Opinion by Hal Brown
Photo bombing is when someone sees people interviewing someone for a news broadcast taking a video and deliberately getting in the background. Sometimes they do something silly and other times they merely make sure that they are caught in the shot.
In other instances inadvertently something or someone appears in the background of a video, or even a still photo, that makes it interesting. There are instances that make the news because a crime in progress was accidentally caught in the background of a video taken by unsuspecting amateur photographers.
I was reading “How Bruce Springsteen – and the left – can reclaim and cultivate a vocabulary of patriotism” in Salon this morning (right) and the red link “bizarre psychosexual display” jumped out at me (shown below).
Of course like all of you I’ve seen videos or photos of Trump hugging and kissing the flag, sometimes described as him humping the flag, many times. See “Stephen Colbert Pans Donald Trump’s Historic Flag Dry-Hump Speech At CPAC” for example.
The first link in the paragraph above went to the story and featured the flag hugging Trump as its illustration, here.
I thought the “bizarre psychosexual display” link would take me to an article about the psychosexual pathology of Donald Trump.
There is a huge list of fetishes, technically called paraphilia. (Not on this particular list is celebriphilia which may afflict some members of the Trump cult.) We already know from ample evidence he fits the definition of someone with frotteurism. Wiki tells us:
In his 2008 book on sexual pathologies, Anil Aggrawal compiled a list of 547 terms describing paraphilic sexual interests. He cautioned, however, that "not all these paraphilias have necessarily been seen in clinical setups. This may not be because they do not exist, but because they are so innocuous they are never brought to the notice of clinicians or dismissed by them. Like allergies, sexual arousal may occur from anything under the sun, including the sun."[3]
Even Trump’s wives and girlfriends probably don’t don’t if he has any of the more unusual fetishes or paraphilias.
Consider what might have happened if the flag hugging and kissing was done by an ordinary man in a public display. It could get him arrested for indecency if he wasn’t president and did it in public. Consider the 9-1-1 call.
- 9-1-1, what’s your emergency?
- There’s a man in front of a building humping and kissing an American flag.
I was wrong.
The link I was wondering about just went to the video:
Probably because I was transfixed by the spectacle of Trump hugging and kissing the flag previous times I missed seeing the man who for a split second appeared looking out from backstage.
I did a web search asking who the man behind the curtain or backstage in the Trump flag kissing video was and nothing came up.
There is a story behind this which, unless the man comes forward, perhaps having read this story, will never be told.
Because this was last year’s CPAC he could have been a fan of Trump who wanted an up close and personal look at him. He could have been a Trump minion. He also could have been just a stage hand who was just doing his job.
While his face is blurred there’s probably enough of it visible that photo recognition software could determine his identity. We can tell who he isn’t and possibly get a general idea of who he might be. The shape of his head and nose can be easily discerned and it looks like he is either bald or has little hair. I think you can rule out Stephen Miller (right).
This isn’t the biggest story of the day on Daily Kos. It may rank as the most insignificant story. The odds of it making the Trending Stories list are slim to none.
However, it does happen to be one story that dare I suggest you won’t find covered anywhere else.
What can I say? At least I try to post original stories on Daily Kos.
If you got this far at least you were curious enough to read about it.
If anyone has an idea who the man might be please comment and I will put a side by side comparison in the story.
The first one who can positively identify this man will be rewarded by personal satisfaction and a custom made online trophy.