Sunday, February 05, 2017

The Sound Of The Fury

It is probably the lame-stream media that is to blame, but I am growing tired of reading headlines that read things like "Trump Blasts," "Trump Threatens," "Trump Squelches" and so on. It would be so very nice to have a day of news that didn't include some sort of rant, tweet or bellow that issued forth from the White House. 
However, I don't expect that time to be coming in the next four years or so. As mellifluous as I might have found the speaking style of Barack Obama, I feel just the opposite about the current resident of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Those oft-parodied pauses in Obama's speech were, I believe placed there for thought. Not just on the his part, but on the listener's as well. What we hear now comes in one hundred forty character bursts that seem to land on our ears with the understanding that it up to us to figure out what he meant.
"Iran has been formally PUT ON NOTICE for firing a ballistic missile. Should have been thankful for the terrible deal the U.S. made with them!"
 "Do you believe it? The Obama Administration agreed to take thousands of illegal immigrants from Australia. Why? I will study this dumb deal!"
"If U.C. Berkeley does not allow free speech and practices violence on innocent people with a different point of view - NO FEDERAL FUNDS?"
Sometimes it's difficult to put a voice to the words we read on social media. Not in this case. The cadence and delivery is easily translatable to those of King Tweet. Sitting around a table on the First of February, opening Black History Month, all those random disassociated ideas came pouring out. “You all read about Dr. Martin Luther King a week ago when somebody said I took the statue out of my office, and it turned out that it was fake news,” Tweet said at the top of the meeting, which was attended by roughly twenty civil rights and religious leaders and black members of the Tweet administration. “Fake news. The statue is cherished. It’s one of the favorite things in the — and we have some good ones. We have Lincoln. And we have Jefferson. And we have Dr. Martin Luther King. … But they said the statue, the bust of Dr. Martin Luther King, was taken out of the office. And it was never even touched.” He did go on: “Frederick Douglass is an example of somebody who’s done an amazing job and is being recognized more and more, I notice. Harriet Tubman, Rosa Parks and millions more black Americans who made America what it is today,” the "President" continued. “Big impact.”
I don't know if I can get used to this. I am pretty sure I don't want to.

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