When Everything's Just A Joke

Mockery is his middle name.

When someone believes in nothing but himself and how he feels at any given moment without logic or consistency, hasn't had an original thought in thirty years, and thinks that anything that someone disagrees with constitutes a personal insult, this is what you get--someone who is devoted only to undoing institutions, doesn't see the need to know anything else about them, and cares only about hearing cheers and adulation and certainly not the truth about anything.

Instead, he mocks, ridicules, and tells crude jokes about whatever he doesn't care for. It's for the entertainment factor, not in service of the truth, justice, or certainly not propriety.

He thinks of himself as a part-time comedian. If people laugh at his mockery, it's because he's brilliant (just ask him). If people chant with him, it's because they, and he, have nothing better to say. Nobody there cares about how the country is served by his presence; they only care about having had a good time.

It's all just a joke. The UN? What a joke. NATO? A bigger joke. Body-slamming a journalist? Sure. It's funny. Just a joke. He doesn't really mean it, but he doesn't really mean anything.

Public education? What a joke that is. So much so that a portion of an inaugural address was devoted to attacking it as part of the "carnage." He left a woman in charge of it who has proven to be quite the joke herself. The Capitol Steps, which appeared here in Milwaukee a few weeks ago, parodied her quite sharply as a nice lady who smiles a lot but knows nothing, who will surely pay the deconstructionists to take her very position apart, though--and anything that it means, which, too, is slowly morphing to nothing.

Public education is, after all, an extension of government, and government is a joke: It takes your taxes and gives you--nothing good. Does it? Everybody went to school. What good did it do?

Political correctness--that is, choosing one's words to keep focus on the issue and not on personal degradation--that's a joke, too. Nobody understands all those big words, so he'll use the same, simple words again and again: Never mind that they constitute, together and separately, big and small lies, buried in the minds of those who will never take the country seriously, only their own backyards.

So easy to cling to bromides that keep us from thinking: the left-wing conspiracy, led by George Soros (as repeated by his Supreme Court nominee). Lock up Hillary Clinton (also mentioned by him). Obama, the worst president ever. Anybody he doesn't like? He'll make up a derogatory name for them. The mockeries are the non-facts masquerading as facts that disguise, ignore, and divert from the facts.

So one of his devotees gets on Bill Maher's show and says that his lies are different--they are said to gain effect. Hello? What lie isn't told to gain effect? "But," he adds, "It works."

So the mockery of the American public can be justified. So the vagaries of politics allows constant lying to gain effect. Don't all politicians lie, after all? Does any of this matter if he can get away with it--get and keep the pulpit, spread the lies and mockery and degradation and ad hominem attacks, bringing all to his level of disgust?

Because if it doesn't, then we are all at risk. When nothing matters, nothing as an idea then matters, too--no values, no history, just the here and now and never mind the results or consequences or the possibly rational reasons that anything has ever taken place. We go down that rabbit hole and we will find it difficult, if not impossible, to return. Things that cannot possibly be justifiable will quickly become not only justifiable, but popular.

The mainstream will disappear, as it has been doing for some time now--indeed, for all of this century so far. When that happens, no government can hold back the disastrous effects because the ideas and values by which it has been created will not matter. If the economy goes bad, and millions go back on the unemployment rolls (which I have done, and that struggle for the maintenance of self-esteem was enormous), we will see the awful results: everyone for themselves.

Even if the election results are more positive next week, even if we manage to provide something of a check on the abuses of power and the descent into meaninglessness, even if we structurally push back against the idea that government is a joke, that alone won't do it. The leader of this nonsense is still there and he will feel threatened, so he will continue and even accelerate the assault on decency.

It's possible that we might establish a new foothold and hopefully so. But under new threat, the forces of nihilism will rebound. We should know by now that that's not a joke. Either.

Be well. I'll see you down the road.

Mister Mark