Night of the Living Dead

The fact that disaffection and even disembodiment are the lingua franca of cultural discourse is not particularly germane to this particular era. One factoid does play a role, however, and that's the extent to which the political situation has burrowed itself into even the most well-defended psyches. You may be in the middle of Swann's Way or The Four Quartets, and find the infection of spurious discourse and gaslighting spreading through the system say like worms in a dog. Just as you're about to catch your metaphysical breath, Trump, like one of the zombies from George Romero's Night of the Living Dead, opens his ghoulish maw, his used car dealer hairdo and hideous unchanging semantic drawl, hammering hope in a coffin. Sometimes people go into therapy with the mistaken belief that external conditions are what is making them unhappy. The process of treatment is to disabuse them of these defenses. Trump mockingly refers to his critics as suffering from Trump Derangement Syndrome. In fact, it's the one thing he says that's true. He is singlehandedly driving the collective unconscious of society nuts.