The Right Tool For The Job

One of the great lessons of classic fairy tales is that very often the last person that you might expect turns out to be the perfect person for the job. Of the King's four sons, three are highly accomplished and respected far and wide, but the fourth son appears to be a talentless simpleton. Guess who becomes the next King and makes a fabulous success of it? Right! The simp! It turns out that the three high achieving brothers are too wrapped up in their chosen fields. They can no longer see the “forest,” because they are so wrapped up in the “trees.” The simpleton lacks focus, but he can see the entire forest; he can clearly see everything at once. He is the generalist that the kingdom needs to thrive. You can take your own moral from that lesson, but today I'm here to propose that history will view D.J. Trump as the perfect front man for the plan that is now being brought to fruition by the ruling cabal in America. The plan being to install themselves, the super-rich, as the sole and permanent rulers of the United States.

What I mean by the “super-rich” might need some explanation. That would be the top of the top of wealth holders in America. The buy-in is in the billions somewhere, where exactly is not important. I don't include corporate entities, because, whatever you may have heard to the contrary, corporations have no personal reality. They are simply a manifestation of their human owners, the super-rich. (You may own some stock, or even a lot of stock, in corporations, but that does not give you any meaningful ownership interest. You exist to be cheated out of your shares when the super-rich decide that the time is right.)

Rest assured that Trump is just a stooge in this plan. The super-rich will get rid of him when the time comes, consigning him to either bankruptcy court or prison, or maybe some foreign exile. He's not in on the joke, and the real billionaires are cynically using him because he is the perfect cover for the real plan. As I am sure that you have noticed, for almost the last four years all of the news cycles have been focused almost exclusively on whatever stupid shit Trump said yesterday, featuring photos or videos of Trump looking fifty shades of preposterous. Comedians tell jokes; opposition politicians prevaricate and feign outrage; social media is clearly divided between outrage against Trump or dumb-struck admiration for Trump, with no room for any notice of the other changes that are taking place. People, pundits, public intellectuals, bloggers, YouTubers, news presenters, and others warn of the dangers that face our whole form of government, but none of it seems to get any traction. During this entire time, our new form of administration has been taking shape as each of the power centers of our government has been remade to suit the needs of the super-rich.

None of this started with Trump, of course. Must I recap everything leading up to this moment? It started with Nixon; Reagan is still the poster boy. Some tax cuts here, some deregulation there. We wake up these days in a country where education no longer educates American children for anything but useless standardized tests, and a university degree is much harder than it has previously been to attain, unless you have the do-re-mi and a fine pedigree. Congress, both parties, do only what they are told, save for a few heroic individuals who only get eviscerated for their trouble. The courts are manned mostly by stooges. Even the Supreme Court has been bulldozed, with Gorsuch getting the seat that was stolen from Merrick Garland and Kennedy being forced out to make way for Kavanaugh. We are surrounded by fifty kinds of militarized police, and everything has been criminalized. God help the Millennials, who are at the mercy of the gig economy, living doubled and tripled up in lousy apartments with few possessions to slow them down when they are forced to move. Private prisons anyone? Leasing out prisoners for day-work that they do not get paid for? World's highest rate of incarceration? Sentences of several hundred years for drug crimes? (What do you get for murder now? Four-hundred-and-nineteen years!) Concentration camps? Separating immigrant families and then “losing” the children? Abrogating treaties around the world for no apparent reason? Is that enough?

If you think about it too much, you may wish to join a peaceful demonstration or something, but I don't recommend it. You might get arrested and charged with rioting! Get your ass thrown in prison for ten years. Lose your house and savings to the “fines,” or be billed for damage done by some judgment-proof anarchists who really were rioting, but who were not caught and who have no money anyway. Besides, the anarchists serve a political purpose, whereas you are just a malcontent who won't get with the program.

The stage was almost set with the Bush II v. Gore fiasco, but the gang of idiots around W. Bush screwed it all up and put everything behind schedule. Not to worry, it all worked to the clampdown's advantage. Hope and Change put a black man in the White House for eight years and society began to scream for relief from the chaotic excitement of democracy. “Please God!” America begged, “deliver us unto certainty!” Social changes; technological changes; demographic changes; what's a poor bourgeois fathead to do!!! Why, surrender to fascism, of course. Surrender, hell, beg for it! Be careful what you wish for.

And into that terrible moment stepped the people's savior, a failed businessman turned reality TV host who had nothing to recommend him for the job of president, but who did have one great skill in abundance: a supreme talent for self-promotion. Since he entered the political arena in 2015, Trump has dominated all forms of media in all dimensions, every day. Even before taking office, the real forces of the clampdown were busy dismantling what was left of American democracy. During the past two and a half years, the work of the previous two centuries has been largely swept away. The damage may be irreparable by now. We'll see what happens next year, but hey, you tell me, do I sound optimistic?

Sure, a Democrat might take the presidency next year, but we've all seen how much good that does. I'm on record as believing that they don't really care enough to be of much help, and they may, in fact, be losing on purpose as part of the master plan of the super-rich. They're the ones with the money, don't you know, and the Democrats like money as much as anybody.

Trump has been a wonderful tool for destruction, but what follows will be different, one way or another. If we are lucky, it will lean more heavily on smiles and businesslike efficiency than bluster, threats, and fear mongering. That might be more efficient. Or it may be a dystopia of misery. Terrible things will happen either way, and no deviation from pious patriotism will be tolerated, and there will be enough suffering to keep people in line, but wouldn't people be more manageable if there were big screen TVs, Netflix, and weed? My guess is that there will also be universal health care, only because it makes so much financial sense. Freedom and real prosperity will continue to fade into oblivion, but some measure of life-security may exist, for a little while. Just when we're getting used to it, climate change will hit with full force, and none of it will have mattered anyway.

The apocalypse will be televised, but only in the beginning.