David McElroy

Donald Trump is so shamelessly corrupt that he’s not even trying to hide the corruption anymore. And his adoring followers worship him so much that they accept whatever outrage he pretends is normal.

Trump is evil and corrupt, but those followers who enable this evil and corruption are downright obscene. You know who you are.

No U.S. president has ever been brazen enough to openly accept a bribe worth nearly half a billion dollars, but that’s what Trump is doing. And he’s even bragging that the bribe is coming at no cost to taxpayers. What a deal, huh?

Trump announced Sunday night that shady Middle Eastern oil billionaires are giving him his very own Boeing 747. Isn’t that kind of them? They must be really kind-hearted to hand out luxury jetliners without expecting anything in return. And that’s what Trump and his kleptocrats expect you to believe. Are you that stupid?

Here’s the scam. The government of Qatar — a tiny old kingdom run by corrupt oil billionaires — is going to give this luxury airliners to the U.S. government for Trump to use as Air Force One. At the end of his term, this fancy plane will be transferred to the foundation for Trump’s future presidential library — so Trump will continue to have exclusive use of it.

Seriously. That’s the deal. And if you think they expect nothing for this, you’re an idiot.

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For most of my life, I had generally avoided novels written before I was born. They were stodgy. The language was outdated. They were boring. Even if they were significant in the historical sense, I saw them as the literary equivalent of reading the King James Version of the Bible.

I was wrong, of course, but I didn’t realize that until the last decade or so. I first started reading English translations of some Russian classics. I came to love Leo Tolstoy’s “Anna Karenina” and Fyodor Dostoevsky’s “The Brothers Karamazov,” among others.

Then a friend introduced me to German novelist Hermann Hesse. To one extent or another, I found that I loved “Steppenwolf,” “Siddhartha,” “Narcissus and Goldmund” and “The Glass Bead Game.” I’ve read “Narcissus and Goldmund” four times so far — and I keep finding new things to appreciate about it.

But I was slow to appreciate the English writer Charles Dickens — and I’ve come to understand that this has meant depriving myself of a kind of literary joy that I haven’t experienced for a long time. I just finished the Dickens novel, “David Copperfield,” a few hours ago — and I’d like to suggest that this book is better than almost any fiction that’s been written since I was born.

I’m left feeling serious regret that I’ve had such a huge hole in my education about literature and human existence.

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Whatever goes wrong in our lives, there’s always someone else to blame. Always.

The boss wouldn’t give me a chance. The woman I loved cheated on me. The man I married turned out to be an abuser. He was a terrible father. My friend made me start using drugs and partying all the time. I had to go into debt because all my friends had nice things and I had to keep up with them. I didn’t get the education I needed. I’m fat and nobody likes me.

Our excuses are endless. But even when our justifications for ourselves are completely accurate, there was always someone else who ultimately had control. And even if we got into a terrible situation — or a hundred terrible situations — there’s always someone who can take control to fix things and make our lives better.

It can be a painful shock to accept that the man in the mirror — or the woman in the mirror — almost always has the power to turn a miserable life into a satisfying life.

But it’s easier to blame someone else and ignore the man in the mirror. I’ve done that at times. Maybe you have, too.

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