Wichita Lineman Was A Song I Once Heard

There are many justified condemnations of Donald Trump, one is narcissism. So, in that vein, let’s talk about wee auld me first.

I look to keep any piece I write on this blog at a thousand words or less. Even at reasonable lengths, in an age dominated by podcasts and YouTube, the written blog is a failing medium. So, knowing this is the reality, writing a blog post that goes over a thousand words is not only a bad idea, it feels akin to doubling down at Blackjack, only you’ve pawned everything and are in debt to people who are threatening to cut bits off you.

Believe me, I’m not looking for sympathy. Bloggers whining about user media preferences is merely annoying, it’s certain cohorts who deceive, deliberately harm others or force folks to do things against their will who deserve scorn. Degenerate gamblers may do so inadvertently in a state of desperation, this leaves us wiggle room for compassion. Nonces? Not so much. They’re reviled, with the same venom as Orson Welles reading a tawdry script for Findus frozen food.

Prejudices are often crafted from selfishness and so are applied inconsistently person to person, issue to issue. Case in point, it’s logical that Michael Jackson is revered, and given a degree of cultural clemency, while Jimmy Saville is despised and cancelled to oblivion. Jacko may have nonced those kids at Neverland Ranch (where was Bubbles when this was going on?), but he certainly made some belting tunes, and that matters more to most than the kids he’s accused of fiddling with. Jimmy Saville doesn’t get the same leeway for the same crime. He’s seen as more dishonest not for what he did to his victims, but because he was a less talented, buffoonish, cunty light entertainment television personality, and he used his charity work as a guise for grooming.

Right, over three-hundred fucking words in already. What does broaching the subject of myopia, via a duo of dead nonces, have to do with Trump’s re-election?

Trump is the dismal result of it being easier to lie than to tell the truth, and this is the culmination of forty-five years of political greed and dishonesty.

De-industrialisation, financial deregulation, privatisation and increased asset speculation, in concert with the commodification of news into opinion, to tabloidization and now social media, have all fomented degradations in public life. We’ve now arrived at hyper-polarised ideologically puritan eco-chambers in mainstream and social media. This is fertile ground for gaslighting, done in an effort to maintain ideological discipline and, in a lack of humility, to avoid being challenged, and it’s becoming increasingly hard not to find political and media figures utilising it. Chancers like Trump mushroom in such a petri-dish.

It’s been fascinating to watch the post-mortem of Trump’s victory. The inquests and recriminations as to why Trump won and they lost, has been one of the most cringeworthy shows of self-denial imaginable. It’s important to clarify who they are – prosperous, mostly middle-class, college educated “sensible” moderates and centrists who populate the political and media classes. This viral clip of a debate around biological men in women’s sport is emblematic of their obstinacy. For any issue there is only one “right” answer; no persuasion, no compromise, no debate.

Most damagingly the same tactic is repeated to reinforce an economic orthodoxy that works for them and their paymasters but is unpopular and ineffective outside their bubble, absolution for their intellectual complacency and the affluent’s prerogative to prioritise niche cultural concerns.

The subtext is clear, we weren’t responsible for assisting Trump’s re-emergence, the proles just didn’t listen or understand we were right and we will never relent on our beliefs. It’s akin to the way the Catholic Church operated for centuries, faith as a means of denial. Cleave, limpetlike, to tradition’s sanctity as means of getting away with keeping things as they are for as long as possible.

Speaking of being out of touch, before the election, everyone’s favourite centrist dad Rory Stewart was convinced Harris would win as her campaign was optimistic, and the populism of Trump would be rejected. To which the question has to be asked, why would a majority of Americans see what she was offering as appealing? Did he actually speak to any ordinary Americans?

You suspect not, and it’s clear most didn’t, or those who did didn’t listen. Indeed, a selection of the theories presented by these great thinkers as the crucial issues which swayed voters was as messy and incoherent as one of Trump’s speeches at one of his immensely dull rallies. Sans that one where the dude tried to shoot him. Side question – how do you fail to hit a three-hundred-pound Oompa Loompa?

Failing to robustly challenge the xenophobia and racism by the MAGA cult was a strongly featured gripe. Or maybe it was not having a stricter (namely racist) immigration policy that could compete with Trump’s? Moving to the right hasn’t paid off here, placing the Democrats in a bind tactically: too neo-liberal to attack Trump’s lie about immigration being an economic whelk, as the explanation and remedy invariably requires examining the inherent unfairness of their favoured economic model.

Did trans activists berating Farmer Johns for not bowing to the pride flag cost the Dems millions of votes, that using the laughable Latinx instead of Latino didn’t matter or was Harris not woke enough? Preferred pronouns, while silly, are largely harmless and there’s no evidence that this issue significantly changes voting preference. The prominence of the trans debate online and in the media, and how fraught it is in those arenas, is not replicated in public.

Joe Biden’s hubris in seeking re-election at his age got mentioned often, so did his cognitive decline, but didn’t he beat Trump four years ago, and he wasn’t a spring chicken then? Seldom mentioned was the Democratic party sticking by Biden’s re-election bid, and the Democratic supporters in the media convincing themselves he could win, until it was clear he couldn’t.

How much did Elon Musk’s shilling on Twitter for Trump swing things, or maybe it was podcasters like Joe Rogan allowing Trump to appear on his show? Was it the Dems unconditionally, disgracefully, supporting Israel’s flattening of Gaza, alienating Muslim voters? I’d say both made little difference, with the latter surely being a non-issue as it matched Trump’s pro-Israel position.

Was it Kamala Harris being a bland uninspiring candidate who was gerrymandered in? Amazingly, in a slipping of the mask moment, MSNBC’s Joy Reid claimed Harris ran a perfect campaign despite losing convincingly. Gotta prioritise identity politics, eh? It’s winning without winning.

Or was it Harris being female and brown that cost her? With the implication here that a large percentage of the US population is sexist and or racist. If you believe that last one passes the sniff test, do you think I could successfully argue that Trump’s marmalade hue is so preposterous that it becomes an inclusive kind of modern minstrel blackface that seeks to heal divisions? Being serious about this, significantly more Latino and black voters turned out for Trump than expected.

Abortion? Sure, the level of moronic Christian zealotry in the US keeps this issue alive (yes, pun intentioned), and here the left has a point about it influencing votes. The Dems are pro-choice, the only sane, morally correct position. They were right to hold the line here, but it did offer Trump the chance to outflank them by allowing a vote on the issue at state level.

Trump mainly won due to two realities. First, there’s that line about the detective’s curse – that the answer was always right under your nose. And here’s another hackneyed cliché – it’s the economy stupid. It always is.

Technically, the Dems weren’t lying by talking up the success of the zero-sum, faux trickle-down economic model favoured by most western economies and Biden’s presidency. But since 2008 that message feels like gaslighting for many, as wealth inequality has been exploding and the poorest have been bearing the brunt of its effects, namely wage stagnation and inflation.

If you’re a liberal in the burbs on six figures, the line that GDP and the stock market is booming and inflation is starting to fall sounds fine, because you were and are coping. If you’re in the rust belt, a small town, or a rural area with few jobs, not so much. A choice between neo-liberal and neo-conservative economic models has also created apathy among the more left-leaning voting bloc, with turnout down considerably among Democratic voters.

Trumpism succeeds in part because it exposes the insidiousness of the bi-partisan consensus on the economy. The neo-liberals want the votes of the economically disadvantaged, working class and the moderate (non-pinko commie) left, which historically, belonged to them, but now don’t want to engage or contend with them or their concerns with redistributive taxation policies. Their fears about Trump trashing the economy ring hollow here. What economy is the question? Trump prays at the altar of Reaganism and will ensure it continues to be a great success for those who matter. The richest ten people in the US made $64 billion dollars within a week of Trump’s election win. La Di Da.

Second, Trump, while sadistic and motivated entirely by self-interest, isn’t bland, boring and exudes confidence. It makes his lies and half-baked ideas sound more appealing; build a wall, sanctions on China, mass deportations. With his sui generis mish-mash of rambling bluster and doublespeak Trump’s peculiar candour disrupts the political mould of laminated politicians coached to speak in banal platitudes. His “legal issues” have been successfully commodified too, the establishment’s hatred of his threat to their electoral hegemony works as means of projection for the average American who despises haughty elites.

If you’re poor, what’s more humiliating, being led by a reality TV personality, a convicted felon, despised by the liberal media elite that also disparage and ignore you? Or being contemptuously told to vote for a programme of government that continually makes you poorer, year after year, generation after generation, because…Trump’s dangerous? Dangerous to what, exactly, your existing inability to buy a house, to find steady employment or afford the basics?

Not that Trump or his cultists don’t lie or care about poverty. Trump is not an effective form of resistance or agent of change the way those who voted for him believe or hope he will be. Loony sycophant billionaire Trump donors overtly shaping US policy aren’t doing it to help the little guy. An anti-vaxer, whose face appears to have been melted by sitting too close to the fire, will be running health. Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, has essentially paid for a place in Trump’s inner circle, confirming oligarchy has replaced representative democracy. The racist rhetoric and immigration straw man central to Trump’s campaigning tapped into the disillusionment and anger at increasing mass impoverishment. In the UK we’ve seen the results of the rancid anti-immigration script weaponised into Brexit and Boris “Pound Shop Trump” Johnson botching the pandemic.

Perhaps having to endure the humiliation of Trump lying for four years, increasing poverty and faceplanting on policy will sufficiently radicalise bi-partisan liberals to argue for an alternative economic vision, or even pose the question – how does it feel to be duped by systems, institutions and people in positions of authority that, in theory, shouldn’t?

We all experienced this in early November when some Maccabi Tel Aviv casuals decided to trash bits of Amsterdam, attack local residents who looked Muslim and sing songs about eradicating Palestinians, before they played Ajax in the Europa League. The locals decided to slap them around for behaving like dickheads. Yet, in the days following the event, many media outlets and high-ranking politicians claimed this retaliatory response to arseholes trashing their property was antisemitic, or, laughably, and gravely insulting to Jews who survived the actual holocaust, a pogrom.

Given the context and chronology of events this seemed an outlandish allegation, and it was debunked quite swiftly. This didn’t occur in a vacuum, as the vast majority of the political and media class are aligned on the Israeli onslaught in Gaza being a just cause. Labelling any act of aggression against a Jewish person or people removes the potentially vocation killing accusation of antisemitism, an important pre-requisite of belonging to the enlightened clique.

Israeli’s obliteration of Gaza and Gazans has exposed a double standard as violence against Muslims isn’t equally or reflexively rebuked. This attempt at narrative grip is essentially a new form of class warfare, with divisions along ethnic and economic lines. The rentier political and media class (predominately white, Jewish and Christian) – lobbied and financed by wealthy pro-Israeli donors and Israeli government money – are pouncing on any opportunity to characterise Muslims as an uncivilised people (serving as propaganda here for anti-immigration and anti-integration messaging) and that they and the “global south” (anyone who uses this term is a certified cunt) is the threat, the enemy to “our way of life”. Deliberately or otherwise, this helps obscure the biggest threat to our prosperity – the super-rich are cannibalising our economies.

Twenty years, maybe even ten years ago, the Gaza portion of the equation might’ve worked and the Israel is defending itself fib may have held enough sway. This is becoming harder to pull off when there’s daily receipts of the gruesome, inhumane bombardment happening all over the internet. Such brazen disinformation is what Trump often, and fairly, is accused of. It has to be galling for them that Trump’s “fake news” has proven more effective.

The continuation of neo-conservatism and neo-liberalism, and the lie that these are the only viable forms of capitalist governments, is a project designed to perpetually erode the political agency of the masses. It’s fair to wonder whether the die is cast. It’s taken forty years, but a new demoralised class has been created, we’re constrained by a stratified political system, wages consistently rising below inflation, a pre-occupation with scratching to survive or paying our mortgages (if we’re lucky), where an egalitarian economic reformation feels unobtainable.

I won’t lie here and claim to have an answer, and frustratingly, the two-thousand words plus I’ve written here doesn’t. But I will state that we need a complete rethink economically, politically and a frank debate as to what the media and political classes exist for, and how they behave. The latter is supposed to serve our needs and the former hold them to account. Can anyone argue this is still the case?

Anyway, some absolute truths still exist. I console myself that eating a Marks & Spencer ready-made Spaghetti Bolognese for dinner while listening to Thriller isn’t living a lie. I can see it, feel the vinyl’s tactile satisfaction on my palm as I line it up, and taste the unpalatableness of inadequately seasoned food. And so, you’ve made it to the end, but why? What, you enjoy reading, yet you’re choosing to read this garbage? Instead, you could be listening to Trump (or his detractors) fibbing or talking bollocks, what’s good for you and what’s true, so you don’t have to consider difficult philosophical questions or the dispiriting cultural and societal blights we face. Make it easy on yourself, go with the script via audio. It takes a lot less effort, and you can even drive off a cliff at the same time.