Changed My Mind, Trump Would Be A Great President

Ever since the 80’s, there’s been a gradual movement in the stagnating field of psychology to revitalize. Traditional diagnoses just weren’t cutting it, people got bored with having psychotic episodes, or latent narcissistic psychoses, they started thinking this was all rather normal. The irony is, yea it is quite normal, there was nothing wrong with most of them.

Inevitably, some psychiatrists took it upon themselves to subdivide conditions and create new mental disorders. Wonderful. Partly responsible was the rise of designer drugs, they went hand in hand with increasingly common custom treatments. Custom treatments gave pseudo doctors an opportunity to create custom disorders. Imagine the disdain of the traditional medical establishment as this developed.

Medical doctors scoffed at this post-modern nonsense, but drug companies could barely contain their excitement. I think more than anything, this really started us on the road to activist drug companies, the ones that market directly to consumers. If your doctor was impeding your ability to get a prescription, well you know what to do, consult a new doctor! Who needs clinical trials anyway?

Needless to say, this created a whole class of people that believed they were sick, some absurd form of self-victimization.

Beyond the white and green walls of the medical establishment, where people spent most of their time, this undertow of obsession with labelling, of creating categories where there are none, became rather prevalent too. In retrospect, it seems a lot like what happens when you give a kid a labelling gun, you can be 100% sure that even after everything frivolous gets labelled, they find yet more things to label.

Over-protective parents consumed themselves with avant-garde preventative maintenance of children, anytime a child acted out, it was no longer a developmental stage, it was assumed to be symptomatic of some deeper mental disorder. Children in droves were sent to quacks, and subsequently over-medicated. Rarely if ever was the actual cause addressed, because the blame would most likely lie with parents, or the sacred school system.

Perhaps it’s the emotional fallacy of parents to demand results of their kids, perhaps it’s their increasing nervousness about a connected world where danger appears to be behind every lamp post. The absurdity of tackling symptoms instead of solutions is in many ways the driving meme of the pharmaceutical industry. Feeling like someone kicked you in the bladder? We have a pill for that.

Yet if you talk to someone in the physical fitness rehabilitation world, the first thing they will tell you is the paradox of symptoms, it isn’t where you think it is. If your jaw hurts for example, the problem could be in your heel, or your hip, or even your shoulder; in such a case, you could rub analgesic on your jaw, you could take painkillers, you might even see a dentist, and none of it would help you.

Sometimes the solution is a slight adjustment to your life, your environment, or your habits, further upstream. Instead of accusing your child of being ADHD because they refuse to pay attention, you need to find out what they are interested in, and what they are being asked to pay attention to, in what kind of environment. A very obvious cause for a child to be disinterested in a class is when the lessons bear no context.

We are highly-associative animals, that is our strength, how dare we expose children at the prime of their associative lives to lessons without those intricate connections to everything else? As teenagers, they are in the prime of their emotional and creative lives, how dare we strap them to a chair for 60 hours a week to read lifeless text books? Is it so much easier to blame the child for failing to be happy with this arrangement?

Society needs a reset button, nobody’s perfect, and that’s ok.

Like an obstinate or unruly child, Donald Trump seamlessly alternates between off-the-cuff remarks with no nuance, to saying things with complete deference that no one should believe, to attacking other people for their behaviour as a deflection tactic. He never really expresses regret, because that would undermine his previous assertions or position. When he apologizes, it always comes with qualifications, not sincerity. When he tries to be the educator, what he’s really saying is you’re the idiot.

If you had a one on one conversation with him, I’m sure you could have a fairly constructive one, provided the limits to that conversation are clear, that the topic boundaries are well defined. There’s no reason to think he’s actually insane, and his anti-latino outbursts are not bigotry alone. He’s just the brat with control of the loudspeaker most of the time, he doesn’t feel it’s a conversation, he’s not really listening for your opinion, so he’s not worried about making a coherent point. His drizzle of rhetoric would only be more comical if he was in the habit of spitting while talking.

I don’t expect there’s any deep seated hatred within him, I don’t get the sense that he’s a hurt little boy out to get revenge on the world for bullying him, and I don’t think he’s lashing out for being personally ashamed of himself like some closet homosexual Republican Congressmen. He really is just a joker who gets taken too seriously, because no one seems to have the balls to call him out on it. He’s the bully that doesn’t care. That’s part of his charm isn’t it?

He’s the collective backlash of the neo-liberals turning equality into political correctness, in the form of a corporate executive. He’s the irreverent narcissist that makes dis-empowered males of all stripes want to take back their authority from militant feminists. He’s the epitome of capitalist excess, the kind of excess the downtrodden workers feel they deserve, the excess denied to them by the system they have supported all their lives.

In short, Donald Trump is an enema.

Consider the state of play in the United States right now, crime is on the decline, police violence is on the rise despite claims that it’s constant, politics is totally unrepresentative, wages are falling, entire cities are going broke, and the mood is downright dismal. Geo-engineering is destroying much of the western United States with drought, and subsequent forest fires. Fracking is routinely contaminating dwindling groundwater, making it unusable, except for even more fracking!

The use of GMO crops causing pesticide resistance in a large number of unwanted plants has caused a record increase in the use of even more lethal pesticides, some that are so toxic, the crops have to be out-gassed in controlled environments for months before consumption. Livestock is increasingly grown in unsafe conditions, with unsafe and inhumane harvesting practices, then sent to meat processing facilities that are increasingly contaminated by superbugs.

The regulatory agencies like the EPA, USDA, and others, have decided to totally abandon their duties, opting instead to rubber stamp new chemicals, downplay public health risks, and basically do whatever the mega-corporations want them to do. Then they remove the warning labels just to be sure.

Consequently, the American people are rightfully miffed. They feel like lab rats in the world’s largest experiment. They feel like they are gambling against sharks with stacked decks. And they feel angry. That anger has no where to be expressed constructively except politics. Bernie Sanders and Donalt Trump have in a strange way become opposite sides of the same anti-establishment coin.

Sanders has garnered the support of millions of optimistic people, the people who think the American train-wreck can be fixed from within. They believe that with the right legislation, corporations and corruption can be curtailed. They believe police can be re-trained, to be the friendly beat cops seen in films from the post-war era. They honestly think big money and Wall St. can be removed from politics. Most of them understand inequality is the reason for most of their ills, and misguidedly think a little redistribution of wages will fix it.

Trump supporters seem to want to burn it all down, and I’m not sure I’m against that after all.

Past the naive citizens banging on the doors of the Ministry of Truth, there’s the nondescript door for the oligarchs of America. The one where cameras never glance for more than a moment, where the usher will not let you in without your Frequent-Spender membership card. The one where morality is antithetical.

These elites of the elites, want the status quo. They want the money in politics to make politics predictable, and take away the fickle public’s ability to screw up their plans. When they spend money, they want the money to count, but they know things don’t always work out, free will is a bitch. The antidote they have against free will, and free elections, is voter suppression, and voter apathy. The sad fact is apathy may be the easier of the two to achieve.

At the core of the constitution, there is an underlying demand that citizens all be involved in the political process. Every citizen is duty bound to not only question their leaders, but to challenge them, and to hold their feet to the fire should they be found wanting. This is the definition of patriotism, more than anything else, it means upholding the foundation of the country, not the perverted traditions of the politicians. It means that under the law, all men are equal, judges, cops, senators, garbagemen, cooks, and even homeless bums.

Right now the political and financial elites have almost complete control over the flow of narcotics within the United States, they control the media that reports (or specifically omits) crimes by individuals and organizations, they own the very entity that creates the money supply. The average citizen gets the privilege of renting the land they occupy, buying the water they drink, and paying taxes for the polluted air they get to breath. Yet there’s relative silence about the injustice of this.

This unholy union of powerful magnates and gangsters has a weakness though, and they are all too aware of it. That weakness is the one they try to hide from you, it’s the one they have been preparing their whole lives to fight you on, the one that will shake all of humanity when it comes to blows. You might think of leaving, finding a nice quiet place to live with your alfalfa and chickens, but I don’t think there really is a safe place anymore, at least not long term.

Understand for a moment that America Inc. didn’t end up in this position by accident, it was a gradual succession of small changes, well timed nudges, and a bunch of propaganda. In fact most of the tendrils of their power are no harder to sever than pulling a weed from your lawn, they just make it daunting, and hard to pinpoint them. You might want to give up when you realize you have 3 billion weeds to pull from your fields, but you aren’t alone, there’s hundreds of millions of you. Citizens must act as the immune system of their country, finding and killing those unwanted infections, and it’s time to fight.

Citizenry aside, the Donald also scares the shit out of the elites. They have become dependent on a steady stream of replaceable politicians, ones that will whore themselves out for any campaign contribution, ones that have no scruples, and will lie about everything on cue. You might start to understand then, that Trump does none of those things, he can self-finance his way, he doesn’t care what anyone thinks, and seems to have trouble even lying when he should. Trump is like that Great Dane you put a leash on, so he runs full tilt wherever he wants to go, knocking you off your feet for the audacity of hanging on.

The small club of leaders around the world have proven one thing repeatedly, they are deathly afraid of democracy, and they will do anything to crush it. Greece was the perfect example of a leveraged buyout, indebting a sovereign country, forcing it to pay back loans that it never received, then forcing it to sell off all it’s assets at firesale prices to cover payment, all while the people voted against it. Greece, the birthplace of democracy, has given up it’s sovereignty to foreign corporations, and foreign leaders, it can’t even sneeze without the approval of Deutsche Bank.

So having spent all their efforts defending their empires from the peasants below, could they ever envision a case where one of them would muscle in from the top? Just how well have they fortified their country club against one of their guests going on a rampage?

This was a scenario they never imagined, you can bet there’s a lot of rich sphincters clenched right now.