People can’t get off the Trump needle, busily retweeting, reposting, and squeezing every drop of outrage from whatever he said this time. The election is long over but they are still wriggling in a constant paroxysm of, “Oh, how shocking! Can you believe he said that?!?”
The endless descriptions of how horrified, terrified, exhausted and tortured the Trumpian tweet du jour made them feel is a substitute for any actual political or civic engagement.
So that would explain why I got yelled at today — people addicted to moral outrage and I was the target. OK. Clarissa, Cliff, anyone, could you please, please comment on my post about the experience? It was highly weird. https://profacero.wordpress.com/2016/11/27/on-academic-freedom-2/
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This post feels meta, just like the dream I had last night/early this morning.
I dreamt that I was writing, or revising a short story about time travel. The laptop was fired up, the screen a bright white glow. The crux is that I was trying to say the character, an author stand-in, had time traveled without actually saying it, and to only signal that it had happened in a short sentence. It was not the kind of signal that any readers would be expected to get. “The air had shifted.”
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The endless descriptions of how horrified, terrified, exhausted and tortured the Trumpian tweet du jour made them feel is a substitute for any actual political or civic engagement.
Of course they’re exhausted. Endlessly reacting is exhausting. The MoJones Facebook feed resembles Buzzfeed. “OMG. Wow. Terrifying”, etc. I’m pretty sure hardly anyone is paying attention though. Making actual plans would be less exhausting.
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A conservative literary critic and college professor
Clarissa's Blog 
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