A Deep Dive Into Trump-Mind Plus Princess Di!

Will today be Pajama Day?

The sky is overcast!

The suspense mounts!

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I only managed to complete 3,000 of the white paper words yesterday because the topic is so very, very dry, I had to moisturize my mind by frequent forays onto social media, which is always a mistake, but you know, I was really bored.

My paternal relations are all rabid Trump supporters and post things like this:



In case you can’t tell, this was posted in response to the election.

Geri, my sister-in-law, posted it.

Geri is a fucking idiot, but you know, well-meaning and a full-blooded Inuit, which makes her theoretically interesting. She’s married to one of the two half-brothers who haven’t yet died of a drug overdose. I guess their heroin is evangelical zeal!

She is my principal window into Trump-Mind.

I kinda get people who voted for Trump on the basis of his tax cut, regulatory slashing, and judicial packing. I don’t agree with them, but I get them.

I don’t get people who think Trump is a Wonderful Human Being.

Geri thinks Trump is a Wonderful Human Being—“a flawed man, but a man of deep righteousness,” she writes. “And who among us is not flawed?”

It’s unnerving to do a deep dive through Geri’s mental laundry as artlessly displayed on the flapping clothes line that is Facebook, and I certainly hope I have the self-discipline to avoid doing so today as I tackle the last 3,000 words of the immensely bor-r-r-ring white paper.

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I also watched a two-hour National Geographic special on Princess Di.

I’ve always been grateful that Princess Di chose the Labor Day holiday weekend to remind the world that no car can sustain a really massive front-end collision and protect lovers in the back seat unless they're wearing their seat belts. She saved my job at People for another year! Dan Okrent, who was helming operations at Time Inc that year, believed the Internet was a passing fad and was preparing to lay us all off. However, we turned around a massive online Princess Di homage in a little less than eight hours and that saved our collective asses.

I’d never felt much sympathy for Princess Di, though.

But I did after watching this special, which is essentially an hour and a half of an interview tape in which she discusses what it felt like to be a lonely 19-year-old with Daddy issues, plucked from relative obscurity to be the royal broodmare.

I felt deeply, deeply sorry for her and wept at the footage of the twisted, battered metal wreckage of her car against the Paris tunnel’s cement pillion.

She had it right: She really was chosen to be a sacrifice, as fully as any maiden in Greek myth.

That’s a fairly sophisticated thought! And proves she wasn’t dumb.

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What else? I went for a tromp through the fairytale forest:



And now, I must do Useful Work.