Weekend Reflections: Alone and Blue in Limbo


Is he lonely here?
Or do the empty spaces
define his freedom?

On September 14, my old internet haunt Trump is God — okay, it’s still officially called American Thinker, for reasons of nostalgia, I suppose — ran a piece by one Frank Hawkins, an octogenarian, entitled, “The 10 Greatest Americans of My 8 Decades.”

I read the title. I stifled a retch. I immediately knew who would be number one on the list. After all, why would anyone write such an article in the first place — and why would American Thinker publish it — except (like almost every other article on AT these days) as yet another excuse to say “Trump is the one true god”?

I’m able to feel a certain pity and forbearance for an eighty-year-old man who needs to feel he is seeing something positive in his latter years, and therefore imagines the last man he had a chance to vote for is the one he has been waiting for, as it were. But why does such sentimental pap deserve to be posted on a website that still uses the word “thinker” in its name, and that used to be regarded by many people (and deservedly so) as one of the more serious and intellectually rewarding “conservative media” sources?

After listing his personal pick of the ten greatest Americans of the past eighty years, culminating in Trump, who “stepped up to ‘make America great again,'” and whose “record of accomplishment is already unprecedented for an American president” — still waiting for details on this highly-touted “record of accomplishment,” and expecting to continue waiting — Hawkins then tacks on an honorable mention list far, far longer than all of Trump’s tiny fingers put together. This seemingly interminable and random list includes — remember we are talking about “greatest Americans” — Marilyn Monroe, various young social media billionaires, successful entrepreneurs, professional athletes, Clint Eastwood, establishment mole Matt Drudge, American Thinker‘s favorite black conservative writer Lloyd Marcus, and Kris Paronto, the CIA security contractor who survived Benghazi and recently got suspended from Twitter for suggesting Barack Obama ought to suffer an attack similar to the one that killed four Americans.

In other words, Mr. Hawkins is infatuated with the kind of fame and material success that dominates pop culture trivia, as well as with presidential power (the top four spots on his list are all presidents — not a single senator, congressman, or governor appears anywhere) and patriotic iconoclasm, so it is hardly surprising he loves the perfect amalgamation of all those enthusiasms, President Celebrity Billionaire himself.

AT posted this pathetic effusion. Hundreds of commenters jumped in to discuss Hawkins’ choices — to quibble over the merits of a few of the picks of a man who just said that Donald Trump is the greatest American since 1938! Which puts me in mind of analogous lists, and similar “discussions,” that must have been floating around Germany back in ’38.

The cult just keeps getting cultier.


A dead leaf reminds
us of Nature’s colors — of
life before Limbo

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