I am all too familiar with feeling misanthropic and having disdain for others; like a lot of adolescents I mostly grew out of it after the hormones started to chill out… although I still occasionally look around and think:
Er, no. His feelings are specifically rich white American boy feelings. No other kind of person would feel anxious about having to tell their parents about failing out of an expensive prep school yet again, while hanging around NYC hotels, bars and restaurants on a big wad of cash from a moneybags grandmaother. Throughout most of the book he’s anxious about a dead brother and overly worried about vulnerable young children, which yeah, are anxieties that some others feel, But by the end of the book, it looks like he’s going to work through his more general anxiety about taking his appropriate place in the social order as a Promising Young Man (that is, rich son of a corporate lawyer), and go on to more or less become someone not unlike (to get back on topic) Donald Trump. None of that is “stuff that literally everybody feels.”
Meanwhile, Alex Jones stated on his show that he has it from “people around Clinton” that she and Obama are actual hellspawn demons who smell like sulphur.
It has little to do with hormones, and more to do with not really having experienced life yet. Thinking all these feelings are new just because they’re new to you. Some people live an incredibly sheltered life, so they might never grow out of it. This describes both Donald Trump and the villain from Season 4 of American Horror Story.
I meant to say that his anxiety was just over generic teenage stuff, but he made it into this great big huge deal, not that my modest Midwestern upbringing was in any way comparable to his.
FYI, bringing up that awful show doesn’t do a whole lot for supporting your argument with me; I’m highly biased against bad writing laced with gratuitous shock value tropes and minimal character development*.
*waits for someone to inevitably have a ‘fanboy hissyfit’ over that opinion
I … wow, I don’t even know what to say about that one. I mean when Trump and his ilk spew lies like “Hillary Clinton is going to take away all your guns,” at least they’re operating in a plausible reality. (Not an actual one, of course, but at least it’s remotely possible that this is a thing that cold be physically accomplished.) Statements like that … I just never know how to respond. It’s as if an adult human earnestly and seriously stated a literal belief in Santa Claus, but went on to seriously suggest national policy guidelines centered around these beliefs.
Alex Jones has always been bonkers, or at least plays a bonkers guy. His character is sort of Rush Limbaugh-meets-Art Bell. I’m not sure if he actually believes the craziness he spouts. It’s sort of the pro wrestling version of political commentary.
Consider the beginning of the book- Holden starts off saying “he’s not going to give you any of that David Copperfield crap” but doesn’t note that his name is, in fact, a David Copperfield pun. Then, as he launches into his stories, we can see that he’s cribbing each of the tales from classic literature- Copperfield, The Great Gatsby… and while Holden keeps asserting that he himself is “practically illiterate” we find that he spins his tales sourced entirely from elsewhere.
Much like Keiser Soze.
The only truth that Holden says is that he’s “the most terrific liar you’ve ever seen.”
Yeah, but the only people looking at that are the people backing Trump, and it ain’t to make it better. Lots of parts of America think its education system is indoctrinating and brainwashing children into being liberals.
