Lots has been said and/or written about what is going on in the US these days…..some see it as an improvement but most see it for what it is….a return of the fascism of the past.
Donny has set himself up as the supreme leader with is underlings cleaning up his messes…..all this smacks of the aesthetics of yesteryear….
What is most revealing about the MAGA aesthetic is its studied ugliness. On one side stands the grotesque excess of beauty-pageant femininity, plastic smiles, puffy lips, lacquered beach-wave hair, sharpened jawlines, and a hyper-sexualized nostalgia masquerading as “traditional values.” US Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem exemplifies this aesthetic as a badge of cruelty. Carefully styling herself in a Barbie-doll register of hyper-femininity, she delivers media performances staged in front of prisons and other sites associated with the punishment and terrorization of immigrants. The effect is chilling: a glossy, pornographic aesthetic fused with images of confinement, state violence, and racialized cruelty. Beauty here does not soften power; it aestheticizes domination and makes authoritarian violence appear natural, even glamorous. This aesthetic of cruelty is not confined to clothing (heavy on tweeds), posture, or setting. It increasingly takes hold at the level of the face itself, where artificiality is no longer concealed but aggressively displayed.
There is more if interested….
The United States is not merely awash in brutalizing and murderous acts of state-sanctioned violence. It is being restructured by them. The killings of Rachel Good and Alex Pretti are not aberrations or tragic mistakes; they belong to a longer and darker history that the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People once named with chilling precision. In earlier periods of American turmoil, such killings were called lynchings, acts “carried out by lawless mobs, although police officers did participate, under the pretext of justice.” Today, this violence extends well beyond the bullet and the baton. It takes form in the expansion of prison camps, what Thom Hartmann rightly calls concentration camps, the war on immigrants, and the routine assault on Black and brown lives made disposable through policy, indifference, and neglect. At the same time, the country is saturated with a culture steeped in fascist spectacle and authoritarian display. Under the Trump administration, aesthetics itself becomes a battleground, a weaponized field where power works on desire, memory, bodies, and pleasure to consolidate domination.
All this is pointing to a problem that we have faced before but not with such approval as today….the GOP today seems to be embracing the policies and actions that this country fought against less than a hundred years ago…..
No less an authority on right-wing extremism than Laura Loomer, Donald Trump’s wacko loyalty policeman, said it: Republicans have a Nazi problem, warning that there are those “trying to redefine” the party “so it can become modern-day Hitler Youth.”
When a Loomer admits it, you know this is a real problem, not just a liberal fabrication.
The Republicans’ entanglement with Nazism — especially after a recent kerfuffle involving conservative hero Tucker Carlson, Nazi apologist Nick Fuentes, and Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts (more on that to come) — has been much written about, as GOP stalwarts argue over whether they should denounce Nazi sympathizers or make common cause with them. This is a debate that really shouldn’t be a debate at all, and certainly not one that requires another disquisition on the Republicans’ moral bankruptcy.
But I am delivering one nonetheless, because — no matter how much space this courtship has been given, no matter how many pundits decry the celebration of Nazis and the canonization of Adolf Hitler by large segments of the conservative movement, no matter how often conservatives trot out antisemitic tropes, and no matter how often conservative leaders declare that this would be a much better country if it were a dictatorship — the fact that one of our two major parties actively, publicly, enthusiastically embraces Nazism should be a scandal, a horror, and a disgrace. Not something to be promptly forgotten, as it has been, but something that should be a front-page story every single day.
Lest we forget — and Republicans seem to have forgotten — the Nazis were the bad guys, the very personification of evil, the force that hundreds of thousands of Americans gave their lives to defeat, and the gleeful, bloodthirsty murderers of millions. They needed to be destroyed, forever castigated as the very worst of humanity, not emulated. Yet emulated they are.
So, yes, Ms. Loomer: The Republicans do, indeed, have a Nazi problem, and that means America has one too.
What amazes me is that many average Americans see no problem with the direction the government is taking….I have people I know that see no problem with the direction that I do not understand for they see and hear the same information I do yet they are content with the erosion of our rights as Americans.
How can this be?
We live in a ‘Dual State”…..
Life under authoritarianism is actually, for the most part, weirdly normal. It’s often even, well, boring. The average person can go about their day as usual. You take your kids to school, you head to the office, and yes, you even host dinner parties. You live in the realm that Fraenkel referred to as “the normative state,” and from within that realm, it’s easy to think that if you just keep your head down and avoid making waves, you’ll be perfectly fine, thank you very much.
Fraenkel’s book is called The Dual State for a reason. This first state, the business-as-usual one, actually exists to lull you into a sense of complacency such that you don’t realize that another state is also operating in parallel with it. That second state, which Fraenkel calls “the prerogative state,” only becomes visible to you when you do something that the powers that be don’t like. Then suddenly you’re in a realm where the rule of law does not exist, where citizens can be killed with impunity, where you — even you, who thought you were invulnerable — can become a target.
The dark genius of this setup is that most people don’t realize that the prerogative state is active until it’s too late. They only wake up when the knock comes on their very own door — or when the door is forcefully broken down.
“The Dual State lives by veiling its true nature,” Fraenkel wrote.
That’s why it’s not surprising to me that your friends have been politically inactive. If they think of themselves as “not the target” — if they’re citizens, if they’re white, if they don’t speak with the “wrong” accent or express the “wrong” political views in public — it’s extremely easy for them to think everything is mostly normal, because the whole political apparatus is designed to make them think exactly that.
(yahoo.com)
Cut it any way you like but the ugliness of the Goon Platoon and Donny’s sycophants is getting out of hand.
We are entering into a world that was crushed before and it will again….but only if the American people have the courage to step up.
Do we?
I Read, I Write, You Know
“lego ergo scribo”