My Blog Week: August 2 to August 8

A Word on the Week

Facing the Facts

It has always been racist for the news media to treat the whitest part of the United States as though it were only place where “old-fashioned” mores could be discovered, and could merit, exclusive to all other regions, these endless examinations. But when journalists interview heartland voters and are told, as they have been for four years, that Trump represents their values, or that he is a maverick (one that functions as well as the old Ford), and it’s for this they admire him, the conclusion is forced that they’ve never met a decent person, and have no basis for comparison.

Their lives have never brought them in personal contact with an iconoclast or rugged individual any less corrupt and criminal than Trump…he is their standard for the “man who goes it alone”. Their apprehension that such a person could be tolerant, humane, empathetic, just, honorable, courageous (not to mention…er…smart), presupposes those qualities to have existed in someone they had known, at some point in their lives, allowing them to internalize the earmarks. Farm life in the old Bible Belt doesn’t perhaps allow time for books and movies; but popular storytelling often revolves around rogue heroes who are at the same time good people. Maybe, consulting personal experience, they can’t believe these stories are not mere constructs of fiction.

We are left to assume these confirmed Trump admirers have never, in their own families, their neighborhoods, their schools, their churches, their workplaces, witnessed an example of better behavior than Trump’s. Sad for them, of course, but by rights a disqualification for their idea of things needing catered to slavishly.

And since heartlanders can’t, given the unpleasant realities of their lives, stand for the rest of the country at all, the American press needs to quit seeking answers among the cornstalks.

A Propaganda Watch item:

Have you ever in your life sat down to a conversation with someone who told you that he was the enemy of religion, hated the Bible, wanted to destroy the churches; further, hated the Constitution, wanted to gut it, specifically to remove the Second Amendment, on the strength of which, (possibly employing an army of secret police) he would arrange to enter people’s homes and take their guns? But more than this, he tells you he hates the American suburb and the Dream of the American Suburb (despite the majority of suburb-dwellers simply growing where they were planted, and dreaming of nothing in particular), and he plans to destroy these. He also lets you know he will take from you the health insurance you love so devotedly, and collaborate with socialists to destroy the capitalist economy. (Where anyone would have guessed this a fait accompli, and caused by a combination of greed, grift, and coronavirus…)

No, you haven’t, because no one has ever been such a clearinghouse of evil traits, schemes, and acts—as is the victim of a vilification campaign. Part of the secret is to never have the conversation at all. Part is to attach so strongly to the fantasy, that if the target were confronted and denied the charge, the propagandist’s tools would prefer believing their imaginations’ version of things.

Logic compels the observation that never doing something is much the same as never doing something; that bad character is not somehow there while forever hidden from view, but evident in the pattern of behavior. (And that the propagandist spreading constant rumors leaves quite at trail, as to patterns of behavior.)