For Donald Trump, the presidency will be a vast stage for accommodating his megalomania and insatiable appetite for money. Those who mock, defy or anger him will feel the wrath of the state. Those who are not obsequious will be cast aside. He will invest most of his energy in his brand. Self-promotion is the only real talent he possesses. Corruption, already rife within the political system, will explode into a full-blown kleptocracy. Manufactured stories about Trump’s prowess, brilliance, sexual allure and goodness, as well as how America is becoming “great again,” will be pumped out by the White House smoke machine. He will demand encomiums that will become ever more outrageous. All love, devotion and allegiance will be to Trump.
Trump is the sick expression of a dysfunctional political system and mass culture that celebrate the most depraved aspects of human nature—greed, a lust for power, a thirst for adulation and celebrity, a penchant for the manipulation of others, dishonesty, a lack of remorse and a frightening pathology in which reality is ignored. He is the product of our escapist world of constant entertainment. He embodies the mutation of values in American society that has culminated in an enormous cult of the self and the abandonment of the common good.
“When a population becomes distracted by trivia,” wrote Neil Postman, “when cultural life is redefined as a perpetual round of entertainments, when serious public conversation becomes a form of baby-talk, when, in short, a people becomes an audience and their public business a vaudeville, then a nation finds itself at risk: cultural-death is a clear possibility.”
Demagogues—insecure and crippled by an unbridled narcissism and seldom of high intelligence—play to the inverted values of a decayed society. They attack all who do not kneel before the idol of “the great leader.” “Saturday Night Live” can continue to go after Trump, but Trump, as president, will use every tool in his arsenal, no matter how devious, to banish such public ridicule. He will seek to domesticate the press and critics first through the awarding of special privileges, flattery, gifts and access. Those who cannot be bought off will be destroyed. His petulant, childish taunts, given authority by the machinery of the security and surveillance state, will be dangerous.
Aleppo.
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Yemen
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Yes, Yemen, too.
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At least we don’t have to engage the Russians there.
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Maybe 7 cm of new snow to shovel in the 18 °F and overcast, foggy weather.
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Took less time to shovel the front steps than the laundry machine took for a full load.
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Today is Bill of Rights day. How much longer will we have such?
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Next year we just get the Bill. 😦
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Not many students in the Hillside Cafe. Most have finished their finals and are off for the winter holidays.
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Kleptocratic kakistocracy.
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Yea, that too. 😦
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No, I didn’t watch your Sanders and Ellison video. I would have had to remember to do that, after midnight, and I didn’t remember. I was busy getting rid of the videos I stored up from FB during the day, to be watched after midnight. I so hate this gig limit crap.
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Get a WiFi hotspot from Verizon or Sprint or T-Mobile, somebody for crissakes! and dump those Bozos!
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Sprint is best.
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Depressing article you posted, but anything about that man is depressing. I can’t get over the shock that he won. 😦 And every day brings new horrors that he will be launching upon us. He keeps doing everything and anything, and tweeting so many things that disqualify him, but they’ll let him waltz into the White House and get to the plundering, and the disabling of the good, the destroying of everything he can think of. No one will stop his conflict of interests, his 4 kids will sit in on secret meetings, they’ll tell him how his businesses are doing, they’ll close deals he sets up from the Oval Office.
The electoral college could stop him, but they won’t because most of them probably voted for him. They are just people. No one promised us electors that would be intelligent. Heroes are in the movies, and this is no movie so our electors will not be our heroes here.
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How would you put that now….oh yes DOOMED!
Keep your head down, get in line, and shutup, or be trampled by idiots with shit on their boots.
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Waiting around for the other jackboot to drop.
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“Your mine” innuendo for my country.
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Raining buckets, kayakers are out back, whitewater action, dry inside, beer also.
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Dry beer?
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