I watch bemused the gladiatorial spectacle of Donald Trump from afar. He is, without doubt, a thuggish buffoon with the subtlety of mind of a solid cube; who pummels through prudence, rationality, empathy, civility, tact and virtue like a rhino in heat. He is the “ugly American”, raised to the third power, whose simpleton appeal to imbecility, confirms democracy’s devolution towards a Confederacy of Dunces.
The meretricious courtesans of political punditry hope that a fickle populace is merely toying with the witless minds and anxious hearts of a neglectful elite. They give the idiocracy too much wit.
Trump is the Rob Ford of the American Whatever. (It becomes practicably difficult to identify a consistent and rationally coherent ideology or feasible strategic policy to his constipated outbursts.) But with Rob Ford; even after a season of Jimmy Kimmel easy-to-make vignettes about our clown naturale; the Bulldozer of City Hall retained a stubborn third of the popular vote in Toronto, indeed of liberal Toronto; before our Ford finally suffered electoral defeat to cancer. I likewise suspect that contrary to “wish-upon-a-star” analysis, the Trump Nation will endure. The ramifications of the long decline of mind and culture of the American Idiocracy is finally coming to roost.
But Trump himself is not the actual threat. He is but a Storm Trooper of political demagogues to come; a barometer to would-be tyrants of the venality and imbecility at the heart of American politics; a harbinger of the effectual end of free civic society, except for its forms, and individual liberty, rule of law and peace.
In early 2009, I concluded that Junior Bush was the worse American president since James Buchanan; and anticipated that Haughty Obama would be worse still. (On this count, Obama has far exceeded even my expectations.) The defining criteria; failure to recognize and address the rapidly widening ideological, sociopolitical and economic schism, which threatens civic, even bloody, strife. But the Versailles by the Potomac remains in oblivious slumber; indeed contributing to the galloping rush to an imploding abyss, through even greater radicalization of both the Right and the Left.
But I didn’t imagine a three-peat. For what have we here? A WWF contest between the champion of mindlessness and the champion of mendacity; the mindlessness of Trump; the mendacity of Clinton. And the decaying hulk of Pax Americana depends upon these overgrown ignoramuses of entitlement.
Strategies against Nuclear Proliferation omitted a potential threat; that of fools and morons occupying the throne with the most guns; that supposed seat of civilizational sanity.
Listen carefully; do you not hear the gods laughing?
An Iconoclastic Orthodoxy 