Have had a spiked headache for a few days now. Stiff neck, won’t get comfortable. My wife said she had it for three days but it passed; mine’s lingering. No idea what sort of bug it is, but it’s pesksome.
I’m proposing Charlie Sheen for Der Trumpenfuerher’s Surgeon General. Makes as much sense as any of the rest.
Enjoyed the Christiane Amanpour article, which I’d seen. She’s great. Also dead smack on target when she warns about needing now to be concerned about not only the freedom of speech enjoyed by journalists, but the actual physical safety of journalists, given Trump’s rhetoric of hate and revenge. Far from lowering the tone since the campaign, he’s increased it to death-threat intensity.
My Pap-Pap fought in WW II against the Axis powers to defeat fascism. We’ve now voted fascism in, not 71 years later. WTF? How is such an idiocy possible?
Look back. In 1932 Sinclair Lewis published It Can’t Happen Here, a cautionary novel about fascism being voted in under a glad-handing populist. This was before Hitler had shown his real colors, too. Prescient, chilling, and still a must-read.
We saw, in 1948, Eric Blair’s George Orwell novel, 1984, warning of what a Stalinesque dictatorship was like as things progressed technologically and psychologically. He was dead smack on target.
We, by Evgeny Zemayatin; Brave New World by Aldous Huxley, and so on, all tried to warn us. Even H. G. Wells in The Time Machine gave us a warning about devolving into the Morlochs and Eloi. Here we are already, far before he predicted.
Stephen King’s 1979 book, The Dead Zone, made into a Christopher Walken movie, features a man with psychokinesis who can glimpse the future of anyone he touches. He inadvertently shakes hands with a glad-handing populist joker/clown candidate at a political rally that comes through his home town, and sees the man rise to become first a demagogue, then the destroyer of the world in a nuclear holocaust. He determines he must kill the man to save the world. Is he crazy or are his abilities real? Even he doesn’t know, but can he risk doing nothing?
It’s chilling to read it now and see Trump so perfectly described.
In 2004 Philip Roth published The Plot Against America, a speculation on what it might have meant for America, and for Jews in particular, had Charles Lindbergh run for and won the Presidency in 1936, as many wanted him to. Lindbergh was pro-Nazi, liked Hitler and his policies, and was an enthusiast of Eugenics, which likely led to his son’s arranged kidnaping and death because the child was in many ways imperfect, for which Anne Morrow, his wife, paid a lifelong price.
Donald Joseph Trump is a proud Eugenicist and Nazi supporter, a white supremacist, so the parallels are obvious.
Norman Mailer released The Castle in the Forest in 2007, his final novel, a study of what made Adolf Hitler such a monster as he grew up never good enough for a drunken, abusive father and without prospects. Mailer dares factor in a hint of the supernatural when discussing the shades of Hitler’s evil. It does feel as if we’re cursed somehow, under a dark shadow, especially after the blood sacrifice made to gain power on 9/11.
Beyond classics of fiction, look at the systematic, predatory piecemeal attacks on secular liberal FDR style programs waged by the right wing, whether it was via the Dixie Democrats or, after Nixon’s “southern strategy”, via the GOP, where it’s lodged now in a swirling ideological cult of fear, hate, and greed. They sabotaged and infiltrated patiently here and there, never making too much noise. Certain exceptions, such as the right-wing inspired paranoid delusion of Satanic Ritual Abuse or Facilitated Communication or, these days, the wild allegations of Bill Clinton’s “Bubba” hit squads, all feeding the idiot monster of chaos the GOP rides on, all such exceptions, when their masks slipped, taught them further stealth.
In came smarmy, lying Reagan, avuncular and charming as he cut your throat and chortled about some half-remembered script or scene.
In came HW, rendered a one-term manoon by proving himself so detached as to be laughable.
In came the Cheney Junta behind the useful idiot stalking horse, and rubber stamp, W, and with them 9/11 and the P.A.T.R.I.O.T.A.C.T and Citizen’s United and other horrors of fascism. They seized power legally through rigging the system.
Now we see Trump, Der Fuerher wanna-be himself, a T-Rump with tiny hands rampaging like a dinosaur amidst a decaying, moribund system of capitalism that is eager to take the world down in flames rather than give up a penny’s potential profit. This even though the profit is long since imaginary, and the world long-since lost to their depredations, pollution, and callous disregard for humanity in any form.
My grandfather, your father, fought against those who now have claimed power. It’s devastating.
Worse is seeing the media normalizing this vile glut of dark shit being splattered over everything by these psychopathic narcissists, these nihilistic monsters. They act as if nothing is wrong, as if it’s all normal.
Worse yet are the quislings, eagerly licking boots for favor.
Worst, for me, are the Vichy trumpers, ingratiating themselves in search of personal leverage, not caring who or what must die so they can have a little jam on their bread.
It’s time to once again stand up against the Nazi psychopaths and defeat them, if we can. No one’s coming to help this time. Quite the reverse, we have superpowers working against us, who helped install Trump. I refer to Putin and to what ever borg runs China.
From oligarchy to kleptocracy and extinction in one stupid act of self-hate, embracing the very enemy we allegedly fought The Last Good War against. The Last Just War.
These are the thoughts I’m having lately. Maybe a stiff neck is endemic for us ferocious liberals who fight Nazis in every generation, in one form of psychopath or another, be it corporate, ideological, or just implacably moronic.
Still, don’t take my growling too much to heart, it’s just my Jewish streak, no doubt, as the razor wire is being strung, as ovens are heating.
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