Conventional schoolyard wisdom holds that the only ways to rid oneself of a bully are to ignore him or punch him back. In the case of Donald Trump, the American media has tried the pugilist's approach with no luck. And so former CNN anchor Campbell Brown argues in a column for Politico Magazine that it's time to stop punching back, and start ignoring the GOP presidential front runner. She is pleading with the TV news media to boycott covering the real estate mogul for one week.
"Let's stop being complicit in promoting his hateful and harmful demagoguery. Just for one week," Brown wrote. "TV turns [Trump] on and only TV can turn him off."
Capitalism created Trump the empire and Trump the candidate. Adam Smith, I believe, was dead on with the invisible hand, and many other things. Yet, an unpleasant aspect of capitalism is that it serves the basest of desires in man as equally as their best. Cynically, I'd say it serves the basest desires better than the best within man because vice pays much much better than virtue.
ReplyDeleteIn Galt's speech at the end of Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand rambles on quite a bit using an analogy of a car and tells the reader not to blame the car that brought them to where they didn't want to go, rather, the problem was the fuel used. The rise of Trump the candidate is not a failure of capitalism. The author does kind of have a point, the media has hung on Trump's every word and has given him endless free air time. But the media would not do so if it didn't glue eyeballs to the TV. That is the real problem, Trump sells. Even if the media suddenly treated him as, "He who shall not be mentioned or displayed", it would not change the "fuel" that is driving interest in Trump.