The world has changed I know not how
Christians vote for sinners now
Not since Ross Perot has a billionaire outsider intruded so dramatically or spectacularly into a US election.
Elon Musk's back flip from deriding Donald Trump to clambering onto his MAGA train is a thing to behold.
Musk told a cloister of dining oligarchs that "supporting Mr. Trump would be politically safe if they did it in large numbers... it was important for [them] to organize their peers" (~NYT 24/10/11) - like a hesitant troop of masked white supremacists traipsing down a street amid startled shoppers, egging each other onward with supportive glances.
It's not unusual for Trump proponents. They all hate him but are quite able to put aside self-respect and stroke his ego in nefarious long games.
Then there's the god-botherers, the pious chosen ones, the rapturists. American evangelicals, the most irritating door-knockers on the planet, are fully in with the nastiest man to ever stand for President. Trump was, they believe, sent by God to test their faith. By the way, brethren, he's long tested the faith of atheists too - faith in humanity.
In this brief read the theory is is put - by Tim Alberta, one of their own - that US Christians, zealots at heart, are no longer moved by moral arguments in their political affiliations, they are driven by a delusional rage.
[When] his father died... some of the congregants approached the grieving Alberta not to console him but to complain about his journalism, demanding to know if he was on “the right side”
Why is the world seemingly coming unstuck? Why does this feel like Europe a century ago? It's not, in this case, so much that history repeats - although it's eerily familiar. We might blame social media.
The idea of telepathy has tickled the imagination since the dawn of thought. It's suddenly reality. Social media exposes us to the open minds of anyone on the planet with a connection to the hive. The noise is deafening - more so for the young, for whom it's become the very fabric of life.
Disruptive and unsettling is to know that of seven billion opinions, half are - from one's own viewpoint - opposite, apposite, incomprehensible, or downright and insanely delusional.
And in the game of life you can't tell which are themselves, are role-playing, are provocateurs, or which are even human - as that seven billion number grows exponentially beyond actual people.
Julian Jaynes suggests auditory hallucinations might have been common (and taken as commands from God) in times before the 'modern' mind evolved (as a consensus reality). Do you get the sense we are slipping back into that realm?
Post World War II, consensus was the morning newspaper and evening radio news. In an era that only the aged recall, we all seemed to be on the same page, while mad people - only a few of us, apparently - were in asylums. Literally. Today, there is no consensus. Now it's Bedlam out there. Lock me up, where it's safe.
This is, reluctantly, being scribed in the closing weeks of the 2024 US presidential campaign and, you know, I've seen it all before. But not quite as ridiculous. Europe in the 1930s didn't have the carnival mood of modern America. Survival wasn't a give back then. Otherwise, rinse and repeat. Each half of a population consider the other half incomprehensibly stupid. The twain yet refuses to meet.
By any measure, according to my twain, Donald Trump is insane, in the best traditions of lunatic megalomaniacs. Why does my opposite twain still barrack for him? Surely they can see what sort of person he is, what he's saying (even threatening, per "the enemy within") and that none of what they imagine he'll do for them will come to pass.
If they cannot accept his over insanity, can they agree that he is the most selfish, self-obsessed, transactional swindler imaginable. And yet he's so perfectly emblematic of what has made America great. Screw the other guy. Cream the suckers. Me first, country second. The buck starts here, but it if shit goes wrong it ends over there, with that guy. The land, indeed, of the wooden ham.
As I try to take in the broad landscape of American electioneering, which simply never stops, I think of this website's banner image and mentally replace its caption with: "The USofA. Too many reporters. Not enough news." A majority of what I see masquerading as 'news' coming from there is but opinion, clickbait, manufactured conflict, speculative floss.
Btw, your scribe, though adding to the floss, is at least writing from afar.
Adding to voter dissonance is a reversal of decades of order wherein business supported the Republican party and labor were in the Democrats' camp. Bad enough that Christians support a debaucher, Capitalism in bed with the Commies - and Democrat nominee Kamala Harris on Fox news? Hand me the smelling salts.
Sort out the shysters, scammers, and liars, the opportunists with dark and hungry eyes, and you'll find a fairly normal cross section of average voters in the Republican camp. A bit roisterous perhaps, but just you or me in a different political bubble. And with a few more pickups, guns and flags. I've two sisters in it. The third sister and I are in that other bubble and quite frankly none of us understand how we four, from identical upbringings, have diverged. But it happens. To an entire country, apparently.
Maybe Trump supporters - the ordinary ones, outsiders, as are most of us - have had enough of the present and want to burn it down. Or want to stir matters up in sheer frustration from years of unhappy or unrewarding lives.
Or maybe it's just plain mischief-making. Let's put the clown in charge and see what happens.