Porky Pig for President

Donald Trump will probably lose the election. But he is a final warning. Unless political elites of both the left and the right become more humble, unless they once again ask themselves how their agendas will play in Peoria, the next rough beast might slouch over the corpse of the republic.[1]

I am in general accord with our John Ibbitson concerning the meaning of Donald Trump. (Indeed, I have pretty much said the same in prior blog posts – re: August 24, 2015.)

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 [the effectual end of] individual liberty, rule of law and peace.

But unlike John Ibbitson and other members of the cosmopolitan media; I do not consider his opponent, de facto criminal and American Marie Antoinette wannabe (re: “irredeemable . . . basket of deplorables”) to be any less the embodiment of the last generation of the American Republic.

So for those Bernie Bros of the Progressive Left seething at the thought of electing the very symbol of corporate-bought, self-serving venality and corruption in Lady MacBeth Clinton, or those Evangelicals who are appalled at the nose pinching Sophie’s Choice between the lesser of two weevils; the question becomes, “what to do, what to do?”

One could vote for third candidates, Libertarian Gary Johnson or the Green Party’s Jill Stein. However, as both belong to either edge of the political continuum, such would not serve the interests or values of the muddled middle. Furthermore, a vote for either would not sufficiently register the disgust and anger at the current state of political affairs.

Taking a trip to the local polling station in order to register a spoiled ballot is unlikely to sufficiently inspire the live-in-their-parents-basement crowd to momentarily depart from their video porn and games.

So taking a cue from our Québécois folk from a couple of generations back, from whence arose the Rhinoceros Party out of their poutine forests, and which garnered a not inconsequential support in the 1980 Canadian election, the American disaffected might take advantage of that unique feature of their politics; the presidential write-in.

But which figure would rally the democratic troops from all corners of the political spectrum in one concord of mass disgust?

James Buchanan, considered the worst president in the history of the United States, whose machinations (re: Dredd Scott) quickened the onset of the American Civil War, seems a suitable stamp of ironic preference. That or Tamelane, Ghenghis Khan, or Ivan the Terrible. However, such would require history and/or civics literacy, to which modern generations of Americans are not particularly adept.

Perhaps, Mister (Fred) Rogers, a Presbyterian minister, whose simple-minded homilies could make even the most cynical secularist liberal weep. But that would require a resurrection, or at least a séance, were Mr. Rogers ever to be actually elected. And like the prophet Samuel, the ghost of Fred Rogers might object.

Perhaps the polarized American electorate could have a kumbaya moment wth Barnie the (purple) Dinosaur; that is all except the Liberty University crowd. Obviously, Kermit the Frog, Roger Rabbit, and Pepé Le Pew would alienate those averse to strange love. Elmer Fudd would provoke objections in those appalled by those who “cling to guns.” And cute little Dora the Explorer has unfortunately been commandeered in the service of the wedge issue of illegal immigration.

Therefore, my candidate of common choice is the bow-tied, suitably plutocratic Porky Pig, whose signature sign-off seems apropos for the times; the swan song for the fall of the American Republic and for free civic politics.

“Th-th-th-that’s all folks!”

And thus it will be said:

This is the way the American Republic ends,

Not with a bang, nor a whimper,

But with a modicum of plebeian wit.

 

 

[1] John Ibbitson, “He’ll likely lose – but Trump is the final warning to elite,” The Globe and Mail, October 7, 2016, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b9434BoGkNQ.

The Significance of Trumpism

For most of my occupational life, I have been an IT professional, either as a code writer or network employee/consultant, dealing with business proprietors, accounting controllers, office and plant managers. In other words, I belonged to the grey-collar set on behalf of the white-collar. But in the autumn of my working life, I have doubled as a blue-collar, just in order to put sufficient bread on the table, while flailing in my attempts to establish myself as a no-collar.

But re-introduction into the blue-collar milieu has been a bit of culture shock, although nothing compared to the psychological disarray experienced during a night in 1979 in a bus station in Tétouan (Morocco). In having been so familiar with the relatively cultivated and effete metrosexual ethos of the corporate office, where collaboration was the modus operandi; the hierarchical and masculinist ethos, which still permeates the factory and warehouse floor, was and continues to be disorienting.

I belong to neither milieu, being too Scythian for the metrosexuals, and too cultivated for the masculinists. As it seems to be in all things, I occupy the middle, in a schismatic age which the middle is largely devoid of fellow sojourners, while the extremes are steadily being saturated to the hilt. But I have discovered that it is psychologically destructive to pretend to be that which one is not, even if it results in social isolation and economic denigration.

And like many in the no-class class, I have been trying to comprehend the sociopolitical significance of the Trump phenomenon. Donald Trump himself is less important. As the ethical barometer has precipitously declined these last many decades, the rise of demagogues and demise of free civic self-governing polities has been expected, although not in the form of Trump. It is the supporters of Trump who will endure, well after Trump (likely) self-destructs and/or becomes absorbed into the Borg of Washington venality, who are more historically and prognostically important. 

Well done, you good and faithful servant

These are the times that try men’s souls. – Thomas Paine – Dec 23, 1776

Every so often, God sends a test to publicly differentiate the wheat from the chaff. During the Decian (250–1 AD) and Diocletian/Galerian (303–311 AD) persecutions, the official test of fidelity was whether professed Christians would renounce Christ and sacrifice to the gods under pain of punishment including death. Those who succumbed, were branded lapsi (apostates) and traditores (“those who had handed over” – e.g. Scriptures, other religious artifacts, or the names of other Christians). Such would later have understandably difficult time being accepted back into the fold.

In 1934, the church was confronted by fascists and their Deutsche Christen wolves, who attempted to sublimate and subordinate the mandate of Christ under the immediate needs of the Volksgemeinschaft. Yet there remained a minority of faithful who were among those who signed the Barmen Declaration and belonged to the German Confessing Church.

I suspect that the Trump phenomenon might be one of those divine tests. For whether from the sociopolitical perspectives and concerns of conservative Evangelicals or of progressive Evangelicals, Donald Trump, this lawless one, violates the ethics and ethos of them all.

The Coming Persecution in America Revisited

The most popular of my blog entries over the years has concerned Christian persecution within America. The next general area of interest is in regard to sex and gender relations. This seems reasonably indicative of where the heads of modern Evangelicals are located.

Revisiting that entry, I must confess a deep disdain and wincing shame. It is not so much that I repudiate any of the ideas expressed. It is that the entry was so horribly written, with inchoate and tangential thoughts and an incoherent flow of argument. Retaining that entry in the public sphere serves as a talisman for a justified humility.

So let me try again.

Interpreting the Signs of the Times

One of the bloggers, I follow, as somewhat of a Dionysian foil to my severe Apollonic propensity is Rick Marschall. I may not always concur with the views of this “social critic, political commentator, and Christian writer.” But I, nevertheless, cherish one those cultivated rarities who are well-informed about their own heritage. However, Mr. Marschall occasionally galvanizes a reaction such as in his recent article, People of Faith Ask, to Trump or not to Trump, which complacently soothsays that the current commotion in the American body politic is not unlike those of yesteryear. Mr. Marschall thereupon gives a fairly detailed history of past political turmoils in his nation; particulars, much of which supplement my own knowledge; and as is therefore much appreciated.

I tend to look upon history more from the perspective of broad ideological, cultural, and social trends. Furthermore, as a student of world history, I will situate American history and politics within the context of a larger ideological narrative with sociopolitical consequences. Whereas, you will find many Americans, such as George Will, unable to think outside of their Exceptionalist box. Historical and external events are measured in the context of American situation and psyche, a civic form of (Ayn) Randian egoism, which I would suggest poses a great noetic stagnation.

It is not unusual for persons dwelling inside the kettle of a society to be oblivious to the tumult that is about to occur within their midst; and when it begins, to be freshly surprised on frequent basis as new travesties and atrocities unfold. I, on the other hand, am inclined to be on the side of the Chicken Littles.

However, this tumult in the U.S. has been anticipated, as has been claimed elsewhere, since the late 1980s. Events since then have pretty well gone to script of previous run ups to civic conflagration. And indeed, I have noticed in the last couple of years, a remarkably dizzying acceleration in the disintegration of the social peace and cohesion such that I am having problems catching up.

Age of Demagogues

I will go further: Mr. Trump is precisely the kind of man our system of government was designed to avoid, the type of leader our founders feared — a demagogic figure who does not view himself as part of our constitutional system but rather as an alternative to it.[1]

Although I have long expected the emergence of demagogues into the American political arena, one like Donald Trump was as much anticipated as the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man. But in hindsight, Trump make more sense. For just as Hitler represented a caricaturish manifestation of German culture and Bismarckian conservatism, Trump is very much the extrapolated embodiment of American mores; the “self-made” Gilded Age vulgarian; the self-satisfied Babbitt; the Ugly American; James Brown and the circus extravaganza in Rocky IV (1985), displaying American decadence in all its Las Vegas glitter and pyrite. “The devil hath power to assume a pleasing shape” (Hamlet 2.2). And what is pleasing to those steeped in a German cultural milieu, will differ from that percolated in an American.

© Copyright John Hutchinson

 

[1] Peter Wehner, “Why I Will Never Vote for Donald Trump”, The New York Times, January 14, 2016, http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/14/opinion/campaign-stops/why-i-will-never-vote-for-donald-trump.html.

Canada and the “America First” Policy

Donald Trump recently declared that he would “put the interests of the American people and American security above all else.” His campaign has already been exemplifying this policy through nativist hostility to foreign journalists. But Trump’s “America First” is merely the explicit expression of a creeping mindset, long in the making; the foreign policy manifestation of the rapid moral decadence in that society, whereby enlightened self-interest, which had undergirded the Pax America, devolves into raw self-interest.

The Benefits of Political Nihilism

 DISCLAIMER: While I subscribe to the factual realities described in the ensuing article, upon reviewing it, its tone sounded more like a mild Jacobin or Marxist Revolutionary pamphlet than an explanation. It is an irritated response to several condescending mainstream U.S. op-eds, as well as being “inspired” by a disturbing exchange on the commentariat with one of those Trumplets, whose inchoate response to any argument was basically to run his interlocutor over. While empathizing with the plight of the plebes, considering that I am, these realities just do not apply to the same extent in a nation whose GINI coefficient is significantly lower than the U.S.

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People have this illusion that if they strike out they’ll accomplish something, but of course they won’t. They only accomplish something by having a smart idea about direction and policy. The violence that’s being fomented is not helping to formulate smart economic policies.

The pro-Trump segment of the American electorate has thus abdicated a basic duty of a democratic citizenry: to hold a candidate accountable for his or her ideas. Worse, many seem to regard his crude simplifications as a feature, not a bug — a badge of uninvolvement in the corrupt Washington system

This condescending sentiment noted above is representative of an establishment elite who, enclosed within their own well-feathered cultural and socioeconomic cocoon, cannot comprehend and scornfully disdain the rubes who would nominate an uncultured Joe the Plumber, albeit a gilded one, who hasn’t a coherent governing philosophy, a consistent agenda; in short, who doesn’t have a clue.

It may be beyond imagining, within gated communities, how the savages outside could possibly perceive that the mere act of destroying the current social system could, by itself, improve their lot. But from the other side of the track, it appears entirely reasonable. And indeed, history grants some credence to the notion.

American Crassus

The potential for Donald Trump to be next American President first brought to mind the last scene in an old, historically inaccurate, and tad overwrought movie, The Fall of the Roman Empire (1964), whereby the imperial title of Caesar was being auctioned off after the death of Commodus, and closing with this somber warning of Ariel Durant.

This was the beginning of the fall of the Roman Empire. A great civilization is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself from within.

The title had once been auctioned off to a wealthy senator, Didius Julianus, in 193 AD by the Praetorian Guard. But this was one emperor removed and three months after Commodus. Disgust by local Romans to that “election” would thereupon encourage military generals to vie for the throne.

But while culturally, America may be in that interregnum between Marcus Aurelius and the Crisis of the Third Century, the wrong Fall and the wrong plutocrat is being referenced. A more appropriate historical parallel is the fall of the Roman Republic in first century BC. The more appropriate plutocrat was Crassus who, along with Pompey and Julius Caesar, constituted the First Triumvirate.

When Is a Non-Profit not a Non-Profit?

Grunts on the pew have long been exposed to the disgraceful travesty of Evangelical profiteers of the “gospel”; although this seems largely to be an American phenomena. Unfortunately, although I dwell in another political jurisdiction, this stench cannot be contained by physical borders. Wheeler-and-dealer Ayatollah Robertson seems to have wielded a legally ironclad deal to have his “700 Club” punish the world in perpetuity. Between Robertson’s CBN and the Crouch’s TBN, The Walrus and the Carpenter of Prosperity Gospel broadcasting, these public persona have largely become the face of Evangelical Christianity.

Hereby, my local interlocutors, let alone all those on the commentariats, find easy reason to dismiss the Gospel and the Christian faith. And who can blame them? And thus again, “the name of God is blasphemed among the [nations]” (Rom 2:24). This is never a good state of affairs within which Christian seminarians should dwell. Such excess of wealth and opulence among the higher ranks of the Romanist clergy became useful fodder for the Protestant Reformers in the 16^th Century, and the Jacobins in the 18^th. And if Russell Moore complains about lack of Evangelical discernment and concern regarding Demagogue Donald, this is partially a function of country club seminarians having alienated many of their grunts on the pew.