He's your big brother. He is working for you. Don't concern yourself with using your brain. Just focus on meeting your basic metabolic and physiological needs. His big brain is doing all the thinking for you. But he's also watching YOU. As long as you do not cross the lines he set for you, you should be OK, hence ignorance is bliss.
This is what johnny-come-late dictator Donald Dumb is doing after growing up watching all the other dictators perform on the world stage. He obviously never read Orwell's 1984. Instead, he has testicle-envy for "great men" like Putin, Kim Jong Un, the absolute Arab monarchs and rulers across the Middle East, Viktor Orban of Hungary and others. His buddy Benjamin Netanyahu is also trying to be a Big Brother, but Israelis won't have it. He's a little annoyed that we have a justice system that is obstructing his grand plan of "Happiness for All, and Billions for the Few" for the country, so he's working on eliminating these judges and trashing the only remaining obstacle to his greatness: the Judiciary, which leaves him, the stable genius, to run the whole country by himself, and FOR himself.
Huge portraits of Donald Dumb are cropping up everywhere, like in any other banana republic run by a dictator. His face might be sculpted on Mount Rushmore with the legendary caption, "Grab'em by the Pussy", that propelled him to greatness.
When asked, he'd say (like Bashar Assad): The people want these portraits. I don't. They voted for me, they love me, and they want to see my portraits everywhere. He's even saying that "people are begging him to run for a third unconstitutional term". He, again, says he doesn't want to, but people are insisting, so to please them, he is looking into it reluctantly and strictly out of a sense of money-making duty, but it would be an honor to be president when, in his mid-to-late 80s, he'd be a dirty senile smarmy vampire in diapers. Which is why he says he is working on a new autobiography, because so many successes have been achieved since the "Art of the Deal" (which other people wrote for him as he is an illiterate moron). The new book, it is rumored, will be entitled "The Art of the Steal".
Kim and Don: Two peas in a pod of tyranny: And they're madly in love!
========================================================
Huge banner of a glaring Trump in front of the USDA is a literal sign the U.S. has lost its democracy
John Casey
Fri, May 16, 202
A colossal, brooding image of Donald Trump now looms over the U.S. Department of Agriculture headquarters in Washington, D.C. The banner is unmistakably authoritarian in both style and scale. It features a stone-faced Trump gazing down upon the capital like a watchful overlord.
This is not a campaign advertisement. It is a signal. A warning. A literal and metaphorical sign that democracy in America is no longer functioning as intended.
Historically, such displays of obnoxiousness have not heralded democratic renewal. Quite the opposite. They’ve marked the entrenchment of dictatorship. Authoritarian regimes the world over have relied on these massive visual monuments to instill fear, demand obedience, and project omnipresence.
For decades, and most especially during World War II, Stalin’s steel-eyed portraits towered over Soviet streets and public buildings, reminding citizens that the state saw everything. Mao Zedong’s image hung from Tiananmen Gate like a secular deity watching over the masses. It was massive, larger than life, eternal, aloof for a reason..
History books and other visions etched in my memory bring images of Kim Jong Un of North Korea, Saddam Hussein of Iraq, Muammar Gaddafi of Libya, Fidel Castro of Cuba, and of course Hitler, who all followed the same playbook. They saturate public space with the leader’s face and saturate your mind with the leader’s authority.
Imagine, for a moment, if Franklin Delano Roosevelt had plastered massive banners of his face across Washington during World War II. Hanging a 30-foot portrait from the Treasury Building or looming over war bond posters with cold, impassive eyes. The public would have been outraged. Congress would have rebelled. Even amid war, Roosevelt respected the distinction between democratic leadership and personal cult.
Trump has now joined this visual canon of despots with his banner brooding over a government institution. It is not just “deeply creepy,” as some observers have said. It is the textbook behavior of a man who believes the state belongs to him. It is fascist iconography, domesticated.
This chilling banner didn’t emerge in a vacuum. Since being sworn in for his second term on January 20, Trump has governed not as a president but as a ruler unbound by law, or at least he thinks he’s unbound by law.
His Department of Justice has been purged of independence, its prosecutors reassigned or fired if they resisted Trump’s will. And don’t even get me started about the “yes, yes, yes” attorney general, Pam Bondi, who is a perfect lackey for the wannabe dictator. "No to Trump" is not in her vocabulary.
Trump’s suggestion that he should be allowed a third term because one was supposedly “stolen,” is no longer a fringe fantasy. It’s a real and present threat, floated not only at rallies and interviews but by White House aides and conservative media outlets that now function more like state-run propaganda than independent journalism.
He has declared that federal workers must show “personal loyalty” to him. Inspectors general and career civil servants have been removed en masse and replaced with unqualified loyalists. Programs that support education, public health, and environmental protection have been gutted in favor of funding massive security forces that answer directly to the Executive Branch.
And his takeover of the Kennedy Center, his chosen board of directors, naming himself as chairman, is just another check-mark on the autocrat bucket list and that is control of the arts.
Meanwhile, efforts to erase and rewrite history are accelerating. Trump’s allies are systematically removing references to slavery and civil rights from textbooks, recasting the January 6 insurrectionists as “patriots,” and purging LGBTQ+ references from public libraries. This is not governing. It’s regime-building, complete with a giant portrait.
As Trump’s face stares down from the side of a federal agency building, it’s a 30-foot reminder of who is in charge, who is watching, and who cannot be questioned.
This use of personal imagery as a weapon of psychological control is not just about ego, and it’s a key mechanism of authoritarian rule. During Stalin’s Great Purge, his image became synonymous with the state itself. To criticize Stalin, even in private, was to invite arrest, or worse.
Saddam Hussein commissioned thousands of portraits of himself, placing them in every school, airport, and office in Iraq. The size and frequency of his image sent a clear message that this country was his.
So too with Kim Il Sung, his son Kim Jong il, and his son Kim Jong Un. whose portraits are reportedly required in every home in North Korea, and most people clean them on a regular basis. Disrespecting the image is a punishable offense.
These leaders understood something simple but potent: Symbols shape reality. And control of the visual environment is control of the collective psyche.
The USDA banner is not just gaudy or excessive. It’s strategic. It’s authoritarian. It’s a message not just to the public but to the bureaucracy itself that loyalty flows up, power flows down, and both are enforced with fear.
Democracy depends on a humble, limited executive, and while we’ve had some egomaniacs as president here in the U.S. (think Richard Nixon), we’ve been fortunate not to have one who plasters banners of himself outside of government buildings.
Our presidents have been elected, not enthroned. They serve, not rule. The placement of a massive Trump banner on a government building reveals that this line has been crossed, and we are no longer a republic. We are living under the cult of one man.
When the government starts using public property to display the ruler’s image, when dissent is criminalized, when history is rewritten and power is centralized, we are not looking at the future. Instead, we are seeing the end of something. The end of accountability. The end of democratic pretense. The end of America as we knew it.
The banner may yet come down. But the damage it represents is already done.
No comments:
Post a Comment