Preface: (Feb. 2017)
Who didn’t already know about Donald John Trump? (a.k.a. John Barron, John Miller, David Dennison) From day one, he was always a business shyster, a lady’s con-man, a poser-faker. Anyone at all aware of pop culture or real estate or television from the mid-1980’s onward could see that much about Trump for themselves. Like so many other two-bit strongmen in the ever-perverse (1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15) mobster underworld of power, money, sex and lies; Trump has been an inch away from gangster crime his entire life. He has never once shown an ounce of respect for “the rule of law.” Evidence is everywhere.
Trump isn’t merely a shady-wager carnival barker. He is a career criminal and a reckless, venal, vengeful, high-stakes, bully man-child, which is exactly why he almost won the ‘popular vote’ in November 2016. Credulous American voters, both dis-educated and ill-entertained, simply stared into their phones and rolled the dice. “Everybody’s saying it. What do we have to lose? Maybe we’ll get lucky and win the election-lottery this time. Then again, maybe not. But how bad could it be? We know Hillary is crooked.” This is how Tyranny creeps in America.
We forget our very own history exactly as we will not remember Willie Horton, swift-boating, hanging chads, Merrick Garland... or Cambridge University’s Aleksandr Kogan, or Harvard’s Gary King.
For Christ’s sake, we even forget about the religionists (evangelicals, charismatics, Opus Dei, white nationalists...) currently swarming this administration: Mike Pence, Ben Carson, Rick Perry, Betsy DeVos, Jeff Sessions, Scott Pruitt, Tom Price, Ryan Zinke, Sonny Purdue, Steven Mnuchin, Kellyanne Conway. This is how Tyranny flourishes; we willfully forget turncoats like Paul Manafort, Steve Bannon, Steven Miller, Michael Flynn. Few truths, religious or otherwise, can withstand the concerted language-assaults of Republican heretical blasphemy.
Indeed, we forget the U.S. has been waging war in Afghanistan non-stop for the last 17 years. American high school students today have never experienced peacetime in their entire lives. College grads today have little knowledge of September 11, 2001. This is happening right now. Instead of remembering Eichmann, Kruschev, Stalin, Mao, or Milošević, we choose to point our fractured attention toward other more important things like Game of Thrones or the Super Bowl. “Love it or leave it.”
American political leaders often encourage their citizens to be faithfully ignorant. North Koreans gleefully describe this peculiar American amnesia as “dotard.” And mass-senility remains the easiest way to re-write human history. Hence, these four critical facts underscore this entire project:
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1.Russia openly attacked our country with no response from Republicans.
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2.Trump is humanly unfit to uphold the Constitution and lead the United States.
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3.A new perverse form of righteous evangelical bile is spreading.
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4.We knowingly fuel our most dire predicaments inside the machinations and misunderstandings of media.
Trump exudes a perverse kind of gamer’s allure, always betting against Death with other people’s money. His reality-TV belief systems are cleverly re-mixed and packaged into jingoistic attack-dog alternatives to clumsy democracy. “We love our country, our freedom, and our flag so much we are going to pervert every tenet and symbol to suit our faith.” The deplorable chants reverberate across Trump’s debased media-cuck base. For King-gods are the easiest form of leadership for an ignorant population to follow. Agitprop doesn’t get any simpler.
Our new communication technologies help speed these perversions. For even at their very best, our media only proffer a partial mechanical truth, excluding most of natural human experience. Yet we are staking all of human historical memory and experience to these ‘forgetting machines’. Who among us hasn’t exclaimed that our ubiquitous mediating technologies have altered our behavior, language, customs and beliefs; flipping Reality into something less, something worth-less?
Still, with every new decision we willingly dig this hole deeper. There is never any Art of the Deal. We simply keep trading away more for less, accelerating our own demise. We can’t seem to help ourselves. “Nothing can shake our faith.” But with this project, I ask the reader to consider the accursed share. Sacrifice is but excess destined for waste, right? Or did Jesus die for our sins? I write more about these below; but cerebral questions like these are truly lost on most of us today. For we have forgotten how to think, how to understand, how to remember.
Now, increasingly, we find ourselves with little left but fakery and evangelizing, technology and promises. Human existence is transmogrifying into a synthetic horror house of cameras and screens, edits and close-ups. Google, Amazon, Facebook, and YouTube happily ploy their dystopian algorithms with the precision of a CRISPR opioid designer. “Of course you are and so am I,” say the robots. “It’s surreal...just like a movie,” say the multi-players.
I fear we will not survive this sinful feudalistic turn, because I see very few signs of humans wanting to survive, or wanting to build a democracy. Democratic endeavors require an agreed upon reality. But the mechanically strong and powerful -- perverts and liars -- have wittingly unleashed these seductive sur-real death wishes, made manifest through incessant technological mediation. All while we, the meek and emasculated, greedily clamor for its inevitability. This beggars all credulity. The greatest human experiment - Democracy - now finds itself leaning once again towards plutocracy...and worse.
We are more than willing spectators to our own demise; we are cheerleading for the ‘End Days’. Churchianity today is little more than media marketing recasting Jesus into a spiritual emoji. The end result encourages us to gleefully rush toward Rapture: the presence of death. No more pining over past tense. No more fretting over future perfect. “The bible says Vote for Trump.” But the bible is a cell phone and Russia is calling again. We have forgotten how to self-monitor and self-correct.
I do this because the entire future of our democracy depends on truth’s discovery and understanding (Investigation+Education). But today, democracy’s future appears to rest solely -- Deus ex Machina -- in one man’s hands: Robert Mueller (and that isn’t true democracy either). “And we haven’t even gotten to the part yet about the NRA supplying its membership content to Russian hackers... or Wilber Ross facilitating criminal money laundering through his Bank of Cyprus. Stay tuned!” My overriding fear, however, is that no one, including you, will trust Mueller’s factuality, even if his facts are revealed to be true -- whether received through computer, TV, radio, phone or friend. For we are forgetting how to ‘tell’, how to know, how to understand.
Humans are increasingly unwilling or unable to acknowledge historical life-and-death human truth. This first year of Trump’s term is the most precarious moment I’ve lived during my entire life. Today is worse than burning Detroit in 1967...because all media today are newly minted lethal weapons instantaneously firing around an entirely surveilled world. No wonder we remain willfully ignorant of facts. It gives me constant goosebumps. Historical meaning is being turned upside-down and used against itself.
“I saved you,” cried the Woman, “and you've bit me, heavens why?
You know your bite is poisonous and now I'm going to die.”
“Oh shut up, silly Woman,” said the reptile with a grin.
“You knew damn well I was a Snake before you took me in.”
An American
resident of Canada, experimenting with new forms of critical media ethnography in Cultural Farming.
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Preface Premise Project Potlatch Pornography Politics Postscript Peroration