I believe I understand the incessant references to Hannibal Lecter. [View all]

[PCIntern]

The imaginary-to-most-of-us villain was unique in popular fiction: he was an extraordinarily brilliant, accomplished, and erudite individual, someone who appreciated music, art, literature, fine dining and wines, and who possessed absolutely no floor as it pertained to actions, amorality, and ability to both inflict the most grotesque forms of torture and murder as well as rationalize its performance in the service of some form of humanity.

Trump sees himself as a brilliant, shrewd, conniving genius who is able to violate any and every norm of humankind. He has done so: he parodied handicapped individuals, denigrated a Gold Star family, termed nations “shithole countries”, allowed and promoted the deaths of a significant fraction of those who died of Covid, thus passively committed mass murder, again, denigrated the military and the generals thereof, both living and dead, raped multiple women (including who knows how many underage) both forcibly and statutorily, lies about everything including the weather, grotesquely sexually demeans his political rivals, and much much more.

And he isn’t finished yet. I have a fertile imagination and can think of some actions he might undertake which might make these others seem trivial. He is a very dangerous individual because the normal person utilizes his or her yardstick to measure the appropriateness of behavior. He does not do so. He exists in a Bizzaro world of negative, antisocial, and manipulatively destructive action which is nearly literary in nature. Thus, the character of Hannibal Lecter is a “paragon” of Trump’s evil, sociopathic, diseased mind. His brain works differently than yours and mine -it is difficult sometimes for us to come to terms with this notion.

What he lacks however, is the brilliance of the fictional villain. He’s an uneducated, poorly diagnosed, low-class pretender. He’s secretly a zero, a cypher, an individual who was accidentally shown to the wrong seat in the great theater of our societal universe.

And we have and are paying what may be for us as a nation, an awful, long-lasting penalty. We as a nation will never be the same, much as Germany will never be regarded as it was prior to Hitler’s rise.