First Head-to-Head, or Full and Frank Discussions

There are many reasons why during the campaign I thought, and still think, that there is no way the man who is, incredibly, now the U.S. President-elect nevertheless, could ever do any sort of a good job as the head of the nation.  One of the chief of those reasons is the certainty that he can’t possibly cut a good figure in representing this country when it comes to foreign relations.  This is in spite of the fact that the world stage is far from filled with impressive figures.  Even in that light he would be like a very large  and restless pit bull, on which all the others would keep casting a wary eye, for obvious reasons.

For one thing, this Beloved of the Angries is not fluent even in his own language, and that reflects badly on a person’s thought processes.  For another, if he ever got a good education, that has, to my notice, never been mentioned even by his most rabid boosters.  Or if he did have one, he long ago left it lying limpid by the wayside, like a used condom, so that everything he says gives the strong impression that he is merely winging it – his ideas, his values, his opinions, his policies, his convictions, everything – and that he has never given deep thought to anything in his life, save for doing whatever would allow him to give close-up inspections to beauty pageant contestants, who would otherwise favor him with hardly a glance, especially now that he is an old and badly decayed rascal, with his most notable physical features being weak-looking eyes and all the space between his chin and the top of his chest having a curiously webbed appearance.

I expect, therefore, that when he meets other so-called “world leaders,” especially when there are a bunch of them together, they will see him as being the embodiment of the famous “Ugly American” – huge, gross, indulgent, self-absorbed, and unthinking -- and they will smile, with all kinds of condescension in their faces and in their manners.

--Except for one guy.

There is one other figure who is his soul-mate among national leaders, and like him, has only recently wriggled into view, and I am waiting with interest to see if my prophesy will come true, which is that this person will be the first “world leader” who will have a private tete-a-tete with the current U.S. Prez-elect.  And surprise!  He will not be the widely expected Putin guy in Russia.   It will instead be the recently elected President of the Philippines, who goes by the name of Rodrigo “Digong” Duterte and who has already established himself as being an individual with homicidal leanings and an enormous potty-mouth.  One report has it that he shot a fellow student while in law school, without, however, actually killing him, while others have him being strongly supportive of the murders of as many as 1,400 criminals and drug dealers without the due process of law.   In addition, while campaigning for President, he is supposed to have vowed to see to the killing of tens of thousands more of such people, after which he would officially pardon himself when his term is over.

Our President-elect will not have to worry about being subjected to the verbal abuse that Obama tolerated from this man, for various nebulous causes.  Duterte claims to have undergone a religious conversion that has inspired him to clean up his verbal act.  That cannot be believed.  Habitual cursing is a true addiction not easily dumped, because it is so easily practiced

In any case on the heels of calling Obama obscene names for whatever the U.S. president said or did, which couldn’t have been much, Duterte then went on to show his true colors again, by allowing a hero’s re-burial of what remains of Ferdinand Marcos, the notorious Dictator of the Philippines 30 years ago.  I wouldn’t be surprised if today, outside those islands, Marcos is remembered for only one thing, and it does not even involve him and instead concerns his wife, Ymelda, a shameless but interesting woman, who used the spousal loot mainly to accumulate an incredibly large collection of shoes.   I always wondered what was going on there, as it struck me as being a supreme example of enormous waste enabled by monies obtained by questionable means.  What was she trying to say there?

It will be interesting to see what tune these two men will sing together, during their first meeting in wherever and whenever, with the likeliest spot being hopefully a leaking raft on the South China Sea.   I think they will make a striking pair.  Having just entered their ‘70’s, they were born at nearly the same time, and they have nearly identical and impeccable credentials for being classic “dirty old men.”

I can hear Duterte going right down the American President’s alley, by telling him about one of his exploits when he was the mayor of the city of Davao, and he had had occasion to view the remains of a woman who had been gang-raped and then murdered.  He was struck by how beautiful the woman had been, and Duterte said she looked so much like an American film star that he had asked why he couldn’t have been the first in line to rape her, since he was the mayor.  When an outcry arose he defended himself by saying he had only meant that as a joke -- that old excuse for bad behavior that is apparently as dismally weak in the Philippines as it is in the U.S.

I couldn’t see that that excursion into outright necrophilia was much different from speaking of fondness for grabbing women by that all-important and sensitive part of their physical equipment, their genitals, as that U.S. President had testified to having, in his confabs over the radio with his buddy, Howard Stern, and there was a tape tape to prove it.   So he and Duterte are sure to get along famously, especially in view of Republican support for rape, as shown by statements by one or the other of their candidates every once in a while and their arguments against abortion.

President Dump and President Dirt.  That’s a picture.  The Bad and the Ugly, with nothing Good anywhere to be seen.