The past five years in American politics have been different from most others of the 20th Century in their absence of courteous formality and restraint, creating a seemingly one-way street with all names displaying the same individual…Donald J. Trump, whose image in the media has shown an egomania that seems to suck in all the oxygen that would normally be shared in rational discussion and debate. The results are tantrums generally reserved for and sometimes expected from infants with diapers that need changing. The constant pontificating and bullying by this crude fraudster have convinced too many weak-minded and unquestioning worshipers that slander and ugly lies can win the day if they are non-stop enough that no one can keep up with them. Civility, grace, truth and mutual respect are reserved for the “suckers” in Trump’s mode of thought.
The result of this man’s lies (latest count: over 35,000 documented untruths over the past five years) is a state of confusion or self-righteous comfort for the many who never question his motives or even his sanity. He’s like a playground bully who believes that rules and laws are only for suckers. Now that he’s being more systematically cornered by truths that appear daily in the media, he has become an even uglier caricature of himself, lashing out with responses from his fountain of lies in order to addle the more naïve and desperate, who still believe he gives a damn about them. They continue to admire the rawness of his rhetoric, which they mistake for truth instead of the sham that covers his fear and revulsion of his ever having to face any unifying message of honesty or sense of community that isn’t under his thumb.
History will have an interesting retrospective about this man and his monumental evasions of truth, compassion, reason, and hope for such a long time that it has brought about an ugly and unnecessary national division, the intensity of which we, as a nation, have not seen since the 1860’s. JB
About John
About John
John Bolinger was born and raised in Northwest Indiana, where he attended Ball State University and Purdue University, receiving his BS and MA from those schools. Then he taught English and French for thirty-five years at Morton High School in Hammond, Indiana before moving to Colorado, where he resided for ten years before moving to Florida. Besides COME SEPTEMBER, Journey of a High School Teacher, John's other books are ALL MY LAZY RIVERS, an Indiana Childhood, and COME ON, FLUFFY, THIS AIN'T NO BALLET, a Novel on Coming of Age, all available on Amazon.com as paperbacks and Kindle books. Alternately funny and touching, COME SEPTEMBER, conveys the story of every high school teacher’s struggle to enlighten both himself and his pupils, encountering along the way, battles with colleagues, administrators, and parents through a parade of characters that include a freshman boy for whom the faculty code name is “Spawn of Satan,” to a senior girl whose water breaks during a pop-quiz over THE LAST OF THE MOHICANS. Through social change and the relentless march of technology, the human element remains constant in the book’s personal, entertaining, and sympathetic portraits of faculty, students, parents, and others. The audience for this book will certainly include school teachers everywhere, teenagers, parents of teens, as well as anyone who appreciates that blend of humor and pathos with which the world of public education is drenched. The drive of the story is the narrator's struggle to become the best teacher he can be. The book is filled with advice for young teachers based upon experience of the writer, advice that will never be found in college methods classes.
Another of John's recent books is Mum's the Word: Secrets of a Family. It is the story of his alcoholic father and the family's efforts to deal with or hide the fact. Though a serious treatment of the horrors of alcoholism, the book also entertains in its descriptions of the father during his best times and the humor of the family's attempts to create a façade for the outside world. All John's books are available as paperbacks and Kindle readers on Amazon, and also as paperbacks at Barnes & Noble. John's sixth book is, Growing Old in America: Notes from a Codger was released on June 15, 2014. John’s most recent book is a novel titled Resisting Gravity, A Ghost Story, published the summer of 2018
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