Donald is not exactly real. He is a creature, created and sustained by the media. Nearly everything about him is an illusion; more like a character on a soap opera who has human-like characteristic, but is, in reality, simply a character created to fulfill a role in a script. And, as with other popular soap opera characters, he becomes real to an audience as they put their viewing energy into him. Everything that character does is carefully followed by the audience as though it were real. It is discussed and analyzed, and it takes on an almost life and death kind of reality.
Being in the news and getting media coverage is what energizes that character, keeps it alive and helps it grow. Eventually the actor who is playing that role begins to believe that he really is that character; the person and the persona have become one. It is like the person playing Spiderman believes that he is Spiderman and begins to act accordingly.
This gives the character a kind of immunity. He cannot die unless they are willing to write him out of the script, and by now too many in his audience want to see what he will do next and how he will escape capture.
Those who fear his character, because of the chaos and destruction he is capable of, work feverishly to stop the person behind the character. But, by now, he has become the character and has a national following and, as in soap operas and in other TV creations, life is full of miraculous escapes. He begins to feel invulnerable and begins to act as though he is.
He watches the popularity of his character and knows he is doing something right. Just look at the ratings. Meanwhile, the efforts to stop the person are interpreted as an attempt to kill the most interesting character in our national soap opera. And it becomes clear that ordinary means are not likely to actually end the farce.
And the media, who have created him in the first place, continue to cover everything about the situation, giving him more energy and often making the attempts to stop him look feeble and ineffective.
Has keeping the soap opera villain alive become so important and addictive that we will eventually sacrifice anything and everything to keep the comic strip going? The media certainly knows a good thing when they see it.
Unless we can find the kryptonite that will stop the media from continuing such a popular series, it will continue its life somewhere between reality and illusion; a very hard place to find an entry, much less to expose the illusion in any meaningful way.
