the ultimate populist

When a populist wins the election.  He can and does still call himself a populist.  Witness the tea party.  Those guys won ranting against the fat cats and then promptly gave the fat cats everything they wanted, but they never changed their rhetoric and called their more moderate fellows RINOs and then along came Trump and they stuck to him like glue, and those in safe districts are doing quite well, but I believe some of the bigger buffoons have fallen.  I would like to read an article about whatever became of the tea partiers.  Well I see that Mister Google has a plethora of articles on the subject, which I will read later.

I call Trump the ultimate populist because, although he has a variety of right wing causes that he shuffles around in his deck of discord, he himself is more important than any of them.  He has his coterie, but they have no power on their own, they echo Trump, often having to do some not-so-fancy footwork when he changes his mind, and if he displeases any of them, or if he just wakes up in the morning in a mood, they are gone.

I've heard that before the Russian revolution the peasants worshiped the Czar.  They thought that their lives were miserable because of their immediate overlords and the overlords of those overlords and if they could somehow communicate to the Czar, why he would make everything right  Trump has cut through all this by not having any middlemen.

Though, as I have said he shuffles issues around the big kahuna would be the wall.  The part about Mexico paying for it has largely fallen away, and very little, if any, of it has been built.  He had both houses of congress for two years, and one since then, and yet hardly a brick has been put in place.  Has this hurt his standing with the basket of deplorables?  Not at all.  Because the wall is not the wall, the wall is Trump and he is still tossing them red meat so everything is hunky dory with them.  Trump is them, they are Trump.  It is a victory for the People.  The ultimate populist.


It wasn't that long ago, ten, twenty thousand years, that we humans were part of the wild, and then we discovered agriculture.  Instead of roaming around hunting and gathering and not leaving much of a mark, we started plotting land, took it out of the wild and brought it into civilization.  The rest of the forest was God's and the little plot was now Man's.

Could that have been the tree of the knowledge of good and evil?  Clearly taking something of God's and making it Man's was evil, but we did it anyway.

Of course we can't know what that writer or group of writers was thinking like six thousand years ago, but that leaves us free to say whatever we want doesn't it?


Leaving tomorrow for the Fourth in Champaign.  Won't be getting back till Friday, and won't be posting again until Monday, so you dawgs carry on without me.


Oh, we were talking about bugs on the 21st floor so I took this photo yesterday morning.