The emperor has no clothes
He's naked. Say it with me.
Back when I gave speeches (a lot), people would complain that they thought the news focused too much on the bad and the ugly.
I have a different take on that. The news is loaded with aberrations, which lean toward the crappy. You can’t get much of a conversation going with a story that starts, “Hey, all my tires stayed aired up today!” but let one tire go flat, and now we have a story.
We are all basically five years old, and 5-year olds expect good things to happen. When good things don’t, we are upset. We follow these aberrations — the coach who’s a pervert, the family man who cheats — because we think these things shouldn’t happen or don’t happen often, and so we must review the details of each instance over and over to figure out how that event came about.
When we have aberration after aberration, this is what we get. We get now. We get shaky foundations and whiplash from trying to keep up.
And so we turn to Hans Christian Andersen’s 1837 story, “The Emperor’s New Clothes.”
As a reminder: A vain clothes horse of an emperor is told by two tailors that they can create an outfit that will be visible only to a certain class — the smart, the worthy, the competent people.
In fact, no such clothes exist, but the vain emperor doesn’t want to admit he cannot see the fabric, and so rather than be honest, he parades around in his birthday suit, urged on by his Cabinet members advisers until his nakedness is finally pointed out by a child too unworldly to care if telling the truth might have negative consequences.
But that’s all it takes, someone speaking up. And soon, the entire town joins in and admits the emperor is naked.
So let’s remind ourselves that the emperor MuskTrump has no clothes. Let’s say it a lot and let’s remind our neighbors. The emperor depends on our acquiescing to the lies, and with every act of rebellion, we resist the lie.
This point resonates: “We are all basically five years old, and 5-year olds expect good things to happen.” The Naked Man jumps all over that reality time and again because he knows that MAGA, in particular, is filled with whiners who believe they have been wronged by government, Democrats, Liberals, or whoever else the Naked Man says has wronged them. The reality is, in the history of the world, on average, the lives of human beings have never been safer, healthier, and more lucrative. But the Naked Man will never acknowledge that fact because it would undermine his entire fear-based power structure.
As the Bible says, love of money is the root of all evil.
Fred Trump was a monster, by all accounts. So is Musk's father Errol, and his mother Maye is no prize, either. Know who else had abusive fathers? Stalin, Hitler, and Ceausescu, who all killed millions of their own people, or allowed them to die of starvation. Trump and Musk haven't got a milligram of empathy between them. No wonder they found each other.