Naked and Pregnant

It is not that I liked or did not like the projected image of Donald Trump naked and pregnant being embraced by a naked Putin from behind, but that I appreciated living in a country where that was possible–and I do not believe that anyone in Public Office has the same rights when representing that office as you or I–it’s not that due process no longer prevails, but the protections from criticism and even mocking are not the same. And it is not that the same protections from slander are not present because they are. But then this projection has nothing to do with slander, and that’s not debatable. If you imagine that the projected image of a naked pregnant Trump is slander then you do not know what slander is. And the brilliance of the contextualization is Trump’s pregnant-ness; if he were simply not pregnant then there could be innuendo that Trump is gay, which might verge into slander, but I would not try that case. Some would, and that would not have to enter into (but might be rooted in nonetheless) inferences of homosexuality as a social pejorative. The pregnant Trump takes it out of the real or the possibly real; there is no mistaking this as a fictional context–and I am not here to debate fictional truth(s) or the boundaries of such in old or new epistemologies. I do believe that the Literary is a separate and viable branch of epistemology, but that argument is not to be taken up here,

And what if it is hateful, as so many critics of the projection have said? And I am not so sure what grace really has to with politics–especially Trump, unless when Trump is an asshole, that’s okay–but this is not to engage in any further ping pong from anyone pretending to be shocked. This does not SHOCK me unless we’re pretending that we have delicate sensibilities or that we have suddenly become Puritans. But once more, let me say, Trump has disgraced the Presidency already far more than any image like this. I always seem to underestimate the Puritanism that runs through Americans. But then I am with Jean-Paul Marat and the Jacobins, so do not get me started because you’ll all be running for cover in your churches, often the first and the last hiding ground of many an immoral Moralist who loves just to moralize and moralize and moralize some more. Usually wrong, the moralizer in matters of morality. Anyone who reads the Gospels of Jesus Christ and hears a moralizer is an idiot.

Now given Trump’s use of slander and innuendo, at what amounts to an alarming rate (so much so that I do question his sanity or his scruples, which I have not believed he has ever had, knowing his persona from New York media as far back as the 70s), I now question anyone’s intelligence who should say that we need to give Trump a chance . . . yeah, I know, to Make America Great Again–and you do know that Hitler, Mussolini, Juan Peron, Franco all said virtually the same thing . . . whether it was Germany, or Italy, or Argentina, or Spain, let X equal any country transformed into Nation-State as a substitute for God. This is why many demagogues either use God or Mysticism rather than rationality. Now this is not in itself what makes it bad, his saying what he has said over and over unto becoming a nauseating slogan, but that it is how simplistic the demagoguery of power plays in politics work so easily . . . themselves a collective testimony to how superficial we are, how lazy, how gluttonous, how semi-literate and under-educated we have become.