A video is going around on Twitter that shows Trump's face. He is weeping, actively sobbing with tears running down his face. It's impossible to tell whether it's real or augmented. That's the way everything is these days. In Salon.com on-line magazine Dr.Lance Dodes explains that the President is "psychotic-like" (whatever that means) and that he will probably resign because he remains "wily." Both the vid and the opinion are more optimistic than not, except that Dr.Dodes says Trp is the "most dangerous man on the planet."
But what makes this opinion less useful is that Dr. Dodes doesn't take into account the useful of a madman to our enemies and rivals, the widespread repetition of this pattern of useful madman and national disruption, and the circle of sycophants who are perfectly sane but effective in protecting Trp. What did he ever do for them, might be doing even now? Bannon is a twisted, vengeful man who explicitly says he want to destroy the world, evidently for the glee of it, but what about Barr? He didn't even know Trp. Does he have the illusion that he's important?
Yet we know all these characters from the movies and I have a sinking feeling that we're going to be exposed to a lot of variations on the possibilities, not least because these tendencies and personalities have always been around. I could name a lot of them if there weren't libel laws, though most had fewer resources.
It's almost inevitable that we would eventually have a mafia president. As many remark, Nixon came close. So did Kennedy and that may be why he was assassinated. Go around sharing gang mols and that's what you get. This is not a political factor. National and international politics just get pushed around.
Some have commented sharply on the derangement of the current culture but this is almost the easiest to have foreseen. Whenever there is an economic break or technical dislocation -- and we have a few that are really scarey, like the loss of the industrial complex jobs and the transformation of money by the internet, escaping from the restraints of nations within boundaries, and the shifting of the planet into new climates of extremes. These were predicted but they are out of any individual or government's control, which means helplessness spreads into our towns and homes.
We have a few people talking about "new religions" -- not so much dogma and artifacts or even institutions, but the kind of change in beliefs about the world that Nick Kristoff or Sam Haselby talk about, esp. among young people. The talk is not so much about creating babies and more about saving the world. "As we know it" is not an operant clause. And the educated middle-class that urges us to treat everyone with tolerance, avoid pain, and enjoy high-class amusement has made us into soft sissies with a professional servant class of medical, legal, and home maintenance people. (I'm exaggerating, but not that much.) What was previously professing, educated, and self-disciplined is now swarmed by quasi-professionals, only partly trained and mostly technicians.
We knew all this was coming simply because there are too many people taking up too much space. We used to worry about feeding everyone. Now the problem is crowding every other life form off the continents, even the ones that form the ecology that sustains us. A big part of Trp's life is simply narrowing everything down to what he knew in childhood, not a very well educated one at that. Anyone outside that circle was like what they call "flat" characters in books, named and labeled, but not signficant. This makes it easy to deal with too many people: kill all the ones you don't like. It's an old solution, practiced by chimpanzees. In a sense they are more advanced because they eat the bodies, recycling.
The rollback in taboos on language has meant that now we hear about things that most of us would never think of and that no other primate is interested in. Rape and torture may exist among them, even war, but not to the elaborate and imaginative extent that our advanced brains can invent or hear about. Instead of getting rid of such things, we've simply made them into commodities, each person thinking they are privileged and unique, hiding little trophies of their ability to dominate and degrade, to use their own little fingers to invade the privacy of others.
Even naming and considering all that will not set us free. Even the most careful rule of law will not protect us. The people who incite atrocities are not the people who put them on paper as laws and there is no law that cannot be twisted. If it weren't for the rule of law, Trp would have died by now. It might not have been sniper fire -- just a little extra in his cheeseburger patty. Even if he had died, it wouldn't make a major difference, though it would be a relief. The underlying and occasionally fatal problem for all of us is not being able to fit into a newly developing world: no job a person can do, no way a person can live, no peace of mind.
I want to go back to this "religion" thing which most people will not recognize as religion anyway, since we think only Euro-Christianity with it's two millennia of inventing rules and ignoring science is "religion." We are flooded with images of these new astounding ideas about what is too small to see, only traced in lines under glass, or too vast to see except as a little bundle of instruments falls past it. It's not hard to imagine. It's just hard to derive principles of daily human behavior.
I'm not that good at it. I'm not sure I'll ever discover a group that I fit into. I've thought I had and turned out to be fooled again and again. Anyway, that's what protects Trp, Bannon, Barr, et al -- that little "ship of fools" who think they are crossing to a new continent even if the captain is deranged. Finally, there be dragons.
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