Neurosis to a greater or lesser degree is the norm in western industrialized societies. Drawing on this fact is the key to effective propaganda. It is well known that neurotics always return to the place they are running away from. It’s a circle game of frustration in which being frustrated is actually the “solution,” because the real problems cannot be faced. The Donald Trump phenomenon is an example of this on a social level.
Everybody knows that Trump is loved or hated in equal measure. And everyone knows he dominates the minds of those who love or hate him, just as the media endlessly focuses on him in a way that only very obtuse people would fail to analyze. The media made Trump and he is their gold mine and the key to the effective propaganda they run for their masters in high finance and the intelligence agencies. Although his image seems big and bold and brazen, it is like an Impressionist painting that, as the art critic John Berger writes in “The Eyes of Claude Monet,” “… is painted in such a way that you are compelled to recognize that it is no longer there …. You cannot enter an Impressionist painting; instead it extracts your memories. In a sense it is more active than you – the passive viewer is being born; what you receive is taken from what happens between you and it. No more within it.”
Like Trump, the impression is fugitive, here and gone, vague and precise. It’s meaning is fleeting. Mutation and flux and the evanescence of appearances are its essence. As with Trump, nothing is really clear, although many claim it is. Monet was painting at a time (the late 19th and early 20th centuries) when, due to technological and economic changes, an old world was dissolving into the modern. Jump a century or more and we have Trump and the electronic media where vagueness and flux rule perceptions.
Celebrity Culture
For Trump is a product of celebrity culture that has come to dominate our world that reminds you that the world of the past has become a reality television show and all the talk about the good old days is an illusion and that we are now living in a society where experience has been reduced to meaningless and ephemeral gestures. The politicians of all stripes play ghosts.
America will never be great again, for it is corrupted to the core and the mass media present it in images that have no bearing on reality. This is something neurotics cannot face, so they still follow the circle game played by the media and fight political battles that are exercises in frustration. But it keeps them busy. Like a sports fan whose favorite team has just lost a game or had a losing season, there is always tomorrow, next season, or the upcoming election.
Before Donald Trump emerged on the national scene with his 2015 announcement that he was running for the presidency, he was known as a wealthy real estate operator who had often declared bankruptcy and a comical reality-television host with a strange hairdo. In short, he was a wealthy celebrity with huge mansions who cavorted with the rich and famous, including former President Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton, among many others.
How such a billionaire celebrity could ever have become president and have such a large following among the white working class – the “deplorables” in Hillary Clinton’s elitist lingo – has its roots in the transformation of American culture from the late 1950s to today when illusion and performance have replaced any semblance of reality.
Boorstin, Postman, and Gabler
Daniel Boorstin described this transformation in its early days in his brilliant book, The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America (1962). He dissected the radical change taking place whereby images and manufactured pseudo-events – “however planned, contrived, or distorted – have become more vivid, more attractive, more impressive, and more persuasive than reality itself.” What I describe as neurotic circling, Boorstin called tautologies. In this new theatrical world of mirrors, people imitate themselves by looking into the mirror of themselves imitating the famous people of all stripes: actors, politicians (excuse the repetition), celebrities, et al. Boorstin writes:
Our very efforts to debunk celebrities, to prove (whether by critical journalistic biographies or by vulgar ‘confidential’ magazines) that they are unworthy of our admiration, are like efforts to get ‘behind the scenes’ in the making of other pseudo-events. They are self-defeating. They increase our interest in the fabrication …. The hat, the rabbit, and the magician are all equally news.
Thirty years after The Image, Neil Postman added to this critique by showing how the new computer technology was tyrannizing over all human values and ways of knowing. In Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology, he showed how the ecology of technology, wherein “One significant change generates total change,” creates a totally new world where cultural and personal coherence become nearly impossible. In a Technopoly where technology and technique rule over all life, any sense of truth dissolves like soap bubbles. “That it why it is possible to say almost anything without contradiction provided you begin your utterance with the words ‘A study has shown … ‘or “Scientists now tell us that … ‘” Scientism and gibberish blend with technological tricks to create an electronic digital society where, in Boorstin’s words, “the news behind the news” – or the creation of the illusions – becomes the most interesting news of all, even as its debunking is a tautology like the definition of a celebrity: Someone who is known for being known.
Finally, in 1998 Neal Gabler put the finishing touches on these developments with his book, Life: The Movie: How Entertainment Conquered Reality. Drawing on Boorstin and Postman, he argued that in the United States life itself had become an ongoing movie in which the manipulation of reality and real life melodramas, the movies and the new information technologies, had melded into a cultural transformation so profound that it marked the end of traditional values and/or the start of a brave new world. When fiction replaced facts and everything became entertainment in a technological kaleidoscope, “life itself was gradually becoming a medium all its own, like television, radio, print, and film, and that all of us were becoming at once performance artists in and audience for a grand, ongoing show…” The traditional media turned from some semblance of reporting actual news to become conveyors of “lifies” (a predecessor of “selfies”) – a flood of entertainments taken from soap-operatic events hyped to the teeth – while theatrical techniques were applied to politics, religion, war, etc., and everything became show business, including the presidency and the national sitcom of political reporting.
Political Theater and Propaganda
This is the context for Trump’s rise to prominence. It makes clear that he is not an aberration but part of a long development that gave us the acting president Ronald Reagan and all the presidential performers who have followed. One could say, if Trump never existed, he would have to be invented, which of course he has been, as was Bush, Clinton, Bush II, Obama, and Biden. Is it surprising that the Ukrainian president Zelensky is a comedic television and movie actor? Performers such as these follow their Director’s orders.
Furthermore, all these developments omit the crucial part played by government propaganda apparatuses in conjunction with the media and technology conglomerates. The growth of such massive propaganda is entwined with all these cultural changes, although it is not the primary focus of the three books mentioned. When all these threads are woven together, we arrive at our current situation – a vast tapestry of lies.
There are various schools of thought on the Trump phenomenon, and most say more about the thinkers than their thoughts. I am referring to Trump’s rise to prominence, his 2016 election, his presidency, and all that continues to transpire around him in 2022 and into the future. (And although Trump will be an old man in 2024 – the same age that Biden is today – you can be assured he will be garnering the headlines then.)
Monet Paints Trump
These diverse impressions of what it all means fall into at least four categories, which I will sketch as I see them.
Trump supporters seemingly came out of nowhere in 2016, but this is false. If anything, they have been smoldering for many decades and their complaints have been mounting for many good reasons. In 1969, Pete Hamill, the New York journalist, wrote an article for New York Magazine called “The Revolt of the White Lower Middle Class.” He said:
They call my people the White Lower Middle Class these days. It is an ugly, ice-cold phrase, the result, I suppose, of the missionary zeal of those sociologists who still think you can place human beings on charts. It most certainly does not sound like a description of people on the edge of open, sustained and possibly violent revolt. And yet, that is the case. All over New York tonight, in places like Inwood, South Brooklyn, Corona, East Flatbush, and Bay Ridge, men are standing around saloons talking of their grievances, and even more darkly about possible remedies. Their grievances are real and deep; their remedies could blow this city apart.
The White Lower Middle Class? Say that magic phrase at a cocktail party on the Upper East Side of Manhattan and monstrous images arise from the American demonology. Here comes the murderous rabble: fat, well-fed, bigoted, ignorant, an army of beer-soaked Irishmen, violence-loving Italians, hate-filled Poles. Lithuanians and Hungarians (they are never referred to as Americans) …. Sometimes these brutes are referred to as ‘the ethnics’ or ‘the blue-collar’ types. But the bureaucratic, sociological phrase is White Lower Middle Class. Nobody calls it the Working Class anymore.
He went on to quote various white working-class New Yorkers, their quiet bitterness, their ignorant racism fueled by a media that emphasizes “the politics of theatre, its seeming inability to ever explain what is happening behind the photographed image,” which results in a superficial understanding of what is really behind their frustrated complaints that they too are victims of the system and are not respected. In an article ostensibly about New Yorkers, Hamill explained where such anger came from, not to justify misdirected racism or ignorance of how things actually work in this country. Update his account, and you have a good portion of Trump’s followers today. His description is just as apt today: “The working-class white man is actually in revolt against taxes, joyless work, the double standards and short memories of professional politicians, hypocrisy and what he considers the debasement of the American dream.”
The perplexing thing, only explained by the rise of celebrity culture, the Internet, and the dumbing-down of the general public, is how Trump, a billionaire reality-TV buffoon could garner their devoted allegiance. A man so different from them, many of whom come from states with large rural populations and Trump a quintessential New Yorker who probably never got his hands in the earth. Of course he said many of the things they were desperate to hear about making the U.S.A. great again, no foreign entanglements, etc., many appealing things after they spent so many years hearing the politicians talk the same jive talk about invading this country and that and fighting Russia to the death. His message appealed to many. They bought his spiel as if he would save them; a claim that all politicians use, but he was touching the suppressed underbelly of the American delusion. An upper class politician talking about, among others things, class matters.
Then there is the liberal counterpoint to Trump, which is essentially the Democratic Party’s interpretation that Trump represents a shocking neo-fascist resurrection of the historically racist, isolationist strain in American history. This position is ironically consonant with the extremist 1950s claims of Senator Joseph McCarthy and his ilk – Nixon and Trump’s lawyer friend Roy Cohn, who represented McCarthy – who claimed there were communists under every bed and the Russians (U.S.S.R.) were coming to seize our liberties. The accusations against Trump, being led by The New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN, etc., are that he is a Russian-connected operative, a stooge, and that he is intent on undermining American democracy and establishing an American totalitarianism; that he stole the 2016 election with the help of Russia; and that he always has been in cahoots with Vladimir Putin. The liberals who hold this assessment of Trump, what some critics call “Trump derangement syndrome,” are as devoted to their assessments as are Trump’s supporters. Both groups look to Trump as an angel or devil; he transfixes both in equal measure.
Aside from those who see Trump as a savior or Satan, there are various other opinions of him that cross ideological divides. Most are equivocal, at best. Some leftists admire him for his less belligerent stance toward Russia and understand the totally debunked Russia-gate accusations against him and the impeachment proceedings as confirmation of his sincerity, although they do not endorse some of his other positions. Others view him as the personification of the rise of neo-fascist, far-right Christian fundamentalism, while also seeing Biden and the Democrats as perfidious fools leading the country to disaster. Some conservatives like aspects of his agenda, as do a small number of libertarians, but they remain very wary. There are many variations on these opinions with most falling somewhere between a rock and a hard place. A sort of pox on both contestants in the electoral game, but most are based on the presupposition that the show must go on, even as both sides claim electoral fraud when their side loses. This is the frame within which impressions of Trump and his opponents are formed.
Rarely is it considered – and this is the take of a tiny minority – that with the rise of celebrity culture, pseudo-events, image-making, and the vast, sophisticated, electronic, intelligence, propaganda apparatus, that Donald Trump is not the impressions he gives off but a creation of hidden forces manipulating reality to an unimaginable extent. That Trump is not the arch-enemy of Biden or Clinton or any Democrat, but that he is a partner in a great game of deception in which the good guys and bad guys play their parts for the Great Director. It is worth remembering what Barbara Honegger, who was present in the West Wing of the White House in February 1981, overheard that day:
We’ll know our disinformation is complete when everything the American public believes is false. – William J. Casey, CIA Director
It is also worth considering a different version of the point the psychologist James Hillman and the writer Michael Ventura raised with their book We’ve Had a Hundred Years of Psychotherapy and the World’s Getting Worse. People might ask themselves if over the past fifty or five years their lives have gotten better or worse under all the American presidents, including Biden and Trump. The answer is obvious. Therefore, maybe it is time to imagine the most extreme possibility: That Casey’s statement has come to fruition.
It is not just painters and comedians who do impressions.
Theory of the Leisure Class by Veblen also ck/out Barbara Mikulsky.s Ethnic Americans speech to Catholic University 1970.
Everyone answers within their bubble.
Writers write there too.
I could remain within my rural setting and be happy, except . . . .
Hey Ed, Just got back from two weeks of bliss in the Montana back-country camping and fly fishing with my brothers and friends. Thirty plus years of this ritual reconnection to the “natural world” as I’ve come to call it. No computers, no web access, just Ospreys hunting trout and trout hunting mayflies. Your essay is the first thing I looked for on my re-entry to crazy land here in Southern California, because I knew it would contain insight, heart and soul in its analysis, no matter the subject. It’s a wonderful piece Ed, and you turned me on to an author I’m not familiar with, Gabler, so there is some more reading to put in the cue. As always Ed, thanks for your humane compassionate “take” on our collective situation, which you somehow manage to maintain amidst the ever expanding reality disconnected madness we call “America” and “Western civilization.”
Ed the short and sweet answer: it’s the system. No matter the players, the clowns and the martyrs. The system roles on, as it did unimpeded after the Civil War killed untold hundreds of thousands (millions adjusted for today’s pop.), many civilians and children; total war in its most gruesome (the lesson was this is an empire in the making and any state or person who thinks they can secede will get the same) or the murder of JFK (in this case, henceforth only clowns need apply for this job if you want to remain in office).
I suspect the system will take us down with it. There’s never been any real democracy, just republican oligarchies. There’s a reason for this, and one of the reasons the US started out on its expansionist project which foretold the “Civil” War. Now 330,000,000 people stretched across over 100 million square miles, the scale is way too vast to have any sort of Athenian democracy (which is kind of interesting).
Ed, what I found interesting in this actors scenario is how it also applies to our daily lives. I’m reminded of the works of Erving Goffman’s Presentation of Self In Every Day Life; and more importantly as we are a nation rebuilding on psychosis paradigms (psychiatric clinics on every corner) – makes the medical dogma look like real “science”. The face, the mask play out in Asylums (another work of his).
If you watch old TV shows like Gun Smoke it’s fascinating the way the same people come and go as different characters (and feel authentic), and the regulars respond to them as if they’ve never seen them before that episode. I think there’s some “reality” in that, and certainly when the show is at its best.
Thank you for this exquisite expose, Ed.
Oh, man, a sucker born every nanosecond. Interesting, Ed, how you cite Jewish writers, Boorstin, Postman, and Gabler, yet, the elephants are in the room with Edward Bernays all the way to Leslie Moonves ,, head of CBS, or former head of it. Quoting him that he said how he can appreciate a Donald Trump candidacy.
“Not that the CBS executive chairman and CEO might vote for the Republican presidential frontrunner, but he likes the ad money Trump and his competitors are bringing to the network.
‘It may not be good for America, but it’s damn good for CBS,’ he said of the presidential race.
Moonves called the campaign for president a ‘circus’ full of ‘bomb throwing,’ and he hopes it continues. ”
So, Ed, the question also ties into Jewish oligarchs who gutted post USSR, and those involved in Ukraine and the Jewish Nazi Comic’s rise to power. Forget Pandora Papers. These fellows moved all sorts of trillions offshore, and many have ended up with four passports, with Israel First stamped on all of them.
Goyim are something else, getting schooled by elites, and many elites are, now come on, Ed, Jewish. So, if most elites were from say the Navajo Nation, I am sure there’d be all sorts of articles, books, stories, flicks, criticisms of Navajo culture dominating education, medicine, IT, banking, media, arts, culture, real estate, etc.
But we can’t do the same critique on the values and family roots and epigentic trauma and reaction to the Holocaust Industry on these folk, like Blinken, Kagan, Nuland, hell, Larry Fink, Soros, well, you get the picture.
So interesting that three fellows you cite are Jewish, and if you try to find that on Wikipedia now, well, those familial lines are missing.
The point is that Trump is what the Madison Avenue “Wish I Was a Rothschild” Fiddling on the Roof is all about. Money. Oh, more money. And, inching their way into power circles.
An Alzheimer’s sufferer, Biden, telling the world he is a Zionist. Telling the world that he also wanted a doctor in the family, so isn’t it great one of his kids married a Jew. Same with Trump and Kushner and, well, we need critical looks at the Jewish influence on so much, but not from Storm Front, and not some cancelling from Southern Poverty Law Center, where an antisemite lurks everywhere, even in the DNA of Jews like Aaron Mate and Max Blumenthal. Also pigeon holed as Russian stooges.
If you really study what has been happening in Ukraine, and even the murder of the philosopher’s daughter, there is not just MI6 and CIA connections. Mossad, baby, Mossad.
Thanks for writing, though.
Oh, that Gabler:
Gabler: The whole idea of the industry when these Eastern European Jews founded it was that Hollywood would be their conduit into America and that the ‘Jewishness’ would be something that they could shed. That’s embedded into the very idea of Hollywood. In some ways, the notion that Hollywood wants to put some distance between itself and its Jewish founders is completely compatible with the Jewish founders themselves. When I submitted the book, it was called An Empire of Their Own and the subtitle was “How the Jews invented Hollywood.” I can’t tell you how much resistance there was. My publisher, which was run by Jews at the time, had great hesitancy in putting that on the cover. They negotiated with me to see if we could change the subtitle and remove the word ‘Jewish’ from the book. So the book itself became an object lesson in the very subject of the book. We went through virtually every permutation of the word ‘Hollywood’ and ‘Jew’ that I could possibly think of until it finally occurred to me, as they rejected all of these things, was that they didn’t want the word ‘Jew’ anywhere near the book. This is all part and parcel of the process of the formation of Hollywood and the formation of American identity.
In “An Empire of Their Own” (Crown), a 1989 collective biography about the Jews who built Hollywood, author Neal Gabler tells the larger-than-life stories of industry pioneers Louis B. Mayer of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Harry and Jack Warner of Warner Brothers, Harry Cohn of Columbia Pictures, Adolph Zukor of Paramount Pictures, Carl Laemmle of Universal Pictures and William Fox of Fox. It’s a world of sharp elbows, business rivalries, womanizing, gambling, labor conflicts and opulent excess. The book is also newly relevant to this moment, a time when hate crimes against all groups are on the rise, Los Angeles’ Academy Museum has been accused of consciously downplaying the role of Jews in Hollywood’s founding, and The View co-host Whoopi Goldberg is currently on suspension from ABC News after saying the Holocaust was “not about race.”
https://theankler.com/p/neal-gabler-the-academy-museum-whoopi
Immersion in, obsession with, consumption by the virtual world of image, appearance, and narrative has been the West’s undoing. We bought our own BS, believed our own propaganda about how Russia was weak and ripe for the picking via a second Afghanistan coupled with unrelenting sanctions. Russia, ever “backwards” and behind the times, stuck with reality and proceeded to grind down the Ukrainian army while joining hands with China and other “non-absorbed”
nations. And now the real world has arisen to wreak its vengeance on the virtual one. Europe will find this winter, for starters, that images and appearances and narratives will not provide heat or other physical necessities. And then the tidal wave of reality will cross the ocean to American shores. Who would have thought that this feeble Boomer would live to see at least the beginning of the self-induced demise of the neoliberalism he grew to so detest? i feel like Moses on the mountain top, given by grace a glimpse of the promised land.
Very true, and propaganda is critical in presenting our version of the “truth” when it comes to war. But propaganda is an illusion – as is power – what nations fight wars over. As a result every empire eventually faces the conflict it is trying to avoid – its own collapse. It seems, the way global events are moving, even the horrors of nuclear Armageddon are not enough to stop us.
https://patternofhistory.wordpress.com/
[The perplexing thing, only explained by the rise of celebrity culture, the Internet, and the dumbing-down of the general public, is how Trump, a billionaire reality-TV buffoon could garner their devoted allegiance.] Is this a satisfactory response/answer/explanation?
Ask Simone Gold, MD, who now sits in prison for no rational reason.
https://twitter.com/drsimonegold/status/1562502082435121153?cxt=HHwWgoDUhbLXj68rAAAA
Ask Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, removed as NSA to Trump for no rational reason and accused of crimes made up out of whole cloth, for ‘sin’ of advocating normal relations with Russian Federation.
Ask Roger Waters.
Ask Dimitry Simes, Russian expert extraordinaire and long-time resident of USA who moved back to Russia, after Mueller Goons tried to frame him.
Ask Valery Gergiev, summarily ousted as conductor of Munich orchestra for not denouncing his country’s president.
Ask Darya Dugina, 29, daughter of Russian Sociologist Alexander Dugin [too late, agents of western neo-empire terrorists murdered her in cold blood].
https://cluborlov.wordpress.com/2022/08/22/ukrainian-terrorists-assassinate-daughter-of-russian-philosopher-alexander-dugin/
Ask Alexander Dugin. [[The old America sees individual freedom as that which excludes any external prescription, any demand to use it only this way and no other, only for this and nothing else. Only for abortion and gay pride, for example, and never for banning abortion or demonising perverts. New America, on the other hand, insists that freedom requires violence against those who do not understand it well enough. Which means that freedom must have a normative interpretation and it is up to the neo-liberals themselves to determine how and to whom they use it and how they interpret it. The old liberalism is libertarian. The new is blatantly totalitarian.]]
https://katehon.com/en/article/united-states-court-against-ideology-progress
Ask Dostoevsky [since he’s dead, read The Possessed].
Ask Thomas Merton [since he’s dead, read him].
Ask Camus [since he’s dead, read The Rebel].
Ask JFK, RFK, MLK, Malcom [since they’re dead, try to understand how this came to be].
Ask Obama. He’s still alive. Ask his handlers, they’re still alive. Except we can’t, as a practical matter, as they are above the law. And ask Trump and his masters as well.
Ask Meryl Nass, MD, whose license to practice stripped for ‘sin’ of trying to save patients using the chloroquines and IVT.
Ask Sen. Huey Long, President Jonas Savimbi, Sheikh Ahmed Ismail Hassan Yassin, etc. [too late, they was murdered by the rich and powerful terrorists of the ”’liberal”’ western institutions].
Etc. etc. etc. etc.
PS
Iranian Revolution, during reign of terror presided by President Jimmy Carter brought Ayatollah Khomeini back to Iran, Qom; from Al-Najaf, Iraq.
There was much secular opposition to US/UK installed Shah.
Ask all of them, opposed this western terror that were tortured and murdered by guess who. . . ask them. . . and perhaps come to logical conclusion Khomeini was only leader remaining to lead Iran Revolution.
Ask all those rotting in prison after being invited into US Capitol by authorities.
Ask and don’t stop asking. . . . Ask all the teachers in this country that were either fired for doing their job or those that left because they cannot teach due to “the madness”. . . .and ask those barred from teaching who refused covid shots that even CDC data now shows kills more who got them, than not, and ditto infections; and given these facts, ask Gov. Charlie Baker why no one can attend university or grad school unless they get the shots, and ask him how this is not segregation in its most vile and heinous. . . .
Ask the town manager and council president of Amherst why they wave Ukraine flags over town hall, and ditto mayors of Northampton and Easthampton. Given their gall to wave those flags, further ask them why they don’t also fly Swastikas and Confederate Flags!
Ask your friends and neighbors and family members who you may no longer be able to communicate with since their neurosis is now out of control. . . .
More than anything, ask yourself why it is that just about everyone you know filters reality through this or that dogma, this or that partisan perspective, instead of apply tools of reason, logic, knowledge, philosophy and scientific method.
And should you choose to, on purpose, to ignore: tools of reason, logic, knowledge, philosophy and scientific method. . . you may have your answer.
-30-
“Lived a knight once, poor and plain,
Silent, simple and pure;
His face was sorrowful and pale
But his spirit was bold and sure.
He had a vision before his eyes,
Mysterious and dark,
And deep did the mark of the vision lie
Graven in his heart.
Not a glance to women would he ever recast,
His soul burned like the sun,
He swore from his lips would never pass
A word to anyone.
Around his neck a chaplet he wore
In place of a lady’s favor;
His face from all was hid e’re more
Behind his steely visor.
Full of pure love and always true
To his one exquisite dream,
A. M. D. —these letters he drew
In blood upon his shield.
And in the deserts of Palestine
From among the rocks there came
Rising to the battle the paladins,
Calling their ladies names.
“Lumen coeli, sancta Rosa!
Wild and fierce he shouted;
As by a thunderclap his foes
The Musselmans were routed.
Returning to his distant castle,
He lived a lonely season,
Ever sad and ever silent
And died, bereft of reason.”
-Pushkin
+++++++
And don’t ask Julian Assange or Edward Snowden or Reality Winner or Chelsea Manning or . . . .
Every treaty with Uncle Sam, the Great Father in DC, broken with the Original People’s of this land.
The Indian War sort of ended when? 1920?
Ask Wobblies and Eugene Debbs.
Ask the heroes like Rachel Carson?
Good old reason. I’m a college writing teacher who can’t teach because I would are to question not only what youth have learned in K12, but question the rampant upside world of overpaid coaches, VPs, and others not in the teaching realm.
Would question why we as state college part-time staff have to have three or more jobs, and still live in our vans?
This is one fun country of murder, death, rip-off, snake oil salesmen, and now the Military-Prison-Ed-Media-AI-IT-Real Estate-Banking-Medical-Pharma-Mining-Chemical-Oil-Energy-Culture-Surveillence COMPLEX.
Dog-eat-dog, a sucker born every nanosecond for whom scammer after scammer can target.
This started, well, you know when. What before 1776, senor!
“America will never be great again, for it is corrupted to the core and the mass media present it in images that have no bearing on reality.”
I wonder, though, when America was great. When it was built on centuries of slavery and genocide, imperialism and neocolonialism? So the family could see the U.S.A. in their Chevrolet on ribbons of highways built for vacationers and commuters to consume maximum amounts of petrochemicals, requiring wars for decades to come?
Hamill and Breslin were fun and bracing to read before co-optation set in and HBO came to celebrate them, as I was just reminded by rereading your “No More Bullshit: Jimmy Breslin and Pete Hamill.” Actually they were never “celebrities” in the sense of being famous for being famous. They worked hard at enlightening. Then circumstances dictated that while fun was fun, these other things weren’t their affair if they wanted to continue to get paid, anywhere.
As one poet put it, “They fle from me that someyme did me seke.”
Everything you said here is so true and spot on. In fact, I’m very wary of DeSantis as I feel he is being intentionally groomed and will be served-up as the next “alternative” to the crap that’s in our government right now.
I see blue & red, left & right, liberal & conservative as two sides of the same old coin – and we’re still to stupid to recognize it. Or maybe we just don’t want to…
This is a wonderful explanation of a key topic for our times. The politicos and the media enhanced the Trump phenomenon, and now they are all addicted to it. The MSM lose ratings if he is not in the news, and the blue bubble people need a scary enemy because they have nothing positive to provide, or at least nothing they will actually act on without reducing it to a minimum and/or spike it with riches for their masters. The red bubble people need hope, however forlorn, that a hero will save them, and that proper application of the ballot can solve the ever-increasing problems faced by ordinary people. Some of them understand that the ballot has lost any value it once had, but any resistance they can imagine has Trump at the head, and even if successful, would only provide token relief.
If one can withdraw from the emotions the charade generates, it is east to see that Trump is part and parcel of the establishment, playing a role to divert energy away from any real solutions or even consideration of the real issues.
Unfortunately,