President Doughtard Does the Dozens

[It's my blog, and I'll be un-PC no matter how many thousands of followers it costs me.]

Kim Jung Un's Korean language insult to our Feckless Leader has been translated as "dotard," an old fool, someone in his dotage.  But I prefer the homophone "doughtard," which does not exist, but would exist if it were not politically incorrect to attach "tard" to things, and, if it did exist, would mean someone with more money than brains.

I googled "doughtard" before writing this and discovered that it already has its own hashtag; so obviously apt a pun was hardly going to go unpublished.  I don't use the twitter, but I hereby virtually retweet any tweets that call our Head Twit a "doughtard."

Watching Trump play the dozens with Kim is more than dispiriting.  This is not a school-yard where young males sort out their pecking order by creative public name-calling.  I suspect that Trump senses the advantages that accrue to the best blusterer in less august settings, and, having no sense of place or occasion at all, he acts as if those same advantages apply on the world playground.  He is wrong.  And he is dangerous.  He has more money than brains - no matter how much (or little) money he actually has.

While I bemoan the President's name-calling, I admit that the urge to label him is overwhelming.  There must be a way to capture the essence of this guy with a trope we have all seen. The common expression "What's it like to ...?"   is literally deep.  We know what we know, and we have experienced what we have experienced.  We want to know which of the things in our personal database we should consult to grasp this unknowable thing.  Name-calling is one way of doing that, and, because our need to understand the President is so great, the need to put a "what he's like" label on him is powerful indeed.

Good communicators are experience brokers.  They look for a name that matches the man and matches something in their own experience that matches something in their audience's experience, too.  I am blessed to have a small enough audience that I don't really have to go for a common denominator.  I can find my label and apply it because it works for me, and let readers take it or leave it.

So, I keep coming back to "Rough Beast," as in:

The Second Coming  By William Butler Yeats

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst   Are full of passionate intensity. 

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,   Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?   

[Because poets do tricky things with orthography, I note that the color was added by me for emphasis.]

Or in terms our literarily challenged President might understand, Yo' mama, Doughtard.