Trump Lives In The Twilight Zone (And Now So Do We)

As we try to comprehend what is happening to this country, we turn to the past and to popular culture. This is like that. Trump is like Hitler because he is a racist, authoritarian hate monger…or he isn’t like Hitler because he isn’t a vegetarian. I posted about how this surreal moment reminds me of the final scene in Rosemary’s Baby.

For a while though I have mostly been thinking that Donald Trump is like a child. A spoiled child. And now a very powerful spoiled child.

Like the one played by Bill Mumy in that episode of Twilight Zone, “It’s a Good Life” from November 1961. The episode takes place in an imaginary town called Peaksville, Ohio. Apt that it should take place in Ohio, because that is where a lot of Trump’s mojo came from this year.

Watch this episode here, on Hulu

In this episode it’s not a wonderful life, it’s only a good life, and that description is entirely ironic. Except irony isn’t allowed in Peaksville. No opposing opinions. No comments or criticisms. And no bad vibes directed at little Anthony Fremont, because bad vibes are punishable by death. You are only allowed to have nice thoughts about this red haired six year-old because he can’t stand for anyone to think differently than he does. And he's vicious. He punishes disagreement with sudden humiliating death. But, like Trump, he is distractible, so the adults around him try desperately to distract him and please him. They are his hostages, again like how we feel right now with Trump. We are all hostage to his moods, his whims, his vindictiveness, his thin skin, his irrational swings this way and that. And he is on the verge of becoming the most powerful man in the world.

The closing words delivered by Mr. Serling could just as well be about the world after November 8th, 2016. (Members of the press take note.)

"No comment here, no comment at all. We only wanted to introduce you to one of our very special citizens, little Anthony Fremont, age 6, who lives in a village called Peaksville in a place that used to be Ohio. And if by some strange chance you should run across him, you had best think only good thoughts. Anything less than that is handled at your own risk, because if you do meet Anthony, you can be sure of one thing: you have entered The Twilight Zone."

The Monsters Behind The Monster

Steve Bannon, the top advisor who will have President Trump on a leash, is the man behind Breitbart News, one of the most notorious lie-producing and hate-fomenting websites on the right.

This is what these people think of women:

"In terms of female happiness, women’s liberation was probably a mistake, and it was a mistake driven by technology that was, of course, invented by men. Let’s start with the device that forced women out of the home they so lovingly kept, wrenched their children from their arms and doomed them to perform unsatisfying tasks in the workforce in order to respond to new social norms: the washing machine."

The full Breitbart article in favor of putting women back in the kitchen and the laundry.

Trump the online bully in chief is going to be advised by the most prolific online bully of them all. Good luck, Melania.

MONEY magazine/CNN on Brietbart's bullying and dishonesty

Hate and hate crimes rose in 2016, encouraged by our new president elect and his posse.

Reported by Minnesota Public Radio

Reported by Quartz

We need to quit normalizing these people. They are not normal. They are wrong. They are dangerous.

In the Fort Worth Star Telegram

The Republican official in West Virginia who said it would be refreshing to have a dignified First Lady for a change, after eight years of "an ape in heels."

LiveScience has an article about the association of low intelligence with conservatism and racism

Have We No Sense of Decency At Long Last?

“One cannot really love Jesus and wish to follow him and also vote for a person who so clearly embodies the opposite of everything Christ taught, died for and demands of us.”

The Christian view expressed in the Dallas Morning News

"Listen: it is not politics as usual when one camp continually threatens the other with imprisonment and death, screaming female-specific vulgarities, painting her face on targets, hoisting her effigy being hanged. No candidate in the history of the US, Barack Obama included, has been subjected to so much jubilant violation.
I suffer these humiliations as my own and can’t understand why voters stand by with arms crossed, assessing her stamina and valour while Clinton is taking it on the chin. How have we not exploded into a new civil rights movement with women and men together rushing on to the streets to demand that female humanity matters? Where is our primal scream against being bullied, dismissed, reviled for the misdeeds of others and witch-hunted for the crime of being competent while female?"

In the Guardian, Barbara Kingsolver invites us to repudiate Trump and his vile bullying.

The Republicans have wrapped themselves in Trumpism because, at the end of 35 years, Reaganomics itself is being revealed as a long con. Probably the most successful and enduring scam in our history.

The Long Con from Reagan to Trump, in the Guardian.

The Hillary hate is a dangerous poison fabricated out of fringe ideas and carefully cultivated insecurities. Ever noticed how Trump takes the things he’s accused of and thrown them back on his opponents? The irony is deeper than that. The cause of the insecurities that fuel the right wing anger can be found in their own movement. It was Reaganomics that destroyed working incomes and working class prosperity. Reagan plus Gingrich plus W and Cheney equals Trump. The long long con game has come home to roost and they have learned to worship it.

CNN sorts through the paranoid fringe of Hillary haters.

Two wrongly debunked ideas have re-emerged and may yet prove themselves right.

1. The Vast Right Wing Conspiracy that Hillary cited decades ago, which was laughed at then, is so visibly and tangibly real today it’s amazing no journalists have admitted it’s real and reported on it. Maybe because they hesitate to prove her right. (That would be “bias”.) Pulitzers are won by telling the truth people have avoided hearing.

2. The Silent Majority. Nixon’s favorite hatchet man, Pat Buchanan, slipped the phrase to him in 1969 and both Nixon and Agnew used it to powerful effect. But Creedence also invoked it in their song Effigy, released the day before Nixon used in his November 1969 speech, so maybe it’s their line. But the phrase goes further back than Nixon and the sixties. The point I’m getting at is a belief that there are a lot more Americans who are lining up against Trumpism than we are hearing about in the polls. A silent majority. The polls have seesawed as news came out favoring one or the other because news that benefits one side or the other encourages people to voice that opinion to poll takers. I’m convinced most Americans are simply keeping their opinions to themselves because the Republicans have poisoned the public conversation where such opinions are voiced. A silent majority.

I get back to what Joseph Welch said to Senator Joe McCarthy, which finally took the wind out of the malign gasbag: "You've done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?"

This should be addressed at the entire Republican Party, not just to Donald Trump and his surrogates.

Your Daily Trump––The Lynch Mob Mentality Is Alive And Well

A perceptive filmmaker has created a video that has gone viral. It plays Trump's hateful violent words over some ugly racist episodes in our past. It's upsetting because it's true. (Please watch this video.)

The old ugliness and hate has crawled out from under its rock.

Trump has validated it and given it a leader. He has given it a voice, his voice.

He has put these bullyboys in action, jackbooted them and encouraged them to bring their guns.

He’s encouraged these thugs to beat up the people who disagree with him. To beat up the people whose skin is a different color, whose religion is different, whose nation of birth is different.

He’s reaped enthusiastic approval from the KKK and American Nazis and he returns their love with a wink.

Hitler had Mein Kampf, in which he explained how brutal he planned to be and who he planned to exterminate.

Trump had his TV programs, which were built around ritual humiliation of people who desperately wanted to get ahead.

Trump’s TV programs brought the ugly brutality and degradation of frat rituals to a mass audience. It was sold as fun, as a joke, as make believe, but it was what he sincerely was after, ritual humiliation of those he could gain power over.

And the TV audience ate it up. They loved watching Trump humiliate people––while they were safe at home and out of his reach.

Well they’re not out of his reach now. The new targets for Trump’s organized beatings and humiliations are American voters, the non-Aryan voters, the non-Republican voters, the voters not born here. And women, especially women. Trump has been rubbishing women for decades from his comfortable position on talk show couches.

We used to call this kind of behavior monstrous and wrong, but Trump has ridden in on a wave of reaction, leading millions of people who hate political correctness because it inhibits their right as Americans to verbally abuse and insult and degrade large groups of Americans they see as different from them. Trump is the champion of those people who think abusiveness is a great cause. His loud presence on television has brought this ugly behavior back into public again, proud and defiant. They have a deep hatred and they want to parade it publicly, the way the ugliness paraded in its brown shirts in Germany in the 30s, the way similar bigots marched down Pennsylvania Avenue in their white hoods in the 20s.

Trump has made this kind of hate popular again. In the early 1960s it was popular to beat up African Americans who sat at whites-only lunch counters across the South. We chose which side we were on then. We must reassert that now.

The Bullying Of American Opinion And How We Let It Happen

In the wake of the Sandy Hook massacre of grade school children the president spoke for most Americans and spoke well and clearly. He decried gun violence, which this was. He expressed sadness that our system was not permitting changes to make Americans safer. But he did it calmly, not as a demagogue. The moment would have been perfect for a demagogue. We are most easily persuaded when we are horrified but we are wise to keep our heads, and a wise leader respects that. Discussing these things calmly is the American Way.

His main points were vehemently opposed and rejected by the Republican Party who were devoted to guns and gun rights and gun manufacturers. Two opposed points of view. We need to choose. Were the two points of view equally valid? Were they equal in light of our values?

Did President Obama fail us here? Should he have whipped up our emotions and forced a change over the violent objections of many Americans? This is exactly what those opponents have warned he would do. They say it so loudly it seems to many that he has done what he has not. Obama did not do what George W. Bush did after 9/11. President Bush exploited our anger to start a war against a nation that had nothing to do with the attack of 9/11. The attackers did not come from Iraq. President Obama did not use Sandy Hook or his considerable oratorical gifts to create a frenzy of anger against the NRA or gun owners, nor did he demonize the sick individual who had perpetrated the attack, he didn’t demonize the mentally ill or gun owners or teenagers or anyone. He did not use the opportunity of national horror to parade his concern for the survivors and their families on national television.

The response among his critics was what it always has been, that he doesn’t care enough, because he doesn’t flaunt his emotions or exploit the emotions of the mourning. Instead he met with the families as they would have wished, as any of us would have wished, away from the prying glare of television and media. There is modesty and decency in this. Of course his critics found fault with modesty and decency. Because he respected their private mourning Republicans and the folks at Fox said he didn’t care enough. Today I saw this article about Obama visiting Sandy Hook. There’s been a decent interval since that horrible day. We now know more about his personal response to the families.

We have two parties in this country, clearly opposed in values and goals. One is an armed camp. The other is less so. One is prone to whipping up violent irrational emotions. One is calmer and more deliberate and is criticized for it. (It took Democrats a few years to determine that the war in Iraq was sold with fraudulent arguments. Deliberations can save you from bad decisions but it can make it harder to oppose them.) One party is a bully, one is quieter. Is quietness the same as weakness? Does it mean the values are not as strong or valid? One party shouts what is on its mind immediately, without thinking things through. The Democratic Party is called dithering because it consults and discusses and listens and doesn’t blurt whatever is on its mind at any given moment, especially at angry moments. The GOP has many angry moments. I have sometimes used the old Goofus and Gallant canard to describe this striking difference.

So I read this article about a quiet respectful president visiting the bereaved out of the public eye.

And this is the top article Facebook recommends I read after I read the article about President Obama's response to Sandy Hook. Point and Counterpoint. It’s implied that both stories are equally true. Facebook is how America sorts its feelings and opinions today. It’s how we sift fact and fiction, right and wrong.

What does this say about us, about what is becoming of us, about what is being done to us?

Are we becoming binary? Either we love and totally believe someone or something or a set of values or we hate them and dismiss them. I think this is the problem Obama has faced from day one: the opposing party decided, its leaders swore a solemn oath on this, to oppose everything he tried to do and everything he said. This filters down to the average person as a command from on high.

When a Republican candidate makes irrational and racist claims and demands it licenses the worst kind of instincts in his followers. Donald Trump’s and Ted Cruz’s and other candidates’ ugly remarks about Muslims and refugees from the chaos we created in the Middle East encourages individuals to confront Muslims they meet on the street and vent their previously suppressed hatred. That hatred was previously unacceptable in public, now it has the Republican seal of approval and everyone who identifies with that party feels he is right to vent those ugly opinions in the faces of anyone they suspect might not be as “American” as they are.

In 2001 President Bush said “You’re either with us or against us.” But he was emphatic that most Muslims are our friends and many are our fellow citizens deserving of respect. Why was that civility and decency discarded? Possibly because of the oppositional nature of the Republican Party that swore to oppose Obama’s presidency at every turn. If this president said peaceable righteous Muslims deserve our respect the Republican attitude needed to be, or at least turned out to be the absolute opposite. Whatever President Obama says has to be disputed and opposed. Binary politics.

Computers are binary, everything reduced to a zero or a one, no ambiguity or nuance. It’s either yes or no. Humans are smarter than that. This Yes/No, either/or evenhandedness expresses itself in different ways. To a computer both zero and one are valid, but Americans increasingly see Yes or No. And the arbiters of the public conversation tend to keep their judgments to themselves. Journalists are barred from having a political affiliation. Which means they must––MUST––write every article in an evenhanded manner… to the point of saying that every point of view, every opinion even an unfactual or unscientific one, is equally valid. Thus articles are built on false equivalencies. If the first paragraph sets out the truth the second paragraph is obligated to set out the opposite, the falsehood, the superstition, and there is no appropriate place for any journalistic judgment. The reader must decide. And that decision is most often made according to team affiliation or inherited prejudice. The reader chooses the version he or she “believes in”––it doesn’t matter which is true or which is a deception or which is paid for by a fossil fuel billionaire or which is cynically expressed by a candidate who wants to harness the hatred in people’s hearts to win power. There is no judgment, only feelings matter. False equivalency, by giving equal status to error and poorly formed opinion encourages that wrongheadedness, endorses it. False equivalency validates falsehood and discredited beliefs by saying they are just as true as truth and enlightened values. So hateful prejudice and fair-mindedness are equally valid today. Right and wrong are equally OK, you get to choose.

And now, it appears, Facebook has embraced this false equivalency laziness. Because they are not a newspaper or broadcast outlet there is no place to point out the flaw in their system. There are no letters to the Facebook editor. There are no retractions of stories they push on us. And Facebook now stands as the absolute standard. This is now how we decide things by giving equal status to our worst instincts and letting the volume of our shouting decide which set of values is valid. This is democracy, of a kind. But absolute majority rule, brute democracy, the democracy of the mob, doesn’t give a damn about the minority. Hitler was elected by a democracy, a German republic, with a congress and parties. His brownshirts hustled and bullied the majority into following its worst instincts, or the worst instincts of its worst members. We know what resulted. Hitler was put in power by powerful men and corporate power who saw a benefit in erasing the individual and creating a mob they could control, but they were unable to control Hitler and his mob. They went along with that mob until the bitter end.

The Loudest, Angriest Person Decides What Is True

Half of America doesn’t care what is true and what is false, they only care which they are supposed to believe. It’s a game between opposing sides and truth doesn’t matter to them. They don't care if Bill O'Reilly is a liar. They like him for being loud and angry, and that's enough.

When scientists tell us terrible things will happen if we don’t lower our fossil fuel use, Republicans simply fire the scientists. Cut off their mikes. Ban them from talking to anyone.

It doesn’t matter what is true. It only matters that their side is louder. That their side has bigger angrier bullies. That they have more oil billions powering their microphones. (It's a nasty but efficient mindset and easy to program people to believe.)

So they can shout down anyone telling the truth the way Bill O’Reilly does on FoxNews

… or GOPTV as it was meant to be called when it was invented in the Nixon White House.

Smells like team spirit, doesn’t it?

Truth used to belong to the loud, the more violent, the one willing to murder anyone who disagrees with them. That was in the bad old days.

Welcome back to the Dark Ages.

Romney In and Out of Uniform

The Boston Globe reports on a serious contradiction in Mitt Romney's carefully crafted personal saga. Today Mitt Romney says "he longed to be sent to Vietnam" when he was draft age. That he wanted to take an active part in the war he supported so vigorously. Not true. Romney actually sought and received multiple and extended deferments.

Is it a lie to say you longed to take part in the war you supported (and protested in favor of) when you actually did everything you could to avoid serving? What else would you call it? And his story has changed from admitting he didn't want to go to Vietnam to saying he longed to be in combat. His changing stories should raise concerns too.

News media avoid reporting this kind of damaging story about Republican candidates. They stonewalled coverage of Bush's elaborate draft evasions and reporting on it ended Dan Rather's career. They downplayed the stories about McCain's bizarre record as a navy pilot and his erratic behavior since. But you can imagine the blanket coverage a story like this would get if it were about President Obama or any Democrat. Even bogus stories about a Democrat always receive serious attention and refuse to die even when debunked. Real ones about Republicans are barely reported.

This story from the National Memo is potentially more troubling: an alleged history of impersonating police officers. What kind of personality engages in this behavior for kicks? And because it's criminal behavior, what could it mean to Romney's candidacy?