For Folks Disinclined To

One thing I have been spared, living abroad is that I don’t seem to run into many discussions with people who are Donald Trump supporters.  Chinese are curious, but largely amused, innocent. (“He’s a business man!”)  I’d be very interested to take the pulse of some of my friends at the Chinese Foreign Ministry, whose opinions I respect, but they’re largely all oversees.  Business contacts from England and Ireland and Belgium and France and Germany and Australia and Canada seem to uniformly regard the 45^th president as a fool.  The U.S. countrymen and women I work closest with over here, just shake their head when the topic turns to our head of state.  Perhaps it’s simply the company I keep, but we seem to heavily preselect in an expatriate setting for folks disinclined to make America great again. 

And as the last election helped to illustrate, I live in my little bubble, where everyone is incredulous, everyone is outraged, everyone wants to find the exit ramp from this shambolic “administration” as soon as possible.  So I discuss disdain as if it were manifest like the sunrise or the winter weather.  Many, many people however clearly don’t agree that this administration is bad news.

This becomes apparent when I try to fill space on a business call to make some light conversation.  I was trying to kill time before another colleague joined a call last year and I mentioned ironically that Trump had managed to endear himself to the Scots during his golf resort press conference, following the Brexit vote.  The person on the other line tried to correct me that local people had responded very favorably to what he had said. 

This was happening in real time.  Perhaps he had some information that I did not.  Perhaps I had missed something important.  I suggested that this was interesting and different from what I’d heard and noted quietly to myself that this was not a topic to pursue with this particular individual, at least not sarcastically.  I later learned of the deluge of criticism Trump received from the Scottish people.  Perhaps this other person had as well.  I longed though to revisit the chat and suggest to him that as a descendent of the Enlightenment, working in software, it was important to work with empirical facts and that the then candidate Trump was a lazy intellect, peddling mendacity.  But those rewind moments never happen.  Instead we decide to simply not discuss. 

Thursday, 02/16/17