Last November, the Electoral College (not to be confused
with the majority of voters—which of itself should not be confused with the
majority of eligible voters) didn’t elect a new president; they elected a new
paradigm of “Rule by Fools,” otherwise known as an idiocracy. They put into the
Executive Office a model of buffoonery based on a self-promoting caricature of
an immoral fool with money, a fool who so believed in himself and in his
ability to obfuscate, cheat, deny, lie, and bully his way into power that he actually
did it with the witting and unwitting help of millions of other fools. In so
doing, he and his enablers remade the presidency into a paradigm of an
idiocracy, predicted in a 2005
film
of the same name by Bevis and Butthead creator Mike Judge.
In an interview with the Telegraph’s Tim Stanley in January 2016, Judge recalled the moment
he was struck by Idiocracy’s concept after witnessing two women fighting and
swearing in front of their kids at Disneyland. “And this was in 2001, so
then I started thinking about 2001
[the 1968 Stanley Kubrick sci-fi movie],” he explained. "What if instead
of this pristine high-tech world that [Kubrick] had envisioned, what if it was
just like The Jerry Springer Show and giant Walmarts, and what if that had been
the movie made in the ’60s? So I thought that’s what I would do. And a lot of
it was kinda based on stuff that was already happening.”
The Telegraph’s Stanley noted, with dead-on prescience 11 months in
advance of the election, the salient consistency of Trump’s modus operandi. “He’s a snake oil
salesman. They’ve always existed, always will. In American mythology, it’s the
guy who rides into town with the promise that he can cure all ills with an
ointment that only requires a little faith to work and 12 instalments of
$19.99. The sad fact is that snake oil only sells if there’s a market for it.
That implies that a significant number of consumers are suckers.”
At the core of every myth or
legend there are some events or characters—sketches or shadows in their own
time—that take on an aura of legitimacy as a willing or desperate or delusional
public embraces what they want to see while discarding that which makes them
uncomfortable. Truth is usually the first discomfiting aspect to be ditched.
And so it was last November.
The truth behind Trump’s
rise to idiocracy was pitched out a window of Trump Tower as surely as Russian attorney Nikolai Gorokhov
was thrown out of the window of his fourth floor apartment last month in Moscow
before he was set to testify on behalf of Vladimir Putin’s longtime foe Sergei
Magnitsky. Like Putin, Trump has no problem dispatching Truth with extreme
prejudice, as long as he can get someone else to do the dirty work.
As one example, here’s a
portion of the transcript
of a discussion this Sunday morning (April 2) between ABC News’ Martha Raddatz
and U.S Ambassador to the United Nations, Nikki Haley, that illustrates Trump’s
willingness to put his toadies out in front of major issues, detaching himself
from any real policy positions. The italics are mine:
RADDATZ: “You really think that you and President Trump are
saying the same things? Let me tell you one thing President Trump recently
said. He defended Putin after Fox News' Bill O'Reilly called him a killer,
saying there are a lot of killers. Do you think our country is so innocent?
So, how does the U.S. maintain its role as the moral conscience
of the world, to use your words this week, if the president won't condemn
what's happening inside Russia?”
HALEY: “Well, Martha, this is what I can tell you, the president
has not once called me and said don't beat up on Russia, has not once called me
and told me what to say, has not once...”
RADDATZ: “But he isn't
beating up on Russia. Should he be beating up on Russia, again?”
HALEY: “I am. I am beating
up on Russia...”
RADDATZ: “So he doesn't need to?”
HALEY: “Well, it's -- of course, he's got a lot of things he's doing. But he is not stopping me from
beating up on Russia. He's not stopping me from talking about the pressure that
China needs to be putting on North Korea. He's not stopping me on how we're
working together to defeat ISIS.
Right now, General Mattis and I are working on peacekeeping
reforms and stability with those issues. So, the president has not disagreed
with one thing I've said. And that means he supports everything that I'm
saying. And I'm going along with everything that I know this administration
believes in.”
RADDATZ: “You know, you take over the rotating presidency of the
UN Security Council this month. And let me read some things you say you want.
You say you want to emphasize the role of human rights, that you
intend to challenge members, not just to talk the talk, but walk the walk.
Russia is going to be at that table having supported Syria's President Assad in
killing Syrian civilians, what you have called war crimes. Putin has jailed and
killed dissidents in his own country. You talk tough. But again, doesn't President Trump have to start
talking tough?”
HALEY: “He has his people
talking tough. And that's what we're doing is right now we're saying
whatever we need to say. Look, he's the president. He can say what he wants
whenever he wants…”
In the Beatles song, The
Fool on the Hill, the fool was the smart one, seeing with the eyes in his
head the motion of the sun due to the spinning of the Earth. In Trump’s
idiocracy (which recently employed a fool from
the Hill, Devin Nunes), the spinning is happening from the press room podium
and in the soundbites of a cabinet filled with willing fools.
Idiocracy: the
new paradigm.
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