How Can They Believe This Crap? Episode III

Third in a series wondering why Trump still has adherents

In Episode I, I suggested Trump's supporters have been brainwashed by their betters; in Episode II, that they simply find him entertaining.

One more theory occurs to me: Trump's supporters—though themselves victimized—think he's the victim.

Blame it on sympathy, the emotion Adam Smith described as the part of our imagination that lets us picture what others feel.

Sympathy elevates our humanity, Smith says—and as every fundraiser knows. It allows us to feel for sick children, frightened refugees, and abandoned pets.

But it has its downside, the philosopher says, giving rise to irrational beliefs.

We sympathize with the dead, for example, imagining how miserable we'd be, were we dead. This "illusion of the imagination" gives rise to our belief in an afterlife.

We make a similar mistake, Smith says, when we imagine the "rich and powerful."

We imagine their perfectly happy lives, and relish that imaginary happiness so strongly we come to believe the rich and powerful deserve their wealth and privilege. So we grieve for "every injury that is done them." 

We could care less about the plight of the poor and powerless; thinking about them provides no vicarious joy.

The rich and powerful, however, aren't perfectly happy, Smith says; in fact, they're often miserable, cunning and vicious. 

But they know how to exploit our sympathy—our illusions about them—by continually claiming victimhood.

Sympathy deludes us, Smith says—and leads us to love our oppressors.

Sympathy: that's how Trump's fans can still believe his crap.

Don't miss Episode IV

How Can They Believe This Crap? Episode II

Second in a series wondering why Trump still has adherents

In Episode I, I suggested Trump's supporters have been brainwashed by their betters.

But another theory occurs to me: Trump's supporters think he's funny.

With the cancellation of The Apprentice, the Reality TV star has taken on a new role—that of the clownish "know nothing" Sergeant Shultz, the laugh-a-minute prison guard in CBS-TV's Hogan's Heroes.

Harold Livera, a high-school classmate of mine, once told me a story about his dad, who'd been a POW in a German stalag during WWII.

It seems the guards in the prison camp amused themselves one morning by knocking Harold's dad to the ground and kicking him in the stomach repeatedly. 

The beating caused such damage to his body that Harold's dad still suffered from his injuries in 1967.

Harold's dad was outraged that Hogan's Heroes was on the air. By turning a blind eye to Nazism, fans of the show gave permission to CBS to turn atrocity into comedy.

Trump gives his fans that same permission. His antics distract them from evil.

While his henchmen perpetrate crimes that result in thefts of the Treasury, destruction of the environment, the imprisonment of children, and the deaths of 400,000 Americans, his followers forgive Trump—because he's hilarious.

Trump can act with impunity because he's so freakin' funny.

What's the matter? You're not laughing?

NOTE: If you notice a physical resemblance between Shultz and Trump, just tell yourself, "I see nothing. Nothing!"

Don't miss Episode III.

We Want You, Big Brother

We do not merely destroy our enemies; we change them.

— George Orwell

Incredibly, the Kremlin has targeted LinkedIn users, with the result that Microsoft (LinkedIn’s owner) is punishing liberals and rewarding right-wingers.

After receiving a half-dozen emails from Microsoft in the course of two days, each advising me the company had censored one of my comments in response to a Kremlin post, I have now been “disappeared” from LinkedIn—as have several of my contacts on the platform, both here and in Europe—for posting “harassing comments.”

In other words, opposing viewpoints.

Meanwhile, the Kremlin—with the aid of thousands of hapless Americans, eager to amplify its stock messages—continues to push out hackneyed pro-Trump statements, all blatantly racist, homophobic, anti-intellectual, jingoist and nativist. 

Weary of the Trumpian twaddle, I tried to “unfollow” the Kremlin’s account before I was “disappeared,” but learned that you simply cannot do so. 

Like the telescreens in 1984 (monitored, of course, by the Thought Police) the Kremlin’s account is ubiquitous.

We want you, Big Brother.

UPDATE: Microsoft this morning has asked me to prove I am an American and asked me to warrant in writing that I will "adhere to LinkedIn policies from this day forward." I guess after that, I can kiss the bride.

UPDATE, OCTOBER 8, 2020: It appears LinkedIn has "disappeared" the Kremlin-backed user this morning. But for how long?

How Can They Believe This Crap?

Propaganda is to a democracy what violence is to a dictatorship.

— William Blum

The Trumpian twaddle that pollutes my social-media streams is deadening.

The obvious question I always return to is: How can so many Americans believe this crap? 

Are they all stupid? 

Or are some stupid and others venal? 

Or are they neither, but brainwashed instead?

Flash back 160 years for the answer.

The Civil War, the greatest trauma to wrack our democracy, was waged because wealthy cotton planters—20% of the South's population—needed cheap labor. 

Those 20% convinced the 80%—one million Southern men altogether—to fight to the death to defend slavery. 

How in the hell did they do that?

Through three cadres of influencers, says Civil War historian Gordon Rhea.

In "Why Non-Slaveholding Southerners Fought," Rhea asks you to "travel back with me to the South of 1860." If you do so, you learn:

• Southerners had no problem enslaving four million Blacks. They weren't real Americans, after all, but "immigrants," as Ben Carson says.
  
  
• Southerners were terrified Blacks would rebel. They'd not just "destroy the suburbs," as it were, but organize and form their own states. John Brown's 1859 Harper's Ferry Raid looked to them a lot like the BLM disturbances this summer.
  
  
• Southerners felt beleaguered by Abolitionists, the critical, cranky "Libtards" of their day.

Rhea says three loud-mouthed groups swayed the 80% of Southerners who owned no slaves to die, if need be, to perpetuate slavery:

• Clergymen. Before there was Fox News, clergymen were the South's broadcasters. Insisting the Bible was infallible, week after week they told churchgoers that slavery had the "sanction of Jehovah" and that Abolitionists were infidels who insulted God's word. One clergyman labeled the Abolitionists "atheists, socialists, communists, red republicans, and Jacobins." (AOC, are you wincing?)

• Politicos. In late 1860, five states—Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina, and Louisiana—sent traveling envoys throughout the South to speak in public, hand out brochures, and place op-eds in local newspapers. Their message was one-track: Lincoln craved not merely emancipation, but equality for Blacks, which meant "the marriage of your daughters to black husbands.” Like today's Critical Race Theorists, Lincoln wanted to destroy the "American way of life."
  
  
• Local leaders. Local Southern leaders—who tended to be planters—told their communities that Abolitionists were "haters" and the enemies of "law and order." Abolition meant releasing "more than four million of a very poor and ignorant population to ramble in idleness over the country until their wants should drive most of them, first to petty thefts, and afterwards to the bolder crimes of robbery and murder.” Defeating Lincoln, they claimed, was the only way to ensure the "heaven-ordained superiority of the White over the Black."

Don't miss Episode II.

Beatnik Babies

 

We'll get you through your children!

― Allen Ginsberg

In April 1996, I dragged my three then-school-age kids to "Rebel Voices Speak Again," a 12-hour poetry slam hosted by the Smithsonian's National Portrait Gallery.

Poetry slams were all the rage at the time, and this one promised to be a whopper: a day-long marathon of readings and reminiscences starring slam poetry's originals, the bards of the Beat Generation (the living ones, anyway).

My kids—by far, the youngest listeners in the auditorium—seemed reasonably attentive and were, thank goodness, exceptionally well behaved throughout. 

It probably helped that we went for lunch to the museum cafeteria, where they could eat hot dogs and potato chips.

I sometimes wonder whether that countercultural cavalcade of cool cats and hot chicks—Corso, Creeley, Elmslie, Ginsberg, Jones, Koch, Lauterbach, McClure, Ferlinghetti, Padgett and a half-dozen others—converted my kids from would-be conformists into the three strong, wildly independent, free-thinking adults they are today.

Did the Beats "get me" through my children?

Maybe it's true: poetry is dangerous.