Donald Trump's latest 'Big Lie' --- that a Clinton presidency would triple the population of America in one week (650 million more aliens in one week was his actual words !) --- has, entirely typically, gotten far more attention among non-presidential-voting humanity outside America, than inside that nation.
Routine exaggerating has been so much part of the general American modus operandi that this latest alien scare whopper goes as un-noticed by the US media and public as does Trump's sordid & routine lies about the heights of his buildings.
True, the NYC building authorities do insist that all legal documents about these buildings must give their true, physical, scientific, height.
But they have no problem what so ever with Trump routinely lying in marketing materials about the height and number of floor of his buildings.
Trump's aim, always, is to have - or at least claim to have - the biggest, tallest, most luxurious building in NYC, America, the world, the known Universe.
'Most luxurious' is so undefinable that this term has been abused by all marketeers for centuries until it is near useless as an effective selling point.
But in our supposed age of Science, surely the physical height of a building can be established beyond all marketing claims.
Except that ours is actually an age of Scientism, where a mere appearance, a mere simulacrum, of science is more than good enough.
So Trump typically divides the total height of his buildings, from the very bottom of the sub-ground footings to the tip of the tippy top flagpole, by 10 feet (the height he claims for a typical floor in a typical skyscraper).
This is how he arrives at his marketing number of stories --- the actual number of floors be damned.
Sweet.
Particularly as Trump simultaneously also claims that the ceilings in his buildings are much higher than the average - which would reduce, not increase, the number of storeys and floors he has.
Doubly sweet : sucking and blowing.
And supposedly sophisticated NYC goes down on its knees before The Donald and licks it up.
Dr Martin Henry Dawson lived the unimportant first two thirds of his life as a Nova Scotian and the last important third of his short life as a New York City resident.
In an age - and a city - of extreme hubris, confidence, optimism, he seemed well out of place : Scottishly dour, dubious, doubtful, skeptic, cautious, pessimistic.
He might be best explained by contrasting Nova Scotia's most important piece of architecture with that of NYC's Trump Towers.
Tourists from all over the entire world - not just from bullish NYC - always express surprise and even shock over the size of the Nova Scotia Legislature.
It is - after all - highly important as a symbol, the very home and birthplace of 'responsible government' (modern democracy) in the British Empire.
Responsible government birthed in the expansive, optimistic era of Victorian times.
But it is so tiny, so very very wrong, a cruel joke, like 'looking at the Westminster parliament buildings, but through the wrong end of the telescope' quipped Charles Dickens.
Even 200 years ago, nearby buildings easily dwarfed it in height and size but this fact never worried your typical Nova Scotian a hair.
It is about the size of a modest mansion, on a postage stamp size lot, slumped down in a small valley on the side of a steep hill.
For centuries, until the post 9/11 security mania, it was mostly used by ordinary City of Halifax residents as a convenient shortcut between Granville and Hollis Streets, a quick 'in the back door and out the front'.
A less Trump-like, less Manhattan skyscraper, building is hard to imagine and it says a lot about the cautious, tepid, modest character of New Scotland ---- and of one of its most prominent and typical citizens : Dr Martin Henry Dawson, he who so first quietly brought the world the twin boons of recombinant DNA and systemic penicillin.....
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