Note: It happened, again. My first draft got posted before I got around to revising it and I don't have time right now. That having happened, I will leave this up and go back to it later this morning,
If, at the turn of the millennium, someone had told me that by 2017 I would be getting some of my most important information from Esquire and GQ and that I'd consider The Nation an unreliable asset of a multi-billionaire crime boss dictator, a former communist from Russia, I'd have told them they were nuts. But such is this world we are living in.
Charles Pierce isn't the only bright light practicing valuable journalism in unexpected venues today, Jack Holmes, also at Esquire, is coming up with some of
the most important information. And speaking of unexpected avenues of truth, there is the man who perhaps pissed me off more than anyone who isn't a Republicanfascist last year, Bill Clinton putting his finger on several its in pointing out something I've mentioned several times, we aren't being screwed around with by people with any kind of political or religious ideology, we are being screwed by a series of international multi-billionaire oligarchs who have no religion or ideology (atheist-materialist religion) other than their own enrichment.
It's still anniversary time, as we take stock of Donald Trump's election and all that's happened in the year since. President Bill Clinton, whom Trump denied the chance of becoming America's first First Man, is doing his own reflecting—some of it on Conan Wednesday night. Clinton ticked through a number of factors fueling Trump's rise and the deep divisions in the country, including the economic stagnancy of the nation's rural areas and the urge to blame immigrants for the results of macroeconomic developments on a massive scale. But he also tackled perhaps the most basic threat of Trumpism: the War on Truth.
Clinton referenced "The Dictators' Club" of autocratic world leaders, and explained how each and every one of them is invested in one thing: "They want to abolish the line between fact and fiction and truth and lie," Clinton explained, as the Putins and Erdogans came to mind, "because they figure if you don't know what's true, and you don't think you can ever know, that pretty soon everybody will accept that democracy is no longer possible."
Though I am certain that Bill Clinton and the likes of Jack Holmes don't read this blog, this is so close to my own thinking of the past year that it makes me feel kind of spooked. And it gets spookier. The role that media amplified lies have played in the subversion of democracy, of using the mass media to effectively alter history has reached the crisis point here as it did long ago in such places as Russia.
It's hard not to immediately think of Kellyanne Conway's "alternative facts," or what Dan Rather and others call the "post-truth" politics of the present. The president, certainly, has almost no regard for whether or not something is true. It is largely irrelevant, in his view, what actually happened, so long as enough people will believe his version of events. His blow-up with a Gold Star family over a condolence call last month actually began when he made the wild claim out of thin air that previous presidents did not make condolence calls. That was completely untrue, but this is basically routine at this point. Fact-checking services like Politifact have scored as much as 69 percent of what the president says as some degree of false.
His forays into history are frequently disastrous, because he knows nothing of what actually happened and, rather than learn before speaking, simply makes something up. That's how he got the River of Blood on his golf course, and how he described Frederick Douglass—an African-American icon who died in 1895—as "someone who has done a terrific job that is being recognized by more and more people."
With the implosion of Marxism, the dictators who used to exert control over hundreds of millions if not billions of people in places such as Russia are now a class of billionaire gangsters who are making common cause with billionaire gangsters from around the world. American gangsters such as man the Trump cabinet and are having their assets inserted throughout the American government, some of them such as Rex Tillerson, de facto Putonian assets, have no intention of serving the interests of the American People, they are as dedicated to enslaving and turning us into economic assets and if selling out the United States to the Putonian crime bosses pays better for them and their corporations, we will get sold down the river.
There is no human institution, no human political or legal theory that isn't vulnerable to the intuition and ingenuity of evil intent and the ideologies present in the 20th century were some of the most vulnerable of human inventions. Those built on the slogans of 18th century enlightenment as found in the Constitution which turn out to be as vulnerable to those evils, indeed, the idolized founders intentionally put much of that vulnerability into the thing*. The desire to be free of moral restraints, the intellectual and academic whoring after the reputability of a science that those doing that seldom understood except in so far as they knew it had attained a status their studies didn't have and a myriad of other things - including actual selling out to anti-democratic ideologies and the thugs who gained power through them - have perverted the secular faith in America's Bill of Rights and the provisions in it. That was the venue through which our media gained total impunity for lying, such as the lies that were told to sandbag Hillary Clinton in last years elections but which have done so much more than that to destroy the aspirations of democracy. The empty dreams of absolute freedom to say and do the most outrageous things, the rock-and-roll ethics of wild man DJs, out of control musicians, gonzo journalists, drugged out, semi-automatic weapons and doing shock jock to gather radio and cabloid audiences through appeals to their strongest and worst weaknesses are just a symptom of the kind of thing that the total freedom of the media to serve itself through promoting the amoral worst as a means of getting our money and enslaving us. There are less gaudy and less entertaining means of doing that, as well. Absolute, gonzo freedom might be tolerable in a brainless movie plot when it's someone without power, a village nutcase or charming eccentric, but only when such people aren't actually in charge of things or leading the town meeting.
Temporarily breaking my moratorium on the use of the over-used term, the irony of American freedom is that we are finding that when it is freedom from even the simplest of moral restraints, the freedom to lie in the most audience pleasing way, from stage, from the page, from the mic and from the camera, the absolute freedom of the press to lie will enslave us. That is no novel concept, the lies of racism enslaved Black people, murdered others, subjugated women all along. The idiocy of the founding slave owners and men of commerce to rely on gentlemens' ethics to protect THEIR interests and their desire to not be inconvenienced by a dictatorial, in their imaginings, monarchal government instead of a morality that depended and mostly still does depend on religion has encoded weaknesses in the Constitution that, through the thinking and practices of the legal establishment have made us totally vulnerable to the studied manipulation and control of the billionaire oligarchs.
The superstitions of Anglo-American materialism aren't any less productive of depravity than the old, religio-political superstitions, those that existed in reality and those made up by the ideologues of the atheist Enlightenment**. The pretense that they have more reliability or, in the worst cased, the actual reliability that science is supposed to have make them as or more dangerous than the superstitions of witch burners and Brit pantomime inquisitors. When you sell people their enslavement with slogans of freedom, when you tell them that their most depraved desires are "natural" if not biologically beneficial, when you tell the privileged that their privilege identifies them as the crown of creation and your legal system is dedicated to the amassing of money and, therefore, power, you will get what's happening to us, when someone who embodies so much of the worst of that regime of amoral freedom, Donald Trump, can get "the evangelical vote" and a minor pervert of the same system, a Roy Moore can prosper and, likely, will become a U.S. Senator though proven to be a pedophile pervert. Donald Trump became president even as his bragging on the Hollywood Access tape was a fact and the possibility of the Moscow fun with prostitutes was already known.
Democracy isn't a thing that can just happen, it depends on the right conditions being present and opponents of democracy can, especially through the mass media, produce the conditions under which it is impossible even as the empty form of it, something called elections, still happen. That is what happened in the United States. That is not news to those American democracy, under the Constitution, was set up to shaft from the beginning, White people of the middle-class and even some of those in the upper class are just finding that we, as well, can be victimized even under the forms of the Constitution. We can even be sold out by our billionaire oligarchs when they get a good enough offer from the dictator of Russia and the great "free press" will be in on the deal. Why expect anything else when such as Australian porn and lie moguls are admitted in the country to do to us here what he did in Britain?
Billionaire fortunes will prove to be incompatible with democracy, the legal-economic features of our own Constitutional government which have enabled the amassing of those fortunes will be proven to have allowed that. Instead of identifying and abolishing the means of our enslavement, the slogans of 20th century the civil liberties industry have helped them destroy democracy. The overriding fact remains, Donald Trump is a product of the media, of the "free press" freed to lie and to serve its owners purposes. Democracy is not possible in a people who refuse to know the truth because lies are so much more entertaining and it's what's on TV tonight.
The fact is, democracy depends on an absolute belief that it is immoral to lie and that lies allowed will produce pain, disaster and death. With modern media, it depends on the prohibition of broadcast lies and their punishment when broadcast, on air, by cable, by internet transmission. The materialist-atheist systems and ideologies can't come up with any way to assert that*** which is more than a flaccid gentleman's agreement. I don't think there's anything except a suspicion that God made that a feature of reality can have the generalized effect which is productive of and compatible with government of, by and for The People. When The People have been corrupted with lies, democracy is impossible. When they believe it's a sin to tell a lie, democracy is at least possible.
* The very things which put a series of our worst politicians and presidents and, lest it be forgotten, Supreme Court justices in power are the slave owner - commercial interest enhancing features of the Constitution. The Electoral College, the unproportional representation that is a mockery of democracy, etc. Even the feeble afterthoughts of the Bill of Rights, successfully turned into manipulable and aimless aphorisms in the manipulations of the drafting and adoption process have been successfully turned into weapons against The People and the possibility of democracy. There has been no more successful weapons than lies and the exploitation of methodically identified and enhanced weakness of character.
** Talking of pervasively and fervently believed in lies, an encyclopedia of those could be complied.
*** I don't think it's any accident that our billionaire oligarchs have sold us out to the billionaire oligarchs of the Putonian mobsters. Putin might have figured that Moscow is worth buying off the Patriarch of Moscow and even going to a Divine Liturgy, but his background is what really informs his moral depravity and that is as vulgarly materialistic as Trumps'. It just spoke a different language.
