Gutenberg, Zuckerberg, Bush, Trump, and Karl Marx

It's presumed Johannes Gutenberg was reasonably well-off as a child because the family owned books, a sign of real wealth in the 15th century.

Gutenberg became a goldsmith by trade, and lived in Straubourg most of his life. He's thought to have invented the printing press there, under severe financial stress. Gutenberg died a pauper, his contribution largely unknown; the church and the cemetery where he was buried were later destroyed. This will not be the fate of Mark Zuckerberg, the Facebook fellow.

Let's move on to Trump! This moron's simplistic views seem to be captivating the nation. Is Trump a moron in the Republican tradition of George W. Bush, the most recent Bush to be President, son of George H.W. Bush, the last Republican President who was not a moron?

George W. Bush, the son, was a moron in the Texas/Yale tradition, a sly, winking moron who hoped you'd believe him to be a moron so he could seem to be just like you or me. Many morons now believe Bush's moronic mien to have been a pose--though it serves him well now as an artist, most artist's being morons themselves--and that there was indeed real intelligence beneath the hat, the same intelligence that led him to think he needed to fool people into thinking he was a moron so they would feel comfortable in electing one of their own to the highest office in the land.

Trump's possibly the same kind of moron--a faux, or situational, moron--posing as a moron the way he once posed as a real businessman and a reality TV star. The Art of the Deal indeed! Apparently we morons like our political morons enough to elect them to high office and then, in the case of our current moron, look on like the bunch of morons that we indisputably are as he brazenly privatizes the office of The Presidency for his personal financial gain and the gain of his extended family.

Another dialectic may be playing itself out: that Trump is indeed a moron, a pure moron the way Mallarme was a pure poet; the type of moron whose moron-ness is so profound, so all consuming, so fundamental to his being, that nothing--not common sense, not self-reflection, not truth, not love or honor--is allowed to stand between him and his personal moron.

Sitting in the Cody, Wyoming Public Library this afternoon reading the surprisingly readable Karl Marx, rejoicing that a man of his substance and energy once existed, I ask myself, and just what is a moron?  We're all morons. We have the leaders to prove it.