Has anyone been following the HBO mini-series based on Stephen King's book -- "The Outsider"?
If you have, you'll understand the misgivings I've had and suspicions that have grown in my mind before I even started watching the mini-series. In a way, the mini-series has some spooky parallels to what I'd already been thinking.
I am an indifferent agnostic, raised Catholic, and carry around the same folklore and sense of it that Camille Paglia mentioned when she told Bill Buckley in the late '80s -- "Bill! Bill! Once a Catholic, always a Catholic!" He had asked her about her positive appraisal of pornography, mentioning her Catholic upbringing as if she had simply cast it away.
And as a college student, I read Milton's "Paradise Lost" -- the epic poem in which a central character never sleeps and flies around in the Darkness of Eternity.
These people who follow Trump are not big on serious reading and serious study. They probably never learned to think for themselves. They've probably never attacked a challenging problem that requires a rigorous application of logic -- unless it's in some specialized technical area, and they'd never think of a synergy of knowledge to apply the same thinking skills to areas outside their expertise like politics or economics. They don't have a facility for sorting out the False from the True, and worst of all -- they don't care. They just want to tyrannize everyone else with their frustrations by imposing a sense of whimsically chosen causation for everything they don't like about life or America.
My superstitions? I'll tell you. Go back on the web and look for pictures of the younger and older man who single-handedly arranged the JFK murder because of whim, jealousy, and just a desire to accomplish a great project of a psy-war campaign on his own -- hijacking the timing and pre-propaganda myth of the book and film "Manchurian Candidate": David Atlee Phillips. The way Phillips' mother describes him, he could've been a little Trump in his youth. He was a malignant narcissist -- should never have been recruited by the CIA in 1950. And his later photographs bear a sort of vague likeness to Trump. Originally fair, slightly freckled, blond, he was later more "orange". There's a likeness there. He was born on October 31 -- Halloween. Phillips was a lot smarter than Trump, but his downfall is that he wanted to prove it to himself, so he could go back and look at it again and again -- his embedded, hidden-in-plain-view boastful confession to masterminding the entire assassination. And the way he did it, in published books that had to be vetted by CIA colleagues who would never figure it out, was something Trump could never do. At least Phillips could write books by himself, even if he would never achieve literary or dramatic greatness.
So you can extrapolate my superstitions from that. And that's why I won't write hate mail to Trump. That's why I don't want to go to a Trump rally "just to see". I don't want any contact with Satan Beelzebub and his minions. I'm afraid it might rub off on me. And having a dialog with the devil -- that's only something that the historical Jesus -- if you believe in Jesus -- would be able to survive.
Thank God that Trump is basically an idiot himself. He may be capable of enthralling a legion of idiots. But he can't think that far ahead. If he had, he wouldn't be in the pickle he's in. On the other hand, imagine if the Russians could somehow pull off the same victory they'd managed in 2016.
If something like that happened, we would all be in trouble. I'm sure of it. And I'm no Bible-thumper. I'm focused on this world -- not the next.
Facebook
Twitter