I fear, with all my better senses, that we are in a very strange place and it is starting to remind me a lot of another time in the past.
Before I get to that, does it seem to anyone else like the powers that be — in all their forms – are desperately trying to erase the last president from digital memory? Which conveniently leads us back to a default time before 2016 happened.
However, this strange place is like a bad movie that is half religion and half radical ideology. Make it radical religion. It is a plot everyone knows as I do. Follow along, it goes like this.
A guy comes into the presidency with no experience at anything, even in the private sector. He has no leadership skill, having never led anything except the line at an ice cream stand. Anyway, it goes that he came in sounding like some righteous scribe that could do no wrong. Pompous arrogance was dripping from every move. His only resume provided was his campaign, as checkered and questionable as that was.
So he actually gets the gig, against the odds and advice of our better angels. One of his repeated points all through his long-winded campaign was that he was bringing welcome change, boasting a list of demographics that would choke an elephant. He was going to help each and every identity group.
You only had to find where you fit in on the list, but surely you were on it. He had a drop down list from A-Z on his campaign website called change you can believe in. Plug yourself into the mainframe and enjoy the ride. All he required at every turn was to keep believing in the change he was promising. And apologize for all our past allegiances because loyalty to him now was the only thing that mattered. It was a faith-based formula.
He even ran his second campaign for reelection on simply “keep believing.” (it had worked so well the first time around) But believing in exactly what was never clear, except the transformational change he promised. The stars and planets were aligned, the tides would turn and sea levels would cease to rise. It was so cool how all you had to do was believe, period, and this whole transformation would mysteriously take place. Then it would operate on a momentum of its own. Nothing could stop it.
If you clicked your heels three times and believed, you were going to the grand ball and, in fact, everyday would be another ball. This time the chariot did not have to whisk you home by midnight. There was no chariot and no curfew. The enchantment would not end once started. You did not have to ever worry about returning to reality because that was the point: changing reality forever more. Speak it into existence and it is, and so it shall be.
This pied piper, then, would create an elaborate fantasy in front of us where the whole world would cooperate because it was such an enchanting theme. It would cast a spell of goodwill everywhere you turned.
So this was the fantasy; who could refuse it as billed? It was perfect as fantasies go. No one would say it couldn’t work; in fact, everyone was committed to the itinerary. They all desired to believe. It was like stepping into a time machine and setting the destination knob to ecstasy, to satisfy your deepest desires. That is how they sold it.
Only this time there would be no naysayers, or dissenters and no one saying it could not be done. Actually, even media went along with the ride, touting their own guarantees of utopia. Everything would be beautiful just as the brochure described. What could go wrong? Nothing, because a magical positive energy was with us all.
But, as the story continued along, there was only one small condition that would surely not threaten all the great expectations. It was simply that we all had to keep on believing whatever storms arose. To not believe would be dangerous, fashionably unthinkable.
No matter what might roll out in front of you, that belief was the anecdote or to any problems that dare stand in our way. The other beauty of this whole plan was it did not matter what policies were enacted, or even whatever faults occurred, the magic belief was more than enough to cancel out potential defeat from any formidable foes before they gained a foothold. Reality was no challenge for this magical belief either. It would be seduced into submission with the plan. All in sync by belief.
A faith-based campaign, election and presidency. 2 terms of change you can believe in.
As fairy tales go, we know, there is always some glitch no matter how good they are. You didn’t need Edgar Allan Poe or Alfred Hitchcock to write one for this. Robert Frost may have written about two roads diverging, but in this story there was only one path and no options. There was a yellow wood but only one mystical path that may as well have been named impossibility.
As the story unfolded, all did not go according to plan because it could not deliver on everything. Many expectations collided, even with one another. There still was only one path and we were on it. At any sign of problems, the merry band of expedition organizers would lecture people to believe a little harder, and just a little longer. Just apply faith in the face of gaslighting. Sing some praises to assuage the rosy path.
It did work pretty well, judging by what press and media wrote about things. They were determined to make this excellent adventure a success. Not for lack of trying, as they say.
Unfortunately, we never skipped to the solution part because no one would admit the problem in the first place, early enough. A country should not be tormented that way, for that long and force-fed the garbage that we were. Now we are back to that script.
So if you do not see parallels, yet, that is okay because I see enough for both of us. We are still, or back, under the illusion of “keep believing” despite what you see happening. Only now the minions are better trained, more experienced. Their lob is keep believing.
They surrendered their will long ago. But they had to retain the will to believe. Once they made up their mind to that, almost nothing would affect their dreamy perception. They want to believe as strongly as they did for 8 years. You can see it everywhere. They eagerly will themselves to believe – in what doesn’t matter.
When Jen Psaki speaks from the pressroom, media are pre-committed to want to believe. They are predisposed to accept anything she says. They want to believe Joe Biden is all right, competent to lead the country and military. They assumed that default. Their will to believe invokes their faith. It makes Jen’s job of lying so much easier. Heck, the press might volunteer good answers to their own questions. But they are committed now.
It is one thing if we have a sickness in the country, namely with misguided belief in Marxism or socialism or communism, but when the sickness is exuding from every office and orifice in the administration, we don’t have a problem we are the problem. As in that administration, he had people so compromised they could not change course even if they wanted to. They wanted it all to be so badly. That Nigerian email really was real!
They would go down with the ship if need be.(could never happen) That is exactly the type of loyal commitment he and the administration sought, needed and so depended on.
Lucky for them that base commitment, willingness to believe, never faltered. Now the same required commitment is back, transferred upon another. A continuation of where they left off, to seal the deal and make it irreversible. What could go wrong? Incestuous will to believe remains high. Denial and cognitive dissonance are making epic strides.
Of course self-awareness is MIA, or at least sitting in the backseat sucking on a pacifier.
Right Ring | Bullright | © 2021
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