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I wrote about the longest week ever -- and the fantasy of strength and the anxiety of weakness that defined it. https://the.ink/p/the-illness-he-is
He is a weak man who has always longed to be a strong man, and he is a weak man’s idea of a strong man, and right before he got sick he made it clearer than ever that he intends to be a strongman. https://the.ink/p/the-illness-he-is
Then came the taxes story.
And at first it seemed like the kind of tax avoidance that represents strength at rigging things.
But this was not that. This was a tax avoidance of weakness — a man just not that good at business. https://the.ink/p/the-illness-he-is
And at first it seemed like the kind of tax avoidance that represents strength at rigging things.
But this was not that. This was a tax avoidance of weakness — a man just not that good at business. https://the.ink/p/the-illness-he-is
Then the debate. At first I worried that Trump's performance of faux-strength, though vulgar and crude, would work.
Then I remembered how vast is the coalition of people who have been on the wrong end of that kind of fraudulent, hollow flexing of power. https://the.ink/p/the-illness-he-is
Then I remembered how vast is the coalition of people who have been on the wrong end of that kind of fraudulent, hollow flexing of power. https://the.ink/p/the-illness-he-is
And then what he had enabled to go around all these months at last came around to him. His has been a policy of manslaughter at scale. Now it risked becoming a policy of suicide as well. https://the.ink/p/the-illness-he-is
Whatever ended up happening to his body, it seemed clear that his illness represented the death of a certain widespread and catastrophic kind of masculinity. https://the.ink/p/the-illness-he-is
The reason he held that super-spreader event was to help Amy Coney Barrett usher in a world in which women are weaker than they are now, a world defined by the every-man-for-himself economic fantasy that has animated the right for the last four decades. https://the.ink/p/the-illness-he-is
What is dying now is so much bigger than him. It is this fantasy, this masquerade, of strength.
https://the.ink/p/the-illness-he-is
https://the.ink/p/the-illness-he-is
What is dying is this old, empty, puffed-up way of being a man. https://the.ink/p/the-illness-he-is
What is dying is this economic philosophy that murders human potential in the name of birthing it. https://the.ink/p/the-illness-he-is
What is dying is this insistence on doing one’s thing, listening to no authority ordering you to cover your orifices, and preferring death on a genocidal scale to your own yielding. https://the.ink/p/the-illness-he-is
What is dying is this clinging to the kind of freedom that kills you. https://the.ink/p/the-illness-he-is
Who knows in what state he will leave the hospital?
What matters more is that everything he represents is dying. This toxic pursuit of strength that has brought America damn near down on its knees. https://the.ink/p/the-illness-he-is
What matters more is that everything he represents is dying. This toxic pursuit of strength that has brought America damn near down on its knees. https://the.ink/p/the-illness-he-is
He is what little he is.
But a whole kind of time feels like it’s ending.
The real struggle now is to define what will replace it.
Read the whole essay at The Ink and share with those who need to hear it: https://the.ink/p/the-illness-he-is
But a whole kind of time feels like it’s ending.
The real struggle now is to define what will replace it.
Read the whole essay at The Ink and share with those who need to hear it: https://the.ink/p/the-illness-he-is
