9/23/2023 0 Comments Apres moi le deluge new world![]() Still, medical experts were interviewed and, by the time I had finished my sandwich and headed into the locker room, the talking heads were still discussing. The only news, beyond the visit itself, was that there was no news at all about HIM. ![]() ![]() In truth, the answer was: no one about to be onscreen yakking had much of anything to offer. But the visit was (gasp!) “unannounced” and evidently unexpected by the hospital staff - as if much that Donald Trump does is announced and expected - and who knew what that meant. The White House claimed that Trump was simply getting part of his yearly physical early because he happened to have a free weekend in Washington. That particular day, when I sat down to eat my sandwich, CNN was on and the story being covered concerned an unscheduled visit the president had paid to Walter Reed National Military Medical Center. On any day as I wander through, the TV is almost invariably on - tuned in to (where else?) CNN, MSNBC, or Fox News - and if you-know-whose angry face isn’t on screen, then there are almost invariably several talking heads discussing HIM or something related to HIM anyway. On my way into the men’s locker room at my local gym, I stopped to have a sandwich in a room with a giant TV screen and a few tables and chairs. Take the other day, a perfectly typical passing moment in my life in the age of Trump. Still, no one is really covering the coverage, not the way it should be covered in all its mind-boggling strangeness. The way that omnipresence is linked to his omnipresence must, I suppose, be obvious to everyone. In other words, HE is eternally there, but the media, omnipresent as it may be when it comes to him, in some sense isn’t. Everyone knows that - and yet, in case you haven’t noticed, the fact that HE’s in all our faces like no king, no emperor, no autocrat, no president, no entertainer, no performer ever is hardly being covered, hardly even acknowledged from day to day, week to week, month to month, or even sadly, given how long the Trumpian moment has already lasted, year to year. To be clear: since 2016, Donald Trump has been covered in our ever-shrinking yet ever-expanding media universe like no other individual in history from Nebuchadnezzar’s moment to our own. Trump is indeed the definition of a deluge and we, the American people, are - thought about a certain way - present-day Venice we are, that is, six feet under water, even if we don’t quite know it.Īnd here’s what may be the strangest thing of all: while HE - and, given the last three-plus years, those caps are anything but an exaggeration - is dealt with by the media in deluge fashion, there’s one story that’s in our faces everyday and yet, in some sense - a sense that drives me bonkers - is simply missing in action. In other words, thanks in significant part to the media and social media, Donald J. Our very own Louis XV is, of course, something else again: a deluge of tweets, insults, self-praise, lies and false claims, and strange acts of almost every imaginable sort. As McCarthy said at the time, “How can we account for our present situation unless we believe that men high in this government are concerting to deliver us to disaster?” McCarthy (whose aide, Roy Cohn, was once Donald Trump’s mentor) offers a reminder that Trumpian-style personalities were not unknown in our history and that, in the case of McCarthy, their antics were, however minimally by twenty-first-century standards, actually televised. ![]() After all, in distinctly Trumpian fashion (though without Twitter), he accused President Truman’s secretary of defense, George Marshall, and his secretary of state, Dean Acheson, of being Russian agents. Of course, you have to be at least as old as me to remember that Trump-anticipating political showman and his own extreme moment. In other words, for us, the deluge is distinctly now and it has an orange tint, a hefty body, and the belligerent face of every 1950s father I ever knew - my own, in his angrier moods, included - as well as of redbaiting Senator Joseph McCarthy. Never, you might say, have we, as a nation, been plunged quite so fully not just into the ever-present, but into one man’s version of it. Given the historically unprecedented way he’s covered by the “fake” or “ corrupt” news media, that “ enemy of the people,” I doubt they really can either. We should be so lucky! Our all-American version of Louis XV, Donald I, is incapable, I suspect, of even imagining a world after him. French king Louis XV reputedly said, “ Après moi, le déluge.” (“After me, the flood.”) Whether that line was really his remains unclear, but not long after his death did come the French Revolution. ![]()
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