Category Archives: another perspective

Lusting for celebrity

Talk about corrosive. How many good intentions are derailed by the lust for celebrity, a chance to be in the limelight?
I’m reminded that my mother, whose presence in my life lasted 64 years, held it against her mother that she had friends whose social status was less. It was something I simply did not understand. Her claim to have sought out important friends didn’t compute for the simple reason that, in the long run, she had none.
‘Tis not a complaint, but in the last years of her life, new acquaintances were confused by her reference to me as her “nurse.” A disappointment as a daughter, I was transformed into a status symbol.
Status seems to be associated with the brain stem. After languishing for some time in a semi-comatose state, four days before her eventual death, my mother seemingly roused herself to address me and the spouse at her bedside, as if she were dismissing us from her employ. She thanked us for our service and then sank back into unconsciousness, albeit not necessarily silence. Indeed, she voiced incomprehensible babble for hours at a time, which also suggests that speech emanates primarily from the brain stem, rather than the cognitive centers. Perhaps it is the brain stem which reprograms itself while we sleep. That would explain why individuals whose cognitive centers are severed have no awareness of dreaming.

Things Left Out of the Comey Statement

The Dude is an instinct-driven person. What that means is that he does not examine his reactions and question their appropriateness. We all have instincts, some strong and some weak. The question here is what triggered Comey’s gut reaction to make him reduce the first interaction with the dude to a memorandum? What prompted an after-action report or interrogation summary?
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Preempt, prevent and premature …

What is it about the prefix “pre” and conservative ideology? Is their attachment to it a signpost to a world view? Just look at this array of negatives in addition to preempt, prevent and premature:

prenuptial
prejudice
precedent
president
predicate
present
pre-exist
predict
preempt
prescribe

Is the prefix “pre” consistent with the prefix “re” as in Republicans, people who do the same thing over and over again? Or is the penchant for acting ahead of time in the interest of avoiding being late?
Apparently, both the Greeks and Romans were well versed in reference to time and place.
That raises the question whether the perception of time and place can be induced by language or does the language merely express the sense for those who have it? Are the prefixes meaningless to those who have no sense of what’s being expressed?

On the other hand, the preference for whatever is prior may well be consistent with being stuck in the past or, as it is also called, conservative.

Rebecca Solnit: The Loneliness of Donald Trump

Once upon a time, a child was born into wealth and wanted for nothing, but he was possessed by bottomless, endless, grating, grasping wanting, and wanted more, and got it, and more after that, and always more. He was a pair of ragged orange claws upon the ocean floor, forever scuttling, pinching, reaching for more, a carrion crab, a lobster and a boiling lobster pot in one, a termite, a tyrant over his own little empires. He got a boost at the beginning from the wealth handed him and then moved among grifters and mobsters who cut him slack as long as he was useful, or maybe there’s slack in arenas where people live by personal loyalty until they betray, and not by rules, and certainly not by the law or the book. So for seven decades, he fed his appetites and exercised his license to lie, cheat, steal, and stiff working people of their wages, made messes, left them behind, grabbed more baubles, and left them in ruin.
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In PTSD land

A White House staff person mouths a confession:
“President Trump has a magnetic personality and exudes positive energy, which is infectious to those around him,” Hope Hicks, a White House spokeswoman, said in a statement. “He has an unparalleled ability to communicate with people, whether he is speaking to a room of three or an arena of 30,000. He has built great relationships throughout his life and treats everyone with respect. He is brilliant with a great sense of humor . . . and an amazing ability to make people feel special and aspire to be more than even they thought possible.”