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syncorsink · 7 years

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Transmuting the Tumblr: A Writer Emerges

Hello, dear reader!

This is both the last post I will be making on this Tumblr, and the first post of a brand new era in my life.

Not long after Trump’s election almost one year ago, I began feverishly writing, writing pages and pages of material, just unfurling, digesting, lamenting, raging my mind. I wasn’t writing because I wanted to, I was writing because I had to--it was somewhat akin to being in a trance state. It disturbed me because the time it was taking up impaired my activities on other commitments, and I couldn’t see the purpose of what I was doing. I felt out of control, seized by the need to write--and it made me anxious. Hearing from even a scant handful of friends that we see you and whatever this is, we’re excited for you and we believe in you made a world of difference.

Now, I’m sure any writer will tell you: my experience is not that strange or uncommon, really. Over the past year, I have begun to look with a more objective eye at the patterns in my life--at my compulsive streams of consciousness, at the stack of two dozen packed journals beside my desk--and come to the conclusion that whether or not I embrace or accept the label, I AM, simply, a writer... and it might reduce unnecessary tension in my life if I were to acknowledge this as a self-evident matter.

Why am I so averse, why have I struggled so grotesquely over all these years, to simply label myself as an artist, as a writer? I’m sure that question is best answered by my therapist. Suffice it to say, it’s been a long and rocky journey to the blatantly obvious. Fortunately: I have chosen to embrace and accept, and work with, myself as a writer.

Perhaps any writer would tell you, too, that it is also not surprising that what I casually dubbed “the Trump pieces” did not go nowhere. They began to take finer and clearer shape. Over many hours and stages of refinement, and with the aid of friendly readers/editors, they are now a set of 9 pieces, amounting to over 25,000 words. Adopted by Metapsychosis, an online journal about art and consciousness (and part of Cosmos.coop’s platform), Transmuting the Trumpocalypse launches today as a prose, dialogue and multimedia odyssey into the subtle roots and forms of power, as exemplified by Donald Trump’s shocking political ascendance culminating in his installment as president of the United States--a predicament that continues to cause disastrous havoc and widespread suffering, today.

I feel excited to share my thoughts. I strongly believe that we are not looking at our collective situation in ways that are helpful, or that can unleash the best of what is possible to accomplish together. Perhaps telling what I see might help reduce harm and confusion in the world, even just a little. I will be sharing insights gleaned from arduous, private efforts on my part to align every last molecule of my life experiences into a framework that makes elegant sense. As you’ll see in the pieces, Buddhist practice, as well as indigenous and permaculture awareness and practice, have played a significant role, for me, in developing this. Though my ego may revolt, so engrained to proclaiming itself small and unworthy, I am learning how to say “this is good and right, and it is worthy of sharing with the world.”

To further support and prioritize myself as a writer, I will be migrating off of this Tumblr and on to an as-yet-unbuilt blog on the new blogging platform, A Theory of Everybody (also part of the Cosmos.coop universe) which will become the central repository for my regular writings. This will be the singular hub where I organize and present my writings to the world; in fact, once the ToE blog is up and running, I am going to try to publish a new piece of writing every day. If you’re wondering why this Tumblr has been so dormant lately, it is because I have been anticipating this blogging platform launch for months now, and have been stockpiling a mighty armory full of backlogged writings. Less than a month from today, it is due to be up and running, so I will meet you there, gleefully, to throw open the gates.

Thank you, as always, for reading. I am looking forward to building my rapport with the world in this way. You, dear reader, are my world. You are cordially invited to receive me and respond to me. I deeply appreciate the opportunity.

In closing, I’ll share the same aspiration here that I close the first essay of Transmuting the Trumpocalypse with. May you cultivate a mental soil that bears wholesome fruits.

And may I be so lucky as to contribute to that process.

With love,

Caroline/Clara

#transmuting the trumpocalypse #writing #metapsychosis #cosmos #theoryofeverybody #consciousness #gonebeyond

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ramrodd · 5 years

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COMMENTARY:

Eric, the biggest difference between your Dumb Ass Dad and Mussolini is that Dumb Ass Don will be treated like Jefferson Davis after he leaves office, this being America and all and Donald Duck Ass being a white northern Protestent and not being Southern Not White.

I mean, when I was growing up in the Army and Duck Ass Don was in a military reform school for rich boys, there were Italians who still loved Mussolini. They still bought into the dream he represented in life. Not unlike FDR and JFK. Only, Mussolini's and Jefferson Davis's dream was bullshit. And the Italians who suffered under Mussolini's bullshit Free Market Fascism and knew it was bullshit before Mussolini bullied his way into power and then made the same sort of diplomatic miscalculations Mussolini made, because Hitler thought he was a God, or, at least, the 2nd coming of Caesar Augustus, and. like Dumb Ass Don, neither one could, in the final analysis, think beyond the end of their own dicks. Like Jefferson Davis.

So, the Italians that strung up Mussolini spit on Mussolini. Jefferson Davis was protected by the US Army until the Radical Republicans got over their post-war orgy of lynch fever and he, Jefferson Davis, could make a good living the rest of his life creating the fiction of the Lost Cause and flogging his Tory Socialism theory of States Rights, where property rights of whites were superior to the human rights of non-whites, universally. Your Dumb Ass Dad might get spit at in Rikers, and you're so cute, you'll be fucked in the ass pretty much all day long. You'll get so you like it, in a YMCA kind of way.

The core constituency that Karl Rove represents in GOP demographics that came to town with Reagan have been spitting on everybody who they classify as "enemies", domestic and foreign. They are associated with the Dark Money agenda of the 1972 Powell Manifesto that is committed to sabotaging Nixon's Peaceful Structues and the domestic agenda he and Daniel Patritick Moynihan put into legislation that is/was designed to transform the Military-Industrial Complex to the Aerospace-Entrepreneur Matrix necessary to create the national infrastructure necessary to sustain a permanent NASA-Soyuz base on the moon by 2001, just like the movie, and, by example and hs Foreign policy agenda he set into motion with Nixon-Breznev Detente and Nixon-Mao Leaky Umpbrella Summit created to spread Democratic Socialism, globally, through a process President Putin describes as Sovereign Democray.

Nixon's Peaceful Structures comes directly from the lessons learned and the historically unpredented success of the Marshall Plan, as an expression of Clauswitz's definition of warfare as a continuation of political intercourse by the intermixing of means, Steve Bannon's agenda, which is the leading edge of the Powell Manifesto, is committed blowing up the Marshall Plan..

I am the leading edge of the League of Nations. It's a family thing. The Marshall Plan is based experientially by Marshall, Churchill, Truman and Eisenhower that the failure of the Radical Republicans to pass Wilson's League of Nations that compounded the folly of the Varsailles Treaty was a major contributor to the conditions that allowed the Free Market Fascism of Mussolini and Nazism to get the necessary critical mass to restart the wasting process of purely unfettered and unbuffered industrial violence and proposed to avoid that same cycle of violence.

Steve Bannon's agenda is committed to destroying that agenda and install the Free Market Fascism of the Tory Socialism and class warfare of Reaganomics and the macro-economic populism of the Trumpocalypse. But that's not why you got spit on, given that just being "Eric Trump" is the proximate cause and not some asshole thing you did, like pat her on the butt, or some such didn't happen. Servers are in it for the tips and they generally don't risk that cash flow for the satisfaction of calling an asshole like you and your brother an asshole: we only have your side of the story.

But assholes like don't seem to realize that Tea Party ass holes like you spent 8 years spitting on all things Clinton and then 8 years spitting on anybody who didn't line up with Richard "Dick" Cheney, America's favorite war criminal and the neo-con wet dream defined by The Project for the New American Century, and then 8 years spitting on all things Obama and then the last 2 years and 5 months spitting on Clinton voters, immigrants, Iranians, scientists, the FBI, CIA , Planned Parenthood, the Marshall Plan and Nixon's Peaceful Structures.

Apparently, white female Trump voters essential complaint is that no one listens to them. Not true. I can hear what Laura Ingraham and Kellyanne Conway is saying, as their proxy, and it is just ugliness. Spiritual, moral, social, material, measurable ugliness. Anti grace and beauty and mercy and charity, All greed and envy and punishment and unearned self-righteousness and backing a narcissism so profound it will eventually be recognized as a separate categorgy of the idiot savant as sociopath. Like Hitler's fixation with Mussolini.

Dumb Ass Don has done nothing but shit in the diplomatic punch bowl of the Marshall Plan. It that's why the waitress spit on you, she's just tyring to get her licks in before Dumb Ass Dad gets strung up, figuratively speaking , by the rule of law.

Unless he keeps his promise to Chairman Kim at the G-20, there will be no trade deals until after 2021.

#transformingamericafirst #eisenhowerrepublicansforAOC

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lost-carcosa · 2 years

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#american politics is fucked up #the trumpocalypse #and so it continues #MAGAts #fuck MAGAts #trump is a shit stain on the sole of humanity

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opgamerop · 7 years

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I appreciate you taking the time to reply. I know most ppl would just ignore a random scream into the internet. I learned a lot, you might have just changed my perspective on a few things. I hope we survive the trumpocalypse to argue about gits some more. have a good one. good luck ~ bye~

Same sentiment, didn't expect to have a conversation really; the most I thought would have been death threats. I would like to continue the conversation on GitS for sure.

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vicnor · 7 years

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Post-Trumpocalypse America

I was leery of Trump when he first announced his candidacy solely on the basis of the vibe I got from him. I stood by still unconvinced as his campaign picked up speed and my circle of people said, “I like how he says what he thinks.” I watched the debates, listened to his speeches, and heard my circle of people excuse his failings. I was never convinced or even slightly swayed. Post election, I am horrified. Every day I see damage to the environment, a lowering of standards of behavior, racism, an attack on consumer protections, a war on women, and a sloppy approach to covert war. This week alone, there was fear a major damn on the Euphrates river would fail from USA precision bombs. I now see his history of contradiction, his inhumanity, and his distain for the humans whose support he thrived upon. For every sensible thing he seems to be doing, there is a spray of nonsensical or illogical actions. The reason for this essay is to start thinking about the post-Trump era. I really feel Trump is apocalyptic. By apocalyptic I mean end of times. The election of Trump has ushered in a new era very rapidly. Continuing at this pace, in eight years we will be living in a very different America. Start imagining.

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andimarquette · 7 years

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Imitating Art: My Experience Living a Scene from The Second Wave by Jean Copeland

One of the best things about being a fiction writer is the vicarious thrill of placing a character in a situation I’ve never had the opportunity or the guts to experience myself. Whether it was my adolescent heroine in The Revelation of Beatrice Darby risking everything to come out in conservative 1950s New England, or Alice Burton attending a political demonstration during the 1970s women’s lib movement in The Second Wave, the creative process of imagining their worlds into print reality was empowering. It was also the only way I’d ever get to experience either event. After all, I can never go back to my early twenties and undo the damage caused by years of hiding in the closet. And I’d just assumed that with America so close to electing the first female president—ever—no longer would women need to galvanize in resistance to a political backlash against our basic human rights. After eight years of Barack Obama and Joe Biden, it seemed like women had finally cleared that hurdle.

So in 2016, when I set out to write my protest scene for The Second Wave, a modern romance exploring the star-crossed love affair of Alice and Leslie, I relied on internet research and my imagination to capture some essence of such a profound epoch, never having had occasion to attend a women’s rights rally growing up in the 80s in women-friendly Connecticut. The closest I’d ever come to anything like it was in 1984 when I was 15 and had tagged along with my older brother, Kevin, to a presidential campaign rally for Gary Hart. The only reason I was interested was because I’d learned that some democrat was making history by choosing a woman as his running mate. Yes, your memory serves you correctly that it was Walter Mondale who chose the woman, not Gary Hart. But that was of little consequence to my budding adolescent feminist sensibilities. What mattered was that a woman was selected to be a major player in the presidential election process for the first time in my life, and I wanted in some way to feel part of it.

Sitting in a coffee shop some thirty years later, I’d all but forgotten that experience as I wrote the scenes in The Second Wave, in which Alice and Leslie and their feminist friends, devoted disciples of Gloria Steinem, gathered to crochet, smoke pot, and discuss the issues women fought for and against in the 1970s. Coincidentally, Hillary Clinton was the favorite for the democratic nomination and, in my mind, sure to trounce any one of the cartoonish republican nominees in the general election. I relished writing the characters’ sardonic jokes about how forty years from then surely congress will have come to its senses and rectified the disparity in pay between men and women. I thought I was being clever having these bra-burning divas dare to dream that we might possibly see the first female president in our lifetimes because I’d truly believed it would happen that November.

Turns out, the American electorate proved they are more comfortable with a man who brags about grabbing a woman’s pussy than they are with a person who has a pussy grabbing the world’s most powerful office.

In the wake of this new, faux-1950s conservatism spawning from a presidential administration manned by Trump, Pence and Bannon, the three horsemen of the Trumpocalypse, male republican legislators have found renewed vigor in their attempts to throw more obstacles in women’s paths and send us back to the starting line faster than you can say executive order. Now the scenes of the biweekly meetings at which The Second Wave ladies lament the various agitations women’s libbers faced like abortion rights, sexual objectification on TV, and equal pay, serve as fresh reminders that the hurdles before us had never actually been cleared.

On the bright side, if I dare suggest there is one to an era of government-sanctioned misogyny, the throat-punch upset on Election Day set the stage for me to live my art and learn what it really means to organize for a cause.

The day after inauguration, exactly one year after I’d written my first fictional protest scene, as thousands mobilized for the Women’s March on Washington, DC, I proudly attended Connecticut’s March of Solidarity. It was both a sad anniversary and an exciting moment of reckoning. When I arrived in Hartford, on my own, unsure of where I was headed, I spotted people carrying rally signs and followed, quickening my pace the closer I got. As I power-walked through Bushnell Park, my adrenaline surged at the distant clamoring of crowds swelling around the steps of the state capitol. My head bobbed in time to the steady thud of drums from a marching band. As I milled through a forest of humans foliated with angry, funny, provocative signs of resistance, trying to get as close as possible, I had to pause to imbibe the synergy. Unseasonably warm and sunny that January day in New England, I was convinced Mother Nature had delivered the gorgeous weather to us as her gift of solidarity.

The march was indeed awe-inspiring, a flowering of relief as two months of disappointment, despair and fear of future unknowns dissipated in the crowd of thousands who shared my anxiety and my hope. As an LGBT woman, I’d never felt safer in a mass of strangers than I did that day. After years writing about poignant events from an abstract perspective, I finally got the chance to live and breathe one as an active participant. My mind was blown bigly by the overwhelming sense of harmony and purpose I felt standing with thousands of others as we spoke out against oppression and demanded our rights and our children’s in peaceful protest.

What we accomplished that afternoon is an intangible thing, but I know we accomplished something. “Hear Our Voices” was the marchers’ mantra, and it continues to resound as the momentum created that day is still inspiring phone calls to politicians in record numbers and plans for future resistance marches. I like to imagine that if Alice and Leslie and their intrepid pussy posse of 1970s activists were real and alive today, they would’ve boarded a bus to DC with flasks of wine and stashed grass and flashed the women’s empowerment fist out the windows as I cheered them on from the lawn of the Connecticut state capitol. Maybe in my next novel, I should have my heroine already be the president of the United States instead of just wishing for it.

Jean Copeland is an author, English teacher and activist from Connecticut. Her debut novel, The Revelation of Beatrice Darby, won the 2016 Alice B Lavender Award and the Golden Crown Literary Society “Goldie” for debut author. She is also the author of The Second Wave, available now, and Summer Fling coming in 2017.

https://www.boldstrokesbooks.com/authors/jean-copeland-113

https://jeancopeland.wordpress.com/

https://www.facebook.com/jean.copeland.7393

Twitter & Instagram: @jeaniecopes

Imitating Art by Jean Copeland

Imitating Art: My Experience Living a Scene from The Second Wave by Jean Copeland One of the best things about being a fiction writer is the vicarious thrill of placing a character in a situation I’ve never had the opportunity or the guts to experience myself.

Imitating Art by Jean Copeland Imitating Art: My Experience Living a Scene from The Second Wave by Jean Copeland One of the best things about being a fiction writer is the vicarious thrill of placing a character in a situation I’ve never had the opportunity or the guts to experience myself.

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jovebelle · 7 years

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Imitating Art: My Experience Living a Scene from The Second Wave by Jean Copeland

https://www.boldstrokesbooks.com/authors/jean-copeland-113

https://jeancopeland.wordpress.com/

https://www.facebook.com/jean.copeland.7393

Twitter & Instagram: @jeaniecopes

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nothingman · 7 years

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By John Feffer | (Tomdispatch.com) | – –

Dystopias have recently achieved full-spectrum dominance. Kids are drawn to such stories — The Giver, Hunger Games — like Goths to piercings. TV shows about zombie apocalypses, pandemics, and technology run amok inspire binge watching. We’ve seen the world-gone-truly-bad a thousand times over on the big screen.

This apocalyptic outpouring has been so intense that talk of “peak dystopia” started to circulate several years ago. Yet the stock of the doomsday cartel has shown no signs of falling, even as production continues at full blast. (A confession: with my recent novel Splinterlands I’ve contributed my own bit to flooding the dystopia market.) As novelist Junot Diaz argued last October, dystopia has become “the default narrative of the generation.”

Shortly after Diaz made that comment, dystopia became the default narrative for American politics as well when Donald Trump stepped off the set of The Celebrity Apprentice and into the Oval Office. With the election of an uber-narcissist incapable of distinguishing between fact and fantasy, all the dystopian nightmares that had gathered like storm clouds on the horizon — nuclear war, climate change, a clash of civilizations — suddenly moved overhead. Cue the rumble of thunder and the flash of lightning.

The response among those horrified by the results of the recent presidential election has been four-fold.

First came denial — from the existential dread that hammered the solar plexus as the election returns trickled in that Tuesday night to the more prosaic reluctance to get out of bed the morning after. Then came the fantasies of flight, as tens of thousands of Americans checked to see if their passports were still valid and if the ark bound for New Zealand had any berths free. The third stage has been resistance: millions poured into the streets to protest, mobilized at airports to welcome temporarily banned immigrants, and flocked to congressional meet-and-greets to air their grievances with Republicans and Democrats alike.

The fourth step, concurrent with all the others, has been to delve into the dystopias of the past as if they contained some Da Vinci code for deciphering our present predicament. Classics like Sinclair Lewis’s It Can’t Happen Here, George Orwell’s 1984, and Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale quickly climbed back onto bestseller lists.

It might seem counterintuitive — or a perverse form of escapism — to turn from the dystopia of reality to that of fiction. Keep in mind, though, that those novels became bestsellers in their own time precisely because they offered refuge and narratives of resistance for those who feared (in order of publication) the rise of Nazism, the spread of Stalinism, or the resurgence of state-backed misogyny in the Reagan years.

These days, with journalists scrambling to cover the latest outrage from the White House, perhaps it was only natural for readers to seek refuge in the works of writers who took the longer view. After all, it’s an understandable impulse to want to turn the page and find out what happens next. And dystopian narratives are there, in part, to help us brace for the worst, while identifying possible ways out of the downward spiral toward hell.

The dystopian classics, however, are not necessarily well suited to our current moment. They generally depict totalitarian states under a Big Brother figure and a panoptical authority that controls everything from the center, a scenario that’s fascist or communist or just plain North Korean. Certainly, Donald Trump wants his face everywhere, his name on everything, his little fingers in every pot. But the dangers of the current dystopian moment don’t lie in the centralizing of control. Not yet, anyway.

The Trump era so far is all about the center not holding, a time when, in the words of the poet Yeats, things fall apart. Forget about Hannah Arendt and The Origins of Totalitarianism — also a hot seller on Amazon — and focus more on chaos theory. Unpredictability, incompetence, and demolition are the dystopian watchwords of the current moment, as the world threatens to fragment before our very eyes.

Don’t be fooled by Trump’s talk of a trillion-dollar infrastructure boom. His team has a very different project in mind, and you can read it on the signpost up ahead. Next Stop: The Deconstruction Zone.

The Zombie Election

In February 2016, when Donald Trump won his first primary in New Hampshire, the New York Daily News headlined it “Dawn of the Brain Dead” and likened Trump’s GOP supporters to “mindless zombies.” Not to be outdone, that conspiracy-minded purveyor of fake news, Alex Jones, routinely described Hillary Clinton supporters as “zombies” on his Trump-positive website Infowars.

The references to zombies spoke to the apocalyptic mindset of both sides. Donald Trump deliberately tapped into the end-of-days impulses of Christian evangelicals, anti-globalists, and white power enthusiasts, who view anyone who hasn’t drunk their Kool-Aid as a dead soul. Meanwhile, those fearful that the billionaire blowhard might win the election began spreading the “Trumpocalypse” meme as they warned of the coming of ever more severe climate change, the collapse of the global economy, and the outbreak of race wars. There was virtually no middle ground between the groups, aside from those who decided to steer clear of the election altogether. The mutual disgust with which each side viewed the other encouraged just the kind of dehumanization implied by that zombie label.

Zombies have become a political metaphor for another reason as well. What’s frightening about the flesh eating undead in their current incarnations is that they are not a formal army. There are no zombie leaders, no zombie battle plans. They shamble along in herds in search of prey. “Our fascination with zombies is partly a transposed fear of immigration,” I wrote in 2013, “of China displacing the United States as the world’s top economy, of bots taking over our computers, of financial markets that can melt down in a single morning.”

Zombies, in other words, reflect anxiety over a loss of control associated with globalization. In this context, the “rise of the rest” conjures up images of a mass of undifferentiated resource consumers — hungry others who are little more than mouths on legs — storming the citadels of the West.

During the election campaign, the Trump team appealed to those very fears by running ads during the popular TV series The Walking Dead that deliberately played on anti-immigration concerns. Once in office, Trump has put into motion his campaign pledges to wall off the United States from Mexico, keep out Muslims, and retreat into Fortress America. He has put special effort into reinforcing the notion that the outside world is a deeply scary place — even Paris, even Sweden! — as if The Walking Dead were a documentary and the zombie threat quite real.

The concentration of power in the executive branch, and Trump’s evident willingness to wield it, certainly echoes dystopian fears of 1984-style totalitarianism. So have the extraordinary lies, the broadsides against the media (“enemies of the people”), and the targeting of internal and external adversaries of every sort. But this is no totalitarian moment. Trump is not interested in constructing a superstate like Oceania or even a provincial dictatorship like Airstrip One, both of which Orwell described so convincingly in his novel.

Instead, coming out of the gate, the new administration has focused on what Trump’s chief strategist and white nationalist Stephen Bannon promised to do several years ago: “bring everything crashing down.”

The Bannon Dystopia

Dystopians on the right have their own version of 1984. They’ve long been warning that liberals want to establish an all-powerful state that restricts gun ownership, bans the sale of super-sized sodas, and forces mythic “death panels” on the unwary. These right-wing Cassandras are worried not so much about Big Brother as about Big Nanny, though the more extreme among them also claim that liberals are covert fascists, closet communists, or even agents of the caliphate.

Strangely enough, however, these same right-wing dystopians — former Republican vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin on the (non-existent) death panels, Senator Tom Cotton (R-AR) on gun control, right-wing pundit Ann Coulter on soda bans and other trivial pursuits — have never complained about the massive build-up of government power in far more significant areas: namely, the military and the intelligence agencies. Indeed, now that they are back on top, the new Trumpianized “conservatives” are perfectly happy to expand state power by throwing even more money at the Pentagon and potentially giving greater scope to the CIA in its future interrogations of terror suspects. Despite falling rates of violent crime — a tiny uptick in 2015 obscures the fact that these remain at a historic low — Trump also wants to beef up the police to deal with American “carnage.”

So far, so 1984. But the radically new element on the Trump administration’s agenda has nothing to do with the construction of a more powerful state. At this year’s Conservative Political Action Conference, Bannon spoke instead of what was truly crucial to him (and assumedly the president): the “deconstruction of the administrative state.” Here, Bannon was speaking specifically of unleashing Wall Street, polluting industries, gun sellers, while freeing a wide range of economic actors from regulation of just about any sort. But Trump’s cabinet appointments and the first indications of what a Trumpian budget might look like suggest a far broader agenda aimed at kneecapping the non-military part of the state by sidelining entire agencies and gutting regulatory enforcement. Bye-bye, EPA. Nighty-night, Department of Education. Nice knowing you, HUD. We sure will miss you, Big Bird and foreign aid.

Even the State Department hasn’t proved safe from demolition. With professional diplomats out of the loop, Pennsylvania Avenue, not Foggy Bottom, will be the locus of control for international relations. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson is being reduced to little more than an ornament as the new triumvirate of Trump, Bannon, and Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner take over foreign policy (though Vice President Pence hovers in the background like a chaperone at the prom). Meanwhile, with a proposed $54 billion future hike in its budget, Trump’s Pentagon will remain untouched by the wrecking ball, as the new president presides over a devastating shrinkage of the government he dislikes and a metastasis of what he loves. (Think: giant, shiny aircraft carriers!)

Thus far, the Trump administration has acted with highly publicized incompetence: administration figures contradicting each other, executive orders short-circuiting the government machinery, tweets wildly caroming around the Internet universe, and basic functions like press conferences handled with all the aplomb of a non-human primate. Trump’s appointees, including Bannon, have looked like anything but skilled demolition experts. This is certainly no Gorbachev-style perestroika, which eventually led to the unraveling of the Soviet Union. It’s nothing like the “shock therapy” programs that first knocked down and then remade the states of Eastern Europe after 1989.

However, since deconstruction is so much easier than construction and Bannon prides himself on his honey-badger-like persistence, the administration’s project, messy as it seems so far, is likely to prove quite capable of doing real damage. In fact, if you want a more disturbing interpretation of Donald Trump’s first months in office, consider this: What if all the chaos is not an unintended consequence of a greenhorn administration but an actual strategy?

All that dust in the air comes, after all, from the chaotic first steps in a projected massive demolition process and may already be obscuring the fact that Trump is attempting to push through a fundamentally anti-American and potentially supremely unpopular program. He aims to destroy the status quo, as Bannon promised, and replace it with a new world order defined by three Cs: Conservative, Christian, and Caucasian. Let the media cover what they please; let the critics laugh all they like about executive branch antics. In the meantime, all the president’s men are trying to impose their will on a recalcitrant country and world.

Triumph of the Will

I took a course in college on the rise of Nazism in Germany. At one point, the professor showed us Triumph of the Will, Leni Riefenstahl’s famous 1935 documentary that covered the Nazi Party Congress of the previous year and featured extensive footage of Adolf Hitler addressing the faithful. Triumph of the Will was a blockbuster film, our professor assured us. It spread the name of Hitler worldwide and established Riefenstahl’s reputation as a filmmaker. It was so popular inside Germany that it ran for months on end at movie theaters, and people returned again and again to watch it. Our teacher promised us that we would find it fascinating.

Triumph of the Will was not fascinating. Even for students engrossed in the details of the Nazi surge to power, the nearly two-hour documentary was a tremendous bore. After it was over, we bombarded the teacher with questions and complaints. How could he have imagined that we would find it fascinating?

He smiled. That’s the fascinating part, he said. Here was this extraordinarily popular film, and it’s now nearly impossible for Americans to sit through the whole thing. He wanted us to understand that people in Nazi Germany had an entirely different mindset, that they were participating in a kind of mass frenzy. They didn’t find Nazism abhorrent. They didn’t think they were living in a dystopia. They were true believers.

Many Americans are now having their Triumph of the Will moment. They watch Donald Trump repeatedly without getting bored or disgusted. They believe that history has anointed a new leader to revive the country and restore it to its rightful place in the world. They’ve been convinced that the last eight years were a liberal dystopia and what is happening now is, if not utopian, then the first steps in that direction.

A hard core of those enthralled by Trump cannot be convinced otherwise. They hold liberal elites in contempt. They don’t believe CNN or The New York Times. Many subscribe to outlandish theories about Islam and immigrants and the continuing covert machinations of that most famous “Islamic immigrant” of them all, Barack Obama. For this hard core of Trump supporters, the United States could begin to break down, the economy take a nosedive, the international community hold the leadership in Washington in contempt, and they will continue to believe in Trump and Trumpism. The president could even gun down a few people and his most fervent supporters would say nothing except, “Good shot, Mr. President!” Remember: even after Nazi Germany went down in fiery defeat in 1945, significant numbers of Germans remained in thrall to National Socialism. In 1947, more than half of those surveyed still believed that Nazism was a good idea carried out badly.

But plenty of Trump supporters — whether they’re disaffected Democrats, Hillary-hating independents, or rock-ribbed Republican conservatives — don’t fit such a definition. Some have already become deeply disillusioned by the antics of Donald J. and the demolition derby that his advisers are planning to unleash inside the U.S. government, which may, in the end, batter their lives badly. They can be brought over. This is potentially the biggest of big-tent moments for launching the broadest possible resistance under the banner of a patriotism that portrays Trump and Bannon as guilty of un-American activities.

And it’s here in particular that so many dystopian novels provide the wrong kind of guidance. Trump’s end will not come at the hands of a Katniss Everdeen. A belief in an individual savior who successfully challenges a “totalitarian” system got us into this crisis in the first place when Donald Trump sold himself as the crusading outsider against a “deep state” controlled by devious liberals, craven conservatives, and a complicit mainstream media. Nor will it help for Americans to dream about leading their states out of the Union (are you listening, California?) or for individuals to retreat into political purism. Given that the administration’s dystopian vision is based on chaos and fragmentation, the oppositional response should be to unite everyone opposed, or even potentially opposed, to what Washington is now doing.

As readers, we are free to interpret dystopian fiction the way we please. As citizens, we can do something far more subversive. We can rewrite our own dystopian reality. We can change that bleak future ourselves. To do so, however, we would need to put together a better plot, introduce some more interesting and colorful characters, and, before it’s too late, write a much better ending that doesn’t just leave us with explosions, screams, and fade to black.

John Feffer is the author of the new dystopian novel, Splinterlands (a Dispatch Books original with Haymarket Books), which Publishers Weekly hails as “a chilling, thoughtful, and intuitive warning.” He is the director of Foreign Policy In Focus at the Institute for Policy Studies and a TomDispatch regular.

Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Book, John Feffer’s dystopian novel Splinterlands, as well as Nick Turse’s Next Time They’ll Come to Count the Dead, and Tom Engelhardt’s latest book, Shadow Government: Surveillance, Secret Wars, and a Global Security State in a Single-Superpower World.

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porchenclose10019 · 7 years

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Doubling Down On Dystopia

Preventing The Triumph Of Trump’s Will

Cross-posted with TomDispatch.com

Dystopias have recently achieved full-spectrum dominance. Kids are drawn to such stories ― The Giver, Hunger Games ― like Goths to piercings. TV shows about zombie apocalypses, pandemics, and technology run amok inspire binge watching. We’ve seen the world-gone-truly-bad a thousand times over on the big screen.

Shortly after Diaz made that comment, dystopia became the default narrative for American politics as well when Donald Trump stepped off the set of The Celebrity Apprentice and into the Oval Office. With the election of an uber-narcissist incapable of distinguishing between fact and fantasy, all the dystopian nightmares that had gathered like storm clouds on the horizon ― nuclear war, climate change, a clash of civilizations ― suddenly moved overhead. Cue the rumble of thunder and the flash of lightning.

The response among those horrified by the results of the recent presidential election has been four-fold.

First came denial ― from the existential dread that hammered the solar plexus as the election returns trickled in that Tuesday night to the more prosaic reluctance to get out of bed the morning after. Then came the fantasies of flight, as tens of thousands of Americans checked to see if their passports were still valid and if the ark bound for New Zealand had any berths free. The third stage has been resistance: millions poured into the streets to protest, mobilized at airports to welcome temporarily banned immigrants, and flocked to congressional meet-and-greets to air their grievances with Republicans and Democrats alike.

It might seem counterintuitive ― or a perverse form of escapism ― to turn from the dystopia of reality to that of fiction. Keep in mind, though, that those novels became bestsellers in their own time precisely because they offered refuge and narratives of resistance for those who feared (in order of publication) the rise of Nazism, the spread of Stalinism, or the resurgence of state-backed misogyny in the Reagan years.

The Trump era so far is all about the center not holding, a time when, in the words of the poet Yeats, things fall apart. Forget about Hannah Arendt and The Origins of Totalitarianism ― also a hot seller on Amazon ― and focus more on chaos theory. Unpredictability, incompetence, and demolition are the dystopian watchwords of the current moment, as the world threatens to fragment before our very eyes.

The Zombie Election

Zombies, in other words, reflect anxiety over a loss of control associated with globalization. In this context, the “rise of the rest” conjures up images of a mass of undifferentiated resource consumers ― hungry others who are little more than mouths on legs ― storming the citadels of the West.

During the election campaign, the Trump team appealed to those very fears by running ads during the popular TV series The Walking Dead that deliberately played on anti-immigration concerns. Once in office, Trump has put into motion his campaign pledges to wall off the United States from Mexico, keep out Muslims, and retreat into Fortress America. He has put special effort into reinforcing the notion that the outside world is a deeply scary place ― even Paris, even Sweden! ― as if The Walking Dead were a documentary and the zombie threat quite real.

The Bannon Dystopia

Strangely enough, however, these same right-wing dystopians ― former Republican vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin on the (non-existent) death panels, Senator Tom Cotton (R-AR) on gun control, right-wing pundit Ann Coulter on soda bans and other trivial pursuits ― have never complained about the massive build-up of government power in far more significant areas: namely, the military and the intelligence agencies. Indeed, now that they are back on top, the new Trumpianized “conservatives” are perfectly happy to expand state power by throwing even more money at the Pentagon and potentially giving greater scope to the CIA in its future interrogations of terror suspects. Despite falling rates of violent crime ― a tiny uptick in 2015 obscures the fact that these remain at a historic low ― Trump also wants to beef up the police to deal with American “carnage.”

Triumph of the Will

But plenty of Trump supporters ― whether they’re disaffected Democrats, Hillary-hating independents, or rock-ribbed Republican conservatives ― don’t fit such a definition. Some have already become deeply disillusioned by the antics of Donald J. and the demolition derby that his advisers are planning to unleash inside the U.S. government, which may, in the end, batter their lives badly. They can be brought over. This is potentially the biggest of big-tent moments for launching the broadest possible resistance under the banner of a patriotism that portrays Trump and Bannon as guilty of un-American activities.

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