The US of A has once again unleashed upon an already suffering world a narcissistic egomaniac, version 2.0, only more repugnant, more sinister, less of everything that makes the US of A, once the envy of the developed and developing world, actually great. In the much eulogised and mythologised Oval Office, this man sits at the helm of a terrifying array of other narcissists making executive decisions circumventing government and spouting misinformation that sound insane to most thinking folk. But to the mostly regional based, socioeconomically marginalised voters who somehow feel that the world had targeted them and purposefully, conspiratorially left them behind, the hailstorm of misinformation this manner of man ceaselessly spouts, reactive, provocative, destructive, cometh as if truth to power, firmly laying the blame for the state of their own lives on migrants, the Chinese, the Canadians, and on every other man and his dog who took what they regard are theirs and theirs alone: the right to pursue economic and social security, the right to an adequate standard of living… In placing the blame for the state of their tattered lives on everyone else but themselves, they have asked to be infantilised, and they are. The world according to these poor souls is to blame for every version of ill they can find, that’s allegedly blighted their lives, regardless of whether, in fact, these supposed ills have indeed done anything to them at all, except in the recesses of their overactive, under-informed, misinformed, collective imagination. All of this would be laughable if this were not actually happening in real time, causing disharmony, provoking hatred and violence at every unfortunate turn.
Every racist, every bigot, or ‘anti-woke’ as they most prefer to be called on their preferred platforms, the vaingloriously muddy waters of social media, has come out, and unable to grasp the nuances of concepts, ideas, ideologies, whatever, have decided to say what they want to say sans filter, or reliance on fact because, why not, when one can claim that regardless of content, one’s opinion once it’s out there, is fact.
I lament the years of study, discipline and rigor at sandstone universities. Why did some of us bother when we didn’t need to, when what the world was actually looking for, were mere mouthpieces with really very little to say but are very loud about it who, bafflingly, long for the world to regress to a past when things were great? Great indeed… for privileged white men, and their chosen kin, until they deemed this kin ready for the executioner.
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