Should Donald Trump Be Seen (And Legally Investigated, and Potentially Punished), As a ‘Force’ (a Psych-Spectrum Case)? Does America Have Precedent in It’s Laws

 The Perched Eye blog is 14 years old,  from 2009 with President Obama's election. Our focus has been eclectic ...  the styles and directions of American politics and culture, with an occasional comment on the impact of new technologies. Our observations sometimes attract a critical eye, but the 'pen' remains unblunted.

Donald Trump might (/should) be viewed as a ‘force’ (a psych-spectrum case), not simply as just a person. But how can an unembodied ‘something’ be punished by a legal system whose underlying origin, purpose, and intent are focused on organic, living things? Can America’s legal system put a ‘force’ on trial? It seems difficult to do …as America is experiencing.

It seems we’re just now realizing that Trump and Trumpism are forces — the former a psych-spectrum ‘case,’ and the latter ‘-ism’ a belief movement intent (by real past actions) on destroying American democratic operations. 

Therefore, at the least to deter future ‘Jan 6’s (2021)’, the punishment for the ‘Jan6’ attempted overthrow of the American government is left with increasing the legal weight of the crime, i’e’, the sentence term. Hence, the DOJ's move to increase sentences for sedition appears logical and perhaps the only recourse to handling cases like Donald Trump’s seditious actions and planning to lead to Jan 6 (and obstructions thereafter.)

One can get lost in legalese ‘entanglements’, but lengthier sentences can serve to prevent future seditious acts, as well as punish the current conspirators whose intent was to overthrow the elected American government. 

(Remember Germany’s experience with Hitler, who was convicted of conspiracy and sedition to overthrow Germany’s 1920s Weimar Republic, but only served 9 months of a 5-year term, then went on to gain total power…with the aid of MAGA-like ultra-right wing thugs and para-military elements, Hitler’s Brown Shirt supporters.) Don’t doubt that America saw the same elements (pro-Hitler thugs and legitimate congresspersons) assembled here to forcibly gain total power for Trump, who openly stated his intentions to serve as many terms as he wanted, and destroy his enemies. Trump’s plans for regaining the ‘throne’ were (are/should be) scary. 

Let’s trust in the American legal process — the simplest route to prevent future ‘Jan6’s is to increase the incarceration terms for sedition. (Otherwise, we will have to wait maybe 4–5 years, or more, for the current Supreme Court to even hear the Jan6 case against Trump-the-person.

WHAT LIES AHEAD FROM THE TRUMP DEBACLE?

Today, Pericles21 wrote a comment on John Amato’s Nov 27, 2020, ‘Crooks and Liars’ article on the future political effect of the 2020 election and was drawn back in memory to the honor of sitting in a small group college seminar listening to Hannah Arendt’s impromptu explorations on human vulnerability to authoritarianism manipulations and specifically on the rise and inhuman atrocities of 1930s-40s totalitarian Nazism (The Origins of Talitarianism, H. Arendt, 1951).  (The remarkable thing about Hannah Arendt is that her explorations, though not satisfying to everyone, were in my opinion 100 percent sincere ... one could tell by her visible pain in attempting, again, after no doubt many such presentations, to express ‘The Answer’, and we still haven’t figured this out.) Although Arendt’s thoughts, explorations and writings did not ‘close the book’ on authoritarianism, Arendt did leave vital ‘thought equipment’ outlining a path to frame, ‘see’ and describe how the human conditions leading to ‘modern’ authoritarian leadership and excesses (such as Trumpism’?). 

One feels that Hannah Arendt would be saddened but perhaps in a resigned yet ever hopeful way not shocked, that her musings and writings on authoritarianism continue to be sought out and critically pertinent after nearly a century ... and raise the same questions in current times! 

In his article referred to above, John Am@to asks ‘what did we learn from the rise, four years of the atrump ‘presidency’ and  the recent election details?  And, ‘can we prevent a future Trump?’ 

One answer, if not the most at-fault agent, is the pernicious effect of deliberate misinformation spread by profit-focused media outlets such as Fox News and similar right-wing outlets. But, in this blogger’s view, is this a too simple jand too quick jump to hand out ‘blame’ ... no matter how satisfying that might feel?  Does such an ‘easy’ labeling actually help create an opposite atmosphere of fear of expressing opinions, i.e., an equivalent misdeed?  

And an important corollary question is, ‘who will be the judge of media boundaries?’ 

Here is Pericles21’s comment on the John Amato article:

“Newsmax CEO Admits Airing Conspiracy Theories As News”  (John Amato, Crooks and Liars, Nov 27, 2020):

Pericles21: “We must be careful of capricious and dangerous censorship, I.e., ‘What is, or is not, News?’ And ‘who or what entity shall judge on that question?’  Why can’t we simply rely on the robustness of American ‘freedom of the press’? Hmmm ... but that ‘freedom’ got us Fox ‘News’, and Trump, didn’t it!!”  

 There is no doubt, in the minds of the majority of American voters (an excess of 7 million votes over Trump voters in 2020) that Trump and Trumpism was a bullet that America blessedly dodged ... and actually dodged back in 2016 when Hillary Clinton won the majority vote. How Hillary won but still ‘lost’ her election must be answered and preventive, but equitable, measures designed and implemented ... such as finally removing or neutralizing the Electoral College.

 

 

WHAT IF TRUMP JUMPS SHIP? (THERE ARE SO MANY SUCH SCENARIOS)

 To be brief - ‘we’d best be thinking about this last Knuckle Ball thrown by a ‘C&C’ master - Chaos and Confusion’, that is!!   

(This post makes note and recommends this possible scenario from the recent NewYorkMagazine article,  What If Trump Is All Too Eager to Give up Power? (Josh Barrow, Intelligencer, New York Magazine, October 19, 2020)

Election 2016: Trump as Performance: Operas Buffa (Falstaff ) and Tragedy (Lear) With Some Gatsby Thrown In - Starring Villains and Buffoons, and Wolves and Lambs, and Despots and Martyrs.....but Few Genuine Heroes (Except Warren and Sanders Who Were Squeezed Out Like Good Money)

I've found a new style device for lazy bloggers - repeating at the beginning of a post, the post's conclusion after stream-of-consciousness drafting (because I'm not a professional writer).

Is it appropriate to say that Donald Trump is a 'retro-1920s-Gatsby ala F Scot Fitzgerald'?

I kind of buy into this comparison. Trump can sometimes seem a 'modern' Gatsby because of his 'flash' and glitzy 'armament' which he is not shy to boast about. But this 'retro-ness' is not a true synthesis of current and Gatsbyan types because he has carried out the Gatsbyan charade for so long without crashing. (But Trump's financial reality might reveal that DT is indeed a reincarnate Gatsby, who knows?)

But where DT does resemble Fitzgerald's 'Gatsby' is DT's quality of 'superfluosity ....an even exaggerated superfluosity marked by glitzy, overdone tastes in material possessions (large, 'neo-pharonic' buildings) and blonde, superficially adorned, physically endowed women who he touts for all to hear about... even when he is describing his own daughter. Yet all these outward signs of success carry with them, or emit, a somewhat 'off' fragrance like a person wearing a not-quite fitted suit, purchased bespoke from a good, though not top tier, tailor. Also, a person wearing a strange, ill-fit, badly dyed hairpiece that turns out to be real hair!

This might sound unfair and a bit unkind so I will end this introduction to the Preface by saying, 'Just as some complain about the seeming plastic, impervious surface Hillary presents and compare her lack of projection with Trump's 'out-there-for-all-to-see', we don't really know who lives inside Trump's bluster and energy...but from what is implied, if there is something beneath Trump's flash and glitz, there might not be much to like...and much to run from in abject fear. DT might make for good literature but let not him become President...that's too real for comfort.

And, just as, for some, Hillary appears to be emotionally monochromatic, Trump appears to have successfully substituted money for morality...or maybe, just as likely, Trump didn't have to substitute for morality because morality was maybe never there.

All of this is to say that this election, taken willy-nilly with no regard for consequences, is highly entertaining like a retro Louis-Schmelling heavyweight boxing match of the 1930s. But this election also seems simultaneously vacuous and lacking in substance - this election lacks an energy of vision that a thinking person can bite into, and yet the stakes are so high:

we can't seem to free ourselves from special interests (profitable status quo corporations) to tackle global climate warming with threat of rising sea levels flooding significant portions of all coasts; America's up-to-the-neck self-entrapment in an out-of-date and endangering oil economy (and energy base), our racial impasse, our Congressional paralysis left-over from the Civil War (no, from the pre-Civil War, Clay-Calhoun states' rights debates that were never resolved, etc.

It seems that after 160 years America hasn't been able to shake off it's demons that caused the Civil War and has prevented America from moving on. Kindly speaking, Trump represents going back to the 1830's and reclaiming states rights (embodied in the 'Alt-Right' catch-bag of neo-confederate, hooded thug, revisionists who have glombed onto Trump like roaches around rotten meat).

On the other hand, Hillary Clinton seems to represent continuing 'partnering'('coddling'?) of government cozying up to big banks and big corporations - just about anything big and making money. Let's hope a 'mandate'election win for her will free Hillary from these chains.

Meanwhile, the interests of working America are stuck in a no-man's land yet America has little time and maybe no remaining chances to resolve this problem.

PREFACE:
First, I am an opera fan and despite my 'run-now!' aversion to TD (Tricky Dick), "Nixon in China" (Adams, 1987) is an opera I like very much. (My fav operas are "Norma" (Bellini, 1831) with of course Joan Sutherland, and Mozart's (1786) "Marriage of Figaro". In a good year, I can enjoy a 'Der Ring..')

But to the point of this, I see real opera material in the tragi-comedic figure of Donald Trump. What might be a title for an opera about Trump? Hmmmm, maybe ...'Vice is Nice but Retribution is like a Tidal Wave', ...or something. Trump will someday be an American literary tragi-hero, if he is not elected, or if elected, an American icon of a post-modern monster...as his hypothetical Presidency will so f...k up the world... (that's just the way Trump rolls).

So on to this 'thing' ("Thing' being a memic, Bush I word that this 2016 election process seems to have resurrected from the '80s).

So, here it is, the repeated 'finale', and of course it's all about Donald Trump who this blogger feels is an iconic, living fossil, example of 20th Century Americana at this stage of its decline, or at its cusp of a needed self-transformation whose occurrence is yet to fade away unconsummated. Note: this blog post has lain in draft form for more than a month because I felt it's premise, that Donald Trump is a genuine American comedic-tragedy - a Falstaffian Fool, yes, but more, a genuine 'American Psycho-Bright Lights- Ellisian-McInerny character flesh-rendered from the '80s,...and destined (doomed) to walk amongst us as a modern, living, walking, sniffin' (Debate #1) tragedy. And Trump is easily recognized - from his actual 1980s, days of sparkle and libido - as a shadow character in Tom Wolfe's, 'Bonfire of the Vanities' (1987). Trump is real, just 30 years out of date - he really believes his 'style' of 'courtship' is ....what ever he believes.

And if G.. is kind, 'It' will find the time and inclination to save America from a Trump Presidency.

This article's conclusion, post-Debate #1:

Trump (The Donald, DT, OD (Our Donald),'Scratch' (from Stephen Vincent Benet's 1936,'The Devil and Dan Webster') is a post-modern, but time-revisted Shakespeare-Quixotish-Rabelaisian-Shelley-Bram Stokerish monster-buffon ala Falstaff, Pantagruel,Sancho Panza and straight-man sidekick Don Quixote, Shelley's monster, Henry !V and V, Count Dracula,Philip K Dickian lamenting cyborg,and the all-time modern monster-tragedy icon - Richard Don't-kick-me-again-but-if-you-must-I-know-how-you-feel-I'm-such-a-fool-mama-said Nixon). Buffoonish and over-exaggerated but at the same time tragically out of date and worse, worth attention from our entertainment-warped culture that morphs serious sh..t with laughs.

Donald Trump, or should one say, 'Trumpism, (or maybe both) will be discussed and parsed for many years to come. One could guess that future times will look back on 'Trump' as the nadir of American or even global politics before the renaissance of government for the people, or 'Trump' will be seen as the peak of American capitalist-democracy, or democratic capitalism, before the Great Fall. Writing about the Trump phenomenon is as challenging a struggle as Trump himself is to 'see' clearly - he is this or that, seemingly changeable at a moment's notice ..or with no notice or logical pre-disposition. Trump is as close to an embodiment of the neither-here-nor-there 'Cheshire Cat' as anything yet seen outside of a theoretical physics construct.

So, after one of Trump's non-sensical detours from normalcy ('normalcy' being, relatively speaking for Mr Trump, only a bit less scary than full on psychotic), one is driven to ask,

'Is Trump real?'

To that self-posed question, one is also self-driven to respond,

'Trump is as real as I feel about him ight now, but I don't know how I might feel about him tomorrow,... but probably worse.'

So,after this preamble, this lead-in to what is almost universally acknowledged (despite harsh disagreements about the person) about Trumpism being a genuine and significant American phenomenon, this blogger comes to the nub of this post:

'Trump' and all the irrational trappings surrounding the person - the lore, exaggerations, psychological analyses and theories about him and about his supporters and his non-supporters-but-tolerators, and about his country and about his culture and about his political-economic backdrop,...Trumpism as embodied by Donald Trump the person, is and will be for a looo-ong time a fertile compost of 'guano' (a pile of bird shit for political satirists) or the highest quality 'Green Thumb Fertilizer' for the boutique gardener of the left (i.e., Ivy League scholars and psycho-analysts), or the rallying cry of the (cranially deformed, hmmm shouldn't say that), ecstatic-drenched extreme right. Take your choice.

There will be plays, songs, short stories, off-broadway pieces, and lengthy (serious) works created to express the inner wonderment many thinkers will hve for Trump the man and Trumpism of which Donald Trump is but one minor god's badly or well-done creative example, depending on one's point-of-view.

But only a few of future devotees and scholars will clearly understand how Trump and Trumpism is all of 'us'. 'Us' being the totality of America - our nation, our culture(s), regions and each person residing in America.

How every person residing in America, legal and illegal, contributes in deed or story to our collective esprit and body. As an example, it is fitting for a discussion of 'Trumpism' to mention illegal immigrants are demonized by Trump (supposedly demonized, if one is to go only by his words rather than by who he hires to do the gardening and cooking at his Florida mansion); yet these supposedly (in the Trumpian world) extraneous, worthless and demon-folk play significant and mostly positive roles in the portrayal of America's cultural memes, i.e., the illegal immigrants of especially Mexican origin have a somewhat 'uber' work ethic ...which in America is comical!

So, to the finale: Trump (The Donald, DT, OD (Our Donald),'Scratch' (from Stephen Vincent Benet's 1936,'The Devil and Dan Webster') a post-modern, but time-revisted Shakespeare-Shelley-Bram Stokerish monster (Falstaff, Shelley's monster, Henry !V and V, Count Dracula,Philip K Dickian's lamenting cyborgs ('Blade Runner' ex 'Do Robots Dream of Electric Sheep?',and the all-time modern monster-tragedy icon - Richard Don't-kick-me-again-but-if-you-must-I-know-how-you-feel-I'm-such-a-fool-mama-said Nixon.

Election 2016: Brexit and Trumpism - We saw it Coming, Where are they Going? Future Benefits.

----
http://www.powells.com/post/original-essays/white-trash?utm_source=powellsbooks.news&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=pbnews_20160629&utm_content=Essay

PowellsBooks.Blog
Authors, readers, critics, media − and booksellers.
ORIGINAL ESSAYS
White Trash
- over time, America has seen more downward than upward mobility, and migration often substitutes for actual class security.
- Americans continue to tell themselves they believe in social equality, but history tells a different story.

- "White Trash": The language used to describe classes and the poor can be traced back to the forceful imprint left by British colonization. Before it became that fabled "City upon a Hill," America was, in the eyes of 16th-century English adventurers, a foul, weedy wilderness — a "wasteland," they called it, where the Old World could unload the idle poor.
- Among the unheroic transplants were convicts, Irish rebels, known whores, ex-soldiers, adults in debt, and the children of beggars, all of whom either chose exile in place of a prison term (or hanging!) or else sold themselves into indentured servitude.
- The great majority of the early colonists were classified as a surplus population, as expendable "rubbish" — a rude rather than a robust population.
- These were America's "waste people," who, sometime around the 1820s, came to be called "white trash."
by Nancy Isenberg, June 21, 2016 4:44 PM

------
Brexit and Trump-ism share common themes and causes focused on the growing disposability of American and European workers. This was a sensed phenomenon Pericles21 posted on this blog site about some time ago (Pericles21' post of February 6, 2009 - "MBA Follies #1: The Public as Labor Pool [Or, MBA wet dreams gone bad)" was a growing but still, at that time, a somewhat contentious question of 'being' for the American worker - what or who exactly, was the American (and western powers) worker in the world of the now truly big, truly powerful multi-national corporations?

Were developed-nations' workers still, foremost, citizens or were they in the process, or well along the way, of becoming just a cost parameter, a cog, in the profit machine...without countervailing powers, losing respect from the national governance systems, and increasingly having their 'being-hood' (ascendancy as living persons) given to, or high-jacked by, the corporations (viz., the American Supreme Court's 2010 decision favoring virtually unlimited corporate election donations, 'Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission'.

Continuing the list of erosions of hard-won benefits and powers suffered by American workers, there has been a ever closer examination by researchers on the decline of unions and real wages since the 1970's. This had resulted in a growing, 'itchy' sense in both researchers and workers that all was not 'ok' in the land of the free, and it's motherland of ideas, Great Britain...and likely including Spain, Greece, and several other nations at this point.

That question about the value and constitutional importance of workers, and the larger worker-middle class (80% of America) could be condensed into a broad question - 'exactly who is the American citizen, what place in American politics does a citizen have in today's America and especially in corporate-globalism, or global-corporatism (the two descriptors are now indistinct since the top-most power element after the 'Elite 1% is the corporate empire which is global and has come to control governments and global electoral processes...until BREXIT and Trump-ism..which caught the pundits, seated politicians and just about everyone else, including BREXIT and Trump supporters by surprise.

On BREXIT and Trump-ism: Not surprisingly, the very democratic principles that the corporate world had cleverly sought (successfully) to manipulate with the result of 'Citizens vs. United', also proved wonderfully robust enough to provide the victims of supposedly all-conquering corporatism with the supreme countervailing power, the referendum and (perhaps) the upcoming vote to elect the American President.

If Trump is not to be the next American President, at least the bells have been rung in this 2016 re-enactment of France's 1790s times of rolling Trumbrils and tumbling heads. Heads may not fall in America, hopefully at least not in reality, but again hopefully we will see balance created in the tug-of-war between the American citizen-worker and the corporate bloc.

Now the question is, 'are there ANY rights left to the worker-citizen?

'Brexit' (and Trumpism) seems to answer for the common folk in both countries, 'Well, one can't be certain where the citizen fits in these days but the common folk have shouted out they do not want to continue to lie in this bed of gross economic inequality.

The ground theme behind Brexit and Trumpism is a combination of lingering, media-romanticized feudalism, dog-whistle racism and habitual knee-bending worship of nobility and its modern equivalent, the corporate and wealthy elites. But why haven't Trumpism and BREXIT exploded before now?

First, Pericles21 challenges the idea that Trumpism and Brexit are original ideas and movements - Trump and Brexit are just terminal signs of a pot that has been building in temperature for several decades and now is exploding its lid.

Pericles21 also proposes that, once again, in America and as well in Great Britain, the roots of citizen passivity-until-eruption derive from the same source - the culturally-engrained, centuries-old, feudalist acceptance by the 'common folk' to be governed by their 'bettors', currently the all-mighty corporate citizens (white collar and those somewhat securely employed under that umbrella) and corporations themselves who in recent years have been given by governments and legal courts astounding recognitions and power in the form of the 'Gift of Beiing' as proferred on bended knee to the corporations by the American Supreme Court in the above-mentioned 'Citizens United' SCOTUS 2010 decision that gifted corporations with personhood.

This class fatalism can still be heard in direct or indirect form among back country, 'White', Scots-Irish-transplanted English folk in the Virginias, Carolinas, Georgia, ...and their generatios later descendants just about anywhere in the south-of-Dixie original states and especially in the family trees of the former Confederate states.

The modern form of this feudal 'inheritance', passivity in the face of corporate excesses, is not a good thing for a modern nation - this passivity is civically unhealthy, but it is ingrained and difficult to get rid of because it is a key theme of American culture that is still programmed into our group think in the iconic symbols of the 'suffering-with-pride', simple-living, uneducated heroes exampled by the Clampett's of television's'Beverly Hillbillys', the 1940's movies' 'Ma and Pa Kettle', ...and many other movie and television creations. These simple folk were held as American memes of truth and quality-of-life, in integrity, while material and social network quality-of life was preserved for their 'bettors', the corporate and upper classes.

This self-delusion had to (must) end and Trump is its voice. If Trump is not eleted President, let's hope that the next President anad Congress will have listened to what Trump's calling out is messaging, deep disatisfaction of the American working class, and implement programs to better the quality of life for the common folk of America (national health care, free college at least at the two-year level, national wage reviews, ...), modernize America's infrastructure to support the businesses of the next century (high-speed rail, national internet, space-resources exploration and mining systems development)