Saturday, January 28, 2017

Goo Goo Ga Joob

Down the rabbit hole. That's where we are currently. You remember the rabbit hole, don't you? I recently referenced The Bizarro World, but this is probably much deeper. This is not the comic book world. This is the deranged universe of Twit In Chief. This guy has nothing on the Queen of Hearts. If it has been some time since you last read Lewis Carroll's Alice In Wonderland, I'll give you a few moments to catch up on your assigned reading.
All done? Good. If you're lucky enough, as I was, to take a semester to study the works of Charles Dodgson then you are probably familiar with all the ways that this story is not necessarily penned for little children. Pick any chapter or verse from the book and spend a few minutes on Al Gore's Internet searching for all the ways that the meanings of the story is twisted around a political narrative that is none too flattering. Why not start with an easy one: The Caucus Race. Feel free to draw your own comparisons, or just let the silliness wash over you as we have for the past one hundred fifty years.
Do so at your own peril.
We are currently living in a world of "alternative facts." If your mind is not drawn to another novel by an English author, please take another moment to check out George Orwell's 1984. That one isn't as amusing, at least from the outset, as Alice's Adventures, but the nervous laughter you hear is coming from the folks who may at one time snickered at the idea of Donald Trump being president. White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer said this: "The press was trying to make it seem like we were ignoring the facts when the facts are that sometimes ... you look at a situation ... in the same way you can look at a weather report. One weather report comes out and says it's going to be cloudy and the next one says there's going to be light rain. No one lied to you." And yet if I am caught in that light rain without an umbrella, I will stop listening to the station that gave that first report.
And so here's the deal: The size of the crowd at Twit's inauguration is not significant in itself. Political types have been using numbers to confound and confuse since before Alice chased that rabbit down a hole. I expect President Twit has been lying about the size of his, uh, hands for decades, for example. And yet those tiny hands are still capable of holding a pen and signing executive orders that undermine a woman's right to choose and promote the cockamamie wall between the U.S. and Mexico. Not quite as amusing anymore. Unless the completed wall includes Humpty Dumpty. You remember him. The egg who said, “When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.” 
I am the Walrus. 

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