One of a host of hard lessons I learned that night in early November when trump "won" the Electoral College, was that while mind-over-matter is a concept in which I have a reasonably high degree of faith; when it comes to mindfulness about matters of the mind, there are millions among us who are simply -- well -- mindless.
And it would appear that in his own mind, trump understands this fully. Either that or his outsized hubris prevents him from accepting the same realities about his overtly dangerous character flaws that his die-hard supporters also ignore. Evidence? All one need do is note that two days prior to being sworn in -- while riding an historically low 40 percent approval rating -- trump announced his 2020 "re-election" campaign complete with a new slogan: "Keeping America Great."
So here we have a man who -- at that time of that announcement had yet to complete even four days as "president" of the United States -- is already demanding "four more years" from his supporters. Yet, who's to say that regardless of how many people trump shoots in broad daylight on New York City avenues, or how many pussies he brags about grabbing over the next four years, that his supporters won't join him in demanding four more?
But perhaps it's not all that peculiar, or even unanticipated. It's been roughly 20 years since media researcher Neil Postman pointed out in his book, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business : "No Big Brother is required in order to derive people of their autonomy, maturity and history"people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacity to think ."
Now, some 20 years later, the world faces an oxymoronic truth; that of a "reality TV" star rising to become "president" of the world's most influential and powerful nation. The rise of donald trump represents the perfect illustration of the insidious aspects of something that might be described as Orwellian-Warholism. It has shown the world just how quickly 15 minutes of fame in the wrong hands can transform a society that skates blithely on the edge into a bleak and divided dystopia -- if enough of the populace is willing to help.
From a symbolic standpoint, donald trump may represent a strong laxative for an American political process that's been constipated since Mitch McConnell decreed that Obama would be a "one-term president" in 2008. At this point however, it is clear that a laxative has turned out to be the wrong medicine. We probably would have been better off with a probiotic.
Meanwhile, with the veracity of the trump dossier still in doubt, there's no way of knowing the degree to which the likelihood of its authenticity may have influenced the decision to advance the "Doomsday Clock" by 30 seconds just a few days after trump's inauguration. Notice of that decision was published in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists . The last time it was moved forward occurred in 1984. So yeah, now that trump's in office, we are two-and-a-half minutes to midnight. Which is kind of like saying that we're now two-and-a-half minutes closer to the end of the world.
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