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Trumpian Invasions from the Past in Sun Tzu Was a Sissy by Stanley Bing (Gil Schwartz)

Another pre-Trump book with Trumpian intrusions, but more than most such encounters. The book itself is a kind of light satire and actually motivated me to read Sun Tzu's original book (which is not long by today's standards), but mostly it's just a lot of tongue-in-cheek jokes. What strikes me about so many of the books I've read since Trump suddenly seemed to matter is how much of "the environment" he had becomes, and this book is an especially poignant reminder of that age of innocence, when Trump was just funny background noise.

So here's the list of cameos:

On page xxv in the introduction he presents a little ontology of wars with one bullet point: "Total conflagration: Donald Trump wants the ground your business is sitting on. Microsoft likes the business you're in and wants to suck it all up for itself. The Wall Street Journal has..." That's between the entries for "Medium-sized War" and "Guerrilla War".

There's a big table of weapons on pages 66-7, where "Outright rudeness" is listed as a weapon that "May be Used Against..." various categories of people, but ending with "Donald Trump" as a singleton. Amusingly, this is a weapon that is "Not Advised Against" such categories as "elderly Republicans" and "Japanese businesspeople". The prior weapon is "Sarcasm", but it's more interesting that the next weapon is "Lying", which is probably Trump's favorite. Among other categories, lying is recommended against "people of the opposite sex you do not intend to see again, even by accident" and "any lawyer but your own". Obviously a problem for Trump since he lies even to his own lawyers.

On page 69 he has a list of people who weren't dead enough. After Hamlet's father (who came back as a ghost) and Napoleon (who escaped from his first exile) and before Slobodan Milošević (who died in 2006, about 2 years after the book was published), here comes Donald Trump with the notation "The big doofus just won't stay down."

On page 116 he is writing about potential discomfort enemies can cause. He presents a scale from "tiny" to "grotesquely Trumpian". An adjectival usage is rather rare.

On page 166 the page starts with a mention of Kim Jong Il, father of Trump's new buddy in North Korea, but the main reference is in the section numbered 12 about PR representatives. (As part of the parody of Sun Tzu's original book, this book also uses lots of small numbered sections.) The list of examples starts with "Jesus himself had the four apostles, plus ... Mel Gibson. Samual Johnson ... had ... Boswell...." and then "Trump has himself." I think this is actually talking about self-promotion, though we now know that Trump sometimes promoted himself by pretending to be someone else.

Finally, on page 195 is a final and weird appearance of Trump. The section is comparing the taste of victory to cheese. I really can't imagine what motivates this short paragraph: "A guy like Donald Trump has got to have a big, hearty cheese, a little smelly, a little sweet, that goes great with ham. Swiss, maybe. It's got holes in it." Maybe the joke has to do with the placement between cheddar and Limburger cheeses?

The other page that strongly struck me in this book was on page 29, where he refers to fake journalist and super-hypocrite Bill O'Reilly, which sound almost prophetic and also seems prophetically related to Trump's current attacks on real journalism. O'Reilly did as much as anyone to promote the "fake news".

More evidence of how Trump invaded the public consciousness long before anyone regarded his candidacy as anything but a sick joke. Too bad Trump lacks the capacity to laugh at himself. Just another part of why he can't learn from his mistakes.

The failure of conservative humor

As if more evidence was needed?

I don't actually read that many books of hard-core conservative persuasion. It's kind of amusing, since many of my personal principles and philosophies do seem conservative on their face, but today's so-called conservatives lie too much. Today's uninteresting example is Don't Vote: It Just Encourages the Bastards by P.J. O'Rourke. He's supposed to be a humorist of sorts, though a more apt description is "libertarian propagandist of little skill".

I've actually read 6 of his earlier books, so I have to count this book as being fooled for the 6th time and shame on me, but I keep hoping to learn something worth the time. After all, the whole point of REAL humor is to learn (in accord with my General Theory of Relatively Funny Stuff), but O'Rourke never fails to disappoint. There are some traces of interesting ideas buried in his stuff, but mostly he's just wasting my time with cheap sophistry. Almost done with this book and so far only detected one interesting thought: The distinction between negative and positive rights. The rest of it was fluff and piffle.

What finally provoked me enough to write this quasi-review was Chapter 8 in Part II. Just too perfect as an example of the intellectual dishonesty of the Libertarians. The premise is supposed to be that Part II is about solutions on an issue-by-issue basis. The ostensible issue of Chapter 8 is gun safety, but O'Rourke actually changes the subject to attack voting rights. It's supposed to be a parody, but it comes off as too sincere, almost a harbinger of the Bolshevik Republican policies of voter disenfranchisement. Actually I'm pretty sure those policies had started before the publication of this book, but either O'Rourke hadn't noticed or it's another example of his highly selective focus. Also a vicious focus in his unfunny personal attacks.

I'll go ahead and run through my earlier tags, though I was planning to discard the book without memory. On a page-based basis:

On page 11 (which is early in Chapter 2, dismissing Chapter 1 as an intro), I was struck by several items, such as the delusional attack against Richard Dawkins that only showed (1) O'Rourke hates Dawkins, and (2) O'Rourke hasn't read the book he's attacking. This page had a number of poorly written, false, and dumb things, but I keep reminding myself that O'Rourke will claim the "It's only a joke" defense, and only more so for his worst writing.

On page 13 I was offended by his joke about the Japanese word "jiyu" for one of the senses of freedom. The only things it showed are (1) racist viciousness, (2) ignorance of the Japanese language and indifference to the truth, and (3) ignorance of what "freedom" actually means--but that's only typical of Libertarian "thinking". The reality is that the Japanese word is about the sense of freedom where the cause of your actions is yourself. Also, I strongly suspect it's a word coined in China, not Japan.

Page 15 had some strikingly offensive personal attacks on the Clintons, but "It's just a joke" of some twisted flavor. A more substantive annoyance was the discussion of "intolerance" without any apparent knowledge of the Paradox of Tolerance. Add Popper's philosophy to the LONG list of important topics O'Rourke is ignorant of or chooses to ignore.

At this point I was already getting fed up and wanted to stop paying such close attention, but... On pages 42 and 43 he dragged Donald Trump into the picture. Really laughable dismissal considering how things have panned out. Most amusing quote must be "Every property he touches seems to go to hell" as he dismisses Trump's self-claimed wealth as a trick of "former Enron accountants". Words worth eating, if not well worth anything, eh?

On page 49 he brings the birthers into the discussion, though Trump doesn't get an explicit mention. The offensive aspect here is the link between birtherism and O'Rourke's own frequent and vicious and unjustified attacks on Barack Obama. Maybe there's some racism there, too, since on the next page (50) he also takes a cheap shot of some sort at Tiger Woods. At least I think it was supposed to be "Just a joke" of some sort. Maybe it was just broken by time? The joke seems to be implying that Woods could not keep a secret, so I'm guessing it had to do with his exposure as a philanderer and subsequent career collapse? Perhaps these things just seem less funny post-Trump-as-politician?

Speaking of narcissistic personality disorder, he actually cites the diagnostic criteria on page 70, but without reference to Trump. If he had mentioned Trump, then it would have looked as wise and prophetic as Harlan Ellison's prediction of the Reagan presidency in The Glass Teat.

Page 95 is the apex of his attacks on science. The only thing O'Rourke actually proves is that he has no idea of what science is about. Even less idea of how it works.

If there's any thoughtful or educational stuff in this book, then it's been shredded far above my poor power to unshred. Sometimes "It's just a joke" is no excuse.