Distracted by Repulsive Objects

I highly recommendFintan O ' Toole ' s new piece in NYRB, which they have kindly made available to non-subscribers. Do read the whole thing, depressing as it is, because it may knock some scales from your eyes. Here ' s a key paragraph:There is, surely, a reason why books that give us Trump in all his outlandish tawdriness —like Michael Wolff’sFire and Fury and Bob Woodward ’sFear: Trump in the White House—cannot, however appalling their accounts may be, do him any harm. They are exercises in “looking straight at him to learn the truth about him,” an act that seems entirely right by any traditional political and journalistic standard but that misses the specificity of Trump’s performance . If you look straight at such a glaring object, you are blinded.While the media fill their pages with his grotesque antics, vile slanders, bigotry, ignorance, schoolyard insults, the relentless torrent of lies, narcissism and psychopathy, something substantive is going on that the world is ignoring. The administration is destroying the federal government -- the infrastructure of social welfare, environmental protection, financial regulation, community investment, science and technology that has been steadily built since World War II. In this endeavor, the Resident ' s ignorance, incompetence and laziness are assets, not liabilities.In reviewing Michael Lewis ' s The Fifth Risk, O ' Toole notes that the federal government seems extraordinarily incompetent at letting the public k...
Source: Stayin' Alive - Category: American Health Source Type: blogs