In Ranting, Veritas
Those of us in the cheap seats have tried to avert our gaze from that spectacle known as the Trump-Musk bromance cage fight. The featured rants came across as a kind of verbal fanaticism: words got fired up; they went on a crusade; worse, they went public. Rants should be transient; these were not.
Each party seems to have been taken over by that little terrorist in the skull and, as they say, when elephants fight the grass gets trampled. At first glance, the primary winner from this whole public meltdown was Team Schadenfreude.
But there’s another way to look at it. Perhaps this has served as a kind of catalyst. After all, the smart money had from the start placed long odds on the long-term survival of this alpha-alpha partnership. From Musk’s perspective, this is the thanks he gets for going all-in on a selfless drive to rationalize the size of an out-of-control federal government. He worked for free. He sacrificed so much in his ridiculously overachieving life . . . . and, for crying out loud, he enabled that whole Trump victory in the first place. All for naught as the BBB turned it all into a joke. Yes, for crying out loud.
From the Trump perspective . . . . well, he’s Trump. It’s not nice to mess with mother nature.
While ranting may be a hot wind carrying lies, one man’s rant may be another’s eloquence. Perhaps the dueling rants have finally teed up the first real debate about the reality of our looming crushing national debt. If so, so much the better than to internalize the rant or, as Woody Allen’s character once observed, the alternative to outward anger is growing a tumor.
What can be so unsettling is the realization these power brokers have feet of clay and, as we know, the gods first make angry those they wish to destroy. Or, closer to home, the children freak out when mom and dad lose it.
Share your own capacity for hair-trigger venting. What sets you off? Is that tendency to rant based on principle or does it reveal some underlying need for control (click: Time, Is Venting Healthy?)? What veritas might be revealed when you lose it?
Yes, please tell us, you masters of the universe.
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