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| https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2017/03/donald-trump-tries-to-read-a-book.html |
Reading is fundamental as the slogan of most of our childhoods constantly reminded us. Though the invention and pervasive infiltration of television into our lives threatened what and how much people read, reading has actually had a resurgence in the modern world of the web 2.0, not to mention web 3.0 or web4.
Without uncloaking the technology that distinguishes between web iterations, the interconnected world of which we are most acquainted seamlessly blends social media with Google search and tree-growth like experiences of moving from thing to thing to thing to thing. Much of these things involve reading. Though people's web-connected experience do not always involve reading books or articles of length and complexity, like so much else, all of those are available at their finger tips.
And yet people are reading quite bit these days, often as alternatives to too much screen time, toxic social media, or increasingly hostile talking heads on television.
I am not prepared to trot out statistics comparatively on reading numbers today versus in the past but anecdotally from informal polls of friends, colleagues, and students, it seems reading is still a very popular past time, whether it's more popular than in times with fewer entertainments or whether its numbers show more popular than some social media consumption (I doubt it) as a segment of the population, I am not inclined to devote the time for that research for this post.
The point of this post is that historically presidents have read, read voraciously, and especially applied themselves to reading reports and briefings that is their JOB to read.
Despite some propaganda at the RNC to the contrary, all indications evince that this "president" does not read and never has. And he lies about it. He claims to have read books he has not. He claims to have read reports that clearly he has not read, and despite making claims that he's a devout Christian, he cannot name a single favorite biblical passage.
He's a fraud.
His lack of intellectualism and self-education on things he needs to know is criminal negligence given his JOB in PUBLIC SERVICE. But moreover, it's his lack of curiosity that is even more disturbing. We need public servants who WANT to learn things and work to educate themselves not ones who resist reading, consume easy and vapid entertainments like cotton candy, and spout ideas that clearly reveal that they know NOTHING about serious issues about which they need to know to do their JOBS effectively.
Vote!
Vote for reading.
In his book Call Sign Chaos, former Secretary of Defense James Mattis writes, "If you haven't read hundreds of books, you are functionally illiterate, and you will be incompetent, because your personal experiences alone aren't broad enough to sustain you." Trump's personal experiences include being on TV a lot and watching a lot of TV.
HE DOESN'T READ. HE DOESN'T EVEN FULLY READ TWITTER MESSAGES BEFORE RE-TWEETING.
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2017/03/donald-trump-tries-to-read-a-book.html
“Well, you know, I love to read. Actually, I’m looking at a book, I’m reading a book, I’m trying to get started. Every time I do about a half a page, I get a phone call that there’s some emergency, this or that. But we’re going to see the home of Andrew Jackson today in Tennessee and I’m reading a book on Andrew Jackson. I love to read. I don’t get to read very much, Tucker, because I’m working very hard on lots of different things, including getting costs down. The costs of our country are out of control. But we have a lot of great things happening, we have a lot of tremendous things happening.” —Donald Trump to Fox News’ Tucker Carlson, March 15, 2017
https://www.gishgallop.com/donald-trump-caught-reading-noam-chomsky/
Hamburg, Germany — President Donald Trump was photographed today reading the Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media during some downtime between G20 meetings with Russian President Vladimir Putin and German Chancellor Angela Merkel. The 1988 book by Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman was given to Mr. Trump but Pope Francis earlier in the week, and the President decided to brush up propaganda model which exists in the systematic biases of the political economy, according to a spokesperson traveling with the President.
The President, who is famous for his disinterest in reading anything, surprised many by his enthusiasm for the Chomsky/Herman book. However his spokesperson sought to clarify why he was reading it.
https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/the-6-books-donald-trump-is-reading-this-summerThe list is blank...
https://americanindependent.com/heres-what-donald-trump-has-been-reading-this-summer/
Trump once bragged that he has a 'very, very large brain.'
On Thursday, CNN reported on "What Barack Obama has been reading this summer." Shareblue Media has obtained a list of the reading material Trump has been reading over the same time period that influences his outlook on life, key issues, and international policy.
Years of reporting indicate that Trump is not much of a reader. He is, however, obsessive about watching TV. He regularly watches Fox News and tweets his reaction to his favorite shows, sometimes from a recorded version on his DVR.
So while Trump likely hasn't picked up a book, what he has been "reading" this year is Fox News. A lot of Fox News.
originally presented in
A Sense of Doubt blog post #1963 - A symbol of hate? Weekly Hodge Podge for July Third
PRESIDENTS READING
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| https://www.esquire.com/entertainment/books/g28711238/barack-obama-summer-2019-reading-list-books/ |
| https://www.businessinsider.com/6-books-president-obama-devoured-during-his-summer-vacation-2015-8 |
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Bush_at_desk_reading_SotU_draft.png |
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| https://gothamist.com/news/video-bush-says-his-blank-911-reaction-was-to-project-a-sense-of-calm |
| https://www.businessinsider.com/bill-clintons-favorite-books-this-year-2019-8 |
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| https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/new-deal-redux-or-great-society-ii-179995/ |
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| https://www.chron.com/life/article/Bush-granddaughters-share-final-touching-moments-13439367.php |
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| https://www.reaganlibrary.gov/arthur-van-court-photograph-collection |
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| https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/president-reagan-gets-comfortable-in-an-easy-chair-in-aspen-news-photo/515560266 |
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| https://www.cnn.com/2018/08/02/politics/trump-books-list/index.html |
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| https://lawandcrime.com/awkward/trump-struggled-to-read-the-constitution-said-it-was-like-a-foreign-language-book/ |
Trump's lethal aversion to reading
If you're reading this sentence, you've read more than the president has today.
Last month, The Washington Post reported that President Trump ignored "more than a dozen" intelligence briefings in January and February warning him of the coronavirus. They were in the President's Daily Brief, which the president doesn't read.
White House trade adviser Peter Navarro wrote a memo in January warning of "a full-blown coronavirus outbreak on U.S. soil." Trump said he didn't see it because "Peter sends a lot of memos," none of which he reads.
After failing to read about the coronavirus, Trump failed to respond to it. It's not a stretch to say that if the president read, thousands of lives might have been saved.
Trump's ghostwriter for The Art of the Deal, Tony Schwartz, speculated that Trump has never read a single book in his adult life, not even a book about him or "by" him, of which there are 17. Trump pretends to have written more books than he pretends to have read.
In an interview on Crossfire in 1987, Trump mentioned Tom Wolfe as one of his favorite authors. Seconds after saying he had not read The Bonfire of the Vanities, Trump said, "I really like Tom Wolfe's last book," which was The Bonfire of the Vanities.
In 2015, Joe Scarborough asked Trump if he could read. After some awkward silence, according to Scarborough, "Trump quietly responded that he could while holding up a Bible."
When Megyn Kelly asked him about the last book he read, Trump replied, "I read passages. I read areas. I'll read chapters. I don't have the time." Trump didn't have time to read the last book he read.
Reading — even about oneself — requires focus, and Trump has none. "It's impossible to keep him focused on any topic, other than his own self-aggrandizement, for more than a few minutes," Schwartz said.
Trump's non-reading evinces not stupidity so much as incuriosity. Narcissists are easily bored, and Trump is no exception. In his 1990 book, Surviving at the Top, which he didn't write, Trump says that travel, exercise, and successful people bore him. "I get bored too easily," he says. "My attention span is short."
Trump's former National Economic Council director Gary Cohn allegedly wrote in an email, "Trump won't read anything — not one-page memos, not the brief policy papers; nothing. He gets up halfway through meetings with world leaders because he is bored."
The only information that interests Trump is information that affirms his self-image. He's rich, handsome, and popular — that's what he wants to hear, which is why he regularly says it himself.
Trump, we are told, processes information orally. If you process information orally, you likely process little information. And if you process little information, you exude even less. Every time Trump comments on a subject, he reveals how little he knows about it. He wondered aloud why the Civil War was fought. He said he's been treated worse than Abraham Lincoln, who was assassinated. He didn't know what happened at Pearl Harbor. He's too dumb to know he's ignorant, and he's too narcissistic to care.
As John McWhorter, a linguistics professor at Columbia University, observed, oral communication is personal, focuses on emotions, and "reinforces what you know," whereas the written word "collects information we don't memorize." The latter is conducive to prolonged thinking.
Trump, putative author of three books with "think" in the title, doesn't like to think. He doesn't even think about himself — his favorite subject — much less about public health. He lives and acts in the moment, chasing instant gratification, which reading does not provide. That's why he prefers television and Twitter to reading and thinking: they are immediate, visceral, and cognitively undemanding.
Reading doesn't necessarily make you a good president — James Buchanan, America's second-worst president, was well-read — but not reading is sure to make you a bad one. In his book Call Sign Chaos, former Secretary of Defense James Mattis writes, "If you haven't read hundreds of books, you are functionally illiterate, and you will be incompetent, because your personal experiences alone aren't broad enough to sustain you." Trump's personal experiences include being on TV a lot and watching a lot of TV.
One of the purposes of reading is to learn, but it's pointless to learn if you already know everything. Trump is convinced of his own omniscience. Last month, he claimed to "know a lot about helicopters" and to "know South Korea better than anybody," right before he got the population of Seoul wrong. "I know windmills very much," he said in December. "I've studied it better than anybody." The president has claimed to possess superior knowledge about drones, ISIS, courts, lawsuits, America's system of government, trade, renewable energy, banks, taxes, tax laws, debt, campaign finance, money, infrastructure, construction, technology, the economy, Democrats, polls, steelworkers, the word "apprentice," environmental impact statements, "the power of Facebook," "offense and defense," Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.), COVID-19, and "things."
None of this is true. Trump is a know-it-all who knows almost nothing and refuses to read anything except his own name. His bibliophobia would be funny if it weren't so deadly.
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+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ - Bloggery committed by chris tower - 2009.01 - 10:10 - Days ago = 1887 days ago - New note - On 1807.06, I ceased daily transmission of my Hey Mom feature after three years of daily conversations. I plan to continue Hey Mom posts at least twice per week but will continue to post the days since ("Days Ago") count on my blog each day. The blog entry numbering in the title has changed to reflect total Sense of Doubt posts since I began the blog on 0705.04, which include Hey Mom posts, Daily Bowie posts, and Sense of Doubt posts. Hey Mom posts will still be numbered sequentially. New Hey Mom posts will use the same format as all the other Hey Mom posts; all other posts will feature this format seen here |
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