The following…the reason for the amazing Trump hysteria in a nutshell.
Think about it.
Please.
From Counterpunch:
Big Brother Isn’t Watching You, You’re Watching Him, by Tom Englehardt.
A record? Come on! Don’t minimize what’s happening. It’s far too unique, too unprecedented even to be classified as “historic.” Call it mega-historic, if you wish. Never from Babylonian King Nebuchadnezzar to Soviet despot Joseph Stalin, from the Sun King Louis the XIV to President Ronald Reagan, from George Washington to Barack Obama, has anyone — star, icon, personality, president, autocrat, emperor — been covered in anything like this fashion.
In our American world, the only comparison might be to a few days of media coverage of the assassination of John F. Kennedy or the attempted assassination of Ronald Reagan or, in more recent times, a terror attack like the one in San Bernardino. Keep in mind, though, that such coverage has been going on for more than two and a half years now. So here’s another possible point of comparison, though it only lasted a couple of hours almost a quarter of a century ago. In fact, it may be the most appropriate comparison of all in a landscape in which shrinking media outlets have been scrambling to glue eyeballs to page or screen in an otherwise dazzling landscape of distraction. Think of Donald Trump’s White House sojourn so far as our first white Ford Bronco presidency.
Imagine that, in June 2015, The Donald hadn’t swept down that Trump Tower escalator into the presidential race to the sounds of Neil Young’s “Rockin’ in the Free World,” but had instead slipped behind the wheel of O.J. Simpson’s infamous white Ford Bronco and headed off on the nearest highway, the one leading directly into all our brains. The two hours that Simpson spent armed in that vehicle in 1994, four days after the murder of his wife, with the police trailing him and TV news helicopters hovering overhead, would prove to be our first experience of the reality TV version of the “news” in which we’re now immersed. If you remember, it seemed to unfold in something like slow motion as roadside crowds turned out to cheer the “Juice” on. It would essentially be two hours of nothing whatsoever that nonetheless seemed to supersede everything else on Earth, two hours during which Americans ordered record amounts of home-delivered pizza, while watching traffic flowing on a highway to nowhere. In the process, a vision of mayhem that might otherwise have passed for boredom was etched permanently into the media’s DNA.
Think of Donald Trump as the O.J. Simpson of our moment and those hours on that highway as a preview of what media life (which, with the arrival of the handheld screen, has become more or less all life) turned out to be. Think of Donald Trump’s presidential run and now presidency as a never-ending white Ford Bronco ride, and if you accept that, all that remains to be asked is who was murdered (democracy?) and did he do it?
All Trump All the Time
Here, in my opinion, may be the strangest thing of all. Who doesn’t sense just how unprecedented the media spectacle of our moment is? Every single day is a new Trump dawn, a new firing or appointment at the White House, a new tweet storm, a new outrageous statement or policy, a new insult, a new lie or misstatement, a new bit of news about Stormy Daniels or other women who — your choice — had affairs with, were groped by, defamed by, or silenced by him, and so on down an endlessly repetitive list of what has become “the news” more or less 24/7 or perhaps more accurately 24/365 (with not a holiday in sight).
Who wouldn’t agree with that? And yet have you noticed how little such coverage is itself actually covered? At least during the election campaign you could get some overview numbers on the blitz of attention the media was giving candidate Trump. It was regularly said, for instance, that he had gotten $5 billion in free advertising in those endless months in which his face, rants, tweets, nicknames, his… well, you name it… was eternally front and center in our media lives.
Post-election, nothing has really changed and yet when was the last time you saw a mainstream news article on such an unprecedented phenomenon? When did anyone front page the fact that no human being in history has ever been covered in this fashion, a fashion that gives the very word “cover” a grim new meaning?
I mean I’m just one guy. My resources are slim. I have no studies commissioned on this subject and little to draw on except my own experience of everyday life. So here’s the closest I can come to catching the nature of that coverage for you. I go to the gym almost every day. There’s a waiting area I pass through on my route in and out of the men’s locker room. On one wall is a large-screen TV. Sometimes, it’s tuned to sports, but mostly it has the cable news on. Basketball games aside, it really doesn’t matter what time I arrive, or whether it’s MSNBC, CNN, or even on the rarest of occasions (this is New York City, after all!) Fox News, here’s what’s always the same: on screen are those ever-present talking heads yakking away about, well, Donald Trump or something related to him (the Mueller investigation, the steel and aluminum or Chinese tariffs, Stormy Daniels, the president’s Putin bromance… you know the list) and under them there’s that crawl, that news ticker, the one that, day in, day out, is always — and I mean always — scrolling away on subjects about or related to Donald Trump.
—snip—
An All-American Cult of Personality
Believe me, if this were happening in Russia or China (The cult of Putin! The cult of Xi!), it would be a major news story and treated as such. After all, thought of a certain way, what we’ve been watching is indeed the creation of an all-American cult of personality (quite literally so when it comes to Trump’s “base,” as any of his rallies suggest). And yet that and the media’s role in it isn’t news.
Admittedly, Donald Trump is a hell of a story. And for a media filled with shrinking news staffs and desperate to find ways to hold onto or increase readership or viewership, he’s a godsend (as well as a monster). After all, his greatest skill — the one he’s spent a lifetime perfecting — is undoubtedly his unerring instinct for just how to attract the camera under more or less any circumstances. The result, however, is a picture of the world that’s deceptive in the extreme. These days, if you only watched TV and read mainstream papers, you would be excused for thinking that we were in a world of Donald Trump and little else. By now, he’s all but blotted out the sun itself. In this sense, for instance, he isn’t so much a climate-change denier in an administration filled with them and dedicated to the promotion of fossil fuels as a climate-change obliterator. (Hence, p. A20 is the only spot left for that “little” story on the sinking of San Francisco.)
—snip—
Back in 1948, George Orwell imagined a society 36 years in the future in which, no matter where you went, “Big Brother” was watching you. That certainly fit the desires, if not the capabilities, of totalitarian governments in that twentieth century moment. It even fit with certain tendencies Orwell believed he saw in western capitalist society. And he wasn’t wrong: the urge to surveil populations has only grown in our American world in the years since in ways that would have blown the minds of the Communist leaders of that past era.
Seven decades after Orwell’s dystopian classic 1984 was published, we in the United States do indeed find ourselves in a full-scale surveillance society — and that world, as Edward Snowden let us know in such a memorable fashion back in 2013, preceded Donald Trump. But when it comes to Trump, here’s the curious thing that Orwell himself couldn’t have imagined: Big Brother isn’t watching us, we’re forever watching him.
Donald Trump, the president we meet in the media every hour of every day, blots out much of the rest of the world and much of what’s meaningful in it. Such largely unexamined, never-ending coverage of his doings represents a triumph of the first order both for him (no matter how he rails against the media) and for an American cult of personality that will take us who knows where (but nowhere good).
And…the little-reported Big Brotherish surveillance development that should have us all quaking in our boots:
US visa seekers will have to disclose social media
According to a State Department plan published Friday, visa seekers — whether visitors or would-be immigrants — will be presented with a list of social media platforms.
Applicants will be required to identify which they use and provide “any identifiers used by applicants for those platforms during the five years preceding the date of application.”
“Other questions seek five years of previously used telephone numbers, email addresses, and international travel,” the notice, published in the Federal Register, revealed.
When these new rules were first suggested last year as part of what US President Donald Trump has called “extreme vetting” of would-be visitors, civil liberties groups sounded the alarm about privacy.
But officials say they could identify potential extremists, such as one of the attackers in the December 2015 San Bernadino shooting — who got a visa despite allegedly advocating “jihad” on social media.
The measures apply both to the DS-260 “Immigrant Visa and Alien Registration Form” and the DS-160 “Application for Nonimmigrant Visa.”
In the last fiscal year, 559,536 people applied for US immigrant visas and 9,681,913 for various forms of visitor visa. Friday’s announced measures will not touch diplomatic or official travelers.
The announcement begins a 60-day period in which interested bodies and members of the public will be allowed to submit comments on the rule changes, which are expected to be approved on May 29.
From tiny acorns, mighty oaks grow.
Think about it.
And while you are at it, think about the following as well. From Wikipedia:
The Social Credit System is a proposed Chinese government initiative for developing a national reputation system.[1][2][3] It has been reported to be intended to assign a “social credit” rating to every citizen based on government data regarding their economic and social status.[4][3][5][6][7] It works as a mass surveillance tool and uses big data analysis technology.[8] In addition, it is also meant to rate businesses operating on the Chinese market.[9]
Translation:
If you have been a good little boy or girl…and I say “boy or girl” because you can damned well be sure that the Big Brothers and Big Sisters of our equivalent 1984 world powers are not going to reward “social credits” to outliers of any sex…if you have been a good little boy or girl and followed all of the rules from jaywalking laws right on through to thought crimes like not agreeing with the government, you will be rewarded with “social credits” that will allow you to be a good worker bee, complete with a little cavern in the giant people hive where you can sleep and shit and an obeisant mate who will do the dishes and have the allowed number of babies.
And if you have not been a good little boy or girl?
Heaven help you…provided of course that the idea of “Heaven” itself is not proscribed by the Social Credit rule-makers.
I repeat:
From tiny acorns, mighty oaks grow, and even poisonous, artificial oaks have their nasty little acorns.
Here they are, in plain sight.
The NATO media…”NATO” being the expanded, modern day equivalent of Orwell’s superpower “Oceania”…are only covering the Chinese and Russian developments in this direction, but do any of you really think that the Google/Facebook/Amazon etc. megamind has not already got us all set up for our own “Social credit” system?
Really?
Could the current media Trumpamania just be a screen? A diversion from the real thing?
I’m beginning to think so, myself.
As Tom Englehardt wrote:.
A record? Come on! Don’t minimize what’s happening. It’s far too unique, too unprecedented even to be classified as “historic.” Call it mega-historic, if you wish. Never from Babylonian King Nebuchadnezzar to Soviet despot Joseph Stalin, from the Sun King Louis the XIV to President Ronald Reagan, from George Washington to Barack Obama, has anyone — star, icon, personality, president, autocrat, emperor — been covered in anything like this fashion.
While (almost) everyone dithers around about the latest misadventures of our own little Sun King, what is going on in the back rooms/dark minds of the controllers?
Inquiring minds want to know.
Unfortunately, there seem to be very few “inquiring minds” left to do the inquiring. Too many of us…on all possible sides of the issue…have bought into the currently raging Sun King/Bad King cover story.
Meanwhile, back at the ranch…
The cooks are hard at work, and the plot thickens.
Watch.
AG
P.S. It used to be:
Your papers, please!!!
Soon?
Unless we wake the fuck up and actually do something besides change the name of whichever centrist party’s turn it may be to act as if it is in control?
Your social credits are not in order!!! Step away from the line!!!
So…at least the beginning of a solution?
WAKE THE FUCK UP!!!
Please!!!
