I watched President Trump’s speech in Fargo tonight. No network carried it except for Fox. The day after the travel ban was upheld and Justice Kennedy resigned, the situation on the border is in flux, primaries happened last night, and no network thought that covering the President’s speech was important, except Fox News.

It was a great speech. It was an important speech.

I was at the Democratic convention in Chicago that nominated Adlai Stevenson. My uncle was a delegate. I shook Jack Kennedy’s hand at the fair grounds in Fargo when he was running for the nomination for President. Donald Trump is the greatest politician I have ever seen. He is also the greatest leader I have ever seen.

I was reminded today of the time when I first met and fell in love with the C programming language and the UNIX operating system, which is written in C and is an extension of the C philosophy. Make no mistake, C and UNIX are not just computer programs. They are guides to how to think.

Developed at Bell Labs in the 70s by Dennis Ritchie, Ken Thompson, and others, Unix has become the universal operating system. MacOS is based on it. Every web site you visit probably runs on Unix. It is difficult to imagine a time in the future when Unix will not be the basis of computing at every level, as it is now, from toasters to server farms. It ranks up there with the printing press for a reality-changing human invention.

I got out my old copy of the slim volume, The C Programming Language by Dennis Ritchie and Brian Kernighan. It’s a second edition from 1988. I think I’ll read it again. The writing is like the C language itself, clean, elegant, inevitable. Reading this book is therapy. Your mind comes out the other side reorganized.

From the copyright page:

“This book was typeset (pic|tbl:rqn|troff -ms) in Times Roman and Courier by the authors, using an Autologic APS-5 phototypesetter and a DEC VAX 8550 running the 9th Edition of the UNIX operating system.”

Among the many precincts of our reality that have been exposed and brought to light by Donald Trump’s ascension is the degree to which human beings believe all kinds of crazy shit. Trump has turned at least 30% of Americans into a howling mob that believes he is a monster who is destroying the world, starting with innocent children.

The collapse of the the FBI/DOJ coup attempt and the Russia collusion witch hunt has driven the anti-trumpers mad. As Scott Adams says, it’s because if they are wrong about Trump, then they have been on the side of traitors conspiring to overthrow the election, and the elected government, instead of heroes saving the country. That kind of head-snapping reversal is more than a human being can handle.

Hence the hysteria about children in cages, which finally proves that Trump is Hitler. It’s the law, has been for many years. Under Obama it wasn’t being enforced. People caught illegally crossing the border with kids, were caught and released into the U.S. Not too big a deal because there weren’t that many. But people learned that bringing kids was a free ticket into the U.S. So now they bring kids, lots and lots of them, in many cases not their own. It’s a mess. It needs to be fixed.

Comparing it to the Holocaust and Trump to Hitler, is not helpful.

When Obama got elected I didn’t like it. I didn’t vote for him. But I had some hope. He was young, smart, cool. Maybe he would have some good ideas. How bad could it be? It was a catastrophe. I don’t like to say that I hated him, but by the end of his two terms, it was pretty close. I didn’t wish any harm on him or his family, but I was sure looking forward to him being gone.

Here’s what I didn’t do: I never questioned the legitimacy of his election, I never called for his impeachment, I never likened him in any way to Hitler. I have to admit that a few times I did question whether or not he was acting in good faith, but for the most part I assumed he was. I thought he was just in over his head and didn’t have a very strong character.

Now the shoe is on the other foot for all the people who loved Obama, of whom there are many. I put up with Obama for eight years. Now it’s your turn. Hillary Clinton lost fair and square. Donald Trump is the President. Grin and bear it. It’s going to be at least 3 more years. Quit being crazy.

He’s not Hitler. He’s not going to destroy the world. He’s not an idiot. He is acting in good faith. He’s doing great things the way I see it, and the way people who support him see it. You don’t have to like him. I didn’t like Obama.

Do you want to live in a functioning Constitutional republic or not?

I used to not like the way political reporting and discourse was constrained within what was at the time a very narrow Overton window. Now I’m not so sure that the sizable expansion of those limits that has occurred, especially of late, is an unalloyed good.

Now we are seeing the reality of what the right and the left really think, or at least a lot more of the reality than before. And it’s not pretty. It doesn’t look resolvable. When human conflicts become unresolvable, that’s when you have war.

Support for President Trump, for example, often means loss of friends, alienation of family, loss of employment, social ostracism, and a damaged professional reputation. Support for Hilary Clinton or Bernie Sanders or Maxine Waters entails no such risk. They are still safely within the confines of the Overton window as defined by the media. it is the President who has stepped outside of it.

Trump supporters are not considered to be fully human by the left. They are ignorant bigots at best, and evil Nazis when you really get down to it. I don’t think this perception is going to change, even if Trump creates peace on earth and prosperity for all. Whatever good thing Trump does never seems to have any effect whatsoever on the degree of hatred directed on him.

If this November there is at least some kind of blue wave, that might calm things down a bit, but if, by some chance, the Republicans actually gain instead of lose, I fear for the collective sanity. The Resistance will lose its mind completely because they will finally see that the entire country is a nest of unrepentant racist sub-human beasts. Typically, that’s when the guerrillas head for the hills.

Of course they would have to buy guns first.

Engraved on my tombstone, I want my epitaph to be:

“We’ll See What Happens”

Back when I loved Bill Clinton, I thought that the whole Whitewater/Monica/impeachment drama was a despicable political witch hunt. Now that I know Bill Clinton to be a scumbag, I still feel the same way about that disgraceful political episode.

But at least Bill Clinton didn’t have the top levels of the CIA and FBI and DOJ and the White House conspiring against him to prevent his election and, after he was elected, to somehow get him removed from office.

I realize that most of the few readers of this post will not believe that this happened and is still happening. I suppose it’s possible y’all may be right. There is much more to come. The IG report isn’t even out yet. But for a bettin’ man, it looks like the odds are lining up in favor of what comes very close to being a coup attempt. Instead of a military coup, an intelligence coup.

It is probably the case that these people, Brennan, Clapper, Comey, McCabe, Strozk, Page, (and more) are all patriots who saw their beloved country about to be taken over by a monster who would destroy America and the world.

I’m sure they do think this. They have many allies in the mainstream media who also believe this. The faculty of the universities believe this. So does the artist/entertainment community.

You know who doesn’t believe it? The majority of the people in this country who live outside of California. This coup is an attempt to overthrow them.

People in the public eye who express support (or even just love) for the President of the United States, pay a price, in lost revenue, vilification in the media, and alienation of friends and family. Attacks on the President are rewarded with applause and promotion in the media, and protection from boycotts in business.

Most people can’t really afford to absorb the kind of abuse that support for President Trump entails. So those who do view him favorably in any way are forced into silence.

I’m 74, self-employed, and not desperate for human company, so I can live with the slings and arrows. Many cannot. This silent majority is larger and more hidden than anything in Nixon’s time.

My life looks like this. Always, 24 hours a day, I have at least two internet capable devices at hand. During the day I normally have five, an Apple watch, an iPhone, an iPad, a Mac Mini with an external display and keyboard, and a MacBook Pro with a 27” Thunderbolt display, keyboard, and external hard drive. And then of course there is Apple TV.

I’m 74 years old, so I get up a couple times a night to pee, and check my email. During the day I am always plugged in unless I go out for some reason, and even then I always have my phone unless I am actually in the water swimming at Jefferson Springs (I went in today, first swim of the year. Fabulous.).

I see many articles and tweets and whatnot about how terrible this kind of internet symbiosis is, how it is ruining our youth, causing addiction, ruining marriages, allowing Russians to influence our elections, etc. No doubt there is some element of truth to these worries, but I just don’t see it. Why would anyone want to have less information? Is ignorance really bliss? I can understand taking some time off and cutting yourself off from the flow to soak up some nature. That makes some sense, but in my experience even those idylls can be enhanced by information-maximizing substances.

Of course not everyone can handle a lot of information. I understand that, and it’s good to know your limitations, and you have to be a good editor, but the way I see it, there’s no such thing as too much information as long as you’re able to process it. That has always been the case.

I’m old enough to remember a time when political discussion with one’s friends and relatives was common and civil. I grew up in a family that talked politics, and whenever my brothers and I would get together, we would always talk politics.

No more. It’s toxic. It’s a mine field. People lose their jobs and their friends, are kicked out of their families, lose their businesses. At the very least one risks being assailed with mockery and rage, and social ostracism.

But it is pretty much all one way. Conservatives aren’t boycotting businesses or trying to get people fired or unfriending people for their political opinions or shouting down speakers we don’t agree with. They, we, don’t do that stuff. We get it done to us. Conservatives aren’t censoring and banning people on Twitter and Facebook. It’s always the left.

My uncle was a federal judge and a friend of George McGovern’s. My father was a life-long Democrat. He was also a WWII bomber pilot just like George McGovern. My Father voted for Nixon. I think that’s when it began, in the 60s.

We all pretty much used to think that the politicians and the FBI and the media were decent people doing their best. Sure, there was some corruption and incompetence, as with all human organizations, but there was no reason to go nuts about whether you were a Republican or a Democrat. But starting in the 60s and accelerating into the present, all of those institutions like the FBI and the State Department and the New York Times have turned out to be corrupt and/or incompetent to a degree we never imagined in 1956.

Everyone is angry. Who or what they are angry at varies. And then we get angry at the people who are angry for different reasons than ours. So the President, Donald Trump, is either a swamp-draining savior or a racist, Hitlerish monster. If you express a belief in the former, you will be subjected to attacks on your sanity and character from those who believe the latter. Strangely enough, it doesn’t work the other way around. There is no penalty for saying that Donald Trump is Hitler or Bozo or whatever the current in vogue insult is.

I don’t see how this gets resolved. I don’t see either side changing their minds en masse. I see the division getting wider and deeper. A real war seems wildly unlikely, but wars are fought when there is no other way to resolve the dispute. So what’s it gonna be?