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2020-02-25 a
The Pendulum Paradigm and Trump Derangement Syndrome
(with concluding remarks about the fissiparous nature of societies)

First, a sincere thank-you to Alissa Hirshfeld, whose announcement, in an alumni magazine, of her most recent literary venture sparked these ruminations. Her editorial opus, Fury: Women’s Lived Experiences During the Trump Era, to be published in about three weeks by Pact Press, Regal House, is “a collection of essays by a diverse community of women.” I daresay that vaunted diversity is mostly skin deep. Variations in subcutaneous melanin content are a superficial measure of diversity. Variations in the urinary plumbing of one’s chosen lovers are not either the best measure of diversity. I consider diversity of opinion to be paramount. I care not what you look like, nor the gender of those who excite you in bed. I want to know what you think, how well you can articulate those thoughts, and how you came to such conclusions. Why would anything else matter?

Alissa admits, in so many words, that she had chosen to inflict herself with Trump Derangement Syndrome. I stand by that assessment.

She did it to herself.

D. J. Trump did not, like an incubus, infect her gray matter. He did not insert that psychopathology into her psyche.

She did it to herself.

Perhaps Ms. Hirshfeld has co-edited this tome with Amy Roost to come to terms with the continuing consequences of the 2016 election. Perhaps they are still stunned that the residents of flyover country denied Hillary Clinton the presidency. Perhaps they thought America’s most recent leftward turn initiated, to a small degree, by Bush the Lesser during the Cheney administration and accelerated under Barack Hussein Obama, would continue forever. Or, they and their essay contributors have simply decided to blame D. J. Trump for anything and everything that ails them.

I don’t know and I don’t care. Only their analysts know.

The angst of professional navel-gazers has never concerned me. I generally stay away from their habitats (the Upper West Side, certain neighborhoods in Brooklyn, an arc along the western fringes of Los Angeles, the watch-where-you-step parts of San Francisco and, lastly, within a 15-mile-radius of the Pike Place Market) and they stay away from mine - probably because of the sound of semi-automatic weapons being fired at the gun club a mile from here..

How can such bright and well-educated people be so out-of-touch?

Insularity is the primary reason, along with a massive moral superiority complex, and listening only to the self-affirming voices of their echo chambers. They read The Times, not The No Times.

In this case, I could also add their ignorance of history to the list. The so-called Progressives in the US, beginning at the end of the nineteenth century, resurfacing during the Wilson years, leaping out-of-control with FDR and LBJ, and making their last gasps with Clinton and Obama had their run. Then, the pendulum swung, as it always does, to correct those excesses. For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. What goes up, must come down. What goes left, must go right.

The corrective action that should most infuriate the Left, the nominations and confirmations of so many conservative Federal judges continues apace and should rid the body politic of activist jurists who inflicted us with what Congress could not enact.

Their fury is misdirected. The excesses of the Left paved the way for D. J. Trump. The evisceration of the middle class by Globalism sans ethics, vulture capitalists sucking the lifeblood out of companies, leaving bankrupt shells, and the constant devaluation of the dollar by the Federal Reserve, also ensured a populist would take the oath of office on January 20th, 2017. Russia had nothing to do with that outcome.

This is cyclical. Get over it.

fissiparous - of, or pertaining to the process of reproduction by fission

Unstable empires and multi-ethnic modern nations decline and decay for years or centuries and then suddenly, so it seems, their terminal decay leads to fission and the creation of new “daughter” nations. The ill-fated Romulus Augustulus, who ruled less than a year, was the last Roman emperor in the west. He was deposed at age 15 by Odoacer in 476 AD. One hundred years earlier, in 376 AD, the Huns first advanced on the frontiers of the empire and began to displace the Barbarians who were driven southward. Barbarians (the bearded ones) included Goths, Visigoths, Franks, Vandals, and Alans. The first sack of Rome was in 410 AD at the hands of Alaric, a Goth and Roman general who bit the hand that fed him. Rome did not fall in one day.

Edward Gibbon, who wrote in 1776 of the decline and fall of Rome, penned these words, “Any order of men accustomed to violence and slavery make for very poor guardians of a civil constitution.”

The Ottoman Empire, carved apart by Sykes and Picot in the midst of WW I, is a more recent example. Its fission products included: Turkey, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Iraq, Palestine, and Arabia. The Austro-Hungarian Empire was another casualty of WW I. Yugoslavia was disintegrated by NATO. The Soviet Union ended on 31 December 1991 and its fission products range from the Baltic States to Belarus and the Ukraine, Russia, and across to the ‘stans of Central Asia.

Fission happens. Oftentimes it’s a bloody mess and sometimes not. The United States is ripe for fission - and getting riper by the day.

I did not need a crystal ball to write that sentence.

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