Make a note of this moment. Take some kind of karmic snapshot so you remember the exact qualities of the toxic, debilitating rash right now tearing at the skin of the collective soul, for it is unlikely to be repeated anytime soon.
And, I think we can all agree, thank sweet goddess for that.
It cannot be understated: We are at a very surreal, sour moment in America’s neo-history, wherein, thanks to Trump, Fox News, the GOP, the “alt-right” and their scattershot armies of desperate white males, the hell-mouth of intolerance and rage has been cracked wide open like few times in American history, and the worst, the loudest, the cruelest of our species are, for a painful moment, being given the biggest microphones, the widest berths, the gnarliest click-bait headlines.
Here is Stephen Bannon, former “CEO” of extremist Breitbart news organization (among other ignoble credentials), second only to Drudge as the most laughable, morally acidic non-entity in modern media, a man despised even by his own fantastically inept former employees, a man who, as Mother Jones points out, created a perfect online haven for white nationalists, right now running a major presidential campaign.
Let’s be blunt: Hiring the Breitbart CEO to run your campaign is like hiring an aneurism to fix your migraine. Bannon replaced the equally disastrous Paul Manafort, who seems to have been one of Vladamir Putin’s scabby lap dogs, which might seem troubling, until you realize Putin is a petty thug and the Cold War is long dead and Russia is about as much a threat to the American experiment as toenail fungus is to interplanetary space travel.
Bannon has been joined by noted propaganda kingpin Roger “sexually inappropriate” Ailes, late of Fox News and even later of human decency and moral relevance, and, along with Mike Pence – apparently tagging along to remind everyone how much they all hate women and gays, too (not just immigrants) – all are now hoping to steer the nation into an autocratic sewer.
You know when racist conspiracy nutball Alex Jones champions your campaign, you’re all class
Given this surfeit of bile, it’s easy to understand the temptation – especially when you add in Trump’s fawning adoration of Alex Jones’ infantile conspiracy cults and extremist right-wing hate groups – to buy into the lie that these are indeed The Darkest of Times, that a deep sickness is afoot and there might be no turning back.
It’s all just nonsense. Let’s be clear: Trump’s wretched crew, while appalling, is light years from resembling the real horsemen of the apocalypse. Hell, they aren’t even the horsemen’s stable boys. They constitute nothing so much as a demonic clown car of raging sadness, flatulent ego, unchecked megalomania. Even the GOP is abandoning them in droves. They are incompetence writ loud. They mean everyone ill.
Here’s the good news: It will be over soon. The Trump nightmare is reeling and churning, eating itself alive, soon to vanish from the headlines. And when he does? Oh, sweet Jesus with an Obama tattoo, the recoil will be glorious indeed.
Here’s the thing: While Trump and his hate-soaked antics have indeed overwhelmed the news cycle like no other election in modern memory, it’s all just wildly unsustainable. The shock value wears thin. The raging orange sneer becomes tedious. Sure, we’ve never been this pummeled by odium and authoritarian dogma, but, by the same token, we’ve also never been this exhausted, sickened, ready for a national emetic.
It’s coming, and soon. Put it this way: Once Hillary wins by enormous margins and Trump suddenly falls from the headlines, the country will immediately begin to recover. We will purge the poison. We will slough off the dead cells. We will be like a crash victim emerging from a fever-dream coma, one who starts breathing and moving normally for the first time in what feels like forever. And lo, it will be momentous.
This is not at all far-fetched. It’s increasingly clear that Trump knows he’s going to be crushed in November, that he never wanted to be anywhere near the actual presidency in the first place, that it was all a gaudy PR stunt, one that, thanks to Fox News and the GOP’s toxic groundwork, went further and uglier than anyone imagined.
Even more likely, given the presence of troll-gods Bannon and Ailes, is that Trump is merely conspiring to launch his own extremist media empire after the election, with the alt-right hate groups as its ready-made, captive audience.
Do you see the benefit? Trump, unbeknownst to him, has done something exceedingly helpful for the nation. He has not only unified the trolls, but he has named them, called them out, tattooed them with the nefarious Trump logo and made them his own. They think they’ve been legitimized and empowered, when in fact they’ve merely been clearly identified, irradiated and made obvious, like a cancerous tumor after a lengthy biopsy.
In other words, if you didn’t know who or what was making you ill before, women/immigrants/minorities/progressives/moderates/intelligent humans of Planet America, you certainly do now. And, very soon, we can all rally, far more powerfully, to excise and eradicate it. Shall we call that a perverse, difficult, but ultimately liberating gift?
Read more here:: Trump’s trolls: Not long for this world
