The Donald Trump Cult

You get to the point where you think the whole electoral system is such a fucked up mess that you just want to take a leap into the abyss—meaning voting for Donald Trump. Why not do something really extreme, like Jim Jones’ followers? The worse that can happen is that the pied piper will lead his children into a figurative vat of cyanide characterized by even more destruction than we have already experienced. If you think ISIS is bad, then wait until the Donald takes over. But unless you’re an illegal immigrant you start to get taken in by the brashness of this pater familias you once rejected. It’s very enticing when someone comes along and seems to have all the answers. Isn’t this what we all want? The model for the dictator is a God who will fulfill all our wishes and dreams. No need for taxes, no problems with illegal immigrants (we’ll build the Great Wall of Trump), no problems with health care (who needs it?) and if you’re a bully in the schoolyard, ie Kim Jong-un or Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, watch out because Daddy’s coming. Remember those oft quoted Yeats lines “The best lack all conviction, while the worst/ Are filled with passionate intensity.” Well Mr. Trump may lack an exact plan when it comes to foreign policy, but he has no lack of conviction. If you're thinking about taking a leap and playing the Trump card, you’ll be in good company. One of his big fans is Vladimir Putin ("Vladimir Putin Chides Turkey, Praises Trump and Talks Up Russia's Economy," NYT, 12/17/15). Or you could bid no Trump.

Manichaeism 101

Adolf Hitler as child

Demagogues dine on hopelessness. They’re like the quarterback on fourth down who  throws the Hail Mary, but there's even something more apocalyptic about the totalitarian mentality. After a string of rejections, have you ever experienced the wish that planet would be hit by a meteor with civilization thrust into darkness? Then the hierarchy would disappear and there would be no top or bottom anymore. The radical reordering of French Republicans like Robespierre (who literally attempted to rewrite history by changing the calendar) finds its modern equivalent in dictators like Pol Pot, Duvalier, Milosevic and Idi Amin. But now a particularly exotic new political cocktail is being brewed. Demagoguery has resulted in the birth of a dialectic. America’s feeling of hopelessness in the face of Islamic extremism (Hegelian thesis) is laying the ground for Donald Trump’s campaign (anti-thesis). In an article entitled “95,000 Words, Many of Them Ominous, From Donald Trump’s Tongue,” (NYT, 12/5/15) The Times quotes Matt Motyl, “a political psychologist at the University of Illinois” thusly,  “ ‘We vs. them’ creates a threatening dynamic where ‘they’ are evil or crazy or ignorant and ‘we’ need a candidate who sees the threat and can alleviate it. He appeals to the masses and makes them feel powerful again: ‘We’ need to build a wall on the Mexican border, not ‘I,’ but ‘we.’” What Manichean views share is a simple view of the world as being filled with right and wrong, with the opponent being objectified in the way that Martin Buber described in his I/Thou v. I/It formulation. Essentially extremist Muslims like Baghdadi and politicians like Trump derive from the same school of oration and semantics. Trump has been accused of perpetrating untruths to make his arguments, but such criticisms are beside the point. Trump like his extremist counterparts in the Middle East is appealing to passion and passion by its nature fuels hyperbole. If there were schools for millenarianism, then all students, regardless of the ideology they upheld, would take the same classes.

Irrational Men

Everyone is insecure, even Donald Trump or Tom Brady. Within every bombast lies a cowering inner child. Imagine making a new version of The Exorcist where a Donald Trump like character suffers from pre-adolescent possession. Chicken Little would be right on target about the sky falling. Under this theory Woody’s Allen’s next film should be a sequel to Irrational Man, Irrational Men which shows the human side of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi and his crew. Somewhere in Raqqa, the reputed ISIS stronghold Baghdadi will be wandering around a former prison which has been turned into a palace. But Abu is a little like the Wizard of Oz, a frightened little man hiding behind plumes of smoke. Underneath all the beheadings and rapes, lies a nervous neurotic played by Allen, with all kinds of eccentricities which he expresses to his confident Mohammed, a Freudian, who had trained as an analyst before being converted to Jihad. One of Baghdadi’s biggest problems turns out to be performance anxiety which takes place when he makes appearances as a guest executioner on the big ISIS reality show Head Today Gone Tomorrow. He’s also a failed ravisher of young women who have been sold into slavery and has had to walk away from his harem with his tail between his legs on more than one occasion, after not getting it up. In fact, the chief cause for his depression and the thing that makes him want to bomb and maim is erectile dysfunction. Naturally he refuses to take Viagra or Cialis which he feels violate the Koran. Besides the slaves, he's married to a balabusta who yells at him when he tries to stop her from using up the Islamic State’s stolen oil revenues for on line shopping expeditions. The portrait of Baghdadi that Allen aims to create would show the human side of a tyrant.

White House Counter intelligence Coup

Overhead View of White House Grounds (US Department of Defense )

The Times reported that the ushers had muted the alarm or “crash box" on the front door of the White House because it was too loud “Armed Intruder at White House Got to East Room,” NYT, 9/29/14) It was further reported that Omar Jose Gonzalez had actually made it all the way to the East Room with a knife in his pocket—something that would have been prevented if the Secret Service had put one of those accordion children’s gates across the entranceway to that wing of the sacred redoubt. Of course, you could dig trenches between the rooms of the White House and create manned battle stations in front of the staircase leading to the presidential family’s living quarters which is one of the places Gonzalez passed in his travels or say on the threshold of the Oval Office. None of the journalistic recountings of the security breach has pointed out that Gonzalez’s possession of a knife, might simply have been indicative of the fact that he could have been looking for a job in the White House kitchen. But what is most significant is that no one in US intelligence has realized that Mr. Gonzalez’s talents could be employed elsewhere. If he could break into the White House, why not parachute him down to the Iraq Syria border or to the Syrian city of Raqqa, which is now the de facto ISIS capital. Let him jump over the fence of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi’s palace and see if he can penetrate to the equivalent of the East Room, an area usually designated for receptions. This would be a real coup, even though there are some (there are always critics—“those who can do do and those who can’t do criticize” goes the old saw) who would find this simply counter intelligent.

Boots on the Ground--The Movie

     

    Boots On the Ground is a feature length action film. American air strikes have not been able to contain ISIS which has also launched several successful attacks at targets in major European capitals, during one of which over a l00 hostages are captured and air lifted to a brutal ISIS prison near Qatar. The United States will be next.   

    Moses Thomas is a high ranking member of U.S Military Intelligence. In his role he oversees covert missions by both Special Forces and Navy Seals. Moses grew up in Chicago where his brother Ike took a different tact becoming a widely feared leader of the Bloods. Ike is now serving a life sentence at Menard, a maximum security prison. During a long period in solitary confinement Ike has developed a deep faith in God and has also earned a PhD in sociology. He is a leader in the prison where he is routinely consulted by inmates and authorities alike.

    Moses has unsuccessfully been trying to get Ike a reprieve for years, but due to his brutal past, all attempts to get pardons, even by Moses interceding at the highest levels, have failed.

   As the crisis escalates Moses develops a plan which will re-establish American hegemony and empty the prisons. Ike and an army of criminals will raid the ISIS stronghold on the Iraq Syria border where Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi is reputed to oversee operations. The stronghold is deemed practically impregnable and bombproof as it lies at the bottom of a famed archeological dig, a holy Mesopotamian city that lies over a half a mile below the surface of the earth.

    Cut to ISIS teams perfecting work on a tactical nuclear devices which will be used for an attack on Washington along with chemical and biological weapons designed to paralyze populations throughout the country.  In the meanwhile the training of Ike and a task force comprised of thousands of criminals has not gone without glitches. Given the opportunity to be good at being good rather than exceling at being bad, some of the hardened mobsters Ike has recruited still remain loyal to the underworld. At first he's forced to use strongarm techniques to discipline his own men. He’s got to demonstrate who’s boss. This part of the film will resemble the kind of MMA you see in the televised Ultimate Fighting challenges. But once Isaiah has prevailed and weeded out the incorrigible, he’s ready to move.

    There will be a scene right out of Preston Sturges when the gates of all the prisons open and the prisons are emptied with a flip to lines of former bikers, pickpockets, murderers, rapists and mobsters all decked out in the uniform of the the United States Correctional Military! Naturally you will have a WAC unit which will live up to its acronym, but will also be an in house source of intelligence while providing the film’s romantic interests). Remember it was a woman CIA officer who was instrumental in tracking bin Laden.

    Moses introduces Ike and his men into the next level of preparedness which involves having access to the most classified levels of weapons technology. They are training not to strike from the air, but by way of an underground drilling operation. This part of the movie will in some ways resemble Jules Verne’s Journey to the Center of the Earth, with underground drones performing high tech feats. There will be sections which also mirror the Chilean mining disaster when Ike and his crew become trapped in explosions and cave-ins that go undetected by their minders who have neither radar nor sonar connections to the army of criminals.  

   Finally our heroes are prevail against the elements and find themselves on a collision course with their ISIS counterparts. They’re willing and ready to use a mixture of street smarts and advanced weaponry to defeat their foe.

    The tone of the movie will be tongue and cheek and filmed like a 30’s romantic comedy with irises and other old-fashioned visual effects and while ISIS may be defeated, our army of criminals is going end up in jail on V-ME (Victory Middle East Day).
    At the end of the film the disconsolate prison guards who had been put out of work by Isaiah and Moses will be happily restored to their jobs. The prisons will be full and American hedge fund honchos and Silicon Valley billionaires, our latter day Robber Barons, will again be free to reek financial havoc with world markets and bring about the same conditions that helped to create terrorist organizations like ISIS and al-Qaeda in the first place. No one has learned anything.