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It Says It All
As a combined Hungarian-Slovak-Czech-Bavarian, I am always interested to see how my people view what is happening in the United States. This cartoon is from Marian Kamensky of Slovakia. I will have nothing more to say about Trump for the time being. Let’s see how fast he and his fragile ego unravel.
Whatever Happened to Real Stories?
Television used to be first class entertainment. There was great comedy (Sid Caesar and Milton Berle), great speculative fiction (Twilight Zone), great whodunits (Perry Mason), and great quiz shows (You Bet Your Life). The shows were either scripted or with great impromptu acting. There was talent in front of the camera and in the smoke-filled rooms where the shows were planned.
That was then. Somewhere along the line, the TV producers decided that reality TV was cheaper to produce and would be accepted by the viewing public. And it was: with hundreds of channels of cable, there were scads of shows like Antiques Road Show, The Kardashians, Dog the Bounty Hunter, Pawn Stars, and a million forensic crime shows reprising old crimes.
Instead of entertaining the viewers, these shows sedated them. One of the stars of the genre was Donald J. Trump of The Apprentice. All he had to do was glower and say “You’re fired!” and everything was golden.
Now this same Donald J Trump is our next (and perhaps last) president. All he has to do to solve the problems of this poor country is strike a few attitudes and tweet his uneducated opinions in the middle of the night. Advance planning no longer exists. We are now being governed by a bunch of untalented poseurs.
A REMINDER: Don’t forget to turn off your TV for tomorrow’s inauguration. Reality TV types hate having a bad Nielsen rating.
You Have Better Things to Do This Friday
Maybe you’re curious to see how badly Mr. Cheeto-Head blows it on Friday, January 20, when he becomes the 45th and worst President of the United States. Don’t bother: You’ll hear all about it later on. I would prefer that all the stations reporting on this non-event register a big loss. After all, our country will be registering a major loss. For either four years or such time as he is impeached and convicted, we will have had it up to here with his negative tweets and failure to abide by any rule of law.
Move Along! There’s Nothing to See Here
If the Orange Demon has any sense of decency, he will bow out the way William Henry Harrison, our 9th President, did in April 1841: Ol’ Tippecanoe died from a cold he got at his inauguration a month earlier.
A Warning to Protect Your Sanity
Newscasters are in the business of delivering the news that is approved by their corporate masters for your delectation. Please note that the news being delivered is, as often as not, false. A news anchor could say anything with a straight face. If there are two takes on a news story, regardless if one of them is flat out wrong and stupid, both will be given equal weight. Some examples:
This elevation to respectability of crackpot points of view is usually referred to as Fair and Balanced Reporting. I prefer to think of it as abrogation of responsibility to discriminate between what is true and what is considered desirable by the lunatic fringe.
I have posted many blogs recommending that people do not watch or listen to news programing, especially if they are easily influenced by what appears to be blatant attempts to influence your thinking. During the upcoming Trump presidency, Americans will be told blatant lies, frequently self-contradictory. The strategy is known as gaslighting, in which an alternative reality is created to neutralize potential opposition.
Most at risk are people who tune in on the same news program every night.
An Amazing Coincidence
When I read Teffi’s essay on Rasputin in Tolstoy, Rasputin, Others, and Me: The Best of Teffi, couldn’t help comparing the dread Siberian starets to an American political figure in the news. Here are three instances, from which you can draw your own conclusions:
The Black Automobile
According to Teffi:
The “Black Automobile” remains a mystery to this day. Several nights running this car had roared across the vField of Mars, sped over the Palace Bridge, and disappeared into the unknown. Shots had been fired from inside the car. Passers-by had been wounded.
“It’s Rasputin’s doing,” people were saying, “Who else?”
Dealings with Women
Teffi was seated next to Rasputin, who tried to get her to have some wine:
Rasputin was drinking a great deal and very quickly. Suddenly he leaned towards me and whispered, “Why aren’t you drinking, eh? God will forgive you. Drink.”
He kept trying to get her to drink and to come to his place, but she wisely refused.
He “Sows Discord and Panic”
Finally, Teffi writes:
He profits from everything black, evil and incomprehensible. Everything that sows discord and panic. And there’s nothing he can’t explain to his own advantage when he needs to.
Now I could add that he tweets nasty, ad hominem attacks in the middle of the night, but that would be giving it away, wouldn’t it?
Jon Stewart, Formerly of The Daily Show
Intellectuals have this little problem: They just cannot understand those who aren’t intellectuals. Irony and sarcasm will not do the trick. When we think that Jon Stewart or Stephen Colbert have produced some withering putdown of someone on the other side of the culture wars, the only response from the other side is, “Consider the source. Who cares what a libtard has to say?” After all, they have their own information sources which Liberals have disdained to meet head on.
It’s roughly equivalent to “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never harm me.”
Looking back at the Presidential Election of 2016, it strikes me that humorous sallies are not a replacement for engaging with Red States. One has to confront, listen, and respond. Barack Obama did this in 2008 and 2012; Hillary in 2016 did not.
I am currently reading a book of essays on G. K. Chesterton by the Rev. James V. Schall, S.J. In a piece entitled “On Becoming Inhuman out of Sheer Humanitarianism,” Schall writes:
In the summer of 1926 (July 3 and 10), Chesterton wrote two essays in The Illustrated London News on literature and novels. He began with some advice that I recall my old professor Rudolf Allers had also given some years ago, namely, “read even bad novels.” Allers’s point was that you will likely find in lousy novels some rather accurate insight into how people are thinking or acting that you will not find in good literature or in your own experience. It is not easy to imagine all of the silly and wrong things that we might perpetrate on one another, yet we need to know this if only to save us from a certain naïveté or ethereal innocence. [Italics mine]
Maybe someone has to listen to what Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh are saying if we are serious about countering it. Even if what they have to say is unadulterated horseshit.
The “Saturday Night Live” sketches about the last election were brilliant: Alec Baldwin and Kate McKinnon couldn’t have been better. Yet millions of voters weren’t listening. They were tuning in to Fox News or Jesus or Breitbart.
Because the Democrats have failed to engage all the voters, we are resigned to waiting for a new Reichstag fire to be set.
It Was Worth It!
Despite all my strong feelings about the upcoming election, there appeared a real possibility that I wouldn’t be able to vote. I could wait for the sample ballot with its attached absentee ballot application, but there was a better than 50% chance that I wouldn’t get the absentee ballot in my hands before I boarded my plane to South America.
So I called the Los Angeles County Registrar of Voters and asked what I could do. They said I could vote in person by going to the County Clerk’s office in Norwalk. Foolishly, I took the 105 Freeway to Norwalk and got stuck in a behemoth traffic jam. It took me all of two hours to drive the 30 miles to the County Clerk’s office and only 15 minutes to vote. Fortunately, I took a better route home (the Golden State Freeway over to the Santa Monica Freeway).
This election matters a great deal to me. I know that California will not go for Trump—even Republican ex-Governator Arnold Schwarzenegger refused to vote for him—but I have to be able to face myself when I look in the mirror. I have to act on my beliefs, or what am I?
You can bet that the Creepy Clown did not get an X in his box on my ballot. I can go to Ecuador now with a good conscience.
They Wear It Like a Badge of Honor
I know I said I would shy away from politics in this grim election season, but I could not avoid writing about what troubles me to the base of my soul. And that is the fact that people persist in backing Donald Trump despite the horrible behaviors that he is admittedly guilty of. At one point, he even said he could shoot some innocent down in the streets of New York without impacting his political base. Now I think that perhaps that is true.
The United States does not matter to these people. All that matters is expressing their defiance of all things relating to Obama, Hillary, liberalism, and political correctness. I keep thinking of Sly in Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew:
Y’are a baggage, the Slys are no rogues. Look in the Chronicles—we came in with Richard [sic] Conqueror. Therefore, paucas pallabris: Let the world slide! Sessa!
Yes, but once one wakes up from a drunken stupor, one has to face a world that is irretrievably broken. What then? Another impeachment trial?
This is the first election in the history of this young nation in which a large number of voters just want to scuttle the ship and sink it, even if they themselves drown in the process.
I am so exercised by this state of affairs that I’m going to drive out to the L.A. County Clerk’s office in distant Norwalk to pick up my absentee ballot for fear that, in the normal course of events, I won’t have it until after I leave for Ecuador. I know that Californians will reject Trump, but now, more than ever, I feel that my vote is personally important.
Consider it my own act of defiance.
The Whole Medium Is IMHO Suspect
About a year ago, I signed up for Twitter. But then, when I found out I was supposed to “follow” three existing Twitter accounts, I suddenly lost interest, so I never finished my application. About once a week, Twitter e-mails me to finalize my application … but I never will.
Why? A certain Prezidenchul candidate has adopted Twitter as his preferred method of communicating with the world, and I suddenly saw what was wrong with the whole setup. Standing at the microphone (broken or not), Donald Trump thinks in limited bursts of thought that are compatible with the character limit on tweets. He jumps from one tweet-length position to another. This effectively prevents him for discussing such nasty things as details that may substantiate his short ideo-bursts.
On the other hand, these same tweets endear him to his fans, who are not into such mundane things as facts. They are, if anything, practitioners of identity politics: Trump re-connects with his base, and since they identify with him, that connection is all that counts.
When you go into details, you could wind up betraying your base. So, the idea is to just skip around, making short promisoids without pinning himself down on any one of them. Promisoids good, facts bad!
So I think I will never complete my Twitter application process. And here, in considerably more than 140 characters, is why.
The Term Comes from Professional Wrestling
The word kayfabe is new to me. I learned about it from reading Nathan Rabin’s 7 Days in Ohio: Trump, the Gathering of the Juggalos and the Summer Everything Went Insane. According to TVTropes:
“Kayfabe” is a carny term thought to have originated from the Pig Latin for “be fake,” possibly originally by pronouncing it backward (“kay-feeb”). Professional Wrestling adopted the term as a reference to the standard Fourth Wall features of separating the audience from the action. It is meant to convey the idea that, yes, pro wrestling is a genuine sport, and yes, this is how people act in real life. It is essentially Willing Suspension of Disbelief specifically for pro wrestling.
Back in the old days, though, kayfabe was much more; it was pro wrestling’s real life Masquerade. Wrestlers, promoters, and everybody else involved with the business alike resorted to any means necessary to guard the secret that wrestling was rigged, from wrestlers roughing up any reporters who dared ask, “It’s all fake, right?” to (alleged) death threats towards anybody who threatened to expose the secret, through contacts with the Mafia and other organized crime. Heels [villains] and faces [heroes] weren’t allowed to travel, eat, or be seen with their “enemies” in public, and changed in separate locker rooms. Wrestlers lived their gimmicks 24/7 and those playing Wild Samoans or Foreign Wrestling Heels could not speak English in public if their characters didn’t. There are even rumors that some wrestlers would lie under oath in court to maintain the illusion, and some old-time heels tell stories about carrying guns for their own protection from those fans who took it just a bit too seriously. To get an idea of just how important kayfabe was, it’s interesting to watch shoot interviews with old-time wrestlers filmed in the modern era, even decades later when everyone knows that wrestling is fake, they often start speaking as if various angles and feuds were real and tend to dance around actually saying that wrestling is staged if pressed….
Now the only concept of kayfabe fakery is highly transferable to politics. In the 2016 Presidential Election, Donald Trump is obviously the heel. But the parallel breaks down somewhat with Hillary Clinton, whom Trump is trying to portray as the real heel. Using the language of kayfabe, this is one election in which there are no faces.
Tarnmoor 
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