The title I must admit is a bit of a tease. You, the reader are supposed to feel “Now what in heavens name is the author referring to?” And once you figure out what it is all about, by that time, hopefully, you are already sucked into my article. However, when all is said and done, for most of you it shouldn’t be all that hard to figure out. In truth, I am being more playful than usual in order to counteract the incredible sadness that I feel with regard to the subject about which I am writing for today’s article.
The subject is the ongoing destruction of all the different facets of life in the United States under Trump. Before Trump, the American economy was not exactly paradise, but it was pretty damned good. Unemployment was incredibly low and the stock market was booming. Inflation was definitely a problem, but it was a problem in many countries, and it seemed to be a result of the economic distortions created by Covid. Biden gave money away to many people to make sure that they had enough to live on during the period of time that people had to self-isolate and therefore had difficulty making a living. So, we had the situation of a growth in the money supply without a concomitant growth in goods and services. The perfect situation for a growth in inflation.
At any rate, Trump seems to be interested in arbitrarily taking economic opportunities away from a lot of people. By dramatically shrinking or eliminating government departments, a lot of government workers are losing their jobs. Furthermore, under Musk, it would seem that there are plans to eliminate or at least shrink Social Security, Medicaid and Medicare, 3 supports that are absolutely crucial to most people at some time in their lives.
With regard to social concerns, Trump has created misery for millions of women. By loading the court with people who are against abortion in any form, he has taken away from women their capacity to have control over their own bodies. And his persecution of trans people in the military is obscene. Then there is the refusal of Kennedy to promote the use of vaccine for diseases as diverse as polio, measles and covid. There is the shutting down of government organizations that have been in charge of distributing food and medicine to people living in Third World countries. Without this support, untold numbers of people are going to die. Furthermore, without this support, Third World governments are going to shift their allegiances to China. And let’s not forget the way Trump has handled the immigration problem, treating all undocumented immigrants as if they are criminals, where they are exporting them to Guantanamo, Panama, and El Salvador.”
With regard to environmental problems, Trump seems to be doing everything that he can to roll back environmental protections. He has withdrawn the United States from the Paris Accords. In spite of Musk and his Teslas, he is hell-bent on finding and exploiting new sources of petroleum and natural gas to continue to power up all of our gas-guzzling polluting SUV’s. Even if it means to damage our oceans and our natural landscapes.
I have used up the space in my article to detail all the different forms of destruction that Trump has been wreaking on our country and I still haven’t come close to covering everything. And I still haven’t touched what was supposed to be the major theme of this article: how did we get this way, how did we allow Trump to get reelected so that he could savage our country. It comes down to the fact that Trump is trying to create some incredibly abrasive occurrences in which infrastructures and systems are destroyed, all with the notion of pulling him out of numbness and the experiential vacuum. Now, going one layer of causality backwards, there is the growing amount of numbness, the expanding experiential vacuum we all experience as a result of the increasing frictionless being generated by modern technology. So apart from the numbness passed on from one generation to the next, there is the numbness generated from the external world living environment in modern technological society. So if Trump hadn’t been around, someone else would have. The main focal point of our culture has been technology. Technology sets the cultural rhythms by which we live. And as technology creates the opposite of organic rhythms, the rhythms created are grounding disruptors. And the more disruption in our grounding, the more we externalize it in disrupting our environmental infrastructure. We have got to find a way of bring organicity into our lives. So, then we can restore our grounding and rebuild our infrastructure. And then we won’t need any more the cult of Trump in order to feel alive.
©2024 Laurence Mesirow
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