And no, I don't mean the most important thing you'll read today is what I write here.
I was just turned to a writer, one Tom Englehart and his fellow writers and editors over at TomDispatch.
I'm surprised I didn't know of it earlier, good as it is. It seems to have very clear, calm, intelligent, resourceful writers, if this piece I read today is any example. Here is that most important thing:
Tomgram: John Feffer,
Slouching Toward the Apocalypse
I think it's a brilliant, if deeply scary piece. It's about not just Donald Trump but about his followers, as well. Herewith, I post just a part of it but the most important part, to me, anyway:
The world according to Donald Trump is very dark indeed. The American economy has tanked. Mexico has sent a horde of criminals over the border to steal jobs and rape women. The Islamic State, cofounded by Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, is taking over the globe. “Our country’s going to hell,” he declared during the Republican primaries. It’s “like medieval times,” he suggested during the second presidential debate. “We haven’t seen anything like this, the carnage all over the world.”
For Trump, it’s not morning in America, it’s just a few seconds before midnight on the doomsday clock. Although his campaign doggedly continues to promise a new beginning for the country, the candidate and his advisers are sending out a very different message: the end is nigh. These Cassandras all agree that, although Obama’s two terms were no walk in the park, the stakes in 2016 are world-destroyingly higher. If Clinton is elected, the future could be, as conservative political operatives Dick Morris and Eileen McGann titled their recent book,Armageddon.
Presidential challengers often paint a grim picture of the world of the incumbent, overstating the case for dramatic effect. Ever the showman, Trump has no compunction about repeatedly going way over the top, calling the U.S. military a “disaster” because it’s supposedly underfunded and the United States a “third-world country” thanks to its precipitous economic decline. Trump talks as if he were the hybrid offspring of Karl Marx and Ann Coulter.
Trumpworld, however, is a photographic negative of statistical reality. The U.S. economy has been on an upswing for the last several years (though its benefits have been anything but evenly distributed). Nationally, violent crime is on the decline(though murder rates are soaring in some cities like Chicago). The Obama administration averted war with Iran and negotiated a détente with Cuba (though it continues to wage war in other parts of the world and has maintained sky-high Pentagon spending). If the Obama years are hardly beyond criticism, they are hardly beneath contempt either.
In dispensing with what one of his senior aides called the “reality-based community,” George W. Bush’s administration attempted to create an alternative, on-the-ground reality, particularly through the direct exercise of American military power -- and we know how well that turned out. Trump seems to have even less interest in the “reality-based community.” He’s evidently convinced that the sheer power of his own bluster, even without the firepower of that military, should be sufficient to alter our world. After all, didn’t it win him a loyal following on TV and -- to the disbelief of politicians and media commentators everywhere -- the Republican presidential nomination?
The reality-based community -- which Trump labels the “elite” -- wants nothing to do with him. The discrepancy between his rhetoric and what other people call facts explains in part why even conservative elites -- prominent Republicans like Brent Scowcroft and John Warner, conservative columnists like George Will, and even neoconservatives like Bill Kristol, not to speak of right-leaning newspapers likeThe Arizona Republic and the Dallas Morning News -- have made historic decisions to abandon their party's presidential nominee.
But don’t kid yourself. There is method to Trump’s particular version of madness. He and his slyly smiling running mate Mike Pence are playing up their vision of scorched-earth America not just to win general political points but to appeal to a very specific set of voters by tapping into the apocalyptic strain in American politics. The evangelicals, anti-globalists, and white power constituencies that form the bedrock of his support hear in Trump’s blasts more than just a set of fun-house facts. When the Donald says that Hillary is "the devil" and America’s going to hell, this constituency -- steeped in Biblical prophecy, survivalist ideology, and racist conspiracies -- takes him literally. America is on the verge of (take your pick): the Rapture, an end-of-days contest between American patriots and U.N. invaders, or an all-out race war to the finish.
And here’s what makes Trump’s carnivalesque presidential campaign especially topsy-turvy. He’s been slouching toward just about every kind of Armageddon imaginable, except the genuine planetary ones that are -- or should be -- almost unavoidable these days. He has, after all, dismissed climate change as a “hoax” and a Chinese scam. He is so blasé about nuclear weapons that he’s been comfortable with the thought of American allies Japan, South Korea, and Saudi Arabiadeveloping their own. He has nothing whatsoever to say about potential global pandemics (but plenty to spout about the potentially malign effects of vaccinations).
To grasp the nature of such genuine dangers requires at least a minimal understanding of science. It also requires a genuine concern that the world as we know it could indeed end in our lifetimes or those of our children and grandchildren.
Of course, not everyone thinks the apocalypse is a bad thing.
I suggest that any and all who find any truth and insight in the above, go to the post and read the rest, too, certainly. It sheds a great deal of light on these people, what they think, what they're doing and what they may yet do. I also suggest you go to the link below to find out about or find out more about Alex Jones, depending what all you know of him.
Heaven and God help us all, folks, pun intended. There are some scary, really scary, uninformed, misguided, dangerous and/or potentially dangerous, emotional, religious people out there. Until reading this, I thought Trump would merely be crushed, electorally, November 8, and then he'd slink away, he and all his supporters.
Now, I'm not certain of that second part at all.
Note: To prove, too, just a bit of what Mr. Feffer writes in the article, this story just broke 37 minutes ago--
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