Category Archives: Pride

2016 Presidential Election, American Politics, Conservatives, Elections, Fear, Foreign relations, Free speech, Immigration Reform, International Politics, Liberals, Plutocracy, Politics, Pride, Republican Party, Society, U.S. Government, U.S. History, US Domestic Policy, US Economic Policy, US Foreign Policy, Voting

Donald Trump is Eaten by a Lion

Leave a comment

Donald Trump is deeply unpopular. Recent polling has shown that he is actually viewed less favorably by people in the United States than lice, traffic jams, and root canals. His misogyny, xenophobia, racism, and hatred are repugnant to most of the country and most of the entire world, which has watched in horror as Trump went from being just a loud rich celebrity and reality show star to the presumptive nominee of a political Party that has existed for over 150-years. All of this got me thinking about how awful Trump truly is as a candidate, which is something I have written of before I even started considering whether or not he would make a better president than some of the most popular antagonists in film history. For instance, I got to wondering how would Trump fare as president compared to Scar, the villainous lion in the Disney classic The Lion King. My decision? Scar would make a better candidate and a better president than Donald Trump.

Let’s take a look at some of the policies of the two ‘candidates,’ here by examining the pros and cons of both of them.
Trump :

Pro*:
Has opposed the free trade agreements such as NAFTA that have decimated American manufacturing.

Has shown a willingness to re-examine the interventionist policies that have created and maintained an ‘American Empire.’

* Trump disclaimer – Donald Trump changes his positions so often that there is no certainty that he truly supports or will do any of the things he has said he will.

Con:
I won’t go too into this category because I did cover a lot of this before, so just a few:

Has obsessively pushed for a border wall between the United States and Mexico in spite of the fact that immigration from Mexico has been falling the last few years, and while he likes to say that ‘Mexico will pay,’ for the wall, he has absolutely no leverage to use to get them to do that, so the wall would cost billions of dollars of tax payer money to build, staff, and maintain.l

Has proposed banning all Muslims (a population comprised of 1.6 billion human beings in a world with around 7.4 billion people total) from entering the United States.

Has encouraged violence at his rallies and been so overtly racist that he has received unqualified support of white supremacist groups.

He is actually running on a pro-torture/war crimes platform, promising to increase the use of waterboarding and other methods of torture, including threatening harm to the civilian families of terrorists and to use them as hostages.

He is a misogynistic, racist, xenophobic, thin-skinned, short tempered, naïve, incompetent, bully.

If he became president, he would be the one with the nuclear codes and the power to pretty much launch a war anywhere in the world (officially Congress must declare war, but we went to war in Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan without any declaration of war in any of those cases).

Scar:

Con:
The whole brother-murdering thing.

The attempted murder of his nephew to cement his coup.

He seems to be a weak ruler as King.

Leaves the attempted murder of Simba to the same 3 hyenas who had failed to kill him once in the movie already, and then never looked into the matter.

Pro:
He is anti-entrenched monarchy and in favor of a more meritocratic system. He uses his intelligence and ruthlessness to grab the crown from his unsuspecting brother. He also neither sires an heir or appoints a successor, which proves that once he died, he hoped that a more democratic system would follow.

He opened society to include the downtrodden and excluded hyenas, who were hated and judged by all the other animals: Zazu called them ‘slobbering, mangy, stupid, poachers.’ So Scar was in favor of greater equality and diversity, and he even provided them with jobs and food BEFORE he took power.

It was absolutely not Scar’s fault that there was a massive drought that hit during his reign and caused the herds to move on. How is that Scar’s fault? He can’t make the weather!

And let’s remember that Simba was an ultra-entitled, greedy brat who, when his father showed him all the land that he would rule (due to no skill of his own, just to being born), his first thought was that he wanted the land that lay OUTSIDE the pride lands too.

The entitled Simba may have grown up to be a bad king (Zazu even tells him so) before he goes through the horror of losing his father and being exiled. So, if Simba was a great king, Scar deserves some of the credit there.

Voiced as a badass in a great performance by Jeremy Irons.

Scar intended to make sure all his subjects and supporters had more than enough food to eat, but again the drought came and changed that, and the drought was not his fault. Plus, as anthropomorphic as the animals are in The Lion King, we don’t see any of them farming or harvesting, meaning that even if he DID know that a drought was coming, there was no way to prepare for the coming food shortage except to try and expand the territory that the Lionesses would need to hunt in, which led to Nala finding Simba in the first place.

Admitted to Simba that it was he, Scar, who killed Mufasa, and not Simba.  If Simba died there – and he was in bad shape at that moment – he would at least have gone out without carrying the guilt that had gnawed at his heart for most of his life. Scar made sure that, if he DID kill his nephew, that he would at least go out with a clear conscience.

Based on all of that, I think Scar would make a far better president/ruler than Donald Trump. He was against the kind of exclusion that has been Trump’s bread and butter, and was in favor for a more equal society. Instead of scapegoating someone else or some other animal for the drought that accompanied his reign, he tried to handle it by giving more license to his surrogates. Scar was a believer in meritocracy, while we know that Trump, and his children and grandchildren, were born into wealth. Trump carries himself as someone who does not believe in the Separation of Powers or that the president must be limited by the Constitution, and he is so thin-skinned that it is not hard to imagine that he would use his power to vilify and attack the press for printing bad things about him. Meanwhile, Scar did not hold grudges and after he secured the throne for himself he didn’t even kill Zazu, in spite of the contempt that Zazu had shown for him from the beginning.

Scar 2016!

Assistance, Help, Medicare, Pride, Scoiliosis, Stubbornness, Welfare

Things We Are Not Supposed to Say #2

Leave a comment

“I need some help.”

It seems simple enough to ask for help, but it is a very hard thing to do (and to clarify, I’m not talking about anyone seeking help for addiction or other things like it – I’m speaking of financial assistance). We are encouraged in America to ‘pull ourselves up by our own bootstraps’ and in movies, books, and television we see character after character defiantly turn help away, always loudly proclaiming, “I don’t need your charity!” Why is it so hard to ask for help? Maybe it’s because, at least here in the United States of America, weakness and vulnerability are held in disdain. Asking for help is construed as a failure of the person in need of aid, and society roundly mocks those who require welfare or food stamps or unemployment insurance, or pretty much any kind of help at all from the government. In far too many cases we portray those who accept such assistance as lazy failures who have made a choice not to work out of a desire to be taken care of by more deserving ‘hard working’ people. A powerful stigma has been attached to governmental assistance and I know of many instances where people who were rightfully entitled to and in desperate need of such help have refused to accept it in order to avoid the negative associations with even needing such help to begin with, let alone taking it. I know this because I am one of those people.

On September 18th, 1998, I felt a sharp pain in my lower back as I rose to leave my first period class. I was born with Scoliosis and had a major surgery when I was 3-years-old, but in the 10-years after that surgery I had never had back pain of any kind; since that September 18th, I have never spent a single day out of intense back pain, and all of those days without hurting have long since faded from memory, and now seem like a dream of someone else’s life. The constant pain I deal with has put me in a situation where doing even the slightest bit of physical work is almost impossible. I can’t stand for very long, and while I can sit for a longer period of time, even that will hurt before too much time has passed. Walking or running hurts because my many spinal surgeries have left me with a fused spine and without the natural shock absorption that is a normal feature of the backs of most human beings. I am forced to take large quantities of powerful medications to deal with my suffering which makes many jobs impossible and makes driving even short distances something I must plan hours in advance to be sure my head is clear. I am in pain when I close my eyes to sleep at night, and again when I open them in the morning. It is my constant companion, and judging from the fact that most people develop back pain as they age, I’m not expecting it to get any better as I get older.

Because of my disability, I am eligible for many kinds of governmental assistance. While I enjoy the benefits of having Medicare, I have never accepted certain other things that I’m eligible to receive; I have not and cannot foresee accepting food stamps and welfare due both to the stigma attached to such things and my own foolish pride. I live a Spartan existence on the meager amount of disability money I get from the government while I simultaneously look for a job that will allow me to take advantage of my intelligence and my specific abilities, but it is hard to tell potential employers right off the bat that there are things one cannot do. I don’t even like to accept help when moving a heavy box; I refuse help and try to do it myself. Afterwards I’m either forced to admit defeat and accept the assistance I had refused before, or I manage to do the job myself and then spend the rest of the day – and sometimes more than one – dealing with the ramifications of my foolish decision.

I almost don’t know why I bring this up because I don’t expect to start seeking out or accepting aid tomorrow or any day soon. I have seen this strain of stubbornness in others both within and outside of my family, and have seen it lead to death too. I honestly believe that my grandfather’s death last year was in large part due to his refusal to accept the offer of my Aunt to move in with her both during and after Super storm Sandy hit New York and flooded his house in October of 2012. He finally took her offer after about a week of staying there freezing in his home and being forced – along with my step-grandmother, who had bad lungs for most of her life – to breathe in the mold of the rotting walls and hardwood floors. Just under a year later my step-grandmother Renee was dead, and my grandfather died two months after her. It should be a flashing neon light warning me of what can happen when one puts stubbornness and foolish pride ahead of necessity, and yet I have not changed my ways and I keep trying to deal with my disability the same way I have for years, keeping my head barely above the crashing waves while I refuse to accept the aid of the nearby rescue boats.

Asking for help is not easy and accepting it even less so. As a society we need to do a better job of teaching our children that it is OK to admit weakness and that requiring help is not some kind of moral failure. I hope we can pass this lesson on to future generations and remove the stigma of seeking help. And I hope that I too learn the lesson before I pass a point of no return, because over 16-years of near constant agony hasn’t been enough to convince me