excellent essay: "The Trump Dictatorship"

[handmade34]

https://www.alternet.org/2019/08/welcome-to-the-trump-dictatorship/

...everyone’s Facebook posts are screams of frustration and anger stuffed with profanity. The sense of powerlessness is almost overwhelming. You don’t feel like you can actually do anything. Everything is in stasis, stuck. Neil Young is right. We’re stumped.

Our senses dictate how we experience the world — our hearing and sight and touch and smell, even the ineffable stuff like intuition and belief. But when our senses are overwhelmed by someone like Trump, when our lives seem filled with a man who does nothing but endlessly tweet and lie and hate, it kills us inside. Trump is killing us.

This is what it feels like to live in a dictatorship. Our nation may not actually be a dictatorship, at least not yet, but it feels like we’re living in one. We are dominated by a man who beats us senseless with an everyday drumbeat of horrors.

...Like tinpot dictators the world over, Trump thinks of himself as the center of the universe, and everything he does, all day long every single day, seeks to put himself there and keep himself there. All dictators equate their interests with the national interest, and so does Trump...

[Newest Reality]

1. Trump

has no real estate at all in my head. He doesn't even live there rent free. I have studied him enough to see through his game and I keep in anything about him in a special room I would call: "Ignoramus Detention and Study Area".

Why is that? Well, I think the article points that out well. Your first job when dealing with a ham fisted manipulator who rides a wave of domination and commandeers the cadence of the commons is to get well acquainted with his tactics and assess him well enough to see through his orange veneer.

That then allows for a greater sense of confidence and a better emotional resilience, and that is necessary when you are being manipulated at this level of influence. It does imply that one becomes apathetic, but imagine, if you will, (shades of Rod Serling) having a strong, participatory detachment that is like a form of political judo.

An image that one can conjure up would be: You are a sleek and powerful panther resting, poised and silent, on a boulder and Trump is cowering in a little gully beneath you, alone and confused because he knows he is not in control and has no clue what to do. Your gleaming eyes stare into him and pierce his weak facade as the sweat beads up on his face and his makeup runs. As you prepare to leap, you growl with a sonorous, frightening, triumphant call of victory and it echoes everywhere saying: You're MINE!!!

That just illustrates in a creative way what you do to turn reactions into the power and capacity to respond in kind and when needed.

We, and our candidates are up for this and we need strategies and skillful means to do this.

[Newest Reality]

2. Another Visualization

This is another form of therapeutic and cathartic visualization that can change one's perspective and gird the ol' loins:

Visualize Trump dressed in a frilly clown suit. He is around three feet high and as round as a balloon. He is running around frantically, loudly flapping his oversized shoes on the ground and he keeps squeezing his bulbous, red nose which makes it squeak loudly like a doggy toy. He is rambling and making the most ridiculous sounds and what he is saying sounds like a munchkin reciting Jabberwocky over and over as it if is very important, but his expression is one of befuddlement and the epitome of not having a clue.

Now, do that on a regular basis and look down on the pathetic clown. Get it as crisp and clear and 3D as you can. Then, see how that feels and if it transforms your perspective. The brain can be trained with what you give it.

Edited to add: Let's call that technique, Leaping Panther, Running Clown. Judo for the mind.

[Arthur_Frain]

3. That right there is a great article.

Neil Young: “I’ve got great melodies....but all my lyrics are profanities”.

Me too Neil! Well, except for the great melodies part, I’m just a schmoe musically, not like you.

But my frustration is exactly the same as Neils.

[machoneman]

4. Say, has there been a day without Stupid's tweets? Or how many in total? Anyone know?