Jekyll & Hyde
JANUARY 2016
In post-World War II America, when did we, as a country, begin to go crazy, irrational and schizophrenic? Was it the Red Scare and the vindictive anti-communism of Senator Joe McCarthy in the early 1950s? Was it Brown vs the Board of Education in 1954 and the desegregation of Central High School in Little Rock in 1957? Was it the assassinations of JFK, MLK and RFK? Was it the war in Vietnam and the Sixties social and political revolution? All of this and more has turned the United States into Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde.
Americans are in backlash mode. The backlash on the Left was triggered by corruption, dishonesty, racism and environmental degradation. The backlash on the Right was triggered by the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and, most recently, by the election of Barack Obama to the presidency. Right now on the Left, Bernie Sanders has inspired progressives and young voters, while Hillary Clinton feels like tired old news. On the Right, thanks to a racist populist outburst that is overheated and unapologetic, Donald Trump has a chance to win the 2016 election.
“After surges of Black progress, periods of right-wing backlash take shape.”
DECEMBER 2016
Marianne is worried that I may not be anti-Trump enough. Rest assured that I remain a staunch progressive tree-hugging Scandinavian-style democratic-socialist swine.
The last 18 months have been akin to a Stage 1 cancer diagnosis. Already I have grown weary of typing words like racist, misogynist and xenophobia. Best case scenario: this country needs Trump as the catalyst who triggers a much-needed political rite of passage. Right now, America’s most dangerous enemy is the cult we call the Republican Party. America needs to finally cough-up this trigger-happy money-grubbing right-wing racist hairball and consign the Republican Party to history’s landfill. Think of the Trump administration as aversion therapy.
[wikipedia] The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari (Germany, 1920) “is a silent horror film, the story of an insane hypnotist who uses a sleepwalker to commit murders. Dr. Caligari represents the German war government. Cesare is symbolic of the common man conditioned, like soldiers, to kill. The film reflects the subconscious need in German society for a tyrant and is an example of Germany’s unwillingness to rebel against deranged authority.”
JANUARY 2017
Donald Trump is a megalomaniac with caustic daddy issues, a functioning sociopath void of empathy. He steamrolled 17 rivals and Hillary Clinton. He played the game his way and he won the presidency. Nobody was ready to play the game by Trump’s rules. Our comedians are the only ones willing to fight dirty. “Trump is the pumpkin-haired rooster taking credit for the dawn.”
FEBRUARY 2017
Sane Americans have an appetite for political insight, one of our finest traits. Quoting a friend, David Frum writes in The Atlantic, “The benefit of controlling the modern state is less the power to persecute the innocent and more the power to protect the guilty.”
NYU scholar Ruth Ben-Ghait strips down Trump adviser Steve Bannon to his dream of “destroying the state in the name of securing power for an insurgent populist movement that is virulently anti-establishment.”
In the reader-comment forum of The New York Times, Byron Edgington notes that “the straight white Christian entitlement myth has already worn out its welcome.”
This afternoon I read “The Cognitive Damage We Risk As a Result of the Trump Presidency” by Sophia A. McClennan at Salon. "Neil Postman wrote Amusing Ourselves to Death (1985), a study that argued for Aldous Huxley’s vision of a dystopian world, where people voluntarily sacrifice rights because they are too distracted by hedonistic consumption to resist. Postman believed control of the population would come from the substitution of entertainment for civic engagement."
What bothers me about this article is that McClennan assumes that America is a bystander society, too passive to put up a fight. McClennan is worried that our minds are being fried by the brain's inability to process an overload of corrosive right-wing bullshit.
McClennan continues, "Neil Postman recognized that the mass media spectacle would have dire consequences for democracy and political action. Consuming an endless stream of spectacle makes it hard for the mind to connect details to the larger context and leads to attention deficits and distraction.”
“The Trump presidency is the first openly and unabashedly spectacle-driven administration in U.S. history. It depends on destroying the public’s ability to see the bigger picture and relies on substituting bluster for substance. Trump is that shiny object we can’t stop watching. The longer we are mesmerized by it, the more our critical thinking suffers."
“Much like the lunch buffet at a strip club, Donald Trump can seem appealing until you take a closer look.”
“Calling Donald Trump a president is like calling Jeffrey Dahmer a chef.”
“Lying in ALL CAPS won’t change the facts.”
“In Palm Beach, Florida, the dress code at Mar-a-Lago is casual white supremacy.”