You know what’s really hard for me?   Reacting to the latest of Trump’s cockamamie remarks.  They are flung out there, one after another, and it is humanly impossible for one person to comment on all of them.  Practically every time he opens his mouth or tweets I scramble for my Macbook, but alas, by the time I have something in mind to transcribe he says something even more dumbfounding.  It’s all completely overwhelming, but of course that is exactly what he wants.  Creating confusion to the point where a normal person just says “fuck it I give up” is a method Trump has fine tuned and I believe something intentional that he is critically counting  on.

It’s exactly for that reason I am taking on the project that follows.  Always keeping in mind this propensity of Trump to deflect and confuse, I naturally have had to pick and choose what topic particularly disturbs me.  I have to tell you a couple recently stick out.  After the disastrous Helsinki summit (addressed in my previous blog), Trump addressed the VFW in Kansas City.  Typically enough Trump turned the event into a political rally but he made a comment that to me was particularly jarring.  “What you are seeing and what you are reading is not what’s happening,” were the Orwellian words that made my hands sweat.

Then there was this. Trump TV Tantrum  Fox News is basically “State Television.”  I know first-hand.  My mother lives in an assisted living facility in the retirement community of St. George Utah, and practically  any television set you happen to see or hear will be tuned to that channel, including my mother’s.  Everywhere you go, in rooms  up and down the hallways of hospitals, rehab facilities, and even in the faraway corners of many businesses, there is Fox News blaring away.

I know there has been resurgent sales of George Orwell’s novel “1984.”  That makes perfect sense given our current political/social environment.  I read it in high school.  But it was not till the occurrence of these two successive incidents that I was personally motivated  to revisit the novel.  So what I am about to do is mention salient points of the novel, and juxtapose related political/social events that have taken place during the Trump administration.  Sorry, this will be long.  I had forgotten how involved and forboding this work is.  I extracted my information from a great You Tube video “The Dystopian World of 1984 Explained”  If you have the time I encourage you to google it as well as read the book.

At its core the Orwellian Dystopia is totalitarianism to the extreme.  The party’s grip on the mind is so powerful what once was unquestionable fact is similar to a dream and you question if it even happened or was ever real at all.  Then, you forget about it.—- Sound familiar?  Trump is so good and persistent at lying and twisting facts we reach a point of total exasperation that progresses to numbed insouciance.  We get worn out trying to defend logic and truth- basically everything I’ve mentioned so far- believe only Trump, state TV.

INGSOC  (the PARTY).  The party controls all, sees all. INGSOC controls information to the extent that facts are not reality and reality can be changed at the whim of Big Brother and the party,  INGSOC is able to normalize aberrant social behavior and conditions- class division, censorship, a general uneducated population, even mass atrocities.  These are allowed to be commonplace because anyone who didn’t agree with it is either too unimportant or doesn’t care.—- Sorry Republicans, but by enabling Trump and all his disinformation and lies you are a 21st century INGSOC. Investigation obstructionists like  Nunes and Jordan types are especially accusable, but McConnell and Ryan are just as complicit by doing nothing.  Their behavior runs pertinently parallel to INGSOC’s Inner and Outer Parties.

Inner Party- 2% of population in 1984 and basically heads of state.  Outer Party- 13% of population and mostly bureaucratic people.  The party only has to worry about its own stability to survive.  The general population is too simple to matter.—-  Republicans are willing to put up with Trump as long as their agenda moves forward.

Proles- the general population- the easy to manipulate, uneducated, simpletons—-  Pretty much how Trump and his cronies feel about the rest of us.

Ministry of Truth- One of four main governmental sectors, the propaganda arm of the party.  The purpose of the party is to rewrite, prevent, or destroy any conflicting bit of news or history that goes against the party.  Examples in the novel are heroes who do not exist.—- Might as well go ahead and label Fox News our modern Ministry of Truth.  Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham, Lou Dobbs, Tucker Carlson- who better to distort the truth and promote Trump’s alternative facts.  Minister of Truth Sean Hannity

Purges- at some point in time INGSOC purged those not loyal to the party’s ideology.—- Trump’s willingness to even consider Russian interrogation of American citizens, one a former U.S ambassador to Russia, more than stands out here.

Solidify the party’s base with new, fanatical, nationalistic adults.  Obviously healthy for your ideology.  In the novel, children are likely to report their parents for “thought crimes.” —-  I could see that happening in the not too distant future. Have you seen those children going berserk  shouting “lock her up” at a Trump rally?   Who let’s their kids attend one of those things anyway?

Newspeak- The official language of the party.  It is simplistic and limited to small bits.  It makes debate controllable or refutable.  INGSOC has a monopoly on discourse because it made the words up.  This goes deeper than a weird language however.  Brainwashing is a cultural manifestation of newspeak.  Reality and history can be changed with the stroke of a bureaucratic pen—-  Trump talk is often a two or three word sound bite.  “Believe me,” “Locker her up,” “Fake news,”  “Little rocket man.” “Witch hunt.”  Trump and Fox News opinion staff repeat his favorite phrases over and over.  No doubt it has an impact at some point on a lot of people.   Simplistic and limited pretty much describe Trump’s vocabulary,  and it is obvious grammar and sentence structure were subjects he never took seriously in school.  And who can forget “Covfefe.?”

Doublethink- a Newspeak term that holds two conflicting beliefs as equal.—-  This happens all the time in Trumpworld.  Friend and foe are interchangeable.  U.S. intelligence agencies are to be believed one day, disbelieved the next.

2018, welcome to 1984.

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As it was with his meeting with Kim Jong Un, the one certain take away from the disastrous Helsinki Summit is this:  When it comes to direct confrontation with demagogues, the “tough guy” image Trump would like us to believe he portrays is pretty much nothing but vaporous prattling.  The entire world was left wondering WTF was this?  Whatever was or was not accomplished, we are left with one of two stark conclusions about the man running our country.  Is the president of the United States an out of control narcissist, or does Putin have something egregiously compromising on him?  The most defensible explanation for his bazaar performance is the first- that he is absolutely obsessed with the idea that nothing must taint his questionable election, to the point of  embarrassing himself and the country in order to put his mind at  ease.

At the summit press conference however, President Putin was asked a question by Reuters reporter Jeff Mason that is puzzlingly contradictory, but was answered in such a way Trump must have felt he was kicked in the balls.  Mason asked if he directed any of his officials to help Trump get elected.  Putin replied yes, he did, because he felt Trump could more normalize relations between the two countries.  In fairness, before Putin thus responded, there was a lengthy discussion where both Putin and Trump interjected remarks.  But still, after repeatedly denying any involvement, Putin gave that answer to that question.  Slip of the tongue?

Putin also “offered” to allow the Mueller team to come to Russia to conduct investigations, but of course only after Russia reciprocated with their own investigations.  During that discussion, Putin suggested the U.S. extradite Bill Browder, the financier who was the driving force behind the Magnitsky Act. There is probably no one else on the entire planet that Putin would rather get his hands on.   And astonishingly, Trump thought the whole concept of Russian involvement in a U.S. investigation about Russia was a perfectly peachy idea.

Trump’s conduct during the entire conference was mind-boggling.  Perhaps feeling that the international community would be just as likely to appreciate his campaign rhetoric as those attending one of his political rallies in a red midwestern state, he took the opportunity once again to expound on his smashing electoral college victory and interject comments about Hillary’s e-mails. One wonders if he felt crushed when neither uproarious applause nor raucous cheering were forthcoming.

Trump’s performance in Helsinki convinced me more than ever that at some point in time our nation will be confronted by that second explanation, that underneath Trump’s hyper protestations about any connection he has with Russia, there is something  lurking that must be  exceedingly  distressing to the president.  We have seen this man’s attempts to undermine our democratic norms and institutions since his inauguration, and what we saw in Helsinki was an even more sinister extension of that behavior.  This is a president who threatens the free press,  and stakes a claim to patriotism by using the American flag to provoke national dissension and deny first amendment rights.  Even more  hypocritical and unpatriotic is a president who won’t defend the citizens* or intelligence agencies of his own country, but does the bidding of the adversarial president of another.

*Besides Bill Browder, we later learned in the mix of U.S. citizens  Trump is considering offering up to Putin is former U.S. ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul.  The fact that I am sitting here typing the previous sentence should scare the shit out of all of us.

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Virginia coal miner Jacob Funkhowser, who was recently diagnosed with Black Lung disease, says he is confident he’ll be fine in a few days since the coal dust he has been inhaling is the new clean kind and not the old dirty type that killed his father.  “My dad just happened to be a miner at the wrong time, before there was all this clean coal we are mining now,” Funkhowser said.  Asked if this is information that he received from his physician, Mr. Funkhowser said he couldn’t recall  what his doctor told him, but he is adamantly confident President Trump knows what he is talking about.  Between coughing fits Mr. Funkhowser did his best to clarify his statement, but the interview was cut short after he noticed his portable oxygen tank was nearing empty.

Resurgence of Black Lung Disease