Bye Bye, Donald

When it comes to PC, the world is now a china shop – yet we seem willing to tolerate the presence of the bull, and find it amusing when he knocks over a couple pieces of crockery. But then he hits the Ming vase, and he’s done.

I said to friends yesterday that I actually admired one quality in Donald Trump – that whatever anyone threw at him, he was invariably able to catch it and throw it back. Maybe what came out of his mouth was complete BS, but he said it with absolute conviction. He never let anything slow him down.

At a certain point, though, our expectations get so low that we’re not surprised when something bad happens. Look, I am no lover of Megyn Kelly. It’s chemical with me. I admire strong women, but she is what a female friend used to call a “hard number.” There was something unsavory to me about how the first individual question to Trump during the debate Thursday night had to come from her, and it was about his documented attitude toward women – and she asked the question with just a little too much glee for my taste. His response was kind of a joke, but he showed no sign of distress. He put his head down and charged.

But that was Cleveland, not Pamplona, and it was a Presidential debate, not reality TV – even though some 24 million people watched it, and I’m sure the popcorn consumption went up that night.

Then there is Trump’s other quality. True to form, he couldn’t leave things alone. He had to pile on Ms. Kelly during a CNN interview on Friday with remarks about what seemed to be her menstrual cycle. Could it be that even those who have been secretly enjoying Donald Trump now have to admit that their Enough Already buttons have been pushed?

Metaphors and analogies are so much fun, so I’ll leave you with another – and you can bring your popcorn. When I was a little boy, I liked going to grown-up movies, because I knew that a cartoon was shown at the beginning, so I had at least something to enjoy. But the cartoon lasted only about five minutes. The grown-ups who took me along may have chuckled at the cartoon a little, if it was good, but they weren’t there to see that. They wanted the movie to start. That’s what they paid their ticket money for.

The cartoon is over for the Republicans. Time to roll the feature.

Fascination with the Monsters Among Us

I think it’s very clear to most of us by now that most people are fine human beings – but not all. And often, we think they’re the former, and they turn out to be the latter. Now we have a school bus driver from Cleveland, Ariel Castro, accused of kidnapping and holding three women in bondage for 10 years. This is the lead international story, and every day, new horrors surface.

How many of us are shaking our heads in disbelief, calling for the eternal torture of the alleged perpetrator, while lapping up every “breaking news” detail that’s breathlessly delivered to us by anchors and reporters, some of them shaking their own heads? How much is a part of us enjoying this story? Do you think maybe the news media folks know this?

That said, I wonder if devoting 45 minutes of every hour to this isn’t a bit much. Sometimes, I think the news producers aren’t good at gauging when most of us yearn to change the channel and see something else. Maybe it’s just that I and some of the rest of you have seen this movie already: “Manhunter” or “Silence of the Lambs.” How long do you think it will be before the Cleveland movie comes out?

I think the Stockholm Syndrome has been covered well past the point of exhaustion. If there is a live topic here, though, I think it’s about privacy. Where is the bright line between minding one’s own business and intervening where it might save victims many years of grief? When do we pick up the phone and call 911 to report something suspicious, or is that just paranoid meddling? In a world where privacy is a vanishing commodity, where does our duty to respect it end and our duty to help another human being begin? If we help, are we heroes? And if we don’t, are we, in some small measure, accessories?

These questions may make us squirm a lot more than the story itself does.