Teaching Children, Well

I WAS SCROLLING through Facebook as I often do with morning coffee, mainly for amusement and elucidation of current American cultural trends, but also looking for ideas for good, juicy provocative essay material, when I happened upon a particularly illumminating statement made in a purely verbal post.It said: "Trump is everything we teach our children not to be." I stopped scrolling long enough to commit the remark to memory, knowing that I had indeed found sufficient fodder for my essay of the day. The words and tune of Crosby Stills and Nash's iconic song "Teach Your children" floated into my mind, and I also knew that it would remain there for the entire day. My daily song stuck in my head for a day had finally arrived, earlier than usual.I furtehr recalled a Facebook post I had seen several times over the past few years, in which Trump's mother, a sever, stern looking woman who looked perfectly capable of raising a son extrememly srictly, proclaimed, perhaps ficticiously, that she had done everytihg she could have done to bring up the boy to have values embodying deceny, honesty, and integrity, but had failed, miserably. She allegedly went on to express her deepest, most sincere hope that her brat boy never grew up to become an imortant, influential member of society, such as, say, a successful poltician, almost as if she had a premonition that he indeed would. As I recall, she was lamenting the failure, perhaps even apologizing for it. Alas, the best laid plans of mice, and men...Clearly,something in Donald Trup's ubringing went horribly wrong, or had horribly disastrous results, in terms of outcome. Trump, demonstrably, has been a great waste of perfectly good clean air his entire life, from his time in forced military oriented grade school through high school, to his time at the U of Penn. No fewer than two of his former professors, still alive in their mid nineties, described himas "the dumbest sonofabitch" I ever had in class." That, I can believe. I assume anyone but the most fervant, devout MAGA brain washed low education low IQ Trump sycophant can too. The facs are wellknown, and, as we like to say, speak for themselves, loudly, and clearly.Trump is widely proclaimed a genius by himself and his semi-moronic cult of followers, as is usually the case with the thoroughly uneducated indoctrinated. Anyone who has ever heard his orangeness attempt to construct a complete sentence from polysyllabic words knows all too well of his utter inability to do so. Trump is cruel, crass, corrupt, without even a trace of moral rectitude, meticulously dishonest as if by concious intent, without even the slightest hint of any redeeming personal characteristic whatever, as one suspects even his most ardent adorers can discern.Trump's mother must have noticed her son's pandering, purely phony personality from an early age, and must have realized that although it was utterly unsuitable for any sort of honest endeavor or livlihood, that it was suitable in modern America to politics, given the made for false advertising political style prevelant in our age of television in the United States of Advertising, as Gore Vidal called America. A wise educator once said that the failure of our educational system is the failure to make of ourselves citizens and philosophers. H.L. Mencken, a political prophet, predicted as early as nineteen twenty that someday, under the current system, somebody as utterly morally and inellectually vacuous as Trump, a complete moron, as he put it, would indeed ascend to the presidency. Mencken had a head start. He witnessed Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover, three hollow peas in a putrifying political pod. Most frightening and distresing of all is that, given the current state of American education, we the people are almost certainly not done electing Trump types to the nation's highest office. We are simply not teaching our children well, morally or politically.