‘Enemy of the People’ wants to meet with Trump’s ‘finely tuned machine’

At his press conference on Thursday, President Trump made two assertions. I want to test both.

Assertion 1 was that my fellow journalists and I are “enemies of the people.”

Assertion 2 was that his administration is running like a “finely tuned machine.”

If the president believes that I am an enemy to the American people, I demand that his “finely tuned machine” immediately arrest me before I cause any irreparable damage to the my fellow Americans.

If I am not arrested, or at least questioned, in the next week, perhaps some representative in the president’s finely tuned machine can tell me were I can turn myself in so that “the people” will be safe again.
 
Mr. President, I look forward to talking with one of your representatives about my allegedly criminal behavior.

I will pack my toothbrush.

If nothing happens in the next week, I will assume that both assertions are lies, and that, accordingly, the real enemy of the people is you, Mr. President. In which case, I demand that you turn yourself in. Frankly, I'd settle for a simple resignation.

Trump's 'Gifts' to America could spell impeachment

One great “gift” that Donald Trump has given "We the People" forces us to break the mold on how we think about political divisions in this country.

In the weeks ahead we will forget Republicans and Democrats and the seemingly rigid divide between the two, particularly in Congress.

We will forget Liberals and Conservatives.

And yes, with time, we will even be able to put aside “Red” and “Blue” states.

The last to fall will be our growing class, racial and educational divisions although our history tells us that those will be a long, long time coming.

(Note in passing: we have already forgotten Hillary Clinton. That clears the air and leaves Trump to be judged free of Clinton baggage and fake news “distractions.” )

So what will end these divisions?

Two words: Donald Trump — but not in the dictatorial way he would imagine.

The answer to the question brings us to Trump’s greatest gift. The realignment is going to be over the values of Trump (if they can be called that) versus the bed-rock values of the large majority of Americans.

Trump and initially his Russian friends are forcing us to rediscover and defend our values.

Welcome to a world divided into pro-Trump versus pro-democracy. Pro-dictatorship versus Pro-Freedom.

And finally: Pro-Lies and pro-Truth.

The first place the divide will become obvious will be in the confirmation hearings in the Senate. The Senate is packed with people with very large egos who have been deeply and personally offended by the President-elect. One does not forget insults to one’s military service, to one’s wife or father or the size of one’s privates.

Those senators, all of them Republicans, have not forgotten.

And so we have Lindsay Graham and John McCain stepping up.  Can Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio be far behind? If they and a few of others join in, initially on concerns about national security and Russian subterfuge, we suddenly have an anti-Trump majority in the Senate.

Knowing Trump, he will proceed with further ad hominem attacks. Expect the anti-Trump Senate majority to grow and solidify, possibly killing the whole Trump agenda and rejecting virtually all of his cabinet nominees.

That will only infuriate the self-obsessed Trump more. He will dig his hole deeper and deeper.

Did anyone say “Impeachment”?

Trump, Postman, Orwell and Huxley

In the introduction to Neil Postman’s classic “Amusing Ourselves to Death,” the author draws several distinctions between the dystopia of George Orwell in “1984” and that of Aldous Huxley in “Brave New World.”

As Postman described it, Orwell’s vision was of an oppressive dictatorial mind control that “flipped” human values. Vis. “War is peace. Freedom is slavery.  Ignorance is strength.”

Huxley, on the other hand, described a world in which we ourselves choose to escape through drug-induced fantasies. “…most men and women will grow up to love their servitude and will never dream of revolution.”

On the status of truth, Postman wrote: “Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance.”

There’s more that Postman contrasted and it’s well worth reading, but at the end of his introduction, he concluded: “This book is about the possibility that Huxley, not Orwell, was right.”

Looking at the 2016 election and the on-going Trumpian transition to power, I conclude that both Huxley and Orwell were right…but there is much, much more going on.

Certainly Orwell’s fear of truth being concealed from us is true and has been throughout our history. But, likewise, as Huxley predicted, truth has become “drowned in a sea of irrelevance.”

Indeed truth itself seems irrelevant, not because it is concealed, but because what passes as truth is fabricated and, even after being unmasked, still manages to retain its power.

So we have “fake news.” We are dizzily forced to tease reality from “reality.” Fact from fiction. If we have the time or inclination for it….

The consequences are clear and dangerous beyond the results of the election.

Yesterday’s news of the armed “self-investigator” set upon threatening a pizza parlor is a case in point. The pizza establishment had been falsely portrayed by trolls as being at the center of child sex ring operated by none other than Hillary Clinton. The gunman bought the lie.

Such rampant lies result from financial as well as political incentives.

Witness the entertainment business. Entertainment, much of it violent and outlandish, is richly rewarding. That has been true for decades, but, amplified by new technologies, it has escalated in brutality.

Society and civility are far the worse for it.

And so we have the president of CBS, Les Moonves, confessing during Trump’s profane, violence-prompting, news cycle-grabbing campaign. "It may not be good for America, but it’s damn good for CBS.”

Solitary trolls have made small fortunes concocting “fake news” (ie. lies) to attract internet “clicks” and hence money on Facebook and other sites.

In such an amoral environment, lying overwhelms truth in the marketplace of “ideas.”

Just as “truth will set us free,” today’s rewards for lying have doomed us to enslavement.

So who was right? Huxley or Orwell?

While I wouldn’t wish our predicament upon Postman (who died in 2003), Orwell or Huxley, I yearn to put the question to them.