Since this blog has most often focused on my interactions on Twitter, I’m going to go ahead and keep going with that theme. I hope that we may branch out later, gentle readers, but for the nonce that’s where we’re at.
So, this happened:
The Emperor Has No Balls is a piece by an artist who goes by Ginger. For those folks who might not be familiar, it’s a reference not only to Trump’s comments about his own physicality, but strongly influenced by the painting Naked Trump by Illma Gore, which can be found—among other places—here: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/apr/17/nude-donald-trump-painting-illma-gore-lawsuits#img-1
Both are amusing pieces on a range of levels, but specifically in addressing the public comments that Donald Trump himself has made over and over again about his physical characteristics, and his bizarre, almost manic need to body shame others when criticized—for starters. He goes on from there to threaten lawsuits, and encourage violence. In this case, though, it combines nicely with such things as his background with beauty contests, and his tendency to comment on his own daughter’s physical attributes in a way that is, at the very least, strange. (I’m being kind there. It’s perverse and demented. More on the use of language here in a bit….)
Before I go into my own meager participation in this art event as an out-outsider, let me first disabuse any of my gentle readers of a few notions.
First, I am not a liberal, nor am I a progressive in the sense that that either of those terms appear to be used these days. That is, in the sense of some sort of Don Quixote-like hippy engaging in a granola-fueled bitchfest on the inequality of society. I would accept and embrace either of those labels in the sense that they mean open to new ideas and progress, but as often as not I hear the folks who use “Liberal!” or “Progressive” or the term “Social Justice Warrior!” as pejoratives seem to be engaging in a weird form of politically correct speech that uses those terms as code for their ideological enemies, but only as a way of casting the shade away from their own ideas, lest they have to express them openly. That is, rather than accept and embrace their own doctrine for what it is, they use positive terms as negatives, re-casting them in a way that I can’t help but parallel (if diametrically opposite) with things like the gay community re-defining “queer” as politically active in gay rights issues, or the way certain ethnic groups have embraced the slurs used against them and turned them into positives. The modern streak of neo-fascists can’t simply call themselves neo-fascists, however, because the public would quickly recognize that language for what it is. Instead, they re-brand. This is what has happened to my beloved Republican party. It’s been taken over by folks who used to simply call themselves fascists, but then hid behind their own dictionary of politically correct speech in order to mask their racist agenda, the dictates of their corporate masters and their dearth of moral fortitude. First they were “neo-conservatives” (an oxymoronic term of truly Orwellian diabolic genius) and now simply Conservatives with a capital C. But they are no such thing, of course, and would admit it if they had the courage.
Second, I don’t particularly have a problem with what often gets called “fat shaming” these days. Fat is not a protected class of citizen, nor should it be. It is not an ethnicity, a religion or a socio-economic group. Fat is a medical condition. It may very well be a genetically pre-disposed medical condition, and there are any number of physical ailments that have weight gain as a symptom, so in such cases we should be duly aware. Often I’ve seen those who are accused of “fat shaming” are actually health and fitness professionals, and that’s simply ridiculous. If not a professional, sometimes so-called “fat shamers” are sincerely concerned for the health of the person that they are talking to.
In the absence of either of those two things, then they are probably just dickheads, and such people should mind their own business more often than not, because freedom is more important than fat. People have every right to kill themselves slowly with food should that be the lifestyle they want to adopt. It’s a free country; have a donut. (Shout out to my boys/girls . I’m still working on my “murder by maple bar” scheme. [I’m not gettin’ paid for mentioned that company in my sad little blog, folks. They made with the funny, so I’m making a little back.]) If you have a donut, I will probably have one myself, and anyone who calls me fat can lick the crumbs from my fingers if they can muster the energy.
If you’re fat and you feel bad about it, then that’s your brain’s way of telling you to get some exercise. If you’re fat and someone else is capable of “making” you feel bad about it, that’s also your brain, not that person’s comments. The way this works is that—with the exception of a medical condition—if you’re taking up two seats on the airplane, then you better be ready to pay for two tickets, and if that pisses you off, you have only yourself to blame. So, when I say I could stand to lose 40-50 pounds, I hope you’ll understand that I am not making an excuse. I’m saying flat out. I like my food more than my fitness, and if that strikes you as hypocritical then I don’t give two shits and a handshake. Enjoy your carrot sticks. If you need any hints as to what to do with them, just ask. (Hint: they can go in your butt.)
Either of those things (Liberal/Progressive & fat shaming) could, of course, be the subject of their own ranting blog post, so I could go on (and may in the future) but at this point I’m going to get to the thing:
Donald Trump is a depraved, pathetic, sad little man. He’s a second rate flim-flam artist, whose only talent is a pathological desire to manipulate. He is what happens when a used car salesman is born very, very rich in a society that treats money like royalty.
Now, in the unlikely event that one of his supporters has made it this far, let me explain that there are three possibilities here. The first is that you agree with me on that assessment. The second is that you’re a dupe and almost certainly incapable of understanding anything I’ve written here. The last is that you are yourself a depraved narcissist trying to latch onto some of Trump’s own success as a megalomaniac in a pathetic hope that it will somehow lead to your own aggrandizement. I’m happy to agree to disagree on a whole range of topics, but if you disagree with me on this one then there’s no talking to you because you lack the intellectual capacity or integrity to use language in a reasonable way. That may be due to some biological dysfunction or it may be an intentional choice, but there is no agreeing to disagree on a subject as unspeakably palpable as this obvious reality. I won’t talk to you not because I have any concern about the strength of your ideas, but because you haven’t any. Not any that you’re really willing to express openly and honestly, that is, and you lack the capacity to do that. I can only do what I’ve realized is the only way to deal with such folks: wish you good luck and goodbye.
(This kind of behavior is not, BTW, limited to Donald Trump supporters. It occurs on either side of the aisle and can take place in nearly any forum. I’ve read these kinds of bizarre sophist arguments coming from the Left, the Right, vegans, housefraus, any number of nationalities, etc. I’m just isolating it in this particular case for reasons I hope are or will be become clear.)
My own interaction with this issue took place when I tweeted “Maybe they should just line up a bunch of these along the border. I’d turn back. #NakedTrump” along with the photo of the sculpture above. As sometimes happens, I wasn’t expecting the response. Over 1,200 retweets and 2,100 likes as of the time of this writing. My most “successful” tweet ever, if one measures success by the number of people who saw it. Personally, I measure it more by the elegance, the almost haiku-like aspect of conveying ideas clearly and emotively in 140 characters or less… but I’m sure that’s not how most folks think of success.
The Emperor Has No Balls is a funny piece. My comment does little more than further contextualize the humor, but the success of that tweet is much more due the original artist, Ginger, than my own very minor contribution. And, as noted, his work is at least referentially related to Illma Gore’s painting. I just wrote a one-liner that connects the piece to Trump’s ridiculous giant wall boondoggle of an idea.
The interesting thing about it to me, however, is not the number of folks who liked it, but the number who did not. It was a surprisingly small number considering the size of that audience. When I posted the “48%” tweet which pretty much became the start of this blog (https://rootwordssite.wordpress.com/2016/06/29/the-48/) there was an awful lot of negativity that occurred immediately. This one took a while. The responses were equally tiresome and repetitive. The usual childish and oddly unaware complaint: you liberals/progressives can dish it out but you can’t take it! and such like.
Let me just pause for a moment to point something out. You can tell the difference between a conservative and this modern iteration of neo-fascist racists very quickly because they whine like little bitches right off the bat. A conservative in, say, the pre-Reagan era wouldn’t lose his shit like that. Even Reagan (whom I hold responsible for the end of my beloved Republican party, BTW, but mostly for economic reasons) wouldn’t have sniveled “not fair!” at such provocation, like some petulant four-year-old. Honestly, it’s sad to watch these so-called “conservatives” being so easily unmanned. You can practically hear their tone straight off the playground. “No, you’re the poopy-head!” as they engage in an utterly transparent Orwellian deconstruction of terms. “You fat shamed my fat shaming hero you liberal!” They shriek like you walked in on them touching themselves on the toilet.
Probably my favorite interaction with one of these folks is this one:
Isn’t that great?!
“FOOL! DOPE!”
Hey, turn off your Caps Lock.
“Oh, thanks.”
It’s like the socio-political argument is so impersonal and detached from the person expressing it that it becomes a kind of reflex. “Hey, let’s not be dicks about stuff….” “You suck, hippy!” “Have a nice day.” “OK, you too!”
Ha!
So, now that all that’s dealt with, and I expect the Trump supporters have long since wandered off to watch How I Met Your Modern Family With Children or whatever, I’m going to talk about them behind their backs, but as if they were still here. Let’s get to the actual core of things:
What if….
For the folks who insist that it’d be different if it were Hillary Clinton being represented, you should know that Hillary Clinton has already been the subject of this kind of art project. Google “naked Hillary Clinton” if you don’t believe me. A couple of those pieces are quite funny. The one by ‘BootyArtist’ has two versions, the first with her in an American flag stripper outfit next to the one of her in a burkha. That is hilarious. It’s not as pointed a project as “The Emperor Has No Balls,” piece, however, because Hillary Clinton has not engaged in a wide range of fat shaming as part of her career, and the Hillary stripper/burka compare/contrast is directed more at his own government’s censorship than at Hillary Clinton. On the other hand, Trump has made fat shaming a cornerstone of his public persona not simply by using it to attack people (Google Trump and Rosie O’Donnell) but by hosting beauty pageants, where his boorish behavior is well-documented, and more than a little worrying to anyone who is also aware of his marital history or the sexual assault allegations leveled against him (or in one case, both.) What’s more, Donald Trump has made an issue of his own physical attributes on dozens of occasions—up to and including a nationally broadcast political debate. So, an artist commenting with his/er art on that subject is a response to a considerable amount of his own public commentary. He opened to door wide. I’d suggest this artist has only barely responded to it. Honestly, I think that sculpture is more than a little kind to the Donald. If I’d made the thing, I’d have put a vagina on him. (Hey, Ginger: there’s a suggestion for a 2.0 version….)
So, yes, turnabout is fair play. It always has been. However, you should be aware that not only has such a project been done before, it hasn’t been as successful because it’s not as pointed and obvious a reference to her actual career and behavior, so it makes substantially less sense, and isn’t nearly as humorous. Plus, this piece already is an example of “turnabout is fair play” so the complaint is more than a little tone deaf. Maybe turningabout a ‘turnabout is fair play’ project is also fair play…. I doubt it would have anything like the impact you seem to be suggesting, but maybe you can pull it off. Give it a shot. Fair warning, though: I’m not a big fan of hers, but clearly Hillary has bigger balls. If you depict her otherwise, you may lose verisimilitude.
Shame on shame!
Well, I addressed this one already, but I’m rehashing it to note that I find it strange that fat shaming is the issue you object to? Really? They depicted the man with a penis the size of an eraser pencil and no balls, but you’re going to latch onto fat shaming as the core objection to that piece of work? Not only have you failed to grasp what fat shaming is, how it works, and what it does, you’ve failed to grasp the piece itself. If that’s your takeaway, you should leave commenting to folks who won’t make complete fools of themselves doing it.
Two wrongs don’t make you Right-wing
“Do unto others as you would have them do unto you” and “An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind.” Yeah, OK. Go eat some granola, you sad hippy fuck.
OK, I’ll address that one a bit more. I can’t help but notice that these little canards only get whipped out when the speaker is having to take a taste of what they’ve been dishing out for some time. Suddenly, the moral high ground because the stance, and the long-suffering martyrdom complex gets kicked into full gear. Again, it’s nonsense, but rather than claim some smug, quasi-Biblical satisfaction, I’m going to just go with it and say flat out: If I dedicate the next two or three decades of my life to making a public spectacle of myself and someone deigns to make a sculpture of me that is unflattering, I’ll own it. Literally. I’ll hand over some of my ill-gotten public scam money to the artist and buy one. Shit, I might do that anyway. That’s what Trump should do. He should put one in his bed between him and that poor mental deficient he conned and bribed into marrying him, because she’s suffered enough. (Not really. She made her bed, she has to lie and plagiarize in it like everyone else.)
So, with all that meandering blather out of the way, let me just say this: thanks to the folks who chimed in positively. I’m sorry if I missed engaging with you personally, but I’m just some schlub in a little home office. I don’t have a press secretary or PR folks to respond to the public. (Sorry, I hope I didn’t disillusion any of you who think you might actually be talking to Mr. Bieber….) I’ll leave you with my favorite response from Twitter user :
1. Trump will resign. The presidency is a job. Trump’s never had a job. Oh, he and his supporters will say he works hard, is a successful business man, etc. But the reality is that he’s a guy who inherited wealth, has spent most of his life squandering it, and been propped up by what is, effectively, a system of economic class exploitation. That’s not the same as having a job. All those folks who complain that the Obama administration, or just the left in general, have been waging “class warfare” are, essentially, right. But they’re right in that essential sense that the class war has been fought for decades and everyone below the upper classes has been losing. There’s a class war in the U.S. alright, but it’s the upper class preying upon everyone else. And Trump, through no initiative of his own, has been a beneficiary of that. Whether someone who has never actually had a job can suddenly step into the presidency for very long is a pretty dubious proposition. Traditionally, Republicans put in an awful lot fewer hours than Democrats in office, but it’s still an actual job, and that’s not the kind of thing Trump has been prepared for.
3. As this article suggests, impeachment. Personally, I don’t see this happening before the midterms. It’s possible that Trump could be impeached by a Congress dominated by his own party, but that just doesn’t seem very likely to me. There could be any number of bases for impeachment. There’s already fodder enough given Trump’s refusal to divest from his financial conflicts of interest to his ties with the Russians, the mafia, let alone his activities in office. Still, we’ll have to see how this plays out. And we should bear in mind at this point that under Bill Clinton the bar for Impeachment was lowered so far as to include lying about getting a blowjob being cast as obstruction of justice.
To get around the limitations of the system, people employ a range of tactics on Twitter, probably the most obnoxious of which is the emoji storm. Not just one, not just two, not just three, but a whole line of animated smiley faces graphically slapping away at mimed knees. Hoo-boy! That’s a hoot! There’s always the site link, which is probably how most of the folks who might be reading this happened upon it. My apologies for getting spammed by me. My personal favorite is the text graphic in which someone puts text into through some shiny word processor, or just does a copy/paste over some longer text they’ve written and puts it into a picture attachment rather than the usual Twitter fare of pirated political cartoons and porn stills. The text/graphic has got a certain charm if for no other reason than it games the system using the system.
Probably my least favorite way of getting around the Twitter character limit is the tweet thread. I suppose under certain circumstances, it has some utility. Live-tweeting a current event, for instance, maintains the Twitter sense of immediacy while also allowing one to convey more detailed information. As a general rule, though, I try to avoid put things up on Twitter that are going to require a series of tweets. It’s unavoidable sometimes, but tweet threads aren’t my thing.
Root Words 