My post on Trumpgod created a fuss. The best response was from the Como Farrago. Here is it.
Trumpgod is not really a god,
not in any sense of the word.
I think what we’re
witnessing is something more akin to the Israelites offering sacrifices to a
golden calf - or something - maybe the golden blatherskite.
Still there is a point
when the manifestation of the god vaporizes, ideally with a
whimper. How and when does that happen?
Some precedential [!]
examples:
The little boy speaks
the obvious, “The Emperor has no clothes!”
That ain’t happenin’
yet. So far most of the little boys who are speaking up are Republicans.
Before they can spook - er, speak to us credibly about how false the golden
blatherskite is, they owe the citizens of this country a huge moment of
atonement for the fact that they’ve made it all possible for the blatherskite
to go around flashing everyone. The GOP has
been the clothing optional party for years now, and it just ain’t pretty.
Look what they’re doing to such an anodyne SCOTUS nominee as Merrick
Garland. (Lee Atwater repented, but not until he was on his deathbed, so
it’s not as effective as it would be if, say, Mitt Romney, Newt Gingrich, the
two Georges, and maybe the Koch brothers all dumped ashes on their heads, wore
sackcloth, and lived in a house on the South Side of Chicago or maybe at the
Pine Ridge Reservation for a few years.)
Toto pulls the curtain
away from Professor Marvel as he thunders, “Pay no attention to that man behind
the curtain!” But the wizard’s reign is suddenly over, and it’s time to
lam out of Oz for Kansas.
So far Toto appears in
two disguises, protestors who show up at Trumpgod rallies and get beat up or
hounded out of the arena. Such protestors mean well, but something about
them - the color of their skin, for example (and unfortunately), or the fact
they’re Syrian refugees or Mexican immigrants, or lib’rals - renders
their protests futile before they even begin.
The other Toto
disguise is the journalist who digs into Trumpgod’s history, and tells the
stories of how Trumpgod ran roughshod over his faithful followers back in the
land of Caanan. Trumpgod’s business dealings in Atlantic City, for
example, should be warnings to all his current rabid followers who are
Trumpgod’s future victims. I think Trumpgod’s word for them is “Losers!”
while his operative words can be condensed to “Screw ’em!”
Alexander Butterfield
tells the Senate Watergate committee that Richard Nixon has a tape recording
system in the Oval Office.
Maybe one of
Trumpgod’s high priests suddenly wakes up and sees the errors of his ways?
This scenario is kind of a combination of the denouements in the
little boy and Toto stories above.
The alcoholic wakes up
and realizes the vodka cure isn’t working anymore.
This resolution would
be the saddest one of all, I think, and wouldn’t happen until sometime after
Trumpgod’s inauguration on January 20, 2017. And who knows how
much damage the alcoholic would do before he wakes up and realizes that
it’s time for rehab, maybe even rehab in the form of a constitutional
convention.
I understand the 19th
century American historian, Henry Adams, said that the presidents from George
Washington to Ulysses Grant were a direct refutation of Darwin’s theory of
evolution. Looking back over the past 40 to 50 years, I’d say that the
line from Eisenhower to Trump is further refutation of Darwin.
I think this quote
from Jung says it all:
“We
think we can congratulate ourselves on having already reached such a pinnacle
of clarity, imagining that we have left all these phantasmal gods far behind.
But what we have left behind are only verbal specters, not the psychic facts
that were responsible for the birth of the gods. We are still as much possessed
today by autonomous psychic contents as if they were Olympians. Today they are
called phobias, obsessions, and so forth; in a word, neurotic symptoms. The
gods have become diseases; Zeus no longer rules Olympus but rather the solar
plexus, and produces curious specimens for the doctor’s consulting room, or
disorders the brains of politicians and journalists who unwittingly let loose
psychic epidemics on the world.”
