They Are Relevant. He Shouldn't Be. Hence the Challenge.

The challenge for us, as we attempt to move forward, is to severe a connection: That between 45, who shouldn't be relevant, and those who are--the ones he's bamboozled into believing in him.

That will be his last stand: To go back out on the campaign trail--he's never left it--and get the minions to feel so sorry for him and thus themselves.

It's the same strategy that got him where we wound up, in the exact wrong place. He doesn't govern; he doesn't know how. He remains completely disconnected with any reality but his own.

All he can do successfully is complain about how things used to be as opposed to the way they are. Oh, and bully: That he can do quite well.

He's like some of those kids I used to teach: Mostly male, lacking self-esteem, perpetually tied to self-pity, suspicious of anyone who thinks they're smart or thinks they have to be so, making sure to make fun of them so they can hear it--hence his endless picking on California Congressman Adam Schiff, the nerd-turned heat-seeking missile who happens to be the chair of the House Select Committee on Intelligence--and refusing to engage in anything remotely indicative of utilizing the development of one's brain.

Instead of high school hallways, they're in bars now, usually after work, grousing about how unfair the world has always been. They're the ones 45 feasts upon, goading them as they do likewise.

Teachers never could reach them, because they're both jealous and dismissive of them. Teachers, after all, have to enforce the rules of the school and their classrooms and try to persuade kids that their particular subjects are worth reading, listening and talking about. Nobody in this roving cabal would be caught dead raising their hands in class to volunteer anything but the utmost cynicism. Teachers are the people on whom they take out their frustration.

This is not new. There was an excellent analysis written about this right after 45's election that was spot-on. But it bears repeating. They're still there. They either remain grousers or get worse and become alt-right apologists and/or ersatz defenders, with or without automatic weapons.

They never got over themselves. They keep snarling. What they need is someone to reach out to them somehow, not to humiliate but to enlighten, if they would and could but allow it. All teaching and learning was, and always will be, a two-way street, after all. If you just listen to one source that reinforces everything you ever wanted to think about yourself, well, that will be your reality whether or not it has anything to do with actual reality.

They'll remain, too, far after 45 is gone, regardless of the manner in which it's done. Truly, they deserve an audience, but not an audience alone: One, au contraire, that engages in a conversation that might begin thus: Okay, then, what can be done about it? And will you help us figure that out? Remember: You're living in this country, now, not the one that once was. It's not the same place. It will never be, either.

They're the ones, too, who will mourn their speeding tickets when "everybody else was speeding, too, they just caught poor me," and put out on Facebook those compilation of prices for every-day groceries back in the 1950s. It's a classic mentality: Don't you wish you had the money you have now and the prices that were being charged back then? But how silly is that? How productive? What purpose does it do besides keep us from thinking about how to move forward in the best possible way?

That's what 45's doing, though. Every time he says something about "back then," he's appealing to that mentality. It's tempting for all of us, true. But we literally get nowhere if we rely on it.

That's 45's thinking in a nutshell: He wants us to get nowhere--nowhere but to rely completely on whatever he says and double-down on his reality his way: Only I can fix. That's getting to be a very tired approach, one that's completely skewed from actual reality. That, too, will be exposed during this unfortunate but necessary impeachment process.

After it ends, there will be a clear and ongoing challenge: To get the cynics to believe in this country again--the country that is, not the one that once was. The former really can be better than the latter. But we will need their help, not their wistful thinking. Too.

Be well. Be careful. I'll see you down the road.


Mister Mark