The Word Heard Around the World and How the Point Got Missed

     Ivanka Trump's businesses in the People's Republic of China employ low wage laborers, many of them women.  She wrote a book, Women Who Work: Rewriting the Rules of Success, published in 2017, the same year she assumed a non-paying advisory position in the White House.  Women With Rich Fathers Who Provide Ample and Lucrative Work Opportunities For Their Daughters would've been a more apt title.
     Her book has such lines as, "Cultivating authenticity is essential to creating strong bonds with your coworkers," and, "I believe that we each get one life--and it's up to us to live it to the fullest."
     Working women, she writes, can relieve stress and attain balance by taking up calligraphy, chess, dancing.
     Guess what?  "Passion is what makes us feel most alive."
     Ivanka Trump on the nature of time: "No matter your age, your background, your education, or your successes, we are all granted 168 hours a week."
     She has something to say about communication: "It's easy to forget that communication is not just a means of relaying information but also a way of engaging with others socially."
     Hey!  Listen to this!  "Success is a team sport."
     Her husband, Jared Kushner (also a White House advisor, and, in his Dungeons and Dragons role, Peacebringer to the Middle East), "...loves to remind me that life is a marathon, not a sprint."
     Note: I copied these quotes from among a far greater number in a Politico article by Annie Karni from May 3, 2017.  My thanks to Ms. Karni.
     Annie Karni titles her article, "The most revealingly unrevealing quotes from Ivanka Trump's new book".
     I disagree that these quotes don't reveal Ivanka Trump's personality and depth of character.  I get the following impression from only the ones I quoted above:
     Ivanka Trump is shallow.
     The line about how we're "all granted 168 hours a week" could be translated as "You gotta make do with the time you have."
     "Success is a team sport" is another way of saying, "There is no I in team."
     Jared "reminding" his wife that life is a marathon, not a sprint, also uses the type of sports-related cliche that politicians and journalists resort to when their imaginations and expressive use of vocabulary fail them, which is often.
     Ivanka Trump's publisher apparently didn't care that his author has a writing style several degrees of competence below that of an unimaginative greeting card writer just going through the motions until retirement.
     Ivanka Trump and her husband, the metaphorical marathon runner Jared, attended the U.S. embassy christening in Jerusalem, an event happening simultaneously with Israeli Defense Forces snipers wounding and murdering thousands of Palestinian protestors near the Gaza-Israel border.
     No matter what your age [young and often shot at], background [Palestinian trapped his entire life in the Gaza Strip], education, [limited due to sadistic sanctions pushed by the United States and Israel], or your successes [proscribed due to U.S. and Israeli policies] we are all granted 168 hours a week [during which you can be bombed, threatened, shot or shot at, tear gassed, and misrepresented by the major news media of Israel and the U.S.].
     We don't know what Ivanka Trump and her husband really thought of the massacre happening in Gaza while they enjoyed the embassy ceremony.  Judging from their smiling faces, I suggest that they don't care.  I suggest further that beautiful Ivanka is actually a callous piece of shit, just like her father.  The lack of soul and original thinking undergirding the sentences and "ideas" in her book suggest further that there's nothing in her heart and mind except the profit motive, and looking after her family.
     While professing to relate to "women who work," she gives advice about taking up chess and calligraphy.  Why not the study of quantum physics?  A Syrian woman who sells fruit to get by would benefit, according to Ivanka, by taking dancing classes, that is, if she can find a building still standing in her town.  Almost every woman on the planet is not as fortunate as Ivanka Trump, who emerged from her rich mother already set up for life.
     She is a legitimate target for satire, of course, but comedian Samantha Bee on her TBS show got into trouble for referring to Ivanka Trump as a "...feckless cunt."
     In social media everybody heard "cunt," many felt outrage.  This seemed a verbal assault, for some, on the dignity of women.  Ivanka Trump, who, in her business dealings in China exploits poor women, received defenses from a broad political spectrum.  Samantha Bee, feeling heat and probably thinking in terms mainly of saving her show, apologized, admitting wrongdoing.
     What she didn't do was define the word feckless: lacking initiative or strength of character; irresponsible.  Cunt, aside from being an extreme slur against a woman, or a word for her genitals, can also mean a contemptible person.
     Ivanka Trump is full of initiative, but does she have a strong character?  Does she stand up to her father's bad judgments?  Is she just a lesser piece of shit than Donald Trump?  Does her cliched writing style indicate there's a deep, thoughtful person there?  Does a person with strong character say nothing about mass slaughter by the government that's invited her to attend a divisive ceremony establishing an embassy that will remain a sore spot in the Middle East for years to come?  Is she irresponsible?  Does a responsible business owner allow near-slave labor conditions in her factories?  Is Ivanka Trump contemptible, another way of saying despicable?
     All of this, in way too many words, is a way of saying that Ivanka Trump is a feckless cunt.
     I'll close with one more book quote from her vacant mind:
     "We often don't realize that while we're waiting for our lives to begin, they already have--and they're made up of all the decisions we make, big and small, conscious or not."
     Karma.

                                                                            Vic Neptune