The rabbit hole, from Alice in Wonderland, is a departure from reality. Being there is, mainly, entertainment. It doesn’t help solve life’s problems.
Trump’s invitation to engage in self-deception is like that. It’s also egotistical — Trump’s defining characteristic. It’s entertaining to believe that science doesn’t exist when I want to believe in something different, and entertaining to believe that my interpretation of the US Constitution — or what it allows — is more valid than the writings of established legal experts. “I alone can fix it,” he said — and that clearly means — as Kellyanne Conway said — that I can create my own facts.
What happens to people who go down the rabbit hole? They get juiced on conspiracy theories and that, also, is a lot of fun. To quote the venerable San Francisco Chief of Detectives Robert Ironside, “the problem with believing something that isn’t so is you keep asking yourself questions you can’t answer.” The solution to that: believe more things that aren’t so.
Anger is a funny thing because it is both good and bad. For it to be good, you have to be angry for yourself, on your own behalf. Your anger has to come from feelings and thoughts that you have turned over and examined from all sides. When you put someone else’s anger on like a suit of clothes, and use it to juice you up, that’s the bad anger.
Trump is angry. That’s his defining characteristic, apart from his egotism. Many of the people who rally to his side embrace that anger — and mythologize it. Anger — what is thought to be righteous and purifying anger — becomes its own justification. Rage means you must be honest and righteous — but the problem with that is confusing the good with the bad anger. Sure, there are problems with our republic and with the Democrats. But is knee-jerk anger, the one that relies on lies and stereotypes, accepting alternate facts that you know aren’t true — the right way to go about solving those problems?
They put Trump’s face on gold coins, on flags, and of course on cars and trucks. Trump himself emblazons his name and likeness on such things as well as on buildings, as if he were a Roman emperor. Of course, Caesar actually fought in his military campaigns and endured the same hardships as his men. Trump was a draft-dodger. But that’s the sort of inconvenient truth that blows up the myth-making.
The Trump anger is being mainlined into the American bloodstream like a narcotic. It gives a high, but there are consequences. One of them is that you may get so dizzy that you forget who you are or what you once believed. When you don’t think for yourself you give up your power as an individual. You put the blinders on yourself, limit your own perception — deliberately.
It’s fun to focus on the political horse races, but as Frank Zappa said, “politics is the entertainment division of the military-industrial complex.” Trump has always been a showman, and he brings entertainment and distraction. Real issues exist in our society and in the world, but in my view, his way of addressing them brings us no closer to solving them. From him and his followers, you get a diet of slander, stereotypes, and obvious BS.
These are serious issues. But Trump’s way of thinking about them is perverted. Civilization builds on achievements in reason, art, and science — a lot of these going hand in hand with religion that is tolerant and charitable. Reverting to ignorance is satisfying, but wrong. It is entertaining, but perverse. And it does fulfill a function — distracting us from what’s important and ways to solve issues that are actually realistic.