Category Archives: Philosophy/Ideas

Travel  is like sex

2018 Trip to Iceland, Philosophy/Ideas,

 

At the end of the trip I reflected on travel. Travel is increasingly difficult. Particularly in airports and aircraft for large people like me. Increasingly, Flying is torture. At the beginning of these chronicles of Iceland I complained about the time wasted in the airport. I did not mean to imply that we were not having a great time. Once we arrived in Iceland we had awonderfultime. Getting therewas something else entirely. It was torture, but I still think it was “worth the trip.”

When we were leaving Iceland, A.O. again showed up to drive us to the airport. We all loved him by then. That was where the fun ended. The airport experience was a melee.

First we stood in line to get our boarding passes from a machine. This was meant to speed things up. It created turmoil as many people could not figure out how to use the machines.

Then came another long line-up for security. Always fun. Walking around in socks with belts removed leaving pantaloons precariously held up by the ether.

Next came waiting to board. We sat for about an hour by our gate and then were forced to get up and standoutside the gate. It appeared there was no reason for this. The Ticket Agent was not there. He showed up about 20 minutes late. Many of the old people in our group (OK we were all old people) found the standing intolerable. But no one could talk to the officials to let one or two sit in plain view of the staff. That was much too risky. What they feared I did not know.

The trip to Toronto was almost unbearable. No food and hardly any service for 5 and ¼ hours. Even though I had paid for extra legroom it was still very uncomfortable. I wish I could afford first class or business class. Or I wish I was not so cheap. Life is hard when you are stupid. Travel is always hard.

Travel opens the mind like fresh air can open a house. Travel allows us to learn that there is much more to life than the opinions we hear from our local pundits around our favorite watering holes in our own hometowns. Thank god for that.

Travel is like sex: the positions are untenable; the pain insufferable; the cost abominable; but the results are immeasurable.

 

 

Travel like Religion is Suffering

2018 Trip to Iceland, Philosophy/Ideas, religion

 

Suffering is essential for religious enlightenment. This is an ancient concept employed by many religions. Suffering in some sense is good.

In his book The First Circle, abut life in a Russian concentration camp in the Siberian Gulag. Solzhenitsyn said, “to the real philosopher as a consequence difficulties must be viewed as a hidden treasure!” He even goes so far as to assert that “anyone who hasn’t suffered in twenty years shouldn’t be allowed to dabble in philosophy.”

Another reason that Solzhenitsyn finds that suffering is a good is that with it one can achieve perfect freedom.  It is sort of like Kris Kristofferson who said, famously, “freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose; freedom ain’t worth nothin but its free.”  Or Bob Dylan who said, “when you ain’t got nothing you ain’t got nothing to lose.” That is why Bobynin, one of the camp prisoners says in The First Circle, that he has nothing.  Not one thing.  He no longer has a wife or child since they were killed.   So too with his parents.  His belongings fit into a bandana.  He has nothing other than his coveralls and underwear without buttons. His jailor needs him, but he doesn’t need his jailor.  The jailor took his freedom away, but has no power to give it back, because he has no freedom himself.  There is nothing more that the jailor can threaten him with.  He tells the jailor to tell his superiors that “for a person you’ve taken everything from is no longer in your power.  He’s free all over again.”

One should be grateful for being in a concentration camp! One is lucky to be a prisoner! There is no better place than a prison, to learn the role of good and evil in human life. That is how he learned that a person shouldn’t regard prison solely as a curse, but also as a blessing.” He sees his grief as the raw materials that allow him to illuminate his speculations about history.

My uncle Peter, who survived the Russian Revolution and was appalled deeply by the shallowness of those in western society, where they had been continually coddled would have agreed wholly with this sentiment.  I remember one day when I told him I was on my way to a local bar,  he said to me,  that had I lived through the Revolution I would not waste my time that way.  He probably had a point.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn also explored this theme in another book about the concentration camps, A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. He showed that there is peace that comes to a person who has suffered so much that he no longer has any fear. He said this was a spiritual peace.  A deep religious calm.  Such a person in a concentration camp can become happy. This is what happened to Shukov at the very end of Solzhenitsyn’s book,.  He was happy because he had a good day.  Even though he was cold, hungry, beaten, and tired,

 

“…he was happy.  He’d had a lot of luck today.  They hadn’t put him in the cooler.  The gang hadn’t been chased out to work in the Socialist Community Development. He’d finagled an extra bowl of mush at noon.  The boss had gotten them good rates for their work.  He’d felt good making that wall.  They hadn’t found that piece of steel in the frisk.  Caesar had paid him off in the evening.  He’d bought some tobacco.  And he’d gotten over that sickness.

Nothing had spoiled the day and it had been almost happy.

There were three thousand six hundred and fifty three days like this in this sentence, from reveille to lights out.

The three extra ones were because of the leap years…”

 

Sometimes it feels like that when one has been travelling.  Sometimes the suffering is atrocious.  Like when I spent 10 hours sitting in Pearson International Airport. Or when I spent 5&1/2 hours cramped in an airplane.

In the camps, it did not take much to make a person with peace and fearlessness happy.  An extra bowl of mush might be enough. That takes a person with deep spiritual equanimity to be happy under such circumstances.  That was why Shukov felt that he was luckyto be in a concentration camp.  “When he painted the number on your cap, it was like a priest anointing your brow.” It was a religious experience to live in a camp.  Outsiders were not blessed.  They did not have the opportunity to learn from suffering.  One should feel sorryfor the unblessed.  There is glory in suffering. Solzhenitsyn believed those who do not suffer cannot find God.

A friend of mine took this a step farther, he said, “Religion is suffering.”  That could be true in more than one sense. I have said before that travel is travail. Travel and religion are suffering, but to some extent that is a good thing.

Whisper words of Wisdom

Moral Humility, Philosophy/Ideas, politics, Truth Seeking, ,

I am still struggling with the concept of moral humility–an elusive but important goal.

A good friend of mine, much smarter than me, told me that he does not feel he can do more than ask gentle questions. He is very effective at avoiding excessive arrogance. He practices moral humility. I aim to move in that direction.

That does not mean I should be silent. I think that if we see someone acting badly, particularly if that person is in power, we should speak. We should do that respectfully, but we may and should do that. I am trying to teach myself to criticize gently, without pontificating. That is not easy.

Today I learned something valuable for a fellow walker in our walking club.  He is a strong Christian—even an evangelical Christian I would guess—and said he had learned something valuable recently.  He said when talking to someone he never tried to convert the other person. Rather, he said,  “I ask questions,” he said, “all I want to do is leave a stone in the other person’s shoe”.

I know that I have been pontificating too much. For example, I have been very critical of capitalism.  I have never denied that capitalism has done a lot of good. It has pulled hundreds of millions out of extreme poverty into poverty. That is a momentous achievement. We need to do even better, but that is not nothing. It is a lot. I doubt that I have converted anyone.

Yet that does not mean we must give capitalism a free pass. We cannot allow capitalists free rein to destroy life on the planet as sometimes they seem bent on doing. We must criticize, but do so with humility always remembering that we mightbe wrong. Recall the uncertainty principle. Act as if we might be wrong.

As the Beatles said, “Whisper words of wisdom. Let it be.”

Reading Lolita in Tehran

Books, Philosophy/Ideas, politics, Truth Seeking

Like the Republic of Imagination that I read last year, this book, Reading Lolita in Tehran that I read this year in Arizona, was brilliant. Both are written by Azar Nafisi. This one is an odd little book. It is written by a young Iranian professor of English literature who now teaches at an American University, but tells us about her first years as a professor in Iran during and after the time of the Iranian Revolution. She started sort of a book club at her home when she felt suffocated by the oppressive regime while teaching  in the University of Tehran. She went home to escape and took some of her female students with her. The professor and her students rebelled. They rebelled not with guns, bombs or conspiracies. They rebelled by reading American and English literature! In their hands that was a revolutionary activity.

All of the women lived in a totalitarian society where officials were wary of the Professor but didn’t really know what to do about her. Some of them learned how to resist. Some of them suffered serious consequences, but that is not really what the book is about. The book is about literature as rebellion.

Nafisi denied that a book was in the ordinary sense moral. She did say this, “it can be called moral when it shakes us out of our stupor and makes us confront the absolutes we believe in.”

One of the most amazing scenes in the book is when her class at the University decides to put the book The Great Gatsbyon trial.  Her students play the roles. The prosecutor is a strict straight-laced Muslim regime supporter. The defense counsel is one of her more radical female students from her book club. It is a remarkable achievement. According to Nafisi, “a great novel heightens your senses and sensitivity to the complexities of life and of individuals , and prevents you from the self-righteousness that sees morality in fixed formulas about good and evil.” It is a revolt against moral hubris in favor of what I have come to call moral humility or restraint.

The Iranian officials tried to prescribe what all the people should do, how they worship, how they love, what they read, and what they think. It tried to restrain them totally.  The women became revolutionaries not by any overtly political acts, but only by readingand thinking. None of them fired a gun. Yet, the women learned how literature can defeat ideology. This is what Nafisi in her second book called “the Republic of Imagination.” Nafisi sees literature as revolutionary force opening the mind to possibilities. Imagine please, Jane Austen as a revolutionary!

Its books like this we should read when we are forced to confront authoritarianism. Times like now.

Jonathan Haidt on Moral Humility

Extremism, Moral Humility, Pessimism, Philosophy/Ideas, politics, reason

I have adopted the notion of moral humility from Jonathan Haidt, one of the speakers at Arizona State University this year as part of their year long series of lectures on free speech. He is  professor of psychology. He had some interesting things to say on a number of topics. One of them was “moral humility.”  He urged all of us to practice more of it.   He contrasted it with extremism.

The classic failure in the 20thcentury to follow modest and humble goals was of course Communism.  They practiced an extreme form of utopianism.   Albert Camus, another of my favorite political thinkers had a similar way of thinking. He opposed thinking without limits. He wanted political leaders to be modest. Humble in other words. The failure to be humble, he thought, is that it leads to an abundance of graves.  That is the problem with utopian zeal or revolutionary terror.

British philosopher John Gray said, “Terror has been used in this way wherever a revolutionary dictatorship has been bent on achieving utopian goals.” Or as he also said, about the Communists, “the scale and intensity of Bolshevik repression, which was the result of attempting to reconstruct society on an unworkable model.” They wanted to create the perfect human—an impossible goal.

Gray finds even more examples of dangerous Utopian thinking. He finds it on the left and he finds it on the right. He finds in religion–in Christianity, and in Islam. He even finds in the Nazis ideology. They wanted to create the pure Aryan race.

Part of the problem with utopian thinking is that it leads to orthodoxy. After all, if you know absolute truth, then there is only one way to the truth and nothing can stand in the way. There is no need to be modest or restrained when you know absolute truth.

The Buffalo Springfield also got it right when they sang:

“A thousand people in the street

Singing songs and carrying signs

Mostly saying, ‘hooray for our side’ ”

There is no need to be humble when your team is cheering you on no matter what you say. That is a license to be extreme. You can call Hillary Clinton “Satan.”  You can compare Donald Trump to Hitler. You can suggest that Justin Trudeau is the devil. Then you can desire to burn the others at the stake. And you will feel joy at the prospect. This is about as far from humility as you can get. No matter what you say, your side will applaud. And if you listen only to your side, you will naturally begin to think that you are a genius. You deserve the applause. It’s hard to be humble when your side gives you a standing ovation.

Donald Trump is of course a perfect example of this. Recently he said at a rally in front of his fans, “Some have asked me, “Did you have anything to do with the Korean leaders getting together?”  He shrugged, grinned mischievously and said, “How about everything.”  Not much humility there.  Then his fans chanted repeatedly “Nobel. Nobel. Nobel.” And Trump grinned again, as if that was a reasonable suggestion. When your side is cheering you on, no matter how absurd, you accept the fawning.

What amazes me is Trump’s fans accept his abject lack of humility. He says he is the smartest. It does not matter how dumb he is. They lap it up. America, it seems to me, has given up on humility. I wish they hadn’t. Many of us could use more of it. Including me.

The Uncertainty Principle

Moral Humility, Pessimism, Philosophy/Ideas, politics, reason, religion, Truth Seeking, violence

Moral humility is born out of uncertainty. Bertrand Russell, the great British philosopher was inspired by John Locke. Locke always emphasized that all knowledge is uncertain.  People should always take into consideration that they might be wrong. This should be remembered whenever we deal with others who have different opinions from us. This leads directly to tolerance in practice. Live and let live. Reject fanaticism in favour of moderation.

Russel called this the liberal outlook. it lies not in any particular beliefs but rather in how they are held. Instead of being held dogmatically, they are held tentatively with the understanding at all times that new evidence may show we were mistaken and will then abandon our beliefs. This is the opposite of how theologians hold beliefs.

Critical thinking is not utopian. It adopts instead what I have called the Russell principle, after Bertrand Russell. He said, “it is wrong to inflict a certain harm to achieve a dubious good.The more uncertain the future goal one is trying to achieve, the less the harm one must employ to obtain it.” It might be permitted to inflict violence to avoid a certain greater harm, but it makes no sense to inflict a certain harm to avoid an uncertain future harm unless that future harm is much, much worse than the means. This always requires a rational analysis of the probabilities. The more dubious the future goal the more gentle must be the means employed to obtain it. The problem with many modern revolutionary utopians is that often they inflict a certain substantial present harm to achieve not just a dubious future goal, but an impossible goal!

I prefer modest goals and modest means.  Many believe such views, especially in religion or politics, is too tame. They prefer missionary zeal. I don’t. I prefer moral humility.

 

Moral Humility is not Utopian thinking

Moral Humility, Pessimism, Philosophy/Ideas, politics, reason

Moral humility is the opposite of utopian thinking. It recognizes limits. It recognizes ourlimits, The concept of moral humility is associated with the concept of modesty/pessimism of John Gray one of my favorite modern philosophers.

His concept is a logical consequence of a sceptical attitude.  If one is uncertain then one should be careful about claiming moral superiority over another person. One should hesitate to judge others. That does not mean we can never judge others. It does mean we should not be too quick to judge others. I think I have been too quick in the past.  I yearn to ease up. As Gray said, “ Utopias are dreams of collective deliverance that in waking life are found to be nightmares.”

Utopian projects are by their nature unachievable. As Hume put it: ‘All plans of government which suppose great reformation in the manners of mankind are plainly imaginary.’” That is why we must be modest. We must be constrained in our optimism. Too often it leads to dire troubles. That is why Sir Thomas More, author of Utopia—a term he coined—meant both ‘a good place’ and ‘nowhere.’ That was why he set his imagined community in a far-off land.

We are very unlikely to find Utopia and are much more likely to find dystopia when we try.  Just like heaven is an illusion, unless it is here and now, so too with Utopia. That is a fundamental flaw with utopian thinking. It looks for a non-existent heaven and then frequently imposes great misery on us in a hopeless effort to achieve what cannot be achieved. That was why Gray’s advice was to be wary of those who argued for Utopia. Instead, Gray urged, “it is dystopian thinking we most need.”

Moral humility requires that we abandon the search for perfection and accept the limitations of the human.  As has often been said, but no often enough, perfection is the enemy of the good.

Obama often told his advisors that “better is good.” We can seldom (never?) do the perfect, but we can usually do something that is better or worse. We should always choose the better and we should often be satisfied that this is all we can do.

We can always make things worse. And as Obama also said to himself, “Don’t do stupid stuff.” Going to war in Syria would have been stupid. One look at American misadventures in Iraq and Afghanistan make it clear that is very easy to do stupid stuff by going to war in the Middle East.  And the costs of stupid stuff can be horrendous.

It is always important to think things through before jumping into a fray. It is often very stupid to jump in, no matter how tempting it seems. This takes time. This may make a leader look weak. It actually makes a leader look smart.

Utopian thinking is the opposite of critical thinking. It accepts impossiblegoals so it justifies the most brutal means. Nothing is too extreme when the object is perfection. Or as Bob Dylan said, “For you don’t count the dead with God on your side.” The religious pursuit of perfection should be rejected for exactly the same reasons. Murder is always justified if the goal is a higher form of human. Lets abandon that goal.

On Being Judgmental

Moral Humility, Philosophy/Ideas, politics, Truth Seeking

I know moral humility is something I have to learn. I wish I had more of it. often it is too easy to be judgemental. From my blogging post it is too easy to pontificate. High horses are difficult to get off with grace.

This is what a friend recently posted on my Facebook page in response to one of my epistles, “Some years ago, while working through some structured Spiritual Exercises, I came to the awareness that there is so much depravity in me… that anyone else’s shortcomings were just not properly on my agenda.” (I have changed his words slightly. I think this was a mild rebuke of me. And I appreciate it. I will tell you why.

I hate to use the defence that Trump’s new lawyer  Rudy Giuliani recently used when he basically admitted his client was guilty of all charges. Not the best defence for a lawyer to use.  Yet that is exactly my defence.  I agree with this subtle charge. Not only is this right it is profound.  I should look at my own shortcomings before looking at those of others. After alI have plenty to go around. It is too easy to be judgmental. Remember Omer Simpson’s prayer, “Please God let me go to church regularly so I can learn to be more judgmental.”

Moral humility requires that we abandon the search for perfection and accept the limitations of the human.  As has often been said, but not often enough, perfection is the enemy of the good.

I think one of the most profound passages in the Bible is Micah 6:8 which says, “He hath shewed thee, O man, what is good; and what doth the Lord require of thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God?”Right now I want to emphasize “humbly”, though the other two are important too.I really need more humility and I need it badly.

I have been pontificating too much. That does not mean I won’t criticize others when I see something is wrong in my opinion. I think that would be abdication. After all I think we should point out important errors others are making, particularly if they are powerful people. We all benefit from criticism. But I must always remember that it is just my opinion. I have not found absolute truth. I must remember my own flaws first before pointing a finger at others. If you know absolute truth how can you be humble? If you don’t you mustbe humble.

But I wil continue to speak. I just hope more wisely.

Why waste time talking about Trump?

Philosophy/Ideas, Social democracy, , ,

 

Some have raised many important issues in messages to me as a result of my blogs. I could bore you with a long diatribe. I tend to that to people. So I will bore you with a shorter diatribe. Some will say not short enough. So be it.

To begin with, as has been suggested by others, I don’t think it is useful to waste a lot of time haranguing Donald Trump. Frankly, he is not worth it. Yet he is the American President and as we know, every time the US coughs Canada gets a cold. As well, it scares me just to think he has his finger on the nuclear button. And it is a big one you know. And it works.

More importantly, about 50 million people voted for him and many of those still like him.  This really scares me. Many people just want to see Trump go away. I do. But that will not end much. Who will those 50 million support the next time? Someone even worse? Trump is just a symptom of a disease.

I think Trump is a demagogue with authoritarian tendencies. Similar potential leaders have had significant support all over Europe. This is an international phenomenon.

If you have time, I urge you to read a marvelous (and short!) book by Timothy Snyder called On Tyranny. Snyder is an expert historian who is familiar with how tyrannies have arisen in the last century. Remember that Hitler was elected before he became a dictator. He did that by preying on the fears of people and finding scapegoats.

Part of the reason so many people voted for him, I believe, is that people, particularly in the US, have for more than a hundred years been accustomed to making important decisions without the benefit of reason. They have made decisions on the basis of faith, rather than reason. They are used to doing that.

Kurt Anderson has written a book on the subject called Fantasyland. So far I have just read a brief summary in Atlantic magazine. I am waiting for the paperback. Sometimes it hurts to be a cheap Menno. His thesis is that Americans have spent 500 years making important decisions on the basis of fantasies rather than reason. They believe on the basis of what they want to be true, rather than on the basis of what the evidence supports. Trump is just part of that process. Many people, particularly people who are unemployed or underemployed, believe Trump can help them, even though the evidence does not support that conviction. Yet they believe it. They have abdicated their reason.

A lot of people are in despair. Around the world. That is understandable given how the lot of most people has seriously deteriorated in the last 40 years, while the lot of the elites has risen sharply. Inequality has risen by astonishing amounts. Rich people have done amazingly well while ordinary people have seen their incomes decline.

The people who have not done well and daily see how well others have done, because the modern media makes sure that everyone knows, are filled with resentment. Resentment is an explosively dangerous force. It is blind to reason. Near home a few years ago a dairy farmer was mad at his wife who wanted a divorce and got so angry that he burned his barn down with all of the cows inside. And he did that  after cancelling his fire insurance. If he could not have it all no one else would have any of it. It was totally irrational. People consumed with resentment can do that.

About a year ago, a man in Alberta who was facing a divorce from his wife, murdered her and their children. If he could not have his family no one could. So he killed them all and then killed himself. Again it made no difference how irrational this was. People blinded by resentment can do that.

People in the modern world are not only resentful of their loss of money, and status, they are deeply insecure. Capitalists, as we all know, have been forced in recent recessions to lay off workers. That is hard and it is profoundly unnerving to those laid off. This has happened over and over again. As a result many people, particularly after the most recent recession feel a deep sense of insecurity. Even though capitalism has produced amazing wonders, it is deeply flawed if it needs to create such misery. Such a system is broken.

This has happened all over the world, but particularly in places like Appalachia, in the US. Many there are resentful and desperate. They justifiably gave up on both Obama and Hillary Clinton. Who can blame them? But they turned to an unlikely source for help. Donald Trump. A billionaire that had no empathy for them. As I have said before, “Trump has the empathy of a turnip.” But at least he heard them. Clinton was deaf. No wonder people turned to Trump over Clinton.

I have little doubt that his supporters will be disappointed in Trump. He is no savior. Voting for him was also deeply irrational. Many people in the United States wanted a personal wrecking ball who would destroy the system. I have met such people on my current trip to the United States. There are surprisingly many of such people. It did not matter who would be hurt by Trump’s actions. It did not matter that he would not help them. As we know he has done nothing for them. He has drastically reduced taxes on the wealthy and unsurprisingly very few people still believe that the way to help poor people is to give money to rich people. That is what Trump and many Republicans believe.

I am not trying to create class divisions as one person suggested to me. As Warren Buffet, hardly a leftwing radical, said, ‘for the past few decades we have been in a class war and my class has won. The rich people.’ The class war, if there is one, or was one, is over. Donald Trump is just the culmination of that process.

I fear that rich people in the US in particular have seized the government to their own advantage and are blind to the damage they have done. They have got temporary benefits as a result, but do not see how the resentment is building up and how dangerous that can be. How will the resentful people explode next time? Who will be the next wrecking ball? This is one of the reasons I say that capitalists are the greatest danger for capitalism.

I really think, the rich people have done a massive disservice to everyone–not the least to themselves! And not least to the system that brought them such prosperity. I am not a revolutionary. They are.

Donald Trump has the Empathy of a Turnip

Fat Opinions, Fellow Feeing, Philosophy/Ideas, politics, Trump

 

I also heard an excerpt from an interview of Donald Trump in a July 2008 on the Howard Stern show. This shows the real Trump, if there is such a thing. It relates to an incident at Mar-a-Lago, Trumps estate for rich cronies and wanna be cronies. An 80-year old man fell from a stage to the hard marble floor and the blood started to flow.Here is how Trump described the incident entirely in his own words:

“I was at Mar-a-Lago and we had this incredible ball, the Red Cross Ball, in Palm Beach, Florida.

And we had the Marines. And the Marines were there, and it was terrible because all these rich people, they’re there to support the Marines, but they’re really there to get their picture in the Palm Beach Post.

So, you have all these really rich people, and a man, about 80 years old – very wealthy man, a lot of people didn’t like him – he fell off the stage. 

So what happens is, this guy falls off right on his face, hits his head, and I thought he died.

And you know what I did? I said, ‘Oh my God, that’s disgusting,’ and I turned away.

I couldn’t, you know, he was right in front of me and I turned away. I didn’t want to touch him. He’s bleeding all over the place, I felt terrible.

You know, beautiful marble floor, didn’t look like it. It changed colour. Became very red.

And you have this poor guy, 80 years old, laying on the floor unconscious, and all the rich people are turning away

What happens is, these 10 Marines from the back of the room.

They come running forward, they grab him, they put the blood all over the place—it’s all over their uniforms—they’re taking it, they’re swiping [it], they ran him out, they created a stretcher.

They call it a human stretcher, where they put their arms out with, like, five guys on each side.

I was saying, ‘Get that blood cleaned up! It’s disgusting!’ The next day, I forgot to call [the man] to say he’s OK.

It’s just not my thing.”

 This is a picture of Donald Trump by the man himself. Other people’s blood and pain is just not his thing. What is his thing? The stained marble floor. The rich people who are upset. He gives no thought–absolutely none–to an 80-year old man lying on the floor in blood. Donald Trump has the empathy of a turnip!

This is the same man who said about how disgraceful it was in Parkland Florida that the armed security guard stayed outside the school during the entire shooting incident in which 17 students were slaughtered by a former student with an AR-15 automatic rifle, and that he really believes he would have run into the school to confront the young man with a machine gun even if he had no weapon. This statement comes from the man who got 5 medical deferments from serving in the Vietnam War because the family doctor said he had a sore foot, an injury that Trump later discounted. Stephen Colbert said that he did not believe Trump because he did not believe that Trump could run. The story is about as believable as any other Trump ever told–not at all in other words.