A shift in my social media usage

Around a year ago I made the statement that I would be spending a lot less time on Facebook and focussing on other social media platforms. More recently I began signalling that this was happening.
I have not been entirely successful in keeping to the intent of those statements. I would have to grade myself a C on it.
During 2017, I have been trying to ensure that any original content that I post is posted to my blog and linked to on Facebook. I dislike the implied gift of IPR to Facebook in their Terms and Conditions. I also have taken periodic timeouts from the platform whenever the online temperature rose, which has happened two or three times since last year’s election.
I tried returning to The Well, one of my long-time favorite online hang-outs, but The Well is a declining place, with no updates to what is an antiquated UI. I am actually, unlike most people, prepared to pay money for curated well-managed social media platforms, but The Well is too archaic and clunky for me, so i let my newly re-activated membership lapse this Summer.
I am behind schedule on way too many other things in my life right now, so Facebook is taking a back seat for the time being. I have a book project to finish.
I recently joined Mastodon, which IMHO is a much better place to be than Twitter. I am winding down my personal use of Twitter, although my Corporate Realist and White Cat Publishing accounts will be active this year and next as I plan to publish Corporate Realist Volume 1 next September.
Mastodon has more character space than Twitter, which allows for a move away from the soundbite pathology that I heartily dislike.
In the current toxic and polarized social and political climate, I have little interest in spending time on media platforms that are actively adding to that level of toxicity by their refusal to understand that they have to curate content if they are to have any chance of surviving and remaining credible and relevant. Facebook and Twitter, in their different ways, do not care about that, because their entire business model is based on volume, not quality. They don’t care if their platforms are infested with bots, trolls and assholes, as long as the click numbers keep rising. Both platforms have essentially been compromised by cyber-subversion.
The announcement by Facebook that it intends to hire 1000 people just to screen adverts is laughable, since it misses the point completely. The problem on Facebook right now is not adverts. It is lies, misinformation and trolling. Those require aggressive content and user privilege curation, but Facebook does not want to go there because it will impact volume, and also because it will undercut their Common Carrier defense to copyright claims. Twitter is impaled on the horns of the same dilemna.
Right now, Mastodon is not infested with bots, trolls and misinformation campaigns being directed by malevolent actors. This could all change of course. If it does change for the worse, I will move on. The distributed instance model for Mastodon provides a measure of protection. it was designed as a distributed platform where the users can set up curated private instances of Mastodon that function as islands of sanity in a sea of madness. Whether Mastodon as a platform can evolve sufficient defense against cyber-subversion in the medium term remains to be seen.

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US professional sports – insight into dysfunctionality

Due to their abject failure to behave consistently or equitably when dealing with player behavior issues, and their craven kow-towing to the forces of censorious asshattery by collectively refusing to employ Colin Kaepernick, I am currently boycotting the NFL.
However, this article shows the extent to which, despite the intellectually dense view that players earning $500,000 a year are more “privileged” than “exploited”, many players in the NFL, NBA and MLB are essentially subjected to a process when the join those leagues that is far from the exercise of free will. The current process is remarkably similar to the now-defunct British naval tradition of the Press Gang.The whole process is part of the weird Faustian bargain where schools and colleges act as training grounds for professional sports, while officially not paying the players.

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RIP Tom Petty, who showed leadership by humility

Yesterday we lost yet another musician and artist with the sudden death of Tom Petty.
I will be honest and say that I was never a fan of most of Tom Petty’s music. He had an excellent backing band, but his songwriting to me lacked enough structural interest. he rarely used bridges on his tunes, and had limited harmonic movement in the tunes. Like R.E.M., another highly popular ensemble, most of Petty’s songs went through my head and out of the other side without engaging my brain.
However, it was clear that Petty was an all-round good guy. He gave generously of his time to numerous causes, and did not go way off the rails like some of his contemporaries.
He was also humble enough to pen this mea culpa in Rolling Stone a few years ago about how he ended up using the Confederate flag in his “Southern Accents” tour, and how he subsequently came to realize that it had been a mistake. It is rare for many famous people to admit to error, but Tom was a welcome exception.
Rest in Peace Tom.

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The Church of the Savvy and imaginary Presidential playbooks

Several of Jay Rosen’s consistent commentary themes converge in this short posting.
Jay, long time ago, coined the phrase “The Church of the Savvy” to describe what he observed as a basic media pathology. It’s an assumption that most of the DC-based media starts from, namely that by virtue of being on the ground in the center of US government, that automatically makes them more knowledgeable about What Is Really Going On. They then can use that presumed knowledge to opine seriously on TV, cable, internet or in print. The implied message at least part of the time is “listen to us, we have the inside information”.
Leaving aside the issue that focussing obsessively on what happens in DC risks paying insufficient attention to what is happening in the rest of the USA (and I certainly think that this was a factor in the failure of the media to understand the scope and depth of the twin voter insurgency candidates, Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump, in 2016), there is a more fundamental issue that the rise of Donald Trump is now revealing.
The Church Of The Savvy pathology, almost by definition, requires that the media is able to explain everything in a way that makes sense. What, then, happens when you are confronted by a leader who appears to have no Grand Plan, who, to use an old expression, gets by on a daily basis by simply Making Shit Up?
Welcome to the confusion and head-scratching nature of Donald Trump.
The media, however, being mostly trapped in the Church Of The Savvy mindset, is not able to imagine or manage a scenario where anarchy and reaction are the predominant modes of operation. Their worldview has always been based on two underlying assumptions (1) every administration or component of the Legislative or Executive Branch has a Grand Plan, and (2) the media is in a uniquely privileged position to divulge elements of that Grand Plan to impress the hell out of its audience.
The media historically has relied for a lot of inside information from leakers in and around government. Of course, some of the leaks have always been deliberate. Over time, this has led to an unhealthy reliance by many media organizations on “unnamed sources” and other forms of non-verifiable information acquisition.
So, since Donald Trump was installed as POTUS, the media has been struggling to continue viably with the Church Of The Savvy approach. They have, like a lot of people, been attempting to amke sense of Donald Trump’s actions and pronouncements. However, their role as the savants means that they cannot throw their hands up and answer “I have no clue” when somebody asks them to explain why Donald Trump just said or did something. That does not make them look…savvy. It makes them look no better than the readers or listeners. What value can you add if you are not savvy?
So, in an attempt to perpetuate the illusion of savviness, the media are instead convincing themselves that there has to be a Grand Plan somewhere, somehow. This is leading them, in turn, to normalize Donald Trump’s behavior. The theory is that he has to have a logical coherent plan. Everybody else in that office has had one. Why should he be any different?
The logical next step, surfaced neatly by Rosen in this tweet, is that if there is no Grand Plan or playbook, then the media is Making Stuff Up if they claim that one exists. However, that gives them an advantage if they imagine one:


It’s a neat response to being unable to divine a Grand Plan. If you make up your own Grand Plan, using tea-leaves, the leak from the guy in the DoD, some coffee-room chat with a guy who knows a guy who knows somebody who painted the Oval Office, and some stiff drinks at the bar in Georgetown, then hey presto! You have a Grand Plan which you can then leak as an “exclusive”. Of course it’s an exclusive. You manufactured it out of next to nothing.
The other part of the rationalization thought process being engaged in by the media, which is potentially a lot more dangerous, is the desire to somehow explain Donald Trump’s more vicious and malevolent outbursts. It’s a lot more comfortable for the media to explain that picking on Puerto Rico is some part of a grand strategy to rally his base than to state that the POTUS is simply being an asshole. Many media outlets described Trump’s war of words with the Mayor of San Juan as a “feud”, when Trump actually launched a series of personal attacks on her. That was a transparently awful attempt at “both sides do it” framing.
Explanations of politician behavior based on the existence of a Grand Plan always tend to sound logical. Explanations that somebody just behaved like an asshole sound vicious and judgmental by comparison, and the media does not want to be seen to behaving like that in the current climate. The media has been cowed for decades by accusations of “bias”, mostly by the authoritarian wing of the GOP, and on topics like this, is only too willing to behave like the abused partner in an abusive relationship, so the media will hem and haw, circumlocute their language in a way that would have gotten high marks from George Orwell, and generally avoid making a definitive judgment. That’s another problem entirely, but if they do not address both of the issues I am discussing, there will not be worthwhile media in the USA within a few years. The sink of internet-focussed misinformation will sink it.

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A single media lede that explains a lot

This lede appeared today in the Washington Post.

First of all, note the masthead slogan “Democracy dies in Darkness”. Hold that in your head for a moment.
Now look at the text in the lede…
Oh My God.
This is supposedly a lede for a profile of a man who just shot nearly 600 people in Las Vegas, killing 58 of them on the spot.
Yet it reads like he is one of the victims.
I have been harshly critical of the US mass media for decades. They are superficial, non-inquiring and have spent the last 20 years mostly behaving like non-critical stenographers.
I don’t care about the accusations of “bias”. We all have biases. What worries me is the continual credulous reporting of bullshit as it it were fact, and the failure to understand how the entire news promulgation landscape has changed.
The media in the USA is already in a tough place, excoriated across the political spectrum for multiple reasons. Their previous niche as the unquestioned purveyors of information has been whittled away by internet-based outlets that learned a long time ago how to generate outrageous tosh to get attention. The current US government despises them, and is seeking to further de-legitimize them, because this is a government led by a demagogue who regards all dissent as disloyalty.
And then one of the oldest media outfits in the USA prints a lede like this?
This lede, like a lot of their headlines since Donald Trump assumed the Presidency, is just indefensibly stupid. It is part of a process where the media is normalizing events and people who should not be normalized. The lede normalizes mass murder in a single sentence.
One is tempted to wonder what this lede writer would have done with 9/11. “WTC hit by unscheduled demolition crews – some casualties”?
Jay Rosen has been writing about the media’s problems for a long time. This lede is perfectly illustrative of his diagnosis of their issues.
Unfortunately, ledes like this make media outlets, sooner or later, difficult to defend from malevolence.
The media needs to realize that history will not treat them kindly if they continue to be credulous, supine, and stupid.

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“I’m not going to tolerate”…and what it says about you

Dear Fellow Americans,
On this Saturday, as the POTUS continues to blame Puerto Ricans for being poor and seemingly unable to overcome having most of their island destroyed, I am continuing to read that some of you are still Very Upset over the sight of players kneeling whenever the National Anthem is played before the commencement of NFL games.
There is a rather obvious reality that you are pissing and moaning about a sports event while a few hundred miles South East of here, people are struggling to stay alive, which makes me wonder which distant land your sense of priorities and proportion have disappeared to. But OK, let’s talk about protest in the NFL.
I am reading a lot of comments from a whole bunch of you. One thing to note about these comments is that many of them seem to begin with or contain variants of the phrase “I’m not going to tolerate”, as part of what usually comprises a rant to the effect that the players who kneel are disrespecting the flag, or the military, or the entire United States of America.
Well, OK. You don’t like the players protesting. That much is obvious.
But my follow-up to people who make statements like “I am not going to tolerate” is simple.
What are YOU going to do about it?
So, you intend to boycott the NFL and its sponsors?
Fine. That is a fundamental freedom that we all enjoy to spend our money as we see fit. Have at it.
But let’s be honest. That’s not all you want. No sir. What you really want is for these people to be forced to cease that form of protest.
Which brings me to my fundamental questions.
1. Who gave you the right to decide what form of protest is acceptable? Did you go to college to learn the rules?
2. Why should any other person or group of people in the USA be forced to modify their behavior because you find some aspect of their behavior intolerable?
3. How does your lack of tolerance of actions that you dislike have anything to do with anybody else? The players are not breaking any laws, and their actions do not harm you personally.
4. How conceited do you have to be to think that I even care about your tolerance?

But when all is said and done, this boils down to two things:
– your feelings are hurt
– you want somebody to damn well do something about it

Your feelings are hurt? Well, boo hoo. You know, one of the parts of life that being an adult imposes on all of us is to learn the ability to move past incidents where events or people upset us over events that are, in the grand scheme of things, nothing. If we can’t do that, we pretty quickly end up as resentful assholes that people tend to avoid. So, forgive me, I really am right out of fucks that I can give right now about your feelings about a controlled, measured peaceful protest at a sports game.
So you want somebody to damn well do something about it?
No. Hell no.
You don’t get to demand and expect somebody (the NFL, the law, Congress, the President) to coerce people into compliance with your worldview. That’s not in line with any of the principles enunciated in the Constitution, or any of the principles that we need to adhere to in order to have a functioning civic society. Actually, your whining and demanding that Something Be Done is a perfect example of the behavior pathology outlined many years ago by the psychologlist Robyn Skinner, in this quote:

“If people can’t control their own emotions, then they have to start trying to control other people’s behavior.”

You cannot control your feelings over the anthem protests, so you just want somebody to make them go away.

So. Back to your “I find this intolerable” schtick.
I don’t care whether or not you find it tolerable or not. Your tolerance is a personal emotional part of your own behavior. It has nothing to do with me, I wouldn’t presume to ask “do you tolerate anthem protests”, because it is none of my business. However, when you start trying to persuade people that coercive action should be applied to other people or groups in order for your feelings to no longer be hurt…well, that is where I say Back Off. You don’t get to coerce other people to modify their behavior to suit your beliefs. That’s not tolerance. That’s trying to impose totalitarianism. That is deeply antithetical to America values. Knock it off.

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That Sinking Feeling

At the age of 62, I have met enough mediocre, dumber-than-rocks people to have become somewhat immune to disappointment.
However, I can still be surprised when I find myself talking to people who, at least on the surface, look to be smart, intelligent and successful, yet, when the discussion shifts to specific topics, they show themselves to be glib, superficial, and utterly devoid of useful thought.
This last week that occurred at dinner on a client visit, when I found myself with a Vice President and an Account Executive. As was probably inevitable, the discussion shifted to current politics.
The VP said that he thought Donald Trump was “fine”, then, after a short pause, he said wistfully “I just wish they would take away his damn Twitter account”. The reality that taking away his Twitter account does not magically change a person’s behavior for the better was a fundamental fact that he had either not thought of, or was determined to ignore. The Account Exec nodded in agreement, then went on to say that he thought that government needed shaking up, and Trump was just the man to do it.
The discussion suddenly shifted elsewhere, which was just as well, since I was probably about to say a few things in response that neither of these supposedly smart Captains of Industry would have liked.
One irony, at least to me, was that the VP was Indian.
This incident is not new. I have become wearily used over the years to finding out that seemingly intelligent people are either politically disengaged (they often decline any and all opportunities to talk about politics, possibly fearing disagreement and disputes) or they have a knowledge that is hopelessly inadequate. I used to think that conspiracy theories were only attractive to dumb people, but over time I have had to accept that even incredibly smart and clever people quite cheerfully sign on to all sorts of cockanamie nonsense all the time. In fact, smart people become incredibly good at elaborately rationalizing their decisions to sign onto total tosh.
I used to wonder why electorates in the Western world often made awful decisions come election time. Leaving aside the fundamental reality that on average, 50% of the electorate is of below-average intelligence, the sort of shallow, glib, flip rationalizations for current events that I heard over dinner last week go a long way to explaining why, even allowing for the Dunning-Kruger effect, we cannot reasonably expect any uptick in overall electoral intelligence any time soon.

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Bill down at the bar

In most small towns all over the world, there are one or more bars. (“Cheers” was an idealized version of the local city bar, with characters built up for television).
Every bar has one or more characters. I’ll call our guy Bill.
We all know Bill. He is there most nights, often on the same seat or stool. He buys a string of beers, smokes a lot, watches the TVs, and talks to anybody who sits next to him or claps him on the back.
Bill grew up in a classic atomic family. Small house with a front and back yard, one sibling, US flagpole in the front, nice manicured lawn, occasional road vacations.
Bill’s Dad was a Big Strong Man. He had been drafted and served in Vietnam. Then he left the army, and got a factory job. Dad was always outgoing, until it came to talking about Vietnam, then he would clam up, and a troubled look would come over his face. The family learned to tip-toe around that war. They also learned to stay away from him when he yelled at Bill’s mom, which seemed to happen a lot.
Bill’s Dad was a big strong man. Until one day, when he fell down on the stairs, and Bill heard his mother screaming. The ambulance arrived, then the EMTs. But, the looks on their faces told the story. Dad, Big Strong Man, invulnerable, manly, The Rock, was gone. A blood vessel deep in his brain had burst, and that was that.
Bill’s mom was a quiet woman. Bill would see her occasionally weeping in the living room, but Mom never said anything about his Dad, other than “he has demons”. Then she too would clam up. After his Dad died, his mother would sit alone for hours, staring into nowhere. Bill wondered what went on in her head, but he and his sister soon learned that asking questions was a waste of time.
Bill left high school at 18, bored with the education system. Bill wasn’t good enough at sports to be a jock and Get The Girls. He also wasn’t good enough at studying to go on to college. Not that his parents could have afforded the tuition anyway, after his Dad died. Besides, universities when Bill was growing up were infested with Communists and pansies. Well, that was what Bill’s dad always said.
So Bill went to work, with several other high school buddies, in the local factory. The job was boring, but the wages were good for the area, and the factory had been there for several decades. Bill worked his way up to a lead role in assembly, and thought he was doing OK. He got married to a girl he met at a local restaurant, and started a family. Life, it seemed, was good.
Then the factory suddenly closed. BOOM. No warning. “Moving production to Mexico” was the terse summary. There was no union to protect the workers. Bill lost his nicely paid job, his work buddies, and his sense of belonging. He began bouncing from short term job to short term job. Then he worked on a construction project one week to make some extra money, and suffered a bad back injury. He spent months in rehab, but his back will never be the same again. He cannot get out of bed without a struggle, and some days standing is too painful for more than a few minutes.
So Bill is now on permanent disability. He became a growling, rage-infested asshole, addicted to painkillers for months, so his wife left him and took the children. Bill ended up going to rehab for a second time, this time to learn how to not pop pain pills like sweeties. After a struggle, he managed to kick the pills.
Now Bill lives alone in his little house, with only his dog for company. He collects his disability check twice a month. He occasionally looks for work, but after 3 years of unemployment, and with a back that rarely allows him to stand comfortably for more than 15 minutes at a time, Bill, according to the government, does not even exist as a member of the unemployed. He has officially been declared a Person Of No Interest as far as employment statistics are concerned.
So Bill sits, sometimes uncomfortably, drinks his beer, and talks.
And Bill has opinions.
Oh yes. He has opinions.
Lot of opinions.
Bill opines about Everything.
Sports (he is sure to always let us know which team he hates this time around in the game on television, and why).
Families. Bill always has a good word for his local relatives, and not many good words for his distant relatives, who are distant because they are Not Like Him. (The idea that they might be distant because they moved to get away from his incessantly judgmental ratchet-jawing is something that most probably never occurred to Bill). As for his ex, well, let’s not go there.
Bill reveres the flag, the anthem and the pledge of allegiance. His Dad flew the flag in their little front yard every chance he got. To him, the flag and the Pledge of Alliegance are an integral, deeply emotional part of being American. He thinks that anybody who doesn’t share that opinion must have something wrong with them. Or they must be one of them furriners. Bill doesn’t trust furriners.
Politics.
Ah yes, politics.
Bill has a lot of opinions about politics.
Of course, Bill hates nearly all politicians. They look to him like a cross between smarmy used-car salesmen and game show hosts. They have suits. They talk in long sentences with way too many of those 100 dollar words. They always seem to be in somebody else’s pockets. And the “somebody else” is sure as hell not Good Honest Folks like him. When the factory closed, after Bill and his buddies, working on a short-term deal, had to dismantle the machinery and pack it into crates so it could be shipped down to Mexico so some damn foreigners could use Their Machinery, the land was soon sold to a property company that seemed to have a connection with the local mayor. Suddenly the land became zoned residential, and lots of new housing was built. Bill will tell anybody that listens to him that the Mayor was a crook in league with the developers, screwing over Regular Folks. As usual.
Politicians always like to act Smart. Bill doesn’t care for Smart. To him, smart people are inherently untrustworthy, the sort of people who you shake hands with, then immediately check your pockets to see if you still have all of your possessions.
Bill holds his nose every time he goes to the voting booth. Sometimes Bill doesn’t even vote, he hates the sons-of-bitches so much. Of course, Bill won’t admit that he doesn’t vote, he wants to make it clear that he understands the meaning of the phrase “civic duty”. Oh Yes Sirree.
Bill was going to sit out the 2016 election. He sure as hell wasn’t going to vote for That Bitch Hillary. Why, didn’t she and Bill arrange for all of those people to disappear and die? It must be true, it was all over the internet. And those damn emails…
Then there was that Bernie guy, colonel Sanders or whatever. The old Jewish guy from one of those librul states. All he did was waffle about universal healthcare. He sounded like he wanted to give Bill’s money to those moochers and takers. Bill was damned if he was going to see the gover…er, his hard earned money being given away to Folks Who Didn’t Deserve It.
…but Bill wasn’t going to vote for the Republicans either. For a start, there were dozens of them, and they all wore those damn suits. And they talked all of those sentences with them high-falutin’ words. Same Ole Same Ole.
Then along came Donald Trump.
Wow.
Bill loved him some Donald Trump.
Here was a man who Told It Like It Is. Bill hates people who beat about the bush. If you think something is Bad, say it for gawds sakes. Don’t be a pussy. None of this wimpy “I think you are mistaken” bullshit.
Donald did it right in those debates. “WRONG!” That’s what you tell those assholes! That Bitch Hillary is clearly completely Wrong. And those librul journalists had it coming too.
Donald was a real businessman. All of those casinos, hotels and golf courses. And that gold in his penthouse. Why, he is clearly Successful, not like those other politicians who talk smart and then get found with their hands in the till because they can’t make their own money, only live off OUR money. The only till Donald has his hands in is his own till, and by golly he has lots of money!
Yessir, Donald is the man, says Bill. He will stop all of this lily-livered nonsense about “rights” and “diversity”. Bill knows that “diversity” is just Smart people-speak for “let more of those brown folks in”. Why should all of those freeloading wetbacks get to stay here anyway?
Yeah! The Wall! Bill worked in construction for a while, and he knows a thing or two. If China could build that great wall umpteen thousand miles long without even having concrete mixers, hell, We Can Build The Wall twice as high.
As for the rest of the world…pffft. Bill knows what goes on in the rest of the world. It shows up every night on the TV. It’s a scary place, full of socialists, communists, furriners, brown people and more of those whiny-ass titty-babies who hug trees and love the Spotted Owl or some such, and who hate the military. Rush told him. Then they beg and plead for America to bail their sorry little asses out all over again. Pfftt!
And Muslims. Billions of Muslims. Why, they are probably swimming the Rio Grande even as Bill speaks again. They have to be. After all, doesn’t everybody want to come to America?
Bill’s pal Donald is going to sort out the rest of the world. We have dozens of aircraft carriers, and all of those F-35s or whatever number they gave the planes flown by Tom Cruise and his buddies. Now, those military guys – those are Real Men, doing Brave Stuff. Vanquishing all enemies, foreign and domestic. Or something like that. Donald, he respects those military guys.
Donald wants America to be Great. No more of this “yessir nosir” crap from our President. What a wimp that Obama guy was. Always bowing and scraping. Didn’t he know We Are America? You know, that nation that bailed out everybody else’s sorry ass in umpteen wars? Why aren’t these people grateful, instead of behaving like a bunch of whiny pissants? Look at the United Nations. A bunch of people, either wearing those con-man suits or dressed in dishrags, complaining about America. Donald will tell them where to go screw themselves. Probably they screw camels anyway, haha.
Hey, want another beer?
You see, Bill loves Donald Trump because Donald Trump, as far as Bill can see, is Bill.
Or he is what Bill would love to be.
Bill would love to go sit in that fancy Oval office, his feet up on the table, telling it like it is. He would love to phone up some little shitface dictator and yell down the phone “listen, cocksucker! You release our ambassador in 12 hours or I will order in the cruise missiles. Now do the right thing, fuckface!” Then Bill puts down the phone, high-fives the military, and picks up the phone again to accept congratulations from that other pissant dictator. Yessir, THAT guy knows his place. Bill just has to make sure that he keeps toeing the line. And if he doesn’t, well, we have a carrier group nearby…
All of those people whining about Donald Trump’s twitter or whatever? Well, lordy lordy, it’s all of those swamp people, the coastal elites, and those prissy liberals with their fancy talk and whining about “equality”. Those little rats are pissing and crying because Donald is rooting them out, ending their silly games, their plotting, their corrupt dealings, their elitist hob-nobbing. Screw the lot of them.
Yessir, Donald is Getting Stuff Done. Those ungrateful NFL players sure got put in their place last weekend. How dare they disrespect the flag like that. WE made them millionaires and this is their idea of gratitude? Tell it like it is Mr President. None of this political correctness bullshit. Donald’s a real man. He doesn’t stand for nonsense. Men need to be men. Keep up the good work.
Bill looks around. The bar is almost empty. Those guys who were sitting with him, they went home to their families hours ago. Not many young people come in here these days. They all went to the city, like Bill’s son, who went to one of the cities, and now comes back once a year for Thanksgiving.
Or at least he used to come back once a year for Thanksgiving.
Bill loves his son, but wishes he wasn’t living with that silly girlfriend who told him over dinner last Thanksgiving that he was a misog…or something that didn’t sound very nice. Bill soon told her where to go. Oh yessir. Now they won’t be back for this year’s Thanksgiving. His son told him they are going skiing in Canada.
Skiiing. Hah! Bill can’t even bend down to tie his shoelaces any more, so he wears slip-ons out of the house, and slippers in the house. No way would he be able to put on skis. Some days Bill wonders what happened to the years when he could lift anything above his head, including his kids. Now he can barely lift himself out of a chair.
Bill shuffles off his bar stool, pays his tab, and slowly heads out for home. He will park his car, gingerly ease himself out, shuffle indoors, turn on the TV, listen to His Man telling it like it is, and then laugh at the libruls whining on the chat shows. Sheesh, they’re such an ungrateful bunch of pussies. But Donald will sort them out. Time for them to toe the line and work to Make America Great Again.
And Bill, after wincing as he peels of his underwear, slides into bed. Another day is done.
In his mind, Bill is Donald, and Donald is Bill. Sorting out Shit. Draining the Swamp. Making America Great Again. Did I say MAKING AMERICA GREAT AGAIN?
And Bill sinks into sleep, into the zone of certitude and vindication, where Right is Right, Wrong is Wrong, and everything is simple and sraighforward, and easy to square away. And where his back no longer hurts, his family is together and happy, and he still has a steady job.
If Bill ruled the world.
But then Bill would be Donald.
And Donald would be Bill.

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