9/11, Donald Trump, publishing

Friday 9/11/26

I saw an interview this morning from back in 2001 of Donald Trump at Ground Zero in NYC. He has lied, of course, about what he was doing back then. Needing to be rescued himself, then saving people. Whatever else he's said. He's always been a liar. Most people are liars. Including the people who go on about Donald Trump being a liar.

Many lie so naturally that they don't know they do it. People simply say things. They'll say what gets them what they want. What gets them out of a situation. The reason why people usually think they're good people--well, one of the reasons--is because they associate being a bad person with sitting there and plotting and trying to bring about ill effects and harm.

That's usually not what evil is. Evil is a way of being. It's how you are and behave. That's why it means next to nothing when people say, "I wasn't trying to hurt you." As in, they didn't have a meeting with themselves about how to do something awful to you. Rather, it just came naturally for them. Which is much worse if you think about it at all.

Anyway, Trump didn't sound like some good guy, but he sounded like a different person in this interview. Not unhinged. As slippery as a greased anchovy between one's fingers, but not raving and mad. He's only sounded raving and mad for a while now. When he talks about 9/11 in 2026, it's entirely about him. But during this interview from twenty-five years ago, you can tell that he was to some degree, even if it was a slight degree, effected by what he'd seen or learned. Despite himself no doubt, but all the same.

People say that power corrupts, but as with everything they say, they're usually just saying something. There's a vast difference between just saying something and thinking through the entirety of what you're saying as you're saying, so that you feel the meaning of those words pass through your brain rather than just roll them off the tongue.

Publishing, for instance, is about power. It isn't about writing or reading. It's not about selling books. It's about having some form of power over others. This is why most of the people who are in it are in it. They have no love for the written word. No more than some middle aged guy who calls the sports radio station to give his "hot take" and thinks reading is for "sissies."

It's the power. Punch Hutton? Power. Now, this is like being a paramecium in a drop of scummy pond water that can only be seen under a microscope so far as the rest of the world--the outside world--is concerned, but that's still power and what a really small, talentless person like that wants is any kind of power they can get. They blow this up in their mind, being someone who never deals in reality and never looks at anything, especially themselves, honestly, as hugely significant.

Carolyn Kuebler having "power" at the New England Review over someone infinitely more talented than she is when it comes to work running for free in a journal no one outside of the tiniest enclaves has heard of and which no one is going to actually read, including the people of that tiniest of enclaves who are just doing lip service and searching for, acting on, brokering, posturing, and/or ceding this kind of power themselves.

Most of publishing is liberal, but most of these people are as Donald Trump as Donald Trump himself is. They're too stupid and lacking in self-awareness to see that. And racist, sexist, hypocritical. Weak. Cowardly. David Remnick? Scott Stossel? Power. It isn't about anything else. Even with all the sex crimes. That stems from and is about power, too. Look at the pock mark in full-sized human form that is Mark Warren. That'll get you a Pulitzer Prize here. Won't stand in the way. Same as being Trump and raping children won't keep you from the presidency. The less talent, brains, character, the more doable.

There is hardly anyone who is morally sound enough to have power and be the same person they were as a good person without power. The same goes with money. The Bible isn't literal. It's lessons. Fables. It isn't about heaven and hell. It has more in common with Hans Christian Anderson's writings than hocus-pocus and sky dad. It's not a guidebook for how to win yourself this ultimate prize. But it contains tales that you can read and think about as to how you're behaving or that might help you think about what you can do better within yourself to become a kinder person. Or a calmer person. A more honest person.

When Christ said it was harder for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than it was for a rich person to get into heaven, he was talking in symbols. He was talking as much about a random Wednesday as he was this Paradise in the sky. He was really talking about power.

But here's the thing. Power corrupts, yes. People don't answer to what's inside of them. That is the system of checks and balance. They answer to what they can externally get away with. They don't stop themselves; external forces do. The person who doesn't cheat on their spouse as they're grinding it out and coming home tired at seven o'clock every night who is given money and opportunity and can hook up with all the college women he wants is going to hook up with all the college women. In many cases. In most.

But even the people who do truly understand that power corrupts usually don't augment that with the understanding that having greater power corrupts more in turn. The more you get, the worse you become. This is human nature. Especially with how human nature has become warped and broken to a greater degree than ever before in this century. Human nature now has a monkey wrench jammed in its spine. It's all bent over and contorted. You have next to no chance in this current world of knowing a truly good person at any point in your life. It's such a small number of holdouts. And they're scattered. It's not like they're assembled in Good Person Town, USA holding a harvest fest on the village green.

Trump has far more power now than he did then. The presidency is like being pickled in power. Small things for small minds can have the same effect. Again, a Carolyn Kuebler at New England Review, a Punch Hutton, a Sigrid Rausing at Granta, a J. Robert Lennon at Cornell/Epoch. Name any one of these people from this fetid drop of pond water that you wish. The bill fits more or less equally. You perhaps have experience with someone who is the treasurer or what not of the co-op or association in which you live, and they conduct themselves as if they're the king or queen not only of your building but what might as well be the world at large.

The reality doesn't matter. It hardly ever matters to people because very few people live in or answer to reality. You'll find a Donald Trump as the shift manager of a Starbucks, and scads of Trumps in a place like publishing. People can get themselves to believe anything, especially what they want to believe about themselves, and what they need to believe. A strong person doesn't need to believe anything about themselves. Not as some preemptive act. Rather, they assess. They deal with who and what they are. If they don't like that, they work to change it. If they feel they're not as they should be, they work to change it.

The amount of strength it takes to see that you suck as a person and do something about it is an amount of strength and also courage that next to no one possesses. And no one wants to go through life thinking they suck. So they're going to decide to see things, term things, a different way, no matter how contrary that way is to reality. But we've also razed reality to the ground, so to speak, stamped it out, buried it, with how we live now. Everything we have built in this world, the way we do everything, the way we speak, write (and can't write), demand, sell, model, is to undercut and erase reality. The seeing of reality for what reality is.

That's what the screen in your hand that you stare at is for. That's what AI is for. It'd be rather easy to fix a bunch of things. You want people to be able to read and think? I'll give you the solution right here: have a house full of books for your kids, read to them, keep them away from screens. I'd say if you actually loved your kids and were a fit parent, this is the only way you could do things. But most people aren't fit parents and don't truly love their children. If they did love their children, they'd parent them better.

That's one example of how to fix a problem that everyone else but me throws up their hands in regards to and says, "Well, that's just how the world is now, nothing to be done about it" as if it were the ultimate act of God.

But that's not reality. You could also publish works that didn't suck, and help create a system that encouraged and produced better writers. The odds of a good writer, for instance, coming out of the MFA system are about equal with a massive comment smacking the earth later today and shearing off a polar ice cap. That's not the way one becomes a good writer. The problem isn't even primarily that what is published sucks; it's that there isn't anyone any good out there with stuff that should be published instead.

But we have millions of people--including millions who've never written a sentence in anger, to use a sports phrase, which people won't even understand doesn't mean writing in anger as in "Roar! I'm angry!"--calling themselves writers, virtually none of whom ever, or have ever, read anything in their lives. Because if these millions and millions of lying, pretend writers, who stick that label in their Instagram bio, were readers, well, what a fantastically literate world this would be, right?

You'll find no one else saying any of these things which are the reality, and should be obvious to anyone who can still process reality. But there's the horrific rub. People are blinded, too, by their personal searches for power. And power at all costs. The Reddit mod. The influencer. The woman who posts photo after photo of herself on her "socials" and checks the dashboard for the tallies of her impressions, comments, likes, fifty times a day, because seeing the numbers go up is, to them, in how they've warped themselves, power. Or a Chris Beha. A Wendy Lesser. Or a president of the United States.