![\"Trump4\"](\"http:\/\/www.ancientrails.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/11\/Trump4.jpg\")
“While laying over in the Detroit airport today I saw a fellow wearing a T-shirt with a caricature of an alien on it with the text: \u00a0\u201cPlease don\u2019t take me to your leader\u201d<\/em> ” Friend Tom Crane<\/p>\nIt has come to this. A barometer reading of the pressure against our democracy. I am, as I said a couple of days ago, unsure of the outcome, but hopeful. That hope is based on little knowledge since I’ve stayed away from polls, a strict diet meant to untangle my mind from the misdirection I found there last time.<\/p>\n
![\"chinese](\"http:\/\/www.ancientrails.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/11\/chinese-curse-420x397.png\")
My gut tells me that if a blue wave sweeps the country, perhaps especially if it’s a tsunami, we’ll have an even more divided nation afterward. I read an essay that suggested a win by the Democrats, taking the House back for example, might help Trump in 2020. Gag.<\/p>\n
The NYT re-presented this 5 minute film yesterday: If You\u2019re Not Scared About Fascism in the U.S., You Should Be<\/a>. It features Jason Stanley, a Yale professor who has spent the last twenty years studying fascism. It will not help you sleep tonight. Since Trump is who he is, a man like Berlusconi, Erdogan, Duterte, Bolsanaro, and Orban, he has no special qualities that make him a good leader. What he does have is the instincts of the demagogue, the ethics of a rock, and a (rock)solid, factless sense of his own superiority. As Stanley points out, fascism follows a predictable path and comes in times like ours when economic and political transitions have undermined the lives of many, leaving them desperate for a sense of order; that is, a sense that the old order, by now already gone, will somehow be restored. The How is unimportant.<\/p>\n It feels peculiar to me to remember fondly the politics of the Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford era, a time, beginning with Johnson, when I spent much of my life protesting establishment politics. But I do. Even the Gipper was not crazy. Trump is.<\/p>\n As the old Chinese curse goes, “May you live in interesting times.”<\/p>\n \n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Samain\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Healing Moon “While laying over in the Detroit airport today I saw a fellow wearing a T-shirt with a caricature of an alien on it with the text: \u00a0\u201cPlease don\u2019t take me to your leader\u201d ” Friend Tom Crane It has come to this. A barometer reading of the pressure against our democracy. I … Continue reading Check your barometer this evening<\/span>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n![\"trump6\"](\"http:\/\/www.ancientrails.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/11\/trump6-420x358.png\")
![\"trump5\"](\"http:\/\/www.ancientrails.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/11\/trump5-420x524.png\")
The last years of my third phase will, it seems, be lived in a world riven by the politics of fear and baked by a climate heated by our own stupidity. Not exactly a rosy picture. And, not one that can be ignored. In one sense our generation, the oft derided baby boom, is now a deposit of memory, memory of a time when politics, while far from perfect, were not ruled by disinformation and a heightened sense that the other was about to steal your job and your life.<\/p>\n