Monday, January 16, 2017

Horror has a Face. And it's orange.



Colonel Walter Kurtz, in “Apocalypse Now” has, years after his soliloquy, made it clear to me: the reason Donald Trump will be the next president. The plan was genius. So simple in its complexity. A work of art; a thing of beauty. 
They put forth a candidate who had, quite literally, so much going against him that there wasn’t enough time to spend on any one, or two, or seven of the potential scandals. And anyone who tried to keep up with them looked like a raging conspiracy theorist in the process. It's like a lawyer flooding you with so much information that you can't go through it all before you go to trial.

In order to keep this piece somewhat smaller than the Bible, let’s just look over the hundreds of merely tacky and distasteful actions from his pouty mouth and his Twitter account before the "Golden Shower" revelation (which would also have faded into the yellow cesspool) and go with just the really yuge stuff; the greatest stuff; the stuff that would have singularly derailed the campaigns of anybody else:

1.      Multiple rape allegations, including the rape of at least one 13 year old girl in 1995.

2.      The “grab ‘em by the pussy” comment, undeniably made on the video that everybody saw.

3.      Married to a Russian soft-porn actress. (3rd wife)

4.      Encouraging Russia to hack and publish Hillary Clinton’s emails.

5.      Refusal to pay countless contractors and others for services rendered.

6.      Funneling income into his charitable foundation to avoid paying taxes.

7.      Never releasing his tax returns because he was “under audit.”

8.      Saying John McCain wasn’t a war hero, because he was captured.

9.      Proposing to ban Muslims from the USA

10.   Encouraging violence against protesters at his rallies.

11.   Making fun of a disabled reporter at his rally.

12.   Bilking Trump University students.

13.   Pam Bondi

14.   Megyn Kelly

15.   Family ties to the Ku Klux Klan

Is there really any need to continue?

The Republicans deserved to win, because, as evidenced by the lengths they went to do so, they had the strength to carry it out. The country be damned. The winning was all that mattered.
Maybe I’m the only one who sees the Republicans’ determination in this quote from Colonel Kurtz. Here it is. You decide.

“ I've seen horrors... horrors that you've seen. But you have no right to call me a murderer. You have a right to kill me. You have a right to do that... but you have no right to judge me. It's impossible for words to describe what is necessary to those who do not know what horror means. Horror... Horror has a face... and you must make a friend of horror. Horror and moral terror are your friends. If they are not, then they are enemies to be feared. They are truly enemies! I remember when I was with Special Forces... seems a thousand centuries ago. We went into a camp to inoculate some children. We left the camp after we had inoculated the children for polio, and this old man came running after us and he was crying. He couldn't see. We went back there, and they had come and hacked off every inoculated arm. There they were in a pile. A pile of little arms. And I remember... I... I... I cried, I wept like some grandmother. I wanted to tear my teeth out; I didn't know what I wanted to do! And I want to remember it. I never want to forget it... I never want to forget. And then I realized... like I was shot... like I was shot with a diamond... a diamond bullet right through my forehead. And I thought, my God... the genius of that! The genius! The will to do that! Perfect, genuine, complete, crystalline, pure. And then I realized they were stronger than we, because they could stand that these were not monsters, these were men... trained cadres. These men who fought with their hearts, who had families, who had children, who were filled with love... but they had the strength... the strength... to do that. If I had ten divisions of those men, our troubles here would be over very quickly. You have to have men who are moral... and at the same time who are able to utilize their primordial instincts to kill without feeling... without passion... without judgment... without judgment! Because it's judgment that defeats us.”
(Thanks to IMDb for the quote.)                                 

“It’s judgment that defeats us.”

© Rick Baber, 2017
 
 

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