The world has changed I know not how
Christians like debauchers now
Not since Ross Perot has a billionaire outsider intruded so dramatically, nay, 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.
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.
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 startling shoppers, egging each other onward with supportive glances.
Then there's the god-botherers, the pious, chosen, rapturists. American evangelicals, the most irritating door-knockers on the planet, are fully in with the nastiest man to ever stand for President. And win. He was, they believe, sent by God to test their faith. By the way, brethren, he's long tested the faith of us atheists too - faith in humanity. Our dissonance might be moderated by a short diversion here - though the mystery will stand till eternity.
Why is the world seemingly coming unstuck? Why does this feel like Europe a century ago? I posit not, in this case, so much that history repeats - although it's eerily familiar. I 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.
Sigh...
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 (nay, threatening... "the enemy within"?? That's ME! ) and that none of what they imagine he'll do for them will come to pass.
No, he's not (necessarily) insane. But 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.
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 us in a different political bubble. And a few more pickups 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.