Aug 11, 2022
If we scapegoat Donald Trump for things he didn’t cause by justifying it as punishment for the heinous bullshit he did cause we’ll fuck up our ability to handle the things he didn’t cause.
Pay fucking attention.
Am I allowed to swear on the internet? That title is so long it’s probably even more obscene than how much I swear in it. For a while I was working on my second book of poetry (Fight the World) but I’ve stepped back from that exercise lately. I imagine I’ll return to it at some point, and here’s a relevant poem that will appear in that book if I ever finish it:
The Fight Against Donald Trump
Look at all the things you’ve won
and look at how they’ve paid.
Surrounded by accoutrements
from this grand masquerade.
Write your name upon the world
etched in solid gold.
See the mask upon your soul:
Fading. Ragged. Old.
We barely need to fight you
because you can only lose.
And you can only lose the trust
of those that you abuse.
The challenge you provided us
was never yours to win.
We needed you to show us that
we needed to begin
to think about each other
and be the things you’re not
and understand the lack of worth
in all the shit you’ve bought.
So as your empire crumbles
and you watch it turn to ash.
Recognize that all you’ve done
amounts to balderdash.
Your buildings built of debt.
Your politics of lies.
Your family of distrust.
Your brand is a disguise.
You could still defeat us
if you dared to turn the heel
by showing us there’s more to you.
and something there is real.
Tell the ones who follow you
–whose greatness you have lost–
why they have kept on suffering:
that they have paid the cost
for all your foolish scheming
and all your failing plots
when you failed to be the man you claimed
and missed the biggest shots.
You Trumped yourself
-you silly man-
and think that we’re the fools.
You thought you could manipulate
and bypass all the rules.
And maybe that’s the way it is
for this period of time,
though it’s inevitable that History
will call your lies a crime.
Here are some Truths about Donald Trump
- Donald Trump is a media and real estate oligarch.
- Donald Trump is part of the media and real estate oligarchy and is compromised by that association to some extent just like all of the other media and real estate oligarchs.
- Donald Trump was the victim of disingenuous or illegal efforts to stymie his progress and he knows his opponents feel this is justified due to the evidently poor nature of his character, associations, and behaviour.
- Donald Trump expects people to commit crimes against him because he commits crime against them.
- Donald Trump spent most of his life as a member of the neoliberal elite.
- Donald Trump turned against the neoliberal elite when they turned against him for playing a character that was on the opposite side of the nascent Culture War.
- Donald Trump is one of the most insecure people in the history of television.
- Donald Trump has always been at the intersection of a significant amount of unethical behaviour or crime.
- Donald Trump has a long history of turning against people he previously supported, and the intensity of his support and rejection always performatively stretch to the extremes of what’s possible.
What if those Truths applied to someone else? Part of what’s happened here is that Donald Trump has erected a vast and impenetrable memeplex around himself and it protects him from a lot of what other people are vulnerable to. It’s a force shield in the space of ideas. People have always known how to do this but now there’s new tech, systems, and data and it’s making people more efficient at it. More people are doing it and it’s becoming more common.
It’s worth learning about Reality Distortion Fields whether or not you believe the concept is parapsychological in nature:
Disclaimer: I generate a reality distortion field. I think it’s something about density of ideas in ways we haven’t imagined how to measure yet.
A lot of stuff is very weird
It’s weird — but it’s not new. A bunch of the shit that’s going wrong everywhere seems to be pretty comprehensible and we just can’t seem to agree on how to come around to comprehending it. But like… the information is there. There’s been so much amazing philosophy and science done by a wide variety of brilliant people all over the world and all throughout history, we just need to pay fucking attention to it. I have a rough and poorly considered project intended to solve this problem that I’m currently using to try and date someone.
On Rene Girard
One extremely relevant person to consider when we want to understand how we collectively deal with trauma is French philosopher Rene Girard. As with everyone with a full life of complex thought: he missed the mark or was wrong about some stuff, but the amount of detail and contemplation he put into thinking about scapegoating is worthy of serious review and consideration.
This was an excellent introduction to him:
If the US can’t agree on a scapegoat? Civil war 2™
Some people may think Civil War 2™ will solve things because the losers will simply and neatly be determined to be the scapegoats… but that’s not what really happened last time. Why would it be different this time? The issues relating to the last civil war didn’t fully get resolved, the scapegoating process failed, and now those issues have mutated, and are amplified and augmented by modern culture and technology.
Civil war is a virus in the American psyche and a hex on the soul of the American people.
It’s hard to predict afterwards who will be least wrong when they think they’ve won Civil War 2™ in the US. The extreme right will almost certainly start it because they’re the most militarized, and some police and military forces will join them, but it looks like a strong majority of the rest of the population, including more military and police, will oppose them. Whoever starts it will probably end up being uncertain because everything will be claimed to be a false flag by everyone once the drones converted to IEDs start flying around suburbia.
As evidenced by the various manifestations of all forms of extreme political ideology all throughout history: both sides have some capacity to commit egregious war crimes against the other. The history of the United States is evidence of many things, and one of those things is that citizens of the United States will commit egregious war crimes against one another.
Another one of those things is that you fuckers don’t like to really think about it very much in a way that’s fucking embarrassing. I’m sorry for swearing at you but holy shit things are going to get so fucking bad because you’re not engaging with this shit openly and honestly. It’s fucking heartbreaking.
On a personal note: If you can find a viable/practical way to scapegoat me personally as a result of any of my various projects in order to inspire the type of collective catharsis we need to achieve in order to generate the energy required to break through the absolutely crushing spiritual gridlock that’s increasingly blanketing our civilization: go to town. I don’t think it’s doable because I don’t think scapegoating can truly be effective, but I’m wrong about a bunch of stuff.
