I have a very learned and intelligent friend.  Professor, doctor, wealthy, worldly, funny, well-spoken.  He’s got it all but youth and even in that, he lives ‘younger’.  He is pushing 80.  Huge brain.  Huge body of life-work.  HUGE.

H just spent 3000 words on (his blog) on Donald and the Deplorables.  Today, he submitted part 2 – another 3000 word piece, this time a dissection of Kayleigh McEnamy (an outspoken and celebrated supporter of Trump).

There is something wrong with that.  Something very wrong. Trump is beneath him. Truly.  It seemed to me as if he was being forced to writing a critique on Paris Hilton’s sex tapes or Kim Kardashian’s booty. What the hell?!

Has it come to this that a man with an IQ twice if not three times Trump’s feels an obligation to argue, debate and analyze the issues that fool and his minions raise? Isn’t that a smidge like mental ‘slumming’?

Don’t get me wrong…my guy is just a guy.  He’s learned because he spent his life doing that (he’s a bona fide philosopher).  He’s one of my very few mentors because he is incredibly moral and does the ‘right thing’ as well as NOT mentor.  I have to ask for an opinion and I hardly ever do (twice in thirty years?). And, sometimes when I do, he doesn’t answer.  (I have another mentor like that but he just yells now and again on his own initiative).

But, regardless, I respect him. (And the other, louder one too).  He is a good man, a decent man, a smart man and a worthy fellow who has proven his bona fides in many many ways (especially helping refugees).  This guy COULD be the president of the US and do a helluva job.

But he has been dragged into the muddy, stinky fray.  And regrettably, WE HAVE ALL been dragged into this slop. Direction: down.  Think: sewer.

Sadly, tragically and sickly, my guy, H, feels obliged to give the DUCK/Donald and his flock some attention and is addressing that pinhead’s issues and behaviors as if they actually mattered.  It’s like hearing the pope opine on hip-hop or Capt. Jean-Luc Picard discuss his hemorrhoids.  Somehow, it brings them down.  It brings us all down.

Trump and the Delorables drags us all down in, oh, so many ways.  But it’s the subtle ways that bother me the most.

I know I shouldn’t feel that way.  A real threat is a REAL threat and only someone in denial will try to rise above what is truly threatening.  Reality is truth.  And the Duck, it seems, is really and truly a threat.  We should face it head on.

But, I confess, it was guys like him that were the reason I learned to fight.  I didn’t want to do engage in that crap (my neghbourhoods were not good) but bullies and bad guys don’t use language, they don’t use debate, they don’t use thinking brains. They use intimidation.  And, worse, they do not give you a choice.  As a kid, I wasn’t smart enough to deal with them on a higher level. So, having few (none) choices, I instead, learned to box.

And, like war on a grander scale, it will work.  A good punch in the nose makes a point rather well. Mike Tyson famously said, “Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.”  Hitler eventually got punched in the mouth – end of plan.

Bullies don’t use their heads, they use their hormones.  Muscles. Profanity. Threats. Loud noises. Like chimps and baboons.  Like Trump.  It can be effective.  And whatever language the bullies did use was just loud and stupid but often equally as intimidating as the hair and the muscles.  Hard to take the high road when being screamed at by a gorilla.  Hard to find another road.  Sometimes you just have to punch those guys in the mouth and hope you remove enough teeth to at least limit the yelling and screaming.

If someone would just punch the Donald in the face I, for one, would appreciate it.

I wrote all that yesterday.  It came from a feeling of ‘defeat’ as Trump is reported to be neck-and-neck with Hillary in the polls.  It came because the smartest man I know was stepping down into the sewer to deal with it in his current writings. It came because Trump is the latest in a succession of loud, brazen politician liars to simply yell ugly crap in our face and get away with it.  

My instinct is to lash out.

But H makes a point.  It is NOT ONLY Trump-the-bully who will influence the White House, it will include his retinue.  Quite possibly Corey Lewandowski, Paul Manafort, Kellyanne Conway and Kayleigh McEnamy will rule over some department, his perv son will influence somewhere else.  Melania will become a role model.  The whole package is pure trailer trash covered in gilt, glitter and sparkles and it brings us all down to their level.

There is not enough lipstick on the planet for this sounder of swine.