The Quotidian (formerly the Diurnal Journal): Leftovers

November 28, 2016

Leftovers

I don't feel in any way responsible for Donald Trump's recent promotion, having publicly raised the significant eyebrow against his election from the first, and having cast my vote for his opponent in the event, but now, just by being American, I find myself uncomfortably complicit in the acts of his coming presidency. Sad.

In Donald Trump's mind the actual and considerable plurality of votes for Hillary Clinton for president can be explained away, giving him the true plurality of votes, if the millions of illegitimate votes for his opponent are discounted, as they should be, being illegitimate.

Evidence of these illegitimate votes is utterly nonexistent, except as yet another instance of arbitrarily tendentious untruth created by our nearly president, Trump.

Otherwise, clearly and unarguably, nearly three million more Americans gave Hillary Clinton their vote for president than gave their vote to Trump. A solid majority of the people in this country did not vote for him and don't believe he's going to do this country any good at all as president.

Donald Trump's initial reaction to such slights is to speil a counter-narrative based on some singularly untrue assertion. That is to say, his first impulse is to make shit up. He won the plurality, he claims, not her! A landslide!

Donald Trump's initial rhetoric is always followed by perpetual grudge. He will hold it against most Americans that they so clearly signalled their disdain. And he'll find a way to get back at them, because that's what grudge does.

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For some years now I've travelled bumptiously about the internet commenting on other people's blogs under the pseudonym "peter ramus," pointedly and I regret to say at times heatedly disclosing the general shape my own intricately devised misapprehension of current events in contradistinction to the remarkable torrent of misapprehensions made known daily on that medium by everyone else.

Nominally I associate myself as much as possible with the views of those who seem to know what they're talking about, but often enough I find myself obliged, like so many others, to go on about things I'm not in the least qualified to address simply because it is my way when the opportunity presents itself. I find this shortcoming as personally irritating as it is to those I've favored it with over the years, an as yet irrepressible feature of my discourse. Thus the admittedly defensive assumption of the nom de blog, "peter ramus."

"peter ramus" isn't to be confused with Peter Ramus, another fellow entirely, who lived and died a long time ago around the sad times leading up to the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre in France, an event which saw his own undoing in the chaotic days that followed.

He was a zeolot, Peter Ramus was. He had a particular bone to pick with Aristotle over the stuff and substance of rhetoric, which led him to propose revolutionary changes in the subject and manner of teaching which prevailed in higher education in those times. A quaestio was convened, a solemn gathering of all the branches of civil society, to see what was to be done about him. The King sent a man, and the Church sent a man, and of course the University of Paris couldn't help but send one, too. Unsurprisingly, they found overwhelmingly in favor of Aristotle and against Peter Ramus. In addition, it pleased the members of the assembled body to pronounce Peter Ramus personally disagreeable and notably ugly to boot. Strictly as an aside.

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The ideas expressed here, and the words used to express them here, are the ideas and words of the Quotidian (formerly the Diurnal Journal), which is to say "peter ramus," which is to say, me. Naturally, given their ultimate source, the ideas are half-formed at times, provisional always, and subject on mature reflection to substantial revision and, often enough, to outright repudiation by the Quotidian (formerly the Diurnal Journal), by "peter ramus," and by me.

The words themselves, however, in the precise carnival train order in which they appear, and such original images which may from time to time be displayed here, excepting of course for those attributed materials the provenance of which, as duly noted, originate elsewhere, are owned by and are the property of the Quotidian (formerly the Diurnal Journal), "peter ramus," or me, and are subject to the terms of Creative Commons License 2.5 , by which license (in the unlikely event that such words and original images appearing here are taken up and displayed elsewhere) clear attribution must be attached to those words or images indicating their ownership, to wit: the Quotidian (formerly the Diurnal Journal), "peter ramus," but not me.