January 2017 - January 2018

                  - Click to view main project & 400 videos -

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Preface: (Feb. 2018)

       Who didn’t already know about Donald John Trump? (a.k.a. John Barron, John Miller, David Dennison)  From day one, he was always a business shyster, a lady’s con-man, a poser-faker.  Anyone at all aware of pop culture or real estate or television from the mid-1980’s onward could see that much about Trump for themselves.  Like so many other two-bit strongmen in the ever-perverse (1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15) mobster underworld of power, money, sex and lies; Trump has been an inch away from gangster crime his entire life.  He has never once shown an ounce of respect for “the rule of law.”  Evidence is everywhere.   

      Trump is no mere shady-wager carnival barker.  He is a reckless, venal, vengeful, high-stakes, bully man-child, which is exactly why he almost won the ‘popular vote’ in November 2016.  Credulous American voters, both dis-educated and ill-entertained, simply stared into their phones and rolled the dice. “Everybody’s saying it.  What do we have to lose?  Maybe we’ll get lucky and win the election-lottery this time.  Then again, maybe not.  But how bad could it be?  We know Hillary is crooked.”  This is how Tyranny creeps in America. 

     We forget our very own history  exactly as we will not remember Willie Horton, swift-boating, hanging chads, Merrick Garland... or Cambridge University’s Aleksandr Kogan, or Harvard’s Gary King.

     For Christ’s sake, we even forget about the religionists (evangelicals, charismatics, Opus Dei, white nationalists...) currently swarming this administration: Mike Pence, Ben Carson, Rick Perry, Betsy DeVos, Jeff Sessions, Scott Pruitt, Tom Price, Ryan Zinke, Sonny Purdue, Steven Mnuchin, Kellyanne Conway.  This is how Tyranny flourishes; we willfully forget turncoats like Paul Manafort, Steve Bannon, Steven Miller, Michael Flynn.  Few truths, religious or otherwise, can withstand the concerted language-assaults of Republican heretical blasphemy.

      Indeed, we forget the U.S. has been waging war in Afghanistan non-stop for the last 17 years.  American high school students today have never experienced peacetime in their entire lives.  College grads today have little knowledge of September 11, 2001.  This is happening right now.  Instead of remembering Eichmann, Kruschev, Stalin, Mao, or Milošević, we choose to point our fractured attention toward other more important things like Game of Thrones or the Super Bowl.  “Love it or leave it.”

      American political leaders often encourage their citizens to be faithfully ignorant.  North Koreans gleefully describe this peculiar American amnesia as “dotard.”  And it remains the easiest way to re-write human history.  Hence, these four critical facts underscore this entire project: 

1. 1.Russia openly attacked our country with no response from Republicans. 
   

2. 2.Trump is humanly unfit to uphold the Constitution and lead the United States. 
   

3. 3.A new perverse form of righteous evangelical bile is spreading. 
   

4. 4.We knowingly fuel our most dire predicaments inside the machinations and misunderstandings of media.  
   

    Trump exudes a perverse kind of gamer’s allure, always betting against Death with other people’s money.  His reality-TV belief systems are cleverly re-mixed and packaged into jingoistic attack-dog alternatives to clumsy democracy.  “We love our country, our freedom, and our flag so much we are going to pervert every tenet and symbol to suit our faith.”  The deplorable chants reverberate across Trump’s debased media-cuck base.  King-gods are the easiest for an ignorant population to follow.  It doesn’t get any simpler.

      Our new communication technologies help speed these perversions.  For even at their very best, our media only proffer a partial mechanical truth, excluding most of natural human experience.  Yet we are staking all of human historical memory and experience to these ‘forgetting machines’.  Who among us hasn’t exclaimed that our ubiquitous mediating technologies have altered our behavior, language, customs and beliefs; flipping Reality into something less, something worth-less? 

      Still, with every new decision we willingly dig this hole deeper.  There is never any Art of the Deal.  We simply keep trading away more for less, accelerating our own demise.  We can’t seem to help ourselves.  “Nothing can shake our faith.”  But with this project, I ask the reader to consider the accursed share.  Sacrifice is but excess destined for waste, right?  Or did Jesus die for our sins?  I write more about these below; but cerebral questions like these are truly lost on most of us today.  For we have forgotten how to think, how to understand, how to remember. 

     Now, increasingly, we find ourselves with little left but fakery and evangelizing, technology and promises.  Human existence is transmogrifying into a synthetic horror house of cameras and screens, edits and close-ups.  Google, Amazon, Facebook, and YouTube happily ploy their dystopian algorithms with the precision of a CRISPR opioid designer.  “Of course you are and so am I,” say the robots. “It’s surreal...just like a movie,” say the multi-players. 

      I fear we will not survive this sinful feudalistic turn, because I see very few signs of humans wanting to survive, or wanting to build a democracy.  Democratic endeavors require an agreed upon reality.  But the mechanically strong and powerful -- perverts and liars -- have wittingly unleashed these seductive sur-real death wishes, made manifest through incessant technological mediation.  All while we, the meek and emasculated, greedily clamor for its inevitability.  This beggars all credulity.  The greatest human experiment - Democracy - now finds itself leaning once again towards monarchism...and worse.

      We are more than willing spectators to our own demise; we are cheerleading for the ‘end of days’.  Churchianity today is little more than media marketing recasting Jesus into a spiritual emoji.  The end result encourages us to gleefully rush toward rapture: the presence of death.  No more pining over past tense.  No more fretting over future perfect.  “The bible says Vote for Trump.”  But the bible is a cell phone and Russia is calling again.  We have forgotten how to self-monitor and self-correct.

      I do this because the entire future of our democracy depends on truth’s discovery and understanding (Investigation+Education).  But today, democracy’s future appears to rest solely -- Deus ex Machina -- in one man’s hands: Robert Mueller (and that isn’t true democracy either).  “And we haven’t even gotten to the part yet about the NRA supplying its membership content to Russian hackers... or Wilber Ross facilitating criminal money laundering through his Bank of Cyprus.  Stay tuned!”   My overriding fear, however, is that no one, including you, will trust Mueller’s factuality, even if his facts are revealed to be true -- whether received through computer, TV, radio, phone or friend.  For we are forgetting how to ‘tell’, how to know, how to understand. 

      Humans are growingly unwilling or unable to acknowledge historical life-and-death human truth.  This first year of Trump’s term is the most precarious moment I’ve lived during my entire life.  Today is worse than burning Detroit in 1967...because all media today are newly minted lethal weapons instantaneously firing around an entirely surveilled world.  No wonder we remain willfully ignorant of facts.  It gives me constant goosebumps.  Historical meaning is being turned upside-down and used against itself.

“I saved you,” cried the Woman, “and you've bit me, heavens why?

You know your bite is poisonous and now I'm going to die.”

“Oh shut up, silly Woman,” said the reptile with a grin.

“You knew damn well I was a Snake before you took me in.”

                                                                  Trump the Snake

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 brand of Trumpian-belief eerily parallels the fealty of Christian evangelistic pugilism.  Trump, however, has no spiritual concept of the original Jesus.  Indeed, there is little room left for a bible when you are 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.  And our national ignorance will advance this repugnant status quo toward something so ghastly it will surpass even surrealism’s ability to describe.

Project:

      Media are the exotic tribes I ethnographically study.     I have constructed projects earlier about politics and also pornography.  I have even written an experimental Trump video back in 2010, and others still about the Bush presidents.  I have examined a variety of perversions (1 2 3 4 5), and critiqued visual anthropology (1 2 3 4 ), but I have never attempted a project quite like this. 

     I began this project by purposefully recording the first TV broadcasts of Trump’s funereal inaugural events.  Then the next day, I recorded Sean Spicer lying about crowd size during his first press briefing, and on it went.  Every day would bring a half dozen more media events.  How could I handle all this?  I determined I needed some structure.  After all, I’m just one guy sitting alone in his home study.  I can only do so much inside one project.

      As we all regularly witness on TV, whatever comes out of Washington D.C. is ripe for opinions; and much of that commentary  happens so fast it often remediates simultaneously to the unfolding event.  The result is often an exponential avalanche of media fabrication.  So I decided to keep this project very simple.  This wouldn’t be just another tiresome screed.  I would forego internal editing as much as possible.  I would allow Trump’s administration to say its piece inside each video instead of trying to publicly murder it all through the heavy-hand of media brutalism: certain death by a thousand iconoclastic edits. 

     Humor is too often impotent anyway, and comedy too often another vehicle for objectification.  Besides, few comedians have ethically earned authority to raise their voice in the public forum.  This project is not to be comedy.  This is critical (auto?)ethnographic surrealism; although things may soon change for the worse yet again.  My work may soon be (both widely and legally) misunderstood as just one more “deep fake” click-hole from another marginalized Cassandra.  Indeed, this may already be true in insidious Orwellian fashion: “War is peace.  Freedom is slavery.  Ignorance is strength.”  So then, how might a home video counterpoint Trump’s lying, robbery, rape and racism?

      Pornography, rather obviously, seemed to perfectly fit the other half of my dirty experiment.  Total, utter, complete, shameful objectification, as found throughout all pornography, could prove to be a viable -- Absurdist -- avenue to explore below the surface of Trump’s perverse iceberg.  Trump plus Porn?  I had to think a long time about that surreality.  Was I critically deciding to attempt to make some really fucked up, yet factually accurate ethnographic comparisons about a very dangerous man posing as president of the United States?  Risky stuff, but this is an actual (sur)real critical method for understanding the madness.

     And there you have it.  This project was doomed to be loaded with perversion.  Almost by definition, I understood it would receive no support from any corner.  How could it be otherwise in this culture?  But then, this experiment might also expose some important factual truths along the way.  Ok then, I’ll attempt this experiment, because Trump has shown himself to be more than just narcissistic, he’s a sadist. (Read: Trump is a person who derives pleasure, even sexual gratification, from inflicting pain or humiliation on others.)  Indeed, Trump and his crony-criminals are professed “killers”.  In religious counterfeit to Jesus, Trump is an antichrist -- a man of sin, a false prophet, a monstrous beast -- who now pervertedly appeals to a lot of Republican evangelicals as a kind of biblical sign, a prophecy now being made manifest.

      So I posited: Trump and Pornography symbolically exchange each other jingoistically like ‘soup and sandwich’.  They just belong together; perversion alongside perversion.  Each component equally deserving its own “parental guidance warning” label, each inflecting the other toward a higher mode of critical understanding.  Good, this research would be rather linear.  For instance, when Trump spoke his lies -- like branding Mexicans as criminals and rapists -- I could easily envision him speaking alongside someone smearing human feces onto their face and eating it... and then vomiting... and then eating that again.  Similar images. 

      Critical ethnography, however, is always a tricky observational experiment.  The methodical collection of cultural material is the easy first part.  It is during immersion and during its writing, however, where important experimentation and critical awareness happens.  Images are, of course, as slippery as words.  Trying to manage both audio and visual simultaneously is a lot like herding cats.  So how should I write back to what I am seeing on my screen in a manner faithful to the experience I’m experiencing right now? 

      What voice should I use?  Who is my audience?  Do I even want an audience?  What style of language and syntax are best?  How much time and energy am I willing to spend here?  What do I want to get out of this project?  What if all this backfires and I get into big trouble?  A hundred more questions flooded my head when considering pushing back against Trump-media with Trump-porn.  What will my wife think?  How am I going to explain this project to friends?  Am I strong enough to do a project like this?  Will anyone even read it if I make it?

      All told, however, my rules of engagement were rather simple.   I have a small 15” TV on my desk usually tuned to 24-hour news networks.  Whenever Trump or a minion spoke, I recorded it.  Then on the internet, I searched for any porn with any kind of irrational resemblance, no matter how ugly or absurd, as an equalizing oppositional perversion.  Nothing anodyne.  This would be an exercising of Reciprocal Verisimilitude.

      My videos purposefully startle, triggering new responses in the viewer through intentional manipulations of surreal montage.  But this isn’t normally where the most important educational lessons reside.  Cultivating a factually educated memory begins during the act of stopping, watching, listening, recording, and responding in kind. 

      To make each video I had to listen closely to Trump’s every word and action.  I noted his repetitions, inflections, postures, pauses, and lies.  I can typically listen to a particular piece of Trump video a dozen times in order to juxtapose properly, critically.  This activity isn’t merely an act of reflex-commentary.  I watch and hear every horrible lie Trump performs on TV for myself.  And I do this multiple times every day for every video I make. 

      Critical appropriation and remix help me to consider, to compare and contrast, and to respond and remember over extended periods of time... and also to practice and perform good ethnographic media writing.  Parody (not this work) is typically a more superficial, sketchy, contemporaneous, performative reply; anyone can swing the bat.  Ethnography (which is this work) is an in-depth, comprehensive, longitudinal, illustrative explication; few people ever employ my methodologies.  (Cautionary truth: Ethnography is also regularly hijacked as a means for profitable human surveillance.)

      Final assemblage was typically determined by each video clip’s content: length, camera placement, speech patterns, background music, screen composition, even color combinations.  It didn’t really matter to me which video portion was positioned ‘inside‘ which.  The primary purpose was to assemble each video in a manner where the porn element was of sufficient strength to viscerally illuminate the liar speaking on camera/screen to me. 

      I only use iMovie 6HD (2006), and a 27” iMac (2012).  My tools are almost extinct by today’s standards.  I also live beyond the reach of coax.  So I have a modest satellite service plan, which regularly bottoms out about every two weeks, after which I have to up/down load during the midnight hours, until the top of the month arrives again and normal service resumes.  That’s about it.  I utilize as little ‘production value’ as possible.

      Once on a porn site, I searched through the mountains of pre-categorized videos using a host of pertinent keywords.  For instance, I preferred to search first with the porn keyword Saggy.  I find a lot of porn videos specifically tagged “saggy” to be sufficiently strong for my purposes.  Plus they make me laugh.  Then, when I peruse another porn site, I search first with that same keyword again in order to determine the amount of similar content.  Many porn sites are merely duplicates of many others; each holding mostly identical content only differently packaged. 

      After pairing a Trump video to a Porn video, craftsmanship was all that remained: simple edits, fades, and audio sync.  I would liken the process this way, “Quick and dirty, like gesture drawings with graphite on paper.”  Others may say, “Quick and dirty, like a lazy hand-job with some lube and a towel.”  Either way these are salacious daily jottings, purposefully lewd, vulgar, ham-handed, grotesque...exactly like Trump’s own tweeting.  I’d simply make each video as is, raw, without dwelling over production perfection.  After a month or two, I began to maintain a schedule (ritual humiliation) doing this all at least once every day, like a teenage girl entering her secret “Dear Diary.”  But shortly, I realized just how potent, even dangerous, this form of reciprocity -- critical ethnographic journaling -- can be.

Potlatch:

     “It is clear that the world is purely parodic, in other       

   words, that each thing seen is the parody of another,

                            or is the same thing in a deceptive form.” 

                                                            Georges Bataille

     There are only two things in my life that continuously give to me without any invitation: The Sun and my home television screen.  The difference between the two, however, is that my TV always carries with it an ‘expectation of return’.

     According to Georges Bataille’s theory of consumption, the accursed share is that excessive and non-recuperable part of any economy, which is destined for expenditure.  Expenditure happens two ways.  Excesses must either be spent luxuriously and knowingly without gain, in the arts, in non-procreative sexuality, in sumptuous monuments and spectacles.  Or, excess is obliviously destined to an outrageous and catastrophic outpouring of war.  Excesses must be laid waste either way: give-away or destroy.

      Bataille, himself an excommunicated surrealist, links the idea of an ever-giving Sun to the anthropological phenomenon of the potlatch-festival of the Kwakiutl indians of the Northern Pacific coast of North America.  Marcel Mauss, too, refers to this phenomenon in his influential essay The Gift (1923), in which potlatch is translated as ‘a gift,’ typically signified through festivals of communal gatherings, where the host can show his generosity by freely dispersing his excesses, even up to the point of total bankruptcy, in a public performance displayed for gaining acceptance and establishing social standing.  (1 2 3 4 5)

      To Bataille, a society that does not develop regenerative strategies of expenditure is no longer sovereign and will suffer uncontrollable events like war, crisis and catastrophe.  Potlatch -- the destruction of the accursed share -- helps to de-fuse and re-distribute both wealth and danger through these communal performances of familial celebration and cooperative exchange. 

      Every project found throughout Cultural Farming elicits this strategy of repayment.  I collect as much as I want, so I must also give back for free as much as I can, with interest.  I re-use this unending material to tell my version of events to the tribe.  This expenditure repayment establishes my social standing.  My honest collection and re-dispersals, regardless how meager, merit an open hearing within the community.

        “Georges Bataille argues that humans can reciprocate the

     original gift of solar energy if they enter into a potlatch with the

     sun from which they can emerge only as losers.  He insists that

     the sun provides a surplus of energy that no human civilization

     can accept, absorb, or utilize in its entirety.  Bataille interprets

     unchecked economic expansion as an attempt to absorb and

     thus to diminish the pressure of this energy surplus.”

      Audio & Visual -- I must return in kind what I have collected in kind.  Excess, Body, Media, Death, Trump, Expenditure, Waste.  Television to television, dust to dust.  This video project is no TV mash-up comedy.  This is surreal ‘science for the people’.  For I am sovereign, as is this research.

Pornography:

      The measure of this project is as much about Pornography as it is about Dirty Don.  But for me, I am most interested in measuring Lil’D and his administration.  Yes, I am not a woman, I’m a man.  And indisputably, men hold more than an equal burden when considering both the obscene and the political.  So while I surely tread on much sacred ground here, this project remains purely experimental.

      In 2003, when I left the television industry and began Cultural Farming, I understood that in order to properly study media I must  continue to live, deeply immersed, where video lives.  To study any culture well one should live with it, learn its language and customs, then present one’s research publicly, and in native tongues so those studied can also make sense and usage of your findings.  From this vantage, I surmise television research is better conducted and written with television.  This is better than telling TV’s stories with words in books.  For television told by other means is merely an exercise lost in translation.  Indeed, TV is sufficiently surreal already without the necessity of switching vernaculars.

      Television is inescapable.  Likewise, the world of video pornography is a media culture greater than any of us can imagine.  If meaningful comparisons could be made, pornography would be found to be a repository every bit an equal to broadcast TV.  An unspeakable number of porn videos of every gyration are uploaded into porn-ether each and every day.  

      Pornography reaches out to every person everywhere, every second of every day, coursing through every cable, over every atmospheric wavelength, embedding inside every spark of electricity.  By every measure, porn is universal and overwhelming. So why does it appear to be so 'invisible' to so many of us?  Ha. Maybe by juxtaposing one taboo against another, I intuited, one might neutralize the power of the other, in order to elicit an intellectual exchange of ideas between the two.  For instance, we  might reply by asking, “What is pornography anymore in the age of Donald John Trump?”  Aren’t children in cages pornography?

      Regardless, Trump+Porn seemed a correct comparative to me:

Grammar teaches the mechanics of language to the student.  This is the step where the student "comes to terms" defining the objects and information perceived by the five senses.  Hence, the Law of Identity: a tree is a tree, and not a cat.

Logic (also dialectic) is the "mechanics" of thought and of analysis, the process of identifying fallacious arguments and statements and systematically removing contradictions, thereby producing factual knowledge that can be trusted.

Rhetoric is the application and performance of language in order to instruct and to persuade the listener and the reader.  It is the knowledge (grammar) now understood (logic) and being transmitted outwards as wisdom (rhetoric).  

     But one daunting fact remained, I would have to spend a year watching as much porn on my computer as Trump on my TV.  So yes I learned an ‘awful lot’ about contemporary human intimacy. And while this project is motivated more by Trump, the porn aspect must be openly discussed, yet I care less to speak of genre, style, or social content.  The porn portion of this project provides surrealist formalism through intellectual montage.  For this openly presents underlying specific Critical feminist (#MeToo) threads as well: Who is holding the camera and why?  Who is pushing the buttons?  Selfie-porn?  Extreme close-ups?  Fetishism?  Celebrity?  Power?  Production value?  Again, what Realities are being excluded inside pornography?  How does production also produce enabling?

      But there is still a real danger when self-selecting porn material.  Have no doubt, every speck of this toxic stuff is misogynous -- 100% of it -- so I stepped around in it very, very carefully.  (Andrea Dworkin tells me so.)  The task, however, was to steer these perverted energies back against themselves.  Fighting fire with humiliating immolation.

     For we must never forget that the very act of photography itself is always dangerous, pornographic, and often lethal.  All of Life’s essence is vacated before a lens.  I spend much of my time in public running away from these cameras and screens.  Ubiquitous image making is sedition against Real, so I try to never wander before the cross-hairs.  In fact, after years of personal resistance, I recently tried once again to acclimate myself to cameras.  It's just not working for me.  It doesn't matter to me if it is CCTV, CNN, PornHub, or my little pocket Canon.  Images are dirty, gravenly devoid of humanity.  Indeed, all images deserve much less respect than we currently afford them.  “I believe the WOMEN.”  I do not hold belief in their photographic images.

      As for my brain, a fair question could be whether I am damaged now too?  Who can tell?  I was often sick to my stomach building these videos.  And from the onset, I could never-ever mention this project to strangers.  Friends, 100% of the time for an entire year, always had that same look on their face, "You're still doing that? Dude, you need to get out and do some other things...(long pause)."  In fact, my wife did keep close tabs on me, so ask her.  But most importantly, I glean from this research that the critical practice of potlatch works.  With every video, I remembered... and Trump’s power incrementally diminished; it felt like I was truly “resisting.”

     Our mediascapes are perverted waste lands, endlessly kissing, groping, fingering, and raping human bodily sense.  For our media suck all sacredness out of experience, just like “grabbing pussy.”  Our cameras are guns.  Our screens are liars.  And our normative notions of media are leading us into death.  We need robust critical methods of resistance; Trump+Porn was one pathway for me.  So who knows?  Maybe someday in the future someone will search 'Trump fraudulent presidency' and my videos will appear, archived as an historical record, probably filed under Graven Images.

“The need to speak, even if one has nothing to say,

becomes more pressing when one has nothing to say,

just as the will to live becomes more urgent

when life has lost its meaning.”

The Ecstasy of Communication

Postscript:

      Few scholars can afford to research taboo or politically charged topics.  Trying to broach teaching-moments like pornography or a fascist Republican Party, even in a graduate communications classroom, will most likely forfeit university support.  Students, parents and cohort will most likely complain.  Tenure, funding and publication potential will most likely falter under the heavy weight of social suspicion.  Any intellectual provocateur is now little more than a dangerous pariah.

      Too many life-topics simply cannot be openly considered anywhere by anyone.  And if attempted, each must be qualified feebly, superficially: “kind of, sort of literally, pretty unprecedented, probably maybe, more or less, perhaps a little bit, and like everything else, uh, you know...SURREAL.”  Likewise, few ethnographers can afford to truly “tell it like it is.”  Amateur thinkers who do stand up stand apart, stigmatized.  Nobody gets a doctorate without first swallowing the indoctrination.

      Still, I keep working.  I ply theory, read philosophy and practice television every single day even while most of my cohort find my research to be untouchable.  Not only is Cultural Farming ignored, there is evidence that my work is intentionally suppressed on the internet.  Algorithms and their makers often behave that way.  Hence, folks may not find my work even if they look for it.  Yet according to ancestral potlatch practice, I am obliged to give back the over-abundance of all I have hunted, gathered, grown, cultivated, harvested.  I’ve accumulated a lot, and so I am obliged to expend my excesses. “As far as the eye can see.”

     Beyond my apparent freedoms, however, this dirty first year of King Don-John Trump has aged me 5 years.  My wife sees it on my face.  I doubt I am alone in this deflating sensation.   Moreover, at almost 65 years of age, I find it physically difficult to sit in an old task chair, 12 hours each day, swimming inside very ugly media content.  This work has literally cramped my innards.  I have a CAT scan to prove it.  I’ve felt my knees and spine scream out loud.  But I have also learned so very much by farming culture through these

acts of closely looking, listening, editing and producing responses to my world, by refunctioning its own audio and visual techne.

      The Grand Old Party is terminally ill, overcome by evangelical pathogens.  Puss filled tumors, oozing of Mother Russia, now grow inside every vital organ.  It makes me cry.  It makes me wretch.  Yet this medieval cancer sweeping across Republican conservatism continues to advance like swarming un-dead zombies.  Give these priapic “stooges’ an inch and they take a mile.  Cilice and Discipline.     

      Historically, of course, socio-political abnormalities often arise with introductions of new communicational technologies.  Today is no different.  Again, I read our contemporary abnormalities this way: Cameras are guns, screens are liars, and normative notions of media are leading us towards death.   I write this as Russia continues to attack the U.S. using our own technological weapons/tools/toys:

                        WE ARE UNDER ATTACK!

...or put another way:

                        THIS IS AN ACT OF WAR!!

      It’s happening right now on American soil, yet Trump, his administration and his republican party simply look the other way without shame.  Belief ‘trumps’ facts.  We have forgotten how to respond to Tyranny's creep -- for every parasite, toady, sycophant, leech, sponge, obsequious self-seeker and hypocritical believer is but another step towards sinful despotism.

      I entirely reject every perverse notion of Trump‘s ‘divine providence’.  Republican Party Zombies archived throughout this project care little for rules of law or Democracy; they serve only their perverted self-serving god-interests.  And they seemingly never die -- vampires -- forever vandalizing historical morality.  These people are not true Americans.  They should repulse akin to Rev. Jim Jones, Larry Nassar, Lee Harvey Oswald, Joseph McCarthy, Benedict Arnold and Aaron Burr.  Rules, Laws, Norms and Commandments mean nothing to people like these.  No amount of re-mediation should ever re-write this ignominy -- exactly as no amount of media within hyper-capitalism can reclaim a national moral compass.

   Trump is treasonous; a term which means he has committed a high crime against America, which can be punishable by death.  As such, treason is not a punchline for parody or TV production; for these are too often symptoms of treason’s creep.  Instead, this project examines Trump’s government for exactly what it is by comparatively replicating its perversion four hundred times during this first fraudulent year.  But the Trump shit-show I render here is only just beginning.  Zombies never die; they eternally advance.  I fear America hasn’t begun to understand this nightmare scenario.  This makes me very nervous about tomorrow, about the next 365 days.  As long as Trump remains president our country is not safe.  Will I live to see the worm of liberal democratic justice turn?  

     It takes honest, hard, repetitive work to healthily farm culture.  But it is worth the effort.  Because I truly doubt Trump’s toxins can withstand the inoculation of (C)ritical practice and the theory of ethical Cultural Farming methods. “This Machine Kills Fascists.”  Lay down your falsifying objectifying technologies -- guns, cameras, screens -- and experience peace right here on this pretty, super-high-fidelity planet.  But the question remains: Will we?  Promote disarmament, my friends!

    Trump has played president for one entire year.  It should be more than evident by now that he dirties everything he touches.   His un-empathetic reptilian brain will be of little help during any future crisis.  Yet, we can see him beginning to flex more, bursting the restrictive leashes of history, party, administration, staff, and the Constitution.  His dirty words and deeds are apparent, yet they are beginning to stick, and this should unite us all in resistance.  But instead, we are now pitted against each other in a vicious media battle.  Today, in January 2018, I hear no one screaming about democracy.  It’s purely believers versus thinkers, fake versus fact, promises versus experience.

     As of this writing, and fortunately for America, Trump’s malevolence is often reined by the magnitude of his ignorance of democratic processes.  But what will tomorrow bring?  For Trump is proving to be worse than a fraudulent president, he is a traitor to America’s constitution, to America’s spirit.  His self-serving behavior has duly earned this humiliating shame-pole video project.  Again, this dirty president and his administration lie, cheat, steal and rape.  Hence, there is no need for any garden-variety slut-shaming, so commonly found today; these methods only cheapen shame’s power.  Trump and his debased base must be forcefully and indelibly checked for eternity.

      I have expended one entire year of my life building this experimental project.  Through it, I have gained certain perspectives from which I may now retell the story.  So with this project, I now commit the word “trump” to invoke perversion -- hate, greed, misogyny, racism, waste -- for time immemorial.  The name Trump shall forever signify a “shit-hole” filled with American lies... stained forever across the open cesspool of our American mind.  He is an extreme vessel for a perverted christian zionist theology, and all those who support him in this perverted belief-cult will entirely share this infamy.  So I now publicly broadcast: “Donald John Trump and his organization lie, cheat, rob and rape. Benedict Donald  will be doomed to legions of Americans pissing on his grave throughout eternity -- the ever-lasting horror of his perverted Trump Legacy.

     This may be America’s most shameful moment, which I fear is poised to get worse, for hate-speech begets hate-acts, ad infinitum.  (Read: Now successful, why wouldn’t Russia be emboldened to strike the U.S. again even harder.)  Still, the show must go on, so why not unleash the hounds too, right?  How else can mere humans manifest biblical prophesy?  NRA members know what I am talking about here.  We are on the precipice of a deadly language war for truth, now dually fought with a digital-serpent’s forked tongue. 

     In the end, if there ever can be an ending, the Un-real may well supplant Reality.  Money may triumph over Morals.  Justice may indeed succumb to the jaundice of Power.  But this new perverse “Tower of Babel” we are fully embracing is more than under construction.  It’s fully operational now.  “MEDIA TRUTH WARS” are eviscerating every reality we’ve come to know and cherish. 

     

      While human memory is being crushed, Trump is but the most visible symptom of this stochastic terrorism.  The time has come for every citizen to choose their smartest weapons, because this Real World War is both licensed and launching right here on American soil.  And a lot of people are going to get hurt.  I am old enough to remember some world history, that everything Hitler did was ‘legal’ under his German law.  And so I wonder now, as I write this: Can my brain stop a bullet?  Because this war has already begun.  We are already casualties, and I fear you don’t even know.

“The sense of a catastrophe perpetually invoked and avoided creates a rapture in whose depths horror and pleasure coincide...”

Michel Leiris, 1963, p.38

       In the Preface section, at top, I listed four critical facts which would underscore this entire project.  Now, one year later, this research has more than illuminated my hypotheses: 

1. 1.Indeed, Russia and many others -- even Americans -- continue to openly attacked our country with no punitive response from the Republican Party.  This will only get worse.
   

2. 2.Trump, continuing to believe he is a King, remains humanly unfit to uphold the Constitution and lead the United States.  This will only get worse.
   

3. 3.A new perverse form of righteous evangelical bile is spreading, and being cross-pollinated with many other extremists.   This will only get worse.
   

4. 4.We continue to knowingly fuel our most dire predicaments inside the machinations and misunderstandings of media.   And that our dangerous normative notions of “THE Media” is literally leading us into further atomization (death).  This will only get worse.
   

And here I would add a fifth point:

5. 5.We must learn to how to wrestle mechanical communication technologies into doing our bidding.  This project --Critical Media Ethnography -- employs historical methods of archival, appropriation, layering, cut/paste, and dissolve, which are robust tools of intellectual iconoclasm (dialectical montage), and which must become universally accepted as vital means for publicly combating mendacious media production.  This must be taught-and-learnt soon, or else...
   

  

      Yes, this project is over, but today is also Ground Hog’s Day, day 378 of this Dirty Presidency.  We are indeed drifting into a Hobbesian State of Nature: War of every man against every man. Both TV-news and Punxsutawney Phil are saying to expect at least six more weeks of winter.  So I am obliged to continue my media potlatch, and to continue planting more trees, because the Sun continues to give to me... and sunlight is the final disinfectant.  You should do this too.  It’s for your own well being.  For there is no better earth than Earth, no better life than Life, no better experience than Human experience.

     But truly, when all considered, I am left with a sense of profound bottomless loss, unbearable guilt, and fierce resentment toward those now in power who didn’t do what was necessary to ward off this unstoppable calamity. (Americans!) How were we led to this predicament of historical amnesia? (Media!)  What is to come of the rule of law? (Autocracy!)  What have we already lost forever?(Truth!)  Why do we continue down this horrific lethal path of ignorant bliss? (Hypnosis!)  What more could I have done to help stem this rising tide? (Resistance!) Why keep asking these questions? (Survival!)

     I so wish I hadn’t needed to make this project.  It is up to others now to resist with even more (C)ritical (theory) methods.

                  - Click to view main project & 400 videos -

                     NOTE: 16 January 2019  (End of year two - day 726.)

                                           TV Surrealism

                       NOTE: 24 March 2019  (Mueller Report - day 793.)

                                     Crime?  Exoneration?

                            NOTE: 29 April 2019  (10,000 Lies - day 828.)

                                 False and misleading claims.

                   NOTE: 29 May 2019  (Robert Mueller speaks - day 859.)

                         Read the Report: Russia attacked U.S.

                  NOTE: 15 August 2019  (12,000 Lies - day 928.)

                                 False and misleading claims.

             NOTE: 26 September 2019  (Pelosi & Ukraine - day 979.)

                                Impeachment inquiry proceeds.

              NOTE: 13 November 2019  (Hearings begin - day 1026.)

                        Presidential impeachment hearings begin.

      NOTE: 10 December 2019  (Articles of Impeachment - day 1053.)

                      House announces Articles of Impeachment.

              NOTE: 15 December 2019  (15,431 Lies - day 1059.)

                                 False and misleading claims.

               NOTE: February - April 2020  (CoVid-19 Response)

                          Trump denies Coronavirus 44 times.

                     NOTE:  27 May 2020  (CoVid-19 - day 1221)

                                   100,000 Americans dead.

                  NOTE: 1 June 2020  (19,127 Lies - day 1226.)

                               False and misleading claims.

                   NOTE: 29 July 2020  (Milestone - day 1287.)

                                 150,000 Americans dead.

                NOTE: 21 September 2020  (Milestone - day 1341.)

                                 200,000 Americans dead.

                     NOTE: 1 October 2020  (Karma - day 1351.)

                           Trump tests positive for CoViD-19.

                   NOTE: 3 November 2020  (Results - day 1385.)

                                     “I WIN THE ELECTION.”