Big Talkers, Butt-Ins, And Bores - The Curse Of The Vaporous And The Charm Of The Politician

Lena Barton was a big talker - an incessant, unstoppable, determined and woman who lurked, waited and pounced. She did not discuss or listen.  There was a djinn inside her which demanded exit.  Whether her hydrangeas, her health, or her boys, they needed out. Tapped within they did not exist; but when voiced whether to interested or uninterested listeners, they lived. 

 

The origins of this talkativeness - or rather this need to talk - were vague - Lena could only remember as a young child feeling the need to talk and to talk a lot.  Speech was a gift not to be wasted. It existed solely as a part of her whether or not it was listened to.  It was her own shamanic ritual, a purging of feelings which had built up in the night.  She told about her dreams and her nightmares, expanded and elaborated them the more she told about them until they had a life of their own and were no longer a part of her. 

 

At Sunday Mass she thanked God for giving her such eloquence - a kind of second, separate but equally important nature.  She could create worlds with her voice, translate imaginings into physical shapes, sounds and smells.  God had been particularly generous when it came to creating her out of a lump of clay. 

In adolescence it - her volubility - turned into gossip.  She couldn't help herself when she heard a rumor - like her speech, a foundationless thing which sprang up without reason or warning - and carried it, embellished it, and spread it.  Rather than isolated as the source of unattributed, unsubstantiated claims, she became a kind of Cumaean Sibyl - a prophetess, a seer - all of which gave her an unusual ascribed agency.  She became the arbiter of all things social - which boys were interested in which girls, who was anointed and who was left out.  Girls came to her for advice, for prophecy, and for guidance. 

Her college years began badly.  No one, it seemed, was that interested in what she had to say - a girl who rattled on was the take - but soon enough she found her voice and her calling. Although campus radicalism was of no interest - a desperate flogging of others on a grand scale for recognition - she was sought after for her by then marvelous prolixity.  Not only could Lena talk and be listened to, she could inspire and motivate.  It mattered little whether or not she believed in what she spoke, it was the articulation which counted - the cadence, the rhythm, the tonality, and the passion. 

Lena was a vaporous person - a woman without substance, principle, or purpose whose voice carried weight; and she used it to her advantage. If people listened, nodded, agreed or not, it made little difference. It was the swaying that gave her credibility and worth. 

It was magic, this ability to turn heads, to turn skeptics into believers, the indifferent into the committed. She had passed on not one iota of wisdom or good sense. It was her words, her gift of gab, her carefully crafted prolixity which did the job. People who heard her were delighted and convinced; and she, having found her calling, was satisfied. 

Opposites attract goes the old adage, and in a way it was true for Lena although with some codicils.  Brent Mayberry was also a big talker which if the old saw were true, she would have stayed clear; but Brent was a different kind of talker.  A bulldozing, voice-over talker.  Hearing a discussion on Joyce, he interrupted with reminiscences of County Cork, the six-pack of Guinness he had downed on the moors, and the lovely dark-haired blue-eyed maidens on his watch. 

He was a man who could not tolerate anyone else's voice. It was not a matter of agreeing or disagreeing but one of center stage.  He could not stand to be left out, a trait he inherited from his mother who no matter what the subject offered either confabulated history, statistics, citations or something from her own store of personal trivia.  

The woman was a tedious bore, demanding attention, claiming against all reason that she was right and it happened the way she said, and Brent got the picture.  He couldn't help himself when it came to discussion.  Drawing on fiction, imagination, and presumption he like his mother kept up the front and added pain to misery as they dominated and bullied their way into every conversation. 

 

So the relationship between Lena and Brent turned out to be a vaudevillian pas de deux.  She began with some impossible confabulation, and he interrupted with more of his own.  Before you knew it the conversation had become theirs and theirs alone, a world apart, disconnected from reason, rationality, and reality. 

One can only imagine their pillow talk, unless freed from the strictures of polite society, they were able to get to the heart of the matter; but the greater likelihood was that they stepped on each other's overtures and turned foreplay into a whodunnit of sexual conundrums. 

Lena waited for the opportunity to talk about Ralph at Wayne State, Bobbie at Ole Miss, and Ferdinand still at home, an assumption of interest that went far beyond neighborliness.  I was supposed to care until after many months of these hijackings I realized that nothing she said mattered to her either.  It was the telling that was important, not the import or the reception.  I could have been a block of granite for all it mattered to her. 

Big Talkers - The Psychosocial Dimensions Of A Compulsive Disorder was a monograph published by Duke University Press by Harold Underwood, PhD, Chairman of the Psycho-Psychiatric Department of the Medical School in which he chronicled the life of what he called 'the needy prolix'

The Needy Prolix needs no introduction, for she has been all our tables, interrupting, diverting, a virtual baboon hungry for attention.  She is obtuse, obvious, and niggardly but cannot stop talking. Somewhere in childhood her personality was distorted and reconfigured into that of an incessant, intolerable bore.  That of course is the popular appraisal. Professionally she is a sick puppy, in need of a reality check and brought back to the here and now. 

For that introduction Underwood was questioned by the editorial review board for what might be considered inflammatory speech but he convinced them that such a preamble was necessary to put the illness in relief.  He didn't condemn these Needy Prolix individuals. Others did, and that was the point.  

Lena was not hauled off in a straightjacket - not that kind of mental illness - although I avoided her like the plague when I saw her coming.  Other than that devilish prolixity, she was not a bad sort, but that is not the point either. I pitied her husband and had no sympathy for her until I read the Underwood sequel which delved further into the painful 'miasma of doubt' that people like her suffered. 

I was still not convinced, but chastened for my summary dismissal of a disturbed woman. I didn't run away when I saw her coming. 

Donald Trump’s Magical Mystery Tour – A Welcome Relief From The Humdrum World Of Facts

The American Left has insisted that it has a hold on the truth, and that the President is the dissembler, the liar, the charlatan, the purveyor of untruths.  He has woven a quilt of lies, distortions, and confabulations and asked the American public to believe him - a master of deceit and legerdemain.  He is a con artist, a carny barker, a common huckster, a snake oil salesman.

Of course he is.  He is a vaudevillian, a huckster, a man of image and promise, a comic book hero, a spinner of yarns, a master of sea shanties and tall tales; and Americans like it that way. After suffering the penitential Biden years – the hectoring, the badgering, the moroseness and God-awful guilt, the Trump presidency is a welcome change.

Ironically it was always progressives who were the confabulators, insisting that men could become women, that reproduction was a technical affair, easily dispensed with and relegated to the broom closet, allowing for the full expression of the diversity of sexual choice.

The black man was not a former slave, chosen, marketed and sold for his brawn and reproductively, but the highest form of human evolution.  A sentient man of the rainforest and savannah, attuned to the environment, grouped in natural, tribal communities and not those confining, arbitrary social gulags enforced by white colonialists.  The world was everyone’s oyster, borders were artificial, racist, restrictive barriers to a universal New Age. Wealth was fungible, rightfully taken from those who earned it to those most in need. 

The Devil in D0stoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov tells Ivan that he is a vaudevillian, and without him the world would be a deadly dull place, a predictable, sanctimonious slog.  With him there is magic, mystery, romance, and intrigue.  Who wants to hear tales of a faithful marriage, an honest politician, proper little boys and chaste little girls?

‘The truth is overrated’, says the Devil. ‘Just look around you, and tell me what you see.  Nothing is what it seems.  If the truth simply stared you in the face, all guesswork gone, all pomp and circumstance retired, every bit of image, fancy, and presentation put back in the dressing room wardrobe, you would invent your own stories.  Rumor and innuendo would take the place of fact, the invented would replace the real.  An oxymoronic circle – truth turned into a confabulation which becomes truth.  I am the one who makes that all possible’.

Liberals have asked Americans to look for the inner woman and dismiss the folly of beauty.  Commonality is to rule individuality – women are a protected class, all the same because of a universal inner worth.

Donald Trump has rejected this and all other confected notions out of hand and replaced virtue with sequins, jewelry, eyeliner, and high heels.  Beauty is not in the eye of the beholder, but absolute.  There is no difference between Venus de Milo and the Hollywood starlets of today.  Theirs is symmetry, perfection, the lines and contours of health, wealth, and stature.

This has always been the case, of course but the Trump illusion is that this historically iconic character – the essential, universal standards of female beauty – is an apotheosis, not something irrelevant and dismissible. Hollywood is not fictitious but high reality.  Image, timeless beauty, limitless appeal and seductiveness are its stock-in-trade.

Trump has created a vision of perfection– the perpetual classic beauty of history.  His reality dismisses the fictitious assumption that everyone is beautiful.

Bill Clinton said that he wanted his Cabinet to ‘look like America’ and opened the door to DEI – Diversity Equity Inclusivity –and by the time Biden was in office, that was the cultural ethos. There was no such thing as ugly, misshapen, disorderly – all were in the same welcoming basket.

Trump said that he wanted America to look like the most beautiful of its citizens. It was his version of Camelot, JFK’s own fantastical vision of the American presidency as a royal court. No one cares about the inner workings of government – the travails of governance – but what it looks like, what it reflects; and the parade of svelte, young, blonde, blue-eyed beauties parading up and down Pennsylvania Avenue headed for the West Wing are the new reality.

So the Devil has had his due – fantasies masquerading as competing truths, all made possible by a friendly demon who only wants to brighten what Thomas Hobbes said was a short, ugly, brutish existence.

‘Fake news!’ shouts Trump to a CNN reporter whose questions reflect a progressive reality while the real truth is in the fable created by the President.  America is the greatest country in the world, hands down, and don’t you forget it, and with the spangles, fireworks, glitz and glitter of the 250^th Fourth of July the truth was writ large.

Politics has always been a smarmy affair with the truth only a febrile dream.  Politicians have lied through their teeth, inventing the most impossible cover-ups to their sexual dalliances, war records, political journeys; and since it takes two to tango, it has required a credulous audience; and the American public has been more gullible than most, perhaps because of our long history of snake oil salesmen, hucksters, and shell game tricksters.

Trump does not lie, he invents, and voila la difference. As a man of Hollywood and Las Vegas, he is a master at his trade.  Don’t lie, create. Use a kaleidoscopic lens, not a microscope.

America prefers Trump’s fantasies to those of the Left – who wouldn’t?  The progressive vision has been squeezed dry of beauty, romance, and fun.  A life in a grim, windowless basement with no exit.

Philosophers have always known that there is no such thing as absolute truth.  The moral precepts taught by Cato the Elder are not God-given and absolute, but simply a proven code of civic behavior.

Psychologists have long understood that all perception is subjective – eyewitnesses see what they want to see.  Durrell, Browning, and Kurosawa have all written about lives that had no reality but that ascribed to them by different viewers.

The truth is not all it is cracked up to be.

The contest between Left and Right is like the epic, fabulist battles between right and wrong, Siva vs Ravana in the Ramayana – pure fantasy, epic, metaphorical, and a romping good ride.

Who cares about the truth?  Who could possibly care in a world with such confabulation and storytelling?

The Trump years are satisfying for many reasons, but the most compelling is that of the impossibly diametrically opposed fabulist visions of the political combatants – magnificent, sometimes perverse, but always fodder for epic battles.

Trump will always be the master of ceremonies, the impresario, the producer- the first cause while progressives can only manage a freak show, interesting in and of itself, but nothing to match the bombast of Donald Trump.  When the Donald Show leaves town, we will all be disappointed.

The President, The Priest, And The Call Girl - The Fascinating Complexity Of Donald Trump

Jimmy Carter was a moral, principled president in whose fireside chats a la FDR, looking very much like Mr. Rogers in his cardigan and simple shoes, he urged Americans to turn their heat down, thereby missing the point of the competitive, free market which is at the hear of the American enterprise. We are not a moral people and while we might adhere to the rules of polity that make civil society workable, we are not about to trade comfort, desire, and wealth for principle. 

There were those who admired Carter for such principle.  It was about time that a president used his bully pulpit for more than saber rattling and patriotism; but most Americans would only adjust their thermostats if made to - i.e. if there were a price to pay. 

  
Today's liberal acts with the same diffuse, arbitrary morality.  He recycles assiduously, assuring that cans are rinsed and never mixed with plastic, sorts and triages, and adds a compost bin to those in the alley.  The economics of recycling are irrelevant.  It is received wisdom, an obvious good, a must for the planet.  The same goes for electric vehicles, another unchallenged, absolute good.  

The child labor in the Eastern Congo, the gaping mining  holes in the Arizona desert, the disposal cost of toxic battery materials, the sudden and precipitous demand for electrical power generated by AI beggaring the environmental impact of E-vehicles, and the new geopolitical competition for rare earths destabilizing the Third World countries are all overlooked. 

The modern liberal, a legatee of Jimmy Carter's naive morality, persists in his accumulation of received wisdom.  Hypocrisy abounds.  Socialist Senator Bernie Sanders who advocates for every progressive cause and insists on the redistribution of wealth, is a millionaire, owns three homes travels to environmental conferences in a private jet and travels to the airport in gas-inefficient SUVs. 'Do as I say, not as I do', says the Senator.  'It's the principle that matters', and given P.T. Barnum's famous adage, 'A sucker is born every minute', millions of credulous Americans light  candle to the senator from Vermont and believe his every word. 

When Donald Trump arrived on the scene, few in the political aerie of Washington took him seriously.  He was a man without principle, without an iota of the compassion and humility of Carter or the rectitude of Joe Biden.  He had nothing of LBJ's higher order principles - The Great Society and Civil Rights.  Trump was a charlatan, a con man, a man of Hollywood, Las Vegas, and the mean streets of New York without a scintilla of morality.  He was out to enlarge, enhance, and expand his own personal financial empire at the expense of the nation. 

 

Of course he was none of those things. Liberals had simply never seen a man like this who had rock-solid conservative principles no different from Ronald Reagan but who was a vaudevillian, a tummler, a Borscht Belt comedian, and outrageous circus act who looked very much like America.  

Former President Bill Clinton famously announced that his Cabinet was 'going to look like America' and by so claiming he began the downward spiral into divisive, contentious DEI (Diversity Equity Inclusivity); but Trump was the first real American President - a man who not only tapped into middle class, middle brow, bourgeois aspirations, but embodied them.  He was crass, vulgar, and with a kitschy, tacky taste - as American as apple pie - and liberals hated him for abandoning their sense of righteousness and moral purpose. 

Worse than that, they saw him as evil – a sorcerer and shaman in the court of the Devil, a fiendish interloper who had to be stopped at all costs. It was no longer a matter of politics or matters for the loyal opposition.  This was a visitation of evil, a man not only without moral principle, but one espousing moral absence – a vacuity of principle not just a political revision.

His was a rule of perverse legerdemain through which he cast a spell on millions who were now his ardently defiant supporters.  Only political exorcism would rid the country of such scourge. Lawsuits, claims of personal and official malfeasance, and attacks on character and family went on for years but to no avail.  His attempts to reconstitute America into a soulless, acquisitive, morally indifferent country went undaunted.

The American Left engineered a revision of sexual identity, insisting that sexuality was only a matter of choice and preference.  Heterosexuality was only one option on the so-called gender spectrum, one of a hundred or more possibilities.  No one needed to be artificially locked into an arbitrary sexuality.  Biology and genetics were overruled. The 'other gendered' were championed as the new wave of social reconfiguration.  Motherhood, fatherhood, siblinghood, the whole gamut of reproduction and social organizations to encompass it were rethought.  The idea of sexual attractiveness, female beauty, and virility was reset. 

Except for Donald Trump who had always been the squire of beautiful women.  Ever since his earliest New York days, Trump was a sought-after male - handsome, wealthy, confident, and appreciative and lover of women.  Female company was part of his persona, his life and his weltanschauung - not just any women but the most beautiful, the most desirable, the top of the line. 

He like Dominique Strauss-Kahn, former French presidential candidate and well-known Lothario, did not stop there.  Their courtesan lovers were worthy of a Sultan's harem.  A beautiful, accommodating, attentive call girl was simply part of the sexual panoply.  When Strauss-Kahn was caught in a prostitution sting, he defiantly replied to his accusers, 'How was I to know they were prostitutes?  All women look the same with their clothes off'.

The allure of such men, both Trump and Strauss-Kahn, was limitless.  They were the quintessential, unreconstructed, unbowed, and unapologetic lover of women.  Women were not put off by their many lovers, but wanted men like this, men who reveled in sexual conquest, sexual favors, and the sexual satisfaction that only they could give. 

While Trump never dismissed homosexuals - his libertine philosophy was all-inclusive - he felt sorry for those who would never know the Lawrentian, ying-yang, Tantric pleasures of heterosexual sex. Homosexuality was not a perversion, but a sad missing out. 

And so it was that heterosexual sex defined the man, Trump, and whether princess or courtesan, he thanked God for the pleasure. 

This male, virile, strong-willed, dominant character was the real reason why Trump hatred emerged; and when added to his hopelessly bourgeois taste - the tacky White House ballroom, the outrageously Las Vegas Arch of Victory, or the Disney-esque Field of American heroes - on top of his radically conservative political initiatives, it was no wonder that the Left was apoplectic. It was one thing to hate a man for one of the three, but all three was the perfect storm. 

Never had progressives seen such a man, a profoundly American man, the embodiment of every lowbrow aspiration of the American lower classes, a sexual truant, a social deviant, and man so ruled by antagonism to good that he could only be a spawn of the Devil. 

This is why Donald Trump is the most complex, fascinating, and unique President in American history.  Other presidents have had lovers, popular appeal and challenging political policies; but none have had the complete package - a man to be envied. 

As psychologists know, envy leads to disastrous corners, and progressives who cannot bring themselves to admire such a sexually, politically, financially, and socially successful man, can only hate him. The perversion is theirs, not his. 

Complexity is hard for the single-minded, and the American Left has shown itself to be a Johnny One Note, capable of one thing and one thing only - hate for Donald Trump. 

The rest of the country has seen a once in a lifetime - no, once in history - American original, and the country will never forget him. 

Of course many of his policies are worth examination and opposition - such is the nature of radical politics - but that is beside the point.  To miss the Donald Trump show and to focus on the obvious, predictable, nit-picky aspects of governance, is to miss the spectacle of a lifetime.