Trump Titanic

I wondered why an intelligent, rational, and well-educated person could fall for the propaganda of MAGA. A dear friend provided the answer. She simply said, “Perhaps they’re expecting a First Class cabin on the Titanic.”

Immediately my mind filled in the blank: “The Trump Titanic.” The latest, greatest, and likely the last of the edifices he will erect as a monument to himself – and to the extinction of the human race.

He is supported by, I think, two classes of people. First are the folks who fear their status, beliefs, and heritage (white, evangelical, poorly educated, irrational) will be overcome by people of color, people whose appearance and beliefs are different, people far below them on the Great Chain of Being that is part of their understanding of reality and the teachings of their church.

Second are those who are willing to accept the existential threats to the human race in exchange for money, power, status, fifteen minutes of fame on a sycophantic news outlet, knowledge they are part of a group who thinks, believes, and breathes like them. A group that will die with them and the rest of us when too many of the drivers of climate change tip and we face a run-away greenhouse effect that will render Earth hot as Venus and all of us dead, desiccated corpses littering the landscape. Alternatively, when one of the enemies Trump has made pushes his button and initiates a global thermonuclear war. (There are other scenarios; these seem at the moment to be the most likely.)

Trump and the more persuasive of his puppets are trying to hide their activities by making us believe the problems are too big to solve, hoping the little people will be distracted by rearranging the deck chairs while the ship sinks. They are masters of today’s technology and of propaganda.

If Gobbles and Hitler had the internet, we would be speaking German, today.

A person who displayed hubris – overweening pride – was marked by the ancient gods for destruction. The Greek gods never had to deal with someone like Trump whose hubris could bring down a civilization and a species.

I invite you to read and remember Shelly’s poem:

​I met a traveler from an antique land,
Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal, these words appear:
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”