Hardball
IN African folklore, the tortoise had a special place. He was the preening, conceited and all-clever figure that often over-reached himself; and became all-foolish.
Why, he once declared he had warehoused all gumption in a gourd; and that common sense was now a tortoise monopoly! Yet, it took a common palm wine tapper to teach him the most basic of gumption: that you climbed the palm tree with the gourd — even of gumption! — at your back, not dangling on your belly! So long for tortoise the wise!
Don’t know about the escapades of the American tortoise. But the African tortoise, dashing king of African folktales, has so much affinity with Trump — proud, cocky, deluded, clever to the point of stupidity and eternally plotting!
Before the election, Trump boasted Joe Biden was the “worst candidate” in American presidential history; and it would be a catastrophe to lose to such a person.
Well, Trump got his dream catastrophe! But the irony is totally lost on him: that his post-loss tantrums are making him the worst and most graceless loser — to use his own customized hyperbole — in American presidential history!
And what a parody from Trump’s own mouth! CNN, his media nemesis, aired a telling video of Trump lampooning someone, who rejected the result of a White House election, even if the election was squeaky clean! Might embattled Trump, with own mouth, be predicting — or was it prophesying? — his own post-poll collapse, to the embarrassment of peacocky America, the self-appointed global democracy police?
For three long weeks, Trump suborned the US General Administration Services (GSA), to hide behind contrived election certification technicality, to stonewall Biden’s victory and sabotage the Trump-Biden transition.
But delaying the transition, many opine, might put America’s security in jeopardy, as its enemies, they claim, could home in with lethal and fatal mischief, seizing the vacuum Trump created. Besides, it could imperil America’s COVID-19 vaccine roll-out.
Now, after Trump’s spectacular mishandling of his much-vulgarized “China virus”, making America the worst hit country in the world (12.7 million cases, 261, 000 deaths and still vigorously counting), a botched inter-administration vaccine roll-out could undo Trump’s only glittering COVID-19 legacy: Operation Warp Speed, that has achieved three effective vaccines in record time.
Still, after the collapse of that gambit and subsequently granting the Biden transition its due, in cash, office accommodation and Intel-briefing, you would have thought Trump would eat crow, accept his well-deserved fate and fade out with the little dignity he has left.
Not Trump! He still richly deludes in up-turning Biden’s election — an action that could have been so comic were it not so tragic. That goes back to the eerie Trump-tortoise parallel.
In Kurunmi, Ola Rotimi’s Yoruba historical tragedy, the tortoise, betrayed a spectacular self-ruin conceit. Asked when he would return from a journey he just announced, the tortoise shot back: “When I’m utterly disgraced”!
Trump, playing the comical post-poll spoiler, is embarking on a journey from which he won’t return until he is utterly disgraced! The ultimate 21st century American “Big Man” (to parody “African Big Man” from The Economist) dancing naked and getting a kick out of it!
For Hardball, it’s so fulfilling Trump is confirming everything the ever-condescending and eternally mischievous western media project and condemn, in the so-called third world and the “non-democratic” other worlds!
Trump, the American tortoise, is prime time entertainment on the global stage. Let’s hugely thank CNN for serving it all, realtime, and in rich technicolor!
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