Some More Things To Think About This Election Season: The “Empathy For The Trump Voter” Edition

With only a couple of days to go before the election, I look back on this unspeakably hideous political season, and I realize its main theme in public discourse (other than that email nonsense) was how badly progressives like me fail to understand/appreciate/love the Trump voter.  In spite of copious coverage, people who are voting Trump are deemed forgotten and ignored by the elitist media.  And so in the spirit of the times, I’d like to add the following three items to this election’s installment of Six Things I Want Every Politically Opinionated Person To Take To Heart:

Déjà Vu

I have refrained from commenting on the 2016 Presidential Election so far because I find it deeply depressing, more so than previous elections have been.  Obviously, I have opinions about it, even strong opinions, but all this disheartening rubbish is so obvious, there is really nothing for me to say that someone else hasn’t already said, better.    Besides, pretty much everything that comes out of Donald Trump’s mouth and the maws of his odious supporters speaks for itself.  Here is what I find fascinating and bewildering, though.  I just can’t, for the life of me, understand why in the name of all that is holy the Republican Party threw in its lot with Trump.

Six More Things I Want Every Politically Opinionated Person To Take To Heart

During the previous presidential election cycle, I wrote a post entitled 12 Things I Want Every Politically Opinionated Person To Take To Heart, in which I discussed some of the most irritating absurdities of American politics.  Now that we are going through this thing again, here is a follow-up.

We Are What We Eat, In More Ways Than One

Last week’s news: Paula Deen, a popular cook and author of cookbooks with an emphasis on traditional (read: breaded and greasy) Southern cuisine, revealed that she had been suffering from diabetes for the last three years. She has come out about it now in order to shill for a pharmaceutical company. There is no denying that the there is irony in the situation, an obese adherent of riotously unhealthy cooking developing diabetes. Quelle surprise. And there is something unsavory in that, having made money for herself by selling such unhealthy recipes, she is now going to make some more by selling medication for a disease that’s caused, to a large extent, by bad diet.

Still, I wish people would stop ripping into her already. The reason for that is, I am just not sure that publishing a cookbook is tantamount to promoting a lifestyle. Were it so, vegan and low-fat cookbooks would certainly have fixed our nation’s eating habits by now. Fact is, however, people buy cookbooks that appeal to their tastes. A health-conscious person may buy a Paula Deen cookbook, but certainly will not use it with any frequency significant enough to impact his or his family’s health. By contrast, people who buy her cookbooks because they like to have that kind of food on a daily basis, would eat junk just as well without her input.

It does make one think, though: why DO people indulge in diets known to lead to serious illness?