Steve Bailey's Blog : Trump's 'odd sense of humor' isn't funny (Richmond Times Dispatch, August 10,2024)

In his July 28 commentary, “3 dumb arguments so far about Trump, Harris, Biden,” Ryan J. Rusak said some things that jumped out at me. The comment, “Trump says weird stuff. But usually, the cause is narcissism or an odd sense of humor.” Really? Consider some of these comments by the former president.

“When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best. They’re not sending you. They’re not sending you. They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.”

Is he just being humorous here? Does he have no idea that most of the immigrants seeking entry into the United States are coming from other Latin American countries? It is not his sense of humor or his narcissism but his ignorance.

How about when he calls our fallen soldiers “suckers” and “losers.” If that is his sense of humor, it is beyond odd. If it is his narcissism, that is pathetic. Maybe he would see things differently if he had worn the uniform instead of hiding behind bone spurs.

Was encouraging his followers to go to the Capitol and “Fight like hell,” on Jan. 6, 2021, just part of the “odd sense of humor?” The U.S. Capitol Police officers assaulted that day did not find it funny. Neither did most Americans.

The article also points out that Trump is now the candidate with the age problem. I am sure that once a person gets past the issues of honesty, morality, racism, insurrection and the criminal record, as Rusak obviously has, the age issue is of little importance.

Steve Bailey.

Richmond.

BOOK REVIEW

History has not paid much attention to first ladies and Jefferson Davis’ wife, Varina, less than most. The Civil War itself took up most of that space. Still, the woman's story in Charles Frazier’s book Varina is of a woman who married a man much older than herself and did not share in his political philosophy. This mother lost all but one of her children before they had grown up and lived out her life with the legacy of the failed Confederacy that she neither sought nor wholly accepted. This is a framed story, that is, a story within a story. Varina Davis, the only first lady of the Confederacy, tells her life story in a disconnected fashion to a young black man, James Blake, who begins visiting the eighty-year-old widow in a sanitorium where she is trying to recover from drug addiction. Blake wants to understand his own identity as Jimmie Limber, the black child whom Mrs. Davis rescued from a savage beating on a city street in Richmond, Virginia, and took in to be raised among her children. In response to Blake’s questions, Varina starts her story with her escape from Richmond, as this capital of the Confederacy fell to Union troops in the final stages of the American Civil War. She and her husband travel separately from each other physically and in the goals they have in mind for their respective journeys. She wants to escape and not return. Jefferson Davis, on the other hand, delusional that the confederacy had not been thoroughly defeated, wanted to head west toward Texas, where there was a small pocket of resistance, and keep up the fight, a fight that had already cost the American people over 600,000 lives. A climax to this part of the story is reached when Jefferson Davis reunites with his wife in Georgia and, in doing so, brings on the wrath of the Federal troops who were pursuing him. He is arrested, and during this period, Jimmie Limber is separated from the Davises. Varina, whom Frazier refers to as V throughout the book, was convinced that had her husband left her alone, she would have made it to Cuba. Varina Howell was a young woman with no dowry when she met Jefferson Davis at a party in 1843. She was seventeen, and he was thirty-five. For her, it was not about love as much as her need for security. She was more interested in his property and material wealth than his political career or ideology. And yet she stood by him throughout his ill-fated venture as the one and only president of the Confederate States of America and campaigned to have her husband freed from incarceration in Fort Monroe, Virginia, Charles Frazier’s debut novel Cold Mountain, about the journey home of a Confederate deserter in the closing days of the war, came out in 1997 and was a runaway bestseller. It was made into a movie starring Jude Law and Nicole Kidman. He uses a lyrical style, his descriptions are deep, and he puts a lot of meaning in a few words. Varina is Fraizer’s only other book with a Civil War setting. A phraseological slip-up appears when one character uses the expression “no worries,” an Australian phrase that was not part of the parlance of the nineteenth-century American language. Nevertheless, this is an engaging story about a woman few people know much about, probably because she was an outlier in the Civil War drama.

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Trump's 'odd sense of humor' isn't funny (Richmond Times Dispatch, August 10,2024)

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