midnight’s broken toe
by uzwi
I enjoyed this article for the way it makes the reality TV aspect of Trumpist politics so clear, but even more for: “Nobody wants to buy a little piece of confusion and sadness.” The deep honesty hidden in this image is the only true thing in the world as constituted now. I wouldn’t normally feel anything for TPT, but here she is, someone human among all these awkwardly-posturing orange mannequins, a woman with a brain tumour forced out of her own reality show into honesty by her terror at the approach of death. She became real, they’re still puppets operated by themselves (“selves” whose very idea of self is penetrated the market they maintain & exploit). That we aren’t winners in that rhetoric suddenly becomes the most powerful ground on which to build. If I’m playing anything on a loop now, it’s “Chimes of Freedom”.
So the battle is how to make Trump look so bad that his supporters begin to despise him. Can be done, but their devotion is pure emotion; logic warped by prejudice and fear. If there ever was logic in the first place. It’s the difference between ‘we made a mistake’ and ‘you lied to us’. The former rarely happens short-term. But anger can appear from nowhere. Trump has always been adept at blaming others for his mistakes but this time it’s a much bigger market – as he’d see it – than before.
You’re right about the article, beautifully written and succinct. A family who see the Presidency as a business opportunity; as a reward for just being themselves. But isn’t Melania being just a little sensitive? From glamour model to First Lady – why, it’s the American Way.
Read Seymour Hersch at the London Review of Books (first reporter to cover the My Lai massacre.) His articles point toward the darkness beneath the wars in Syria and Libya under the last US administration. You won’t read it at the Guardian, I’m sorry to say as a former life long reader.
The smooth efficiency of PR machinery around Obama had many of us believing that eight years of war was heaven revealed. (First US President in history to be at war every single day of his presidency.)
Trump is continuing everything a US president does, almost exactly as normal, business as usual. Except no smiley on the tin, just the tin.
Even the racism isn’t really new. Look closely at what actually happened in and around America over the last eight years, from environment to the specifics of health care, to the proportion of Blacks arrested or killed by police, to US spending on war, extrajudicial drone killings, nuclear weapons and big surveillance. All increased, some broke records. And not least American interventions in foreign democracies, including ours. (Media ownership)
All of those toys are in the hands of an orange alien today. I wish it were otherwise but the choice was bad cop, worse cop.
I can’t get as worked up about Trump as I’m required because, well, apart from the words used, I can’t tell the essential difference.
People see the blatancy of it. They see that the blatancy of it is a step towards an even worse state of affairs. I don’t think you should blame people for just now waking up to something you have already recognised. Trump has been good for that. I see real hope in people blocking school access to Betsy de Vos, for instance, simply because they’ve suddenly had it brought home to them that their kids’ education is now the hands of a putrid Randista. I can’t see that as a bad thing. At the moment I see any kind of action along any part of the spectrum, from soft to hard left, as a good & neccessary thing. Sorry. People are trying to wake up.
“Trump has been good for that.”
I agree. There are few illusions left although as you’ll have noticed, Brexit immediately became about racism in media commentary and therefore in liberal middle class opinion and so has Trump. The voiceless are quietly expiring in nursing homes, crowded terraces, in bedsits, in car parks and shop doorways and in their thousands in Yemen at this minute, underneath a hard rain manufactured right here in the UK.
I admit, I have blamed the middle classes or more specifically the managerial classes, so I might as well be honest and admit to it. There but for the grace of failure, I suppose.
“Chimes of Freedom”? It’s more like “Blind Willie McTell” out there.