EXCEPT FOR WHAT'S NOT TRUE
EXCEPT FOR WHAT'S NOT TRUE
Final thoughts on a post-truth Trumpian election as we come down to the wire | october31.2024
EDITOR’S NOTE: Through the election on Nov. 5, I’ll be re-posting election-centric coverage to WestVirginiaVille from NotesBeforeYouVote.com. The stakes are no less than the future of America, when you get right down to it
By Douglas John Imbrogno | october31, 2024 | I have a book-length ‘sorta memoir’ manuscript two-thirds done, titled “CRAZY DAYS: Confessions of a Fallen Altar Boy.” The book-to-be is written in the liberating fashion of giving oneself permission to fictionalize some details of the larger non-fiction events of one’s life, while staying true to the fundamental truths of your story. The publishing industry calls it ‘autofiction,’ signifying ‘autobiographical fiction,’ and the book accurately recounts some colorful, checkered, and ultimately catastrophic living abroad in France and Ireland in the 1970s and ‘80s. Not to mention a love affair on the New York City streets, along with what it was like growing up in the country I come from called the Midwest (to paraphrase Bob Dylan). When I read excerpts publicly from this work-in-progress, I introduce them this way: “Everything is true except for what’s not.”
I go on at length about this project for two reasons. One is that with the mammoth stakes of the election next week, I have for months been unable to turn my attention to the deep-dive immersion into memory, research, and literary spellcasting required to complete the last section of such an ambitious effort. Much less one that professes to boldly share truths about my life — except for what’s not true — including some of the darkest days and ugliest things I have long hidden.
Maybe you, too, are having trouble focusing on the rest of your life and your own projects? We could easily blame Donald John Trump for this. He’s quite impressive, really. Via his unswervingly perverted personality he has helped to pervert America’s body politic. He has shoved it to the edge of a high precipice, at the bottom of which — if things go south Nov. 5 — America will lie shattered and fractured, likely beyond repair.
Meanwhile, the broken pieces will be hoovered up by his eager and amoral factotums, minions, and toadies and reassembled. Into what, exactly? An autocracy? A kingship? A full-on dictatorship? Or an idiocracy, in which all of us “enemy within’ — meaning anyone who doesn’t kiss Trump’s ring and other body parts — is persona non grata, if not deported, imprisoned, exiled, executed, disappeared or dismissed from public life in the new, glorious, watch-what-you-say Trumpocracy?
THE BLAME & THE SHAME
Yet the blame, the shame, and all the machinery of criming that it might take to overthrow the dream of America require a massive group effort. And speaking of ‘toadies,’ here are the roots of the word, according to the Oxford English Dictionary:
‘TOADY’ — Early 19th century: said to be a contraction of toad-eater, a charlatan's assistant who ate toads; toads were regarded as poisonous, and the assistant's survival was thought to be due to the efficacy of the charlatan's remedy
I can think of no finer image when contemplating former diehard Trump opponents — like Lindsey Graham, Marco Rubio, JD Vance and many others who are now exalted Trump Crime Family capo di tutti — than as assistants required to eat poison toads at the behest of a charlatan. They survived their poison toad dinners, but that only locks their soulless states into yet greater bondage to ‘the charlatan’s remedy.’
So, it takes a village to Trump a country. And, importantly and essentially, it takes millions of neighbors, colleagues, acquaintances, relatives, and former friends (now blocked on Facebook and Twitter/X), all marching lockstep — and some in goosestep — toward the ballot box. I won’t profess to delve into the psyches of so many different people willing to bet the fate of their families, communities, kids, and country on a man who tells more lies in a day than most of us tell in a decade. But it’s a jawdropping, soul-crushing thing, isn’t it?
A FEW CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY
Then, there are the countless snarling Trumpcult junkyard dogs, snapping and yapping 24/7 on the Internet, howling for blood, retribution, and not a few hangman’s nooses. Will they get what they want? If they don’t and we get through all this to a post-Trump America — excuse me while I find some wood to knock upon — we have multiple reckonings. I am hardly joking when I say Rupert Murdoch and his vile, black-hearted son, Lachlan, should be hauled before the International Criminal Court in The Hague on charges of Crimes Against Humanity. The indictment? Blackening the hearts, minds, and souls of tens of million of people via the poison toad FOX News, while possibly killing off a country, even while downplaying a global climate crisis that will kill everyone left.
A boy can dream …
Just like what Donald Trump has accomplished — is he, perhaps, the greatest performance artist in history? — FOX News, its imitators and the poisonous princes and princesses in what can only be called the Trumpublican Party have concocted a powerful, interlocking, post-truth congolomerate of lies, obfuscation, and indoctrination that is the handmaiden to Trump. It’s why he is still standing, a charlatan still poisoning America’s well.
RUNNING AGAINST DEMOCRACY
So, after all is lied and done, and lied and done — and lied again and done again — we have come down to it. For, at least at this very moment in time, we still have the vote. The hour is late and the grotesque ‘enshittification’ of American politics has been a resounding success, so far, as Dahla Lithwick writes in Slate this week:
What Trump and his acolytes have finally perfected, with their attacks on the fundamental pillars of democratic participation, reflects their absolute contempt for the consumers of democracy itself. Trump and his oligarchs and his tech bros and his nativist white supremacists have worked tirelessly to enshittify each entity that exists to ensure the continuation of voters’ ability to decide their future …
The problem with enshittification is that there is no exit as the systems on which we rely really begin to break down. There is nowhere to go, and for those of us who still believe in the ideals of voting, a free press, the rule of law, and fundamental equality, there is nothing to be done but to keep trying to perfect those same systems as they are being jacked up on cinder blocks and sold for parts.
I keep hearing that Americans don’t vote for vague concepts like “democracy.” But it’s hard to listen to Trump and his followers without understanding that it is the thing he is decidedly running against … | READ ON
WHAT MOLLY SAID
I will, of course, tell you to get out and vote for Harris/Walz. And to take someone who might otherwise have difficulty in getting out of their residence to vote for Harris/Walz. And to tell everyone you know and love to vote for Harris/Walz. Especially if they are — my dear gawd — still undecided. Or leaning toward a vacuous, anarchic vote for Jill Stein or some other Third Party candidate for whom a vote is as good as a vote for Donald Trump, by any other means.
And let us all read and share — when the poison toad eaters and junkyard dogs howl in the social media darkness again — what the late, great political commentator Molly Ivins once said. It’s still true, after all these years.
READ ON & SHARE ONWARDS
Click here or on the image below to view and read past episodes in ‘NotesBeforeYouVote,’ including our ongoing ‘Election Season Song Series,’ featuring some of the finest singer-songwriters I know where I live. And don’t know, personally. But, man, Stevie Nicks kicked it recently on ‘Saturday Night Live’ with her tune ‘Lighthouse,’ which we showcase in EPISODE 6.
Great commentary