The 25th anniversary of September 11 got me to thinking. Marx wrote that history tended to repeat itself, first as tragedy and then as farce. It seems that the MAGA administration in the US has decided to combine the process and roll both together in its second term while elevating its stupidity and cruelty to new heights. Let’s call it “tragicfarce.” The US is a historical tragicfarce unfolding before our eyes. The slide into decadence began long ago but 9-11 was the accelerant that fed the flames of reflexive imbecility and its attendant turn to global villainy.
The cast of culprits is large and the cliches write themselves: the gilt-edged monumental vanity project known as the MAGA circus clown car dumpster fire careening downhill has now jumped the shark. It is led by a snoozing Russian asset pedophile rapist diaper-wearing conman with orange facial skin and a cotton candy hairpiece (and his grifter family), seconded by a coke-snorting steroid freak, road-kill eater and racoon penis collecting Secretary of Health; a closeted Beta-boi Islamophobe misogynist alcoholic as Secretary of War; a google eyed podcasting ambulance-chasing lawyer drunkard as FBI director and a mob attorney as Attorney General; a former plumber/cage fighter as Secretary of Homeland Security (who replaced an adulterous former beauty queen puppy-killing mean girl); the wife of a wrestling mogul as Secretary of Education; a bitchy top as Treasury Secretary; a real estate fraudster as Secretary of Commerce; an adulteress fraudster with an on-the-job drinking problem as Labor Secretary; a sofa-humping neo-Nazi billionaire’s hand puppet whose fictionalised accounting of his life story was the launching pad for his rise as Vice President; a reality TV personality on a long road trip with a dozen kids as Secretary of Transportation; a closeted ideological troglodyte in heels as Secretary of State; the former head of the think tank that produced Project 2025 as the blueprint for this Carnaval side-show posing as government as Director of the Office of Management and Budget; and so many lesser sycophantic and opportunistic others that the list could fill an anthology of cravenly crass creeps (including a bleached blond known as the human printer who dotes on the slumbering Jabba with a diaper bag at her side). These extend down to the local US political level and to places overseas like the presidencies of Argentina and El Salvador (and the NZ First and ACT parties).
This ensemble of morons and cretins striving hard to become idiots have waged war on the US people using their own Gestapo known as ICE and are in the process of losing a war of opportunistic choice against Iran started at the behest of a genocidal Israeli state and its criminal Netanyahu government. It has killed scores of innocents at sea without evidence or trial, forcibly deposed and removed a foreign head of state and his wife while killing dozens in the process, then corruptly appropriated that nations’s oil assets, threatened to annex Canada and Greenland, renamed international bodies of water as “American,” blockaded Cuba, openly interfered in several Latin American elections, deported people to prisons in El Salvador and elsewhere, launched a global tariff war, eliminated foreign aid programs and financial support for international organisations and humanitarian relief agencies, ignored international law and engaged in punitive retaliation against international legal bodies like the ICC, and generally acted in what can only be described as a rogue way.
There is so, so much more on that score. Remember the reflecting pool make-over into a sewage pond? Or the Kennedy Center re-naming? or the Arch d’Trump at the entrance to ArIington National Cemetary? Perhaps not because there is so much more piled on top of those cultural and architectural atrocities. In fact, the plan seems to have been all along that the MAGA administration would perpetrate one or two outrages per day or at least several a week, in order to, as Steve Bannon advised them, “to flood the zone with sh*t.” That way one scandal would blend into another affront that in turn would bleed into a a vortex of policy and personal dysfunction that would be lost in the media cycle in the so-called “attention economy.” Forget North Korea, Iran or any other of the despotic regimes extant at the moment. The real threat to global peace comes from this criminal rabble and their endless dirty spin.
MAGA mouthpieces keep on speaking of “winning” and being great when inflation is unchecked, prices of domestic staples are rising, poverty is growing (and along with it civil unrest). It mugs and postures on real and imagined holidays but always with an eye on itself, not on the people or causes being venerated. It speaks of traditional Christian values and beliefs but it only worships its power over others. In a fairer time it would just be a parody of bad governance, sort of like a “Yes Minister” pitched along very dark lines. Sadly, it is not.
It is a theatre of the absurd made real and stocked with cartoon villains.
I could go on and on but we all know what we are seeing even if it is hard to fully comprehend. Some even seek to emulate these monsters in suits, spray tans, big hair and fake breasts. That cannot be allowed to happen, either in the US or anywhere else.
May their reign soon end and may their demise be painful..
My own experience with this type of cyclical behavior shows a much slower progression than what is described here. The concept of history repeating itself changes significantly when considering different political contexts.
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Trump is a real-life Auric Goldfinger. And many of his loyalists are the Mafiosi who supply him, only to be repaid for their loyalty by getting gassed in the boardroom.
Just adding my five cents worth. It always puzzles me that those who really dislike black and brown people want to paint their own faces brown. Trump will never have a suntan with his Celtic ancestry. Hannity is becoming browner every week. He still forgets his hair parting. Why do they dislike those with a natural skin colour? Just sayin’
Barbara:
That was an odd aside. There is much sociological and anthropological discussion about why people chose to alter their appearances. The phenomenon of African and Asian people attempting to “whiten” their appearances, including plastic surgery on eyes, lips and noses as well as the usual resort to bum and boob alterations by people of all races and ethnicities, has begat an entire cosmetic industry that cater to their desires (duh!). I saw this vividly in Singapore while living there, where women of asian descent fed a complex of magazines, beauty salons, surgeries and more in order to appear more Caucasian. On the other side, many white folk, including myself in my youth in Argentina and lasting long into my 30s, look for the perfect “tan” as part of their summer rituals or as a year-round obsession. You may remember that actor George Hamilton and his tan. White bodybuilders use bronzer like crazy before competitions. Hannity lives in Florida and clearly spends lots of time sunbathing. Be glad that we just see his tanned face and nothing else. His hair is a chemical waste deposit so the part does not matter so much as his scalp glowing in the dark.
I stopped tanning when I shifted to endurance racing and training because I have fair skin and I got blistered by the sun in places where I lived when doing so. Kiwis are ahead of the game in this regard but many, many people still do not accept that tanning causes irreparable skin damage, including skin cancers. I am proof of that now that I am older. But the practice of appearance alteration is, sadly a basic human syndrome, one that is socially-driven rather than natural in origin (i.e. it is socially-constructed rather than a human trait).
As for Trump. He is just a psychopath of the malignant narcissist sort. I think that his appearance alterations have little to do with race, ethnicity or even self-loathing. He is just a freak.
One last anecdote because you got this started. Years ago I dated a woman who had classic Sub-Saharan African features. At some point in our relationship she said to me “I have a confession to make. I am a barbie killer.” I asked what the heck that meant. She said that the classic barbie doll was the antithesis and refection of everything she was as a little black girl and later as a woman. So she would go to toy stores with a scissors and snip the heads off of barbie dolls as an act of defiance against white dominated beauty standards. Again, as a child. When I asked her if she was still doing that she said that she occasionally had the urge but no, she had moved on to better things. She was a special person and I benefitted from our acquaintance. We parted company amicably when I moved away to other places but that anecdote was an eye-opener. I have never thought of barbie dolls in the same way as I did before I met her and understand that now they come in all racial stereotypes. Capitalism at work.
PS. If Trump isn’t Auric Goldfinger, then he’s Johannes van der Smut a.k.a. Goldmember.