Tuesday, July 21, 2020

Donald Trump's Death Wish

No, he doesn't want to literally die, despite months of going maskless in public and a whole sedentary lifetime's worth of poor eating habits. Trump reminds me of a reanimated Megatherium, the giant bipedal ground sloth the size of an elephant that plodded the earth for more than a million years mindlessly gobbling up whole forests before it was finally hunted to extinction by the smarter, smaller animals known as humans. Trump the sloth has become woke enough to lumber forth from his Coronavirus hibernation cave to deflect the blame for the country's collapse in some new directions - as in, Portland, Oregon and maybe even a city near you.

 At the rate we're going, Homo sapiens will lucky to survive as earth's dominant species for even one more decade. And for everybody regretting how old they're getting and how they won't be around to see how it all ends, please do not give up hope yet. Try to hang on just a bit longer.


Donald Trump, for his own clumsy part, is  grasping at straws in an orgy of hope for his own political survival. Perhaps experiencing a primordial genetic memory of the Pleistocene's mass extinction event, our MAGA-therium president has taken to playing Charles Bronson in the 1974 mega-hit Death Wish. In Trump's mind, the cinematic thugs and muggers of the 70s are disguised as peaceful protesters demonstrating against police brutality and other capitalistic depredations, like evictions and starvation wages.


Bronson had portrayed Paul Kersey, an architect who goes on a revenge nationwide killing spree after his wife is murdered and his daughter raped by a trio of home invaders. The film roughly coincided with Trump's own rise to power in a near-bankrupt New York City, which was experiencing its own crime wave at the time. As chronicled in the book "Fear City," it was Wall Street's bond vigilantes who at the dawn of the neoliberal era, led the charge for cuts to social programs, public services and the destruction of labor unions. The corrupt New York political machine welcomed Trump, the brash young tycoon, with open arms because of his magnetic power to draw other movers and shakers to the Big Apple and to make all that creative destruction such good, grisly tabloid fun.


His niece Mary Trump writes of the media's essential role in exploiting Trumpism in "Too Much And Never Enough":

"In the 1970s, after my grandfather had already been preferring and promoting Donald for years, the New York media picked up the baton and began disseminating Donald's unsubstantiated hype. In the 1980s, the banks joined in when they began to fund his ventures. Their willingness (and then their need) to foster his increasingly unfounded claims to success hung on their hopes of recouping their losses."

The exploitative Death Wish vigilante film was a blockbuster nationwide hit, grossing more than $20 million for its producers and distributors, and spawning eight sequels as well as a more blatantly racist, alt-right 2018 remake starring Bruce Willis - who bears a startling resemblance to Trump himself on the DVD cover:




 Vincent Canby's New York Times review of the original movie was scathing:

(Director)Paul Kersey describes his actions in the film as “the good old American custom of self‐defense” (as once practiced against the Indians?) and the movie clearly agrees. In other words, there's nothing wrong with this country today that giving guns to all the right people wouldn't cure. Who are the right people? White middle‐class maniacs. For anyone with two brain cells to rub together that might be a tough question, but not for “Death Wish.”...
 It was, however, a stroke of genius to cast Charles Bronson in the unlikely role of an upper middle‐class New York liberal who sees the light. Almost any other actor I can think of would probably look very sheepish under the circumstances. Not Bronson, who seems no more capable of intellectual activity than a very old, very tired circus bear. It's enough that he is able to walk around on his hind legs and occasionally, shoot a gun.
Trump is certainly no Charles Bronson. Despite his resemblance to a tired old circus bear (or an extinct circus Megatherium) our aged sloth-president is cravenly proxifying his vigilantism by sending camouflaged Border Patrol/ICE thugs to Portland (and later maybe to Detroit, Chicago and New York City) in his stead, to kidnap citizens off the streets when not actually assaulting them with deadly weapons.

Since the 1974 film resonated so strongly with the white suburban audience  that Trump relies upon to win re-election, he perhaps hopes that the paranoid American mindset has not gone completely extinct in this New Age of Wokeness. Maybe he can make liberals see the light after all. Because, how fast can human beings really evolve from fear and loathing of The Other into solidarity utopia?


Canby's Death Wish review can be read as a preternatural forecast of the Trump White House itself:

It's a tackily made melodrama but it so cannily orchestrates the audience's responses that it can appeal to law‐and‐order fanatics, sadists, muggers, club women, fathers, older sisters, masochists, policemen, politicians, and, it seems, a number of film critics. Impartially. Its message, simply put, is: KILL. TRY IT. YOU'LL LIKE IT.
Donald Trump thus tackily invited the courtier establishment media into his inner sanctum to offer his own self-review of the Remake, the Sequel, the never-ending nostalgia for the 70s and bleeding heart liberalism turned on its head:
“I’m going to do something — that, I can tell you,” Mr. Trump told reporters in the Oval Office. “Because we’re not going to let New York and Chicago and Philadelphia and Detroit and Baltimore and all of these — Oakland is a mess. We’re not going to let this happen in our country. All run by liberal Democrats.”
 The president portrayed the nation’s cities as out of control. “Look at what’s going on — all run by Democrats, all run by very liberal Democrats. All run, really, by radical left,” Mr. Trump said. He added: “If Biden got in, that would be true for the country. The whole country would go to hell. And we’re not going to let it go to hell.”
That, of course, is being unfair to Joe Biden, who for most of his adult life has acted out his own inner Charles Bronson to Oscar-worthy perfection. He arrived in the U.S. Senate in 1973, just before that the influential Death Wish movie was released to packed audiences throughout the country. His Bronsonian zeitgest has lasted through all eight sequels and all of the nearly 50 years of his political career. His 1993 Senate floor rant promoting the crime bill even included Hollywood imagery of "My wife, my daughter" being victimized by sociopathic predators.

With Biden's history of attacking Republicans from the right on their law and order bona fides, you can sort of understand Trump's recent one-upmanship, both in words and terrifying authoritarian actions.


As the New York Times reported last year (when the bumbling Biden's chances for the nomination seemed tenuous):

In 1989, with the violent crime rate continuing to rise as it had since the 1970s, Mr. Biden lamented that the Republican president, George H. W. Bush, was not doing enough to put “violent thugs” in prison. In 1993, he warned of “predators on our streets.” And in a 1994 Senate floor speech, he likened himself to another Republican president: “Every time Richard Nixon, when he was running in 1972, would say, ‘Law and order,’ the Democratic match or response was, ‘Law and order with justice’ — whatever that meant. And I would say, ‘Lock the S.O.B.s up.’”
Fast forward to 2020, and Biden boasts that he has narrowed his vice presidential beauty contest to four lucky Black finalists as he fights to end "systemic racism." He lumps Black women into one monolithic group that has "supported me my entire political career. I've been loyal to them and they've been loyal to me."

No wonder that MAGA-therian Man, under constant siege for hiding behind his own harem of work-wives and for demanding and getting loyalty from his sycophantic underlings, is going nuts. His remaining brain cells must be rubbing themselves together into a frenzy.



I Am Being Treated So Unfairly!

As is usual during these internecine oligarchic battles, the average Joes and Janes of Exceptional America end up being the collateral damage as we await the extinction of the corrupt two-party system and fight against our assigned status as aliens in our own land.

4 comments:

  1. The Death Wish franchise, along with Rambo, Straw Dogs, Taxi, etc, are all part of the vigilante film genre where a typical American male seeks revenge against ruthless criminals, rapists and drug dealers. The things that all these films share in common is that the legal system has failed and action must be taken to seek justice, the enemies are by and large Blacks, Latinos, Mexicans, Asians and, of course, Muslims, and there is an effort to generate intense emotion and anger toward a perceived enemy It is the foundational theme that Donald Trump was elected on. His opening remark about Mexicans on launching his campaign:

    "They're bringing drugs. They're bringing crime. They're rapists."

    Birth of a Nation used the same outrageous playbook.

    The difference today is that the bad guys are not being targeted as part of the criminal underworld. They are peaceful demonstrators. There's another genre for this real-life franchise. It's called fascism.

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  2. For your erudition, amusement, disgust (via www.blitz211.com), from the advertisement for asshole and right-wing opportunist (or derangement syndrome sufferer) David Horowitz' new book "BLITZ: Trump Will Smash the Left and Win."

    "Hillary and Obama want Trump defeated.
    It’s payback for 2016.
    David Horowitz says they will fail.
    Trump has a secret plan ..."


    To which I'll say: Yeah, Trump DOES have a "secret plan" (though as the hospitals and morgues fill up, not so secret any more) -- it's that everyone in the country will die or be incapacitated from COVID-19, insuring that there is no one left to vote against him. Therefore, Trump will not be defeated! The logic of it all is asstounding!

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  3. In less than six months a president, the same old Trump or the same-old Biden, will be sworn in on the steps of the Capitol. If, if, if an election is held in November, and if, if, if the results are not contested to the point of civil war.

    Which side would the generals support if it came down to them to sort out the mess?

    Brown shirts in spirit in unmarked black uniforms are now invading Portland, Oregon. They are dragging peaceful demonstrators off the streets into unmarked vans. Trump threatens to do likewise to Chicago and other Democratic cities packed with minorities who add up to majorities.

    In response, (h/t Valerie) the Philadelphia DA declares he will arrest any feds who illegally descend on his city as they did in Portland. His words are encouraging, a government of laws and all that, instead of misgovernment by the likes of Trump. The DA's words are the pushback we need right about now by a responsible authority to keep worst-case scenarios at bay.

    "There might be some city that had some problems, but that’s not what [Trump]a's talking about. What he’s talking about is going to pick a list of cities, which not coincidentally are mostly big cities in battleground states. They are mostly or completely Democratically controlled. And perhaps most importantly, they have a very large population of people who are Black and Brown. He knows what he’s doing when he attacks Kim Foxx in Chicago. And he attacks Philadelphia where the white population, which includes me, is about 35-40% of the total city. He’s going after Marilyn Mosby in Baltimore. He’s going after Eric Gonzalez in Brooklyn. He has an agenda. It is a strictly political, racist, divisive, fear-based fictional agenda. All of this stuff comes out of the fascist playbook. All this stuff comes out of the white supremacist playbook."
    https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-07-20/how-to-pursue-a-ballot-initiative-during-covid-19

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  4. Valerie Long TweedieAugust 4, 2020 at 5:31 AM

    I know I am late to the party - commenting - but this is my two cents.

    I underestimated Trump and George Bush Jr. With Bush, I thought,"The country has a choice - smart vs dumb - it is no contest." Well, it was more of a contest than I thought and Bush beat an intelligent and experienced politician. I thought Trump didn't stand a chance. I, personally, despised Hillary but, of course, she was better than Trump - who I thought, would be laughed out of office.

    This time around - as much as I dislike Biden - I will vote for him. While Biden will surely keep the wars going and will continue with public welfare for the multinational corporations and the banks - he will not send storm troopers into cities against the will of the governors and mayors to break up peaceful protests and he won't build a wall between Mexico and the U.S. I think that Biden is a corporate shill but he is better than Trump. As much as it pains me on principle, I will vote for tlote (the lesser of two evils). There are just too many stupid people willing to vote for Trump because they genuinely believe he is the saviour of the U.S - including my mother!

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