Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

  Is it just me, or is it difficult for anyone else to bat away the feeling that George Santos is Donald Trump's mini-me. This makes perfect sense if we are all in fact characters in a gigantic Simulation created by computer programmers in some other world, the prime world.  Their algorithms are complex, but recognizably fractal. Donald Trump's character arc could not appear just once: it had to appear in an oddly overlapping way and in miniature.  Even Santos' drag-queen persona seems to be a miniaturization of Trump's time in show business, as the decisive CEO telling apprentices "you're fired." His life as a real-estate wheeler-dealer was nothing like the Hollywood fantasy of board room re-hashes and confrontations. It was a drag show. Publicly owned exchange listed businesses have the sort of big board room portrayed in those scenes. Trump has never run one of those, and didn't have such a room available. So the television production company creat...

She keeps coming back into our lives like the cat in a certain campfire song who wouldn't stay away though "they thought he was a goner." She, of course, is Omarosa Newman, who first appeared on pop culture's radar during the very first season of The Apprentice.  That was fourteen years ago. She was fired in week nine, which means she finished in 8th place, but she made a memorable impression (the love-to-hate sort of impression) for avoiding elimination as long as she did through back-stabbing At any rate, in later seasons Trump kept having her back. In July 2016, the Trump campaign named her its Director of African-American Outreach. Apparently because she was black and sort-of famous. It isn't clear whether she had a regular work day during the campaign or what she did during such a day. Maybe her new memoir sheds some light on this. She got a similarly vague communications job in the new administration, leaving in December 2017. The manner of that le...