But he said so, plucking it out of the corner of his addled mind. I wonder how many of the hordes that went to hear his latest pile of nonsense in Sunrise, Florida, yesterday believe so now. After all, there was a 'war on Christmas,' wasn't there?
No, there wasn't one of those, either. Nobody tried to take Christmas away from anyone. Nobody said or made any kind of rule that someone couldn't wish someone else a "Merry Christmas." It's just that government, in its wishes to keep religion outside the taxpayer realm--necessary in our secular state--sometimes has to drop the Christmas moniker to a Holiday one. That's not a 'war.' That's following the Constitution. (Disingenuously, as is his wont, Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick of Texas has, with his campaign money, put a Yuletree up in the lobby of the Texas State Senate, challenging anybody to object to that. Never mind the constitutionality of it; he figures that nobody would want to get a hard time from his shaming of them.)
But now that the small-h holidays are upon us, 45 can riff about victimization all he wants, even if he needs to keep making up reasons for people to be appalled--at least those who choose to regard him as a great sage of this silliness. But it's the impressment upon their minds that continues to be scary.
As he speaks, so they think. As they think, so they think they know. And they will not question. They won't look anything up. They'll just accept it as truth when it certainly isn't.
It's a lie, a big lie: The kind of big lie that will be tried again and again. Hitler did that, too. He didn't tell them all at once, either. He built up to it. Then he shouted and harangued as his minions jeered along with him. And followed him to defeat and oblivion.
There were others who tried to ignore it at first, and then to avoid it. They were those who didn't buy into the tawdry propaganda. They read things, listened to things, thought about things, debated things. And they never let go of the idea that ideas matter.
They are here, too. In Nazi Germany, they lost out. Will that happen here?
Not an absurd notion. Though this society is far more enormous than that of Germany in the 1920s and '30s, it is held together and divided simultaneously with mass communicative techniques that are being manipulated with nonsense as we speak. Remember: 45 has Fox News. It is a highly malleable, mostly subservient (and if you debate this, consider his last 54-minute harangue on "Fox and Friends," on which he's been allowed access any time he wants it) and very effective propaganda wing of his administration. Some working there know it and protest, but some have also given up on it as a source of genuine journalism and left the network. You can bet, for instance, that it has and will spew the nonsense of a 'war on Thanksgiving' and imbed that into their viewers' heads to build their resentment against "elites."
The best opponent against this onslaught is access to knowledge and information that someone has tried to push into the public realm without excessive bias. It is the ability and willingness to seek out and absorb multiple sources of information and test it against decent standards of judgment. If people fail to do so, those multiple sources can be removed.
Here is William L. Shirer, writing in The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, in the chapter describing the legal, but awful, policy of "coordination" of all aspects of German life under the Nazi banner:
No one who lived in Germany in the Thirties, and who cared about such matters, can ever forget the sickening decline of the cultural standards of a people who had had such high ones for so long a time. This was inevitable, of course, the moment the Nazi leaders decided that the arts, literature, the press, radio and the films must serve exclusively the propaganda purposes of the new regime and its outlandish philosophy.
It's exactly why 45 won't relinquish his attacks on the free press. He can't control it, so he trashes it in the name of self-pity and victimization. In any event, he re-directs the main source of information (and attitude regarding it) to himself. Information, true information, disappears to all those who feel they don't need to access it. It becomes an endless droning of sameness and dullness: Easily understandable but lacking any depth. The Nazis controlled information sources so completely, wrote Shirer, that the result "was to afflict the German people with radio programs and motion pictures as inane and boring as were the contents of their daily newspapers and periodicals."
Likewise, he repeats the same themes, the same attacks, and the same conspiracy theories every so often to remind his followers to keep thinking about the same things, not the terrible policies to which we have been subjected, and the very thin highwire on which we are now balancing matters of war and peace. He wants to get us to forget about the past--and if not, only the past things he prefers. Those who give into that shallowness will allow themselves to be bored, to tune it out, and blindly follow the next things he says. "A steady diet over the years of falsifications and distortions made a certain impression on one's mind and often misled it," wrote Shirer.
That's just what 45 wants, too, with his 17,000 lies and counting. He wants people to throw up their hands and stop fighting them.
That's just what 45 wants, too, with his 17,000 lies and counting. He wants people to throw up their hands and stop fighting them.
It's why we must keep reading and accessing information sources that are independent, though subjected to, his attacks. If they're attacked, no doubt they're telling the truth. We must continue to have access to the things that are really happening, and that have happened.
Our thirst for knowledge cannot slacken. Our reliance on independent judgment and the formulation of genuine political will, based on facts, depends on it. It's 45's worst enemy, and he knows it.
Go to your library. Read a book on history. Get a magazine. Pay attention to non-Fox news programs. Get away from social media for a minute. Nobody has to shout. They just have to read.
Be well. Be careful. Happy Thanksgiving, and if you have to stand up for yourself against nonsense, please do so. Do it respectfully and matter-of-factly, but do it. I'll see you down the road.
Mister Mark
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