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"LOGIC IS AN ENEMY AND TRUTH IS A MENACE"

The title words were spoken by Rod Serling, "Twilight Zone," Season 2, Episode 29, "The Obsolete Man." The words are every dictator's "iron rule," said Serling; its inviolability, prevailing throughout history. Narration commences at one minute in.


The condemned played brilliantly by Burgess Meredith, so too the condemner, Fritz Weaver.

Only in that sense can America's first dictator be thought a traditionalist, a goon intent on maintaining history's ugliest theme. Save for reading My New Order (Hitler's collected speeches), Trump's historical knowledge is nada. Perusing just the Führer's grandiosities might have successfully made him the loathsome demagogue he is; then again, his mouth-foaming rages appear quite naturally inspired.


Either way his principal, Serling-observed enemy and most threatening menace uphold the soulless authoritarianism of fascist tradition. What's particularly striking about Trump's deeply unAmerican adoption of it is that he not only withholds concealing his two most dictator-defining tipoffs — logic, hostile; truth, ominous — he positively relishes waving them about.


Our own little führer's latest iron-rule brandish occurred in near-pure form on Wednesday. In prefacing his dual paranoia, Trump wrote "We will MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN, and it will happen very quickly! In order to save time, money, and effort, it would be helpful if you would not send, or recommend to us, people who worked with, or are endorsed by" the following:


"Americans for No Prosperity (headed by Charles Koch), 'Dumb as a Rock' John Bolton, 'Birdbrain' Nikki Haley, Mike Pence, disloyal Warmongers Dick Cheney, and his Psycho daughter, Liz, Mitt Romney, Paul Ryan, General(?) Mark Milley, James Mattis, Mark Yesper, or any of the other people suffering from Trump Derangement Syndrome, more commonly known as TDS."


Wow. Just ... wow. Rare is the screed that explicitly publicizes its own derangement. I'll give Trump this much: Although nakedly singular in the tirade, it is a truth — his only error, omitting the possessive mark, Trump's Derangement Syndrome.


Of Romney, Ryan, Haley, Pence, Milley, Mattis and Yesper, we'll make short work. They openly countered Trump's stupidity, that being the most violent assault imaginable to the latter's tissue-thin epidermis. Enough said. (We'll take more notice when the inaugurated despot orders top-crony Pam Bondi to plunge them into fathomless seas of gratuitous investigations and, barring Romney, futile-but-bankrupting prosecutions.)


As for the rather colorful list of others, we begin at Trump's beginning. I've no love for, nor even the barest admiration of, Americans for Prosperity; its macroeconomic theories, altogether discredited humbug. Yet AfP is a traditionalist as well, its laughable backwardness in modern economics was once the mightiest of GOP humbugs and general devastation, Q.E.D., time and again.


But labeling such Old Guard foolishness deranged? Not to the few meant to benefit — and to those who'll benefit even more under AfP-likeminded Trump. Demonstrated is logic as lethal enemy. Further, slamming Bolton, Cheney Sr. and daughter Liz as warmongers while he himself advocates three pronto wars stands — stunningly, I'll add — as his menacing dread of truth.

In one short post Trump almost perfectly manifested Rod Serling's elegant phrasing of authoritarianism's vulgar iron rule, episode intro. In its closing segment, also propelled in large part by his uniformed witnessing of fascism's 1944 horrors, then fascism's 1945 collapse, Serling posited what the civilized world has long-trusted as a logical iron truth: "Any state, any entity, any ideology that fails to recognize the worth, the dignity, the rights of Man, that state is obsolete."


With that, here's to Trump as "The Obsolete Man" — a truth known and accepted by all but his hardest-core MAGA cretins inside the first three or four months of his embryonic dictatorship.

2 comments

2 Kommentare


ssdd
18. Jan.

Love me some old school TZ, though I’m partial to the more (if rare) uplifting episodes. My favorite is their adaptation of Ray Bradbury’s “I Sing the Body Electric.” If I had to pick one that we’re living in now, you’ve chosen a good one. But for full context, it should be preceded by “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street.” We (and I don’t mean you or I or others who pass this way, just our country in general) did this to ourselves. The orange monster just took advantage.

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PM
19. Jan.
Antwort an

True, "Maple Street." After reading your comment yesterday I kept thinking there was another episode along these lines. If so, I have failed to summon the plotline; more likely, my "thinking" was my imagination.

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