Hey, #Me, Too!
A gentleman standing in front of me on a long, slow-moving line of Christmas-related customers at the fabulous FDR-designed U.S. Post Office in Poughkeepsie last Friday morning, a craggily handsome old character looking like a cross between Kenny Rogers and Jeffrey “The Dude” Lebowski on one of his better days, turned around and nodded, perhaps detecting in my Colonel Sanders countenance a fellow traveler. Something was obviously on his mind. On the way down the stairs outside of the building, commenting wistfully about how there used to be more than two tellers working such a crowd and how the country is going to shit, he got to the point. “I liked Trump … I voted for him, but this tweeting bullshit is too much. And women are ruining this country, all these men going down for …” … he couldn’t even finish his sentence. “They’re not going to let him be president. Maybe Hillary’s behind it.” After admitting to the poor guy my conflicted feelings about Trump (a genuine outsider and agent for change, who happens to be out of his gourd and thus a possible threat to the American experiment, not to mention life on Earth), we shook hands and parted amicably, two sides of a wobbly, spinning coin that’s fast approaching the edge of the table.
The cognitive dissonance that has bedeviled America since the first disease-ridden European fortune hunter set eyes upon these virgin shores is once again approaching the sort of fever pitch that spawns revolutionary behavior. This is happening thanks largely to the mass manipulation possibilities afforded by the World Wide Web, an exponentially more effective form of mind control than the already reliable printing press, radio and television. I see this cancer growing and metastasizing in my painstakingly bipartisan Facebook and Twitter feeds, as livid, screaming righties and lefties tear themselves and each other apart over the cunningly contrived set of “issues” being force-fed to them 24 hours a day. Every conceivable form of degenerate human behavior has been resuscitated into the eternal omnipresent and is paraded before us for inspection and divisive comment: racism, sexism, rape, child abuse, beheading, torture, murder, genocide, police brutality, black violence, white violence, drug addiction, alcoholism, slavery, human trafficking, corporate and government corruption, and on and on. The moment you first click “like,” the algorithms pile on, working you farther and farther into one wormhole or another, until you can’t look your neighbor straight in the eye at the grocery store for fear that he or she is one of the enemy.
Most of our nation’s uncomfortably “united” population has sorted itself into at least two — but probably more than five or ten or twenty — separate camps, divided and conquered by an accommodating media and the economic and political powers that control them. Those who do not self-identify as “angry” or “disgusted” are usually either “afraid” or “depressed.” A small minority claims to pay no attention to any of this and copy/pastes pointless detritus like rainbows, trite quasi-religious homilies and cat movies, while staying at home and either forgetting or outright refusing to vote.
There are very few, if any, issues that can unite more than half of us in any meaningful way, a situation that has devolved into a zeitgeist ripe for exploitation by the likes of Donald Trump or worse.
It’s not good, right?
Well, yes, but the knife can and does cut in multiple ways. Assuming the Satan-spawned Trump/Pence coalition doesn’t send us careening headlong into the Christian right’s long awaited and hotly anticipated Armageddon, there is hope on the way for those among us pining for a return to a more run-of-the-mill form of soul-crushing, one-world statism. This “hope” for “change” comes once again in the form of wily old Chuck Schumer, the man who brought us Barack Obama and the decimation of Hillary Clinton, among other things, and whose gnarly hand remains firmly on the tiller of the deep state, his steely gaze locked on goals far, far in the future. As our President seems dimly aware, Sen. Schumer is orchestrating a complex, multi-step coup d'état, setting the table with the Ronan Farrow-initiated takedown of Democratic mega-donor Harvey Weinstein, which resulted in a flurry of similar takedowns of alpha miscreants on both sides of America’s ideological Red/Blue divide and the rise of the #MeToo movement. This past week, Schumer-led forces, spearheaded by his pick to lead the Democratic power elite back into the driver’s seat, Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, doubled down on the zero tolerance theme, hounding sacrificial lamb Al Franken out of office as a prelude to the longer goal of knocking out Trump, and the even longer goal of returning a female-led U.S.A. contingent to a seat at the New World Order buffet table.
On Monday, on cue, Gillibrand went on CNN (the entity disparaged by Trump supporters as the “Clinton News Network”) for an “exclusive interview,” opening fire on Trump: "President Trump has committed assault, according to these women, and those are very credible allegations of misconduct and criminal activity, and he should be fully investigated and he should resign."
Interestingly, almost as if he were reading from the same Schumer-penned script as Ms. Gillibrand, the Trumpster stuck his foot even farther up his gold-plated ass by tweeting: “Lightweight Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, a total flunky for Charles E. Schumer and someone who would come to my office ‘begging’ for campaign contributions not so long ago (and would do anything for them), is now in the ring fighting against Trump …”, prompting yet another reactive firestorm and playing directly into the Schumer camp’s hands. Makes one wonder if The Donald himself were not recruited long ago as a pawn in Chuck’s master plan to destroy the GOP from within.
Anyway, Ms. Gillibrand’s star is truly on the rise, as I predicted would happen eight years ago. And politics, as they say, really does make strange bedfellows. They’ll never, ever tire of fucking us over. Make sure you click “like” as you bend over and enjoy the ride.
Biff Thuringer