Lakhota
Diamond Member
By the time Donald Trump becomes president in a few, desperately shortening weeks, he will already have made falsehood a U.S. goal. Trump does not lie to cover up the truth; he lies to deny the possibility that such a thing even exists. His feints and reversals are the essence of his belief system; he espouses a philosophy of bullshit. Until now, those habitual falsehoods have been the idiosyncrasies of a private citizen with no real responsibility toward anyone but himself. Once he takes the oath, his style becomes policy. We will have to get used to a president who dismisses the intelligence apparatus he commands, who denies events that took place on live television, who does not care whether he is caught in an obvious contradiction. We will have to learn to read a leader who treats truth as one option among many. When he issues a howler from the Oval Office, and his minions faithfully repeat it, that won’t be propaganda, but showbiz.
The term propaganda comes from the Latin phrase denoting a 17-century committee of cardinals charged with spreading — propagating — the faith. The word has an overtone of menace: This is what to believe; accept it, or else. It also implies the existence of an overarching philosophy, a consistent way of accounting for (or willfully distorting) facts. The authoritarian rulers to whom Trump-haters reflexively compare him to, primarily Mussolini and Hitler, caged their people within a rigid version of the world. Those who expressed unsanctioned opinions chose to dash themselves against those ideological bars, usually with lethal consequences.
Trump, on the other hand, has stripped his public utterances of coherence, let alone ideology. His rhetoric is shot through with the language of coercion, but he always seems to be winking while he makes his flamboyant threats. (His more unhinged followers may act on them, however.) Instead of riling up crowds by preaching faith, or nationalist zeal, or dialectical materialism, he relies on his instincts as an entertainer. His highest value is not fanaticism, but sheer excitement and suspense. He fears only that we look away — and by getting elected president, he has ensured that we can’t.
In his collection of essays from the early 1950s, The Captive Mind, Czeslaw Milosz describes the mind games that citizens of the Soviet sphere played to insulate themselves against an all-consuming ideology. The friction between official policy and personal experience produced a population of actors, people who, even amongst themselves, recited lines they knew to be false and masked their thoughts, which were by definition dangerous. We Americans of 2016, instead of becoming actors and reading ideologically prescribed lines, have elected as president a performance artist who has no script at all. Trump’s mendacity is improvisational, insubstantial. He tosses out a daily spectacle of sparkling untruths that dazzle like fireworks and are replaced by others before they have a chance to flare out.
Trump’s lies can seem like ploys to divert us from some underlying, unspeakable truth. But in the spray of distractions, he seems to have forgotten what, if anything, he’s supposed to be hiding. Are his Twitter blasts a diversion from a plan to use the presidency as leverage in his business dealings? Is his overt corruption really a cover for a program of white supremacy? Or does it all mean nothing?
More: Donald Trump’s War Against Facts
Amen! We're in for a wild ride. Trump is scary enough - but his unhinged followers are even scarier!
The term propaganda comes from the Latin phrase denoting a 17-century committee of cardinals charged with spreading — propagating — the faith. The word has an overtone of menace: This is what to believe; accept it, or else. It also implies the existence of an overarching philosophy, a consistent way of accounting for (or willfully distorting) facts. The authoritarian rulers to whom Trump-haters reflexively compare him to, primarily Mussolini and Hitler, caged their people within a rigid version of the world. Those who expressed unsanctioned opinions chose to dash themselves against those ideological bars, usually with lethal consequences.
Trump, on the other hand, has stripped his public utterances of coherence, let alone ideology. His rhetoric is shot through with the language of coercion, but he always seems to be winking while he makes his flamboyant threats. (His more unhinged followers may act on them, however.) Instead of riling up crowds by preaching faith, or nationalist zeal, or dialectical materialism, he relies on his instincts as an entertainer. His highest value is not fanaticism, but sheer excitement and suspense. He fears only that we look away — and by getting elected president, he has ensured that we can’t.
In his collection of essays from the early 1950s, The Captive Mind, Czeslaw Milosz describes the mind games that citizens of the Soviet sphere played to insulate themselves against an all-consuming ideology. The friction between official policy and personal experience produced a population of actors, people who, even amongst themselves, recited lines they knew to be false and masked their thoughts, which were by definition dangerous. We Americans of 2016, instead of becoming actors and reading ideologically prescribed lines, have elected as president a performance artist who has no script at all. Trump’s mendacity is improvisational, insubstantial. He tosses out a daily spectacle of sparkling untruths that dazzle like fireworks and are replaced by others before they have a chance to flare out.
Trump’s lies can seem like ploys to divert us from some underlying, unspeakable truth. But in the spray of distractions, he seems to have forgotten what, if anything, he’s supposed to be hiding. Are his Twitter blasts a diversion from a plan to use the presidency as leverage in his business dealings? Is his overt corruption really a cover for a program of white supremacy? Or does it all mean nothing?
More: Donald Trump’s War Against Facts
Amen! We're in for a wild ride. Trump is scary enough - but his unhinged followers are even scarier!
