Trump and Pigpen

One of my favorite comic strips growing up was “Peanuts,” by Charles M Shultz. “Peanuts” gave us $0.05 therapy from Lucy's stall on her lawn. Lucy's crush on Schroeder who was a master pianist on a child sized piano. There was Charlie Brown who has become an icon of losing whether it was captaining the baseball team, or kicking the football which Lucy always pulled away, or having his kite eaten by a tree. And there was Snoopy the most remarkable Beagle in the world. Finally, there was Pigpen. Poor Pigpen, a cloud of dust and dirt surrounded him no matter what he did. He could not bath it off, or keep it off.

It was Pigpen who got me to thinking about DJT and the chaos which swirls around him. He cannot help it. He can go out and read from a teleprompter once but he is like a big fish being reeled in fighting all the way. As soon as it is done, he says something foolish or inaccurate or caustic, or unprofessional. He can't help it. Why? Because his mind is in chaos. That is why his primary way of communicating is through Twitter. His brain can hold only 280 characters at a time. Then it is on to something else which can be tweeted in 280 characters. I am a little troubled by a President whose knowledge on any subject can be distilled to 280 characters.

Never having been a “Tweeter,” it is profoundly troubling to me that diplomacy, serious national issues, legislative matters, leadership thoughts have in our time followed the President's folly of tweeting without any real sense this medium allows for thoughtful reflection, wisely, well crafted statements, or a meaningful addition to anything going on. Instead, it is generally incendiary, knee jerk, mean spirited, and adds nothing to the public discourse of anything. This is nothing new for Trump.

Well before he was president, he tweeted. He somehow believed Americans needed to know what he was thinking at any given moment about any given thing. What thoughtful Americans learned was he was not good at thinking. He could not analyze a situation, he could not frame a perspective, he could not add to the collective wisdom of the moments but instead just jab, criticize achievements of others, announce his biases for all the world to see if anyone bothered. His perspective was uninformed, rooted in a myriad of biases, barely tolerant of others he shared the planet with, and studied over time was chronically contradictory.

Truth is, Trump tweeted his unstable feeling believing they were opinions worthy of showcasing and sharing. They weren't then and sadly, they aren't now. I would go so far as to say, his tweets are like the mirage of water on the hot summer pavement--illusory and shallow.

Since my brain has made that connection with the fictitious Pigpen engulfed in dust, I will see DJT in a swirl of chaos both within and without.