They’d given him deals for books that he hadn’t written and stuck him on television whenever they thought it’d turn a buck.
Trump, who pretended on television that he was a billionaire, was big entertainment dollars.
His media persona was this: he was a total fucking jerk!
And he was rich!
He was great entertainment in a country that fostered a delusion in its poor that they too, someday, would be rich enough to treat other poor people like shit.
Donald J. Trump ran for the Presidency, and won, by embracing political viewpoints in direct opposition to the very people who had created him.
The liberals in the Celebrity branch of American governance had made a beast which they could not control.
It was like Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, or, The Modern Prometheus, a novel about a scientist who creates a monster out of spare human body parts that he’s dug up from graves. The monster gets angry. Things go badly.
There were some differences.
The monster in Frankenstein, made of rotten human remains, had a body that was slightly less disturbing than the body of the President, which was made of media coverage stitched together with plastic surgery.
The monster in Frankenstein didn’t have a speed habit.
And the monster in Frankenstein had a more honest relationship to literacy.
The monster in Frankenstein was into reading Milton, Plutarch, and Goethe.
By contrast, the monster who was the President just put his name on books that other people had written and then took money from political liberals in the publishing industry.
What’s the harm? asked the publishing industry.
It’s all just business, said the publishing industry.
199,900 years of shitting in the living room.
Anyway, the election of Donald J. Trump made America go nuts.
To be fair, the country had always been pretty crazy.
War, genocide, and slavery aren’t good for anyone’s mental health.
But after Trump assumed the Presidency, the madness got worse.
The people who’d voted for Trump went nuts because they’d won and had no idea what to do with their impossible victory.
The country’s political liberals went nuts because Trump put them in the position of facing an undeniable and yet unpalatable truth.
This was the truth that the political liberals could not deny and could not face: beyond making English Comp courses at community colleges very annoying, forty years of rhetorical progress had achieved little, and it turned out that feeling good about gay marriage did not alleviate the taint of being warmongers whose taxes had killed more Muslims than the Black Death.
You can’t make evil disappear by being a reasonably nice person who mouths platitudes at dinner parties. Social media confessions do not alleviate suffering. You can’t talk the world into being a decent place while sacrificing nothing.
The socialists didn’t go nuts.
They were the people who’d thought about the complex problems facing the nation and decided that an honest solution to these problems could be achieved with applied Leftism.
But don’t get your hopes up.
Despite being correct in their thinking, the socialists were the most annoying people in America. When they spoke, it was like bamboo slivers shoved under a fingernail.
I don’t know why.
It was the single biggest American tragedy of the last one hundred years.
By the Year of the Froward Worm, too much warmongering had splintered the national psyche into a series of tribes.
The most obvious schism was between the public voices of the liberal warmongers and the public voices of the tribe that had helped Donald J. Trump win his impossible victory.
For the sake of clarity, let’s call this second tribe the Fucking Assholes.
The noise from the public voices of the liberal warmongers had become the dominant voice of the haute bourgeoisie. This contingent was represented by a mixture of high-grade celebrities, op-ed writers, Democratic party apparatchiks, and the mentally ill. A great number of these public voices had passed the Cash Horizon.
For varied reasons, the public voices of the liberal warmongers had devised an idea that was extraordinarily profitable for the arch-capitalist class: that the Celebrity branch of American governance, and its products, could be read as a proxy for the struggles and strife of the great American unwashed.
The public voices of the Fucking Assholes were represented by a mixture of low-rent celebrities, op-ed writers, Republican party apparatchiks, and the mentally ill. A great number of people in these public voices had passed the Cash Horizon.
The public voices of the Fucking Assholes agreed with the public voices of the liberal warmongers: the Celebrity branch of American governance, and its products, could be read as a proxy for the struggles and strife of the great American unwashed.
The only difference of opinion was about the interpretation of this proxy.
Both sides accepted the unchallenged underlying thesis.
The argument proved to be very profitable for the arch-capitalist class who actually owned the Celebrity branch of American governance.
Everything was an advertisement.
And if you’re wondering about the opinions of the non-public voices, then go and fuck off back to the Dark Ages.
You’re revealing a thinking that’s very Twentieth Century AD, with atavistic tendencies towards logic and dreams of a populace that hasn’t been preyed upon by the mind-altering substances of the pharmaceutical industry. That shit is ancient news.
You either agreed with the country’s priestly castes, and their apparatuses of sycophants, novitiate aspirants and true believers, or you found yourself on the receiving end of a barrage of hatred and death threats.
Here was the difference between the priestly castes, many of whom had opinions on deadline for money, and everyone else: sane people shut the fuck up, nodded their heads, and did what they needed to survive in a toxic political landscape.
In an era when public discourse was the bought-and-paid property of roughly twenty companies, and the airing of an opinion could subject a person to unfathomable amounts of abuse and recrimination, the only reasonable option was to be quiet.
So when you next fawn over someone’s brave public thoughts, repeat the following: The contours of discourse are so horrendous that one thing has become certain. Any individual offering up a public opinion necessarily must be either hopelessly stupid or insane. I am engaging with a product of madness and idiocy.
Regarding the public opinions offered up in this book, they are the products of both idiocy and bad craziness.
But at least I have some justification for engaging with the stupidity and insanity of this book.
I wrote the thing.
Reader, what’s your excuse?
Here was one thing that all the priestly castes agreed upon in the run-up to the election in the Year of the Misplaced Butter: Donald J. Trump could not, should not, and would not be President.
It was impossible.
But Donald J. Trump won anyway.
A creature created by the Celebrity branch of American governance had taken over the Executive branch, the conflation of entertainment into political life was complete, and it had happened without the blessing of the high clergy, and it shut out the vast majority of people who were from the Celebrity branch of American governance.
By the way, all of this is why one’s political tools should probably be comprised of effective organization, decent arguments, an understanding of the actual political landscape, as opposed to an imaginary map built as a reflection of one’s own virtue.