The Perched Eye blog is 12+ years old, from 2009 with President Obama's first term. Our focus has been eclectic ... the ways and directions of American politics and culture, and occasionally summarizing the potential impact of new technologies. Pericles21's observations sometimes attract a critical eye, but the 'pen' remains unblunted. --------
Thnx to Ms. Cassidy Hutchinson, today’s Jan 6 Select Committee's emergency hearing witness, for keeping her cool as she related the horrors around her as they evolved leading to the attempted coup on January 6, 2021. And thanks to the Jan 6 Committee's Chair and co-Chairs, Bennie Thompson and Liz Cheny, respectively) for guiding viewers and witnesses through the mire and muck of Trumpville. And thanks to Michael Cohen, for his fall from grace, imprisonment, and self-redemption to speak out about Trumpism. And thanks to others for background context from their own 'Trump' experiences. (Note the proper name of the 'Jan 6 Select Committe' is U.S. House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol.)
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Today’s ‘Jan 6' hearing brought to mind watching two prior televised hearings equal to the Jan 6 House Select Committee Hearings’ import: the McCarthy Army Hearing in 1954‘ (“Have you no sense of decency, Senator McCarthy”), and the Watergate Hearings (1971’s “lordy there are tapes”).
All three hearings originate from the actions and/or warped thinking of sociopaths who somehow slithered to national attention in the age of television.
McCarthy died young. Nixon resigned during his second term. Trump, if not sent to prison, and even then, must be permanently barred from ever again filling any elected position or even serving in any public post.
(But even if Trump is banned from future elections, that might not be enough to neutralize Trump — recall that Adolph Hitler served less than a year of a five-year sentence for his 1924 seditious coup attempt to overthrow Germany’s Weimar Republic…much like with Trump’s Jan 6, 2021 coup attempt.)
Also, in the three American near-misses cited above, television, the nineteenth-twentieth century common man’s voyeuristic ticket to the world around us, opened windows to places that confirmed many of our suspicions, repelled us and yet had us fascinated to want more.
Yes, many of us were frightened as Hell sitting in the virtual front row of life’s Play. And those scary actors! But it all added up to great entertainment the evening before we had to return to work at the soup factory…and we remember our emotions as we watched. Those peaks (‘highs’?) still reside as faint outlines in our minds…and we welcome their return as new stuff appears from the foggy bog of American culture.
America's vicarious TV hearings, IMO, also ‘jumped’ America into a national addictions just as pernicious as real narcotics. And those experiences groomed us into real substance abuses, e.g., ‘Crack’, “Meth’, ‘Oxy’, Molly…all high-emotional-cost, escapist, chemical boosts that for a short time have given America repeats of the thrills we first felt on a national scale as we watched real life on television.
Now we are again via televised hearings we are watching from front row seats the unpeeling of the Trump orange (double entendre).
This time the destruction of America, by Trump, was narrowly avoided… largely because the plans of psychotic minds seem always to fall apart from the over-reaching hubris of their human hosts. (I distance the evil(ill) mind from its physical host in the belief that the illness is its own ‘self’, apart and above the human host.) 'Trumpism’, the extension of Trump's evil intentions into conned followers are are manifestations of an ill brain.
There is a kind of reptilian ‘beauty’ to Trump’s “-osis”. Trump , as reported he said, didn’t fear the Jan 6, 2021, mob, with their military-grade automatic weapons, because in his snake-kin inner brain, he ‘knew’ the mob and the surrounding crescendo-building chaos was the product of his own subliminal, rarely explicit manipulations of his staff and his zombie proxies at Congress, at state legislatures and the mob actors themselves.
‘Trump’, the ill brain, must be named to force it from the shadows into the light. We don’t see ‘Trump’ the brain. What we see is a shade, a sidewalk shadow cast by the ‘brain’ itself..like a 1930–40s BW horror film, that operates from a human body that is too quickly chosen and fits like a cheap suit.. but regardless is functional!
Evil ‘shades’ are not perfect in everything; they lack human aesthetics and are impatient to get about their business…so they sometimes make bad choices about things trivial to them even if important to the rest of us, such as physical health, nice ties, et. -that is how we catch them out!).
Trump is not a perfect evil, nor perhaps not even earning top-of class evil when compare to world-class evil entities such as Adolph, or Genghis who killed millions. But if not neutralized, for good, Trump potentially may end American democracy. May the gods bless and continue to watch over us.