POTUS
He’s just a phase in history, but when will this phase end?
The whole world’s breath is being held. When will he round the bend?
As he jogs on in his next race, we wish that it were ended.
Surely as he gains in girth, he must be getting winded!
Yet our domestic maniac goes on planning his crazies.
The world will not be sane again ’til he’s pushing up daisies!
Word prompts for the day are domestic, maniac, history and phase. Image by Visuals on Unsplash. Used with permission.
Knave of Coins
Bored with all his yesterdays, needing a new tomorrow,
grown used to fickle intimacies, much to all our sorrow
he stood upon a precipice where the whole world looked back
and declared himself the ruler of the whole damn pack.
That anybody listened is a sort of modern miracle.
He wasn’t very smart and he surely was not lyrical.
Though he understood but little, what he knew just seemed to work.
One can capture much attention by being a dumb jerk.
He pulled the haters to him—the fearful and the jaded.
All his moneyed cronies supported him, elated.
He’d pull apart the world we knew and put it back again,
but I fear that what few plans he had turned out to be in vain.
For when he’d knocked everything down, he knew not what to do
except to blame the mess he’d made on everyone he knew.
The whole world knows that he’s a knave, his mind and soul both dim.
The thing that is distressing is those who supported him.
Word prompts today are overcome, fickle, intimacy, precipice and yesterday.
Photo by Alessandro Bellone on Unsplash, used with permission
Old Friends
We are grappling with our friendship over difference of opinions.
My beliefs are liberal. He’s one of Donald’s minions.
He won’t put up with teasing. I can’t bear his iron will.
Of faux patriotic slogans, I fear I’ve had my fill.
How can it be that all those years I thought that he had heart,
he was harboring this meanness? When did it get its start?
This virus in our populace that masks as patriotism
spreads misinformation, creating such a schism
that no bridge can be long enough to bring us all together.
The strength of our convictions seems to hold us at short tether.
When will come the end of it, and if that end should come,
what will end this great discordance and restore the hum
of democratic harmony? Are voices so distorted
that we cannot reclaim the friends with whom we once consorted?
When I walk the streets where we once walked, my former friend and I,
he crosses to the other side if he sees me walk by.
When change comes, certain evils must come to an end,
but I don’t think it will mend the hearts of me and my old friend.
Word prompts for today are tease, iron, opinion, grapple and friendship.
Impotus
He’s up there on the platform acting crass and disagreeable.
That he will bring the whole world down around him is foreseeable.
Every single day I hope and pray for his quiescence,
but, alas, refraining from brash speech is not his essence.
He opens mouth and words fall out—disjointed, vague and dense.
He’d make a great orator if only he made sense.
Good that his mother cannot see the travesty she bore—
narcissistic, senseless, and rotten to the core.
His attempts at humor only render him more silly.
His stench sickening and cloying—like an Easter lily.
He’s like a wild animal: vicious, cunning, feral.
What more can he do to put our whole wide world in peril?
No good can be said of him. He’s rotten through and through.
Daily, the world waits for him to drop the other shoe.
Prompt words today are disagreeable, platform, mother, quiescent and Easter lily. And action!
Remember when Donald Trump kept the Queen waiting for tea?
https://bergensia.com/someone-asked-why-do-some-british-people-not-like-donald-trump/
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If you missed the previous newsletter, you can read it here.
Al Drago for The New York Times
I didn’t expect Donald Trump to turn eloquent overnight, nor is that necessary. Strong leadership doesn’t require it.
I didn’t expect him to stop complimenting himself. Bragging is as central to his existence as swimming is to a whale’s. It’s what propels him. It’s what sustains him. At this point it’s not merely reflexive. It’s autonomic.
I didn’t expect him to start telling the truth. I’m an optimist, not a fantasist.
But what I did expect, or at least hope for, was that this once-in-a-generation pandemic would tamp down his pettiness and meanness. How could it not? How cold he behold the scale of the suffering and the dimensions of the challenge before him and not realize that he finally had to be bigger and dig deeper?
There is no such bigness in Trump, no such digging. There is just the usual martyr complex, the familiar tirades and the same old passing of the buck. I’m forced to conclude that he’s not just a man ill equipped for this moment. He’s a man whose soul went missing.
I said as much in a column published a few days ago, and I winced when I wrote it and cringed when I sent it to my editor, because I don’t want to feel this cynical about an American president, certainly not now. I want to be pleasantly surprised. I want to be forced to reassess all prior misgivings and to apologize for selling him short, because that would mean that he was ably and nobly guiding us through this nightmare. Get something this important right and you’re forgiven all wrongs.
But as I explained in the column, which assesses Trump’s behavior over the past month, he isn’t finding the grace in crisis that other presidents did. He doesn’t even seem to be trying. I can’t fathom that. And I definitely can’t swallow it.
Laments like mine won’t change him. His rot is too fundamental for that. But they do, I think, serve a purpose: They nudge us past any lingering illusions that the direst of circumstances will transform the false prophet into a benevolent god.
No, this prophet just demands an even greater magnitude of worship. And he grows all the more furious when he doesn’t get it.
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Federal Government knew about the Corona Virus breakout and what effect it would have on the U.S. as early as November. Read about it here. People, we need a head of government who knows what he is doing and who is not just a media star! Open your eyes. Your life and the existence of the world is at stake in this and other matters. Research says that pollution helped to spread the virus. Listen to the scientists, not a reality “star.”
lifelessons - a blog by Judy Dykstra-Brown 