Thursday, November 19, 2020

Trumpty Dumpty: Once Upon a Time in Hollywood

The thing about cults is that they depend on a certain degree of despair. Hopelessness is the springbooard from which people are willing to throw themselves into a safe harbor from truths which are hard to face. It’s like the person suffering from a chronic illness who  runs off to quack doctors selling magic potions. Democrats are dumbfounded by Trump and Guiliani’s unfounded claims about the election. After tweeting “He won because the election was rigged,” Trump made a correction saying simply, “I won the election.” Living in an alternate universe is something that many people do and it comprises in fact a whole genre of science fiction. For instance Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle imagines a world in which the Axis powers won World War II. In order to understand the world of Trump’s base who buy his claims lock, stock and barrel, you probably would have to have street signs in Russian since the Russians, who have been promoting Trump since 2016, would be the chief beneficiaries of the failure of democracy. Nevertheless the whole Trump phenomena is really nothing compared to cults like those of Jim Jones (whose followers drank a deadly poison), Nxivm (whose adherents allowed themselves to be branded and turned into sex slaves), or Charles Manson whose murderous attack on Sharon Tate itself was made into an alternate reality, where the event is forestalled, in Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. Trumpty Dumpty sat on a wall. Trumpty Dumpty had a great fall...


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