This started as a simple diary of my photoshopped personal therapy in response to the news. I posted it on Twitter, so you can pass it around if you have a Twitter account click below by retweeting it. By the time I finished writing it I got into addressing the morality of wishing someone you think is evil just die of natural causes.
This is from Dictionary.com: To vent one's spleen: Express one's anger. This expression uses vent in the sense of “air,” and spleen in the sense of “anger,” alluding to the fact that this organ was once thought to be the seat of ill humor and melancholy. However the The Word Detective goes further:
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“To vent one’s spleen” means “to express one’s anger,” usually in forceful terms and/or at top volume. “Venting one’s spleen” differs from “spilling one’s guts,” which means simply “to divulge a secret, to tell the whole truth” or “to confess.”
The spleen is, of course, one of those brave little organs nestled in the human midsection (just east of the stomach, in this case), performing those thankless tasks we don’t notice until something goes wrong and our deductible becomes relevant. The spleen’s job is to act as a sort of filter for the blood, but in medieval times, when each bodily organ was thought to be the home of one emotion or another, the spleen was regarded as the seat of melancholy (a mood we now know to reside in the wallet). There was apparently a brief period later on when the spleen was suspected, improbably, of supplying humor and good cheer, but by the late 16th century it was decided that the spleen was the source of rage and ill-temper. Thus “spleen” has for several centuries been a metaphor for “anger,” “resentment” and general crankiness.
“Vent” comes ultimately from the Latin “ventus,” meaning “wind,” and as a verb means “to emit or discharge from a confined space,” as a fan “vents” cooking fumes from a kitchen. The “vent” in “vent one’s spleen” is a metaphorical use of the verb that arose in the 17th century meaning “to relieve or unburden one’s heart or soul,” a sense we still use today (“Don’t mind me, I’m just venting”).
Even though Trump has Walter Reed at his beck and call he might do well to call the only still living of his two favorite doctors. Dr. Larry Braunstein, the podiatrist (his old office, right) who diagnosed bone spurs died in 2007 and wouldn't be qualified to deal with a ruptured spleen anyway. The other is by sheer chance the similarly named Dr. Howard Bornstein who appropriately is a gastroenterologist and is qualified.
We all remember Dr. Bornstein’s famous letter about Trump’s health status (although he neglected to mention that he had the biggest brain).
From a National Post article:
This is what Phillip Bump writer about it at the time:
“Trump’s recent lab tests were ‘astonishingly excellent,’ said Harold Bornstein, a gastroenterologist on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. His recent examination showed ‘only positive results.’ His strength and stamina are ‘extraordinary.’ His cardiovascular system is ‘excellent,’ and he has ‘no history’ of drinking or smoking. “What’s more, Bornstein writes, ‘If elected, Mr. Trump, I can state unequivocally, will be the healthiest individual ever elected to the presidency.’ “Clearly, Trump’s hyperbole is itself a disease — and it’s contagious.”
A Newsweek reporter responded to the Trump campaign’s innuendo about Clinton by raising fresh own questions about the letter, suggesting Trump’s doctor’s letter might not be totally legitimate. Kurt Eichenwald noted the doctor said Trump had received only “positive results” during a recent examination – when testing “positive” generally suggests a bad result.
CNN’s Sanjay Gupta then raised his own questions about the letter.
Of all the problems with the letter — and there are more than a few — the biggest may be the hyperbole. Doctors are trained to be circumspect and not draw conclusions that aren’t supported by facts. Bornstein’s letter, quite simply, didn’t sound as though it were written by a serious-minded doctor who had given it the kind of thought it warranted.
And in his interview with NBC, Bornstein seemed to confirm it wasn’t.
“In the rush, I think some of those words didn’t come out exactly the way they were meant,” he said.
On a serious subject, whenever my friends and I discuss Trump there’s a new equivalent to Godwin’s Law (which still applies though we have brought up Hitler so many times we are tired of the comparisons even though his behavior over the past week often leads to our making Hitler analogies). It is how talking about his health and the apparent accident of genetics that has kept him alive and physically functioning this long what with his horrible life style of eating unhealthily food, getting no exercise, poor sleep hygiene, and explosive anger should have led to a life threatening illness, or worse, by now.
Trump’s father Fred lived to be 93 and his mother Mary lived to be 88. So I have to tell my friends not to get their hopes up although for the superstitious among them I note that there is a cottage industry of companies selling Trump Voodoo dolls so obviously there are superstitious people wishing they could do something magical to harm the president...
… not that I would ever get one…
I do not this it is psychologically healthy to wish for someone to die although it is a complex philosophical or even spiritual question when it comes to someone whose behavior is causing other people to die or suffer greatly.
.Jerry Allen Coyne is an American biologist known for his work on speciation and his commentary on intelligent design. A prolific scientist and author, he has published numerous papers elucidating the theory of evolution. He is currently a professor emeritus at the University of Chicago in the Department of Ecology and Evolution. This entry on his Facebook page is food for thought:
In which I unfriend people on Facebook for wishing that Trump would sicken and die.
A few days ago one of my Facebook friends posted a comment on their timeline wishing that someone would send Donald Trump E. coli-contaminated romaine lettuce, with the clear implication that this would sicken or kill him. Much as I despise Trump and his views, I found that comment insupportable, and after a testy remark I unfriended the person. (The concept of “friends” on Facebook is weird anyway, as I haven’t even met most of these friends, including the Death-to-Trumper.)
My view, which I try to promote on this site, is that you can disagree with someone without insulting their looks, their family, or (especially) wishing that they were dead.
Imagine my surprise, then, when in the comments to my post appeared several people who shared the Miscreant’s sentiment. One said that the comment was excusable for several reasons, including that those romaine-eating people might have gotten sick and died because of the FDA’s lax food-monitoring rules, made more lax under Trump. And indeed, that may be true, but it’s still no reason to wish Trump dead—any more than it would be to wish Obama dead because he kept U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan, enforcing a futile policy that ensured that U.S. soldiers would die. Should we wish Obama dead for the foreseeable effects of that policy?
The argument continued: Trump deserved to die because of his immigration policy (which I oppose), or because of his failure to express sympathy for the death of Heather Heyer in Charlottesville (which is reprehensible, as was Trump’s statement that there were “good people on both sides”). But to me, none of that justifies wishing death or illness on someone. If you don’t like someone’s policy, campaign against it, write Trump or the Congress, picket, and so on, but don’t wish someone dead.
Yes, if Trump died a natural death right now, I wouldn’t have anything good to say about him, but he does have family and friends and presumably values his own life. It seems mean and churlish to wish that life would end. (Yes, it might be salubrious for America, but there are a lot of people whose deaths would be salubrious for America, and we shouldn’t wish them dead.) Continued
I wonder what Dr. Coyne would say if he thinks he’d feel same way if he was alive during World War II about wishing Adolf Hitler would get a terminal illness. Is it morally wrong to wish someone who you believe is truly evil just get sick and die? What if they don't directly cause death like Hitler did but cause a Democratic country you love to turn into a cruel dictatorship?