Breaking the Hypnotic Trance

Is the spirit of 1776 still alive?

I’m not gonna say, “I turned 80”— it’s a hackneyed phrase, and I get a rash if I utter hackneyed phrases. Also, on a purely physical-health level, if I turn too quickly these days, I might fall down (is there any other way to fall—except being in a space station—but down?). So what should I say about reaching that advanced age? Being, essentially, a negative sort (pessimism being my default position for just about everything) I might say that I “got” to 80, or more typical of my thinking, that I “survived” to 80.

Whatever… I’ve noticed that, like many old people, my world-view has become narrower: Should I have an apple or a pear for my afternoon snack—and why I worried about that several hours in advance?! And didn’t I just turn up the volume on the TV; and if I did, why is the sound so low? AND--to the point of this essay, is there anything left that I, in my dotage, can do to stop or even minimally slow down my country’s mad stampede toward out-and-out fascism?

Sadly, as we can all see, the country is suffering from a near-fatal case of galloping petrification of the branches of government: First, the stark fear and sheer cowardice of the currently ruling congressional party; who, whatever they may actually think or feel, are behaving like hypnotized cult members or programmed MAGA robots.

Then… there’s the majority of The Supreme Court, recently issuing decisions that keep turning the political and moral clock backwards—as if they lived in the 1950’s or the 1890’s. They seem to traveling back to a time when the arc of the moral universe bends toward INJUSTICE.
This majority calls themselves Originalists, but what that seems to mean to them is that every step toward actual equality is an intolerable attack on the absolute rule of rich, white men. In the Revolutionary period, the country was teeming with “loyalists”—people who regarded the “rebels” as traitors to King George.
I look at these six figures in black robes and I am struck by their utter contempt and even hatred for anyone who doesn’t share their antediluvian political viewpoints.
All they need are large, powdered white wigs and a parchment of appointment by the King…

If you take a very wide-angled view of the majority’s decisions, it’s obvious that they exist (or yearn to exist) in a historical period somewhere between 1750 and 1850; as if America had never grown beyond The Civil War and the constitutional amendments that followed...

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And then there’s the Executive branch, which, in the last fifty years, since Nixon understood that he had resign in disgrace, has slowly but surely—like The Blob in the 1950’s horror picture—absorbed almost all government power.
How this happened is the subject for an entire library of books, but the end (and it may be the end) of all this moral rot is that half or more of this country has effectively become a cult, ruled by a deranged narcissist. The leader of this cult clearly has no one’s interest at heart but his own, but his depravity and selfishness are seemingly invisible to his millions of followers, whom he regards as meaningless pawns on his personal chessboard.

So, three branches of government—now become one, subject completely to the will of a mad king. Despite all the technological advances and the hundred-and-fifty years of bloody battles fought to secure equal rights for millions of people, the country has descended headlong, like a bunch of mindless lemmings, into the corrupt, nutty—and eventually suicidal universe of Trump.

Being old, and slow to adjust to most things—like this current cult-like political system, and still believing that I live in a functioning democracy, I find myself constantly appalled by what’s going on. But I see, finally—and this may be inevitable—that, lacking the re-humanizing of Congress, and the majority of the Court awakening from their 18th-century coma, that THE PEOPLE have to become the true Originalists and take this country back.