Saturday, November 24, 2018

Came to an interesting conclusion just now...

Was reading a WaPo anti-trump piece, on Election Day, and there's a comment:

"[trump] massively overestimates his abilities so he is forever driving things into the ditch, and ends every venture with disaster but still manages to walk away as everyone else is carted off the emergency room"

Remember the book "A Spell For Chameleon" ? By Piers Anthony. One of his best.

I read that when it was new, 40 years ago. The book is about a parallel universe zone in Florida near Okeechobee where magic is a real thing. Each person there has a magic skill. Except the hero. He has nothing. The book is a classic "voyage of self-discovery" in that he DOES have a skill, but it's a passive skill, not an active skill. That passive skill is that he cannot be harmed by magic. *Something* will happen to negate or block any magical attack on him. It's not a thing he controls, it just happens. 

The quote in the comment feels like this. His actions may produce disasters, but he emerges largely unaffected by the outcome, and always claims a win.

The problem in the book was that "sticks and stones could break his bones, but magic could never hurt him". Most of the rest of folks had what could be attack magic, which was rendered useless, but everyone could use a stick.

Trump feels like that, a bit. Reagan, the "teflon president", kinda did too. Altho Reagan's disasters were not on the same scale. 

That'd lead to some weird personal assumptions--like "everything I do works out good", even when it doesn't. 

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