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A EULOGY FOR THE WORST THAT HAS EVER DRAWN BREATH
By Tom Wellborn
Being a Complete and Unflinching Account of the Most Loathsome Specimen Ever to Consume Resources, Occupy Space, and Insult the Patience of a Universe That Deserved So Much Better.
There are villains, and then there are monsters, and then there are creatures so cosmically, transcendently, almost admirably terrible that language itself recoils from the task of describing them. Grammar buckles. Syntax weeps. The thesaurus slams itself shut and refuses to cooperate. He is this thing. He is the thing past the thing past the thing. He is the sub-basement of the human condition, the moldy crawlspace beneath that sub-basement, and the writhing centipede beneath that.
To call him despicable is to call the sun a little warm. To call him hatable is to say that the Black Death was somewhat inconvenient. He does not merely inspire hatred. He manufactures it, industrializes it, ships it wholesale to people who had never previously experienced a single negative emotion in their lives. Buddhists who have spent forty years meditating toward unconditional love have encountered him briefly and immediately relapsed into pure, screaming fury. Pacifists clench their fists. Quakers throw things. He has caused more apostasy, more broken vows, more abandoned philosophies than any theological crisis in recorded history, simply by existing in the same zip code as decent people.
He has no morals. Not a single one. Not even the bad morals that at least imply a moral framework: the corrupt cop who loves his dog, the mob boss who goes to church. No. He exists in a morality vacuum so total that ethicists have proposed naming it after him. Philosophy departments around the world now use him as a thought experiment: Imagine a being entirely without moral content. Not evil, because evil requires intention. Simply absent of the entire apparatus. He is the null set of conscience. A moral negative space shaped vaguely like a man.
He has no empathy. Scientists have confirmed this. They put him in a brain scanner and watched his amygdala just sit there, inert, like a raisin, unmoved by footage of suffering, by crying children, by injured animals, by literally anything. The researchers wept. He asked if there were snacks.
He has no sympathy either, which is worse, because sympathy doesnt even require feeling. It only requires pretending. He cannot manage the performance. He cannot fake it. When people around him suffer, his face rearranges itself into an expression that experts have described as a beige wall trying to look interested. He is incapable of the most basic social theater that even sociopaths manage. He makes sociopaths look like Florence Nightingale.
His regard for human life is so nonexistent that physicists have theorized it may be negative. He is somehow subtracting regard from the universes fixed supply, leaving decent people fractionally less capable of caring about one another, because he is consuming their collective empathy like a moral black hole, bending the very fabric of human decency around his grotesque gravitational pull.
He takes without asking. He takes everything without asking. He takes things that arent takeable. He takes the goodwill of strangers. He takes credit for things he didnt do. He takes years off the lives of people who have to deal with him. He takes the oxygen out of rooms. He took someones lunch once, a sad and modest lunch that a tired person had been quietly looking forward to all morning, and he didnt even enjoy it. He took it on principle. The principle being: I can.
He steals right out in the open with the brazen, unembarrassed confidence of a man who has never once considered that other people are real. He doesnt steal in the dark. He doesnt steal furtively. He steals the way you pick up your own mail: casually, boredly, without a single spike of adrenaline or guilt. Guilt would require believing that the person hes stealing from has standing, has claims, has feelings that matter. He does not believe this. He has never believed this. He was not built to believe this.
He is stupid in a way that is almost majestic. His stupidity is not the ordinary kind, the forgivable, relatable kind that all of us carry in patches and compartments. His is total. Unified. A stupidity that has achieved something like integrity. There is not one chamber of his mind operating at even a remedial level of insight. He has been wrong about everything, always, without exception, without a single accidental correct answer slipping through, which statistically should be impossible and yet here he is, a living rebuke to probability. If you put him in a room with a hundred doors and told him the exit was behind one of them, he would find the ninety-nine wrong ones first, in sequence, and then stand in front of the last door and walk into the wall beside it.
He is callous the way concrete is callous: not through malice, not through choice, but through an utter material inability to register the soft pressure of another persons pain. You could hand him a book of tragedies, and he would complain about the font. You could show him the face of grief, and he would wonder aloud if there was parking nearby. He does not process human suffering as data. It does not reach him. It never has.
He is vicious without the interesting parts of viciousness. Without cunning, without strategy, without even the cold competence of a true predator. He is vicious the way a blunt instrument is vicious: through sheer, undirected force, through the momentum of his own awfulness carrying him forward into collisions that leave damage everywhere and leave him untouched, unmarked, unaware. Animals that bite have reasons. He does not have reasons. He has trajectory.
He is physically unhealthy in ways that feel karmic, as though his body is attempting to file a formal complaint against his soul. His constitution has mutinied. His own biology is staging a protest.
He is untempered. He has never been tempered. He came out of whatever process produced him without the crucial step: the cooling, the shaping, the refinement that turns raw material into something useful. He is still raw. He will always be raw. He is smelted fury with no purpose, unforged, unbent, uselessly molten.
He is, in the final and most complete assessment, a disgusting anomaly. A statistical outlier so extreme that evolution seems to be embarrassed by him, a glitch in the long project of civilization, a misprint in the human genome so catastrophic that it somehow achieved sentience and got a drivers license. He is proof that the universe has no quality control. He is what happens when the worst possible combination of traits clears every filter, slips through every gate, and arrives, blinking and unconcerned, into a world that never prepared for anything quite like him.
And the most horrifying part, the detail that keeps philosophers up at night, staring at the ceiling, reconsidering everything, is that he will never know any of this. He will never know what he is. He will go to his grave certain that he was, in fact, pretty good. Maybe even great.
That is the final insult. That is the thing that cannot be forgiven.
eppur_se_muova
(42,331 posts)Buns_of_Fire
(19,205 posts)calimary
(90,551 posts)That reminds me of the way of any dog - whose instinct when it needs to pee, just pees wherever it feels the urge. No matter if it's peeing on dirt, a plant, a tree, the side of a building, the side of a sofa (to mark its territory), or maybe even somebody's leg (assuming the dog does not like the person whose leg it's chosen to pee on)!
Id like to share this
tia
✌🏻
PCIntern
(28,524 posts)Author ?
🤔
✌🏻
mobeau69
(12,442 posts)calimary
(90,551 posts)erronis
(24,331 posts)When possible, find and report the original source. Making everyone do a search for the material is not useful and can also end up in non-authoritative places.
Great piece.
PCIntern
(28,524 posts)I I had known that the rules of dissertation composition were applicable here I would have put my crack team onto it, but I was busy digging out abscessing and decayed molar roots on an 86 y.o. (Year old) lady who is attending her grandsons graduation out west next week.
Again, my apologies.
erronis
(24,331 posts)I think I need to adjust my meds --- snarkiness has been noted by others also.
PCIntern
(28,524 posts)Just trying my best under adverse conditions.
No hard feelings.
niyad
(133,640 posts)SCantiGOP
(14,744 posts)that calling Trump corrupt ( or incompetent or mendacious) is like saying that Hitler was grouchy.
Ilsa
(64,501 posts)Julius Caesar, and Napoleon Bonaparte:
Donald Trump has not been coy about his desire to be remembered as the most powerful person to ever live. The 79-year-old president has been privately and publicly musing about his place in history as he serves his final term in the worlds most powerful office, a longtime confidant and senior administration officials told The Atlantic.
Hes been talking recently about how he is the most powerful person to ever live, the Trump confidant told The Atlantic. He wants to be remembered as the one who did things that other people couldnt do, because of his sheer power and force of will. The Atlantics in-depth investigation drew on multiple White House insiders who spoke anonymously to candidly detail their private conversations with the president.
https://www.wonderwall.com/politics/donald-trump-thinks-he-the-most-powerful-person-to-ever-live/
He thinks he's too good to be compared to Washington, Lincoln, or Roosevelt.
K&R. Bookmarking. Thank you for posting.
Solly Mack
(97,161 posts)calimary
(90,551 posts)I'm STILL smiling after first reading it the first time!
"A Eulogy for the Worst That Has Ever Drawn Breath" - by Tom Wellborn
You don't even get INTO the actual essay without savoring an intro like this:
"Being a Complete and Unflinching Account of the Most Loathsome Specimen Ever to Consume Resources, Occupy Space, and Insult the Patience of a Universe That Deserved So Much Better"
I could read this again with a steak knife and fork, and an extra-large napkin to sop up the droppings!
Solly Mack
(97,161 posts)Skittles
(172,499 posts)I've never voted for a republican but many of them I could find SOMETHING good to say - not so for Trump - he is absolutely VILE in every way possible - there's not one single redeeming feature about him, NONE
PCIntern
(28,524 posts)Even the mobsters had some redeeming qualities: loved their families of origin, dressed well, possessed a certain brand of morality within their framework.
Not this guy. Nothing. Zero
Skittles
(172,499 posts)I'll use Dubya as an example - I absolutely DESPISED him, as governor of Texas and as president, but he does seem to be a decent husband and father.
Not this guy Trump. Nothing. ZERO!. Just DISGUSTING in every way possible. That simply is NOT a normal human being.
Keepthesoulalive
(2,362 posts)Deplorable's all.
Skittles
(172,499 posts)too late
at the very least it says NOTHING GOOD
they are as vile and disgusting as him, an utter fucking DISGRACE to America
Buddyzbuddy
(2,806 posts)canetoad
(20,927 posts)So, glad you posted. Lovely turn of phrase, slightly reminiscent of John Mortimer.
Swede
(39,917 posts)electric_blue68
(27,136 posts)SuzyandPuffpuff
(636 posts)Simply perfect. Succinct. Didn't miss a thing. Genius whoever did it and thank Yu for it