“IF I CAN’T HAVE IT NEITHER CAN YOU” - THE SEETHING INADEQUATES IN ACTION

“You’re no better than me,” is the timeworn playground taunt of the bully, the cretin, and the coward. What’s really meant is, “How come you have/get to do all those cool things I should get to have/do that they won’t let me have/do?”

From this morning’s Washington Post:

“Republican polling leader Donald Trump on Tuesday threatened unrest if the criminal charges against him cause him to lose the 2024 election.

“‘I think they feel this is the way they’re going to try and win, and that’s not the way it goes,’ Trump said. ‘It’ll be bedlam in the country. It’s a very bad thing. It’s a very bad precedent. As we said, it’s the opening of a Pandora’s box.’

“The former president did not take questions and walked away as a Washington Post reporter asked him to rule out violence by his supporters.”

I recently ran across a good term for Trump’s “patriot base”: Seething Inadequates.

The Seething Inadequates have always been with us. Nathaniel West wrote about them in “The Day of the Locust;” they were willing to burn things to the ground from their seething envy of those they perceived as being given success they were prevented from achieving.

They still think that way.

Throughout his career - from destroying the Art Deco pieces on the front of the Bonwit-Teller buiding he razed to build Trump Tower, after promising he would protect them - to having his “spokesman” John Barron argue that he belonged on the Fortunate 500 list of richest Americans, Trump has had his nose pressed to the glass door that will never be opened for him by the “elites” on the other side. His envy of his betters has powered him like a personal nuclear reactor. Trump gains his followers from the fact that he is actually the Biggest Loser of the bunch of them. His envy of his betters is theirs.

As Michael Kruse noted in a POLITICO piece in 2018 on Trump:

“In interviews and speeches at rallies, as his campaign gathered momentum, the steady target of his ire was the establishment and its even more suspect inner circle: ‘media elites,’ ‘the political elites,’ ‘the elites who only want to raise more money for global corporations,’ ‘the elites who led us from one financial and foreign policy disaster to another.’ Hillary Clinton, he said, hammering away at starkly sketched lines, ‘stood with the elites.’”

Trump has tremendous faith in his own brilliance, as shown in this tweet from 2018: “Actually, throughout my life, my two greatest assets have been mental stability and being, like, really smart,” adding that his life “would qualify as not smart, but genius .... and a very stable genius at that!”

These statements seemed always to be followed by such “genius” ideas as taking bleach internally to clear out COVID, or announcing that Vladimir Putin “very strongly rejected” claims of interfering in the 2016 election, “...and I believe him.”

Trump and his diehard fellow Seething Inadequates are the perfect examples of the Dunning Kruger Effect: “A cognitive bias in which people with limited competence in a particular domain overestimate their abilities.” In the case of Trump and the Inadequates, the term is “very limited competence.”

Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice Jill Karofsky was recently quoted, saying “I believe people when they say that they want to hurt us or kill us. I don’t think they’re idle threats.”

They aren’t.

Like many authors, I’ve had to deal with a stalker, one of the Seethings, a resident of the Redneck Riviera down in Floridumb. Don’t laugh, but the reason he first got wound up about me was over plastic models. He couldn’t stand the fact that I had (and have had for the past 25 years) a regular reviewing day over at Modeling Madness. Why, I was getting (and still do) free kits! And other modelers liked (and still do) that the reviews had a history write-up in them. And not only that, but I was a @#$#@!! Hollywood Lib’rul, and didn’t even support Widdle Georgie’s Invasion of Poland (er, I mean Iraq). And not only that, I got to know the people he wanted to know, and never could. This guy threatened the publisher of Modeling Madness with an “organized boycott by your patriotic readers” if he didn’t drop me - and even volunteered to receive the free models that he would patriotically review. He made a similar threat to my then-editor over at Flight Journal. In both cases, the responses he got were strong enough to take paint off a wall. But when he decided to try and interfere with my book publisher, he was stupid enough to use the company e-mail at his dead-end job. As with most publishers, mine knew what to do with this kind of idiot - they referred him to the FBI for internet harassment of trade (that’s actually a crime). I took his email and contacted his employer, which resulted in him rejoining the job seekers, this time with a big black mark in his record. Since he hadn’t been able to make good on any of his threats, all he got was a first timer’s visit from the FBI and the advice to knock it off.

All that only pissed him off more. So much so that when the next year’s IPMS National Convention was held here in Anaheim, he made the mistake of posting at another modeling site that he was going to come to the convention and “make TC sorry for all he did.” That rose to the level of internet terrorism, and got taken seriously by the FBI when I handed the information to them. He got charged; unfortunately the Florida judge didn’t see what he was doing as a serious crime; he got three year’s probation and an order not to contact me. Which he lived up to. Right to the day it expired.

And then it began again. By this time, though, he had bragged on a forum about being a former naval aviator. When I took the time to google him, there was no mention in his published resume of either college graduation or of his time as a naval aviator. This interested me, because I have never met naval aviator who didn’t make that time in his life the Major Item in his resume. By now I had a couple of retired admirals on my list of friends from putting them in my books. I asked one if he would check with the Navy about the truth of this. And lo and behold! BuPers came back with the statement that there had never been a Naval Aviator in the entire history of naval aviation with his name, let alone the rest of his information. That’s what’s known as “stolen valor,” and even at places like Free Republic (one of this idiot’s favorite hangouts), the veterans there don’t like people who do this.

I forwarded the email from BuPers to him, with the additional comment by me that if he ever opened his yap again, ever made any attempt to bother me, this information would be posted at every website he visited.

And he’s been dead silent ever since.

While all that was going on before, he didn’t keep his beef with me private. He managed to rile up more than a few of his fellow Inadequates, who put me on their list of Lib’ruls to Threaten. There was a period right after Obama won the presidency where the abuse rose to a roar. The FBI agent I dealt with at the Los Angeles office advised me to take precautions. Which I did. It took some time and some money to make me invisible on the internet (though that is hard to maintain and have a public-facing existence). Everything finally died off after Stalker Boy received the notice of what would happen to him if he continued. Without his provocations, the morons moved on to the next target and I lowered the defensive wall.

The reason I tell this story here is to demonstrate that these people are driven more by envy than by politics, though a political excuse lets them think they somehow aren’t the worthless loser pieces of shit they’ve been all their life.

Now that all of life’s losers have been given permission by Life’s Biggest Loser to let their freak flags fly, I no longer think of The Day of the Locust as fiction. I was fortunate that I do business with friends who didn’t take well to the harassment. When I think of the others I’ve read about whose “crime” was something like volunteering to be a vote counter in 2020, it pisses me off that there aren’t better ways to smack the Inadequates.

I really hope someone is able to claim Rick Wilson’s $25,000 reward for the confirmed identity of the piece of shit loser who swatted him and his wife this past Sunday night.

2024 is going to be the most important terrible year of our lives. You can support That’ Another Fine Mess through all this as a paid subscriber for only $7/month or $70/year.

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