvation. You should love your fate without the need of fictions and false securities to comfort you” (Jackson 103).
Since God is dead, life is meaningless, and fate trumps faith, it is clear that an alternative philosophy of life is necessary, and Nietzsche provided an alternative philosophy of life that is life affirming. Surely Nietzsche distracters have not been dissuaded from their religious beliefs; however, maybe, just maybe, a few of their misperceptions have been clarified.
“Inasmuch as at all times, as long as there have been human beings, there have
been herds of men (clans, communities, tribes, people, states, churches) and
always a great many people who obeyed, compared with the small number
of those commanding . . . it may fairly be assumed that the need for
[herding together] is now innate in the average man. . . .”
~ Friedrich Nietzsche
Works Cited
Jackson, Roy. Teach Yourself Nietzsche. First ed. United States: McGraw-Hill, 2008. Print.
Soccio, Douglas J. Archetypes of Wisdom: An Introduction to Philosophy. Seventh ed. United States: Wadsworth, 2010. Print.
Always Question Authority 