Response to America's Women

(See: Just Above Sunset: America's Women)

The fact that so many women are impressed by this blatant lounge lizard makes me wish somebody would do a serious survey on the kind of people who support Donald Trump.

In some ways, they are what we would, in days of old, have called a "cheap date". You don't need to do much to impress them; all you have to do is talk a lot, yet say nothing of substance. Be yourself, even if yourself happens to be all sizzle and no steak.

I confess that I myself often wish that my favorite politicians would stop talking like politicians and just talk like regular humans do, but it would never occur to me to be attracted to some vacuous candidate because he's a "straight talker". Yes, it was nice that candidate Barack Obama sometimes gave a great speech, but it wasn't so much how he said it that made it great, it was what he said. And yet, on the other side of that argument, we have Donald Trump.

Please forgive me if I'm repeating myself, but at least in some respects -- although not in his pleasant demeanor -- Donald Trump is Chauncey Gardiner, from the Jerzy Kosinski movie, "Being There".

If you're not familiar with the film, Gardiner (Peter Sellers) is a simple-minded middle-aged man who has lived his whole life hidden away inside the Washington, DC, townhouse of a rich man (who is probably his illegitimate father), and who is set to wandering the city after the old man dies, wearing some of his late benefactor's discarded but impeccable pin-striped suits.

Like Trump, Chauncey's knowledge of the world is almost entirely based on what he has seen on television, but his way of conveying this knowledge is so beguiling that people tend to read disguised wisdom into everything he says. Chauncey finds himself in the company of some very rich and powerful people who, as the movie ends, are so impressed with his refreshing way of expressing himself that they are considering running him for president of the United States.

It's a black comedy about how tenuous the threads of power are that hold our republic together, and it seems to be coming true.

People don't really listen to exactly what he says, but they just like the way he says it. Forget that he doesn't really say much, at least he's a straight-talker who tells us everything that's on his mind -- which, as I said, isn't all that much.