Sooner or later, all great imperial powers go down the tubes — or do I mean the drain? — in some fashion, even if Donald Trump, the second time around, gives tubes and drains a new meaning. Just ask any of the emperors of imperial China or Winston Churchill or, for that matter, Mikhail Gorbachev about imperial decline. But to have almost 50% of the population vote to send this country directly (no stops along the way) whooshing down those tubes into the basement of history, well, that’s no small thing, is it? Or maybe, on a planet already going to hell in a climate-changed handbasket, it actually is a small thing. (And, yes, I just can’t seem to help myself when it comes to italics and him, though he’s all too literally not a small thing, not The Donald!)
Who knows anymore? Who can make any real sense out of it when you’re not comfortably outside looking in, or in the present peering into the long-gone past, but right here, right now (and nowhere else), distinctly experiencing everything from the inside out — or do I mean, the outside in or even the inside in? That, in truth, may be the lesson Donald Trump(ed us all) has to offer when it comes to our ever stranger world. And perspective isn’t exactly available to us, is it? After all, when The Donald fills the screen 24/7, how can anyone perspect — if you don’t mind my making up a word to fit our ever-stranger world — anything?
And yet, let’s face it, if you try to take a step or two back, even if it’s into the deep doo-doo of the rest of this planet of ours — check out Benjamin Netanyahu’s nightmarish version of Israel, for instance — Donald Trump isn’t just a strange (all-)American happenstance. Under the circumstances, however happenstantial, of a country in which there was already an increasingly greater (and still growing) space between the wildly wealthy (especially the rising number of all-American billionaires who have more money than half of the rest of the population combined) and the ever more pressed working and middle classes, what populace, already distinctly in trouble (or he never would have made a political appearance in the first place), wouldn’t have elected a “businessman” (and I’m only being socially truthful by putting that word in quotes) who claimed to be all in for them on his third presidential run (though, of course, you won’t actually see 78-year-old Donald Trump, the man who reputedly once urged soldiers on our southern border to shoot migrants in the legs, running anywhere). Whew, that was one long sentence! And no wonder, since he’s distinctly wound us up in an endlessly convoluted world….
https://tomdispatch.com/trumped/
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After the truth-shower 