Beyond Trump
Taking the Long View
Donald Trump is a professional narcissist. For those old enough to remember, he was the Kardashian of the eighties. Basically a brand looking for products to sell. He realized there are significantly under represented sectors of the American electorate and stamped his brand rather effectively on a large part of one of them.
During the 2016 primaries, the media had great fun focusing the majority of their attention on him, as a way to ridicule the Republican field in general. Not that it was hard to do. Another Bush!!!!
Yet for an America raised on corruption and comedy, media and the worship of money, he was a camp classic and far more appealing than the corporate toadies.
Which thrilled the Democrats no end, as the Chosen One had an actual clown to play off of. It simply didn’t occur to anyone who mattered that he could win. Like David Cameron assuming Brexit was an easy bet to shut up some obnoxious critics.
Yet for a country having just come to terms with Mr. Hope and Change proving to be a shill for the banks and “foaming the runway,” for them, with the homes of hundreds of thousands of Americans, not to mention quite a few having been drug through the endless wars, the chance to pitch a monkey wrench into the gears was too good to pass up.
Now it would be impossible to try picking apart all the varied shenanigans that have gone on over the last four years, as most people like their stories black and white, so nuance is seen as heresy, but it’s safe to say the cracks in the country run deeper than ever.
So the real question is as to where we are going from here.
For those of us who were “woke” back in the 60’s and 70’s and now just scribbling notes on the margins of our cluttered and overwritten minds, there is one lesson to impart. Get ready for this, it’s deep; A wolf in sheep’s clothing, is still a wolf.
I know. Images count, but there really is a lot going on under the surface. For example, I doubt Black Lives Matter, or Antifa thought of blaming Trump on the Russians. One can only wonder what little sheep dreamt that one up and why? Why not blame him on a show business culture run amok? Too complicated, I guess. Better the monster across the street, than the one under the bed. Especially when trillions in defense money needs a purpose, otherwise it would just be wasted on schools and such.
The fact is that predators are experts at camouflage. They will be whatever you want them to be, just so long as you do what they want.
Don’t worry though, Ole Joe has your back. Does anyone here know how long Joe has been running for president? Since 1988. Can you count backwards that far?
But we know, should he start to slip, he’ll just hand the reins over to Kamela. No problem.Though for those us who’ve spent decades watching politics, we have this vague sense that politicians naturally say what people want to hear, but sometimes they don’t always mean it. After 32 years, I suspect Old Joe is not going to let go of that prize willingly.
Then there is the money and the markets. The world is gripped by the worst pandemic in a hundred years, the economy is on life support and the markets are acting like its 1999. What gives? Rather than investing in actual production, with all that freshly printed money, given the economy is shut down, it’s going to play the ponies, on Wall Street. It’s not so much the investments are going up, as the value of the investment dollar is going down.
Given the economy is going to be locked up even more, as more money is poured into it, it seems doubtful the markets are going down anytime soon.
Then, eventually those with large piles of cash will start buying up distressed properties for pennies on the dollar. It’s called predatory lending, disaster capitalism, when we do it to third world countries.
Basically what happened to all those houses, as the wealth flowed upward, under Obama. Now if you were not one of those people, the media didn’t spend much time obsessing over this process, but if you were, voting for Obama’s successor was a hard sell. Is Joe going to let Bernie try stopping this process happening again. If you think so, I have a bridge you might be interested in.
Are the politicians going to solve our various problems, or just scapegoat each other and their respective followers, as they find ways to pay off their patrons?
For the Democrats, the old comment about watching what you pray for, because you might get it, comes to mind. They might have the tech companies and the media to amplify their side of the story, including any holes in the narrative, inconsistancies, incongruities, chest thumping, etc, but the deciding factor is that narrow sliver of voters in the middle and it wouldn’t take many to be turned off, for the Republicans to win back both the House and Senate in 22, then we get investigations going the other way and, safe to say, no quarter given. Russiagate in reverse. Only now, the war toadies will be pointing at China.
Are we going down that road, or can either side step back and accept there will always be two sides to every coin, start to accept those you disagree with are still human and understand that when personal grievances matter more than civil institutions, we are treading a well worn path, downhill.
What cancel culture should keep in mind is that in the real, bloody revolutions, French, Russian, Chinese, Cambodian, it was the peasants revolting against the bourgeoisie, not the other way around.
The structure and organization of society might be top down, but the nature of its evolution is bottom up. You can’t cancel history, but history can cancel you.
Not that I am taking sides, as Trump did an extreme disservice to this country. Not in disrupting an increasingly self centered and self absorbed status quo, but by further enabling a massive number of disaffected citizens to be defined in terms of their more extreme elements. Though he was facilitated in this by that aforementioned status quo.
Now that he has gone, nothing has been learned and the more simple minded extremes on both sides dominate the debate. Restraint has been tossed to the wind.
History appears to be repeating itself.
