Another brilliant (and terrifying) essay, James.
While I am nowhere in your league I do have some personal experience to validate:
It has been said that the easiest person to con is another con. Perhaps this is because cons have absolutely no sense of the truth. There’re all bullshit salesmen. So this brings us to General Kelly who by all accounts is nothing like Trump.
In the 1970s I got a job working for a small early birth of computers and Internet company that sprouted in the
Swamp
that Trump is so fond of sucking at. I worked in management for people who were not trump scale but very similar in behavior to Trump. Imagine Trump something like a Cockroach the size of a Tyrannosaurus Rex and these people just regular finger size roaches. They were bullshit salesmen who destroyed themselves. Long, long, long story. A novel at least. And their self destruction was facilitated by a former Navy Seal and a brilliant young feminist female executive who were initially pulled into their orbit and then woke up to their vile nature and behavior.. Some things you just can’t make up.
And it gets even better. A few years later my wife and I found ourselves in battle with a fairly large New Age cult. (Both of these misadventures occurred in Oregon.) The cult leader (a very nasty peace of work) was a complete bull shit artist who stole about a million dollars over a 20 year period in ways that did not look like stealing and while not particularly violent (though kind of fond of hitting women and intimidating gullible cult followers) was very much a bull shit artist who believed his own bull shit. With the help of a brilliant young lawyer and some victims who turned into allies, my wife and I destroyed the cult in a law suit that went to the Oregon state supreme court. Without going into a novel length of details, we won by “swindling” (perfectly legally) him out of $50,000 because he believed his own bullshit.
Also, I discovered, I am not a nice person, too much like this cult leader. If I weren’t just barely smart enough to know that I would destroy myself, I would be not that different from Trump and crew, Accucom (the company I speak of) and Christopher Canfield’s Cerro Gordo the cult I speak of. All lost in the mists of time.
As we all will be.
Thanks again for great satire.
All hail the God of Satire
