Insanity
Two days ago, a Connecticut
Republican was arrested for grabbing a woman’s genitals. Prior to his arrest, he allegedly exclaimed “I
love this new world, I no longer have to be politically correct.” In related news, a week ago, Jeff Sessions,
said, regarding pussy grabbing “I don’t characterize that as sexual assault… I
think that’s a stretch.”
Seriously, and I mean this,
WHAT THE FUCK???? What warped world have
we entered?
To begin, I have written
several blogs on the idea of nostalgia, and how it is a desire to return to a
past that never was, one that we imagine to be better than the present, and
definitely better than the future. At
its base, it is pure revisionism that glosses over all of the terrible things
of the past to present an idealized vision of things. Nostalgia gives us “Gone With the Wind” and
its visions of happy and comfortable slaves.
Nostalgia presents us the happy housewife. Nostalgia creates images of smiling children
that are seen but never heard.
In short, nostalgia warps
our ideas of the past into a bizarre parody of actual life. It removes all of the bad things, and
elevates the good in a horribly distorted manner. And on the surface, Trumpism would seem to be
a nostalgic return to the 1950’s when the races were segregated; miscegenation
was a felony; when women were completely subservient to men; and being a white
male, regardless of social class, was the best thing in the world. It would seem that Trump is trying to turn
back the clock to a vision of how America would have been without Civil Rights,
without Women’s Rights, and without Religious Freedom
The Trump World is not
nostalgia, instead, it is a vision of the past through a dark and twisted
filter; it is a desire to bring back, not the good things of the 50’s, but the
evil. It is a desire for darkness that,
in all honesty, can be called Satanic.
First, let’s look at what
real Nostalgia for the 50’s encompasses, and remember the fact that there is a
significant amount of truth at its core.
The 50’s were a very prosperous time.
A man, even without a college education, could be the sole breadwinner,
bringing home a comfortable middle class life to his family. His wife would meet him at the door, with a
drink in her hand for him and a nice dinner on the table. Blacks and whites were “separate but equal,”
and there was no racial animus. (Remember this is the nostalgic view of the
50’s) College students were uniformly
crew-cut young Republicans that would follow their fathers into business, and
in due time settle down in their own white picket fenced heaven.
Of course, this is a false
vision wrapped around a core or truth, but it is a powerful and penetrating encapsulation of what remains,
even largely to this day. as the American Dream.
But even if it looks like it
on the surface, and even if the claims are that is the world that they want to
bring back, Trumpism is hellishly dystopian vision of this dream. In the Trump
vision, the man is head of the household, not through respect, but because it
is his goddamned right, and woe unto any woman who dares challenge that. The woman is not the happy homemaker, she is
an ornament, a thing of beauty, to be discarded when the first inevitable lines
crease her face. And I will add, those
lines will show up much too early because of the pain and grief poured on top
of her by the husband who thinks of her in much the same manner as he thinks of
his automobile. And, like the car, she
can easily be traded by the Trump Man for a newer and more exciting model. No sedan wives in this new world.
The black man is not “separate
but equal,” he is separate because of the bars on the cell he was thrown into
at about the age of 14. A cell he was
cast into because all Black men are born criminals, and if one dies at liberty,
they do so only because they have to good fortune to have done so before
committing the murder that their genes demand.
(And acknowledgement to Adolph Loos for giving me this turn of phrase,
although he referred to the tattooed, not to minorities, but it still applies here.)
And more, Trumpism advocates
for literal concentration camps for Muslims (a group so small in the 50’s that
they warranted no consideration, unless it was for the CIA to overthrow a
government to install their chosen leader)
The Trump vision is also to load several million immigrants onto trains
and ship them back to where they came from, on trains that would run day and
night, week after week, year after year, to purge the country of the taint of
immigration. At this point, even the
Germans are suspect. Only the Russians
seem to be worthy of consideration for entry into this country.
And finally, College
students, like children, need to sit down, shut up, and accept the fact that
they will take on a mountain of debt while being indoctrinated into the
Republican Party, because all college faculty will have to pass tests of
ideological purity to show that they are patriotic Americans who worship at the
altar of Adam Smith, God and prosperous Jesus.
And after graduation, their compliance is assured, because they are
literally slaves to a debt that they will never, in their entire working life,
be able to discharge. Welcome to Slavery
2.0, where the Masters pull their slaves strings through a combination of
threats of debtor’s prison and the dangling fruit of the job that pays in
experience, not wages.
George Orwell could not
create a world more terrifying than Trumptopia, and H.P. Lovecraft could not
envision a monster more amoral and soulless than The Donald.
And the news shows how
quickly we can fall into this abyss. A
quick perusal of the headlines of the last few weeks, the race based attacks,
the rapes, the hate that pours like sweat off of the brows of the men who now
hold our fates in their greasy palms, tells us how far fallen a creature man
is, in this time, in this place.
I’d quote Joseph Welch, and
ask “At long last, have you left no sense of decency?” But this is just beginning. This is only the start. And we have 3 days before the
inauguration. If people can feel free to
throw away 50 years of societal growth in 12 weeks, what more will happen in 4
years? How many more atrocities will we
endure before we rise up and scream, “NO MORE, THIS FAR AND NO MORE.” But I fear that there is much more, and this
is only the prologue to a play of such cruelty and depravity that even deSade must
turn his head. This time coming up will
teach each and every one of us Artaud’s ultimate truth:
“We are not free, and the
sky can still fall on our heads.”
I hope to write a blog full
of hope and talk about what can be done to stave off the darkness that engulfs us. But not tonight, not now. Right now, I need to take a shower, and weep
for this brave new world that has such people in it.
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