America

Posted by Ray Schaufeld on Tue, 08 Nov 2016

Clinton or Trump? Sometime tomorrow we shall know the answer to this nasty, brutish and very long Presidential campaign. My money's on Trump. 'Brexit plus, plus, plus' - the man said it himself. He would not get my vote (and I voted Remain) but we have to look long and hard at where these massive protest votes are coming from.

Yeats made a prescient point in his poem The Second Coming, written in 1919

'The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.'

Comments

Submitted by thornwood on

My moneys on clinton to win. Things are going to be right interesting if trump wins though this is not neccessarily a good thing.

Stephen d

Submitted by Ray Schaufeld on

We live in a Mickey Mouse world and Donald Duck is now president. However he made an intelligent and generous winning speech. 'One time in a thousand the wise man speaks not right, one time in a thousand the fool shines bright'(old Chinese proverb). Can this bigoted old fool now act wisely, perhaps with good advisers on all sides. I live in hope.indecision

Submitted by celticman on

funny elsie those lines sprung to my mind from the second coming. 

 

Submitted by Ray Schaufeld on

That lack of conviction can be lethal. Think of Corbyn's 'I support Remain by seven tenths' compared to the bombast of Farage.

As for passionate intensity and an unswervable conviction that he was right and that he would have the support of the people come what may, yesterday Simon Schama compared Trump to Hitler. I disagree, Trump has often been a loudmouthed idiot but he lacks the hate of Hitler, perhaps becauses he loves himself too much. But his supporters are 'Hitler's supporters' - the ordinary Joes who have lost their jobs, lost their faith in the system, people who have a burning national pride in being English or American and feel that the powers that be scorn them and walk all over them, a willingness to blame the foreigner, - the Jew, the Muslim, the Mexican...sad

Submitted by celticman on

nearer to Mussolini 

 

Submitted by Ray Schaufeld on

yes, you could be right

 

Submitted by Ray Schaufeld on

As my father once said, 'back in the 30's the world was run by criminals - Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini....'

Submitted by celticman on

you could be right too - unfortunately.