The Masks Have Come Off

If you believe what is written on those hats worn in the Israeli Knesset – “Trump the Peace President” – you are deluded beyond hope. Halloween may be coming, but you don’t need a frightening mask to realize the horrors that confront us. Trump is the culmination of a long developing horror story.

Unlike his predecessors who prepared the way for him and who generally wore traditionally allaying masks to hide their evil actions, he is the greatest blatant fraud to ever occupy the White House. He is a war monger, a genocidal killer, and an enemy of people home and abroad so obvious, so capricious, so erratic – a man of endless threats – that no one should be surprised to wake up one morning to news that might seem “shocking.” Everyone should expect surprises, not treats but tricks.

Trump is like an advertisement that tells you its characters are not ordinary people but actors and their spiel isn’t true – only to tell you to buy the product they are pitching. Every pitch Trump throws is a curve ball.

The only way his schtick can be explained is that he is the culmination of a decades’ long development in American culture where acting is presented as so fake that the audience thinks it’s real because of its fakery. He is a dangerous joke, and all the more dangerous because he fits so comfortably into the larger cultural development that Neil Postman in 1985 aptly termed Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business and Neal Gabler later called Life:The Movie: How Entertainment Conquered Reality.

He is the culmination of the latent stream of despotism that has flowed through American history, especially during the last twenty-five years, but which many see as only a battle between political parties, the so-called good and bad. They fail to see that fascism is like a castle that takes years to build from the foundation up, and it necessitates the slow acceptance by all shades of political opinion of the gradual loss of fundamental freedoms, the acceptance of a corporate warfare state, and a secret government lodged in “intelligence” agencies such as the CIA, the NSA, and the DIA (Defense Intelligence Agency), working hand-in-glove with the major media and Silicon Valley corporations in their partnerships to propagandize and spy on the public.

Someone like Trump is not hatched overnight. His progenitors are all those bipartisan sycophants who have accepted the official explanation of 9/11 and the immediate institution of the Patriot Act (prepared during the Clinton administration), the national state of emergency declared by George W. Bush on September 14, 2001 and renewed annually since, the wars against Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Russia, Iran, the Palestinians, etc. (wars launched and supported by Republicans and Democrats), the bailout of the Big Banks and financial institutions in 2009, the 2014 U.S. coup against the Ukrainian government, the so-called war against terror, the Russiagate fraud, the extrajudicial murders by U.S. presidents, the endless propaganda, the growth of Public/private “partnerships” that have privatized government services, the COVID lies, the new Cold War, and the enormous influence of Israel within the U.S. government, etc. The list is extensive. Trump the chickenshit despot did not hatch overnight; he is the chicken come home to roost.

“But what happens,” writes Gary Wills in Reagan’s America: Innocents at Home, “if when we look into our historical rear view mirror, all we can see is a movie?”

Fascism is often accompanied by a dreamy complacency and Hollywood effects, such as with Triumph of the Will, Leni Riefenstahl’s 1935 Nazi propaganda film, commissioned by Adolf Hitler. Today screen culture dominates people’s thinking night and day, and images and digital videos accompany their day and night dreams. As a reality-TV actor, Trump is the perfect embodiment of this screen culture. Everyone is now waiting for something to culminate in their celluloid illusions, some denouement in a horror picture show, as in Poe’s The House of Usher.

The German playwright Bertolt Brecht said: “To understand fascism you have to understand capitalism from whence it springs.” Capitalism’s spring is its need to create inequality between the haves and the have nots. Once that becomes threatened, capitalism metamorphosizes into outright totalitarianism.

It was in 1985, the year of “amusing ourselves to death,” that Donald Trump, a fake-estate developer, acquired the Atlantic City Hilton Hotel and renamed it Trump’s Castle, a sign of his obsessive megalomania. Trump’s homage to himself went into bankruptcy seven years later, forecasting the future fate of the USA. It was the first year of the second term of Ronald Reagan, a former actor who was called the acting President by his critics. But Reagan himself was proud of his acting; he thought it served him well in the White House, as Gary Wills writes in Reagan’s America: Innocents at Home.

Trump makes Reagan look genuine as hell. Everything about Trump is kitsch, fake in every way, a copy of a copy of a copy in a culture of the copy. But that is his appeal to those who can’t distinguish between illusion and reality. Is it the ridiculous reality-TV guy firing people left and right or really the President of the United States?  It is most apt they he has returned to the presidency as Artificial Intelligence has come to prominence.

At 5:16 P.M. on November 9, 1965 in New York City, I stepped out of an IRT # 4 Subway car on the elevated outdoor station at 161^St overlooking Yankee Stadium and all the lights went out throughout the northeastern United States. Such things happen when we least expect it. One rat can spend years building a house of cards to his own glorification, but another rat can turn the lights out and bring it down in one night, as Kris Kristofferson sings in Darby’s Castle.

One can be certain that behind the walls of America’s Potemkin Village, the ruling rats are fighting among themselves for dominance, and the public – whether they dwell in the doll’s house of illusion, still thinking things are good under Trump, or fear much worse to come – will one day awaken to a great surprise. “But it only took one night to bring it down /  When Darby’s castle tumbled to the ground.”

Whether that surprise will just be Darby’s personal Castle falling, or the U.S. and world economy, or our semblance of democracy, or the entire world under falling nuclear missiles, no one can say. But like a jack-in-the box that has never been opened, when that handle is turned by sinister forces in the darkness of night, we will wake up to a great shock. For the masks have come off.

Oh, it took three hundred days
For the timbers to be raised
And the silhouette was seen for miles around
And the gables reached as high
As the eagles in the sky
But it only took one night to bring it down
When Darby’s castle tumbled to the ground

Edward Curtin: Sociologist, researcher, poet, essayist, journalist, novelist….writer – beyond a cage of categories. His new book is AT THE LOST AND FOUND: Personal & Political Dispatches of Resistance and Hope (Clarity Press)

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