My Blog Week: January 17 to January 23

A Word on the Week

As I told you last week, I’ve been rereading a favorite from the past, the Lloyd Alexander series, The Chronicles of Prydain. I thought I’d share this:

The cover art from the 1978 reissue is a little curious—the artist excellent at detailing interiors and secondary characters, but possessed of an odd kink in depicting the hero. Poor Taran has been handed history’s least-flattering haircut, a persistent tunic-without-pants fashion statement, and in this egregious effort, a face that’s a dead-ringer for a certain deposed American president. Sad.

As to freakshows and fantasy, the news this inauguration week revealed the insurrectionist conspirators had a bigger dream than their own participatory treason. They thought Biden’s swearing-in would be interrupted by a swoop of Q, mass arrests, and a continuation of the Trump Loafdom. On the positive side, many disillusioned Q’ers have shown self-awareness in their discouraged comments. They feel like fools; they don’t know who to believe…

How to use your observational skills to make sound judgments is a study, requiring personal application…but suspecting you’ve been wrong makes a beginning.

Meanwhile, several congresspersons and the crew on Fox News seem inclined to finger the wrong pulse. They are in store for that special enlightenment that comes from running out of money. Already, we’ve seen the good effects of social media’s shutting down the propaganda mill; breaking, at least, the trance. This is not a free-speech problem. The first amendment begins with: “Congress shall make no law….”

Twitter-heads are allowed to make rules to govern their own business. No one has the right to impose speech in any venue. Otherwise a hijacked Alexa could spew hate at a victim, and the talking part would not be a crime. (No, we aren’t going there.)

Of beliefs, there are the little b and the big B. The Big B is the dangerous kind, the Kool-Aid drinking sort, but real-life stories teach us over and over that even the most willfully delusional, or the most mired in their own mess, know the truth and have always known it, regardless of what they had hoped to gain when first they practiced to self-deceive.

And such gains are commonplaces: attention, money, protection from a bully…

However, there is a weird phenomenon among those indoctrinated by false stories, such as The Amityville Horror, or Sybil, or Emmett Till’s alleged crime, or David Berkowitz’s talking dog, (while Berkowitz seems an opportunistic fabricator who readily develops a new storyline; thus he has both retracted Son of Sam and added a born-again Christian theme). Not just the well-seen phenomenon of the lie getting far more publicity than the truth that comes later, but that a lot of people invest their discontented selves in these stories and want them to be true.

Qanoners no doubt want Q to be true. But one day, someone will explain how and why the hoax was perpetrated.