All:
Oh my goodness.
I did not know the facts(?) as presented herein. I guess that the good
old USA is soon to be SOL and way up t he creek with not paddles.
Richard
On 12/12/2016 5:53 AM, Miriam Vieni wrote:
Truthdig
Demagogue-in-Chief
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/demagogue-in-chief_20161211/
AddThis Sharing Buttons
Share to FacebookShare to TwitterShare to More6
Posted on Dec 11, 2016
By Chris Hedges
Mr. Fish / Truthdig
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
(http://neilpostman.org/) , "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
(https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/arts-and-entertainment/wp/2016/11/20/fa
ke-donald-trump-returns-to-snl-and-the-real-one-is-not-happy/?utm_term=.7ed9
4d79d476 ) , 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.
Trump's fight with the Fox News host Megyn Kelly illustrates his
vindictiveness. Kelly, who was sexually harassed by Roger Ailes when Ailes
was Fox News chief, questioned Trump on her television program about
allegations of rape made by Trump's first wife, Ivana. Ivana Trump later
recanted the allegations, although she had provided graphic details of the
rape in a signed deposition during divorce proceedings. Trump was furious
with Kelly for raising the matter.
In an interview by Terry Gross
(http://kdlg.org/post/megyn-kelly-trump-and-media-were-dangerous-phase-right
-now ) on "Fresh Air" that was posted last week, Kelly said that for months
Trump attempted "to woo me-not romantically, but just, you know, into
favorable coverage." Trump demanded that she phone him, Kelly said, and she
did so. There was a moment in that telephone conversation when he realized
he had failed to persuade her, she said. "He became very angry. He told me I
was a disgrace, that I ought to be ashamed of myself, and that's when he
said, 'I almost unleashed my beautiful twitter account against you and I
still may.' "
The conflict between the two exploded after the first Republican primary
debate, in August of 2015, in which Kelly asked Trump about his derogatory
comments about women.
Kelly was savagely attacked by Trump for nine months after the debate,
including repeatedly on Trump's "beautiful twitter account." The attacks
ended when Kelly went to Trump Tower to film what she called "a softer focus
interview" with Trump but which in journalism slang is called a "puff
piece," one that flatters the subject of the interview.
Kelly told Gross that the attacks by Trump "unleashed a chaos in my life
unlike any I have ever experienced."
"I was receiving death threats regularly, serious death threat against me,
against my family," she said. "Strange men showed up at my apartment
building demanding to see me in a threatening manner. People started casing
my home. Photographers were found on my property. I don't know if they were
private investigators or what they were, but people started digging into my
past, bothering my mother, bothering my closest friends, bothering my high
school friends, trying to dig up dirt on me."
"The c-word was in thousands of tweets directed at me," she said. "Lots of
threats to beat the hell out of me, to rape me, honestly the ugliest things
you can imagine."
"The thing I was most worried about-I have a seven, a five and a
three-year-old-and I was worried I would be walking down the street with my
kids and somebody would do something to me in front of them, that they would
see me get punched in the face, or get hurt."
Kelly said the "crescendo of anger" sent "my life into lockdown."
When Gross asked Kelly about the "alt-right" figures gathered around Trump,
including Steve Bannon, Kelly was unequivocal. "They will come after you,"
she said. "They will target you. And they will be relentless about it."
Ridicule especially antagonizes the demagogue. It deflates the pretentious
and the powerful. It reduces to human size those puffed up by their
self-importance. It exposes them for who they are. It affirms the
self-respect and dignity of the oppressed. Demagogues, lacking the capacity
for self-transcendence, cannot see the ludicrousness and absurdity of their
pretensions. They cannot distinguish between their inner fantasies and
reality. They can belittle and ridicule others, as Trump does, with great
cruelty, but they see nothing humorous about similar treatment directed at
the self-created edifice of their own glory.
"There are people who tell jokes," goes a joke illustrating the morbid humor
prevalent among the populace in East Germany during the communist rule.
"There are people who collect jokes and tell jokes. And there are people who
collect people who tell jokes."
I have covered numerous demagogues as a foreign correspondent, including the
Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, the Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega,
the Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, the Libyan dictator Moammar Gadhafi and
the Syrian dictator Hafez Assad of Syria, as well as Erich Honecker of the
former East Germany, Nicolae Ceausescu of Romania and Slobodan Milosevic of
Serbia. They had different idiosyncrasies and styles. Gadhafi and Ceausescu
loved the spectacle and pomp that come with power. Milosevic and Assad spent
long periods out of the spotlight. But all had patterns of behavior
exhibited by Trump.
Bertolt Brecht (https://www.britannica.com/biography/Bertolt-Brecht ;) 's
"The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui" provides the blueprint for how demagogues
work. It is the story of a Chicago mobster cornering the cauliflower market
in 1930s Chicago through threats, blackmail and coercion. It is also a
thinly disguised allegory for the rise of Adolf Hitler and the Nazis. The
Barker, who opens the play, lays it out in the prologue:
Ladies and gentlemen, we present today,
The great historical gangster-play!
Learn all bout blackmail and framing! Further:
How to succeed in big business through murder.
Demagogues expend great energy marginalizing, censoring and silencing all
critics, something the corporate state has already done to dissidents such
as Noam Chomsky and Ralph Nader. They use the media, especially the
airwaves, as a vast public relations department to amplify their lies and
promote their personality cults. They destroy cultural and education
institutions, replacing them with rote vocational training, nationalist
kitsch and tawdry entertainment. They elevate members of their family, sect,
tribe or clan to the inner circles of power. (Trump's tribe, of course, is
the billionaire class.) They put generals in key positions. Those in the
military appeal to demagogues because they are not trained to think but to
be obedient. The military also does not shrink from violence. The demagogue
and the inner circle grow fabulously rich by pillaging the state. They live
in private inner sanctums of opulence and depravity that resemble Versailles
or the Forbidden City
(http://www.chinahighlights.com/beijing/forbidden-city/ ;) . They banish
anyone in the court who tells them unpleasant truths. They read into the
most benign acts wild conspiracies. They often sexually assault girls and
women. Hussein and Gadhafi were notorious rapists. Trump's misogyny is well
documented.
Demagogues foolishly see the elaborately staged public events held for them
as proof that a populace loves and respects them. And in the final, decrepit
stages of their rule they became grotesque parodies of themselves. The
sycophants around them, profiting from the orgy of corruption, feed their
gargantuan self-delusion. The demagogues, believing they are divinely
inspired geniuses and omnipotent, make decisions based on hallucinations.
When a demagogue reaches that stage, society can be obliterated.
Demagogues usually seek to immortalize their grandeur in huge building
projects that are monuments to their immortality. Saddam Hussein sought to
rebuild the ancient city of Babylon. He constructed a replica of the palace
of Nebuchadnezzar II on the ruins of the original, embossing his name, like
Nebuchadnezzar II, on many of the bricks. Gadhafi built the largest
irrigation system in existence, calling it "the eighth wonder of the world."
Ceausescu, whose birthday was a national holiday, constructed a massive
palace, The People's House, at a cost of $1.75 billion in Bucharest. He
conscripted as many as 100,000 workers for the project. There were hundreds,
perhaps thousands, who died from accidents during the construction. The
palace, which is the second largest building in the world, after the
Pentagon, has 3,500 tons of crystal and 1 million cubic meters of marble. It
was two-thirds finished in December 1989 when the regime was overthrown. In
a visit to the national museum that winter, I found it filled with idealized
portraits and busts of Ceausescu. Rooms were devoted to hagiographic
accounts of his mythical life story. Building projects and image creation of
this kind make Trump-who has decorated his residence in Trump Tower
(http://www.idesignarch.com/inside-donald-and-melania-trumps-manhattan-apart
ment-mansion/) as if he were Louis XIV, the Sun King-salivate.
Demagogues foster the psychosis of permanent war, which often leads to
actual war. The psychosis of permanent war becomes a tool to abolish civil
liberties and condemn dissent as treason. Huge expenditures go into the
military, which demagogues see as an extension of their personal power,
while the rest of the country decays. There is nothing a demagogue loves
more than a big military parade.
The story of demagogues is as old as civilization. They have risen and
fallen like the tides, always leaving in their wake misery, destruction and
death. They exploit the frustrations and anger generated by a decayed
society. They make fantastic promises they never keep. They demonize the
vulnerable as scapegoats. They preach hatred and violence. They demand
godlike worship. They consume those they rule.
Demagogue-in-Chief
Are Obama's Immigration Prisons for Families Legitimate 'Child Care
Facilities'? Judge Says No
Senate Finally Approves Flint Aid at Expense of the Golden State
Noam Chomsky and Harry Belafonte Talk About Bernie Sanders, Donald Trump,
the KKK and More (Video)
Truthdig: Drilling Beneath the Headlines
C 2016 Truthdig, LLC. All rights reserved.
Signup for Truthdig's newsletter
