The Inescapable Tyrant
Months would pass when I didn’t think about George W. Bush or President Obama during their administrations. Meanwhile, Donald Trump has managed to find a way into our lives every day since he began picking up momentum during the primaries.
My wife and I spent a weekend in Palm Springs earlier this month, sans Charlie. After months without so much as a date night it was our intention to spend our weekend hiking and laying by the pool and enjoying each other’s company. We had an agreement: no politics. This arrangement lasted only 12 hours. Long enough for Donald Trump to accuse the former president of wiretapping him. Succotash suffered. How do you not discuss that when its playing on the television at the bar?
In many authoritarian regimes, families are “encouraged” to hang portraits of their leaders in their home. Kim Jong-un’s doughy visage may linger over the dinner table, rendering a family unable to escape him from entering their lives. Under Trump’s regime, he or one of his acolytes find a way to create such an offensive spectacle that his presence gets pushed onto television, blogs, throughout social media, and into every crevice of your devices until your family is inevitably talking about him around the dinner table. He doesn’t need his face on your wall, just his name on your tongue.
In many ways, having an iPhone in the age of Trump is like wearing the handicap radio Harrison Bergeron was forced to wear to disrupt his train of thought should he become too focused on anything of intelligence. “Hot Media” has become so integrated into our lives that information is fed to us regardless of whether or not we’ve made any attempt to obtain it.
Donald Trump has mastered the manipulation of hot media. Inadvertently at times, but he has been able to tap into the kind of spoon-feeding that has forced you to know who Taylor Swift is dating or what activity Kanye West is currently engaged in, whether you care or not. Trump may be struggling to control the office that leads the free world, but he is the undisputed king of the second life “metaverse” that exists when we live on our phones.
In the worst days of George W. Bush’s administration, Charles Krauthammer coined the phrase “Bush Derangement Syndrome” to describe liberal’s reflexive tendency to push back on any and all parts of W’s agenda. It was a brilliant way to deflect genuine criticism by labeling it as the delusion of obsessive, paranoid leftists. Don’t be surprised when the term is given a spin and a reboot to assist Donald’s detractors. A lot of work is going in to making us deranged.
