Donald Trump and the decline of American civilization
Here is an absolutely wonderful article on the collapse of American civilization- and parenthetically, its relationship to one of its most crude and obnoxious manifestations: the Donald Trump phenomenon.
The dumbing down of America has been going on for years. Even trivial things- like our celebrating the turn of the Millenium a year early (as if we counted, "0,1,2,3,4,5...") have pointed to the malignant spreading of unprecedented ignorance among us. We no longer know how to think rationally. Which in one way is probably just as well: we don't know enough about most things to do a reasonable job of thinking anyway.
We've forgotten our values and called it "tolerance" and "open-mindedness." We celebrate our mindlessness as a triumph of the heart. We not only are no longer embarrassed by the shame of others, but we have lost our own shame.
And now comes a rude, immature bully of a man posing as a Christian (but one who, despite being and admitted serial adulterer, has no need of repentance because he never does anything wrong) and treating others with a degree of incivility and rudeness we would not tolerate from our own children, and we look to him as some sort of a messiah. He promises to make us great again- though he can't tell us how beyond making grandiose promises the "how" of which he also keeps a secret. He refuses to be accountable to anybody or anything- including the past we have forgotten. How else could we be fooled by the promise of such a man to restore us to a greatness whose very nature we have forgotten?
Donald Trump is no mere Huey Long or George Wallace. He is not a rallying symbol for the discontented margins of society. The New Hampshire primary proved that. He is, as I've said before, the American Mussolini- an arrogant, swaggering, overgrow child on an ego trip a sizable fraction of the American people is lost enough to look to as a parental figure.
I continue to refuse to believe that he will be the Republican candidate for president, or would have any chance of election were he actually to become the nominee. I refuse to believe that the bulk of Republicans or of Americans generally could be that gullible, that pathetic, that much the opposite of the very greatness to which Trump promises to restore us. But even if he loses every single primary from here on out and is forced from the race, he is still an ominous figure.
He's ominous because he's a voice and a symbol for everything that's killing America.
Photo: DonkeyHotey
The dumbing down of America has been going on for years. Even trivial things- like our celebrating the turn of the Millenium a year early (as if we counted, "0,1,2,3,4,5...") have pointed to the malignant spreading of unprecedented ignorance among us. We no longer know how to think rationally. Which in one way is probably just as well: we don't know enough about most things to do a reasonable job of thinking anyway.
We've forgotten our values and called it "tolerance" and "open-mindedness." We celebrate our mindlessness as a triumph of the heart. We not only are no longer embarrassed by the shame of others, but we have lost our own shame.
And now comes a rude, immature bully of a man posing as a Christian (but one who, despite being and admitted serial adulterer, has no need of repentance because he never does anything wrong) and treating others with a degree of incivility and rudeness we would not tolerate from our own children, and we look to him as some sort of a messiah. He promises to make us great again- though he can't tell us how beyond making grandiose promises the "how" of which he also keeps a secret. He refuses to be accountable to anybody or anything- including the past we have forgotten. How else could we be fooled by the promise of such a man to restore us to a greatness whose very nature we have forgotten?
Donald Trump is no mere Huey Long or George Wallace. He is not a rallying symbol for the discontented margins of society. The New Hampshire primary proved that. He is, as I've said before, the American Mussolini- an arrogant, swaggering, overgrow child on an ego trip a sizable fraction of the American people is lost enough to look to as a parental figure.
I continue to refuse to believe that he will be the Republican candidate for president, or would have any chance of election were he actually to become the nominee. I refuse to believe that the bulk of Republicans or of Americans generally could be that gullible, that pathetic, that much the opposite of the very greatness to which Trump promises to restore us. But even if he loses every single primary from here on out and is forced from the race, he is still an ominous figure.
He's ominous because he's a voice and a symbol for everything that's killing America.
Photo: DonkeyHotey
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