Skip to main content

Fine Motor Skills

Take a look at President Trump signing some documents and see if you see what I see.

When I watch our president sign his name, I see a man moving his arm back and forth with some significant, and unnecessary, fervor.  I realize that the D, l, d, J, and T are tall letters, but I have some tall letters in my name, too, and I don't have near that much arm movement in my signature.  I also sign my name relatively large, and yet most of my writing is finger movement, not arm movement.

I acknowledge that I might be making too much of this, but they say you can tell a great deal about a person by their signature.

Watching this large movement, where small movements suffice, makes me think of his over-sized aggression towards Hillary Clinton (and his Republican opponents before her) during the campaign.  I think of his huge, bold statements about walls, health care coverage, restoring America's greatness, his superior knowledge of things military, and so much more.  I look at his signature and see a series of jagged diagonal lines in the r-u-m which are tough to differentiate if you don't know what you're looking at.  I see the initials and I get the gist of it enough to discern what he's going for, but I can't actually read it.

When I think of that, I can't help but think of the travel ban which he has tried to pound through, the grand statements he makes about how wonderful certain people will be in the administration only to see them flunk out or be fired, and then I come to something that seems so particularly out-sized.  I see the firing of then-acting AG Sally Yates, and now the firing of FBI Director James Comey, and I can't help but see that he's trying to leave his mark somehow.  It's difficult, however, to discern exactly what he's communicating in these moves.  That makes it tough to combat, as well.  The broad strokes are clear.  He is attempting to stop, and if that's not possible then to at least stall the investigation into Russian involvement into the hacking of the DNC.  But what else is in there?

The question for me is about the details of what he's trying to do.  We can see the arm movements to see what he's doing, but I fear that his lack of usage of fine motor skills might just leave things unclear enough that we will be left with his jagged, aggressive script all over our government with no legible record of how he has managed to succeed to this point, nor of how he managed to leave us in the state in which many Americans fear we will find ourselves.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

All for one?

Yesterday I was in a union meeting.  Among other things, a brief discussion was had about the evolution of individual contracts versus group contracts in particular among ballet and theater companies, not necessarily on the opera side of things.  It was pointed out that the movement began primarily because more and more dancers wanted to be seen as soloists in the troupe rather than "ensemble dancers", and they wanted to negotiate their own contracts accordingly.  Over time that has led to less negotiating power for dancers, ultimately developing into much lower pay, often the legal minimum salary for dancers. That led me to connect the dots between that devolution of solidarity in the ranks of ballet troupes where each had been a part of the braided fabric, strong and durable, to the political devolution we're starting to see around the world.  For some time now, countries have been murmuring about wanting out of the EU.  Granted, there are positives and nega...

Strange start, I know

So, here I sit just killing a little time after reading articles about the Dallas Cowboys.  I took a few minutes to entertain other people's thoughts on the 2017 NFL Draft and am intrigued by several things, but one in particular stands out to me and I wanted to jot it down here and now. I know that the Browns are currently 0-for-2016, but they've been within one score in four of their games this year, and within two scores in four others, and there is good young talent there.  So, I am going to say here and now that the NFL better look out for them next season.  As long as they do well with their picks in 2017, they will be an incredibly talented group next year.  With FIVE picks in the top 65 of the draft they could possibly wind up with four or five first-round talents, depending on slippage and preferences of other teams.  So, I'm just saying it here, mid-December 2016, watch out for the 2017 Cleveland Browns! Stranger things have happened! (see Election...

Let it Go

In case you missed it, a major turning point in the movie Frozen  is the song "Let it Go".  It is during this song where Elsa literally takes off the gloves and lets her special power come out.  What results is spectacular.  While she still feels strange or dangerous, it is at this time that she starts to at least be able to grapple with the reality of what she can do and she begins learning how to harness the power that she has.  I feel like Hillary Clinton needs to embrace what she really is at this point, a failed and defeated presidential candidate, and let it go. I won't go into the myriad reasons people enumerate as to why Clinton lost the presidency.  You can find those on YouTube or the nightly news archives.  What I will say is that it is my opinion that, though Hillary's presence on TV talking about likely Russian involvement in the election, the sexism she feels is still alive and well, or any other perceived reason she was defeated might ...