You put up a problematic candidate, your reasoning for doing so, problematic, and you are bound to face problems, in current circumstances bringing about possibilities that no one should want to have to face, let alone suffer. There is no worse candidate than Donald Trump. Hillary Clinton is the better candidate by a long shot. But Hillary is not a good candidate and for many reasons, the secrecy issues one set, the arrogance even more disturbing because it is the arrogance that is responsible for justification of actions that are predicated in arrogance. To run for president aware of the kind of baggage one carries, with knowledge of the damage to candidacy that revelation of what the baggage contains and the consequences of a loss would mean, that is arrogance heaped upon arrogance.
My friends and not friends who have insisted from the beginning that Hillary is the right candidate have, from the beginning, simply ignored certain ugly truths about Hillary, not all of the ugly of Ms. Clinton’s making but an amount of it her making and enough her making to make it particularly toxic because what she had made gives those against her substance that gives enough of a degree of credence to the unfounded or unproven, the possibly, maybe false, the stuff that is not of what she has done but what it is possible she has done viable as truth.
I am truly tired of suffering for Ms. Clinton and I have suffered for her for a very long time, for the way she has been treated, for the kind of treatment she has received that ignores the good in her, the good deeds she has done. I love a good part of the life she has lived and I give her a huge amount of credit for being a diligent and hard-working humanitarian. To watch this good person Hillary under constant attack by those who simply hate her for being Ms. Clinton has been rather hard to stomach. The humanitarian and seemingly selfless Hillary of her humanitarian side has done incredible good works and those good works have benefited in significant ways good numbers of real human being.
That the humanitarian Hillary is not the whole of the Hillary the public knows is something of a tragedy, a tragedy because it is Hillary who undercuts her own goodness, yes, by some of her actions, some of those seemingly selfish—and a little selfish at times is not a crime at all—but, more than by action, by what has to be categorized as attitude, the attitude that is of arrogance, that arrogance made public, a refusal to acknowledge the problematic aspects of the career, the reasons for the reasonable suspicion of her forthrightness and integrity.
At this very moment, after many months of difficulty dealing with those who refuse to deal with the problematic nature of the Clinton candidacy and the candidate, of being in a state of consciousness where right answers to the questions being raised by this election cycle are almost impossible to find, at this point, with the announcement that the FBI, less than two weeks before the election, will re-open the probe into the e-mails because there is sufficient reason to believe that newly found e-mails may be problematic security-wise, I really do not know what to do with myself, do not know how to deal with the confusion and anger and fear that is my current state of mind.
I can blame the Republicans for putting up for election the very worst kind of candidate, a truly terrible human being. I am mad and madly trying to deal with pronouncements of election rigging, the illegitimately of the process, the acceptance of the unacceptable by people who are the most acceptable of a stripe, the portents of obstruction of democracy by these people in regard to supreme court nominees, the undermining of democracy, a system of governance that necessitates good sense and a strong sense of fairness on the part of those involved in the societal decision making process. I can blame that ugly crowd that supports Mr. Trump, that favors him because of his ugly mind and his dastardly deeds. I can blame many individuals and groups for setting the conditions by which a Donald Trump becomes a nominee for the presidency. Show love for the beyond crazy evangelicals and tea-partiers, for the gun lobby and for racists and sexists, give them credence by failing to undermine their legitimacy by pointing directly at the stupidity of the thinking, this, yes, in the name of political correctness and righteous tolerance of all points of view, do such and you get what we have got.
But this is only a part of the cause, another being those who tolerate bullshit of the kind that is the democratic party and the Clinton candidacy. The tolerance of that bullshit, made undeniably real in the e-mails that that nasty Assange has been releasing, made undeniably real by FBI probes and so on and so forth, has made it impossible to distinguish bullshit from truth, has legitimized that terrible tactic that makes bullshit the operating truth that a nation comes to live by.
At this point I am beyond answers and almost beyond hope. Yes, the rightwing bullshit machine that was created by the likes of Lee Atwood and Roger Ails and Carl Rove and Fox News and Rush Limbaugh and Michelle Bachman and Sara Palin and Jason Javits and Mark Levine and idiots in office like Mr. Inhofe and Mr. Gomert has been dominant in building the great confusion machine that twists truth and encourages faith in demagogues, thoughtlessness, and reaction rather than reason is responsible. But they alone are not the cause of the miserable reality that is the reality in which we are currently living as a body politic. Those like the Clintons and their friends like Wasserman-Shultz and the rest of the democratic party elite have countered bullshit with their own brand of bullshit and when there was a dire need for sound reasoning and the promotion of reasoning as a tool for discovering truth,
Truth. The conservative game to make truth malleable on a grand scale for the sake of political and economic gain has had a terrible effect on democracy. Manufacturing doubt to create truth out of lies has become an industry that makes political consultants and lobbyists very wealthy and their spinning of truth accepted practice in the United States of America. Those truth spinners appear regularly before the public to explain how they go about spinning and they are respected for their genius even when their deceits are acknowledged.
Truth. Hilary could have told the truth and if she were a truth loving being, many of the actions that carry the air of nefariousness would not be a problem today because the actions would not have taken place and there would be no good and legitimate reason for anyone to think that what one was hearing and seeing wasn’t really what actually was.
There have been so many terrible moments during this campaign that my world has been turned ugly. I live day by day aware of the fact that ugly behavior is a regular part of the real in which I have to live and that ugly behavior is being made to be something else by those who want me to believe them and in them. I receive more than a hundred e-mail pitches a day and these days most are not for bogus herbal remedies for the pain I feel and the hurts I suffer. Most are for dollars to support candidates who tell me they are telling me the truth, most of whom undermine their credibility by using claims of closeness to the party line and the party candidate to sway me to allegiance with their cause. Some of those are pitching truth as they understand it and with them I would stand if I could verify their sincerity and their allegiance to my causes, their sincere concern for my support of that for which they stand and not my five or ten or twenty dollars alone (hey, want to make if monthly?).
Donald Trump and those who have worked so diligently over the past many years to make his candidacy possible are despicable, terrible human beings and truly patriotic in the sense that they do not like at all the idea of democracy in which is embodied the true American ideal. Those who are already planning to delegitimize the election process and the process of advice and consent, in some kind of hell is where they should be. And those who fail to understand how backing a candidate who refuses to be fully candid, who has come to be a player in the wretched game that is being carried out in the stead of a truly democratic process, fair and of and by the people, they should join them because their deceptions, little and bigger, add to and make normal the practices that keep the people from building that more perfect union the founders envisioned a few hundred years ago.
4 replies on “Burned by Lies: A Society in Danger”
Well, we build up the way we view the world over the course of our lives. Many people see what they’d like to see; there’s a reason why mirrors aren’t placed to far away. I’m hoping that Mr. Trump will put some decent people in decent places and in the end things will be alright. Though of course there will always be worries regardless of who the figurehead is. The media is an amazing tool. Amazing in its ability to craft narratives only lightly based on truth in order to attempt to accomplish some sort of predetermined conclusion. For many folks this narrative seems too true to be excluded from rational thought. I guess ol’ Baudrillard was correct in his notions of simulacrum when he wrote, ““It no longer has be ne rational, since it is no longer measured against some ideal or negative instance. It is nothing more than operational. In fact, since it is no longer enveloped by an imaginary, it is no longer real at all”
I am still working long hours delivering concrete to several huge buildings being built around Reno—including the Tesla factory off USA Parkway. I spend so much time driving mixer, my hobbies of fishing, making music and writing get left behind. Anyway, sitting here enjoying bourbon and coke, watching the Bates Motel with my wife of over three decades—your posts always make my think and encourage me to write. This is a response to what you posted on facebook. I was going to post this to facebook but I left the page and then I could not bring your post on the facebook feed again?
So I came here and remembered your post or many posts: “It is an educational system.” I agree to that to a degree, but I would go a bit further and say it is an indoctrinational system, and a psychological thing.
Idolatry? How can I put into words, explain how people feel about certain abstract issues. I do not mean abstract in the strict sense, but, to the person who feels and believes certain things about certain issues or candidates, they are: because their feelings and beliefs are based on mass media communications—edited reports. I think of the old proverb: “Never believe anything you are told and only half of what you see.” People of faith believe a lot of what they have been told and have read out of their holy book. However none of what we see in our everyday common real world shows us any evidence that there is a God at work in our world supernaturally. The closest that anyone can claim is that it seems that life can not just merely exist, but this begs the question, “What came first the chicken or the egg?” Anyway, why do you believe what you believe? Or as Lafer might ask, “Why do you not think about your thinking?” Why do people need a starry eyed messiah? I am amazed how quickly once a candidate is elected how some in one corner idolizes him/her and some in the other corner are filled with hatred for her/him. People who are held in the power of an idol do not realize the cloud of idolatry they live in. How can a text, like the Bible, which describes idolatry become a source of idolatry. The answer: when it becomes the ultimate guide for interpreting the real world. I read once (Bellah) that any kind of blind commitment will make an extremist out of anyone. Neither an extreme commitment to communism or capitalism is the answer; it seems to me both tend to lead to authoritarian dictatorships. At present, I see this in those committed to the Republican party, saying: “Donald Trump, that righteous man.” And those in the Democratic party “allowing” the intended chaos and corruption of the caucuses because they couldn’t stand the thought of an outside socialist winning the Democratic nomination. Here is a new definition of idolatry: Forcing the real world into an ideology—forcing the real world into accepted, edited abstractions. Both parties—rather than actually knowing and relating to real working people—one losing the election and one unwillingly split by one who understands how to play off people’s frustration is a telling reality of how the ambitions and commitment to certain ideologies simply blind people to the real realities all around them. The frustration and pain of realizing our faith, ideology or political party is not always the answer is too hard for many people to admit, so what happens is that we continue in our illusion until we crash.
As I have argued throughout my postings, this is a problem of an education system that teaches people NOT to think for themselves. Rush people bought hundreds of thousands of bumper stickers that read “Rush is right,” this indicating that it did not matter what he might say, that whatever he would say was right before he even said it. That is the state of mind that is our society’s undoing.
My colleagues at work are so full of Fox News and Rush Limbaugh I have given up talking any sense to them. They are so convinced by those they listen to it makes me barf. It is not unbelievable but it is amazing that they cannot see what is “real” right in front of them and compare it to the bullshit which is given them from the media. I believe it is an ego thing. Their ego cannot accept the fact that they are so gullible! It is too painful for their pride to accept.