It is this combination – the hint of menace beneath the surface
added to what appears to be an unpolished immediacy – that millions of
listeners take as evidence of Trump’s authenticity and spontaneity. Indeed, the
way he talks reminds them of the voice inside their own heads – a rich and
sometimes dark stew of conversational snippets and memory scraps, random
phrases and half-thoughts – and, by extension, it somehow seems as if they’re
hearing the voice inside his head.
Twitter perfectly matches this state of
affairs, what with ‘snippets and memory scraps, random phrases and
half-thoughts’ being the main fare of so-called communication. It is perhaps
not surprising that this mode of communication has become the mainstream news
service as well, shaping public opinion in the slipstream of contemporary
politics in Western democracies. That the proponents who provide the necessary
machinations have become extremely rich in the process is also no accident.
Trump, as a mere bit player, used his primitive, ruthless business instincts,
combined with a jovial appearance, to play the game in any which way possible,
exploiting every tax loophole there is. Dabbling in realty TV, golf courses,
real estate and the female beauty industry landed him in a golden circle of
like-minded entrepreneurs who define luxury as a golden toilet seat. With a
hint of mild debauchery and good Calvinistic morals, the contradictions are
many when subjected to rational analysis. The idea to elevate this game to the
presidency of the USA is as outrageous as it is ludicrous. The idea that an
amalgam of political mavericks, from Tea Party Republicans to KKK, could
galvanize the American voters to put Trump into the Oval Office, was however
not as daft as some would have predicted. Given that Trump’s verbiage was ideal
for Twitter and other such moronic social media, the road to success was all
but guaranteed. Ad hoc observation of the citizenry being glued to so-called
smart phones and other such mobile devices, it is not too difficult to realize
that a few clever algorithms could program a simple Pavlovian stimulus-response
behaviour, especially tailored for American voters (see my previous blog on
Mercer and Co.). Not that there was a choice anyway: Clinton was just a lesser
evil, separated by two degrees. Only Putin perceived a wider gap and thus
preferred a primitive businessman to a rabid politician, and thus contributed
his two cents worth of cyber intervention, which now is taken as the one and
only possibility to impeach Trump as a puppet on the string of Putin’s
henchmen. To take the sting out of the investigation (Comey and Mueller – which
is a joke in itself) Trump’s advisers will arrange for a few military strikes
against the Russians in Syria, so as to prove Trump’s true Roman Christian patriotism
in the face of a suspect Russian Byzantine Orthodox ideology. Putin will be
even more confused – as seen in his recent interviews with Oliver Stone who as
a supposed example of American rationalism demonstrates a poor grasp of Russian
and world history.
Rational people operate by forming thoughts
in their brains and then try to verbalize these thoughts as best as they can,
given the operational restrictions that language has. In other words, the best
minds are often those who match thought with language without losing any of the
essential content. Irrational people, as the saying goes, speak before they
think, uttering half-baked phrases, which the brain has difficulty with in
actually interpreting as something that falls within the realm of reason and
common sense. Such people do get hooked on very simplistic ideas that are then
applied to all and sundry environments. Take for example the simple concept of
‘freedom’ and apply it to the world of business. It means, in Trump’s world,
that a businessman ought to be ‘free’ of all encumbrances, dedicated only to
the aim of turning a profit. Hence if a health insurance business were to be
forced by government regulation to insure people with pre-existing health
problems, then a basic ‘freedom’ is violated inasmuch you cannot turn a profit
from insuring sick people who lack the resources to pay for their medical bills
at private hospitals. ‘The freedom to bear arms’ is another brainless phrase,
easily uttered, yet with devastating consequences when applied to non-sensical
contexts. The freedom of keeping out unwanted guests from one’s private
property, as much as from one’s own country, is another milestone – if not mill
stone - in modern, archaic political discourse. By definition there cannot be
‘freedom’ to critique the proprietors and therefore protectors of freedom,
especially if such critique or opposition involves rational thought expressed
in scientific language. Climate change as a science project is to be dismissed
as it infringes on the freedom to say otherwise, i.e. unthinking. Indeed it is
most advisable to distrust all modes of deep thought as it invariably leads to
Gordian knots that then need slashing with brute force. The question then
arises why there are so many simple-minded people who vote for simple-minded
people like Trump. While Blair’s quote seems to give the answer via ‘…the way he talks reminds them of the voice inside their own
heads’ we note that this is not an answer as much as it is a restatement of the
problem, namely that birds of a feather flock together. It is quite tempting to
explain such a state of mind as pathology, worthy of entry into DSM-5. Not that
Trump proved as yet as insane as some of his predecessors: leafing through The
Great War for Civilization: the conquest of the Middle East, by Robert Fisk
(2005) one is reminded again and again that the Bush dynasties, and Reagan
before them, were certainly on par with DSM diagnoses, or as Guardian
correspondent Johnston puts it for Trump:
It’s laughable when pundits try to distill a Trump doctrine from
his word salad. His own words illuminate the undeveloped space between his ears.
Still, all we
have to go by so far, as far as Trump is concerned, are his demented twitter
messages but not much action yet. Sure he is continuing covert military
operations all around the world, just like Obama did, but he has not yet
started any new wars – that he is itching to start one with North-Korea may be
on the cards however.
Maybe Trump
will turn out to be a somewhat harmless, narcissistic gadfly, bent on
entertaining his followers, doing shady business deals on the side … but what
if his words (and those put in his mouth by his ghostwriters) are translated
into action by maniacs hell-bent on self-destruction? The cabal surrounding
Trump range from the demented to clever dicks and chicks, the latter who just
see a great opportunity to feather their own beds, while the former, mainly
military types, want to see how far their brinkmanship will take them.
There is an
obvious analogy with the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (as told by
Gibbon) whereby a long list of emperors (read ‘presidents’) become more and
more unhinged (Nero and Caligula being outstanding examples) until the whole
edifice crumbles in the dust of history. The only worry now is that the ‘dust’
will engulf the whole world and we will literally experience the end of
history. Or else it could be a protracted decline – assuming that no nuclear war
breaks out – by way of climate change deniers, heralding a gradual but
accelerating descent into the hell of a global storm. In the meantime, the show
must go on, babies must be born, lives lived, menial jobs to go to, money to be
made, bubbles to be made of real estate, billionaires to be created, feudal
states to be celebrated, slaves voting for their masters, climate refuges
drowning in the oceans, esoteric science to be funded very well, escapist
entertainment quadrupled (give the people bread and circus), fashionistas
designing body bags, artists encrusting the latter with diamonds, the Internet
bulging with fake news and bodies, sex robots looking for customers, people
with good insurance cured of old age, a little love here and there, a sunny day
after weeks of rain, a lonesome flower … all punctuated by ever more bizarre presidential
and prime ministerial campaigns in Western countries while the Orient (China in
particular) will remain true to its mysterious machinations, political and
economical, but all the same gripped by the maelstrom that goes from Trump to
Trumper and eventually to the Trumpest, creating instant history as a farce.
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