AUTHOR’S NOTE - 25 December 2017:
It is Christmas Day. Shockingly, King Don-John Trump is still president of the United States, and has been for 338 days. Since his inauguration, I have built 360 videos: 360 porn videos = 360 Trump administration videos...and vice versa. Work is not getting any easier. This longitudinal brand of critical intellectual montage is a dangerous experiment, and it is taking a heavy toll. Just ask my wife. You can see it on my face.
Still however -- and I tell everyone I meet about this ethnographic TV project -- I have found no one willing or able to equate Trump and his actions to the vile realm of ‘pornographic violence’. And there lies the rub. Who among us wants to understand history, democracy, pornography, or the evils lurking inside mechanical (inhuman) communication? Who cares, eh? “Less taxes gets me more money in my paycheck”, say Wall Street propagandists and beggar-citizens in unison.
Today, less than one month from Trump’s first full year as president, I continue to make at least one comparative video per day; it has almost become (a bad) habit. During most of my waking hours, I watch, listen, think, search, compare. It’s a dirty job. Yet I am falling behind this paranoid, infantile, sadistic narcissist who demands to be re-mediated multiple times per day. I don’t want to listen to this bully’s every word. Just like I don’t want to review other similar pornography every day. It would be great to have ended this project at 10, or 100, or 360 videos. When is enough? When should research stop?
And this wavering on my part is what I fear most. Who will remember if I don’t? For once I tire who is left? Who will witness every speck of media-Trump? Who will montage political sickness (GOP) with the obscene (Evil)? I bet someone somewhere is attempting to equate Trump’s media lies with other equally absurdist and obscene media, but I surreal-as-hell don’t know who or where they are. This leaves me with many questions.
Am I alone in writing video “contemporaneous memorializations”? Can the powerful act of counter-image-making break through the evil magic lurking inside contemporary media? I truly think so. But who is willing to intellectually experiment with the most vile videos they can possibly imagine? Can anyone see this project for what it is: a dangerous personal struggle to reconcile ignorance and education?
This project is ultimately less about hating Trump and much more about developing a necessary critical personal-action methodology. After all, Trump’s policies --and his toadies-- will far outlast Trump the man. Indeed, I often think about the average citizen living in 1930’s Weimar Germany. Who among them asked, “What more could I be doing right now to resist this fucking insanity?” And this is what I ask myself while media-Trump remains a clear and present danger.
All media should be contained within common ethical tenets. Instead, we find the opposite, which is conflating into a national malaise as perverse as Bernard Law. For example, consider Christianism’s wholesale neglect of its own historical fundamental Biblical tenets: 2nd Commandment, Tower of Babel, casting out money-changers, curing the sick, helping the poor and hungry, etc.
Eventually, some day, Trump will implode. He has gamed his version of Reality far too long. And he is leaving a wide swath of destruction in his wake, which we must never forget. But even this will not address our most dangerous predicaments. We are all sleepwalking inside a digital nightmare. For we, too, have failed Reality by failing to understand the lethality of our own graven images.
We must collectively come to understand the necessity of reining our new technologies away from displacing Human-Nature with “thingness”. We must establish new social codes of conduct for our images, for our communications, and for ourselves. Without discernible cultural limits, we are actualizing a digital form of Russian Roulette. My comparative videos here should make this abundantly clear. We need cultural farming, precisely because we face a crisis of morality and truth.
There will come a day of intellectual and spiritual reckoning -- maybe even a ‘constitutional crisis’. Whichever, we must always remember that every Nazi atrocity was legally performed according to legal German laws. And they, too, were masters of militarizing new media. The difference today is that we are not just using our communicating machines to erase historical Reality, we also are happily employing them to double Reality ...whether it be politicians, pornographers, TV news, religionists, advertisers, or our own social media behaviors.
Through utter neglect, we are losing our minds again. Dangerous signs are clearly visible in every direction.
