Is a Guy Like Trump the Exception?

As Donald Trump finally seems to be imploding, Matt Taibbi wrote:
“There are not many places left for this thing to go that don't involve kids or cannibalism.”
Trump’s party still doesn’t seem to know how to handle the situation:
“The strategy seemed to be to pretend none of it had happened, and to hide behind piles of the same worn clichés.”

Assuming Trump is toast, the next question is whether he was a one-off case of such a candidate reaching this far? Tiabbi is not so sure. After all, he says:
“All 16 of the non-Trump entrants were dunces, religious zealots, wimps or tyrants, all equally out of touch with voters.”
John Scalzi is even more alarmed. Here’s why:
“Donald Trump is not a black swan… He is the end result of conscious and deliberate choices by the GOP, going back decades, to demonize its opponents, to polarize and obstruct, to pursue policies that enfeeble the political weal and to yoke the bigot and the ignorant to their wagon.”
In American lingo, GOP is short for Trump’s party.
“He was planned. He was intended. He was expected. He was wanted. But not, I think, in the exact form of Donald Trump… They don’t control Trump, which they are currently learning to their great misery.”
And so says Scalzi:
“The GOP created a monster, but the monster isn’t Trump. The monster is the GOP’s base. Trump is the guy who stole their monster from them, for his own purposes.”

If Scalzi is right in saying that the problem is how the voters have become (not just a candidate), then what’s the solution? After all, a party will do what the (majority) voters want; the party won’t try to “reform” people because that would be suicidal politically.

All of that is why Jeff Jarvis feels the media needs to step up to the task:
“The answer begins with empathy — empathy not with Trump’s racism, misogyny, and hatred, of course, but with the real lives of at least some of the people who are considering voting for him.”
Jarvis is aware of the uphill nature of the task:
“Because media demonstrated that we did not hear, care about, or understand them, they did not trust the rest of what we had to tell them.”
On paper, the solution is to strike a balance between opposing views while reporting. Then again, hasn’t that concept been corrupted for other ends?
“False balance is used to justify friction and fighting on the air.”

So while there’s no clear solution (yet), it’s something perhaps we too need to start thinking about: isn’t out politics just as polarizing and demonizing? Isn’t our media perceived to just as biased and only chasing “fighting on the air”?

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Student of the Year

Image
As a toddler, my daughter loved Alia Bhatt’s songs, esp. the ones from Student of the Year . (That movie did have many good songs and well-choreographed dances). Fast forward to present day, when she is 12 yo. She rarely watches Hindi movies now, but one of the few ones she likes of late, Raja aur Rani ki Prem Kahani has, yes, Alia Bhatt.   If I had any hopes that there was anything to be read in the name of her toddler-time favorite ( Student of the Year ), they have been dashed. Our conversations come exam time are perfectly captured by this photo and its caption: In fact, the pic below captures how she and I look at her answer sheets – me intently, she with an expression of “It’s over, so why are you even looking at it?”   Of late, we pull her leg and tell her that she isn’t showing any signs of academic prowess, she’d better find a rich guy to marry. Some time later, she showed us this meme on the Internet: “Me No Study, Me No Care Me Go Marry Millionaire If He Die
Read more

Animal Senses #7: Touch and Remote Touch

Instinctively, we think touch is based on contact. Not entirely true, explains Ed Yong in Immense World – there’s a more important aspect than contact: “These incredible feats are possible through movement. If you rest a fingertip upon a surface, you can get only a limited idea of its features. But as soon you’re allowed to move, everything changes. Hardness becomes apparent with a press. Textures resolve at a stroke.” As you run your fingers over a surface, they hit the tiny peaks and troughs and set off vibrations in the mechanoreceptors at their tips.   At the tip of its snout, the star-nosed mole has many pairs of hairless appendages. It uses them to touch things around itself. Alive or dead? Food or ignore? It does these movements at an insane speed. In the time it takes to blink our eyes, the star-nosed mole can probe, identify and swallow its food. “Light may be the fastest thing in the universe, but light sensors have their limits, and the star-nosed mole’s sense of
Read more

The Retort of the "Luxury Person"

Image
Coming up with biting and witty retorts. It’s something we dream of, but rarely manage to pull off. Worse, the more we stew over the offending remark, the more likely we are to come up with that dream retort, as Calvin ruefully points out: During our last holiday at the Taj Resort, seeing my wife carrying towels to our poolside chairs, one of the kids there mistook her for a member of the staff and asked for a towel. When my wife narrated this to us, I did not imagine that my 8 yo daughter would come up with her own retort. But a day later, my daughter recapped the incident, an incident that didn’t even involve her in the first place , and said, “You know what I’d have told that kid who asked for the towel?”. And without waiting for an answer, she told us anyway: “I don’t work here. I too am a luxury person who is living at this resort. Go get your own towel.” We were highly amused by the phrase she had coined: “luxury person”. It certainly captures the kind of holid
Read more