@Coloma I disagree on one small point about your observation about Trump. He does not come from an era where the misogynistic male was the rule rather than the exception. Many people today have a kind revisionist view of the 1960’s when he was attending college. It’s not surprising as nearly all of our newscasters and historians on media today weren’t even alive at that time and push the revisionist views.
Trump came from an era of radical change and as I remember it, if a man desired a relationship with any woman with any brains at all—whether radical or conservative—you did not speak and act like a pubescent teen. But there was always a contingent on campus, a minority contingent of men who were rewarded with memberships in fraternities for the attitude Trump exhibits today.
These young men were usually of privilege and were followed by wannabees of the same ilk—men who steadfastly held the status quo of the 1950’s in return for connections in their fields later on. I don’t fault them for wanting the connections. I faulted them at the time for their backward mindsets especially because they slated for leadership positions in the future and that did represent the change people like I felt America needed. For dating purposes and marriage consideration, they had their counterparts in the sororities.
Sororities and Fraternities were anathema to the majority of the student population of the U.S. at the time. Whereas the rest were struggling to either initiate change in America or simply unsympathic to the direction America was going, these cloistered campus clubs where rife with Young Republicans and represented an obstinate will to defend the status quo and a stalwart blindness to the need for change.
I don’t mean to condemn all of these types. Many fraternity and sorority members felt the need for change and determined that this could best be accomplished more effectively by working within the system and didn’t necessarily enjoy the “lockerroom talk” or the hazing, etc. They tolerated it in order to accomplish personal and societal goals. Many others found this futlile and actively joined the Left, and many of those became well-known radical leaders. But the majority of these people were there to support the old guard, take the advantages one received by doing so and thus held in contempt by those of us who were fighting for change.
Trump went to Fordham from 1964 – 68, an Ivy League hotbed of dissent, both in theoretics and actions. All around him on campus were anti-war protests, women’s liberation rallies, freedom of speech forums, human rights demonstrations. And in the lecture halls at Fordham at the time of Trump’s attendance, were groundbreaking visiting professors, such as Canadian professor Marshall McLuhan (famous for his lectures illuminating the democratic values of electronic media [“The medium is the message”] who prophesied the internet and was installed full-time in 1968) and the famous (or infamous, depending on one’s POV) civil disobedience promoter, human rights peace advocate, and radical anti-war leader Father Daniel Berrigan, SJ.
But Donald spent his time at Fordham cloistered in the world occupied by the privileged, those people who were members of fraternities and their groveling minions, a decided minority on every campus in the nation, and like them, he willfully ignored the change happening around him that threatened the system from which his wealth and privilege was derived.
From 1966 to 1968, with his father’s help in the form of financial donations to the school, he entered the Wharton School of Finance at the University of Pennsylvania in their new Real Estate studies program, from which he graduated in 1968 with a Bachelor’s degree in economics. This was a quieter, more conservative campus in those years and while there, as back at Fordham, he obtained draft deferments for various medical conditions, one notably for “heel spurs”, and operable condition. He eventually, like myself, drew a high draft number under the new draft system and avoided military service entirely throughout the Vietnam War.
These were days of change, a struggle against the status quo of the 1950’s and the majority of students, who saw themselves as America’s future, were either actively or passively for change in foreign policy, gender roles, human rights, and real democracy for the masses. The rest, a very small but powerful minority, were like Donald Trump—desperately holding onto the past while acting and speaking accordingly. Many of these privileged people made it into leadership positions with the help of the old guard sharing the same interests and many of them never developed beyond their fratboy mindset as it was highly rewarded behaviour.
However, in no way do they represent the era in which they spent their formative years.
Put simply, Trump was an anachronism in his own time, not a representative of his era of development.
Composing members:
0
