Premise:
If very little anymore holds actual Truth, why should Republican zealots -- or any of us for that matter -- show respectfulness to it? Trump’s truth is whatever he makes it to be. And this kind of Trumpian-belief-system eerily parallels the pugilism of Christian evangelistic fealty. Trump, however, has no spiritual concept of the original Jesus. Indeed, there is little room left for a bible when you’re born with a silver spoon up your ass.
Lil’BabyDon was reared under the invectives of his parents (Frederick Christ Trump & mother Mary), with Joseph McCarthy and Walter Winchell in the mix. But it was Norman Vincent Peale, a long forgotten master snake-oil salesman, who most instructed Trump in his narcissistic power of positive thinking. (Peale officiated Trump’s first marriage.) And Trump was always a quick study. His preferred technique: bluff, bully and burn. Then came Roy Cohn...followed by David Pecker along with Mark Burnett.
Trump was all of this, and much more, well before his campaign for president. But we’ve forgotten how to critique this kind of rot. And it is this apparition (Trump’s media-mirage) that darkly paints the foreground to this entire transgressive project.
If there is True truth inside this project, it illustrates that North Americans regularly choose to ignore actual life-and-death matters. Moreover, it illustrates how we don’t know shit about half of what we claim expertise in, because we simply never take time to critically stop, watch, listen and learn for ourselves through human experience. Belief is much easier when fact and fake simply conflate into one ear and out the other, without the necessity of critically exercising a response. In fact, we are continuously encouraged to abandon the intellectual tools required for understanding: Grammar, Logic, Rhetoric (Trivium). And still we wonder why our national intelligence quotient is this dangerously low.
Inside this media-filled hyper-reality, we find a digital cacophony sweeping us into phony binaries of yes-no, like-unlike, fight-flight. Each simplistic mechanical choice de-circuits historical, educated, human memory and response. How could it be otherwise? We no longer care to cultivate good habits of remembering. Indeed our new technological distractions handsomely reward amnesia. And so it was before Trump’s inaugural celebrations that I determined I must remember. The best way for me to do so is through immersion, to journal what I experience daily. Uh-oh.
If nothing else, I would witness and record the daily interactions of a fraudulent presidency... for myself... by myself. I would choose to remember that Trump did not win the 2016 presidential election. He criminally cheated with Russian help, and he must continue to lie about it all...or suffer the consequences. Yes, Trump must now continually lie exactly as the entire Republican Party must also deny his fraudulence, or face their own penalty-of-death rewards.
Trump has dirtied America. He dirties everything he touches. He is a serpent of the underworld dressed in presidential garb. This media research project foregrounds a growing darkness, a toxic national ignorance, which is quickly advancing this repugnant status quo toward something so ghastly, it may even surpass surrealism’s ability to accurately describe the coming nightmare.
An American
resident of Canada, experimenting with new forms of critical media ethnography in Cultural Farming.
Click to view main project & 400 videos
Preface Premise Project Potlatch Pornography Politics Postscript Peroration