“I’ll thcream and thcream ‘till I’m thick!”
So threatened Violet Elizabeth Bott, the utterly spoiled rich kid of a nouveau riche millionaire in Richmal Crompton’s “Just William” books. A phrase trotted out by her whenever she was not getting her way, and one used to threaten the lovable rogue William who was the unlikely scion of an impeccably middle-class family in a country village in southern England.
The eleven year old William (he does not age in, spite of the fact that the Just William series of books was published over a period of almost fifty years from 1922 to 1970) is a loveable rogue and leader of his gang of the Outlaws (with his mongrel dog, Jumble) who, while constantly trying to do what he sees as good, is just as constantly frustrated, or misunderstood.
These characters came to mind when I was reading the news this morning and saw what the latest antics of the Lying Sex Pest involved.
Whatever trouble William ended up in, he was never vicious in what he was about. William and his Outlaws saw themselves as positively knightly, seeking to do good and right wrongs. The fact that few others saw them in that light was the reason the stories were so enjoyable. William was fundamentally decent, and not mean minded.
Trump, however, is the antithesis of Just William, and the comparison in the stories is not the ‘heroic’ and the oh-so-misunderstood William, but the spoilt brat Violet Elizabeth Bott.
Like her, Trump’s whole existence and development is based on the wealth of his father. Apart from his wholesale corruption as President, his previous entrepreneurship was one series of disasters after another, with his failures being compensated for by his father’s cash. Trump is the epitome of small-minded selfishness that characterises the whole breed of entitled nepo babies who actually believe that they got to their positions by merit alone!
Trump, god help us, is the single most powerful person on earth, the President of the United States of America, but he behaves like the most insecure non-entity, needing constant reinforcement and being totally unable to take contradiction or denigration – though like all bullies, he is supremely at ease in dishing it out.
He is no William, but he is a perfect Violet Elizabeth Bott, who will threaten tantrums unless she gets her way.
I would say that the latest revealing incident of Trumps pettiness is the re-naming of Lake Ontario as Lake America. But what is left to ‘reveal’ about this apology for a president that we haven’t seen so many times before.
The charade of the re-naming ceremony was at a press conference in the Oval Office of the White House. What was an elegant workplace is now so festooned with the gaudy gilt of gold, that it makes Trump look like some sort of bloated makeup-plastered caricature of a Madame of a sleezy brothel. With a squeaky Sharpie, this grubby monstrosity, draws his oversized signature and displays it to his cult members for the customary adulation.
The pettiness of his actions in a world of disasters (some of which are of his own making) that should be claiming his attention, is breathtaking – if we hadn’t seen so many instances of his unparalleled childishness and spite in the past. We are getting numbed through repetition so that we merely shrug at his antics, rather condemn and urge those who could, to force his resignation.
But those who could and should, don’t.
And so Violet Elizabeth Bott-Trump continues to bully and, of course, to get things wrong.
Did anyone tell the very stable genius Trump, as he crossed out Ontario and inserted America on one of the Great Lakes, that America is the name of a Continent and NOT a country. The United States of America is part of America but is not America.
So, in his ignorant spitefulness, he has actually renamed a lake for the whole of a continent and not for a mere country – how woke is that!
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