Like a red-faced homunculus in a playpen throwing all its toys out in a fit, Donald Trump in his own way has developed quite the Manichean mindset about who people and organizations are to him. In his classic manner of seeing the world as a set of transactions and reciprocal back scratches, you are either 100% Trump Trump Trump or you are the enemy of “the People”. In the context of journalism, Trump has categorized a bevy of news outlets as fake, which as you all know simply means that said outlet didn’t support or aggrandize Trump when they reported on him.
In the end, Trump really only wants you to listen to him and no one else. He’ll tolerate the straight media as long as they avoid being critical or as long as they trumpet his accomplishments and his agenda. Other than that, he constructs Big Media strawmen to tear down, reliable bete noires. This is dangerous because Trump’s reptilian brain understands how to divide and conquer, and he is a 33rd degree confabulator borne from any number of underlying psychiatric disturbances. Somehow this otherwise fucking idiot managed to hornswoggle nearly 40% of voting age adults into believing in an alternate universe with its own facts, the selfsame ones that Kellyanne Conway told us about.
This situation is not new. The right wing in this country has been waiting for a polarizing leader (I hate using that term about Trump but it cannot be denied that he is leading something) like this. Hell, they have been instrumental in creating him. This crayon-colored Frankenchrist we’re dealing with now is the apotheosis of decades of right wing hate programming from the radio, the television, and for some of the savvier or younger crowds, the internet. The pied piper of asshole political priorities has finally arrived, a creature with no shame, ethics, or self awareness.
Just like them.
Just like 40% of you.
The preferred way to lock in the conservative/Republican base is to brainwash it and feed it garbage. The president’s Twitter feed is full of raw sewage calumny against anything that makes him look weak or stupid. And it works because it’s easier to believe a simple lie than it is to try to understand a complicated truth. And that’s why the right stubbornly hangs onto power, because I feel we don’t educate enough in America, we just train the next generation of drones. Drones that lick the boss’ boot and allow the capital class to drain them of resources, poison their air, food and water and teach them how to resent and suspect their neighbor. We have an inculcated doctrinal fiction, one that says everybody must go it alone in the richest country on earth. How risible is it that working class citizens here thinks they are the middle class- because who could be poor in America? Must be your fault, chumpus. And you gotta be paranoid that someone is trying to take what you ostensibly worked for. Ding dong! Who the fuck is that? Oh, whew, it’s just UPS. I’m glad I checked my security camera before I answered the door strapped with my Armalite. Remember Invisible Sun by The Police? Even in 1980’s UK, hardly a hotbed of murder by gun, artists like Sting feared the prominence of the weapon in their society. Fortunately for them, the UK didn’t have to do an end run around a fucking constitutional relic from a time that doesn’t exist anymore like America has to. They’ve always remedied when necessary though vigorous initiatives like buybacks, which I know sounds loony on this side of the pond because it’s government spending (heaven forbid!) and any policy to restrict gun ownership will undoubtedly find its way to the nation’s highest court, which has already affirmed the individual right to own firearms independent of militias. Yet, a gun free world is possible, we just have to want it badly enough. And in a society with tens of thousands of gun deaths every year, you would think we’d do something proportional to the problem. Instead we nibble at the margins by banning niggling shit like bump stocks, while the size of a magazine in a very popular machine that can easily kill a dozen people per minute is completely ignored. And it looks like we are going to do nothing but talk in the wake of back to back mass shootings recently.
The Illogical Seminary 