Eat all your vegetables or Donald J Trump will get you!

Well munchkin’s, I’m back, from outer space.

Here we do our annual review of US politics and follow up on from our post last year on the “extent of dissent” there.

I have had a month off from blogging and I needed it but all good things have to end so let’s kick this off by checking in with the world’s favorite reality TV experience: Amerika!*

This season has seen the introduction of a new character onto the show in the form of Donald J Trump, the man you love to hate. In fact hating on Trump is such a popular pastime that it’s become one of those gaudy flash in the pan fads like fidget spinners, Dub-Step or Mike Hoskings*2.

Not since the Middle Ages has uttering a name been so able to produce such a fearful result in so many people. Back then it was enough to say the name of Satan or Lucifer and people would cross themselves utter a prayer and make signs to ward off the evil.

Today all you have to do is say “Trump” and see a similar reaction with predictable screeds on social media and the mask of social nicety being ripped away to hear all sorts of vile statements about the man and “what they would like to do” to him.

In many ways it’s a stark reminder of exactly how thin the veneer of civilisation is and that lurking just beneath the placid, genteel surface is the same murderous atavistic fury that would see most people seriously consider killing and eating their neighbours three days into the apocalypse, after the food has run out.

A range of my friends and colleagues, most of whom cannot articulate anything specific about why they dislike the man so much beyond the kind pabulum that the media feeds them, have voiced, in public and with great detail, the kind of violent sadistic fantasies that you find in torture porn and all with seemingly no cognizance of what they are actually saying.

“But he is evil!” one excessively liberal SJW friend moaned to me when I asked about what exactly she did not like about the man; “He boats about grabbing pu**y and look what he has done to America”.

Yes let’s look what he has done to Amerika shall we because Trump has produced such a visceral reaction in the public consciousness that in an age of endless media scandal and dodgy behavior by politicians (just think about the last nine years of the National party for starters) it has to be more than just the man himself but more what he represents.

Donald J Trump is, and represents, the final evolution of 100 plus years of US imperialism and power politics. He is the what lies beneath the warm fleshy mask of all US presidents, he is the bastard lovechild of G W Bush and Barack Obama (with possibly some sloppy seconds from Bill Clinton) stripped of any rational pretense; he is the naked leering face of raw greed and unbridled power in thrall to an inflamed Id and ego with little or no restraint.

However the only difference between Trump and what came before is that Trump is the raw product of the forces that have shaped Amerika for over a century and the US Empire is now in clear decline so the post WW2 consensus and Cold War ideology which shielded and often was used as justification for US predation no longer exists. Trump is just another puffed-up political strongman in a suit and tie in a world where global leadership seems to have a preponderance of such people (Putin, Xi, Erdogan, Duterte, Burlusconi etc).

In better times those same forces would have produced a president with more polish and a thicker veneer of civility but what was behind them all is the same as what Trump proudly displays today but with US predominance squandered after the cold war and in places like Iraq and Afghanistan this raw hubris (the greatest strength and paradoxically the Achilles heel of all empires) is all that’s left and it scares people to see it.

But I am not here to discuss the collapse of the US reality tunnel (go see my post on that) or the fact that it’s easy to kick a cancer laden petrochemical racist dinosaur when they are down to their last trillion.

No lets discuss why you, the reader, have elevated Trump to the same status as Adolf Hitler (the bogeyman of the 20^th Century) in your collective consciousness and let’s put aside your general ignorance of US politics and presidents (as bad presidents go he is on par with Warren G Harding but he’s no Richard Nixon), your limited worldview based on you being manipulated by push button media (how many of you got outraged by the chemical attack in Syria last week because the media told you so?) and take a personal look at what’s really pulling your strings.

And to find that out I have spent the last month asking people exactly why Trump turns them into frothing, rancorous, spittle flecked acolytes of the Donald Trump hate cult.

The answers were not surprising.

Some (like my friend Hardley of the Crank and Loon blog*3) do it because (in their words) it’s a rebellious act that feels good while others like my excessively liberal SJW friend it is because “it’s the right thing to do”.

For certain other of the partisan persuasion (into which Pablo from KP would fall into) it’s due to a political bias (in their case being for the Democrats) which equates one side as good and the other side as bad and where the horrid reality of a failing empire is being ignored.

People know they have to be in opposition such an obvious monster but the extent of that opposition is slathered with a layer of apathy that prevents any real opposition and twists the debate into a liberal version of Two Minutes of Hate.

“But he is in league with the Russians” I hear you wail “they hacked the elections” they state with authority (ignoring the irony given how many elections the US has “hacked in the last 70 years), “he and his cabinet picks are corrupt (ignoring all the other corrupt US presidents and cabinets)” they thunder, “he cheats on his wife” (forgetting who Monica Lewinski is) the words now coming almost mechanically like a religious chant, “he has small hands” voice rising in tone and becoming more hysterical, “he’s evvvviiillllllllll” finally collapsing sobbing to the floor.

See what I mean.

Some of these points are undoubtedly true, some are not and others remain unclear but it’s not so much that this president is worse than the last but that Trump flaunting the power so avariciously destroys the whole illusion that so many people want to have about the US and US power.

Thus hating on Trump is easy, like emotional junk food; it’s a cathartic release in an age where civil society is being swamped by the toxic waste products of corporatism (be it the hollowing out of democratic systems and social welfare or actual toxic waste and environmental destruction) and rather than doing anything concrete it’s easier to send out a tweet, post a meme on social media and simply close your eyes and start chanting “Trump is bad, Trump is bad, Trump is bad” in the hope that it will go away.

Trump is undoubtedly a bad president but he is the symptom not the cause and yet the discourse never makes it out of first gear because the focus is always on Trump and the “bad” things he has done.

So what has changed from over a year ago when I first posted about this curious phenomenon?

To be honest little has changed and I could have just reposted from last year and all of what I said would still be relevant but its good exercise to get the mental muscles moving again with something light and easy to blog about.

The biggest changes in the last 12 months have been that there is now defined “legal-limit” to Trump hate (thanks to “comedian” Kathy Griffin) and that many artists, entertainers and comedians have managed to stave off poverty by using Trump as their muse.

However it’s a sad reflection on what’s left of the humanist project and the liberal agenda when the muscles of the “vox populi” are so atrophied that all they can lift is pseudo therapeutic debate covered in a lightweight froth of sarcasm ridden ranting (and I include myself in this camp) rather than heavier things such as honest self-examination.

But it’s clear that as bad as Trump becomes and as active as the artists, comedians and talk show hosts get in playing the “Trump” card it’s going to take more than just jabbering about it like the bunch of stereotypical bitchy schoolgirls in a chick-flick to remove him.

It would help if the Democrats had an alternative to Trump which is not a Clinton or a Clintonoid but US politics is the “swamp”, as Trump defined it (the fact that he promised to drain it but instead just pumped in more slime notwithstanding) and remains as corrupt as ever so there is no guarantee that what replaces him will substantially be any better except that they will have been told to dial down the hubris.

And even if Trump is removed, then what? Will getting rid of Trump fix the sucking bog that US politics has become or just allow the comfortable delusion to slip back into place while we still slowly track towards the grim acceptance that the US (and by extension the West) is not number one anymore and our moral hegemony is no longer absolute (again a topic from a previous blog post).

I end here with my warning from my post last year on this subject which is:

Realize also that there are times when it’s not enough just to voice dissent sometimes you have to act it out as well and that is not ever an easy thing.

That remains true then as it now and hence why I am back blogging*4

*-Or should that be AmeriKKKa

*2 – Who recently proved the existence of God by saying it’s not speed that kills but the idiots behind the wheel and then promptly went and crashed his expensive sports car, bravo Mike!

*3-nice to see you back up and blogging again

*4-You can decide if this is ironic or not