The the Huff Post reports how much our new Eduction Sectetary donated to Republican Senators, all but one of whom returned the favor by voting to maker her the Nation’s Secretary of Education.
My Brother asked me yesterday what I thought of DeVos. I told him that she was the Koch Brother against public education. He wrote back to tell me he’d just left an unhappy message about her with his representative in Washington D.C.
After she fights off the Grizzly Bears in Wyoming schools maybe she can tutor the President in reading. I highly recommend she employ the drill and kill method so rapturously favored by the Republicans.
She came by her money honestly. She married into it. The fortune came from a pyramid scheme that passed legal muster.
Which reminds me of a story.
In 1978 I tried a different tack to run against DFL Representative Mike Jaros. I decided to speak one-on-one to a hundred of Duluth’s top civic leaders. One of them was a realtor who had been active in the Jaycees. At his suggestion we met at Wings Restaurant in a booth with a very narrow table. It put us face-to-face with barely a foot and a half distance between us. This fellow proceeded to stare at me unblinkingly through our entire meeting. It is the only time I’ve been so unnerved that I began to speak haltingly. He never took his eyes off me. I left hugely embarrassed and well aware that he used my hat-in-hand position to enhance his own sense of self esteem.
I lost that election but managed to elevate myself enough in local political circles to become an up-and-comer. About this time the fellow jumped to a new big money scheme – Amway. Amway sales strategy was a lot like chain letters. The first person selling made a fortune based on everyone else to follow raking in all the commissions from everyone else. At the lowest levels of sales – folks who worked under the folks who worked under the folks who worked under the top level owners Commissions were earned only on sales they made often to friends and families or those they could talk into selling under them for which they could collect commissions. Once the market was saturated it became near impossible to make a living on Amway sales.
The fellow who had stared at me non-stop years earlier called me up to have lunch. He wouldn’t tell me what he wanted until we met and it turned out he wanted to pitch me on selling Amway under him. I began returning the favor. I began staring at him non-stop while he wanted something from me. Suddenly he began to stammer and fumble just as I had years before.
I didn’t have it in me to prolong his agony so I began giving him eye breaks by staring away and lowering my eyes. I didn’t give it up completely and when he regained confidence I would again return an intense gaze. I didn’t bring him to his knees but I was able to keep causing him subsequent hiccups with short bursts of a steady stare.
I don’t intend to give Donald Trump a similar rest but I don’t need to. There are millions of Americans returning his cocky 2016 gaze. Of course, he still has his finger on the nuclear button. Talk about a trump card.
