To my friend, James

Does anyone beside an original poster read comments? On mass media sites, there are often so many comments that reading all of them would take days, and some individual ones are as long as the article they're responding to. On little-read blogs like this one, comments are usually read only by the original poster and if the poster responds to them at all the response would only be seen by whoever commented. 
In this case, however, I want to respond to a comment because I think the issues it raises go beyond those of a dialogue between two people; they're issues we're all hearing about daily.

Donald J. Trump.

Earlier this month I wrote about Brexit and what it meant to me. In that post, I said, "when Brexit passed, I thought, 'Uh-oh. If that happens there, there's a good chance that this clown Donald Trump could get elected here.' (Trump people who feel insulted by that characterization: Think back to 2015 and you'll recall that you felt the same way. How easily we forget such things and end up supporting an admitted sex offender.)"
I was referring to the 2005 Hollywood Access recording of Trump talking to other men while on a bus taking him to do a cameo appearance on a soap opera. The Washington Post published the recording in 2016. 
A man named James, one of the few who reads this blog, took offense to my characterization: 

To call him "an admitted sex offender" is so ludicrous that it barely rates a response. He bragged about being able to do something (in what he thought was a private conversation with a guy he clearly was trying to impress) that there is absolutely zero evidence that he has ever done. A sad, stupid, sexist remark, nothing more. Which is why it didn't cost him the presidency.
Anytime you start to work yourself up into a righteous huff about how terrible a person DJT is, you should call Bill Clinton to mind. In addition to a lot of other factors, WJC and his lovely wife did more to enable Trump to be elected than anything else. After he used and discarded his poor intern and lied about it to Congress and the American people without paying any meaningful price, where exactly did you think American politics would go ?
You said plenty of other ridiculous things, but I'll let those pass. 

I have never met James in person, but I feel that I know him as well as you can know someone online and from what I know of James, he is an intelligent, good and decent man with strong faith in his god and I value his opinions. But there's a blindness that has inflicted us all, on the left and the right. That blindness and it's been caused by anger, anger that had been brewing for some time. Many would say it was due to erupt. I agree, but I'd say the speed and severity of its eruption has been exacerbated by Donald Trump and that the way it's come out is damaging America. 
The level of unfairness in American society is not much higher than it was fifteen years ago. Indeed, three people near George W. Bush at Trump's inaugural address independently verified that his response to it was, “That was some weird shit."
I think James is guilty of the blindness I'm talking about. He, like many Trump supporters, seem to have read only a part of the Hollywood Access recording, the "grab them by the pussy" part, and this they dismiss as what Trump called "locker room talk." 
Oh please. When have you heard men in their late fifties talk that way to impress people far lower on the social totem pole than they are? That's right, never. In any case, those defenders are ignoring this part of the recording:

Donald J. Trump: You know and ... 
Unknown: She used to be great. She’s still very beautiful. 
Trump: I moved on her, actually. You know, she was down on Palm Beach. I moved on her, and I failed. I’ll admit it. Unknown: Whoa. 
Trump: I did try and fuck her. She was married. 
Unknown: That’s huge news. 
Trump: No, no, Nancy. No, this was [unintelligible] — and I moved on her very heavily. In fact, I took her out furniture shopping. She wanted to get some furniture. I said, “I’ll show you where they have some nice furniture.” I took her out furniture. I moved on her like a bitch. But I couldn’t get there. And she was married. Then all of a sudden I see her, she’s now got the big phony tits and everything. She’s totally changed her look.

Trump's supporters have praised him for being someone who would disrupt the usual order of things. He has and is doing so. That's not a good thing. Part of what's kept America's government stable over the centuries is its slowness to change. Americans have always favored stability and liked change to occur over time, after long periods of discussion and compromise. 
James is guilty a couple of logical fallacies. One is that it matters that Trump said what he did during a private conversation. It doesn't. At all.
Another that James and others are guilty of, in a tiresome way, is something popularly called "whataboutism." The phrase has been used since the 1970s and Trump's you'll hear it used on Fox News much the way James uses it here, in reference to Bill Clinton's behavior while in office. (They have to go back twenty years because Obama's presidency was free of any scandals.) 
Whataboutism is an attempt to discredit an opponent by calling them hypocrites. 
Here's a sample of its pattern:

1. Person A makes claim X.
2. Person B asserts that A's actions or past claims are inconsistent with the truth of claim X.
3. Therefore, X is false.

Whataboutism makes little sense here because James has no idea how I feel about either Bill or Hilary Clinton and doesn't know that I was in fact a registered Republican within the last decade. Partisanship has no bearing on this. Also, James doesn't mentioned that Bill Clinton did indeed pay a price for his actions: He was impeached and his legacy was severely diminished.
I shouldn't have gotten political. I'm not smart enough to opine on a lot of this. We're all having a hard time not raising political things these days, though. I look at profiles on dating sites and see that many more women use Trump as a litmus test. Some say if you don't like him, don't bother messaging them. Others say the same if you do like him.
Advice to people on the right and the left: Read reporting by the Associated Press. It's journalism that focuses on being scrupulously fact-based. You will never hear of AP reporters getting awards for being great literary journalists, but they do get awards for good reporting. It's dull, just-the-facts writing, designed to be cut-from-the-bottom, inverted pyramid reporting so the first paragraphs are so heavily loaded they can be a chore to read. But you will never hear Trump call the Associated Press "fake news," his preferred phrase for reporting that riles him.

 

The Loser Can't Sleep

It's nearly 2:30 a.m. and the Loser is awake. His fault. He got home from work at the usual time, ate the usual meal, watched a DVD (Woody Allen's latest. Sucked.) and then made the mistake of lying down, which led to a nap which led to this—awake in his stuffy, humid apartment.

He has insights on nights like these. The path of his life of being a loser becomes clear. He wakes up and scribbles these insights in a notebook he keeps on his bed table. Later, he reads them again and is chagrined to find that rather than the nonsensical writings of an insomniac, the sentences make sense.

A digest.

The Loser had a childhood bone disease which ruined a leg. He has worn a ridiculous, huge shoe since he was seven to make up for a leg length discrepancy of over half a foot. Yes, there are those with far greater afflictions who have lives filled with love and success. There are also those with no problems of any kind and keen minds who live lives as miserable or more so than the Loser's.

The Loser had neither a body nor mind that could compete with those of others. He has no artistic gifts, significant writing ability, knack for magic tricks or passion for learning about something, anything, that would set him apart. His ability to tell jokes is mediocre.

His dream job since early high school was to work as a journalist, but he was too shy and afraid of the taunts of his peers to ever pursue a position at his school papers in both high school and college. He assumed that he would fail at it as a profession too, that those with sharper writing skills and greater confidence would outperform him. It wasn't until his mid-30s that he enrolled in a low-tier graduate program to get his master's degree in journalism.

He worked as a journalist for five years. The stress at first took a toll. There were months, literally months, when he slept no more than two hours a night. After that, for a year or two, all went well. He knew what he was doing, mistakes were few and mild, the money was good enough. The circulation of the newspaper he worked for, a suburban weekly, went steadily downhill but this was hardly his fault. He was the primary reporter, true, but people buy such papers for other reasons, like the society page and coverage of local school sports. The paper followed the sliding trend of all such papers in the late 1990s.

In 2000 the Loser, over 40 and tired of covering zoning board hearings and store openings, went for a job in the city. He applied for and got a job as an editorial assistant at the Associated Press.

He did not do well there. What confidence he had gained at the weekly drained in the big time. He made mistakes. An editor yelled. He overheard himself referred to as "the knucklehead." He left work each day with the self esteem of a wet paper towel on a mens room floor. After a year, it was time to go.

The Loser is a 51-year-old cashier now. He makes far less money than he did at the AP and his feet hurt all the time.

The physical gifts we have or lack can nudge our personalities. The Loser wonders now that if he had been physically normal and able to run, perform in plays, wear unaltered trousers, go a year without once being mocked by others, if he would have pursued his goal at a younger age, taken his lumps then and had some measure of success.