I showed Swamp Rabbit a news story and noted that no one could write a more bat-shit funny satire of Donald Trump’s thought processes than Trump himself.
We’ll have an economy based on wind. I never understood wind. You know, I know windmills very much. I’ve studied it better than anybody. I know it’s very expensive. They’re made in China and Germany mostly — very few made here, almost none. But they’re manufactured tremendous — if you’re into this — tremendous fumes. Gases are spewing into the atmosphere. You know we have a world, right? So the world is tiny compared to the universe. So tremendous, tremendous amount of fumes and everything. You talk about the carbon footprint — fumes are spewing into the air. Right? Spewing. Whether it’s in China, Germany, it’s going into the air. It’s our air, their air, everything — right? So they make these things and then they put them up.
“That ain’t satire,” Swamp Rabbit said, reading Trump’s remarks. “He don’t do no satires of himself. He don’t do no jokes at all except to pick on somebody weaker than him.”
“That’s my point, rabbit,” I replied. “He’s never joking when he says something stupid. He’s irony-free and satire-proof. He believes what he says and so do his fans. If Trump says wind power is dirty — that turbines spew fumes — then that’s good enough for Trumpers.”
I told him it took the emergence of Trump to remind literate people that there are limits to the usefulness of satire and other literary devices that have been used through the ages to shame authority figures into behaving better. You can’t shame the shameless.
“What about Stephen Colbert and them other comedians on TV?” Swamp Rabbit said. “Why can’t they get through to Trump’s peeps?”
“Because Trump’s peeps don’t watch them,” I replied. “If they did watch, they wouldn’t get the jokes.”
Footnote: Trump’s bizarre opinion of wind power has nothing to do with pollution, of course. It dates to the bitter battle he fought to stop construction of an offshore wind farm near his golf course in Scotland because he felt the wind farm would spoil the view from the course.
