Day 1174 – Two Themes Running

Day 1174 – Two Themes Running

Monday April 6, 2020 

209 Days until the election on November 3rd

289 Days until the Inauguration on January 20, 2021

Yesterday I posted an article on my Facebook page from The Guardian, the British newspaper. It outlined the syncopatic co-dependent relationship between Jared Kushner and Donald Trump. It seems every bad decision Trump has made has been at the behest of Kushner. I’m sure that’s going too far because Donald was making bad decisions before Jared showed up on the scene. Maybe, I should amend the above to say, “In this administration many, if not all, of the bad decisions have been because of Jared.” 

The Guardian outlines them and it is stunning. Also of interest is the fact that people who worked for Jared when he ran a paper called The Observer were shocked at his rise to a place of such power in the Trump administration because they knew of his incredible bad decision making ability. One has only to look at his buying that building in New York at (I love this) 666 somewhere or other (Park?) to see he has really bad business acumen. I mean you buy the sign of the devil and pay too much? (I digress, sorry.) 

But now Jared is advising the president. I realized they, Jared and Donald, are locked in a co-dependent relationship, and a bad one, a very bad one. Cogitating on this has led me to see a second emerging theme in this piece and in my thinking – the danger of religion, any religion, over truth. 

The two themes of this piece, and probably many to come, are:

1. The danger of co-dependent relationship. Here as expressed in the relationship of Jared and Donald.

2. The danger of religion over reason.

(PS Don’t expect this kind of clarity in my writing most of the time.)

When Trump won the presidency he appointed Jared in charge of domestic policy and threw in solving the Middle East crisis and later fixing the V.A. Why did he do that? It has become clear in articles and books that Trump has no interest in running anything, be it a business, a charity, a government. He likes the flash and the sizzle, but the actual work? Forget it. Remember as soon as he became president he signed Executive Orders? He held up the two fold binders with the order signed in black sharpie and turned it toward the cameras? Yeah, that’s what Donald likes. Actually doing something? No, he lets other people do that. 

It’s been a disaster for him. We now have clues in his business dealings how bad it was and still is. He was losing somewhere near a billion dollars a year for several years running back in the 90s. His father kept bailing him out. Finally, the Russians came in and had him doing their dirty laundry. He continued to fail upward. From an academic career that we don’t really know much about, other than he didn’t spend much time in class, didn’t do much homework, and spent most of his time sucking up to his dad via dad’s real estate business. He went on to announcing a number of flashy Manhattan real estate projects. Most of which failed or put him further in debt and left him bankrupt, but on financial resuscitation via an allowance from the banks he owed money. This morphed into his TV show where he used his brash reputation to make people believe he was some sort of captain of capitalism. The show worked because he wasn’t too bright and kept repeating the same lines, which in a TV series is a good thing because you don’t have time nor do you want to keep having to re-educate your audience. They already knew the characters and their actions (i.e. “You’re fired!”) You could watch as a B-list actor and/or tangential celebrity tried to please and ultimately fail (the worst I think was Meatloaf – so pathetic.)

From that show he was able to cobble together an odd assemblage of hateful people and using the same sales pitch he has always used win the presidency. It wouldn’t have happened without the yeoman disinformation work of Fox News and the Russians. 

But now what? He’s won the most powerful office in the land, has no interest in actually doing the job, hasn’t thought about or prepared to do the job (still hasn’t) what should he do? The solution is to dump all or as much as he can on Jared. Problem solved.

But it’s not only because neither he nor Jared have any idea what the American system at its core is all about. They are both hampered by their flawed personalities. I knew Trump to be lacking in the ability to emote, to understand sadness or happiness, to be able to laugh or cry. But Jared is the same way. He has demonstrated a lack of empathy and caring combined with a level of banality, stupidity, and misunderstanding that can most easily be described as evil. Not that he knows or cares what it is, but it is there. 

To understand Jared you have to understand that he is Jewish, conservative Jewish. This is an important part of who he is. His family survived the Nazis by tunneling their way out of a ghetto and living in a forest in winter in Russia (or close to Russia.) They eventually made their way to Italy where they heard of a program that would allow them to immigrate to the U.S. (Thank-you Democrats.) They began building housing in New Jersey. Much of it crappy housing, as opposed to Fred Trump who was building crappy housing in Queens and Long Island. Jared’s dad employed people from they synagogue. In fact, if you weren’t a member of the synagogue you probably wouldn’t get a job. At least not a job where you were going anywhere.

Dad got a little too big for his britches and started mixing money from one place to another. He was a mini-king maker in that part of Jersey, but eventually he ran afoul of the law and another glory seeker named Chris Christie put him away on tax evasion. Did Christie have a chance in the Trump administration? No. Jared made sure of that.

But if you’re conservative Jewish and your family tunneled it’s way out of Nazism to live in the woods in winter you’ve got a certain toughness and distain. You do what you gotta do to survive, and this colors everything you do, are, and be.

Here’s the thing about Donald and Jared. They don’t understand. They don’t understand basic human emotion. You only have to listen to Joe Biden for a minute or two and you know he feels deeply for the hurt and the tragedy of everyday life. Donald? Never. Jared too. I think it is completely missing from those two. Called it sociopathic or psychopathic. Human empathy and emotion – it’s not there. Seth Myers has said that when he worked on an SNL skit with Trump. (Sorry, I know. I’ve told this before.) Trump did not understand the humor. He didn’t get it. He had to observe other people laughing to understand that it was – apparently – funny. He never laughed at it because he is incapable of laughter because he doesn’t get it. 

He also thinks he can turnover the running of whatever it is he is currently into to someone else and they’ll take care of it. This leaves him free to make more public pronouncements and seek publicity, which seems to be the only way for him to gain satisfaction. 

Now he’s president. He’s turned the government over to Jared and a bunch of crooks who are looting our resources and good will and anything else they can get their hands on as quickly as possible. Meanwhile he’s been going to rallies, now press conferences, and getting rid of anyone he suspects that isn’t adding to his glory.

But Jared is sacrosanct and this shows in stark detail the danger of nepotism. Jared is not only his son-in-law, but the guy making lots of decisions albeit really bad ones. He and Trump are locked in this bad relationship that they can’t get out of.

Nothing has shown this more than this pandemic. Neither Jared nor Donald understand the basic purpose of the Federal government in a time of crisis. In fact, Jared not only doesn’t think the Federal government should help the states when they are overwhelmed, he actively works against them. He doesn’t quite say it that way, or maybe he does? How else is one to understand the statement that the National Stockpile is not for the states? 

This leads me to my second theme the danger of religion. Not spirituality, but religion – organized religion. Be it a huge enterprise like the Catholic religion or a small cult like Jim Jones or a general set of guidelines and principles be it Christianity, Mohammedanism, Judaism or any of the other big religions. They, at their core, have a few things in common. One is belief. Belief in something. It’s called belief because it isn’t factual. They hope it is true, but they can’t prove it, and don’t really know. 

This relying on a belief that can’t be proven has led to some pretty drastic and crazy behaviors over the years. Most of which end up some someone dying. Maybe, many people dying. 

What stuns me is that despite any evidence how such a belief takes hold and how it can persist for years, decades, centuries, millennia. 

I think a search for the truth is a better way to go. Have beliefs if you want to, but realize and be prepared to abandon one or all of your beliefs if evidence to the contrary is presented. Of course, this is not what happens. Religion seems to be more a rear guard action defending itself from the truth as more evidence to the contrary of one’s beliefs presents itself.  

Science is the search for truth. Religion is not. Therefore, I believe in science because I believe in the truth. 

I’m wondering when that graphic will start making its way around the internet again. The one that shows how many diseases science has wiped out or contained versus religion. ( Spoiler Alert: Religion 0 ).

Link to the Guardian article:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/05/jared-kushner-coronavirus-aid-trump-governors

209 Days until the election on November 3rd

289 Days until the Inauguration on January 20, 2021

PS Who doesn’t love an elephant! I wonder what this one is thinking. I’m betting he’s thinking “Man, I was a dummy to allow this guy to get up on my neck.”