PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP is the Father of Nightmares. The logic of his administration is indistinguishable now from the logic of dreams: his White House minions prey to the same abrupt shifts of mood; the same lightning-fast transitions from elation to dread. America itself has become the prisoner of its President’s vagrant fancies: a place where trust and treachery grapple like celebrity wrestlers in front of a television audience of millions. The whole country teeters precariously on a narrow ledge of sanity while POTUS, gargantuan and grinning, bids it step out into the abyss.
Unwitting and unprepared, America and the world have been propelled back through time to the era of kings and emperors. Accustomed to living in a world from which the habits of obedience and obeisance have long been banished, the realisation that they are now as frightened and vulnerable as any of the inhabitants of those luckless nations on the margins of civilisation has come as quite a shock. Presidential pique can now upend lives as easily as presidential beneficence can redeem them. The world’s leaders have been reduced to mere courtiers in the planet-sized Versailles the USA has built for them.
How to respond when American foreign policy is driven by presidential whim? When international trade is reduced to a pile of chips in a testosterone-fuelled game of Texas hold-em? What to do when old allies are treated like the hired help and brutal dictators are treated to “The Donald’s” best real-estate advice? When the 400-year-old Westphalian System of sovereign states pursuing their national self-interest rationally and predictably is impatiently tossed aside? When did it become okay for the leader of the world’s “indispensable” nation to behave like a Mafia don?
It’s worse for those ordinary Americans who have yet to succumb to the fever-dream that is Trumpism. Americans with college degrees and what were once considered to be good manners. Americans who believe in Darwin’s theory of evolution and regard the Bible as a collection of moral metaphors. Americans who won’t have handguns anywhere near their children. Americans who read. For these Americans every heavy footfall in the public square sounds as close as their front door. They would call the Police if they weren’t so terrified that it’s the thud of policemen’s boots that woke them.
The true horror of Trump’s nightmares is that the people in them, the people doing the most monstrous things, don’t even know they’re monsters. Those Texas cops and border guards carrying the children away from their parents. Those minimum-wage workers in the camp canteens, dishing out the detainees’ food with friendly smiles. If asked, they would swear on a stack of Bibles that they are the good guys in their President’s movie. Except that it doesn’t pay to ask that sort of question, does it? Not unless the questioner wants to see the look of easy familiarity disappear from their eyes. Not unless he or she wants to see it replaced in an instant with the cold, gun-metal glare of hostility that Trump’s supporters reserve for his enemies.
That’s when the panic sets in. Trump’s press secretary, Sarah Sanders, is asked to leave the Little Red Hen restaurant in Virginia and liberal America cheers. But then the awful thought strikes them. What if Trump’s supporters decide to do something similar?
“How hard is it to imagine,” asks the Washington Post’s editorial writer, “people who strongly believe that abortion is murder deciding that judges or other officials who protect abortion rights should not be able to live peaceably with their families?” And that’s the thing, isn’t it? Knowing that whatever peaceful little protest the sort of Americans who watch The Handmaid’s Tale might make against Trump, can be answered in an instant by bearded men with bulging beer-guts toting pump-action shotguns and wearing “Make America Great Again” baseball caps to hide their male pattern baldness.
The Father of Nightmares has sired too many nightmarish children.
All propped up by corporate money
Not forgetting ‘ Machines of Loving Grace.’
As for ‘The whole country teeters precariously on a narrow ledge of sanity while POTUS, gargantuan and grinning, bids it step out into the abyss.’ All this means is that life is imitating art so while everything appears to be disintegrating what is taking place is the ultimate fusion of all and everything streaming like a mighty river into the digital dream. The Power of Nightmares indeed. Pa Ubu up from the bottomless pit meets Lilith in a Mexican takeaway. They are outcast and forgo tortillas but ultimately, does anything change?
What is there to choose between ‘presidential whim’ and The Plan for the New American Century?
The only thing that has happened is that the smooth veneer of the covert sociopath (Obama) has been replaced with the overt psychopath of Trump. Americans exterminated 10’s of millions of native indians and has been on a bloody path both covertly and overtly ever since to achieve world domination. America is like a cult with their megalomaniacal patriotism and its blood thirsty its our way or the highway attitude. It is a totalitarian police state designed to ensure the ruling elite are safe from any consequences of their actions.
When we look back at the coming new american civil war it will seem obvious that it happened except after all the deaths and destruction nothing will be won, nothing will change and nothing will be for the better no matter who claims to win. Except of course the ruling elite will then have full spectrum control over all aspects of life in the interests of peace because the people cant be trusted.
All because people refuse to agree to disagree in a civil manner. A nation built on continual war and bloodshed will only ever create a bitter harvest that ends in its destruction from within.
Indeed, presidential good cop,bad cop.
How long do you think America can continue running a massive trade deficit with virtually all the rest of the world Chris ? What he is trying to do is remedy for America the worst effects of neoliberal globalisation. I thought you would have approved. The profits from US corporations setting up in China go to the 0.01% of Americans, the deficit is carried by the many who’s jobs are hence in jeopardy . So the traditional trading partners on the winning side of the trade imbalance might have to be disappointed , if not now then when the big apple is finally discovered to be rotten at the core.
And do you really disapprove of trying to normalise relations with North Korea? This seems a strange position for you to take too.
And much as Mr Trump may have wished to have sired the entire deplorable brood he did not. He may not even be one of them.
D J S
an eloquent way of saying ‘what goes around comes around’
California about to shut down the Internet. Wants to police emails, text, social media for fake news>>> https://youtu.be/pw4DUzQ-yUk
My comment: Hollywood execs trying to deny they’ve all got pornhub subscriptions and every one knows they scared shitless about falling sales.
oooh yes..another article about Trump and thingy getting kicked out of a restaurant (i think that’s been covered twice this week). Now we’re even worried about Trump supporters behaving like Democrat Party supporters. Only with trucker caps on. And they probably don’t even watch ‘Curb Your Enthusiasm’ reruns. Imagine that.
Is there some reason we aren’t talking about Ocasio-Cortez spectacular win and all its ramifications?
You know..some hope on the horizon.
I for one have been reveling in the image of Nancy Pelosi screaming in blind rage into her pillow.
Anybody who blatantly and repeatedly lies to my face abdicates all rights to civility in my response to them.
That right of mine is non negotiable. It does not necessitate that I will be uncivil in response but means they have no right to complain if I am.
And Sarah Huckabee Sanders is a serial liar.
It seems others fell the same way as me, good for them.
“”When did it become okay for the leader of the world’s “indispensable” nation to behave like a Mafia don?”” asks Chris.
When the world is being run as a swamp of psychopath murderers and paedophiles. That is when: Make America clean again, the Don!
Ronald Reagan: ‘If Fascism Ever Comes to America, It Will Come in the Name of Liberalism’.
And Trump is no liberal …
I’m so reminded of the poem ‘The Frivolous Cake’ written in 1990 by Mervyn Peake. I was fortunate to hear it sung recently as a local composer has set this to music for mezzo soprano and instrumental ensemble. A freckled and frivolous cake is pursued by a knife across a pointless sea. ‘ Or any lugubrious lake there was / in a manner emphatic and free.’
Love it seems, cannot live without cake even though the sea is unrelentingly pointless.
I believe any respectable baker, candle stick maker, wall paper designer or tomb stone maker has the right to decline an order for a product depicting phallic emblems, busty substances or vaginal meanderings if these items offend religious sensibilities whether these be Druidic, Rastafarian, Rosicrucian, Coptic, Gnostic or neo Platonist.
This is essential to a free capitalist financial system amd can only pave the way for legitimate pornographic bakers etc., to set up specialist businesses.
One simply has to see the greater implications in the grand and utterly pointless overall scheme of things.
Previous remarks about cake or no cake led to the French revolution, so cake is a dangerous incendiary unlike the Nato bombing of Serbia or Libya which are merely every day banalities not to be protested by any one of the dozens of genders now available.
The sea, once brimming with riches and strangeness, curiosities absurdities, eccentricities and terrors is fast becoming lifeless, dreary, empty, uniformly dull, ugly and hopeless. That is to say, pointless as Mervyn Peake pointed out.
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