\u201cMedals for Everyone!\u201d<\/b><\/p>\n
A guide to understanding Trumpenstein II<\/b><\/p>\n
Bryan Zepp Jamieson<\/i><\/p>\n
November 17th<\/sup> 2024<\/i><\/p>\n If you haven\u2019t seen the 1933 Marx Brothers classic \u201cDuck Soup,\u201d now might be a good time to do so. Raucous and absurd, it\u2019s also a fairly handy guide to what Americans might expect over this coming year.<\/span><\/p>\n In the movie, a rich plutocrat (Gloria Teasdale, played by Margaret Dumont) with more money than common sense makes the nation of Freedonia an offer it can\u2019t refuse. $20 million in US dollars (worth nearly $500 million today) but there\u2019s a catch: she gets to appoint the next leader of Freedonia. She has someone in particular in mind: Rufus T. Firefly (Groucho Marx).<\/span><\/p>\n Rufus is erratic, egotistical verging on monomaniacal, impetuous and basically a force of chaos. Without the intervention of moronic money, he would never have gotten within a time zone of the levers of power.<\/span><\/p>\n Freedonia falls into corrupt paralysis and eventually ends up at war with its neighboring country. Freedonia collapses, and the enemy troops find Rufus and his rich sponsor, toss them in stocks and pelt them with fruit. <\/span><\/p>\n This being a Marx brothers movie and not the country you grew up in, it\u2019s all very hilarious.<\/span><\/p>\n Thanks in large part to the power of propaganda, a majority of American voters felt liberated to be complete, vicious, selfish shits and elect a hateful nut as President. If you think of the coalition of plutocrats and corporations that promoted this (the National Association of Zealots and Ideologues, and yes, I\u2019m going to keep right on calling them that until they throw me in the camps) as the Teasdale coalition, and Donald J. Trump as Rufus T. Firefly, then suddenly Duck Soup stops looking like an amusing, if dated parody and instead, becomes our future.<\/span><\/p>\n I won\u2019t bother discussing the start of our new era. The headlines speak for themselves. Not only is it as bad a start as we can imagine, but it\u2019s a worse start than we could imagine. Andy Borowitz caught the spirit of this new world order with a picture of Matt Gaetz and the caption: \u201cMaybe this is what QAnon meant when they talked about bringing pedophiles to Justice.\u201d <\/span><\/p>\n Our only real hope is that the new regime, like that of Rufus T. Firefly\u2019s, will be so corrupt and incompetent that it will simply collapse before it has a chance to utterly destroy the nation. What such a collapse might entail I can\u2019t really imagine. But it has already begun.<\/span><\/p>\n We\u2019re already hearing reports of a incandescently angry Trump screaming at aides over leaks, mostly because the leaks tend to be true. We\u2019re seeing flat-out lies already, and repression is rapidly spreading. I know that for some time the earth sciences have been moving data and access to data out of the country, a stream that has become a flood since the 5th<\/sup> of November. I imagine a lot of other disciplines that fall under the tent of \u201cwoke\u201d or \u201cbad for business\u201d or which contradicts holy script are all doing the same thing. We\u2019re not going to get out of this without falling into a mini-dark age at the very least.<\/span><\/p>\n Fortunately, most of the world\u2019s library is on-line and safely abroad. They can ban all the books they want, but as long as people can log on overseas (magic words: Tor Browser and a virtual private network) access to knowledge and wisdom will remain.<\/span><\/p>\n Another reason to believe that the age of Trump might be short-lived: his policies (tariffs, deconstruction of nearly the entire federal government, deporting nearly half of the agricultural labor force) are going to be catastrophic for the economy, and no matter how much his regime tries to hide it, the same plutocrats who made Trump possible (the top ten richest Americans added $68 billion to their wealth in the DAY after Trump as elected) are going to start seeing immense losses. <\/span><\/p>\n Social unrest will probably rise to levels unseen since 1933. Trump wants to respond to protest violently, which is the surest path to cause discontent to blaze into full rebellion. Trump and his motley crew are probably too arrogant and too stupid to realize it, but they are creating what will become a social tsunami. It won\u2019t be pretty.<\/span><\/p>\n