The Trumperium: Building Resistance Movements In The Time Of Donald Trump

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We are now entering the “Trumperium,” a sinister, unethical and amoral wasteland, where a kleptocrat and his cronies from around the world, will be allowed to cavort among the ruins of every value that progressive politics have always held dear.

The “upside” of all of this, if you could call it that, the “lemonade from lemons,” is that progressive Americans now have a chance facing the Trumperium to create a vibrant, “take it to the streets” left like the one that accompanied Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and resisted the war in Vietnam, or like the one that energized Roosevelt’s New Deal.

The question being, who are going to be the “Freedom Riders,” or the Panthers? Who is going to write and sing the fighting songs, now that Bob Dylan has won the Nobel Prize? What will the be the “We Shall Overcome” of the anti-Trumperium underground?

Donald Trump: Mr. Voldemort Goes To Washington

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These days I often find myself wishing that Norman Mailer were still alive to turn this fecal moment of America’s democratic saga into art.

Mailer’s “The Armies of the Night” and “Miami and the Siege of Chicago,” both dating from the legendary year of 1968, were an important help in making some sense of a period that had begun with the mysterious assassination of JFK and carried us through the civil rights battles and martyrdom of Martin Luther King, all accompanied by the obscenity of the Vietnam war … a period whose divisions and bitterness have yet to heal.

It was a great story and Mailer told it well.

Intuition tells me we are about to enter a similar period.

The Magnificent Quest For Shinola And Its Dangers

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In American-Speak someone of little understanding is said to be unable to distinguish between excrement and shoe polish, we say then that he or she “can’t tell shit from Shinola.”

It appears that a perhaps critical mass of Americans have taken it upon themselves to investigate the why and the how of the odor coming from the collective “shoe” and have set about to do something about it. Not a moment too soon, if the the never ending antics of the Republican House of Representatives or the appearance of a nightmarish buffoon like Donald Trump, are any sort of leading olfactory indicators of the nation’s health.

Contemplating the mere possibility that something that should only be handled with forceps like Trump could now lead a party once led by Abraham Lincoln or Dwight Eisenhower; one gets the feeling that the spirit of the republic is a little like the Bruce Willis character in “The Sixth Sense,” dead, but doesn’t know it yet.