Friday, December 29, 2017

The View From Inside:
He's Going Down

Down down down down down ... Love the kick drum on this number. Thwack thwack thwack thwack thack!
"Inside My Brain"
Dr. Charles P. Pierce (not an actual medical-type croaker) checks inside Trump's brain.
In my view, the interview is a clinical study of a man in severe cognitive decline, if not the early stages of outright dementia.

Over the past 30 years, I’ve seen my father and all of his siblings slide into the shadows and fog of Alzheimer’s Disease. (The president's father developed Alzheimer's in his 80s.) In 1984, Ronald Reagan debated Walter Mondale in Louisville and plainly had no idea where he was. (Would that someone on the panel had asked him. He’d have been stumped.) Not long afterwards, [sic] I was interviewing a prominent Alzheimer’s researcher for a book I was doing, and he said, “I saw the look on his face that I see every day in my clinic.” In the transcript of this interview, I hear in the president*’s words my late aunt’s story about how we all walked home from church in the snow one Christmas morning, an event I don’t recall, but that she remembered so vividly that she told the story every time I saw her for the last three years of her life.

In this interview, the president* is only intermittently coherent. He talks in semi-sentences and is always groping for something that sounds familiar, even if it makes no sense whatsoever and even if it blatantly contradicts something he said two minutes earlier. To my ears, anyway, this is more than the president*’s well-known allergy to the truth. This is a classic coping mechanism employed when language skills are coming apart. (My father used to give a thumbs up when someone asked him a question. That was one of the strategies he used to make sense of a world that was becoming quite foreign to him.) My guess? That’s part of the reason why it’s always “the failing New York Times,” and his 2016 opponent is “Crooked Hillary."

[...]

So, no, I don’t particularly care whether Michael Schmidt was tough enough, or asked enough follow-up questions. I care about this.
I’m always moving. I’m moving in both directions. We have to get rid of chainlike immigration, we have to get rid of the chain. The chain is the last guy that killed. … [Talking with guests.] … The last guy that killed the eight people. … [Inaudible.] … So badly wounded people. … Twenty-two people came in through chain migration. Chain migration and the lottery system. They have a lottery in these countries. They take the worst people in the country, they put ‘em into the lottery, then they have a handful of bad, worse ones, and they put them out. ‘Oh, these are the people the United States. …” … We’re gonna get rid of the lottery, and by the way, the Democrats agree with me on that. On chain migration, they pretty much agree with me.
[Yellow, orange, whatever. We don't see color.]
We’ve got bigger problems.
No shit.

More from the act most in tune &/or obsessed w/ whatever's going on in their gray matter:
"Right Side Of My Mind"
And a bonus downer:
The Wolf - "Going Down Slow"
Let's hope the downfall is not so slow it draws everything else in, black hole-style.

1 comment:

Frank Wilhoit said...

Pierce does need to care whether Schmidt was "tough enough", tho' that may not be the very best word with which to label the axis I am thinking of, which is the one along which a skilled interviewer could reduce Trump to total emotional collapse in thirty minutes. God speed the day when someone steps up and does this -- on film.