Labor Day 2020
To “Wag the Dog”, first you agitate and amplify the problem. Then you prototype and stage it in the nation’s capital in front of the People’s House. Once tested, you incite domestic white grievance terrorism in your opponent’s most vulnerable locations. In your case you infect majority minority neighborhoods belonging to cities, counties and states run by elected officials from the opposing political party, already reeling from and susceptible to racist and over-militarized, fatal policing.
Amid the choreographed burning, rioting, and looting, you pretend to restore law and order in your image and likeness. Like your signature commoditizing taxpayer-funded coronavirus stimulus checks, you offer up signature cause and effect political violence because you failed to douse the conflagration flames of a deadly invasive pandemic so far threatening over six-million and killing over two-hundred-thousand Americans. Instead, during your reign you deliberately helped COVID-19 fester and explode so that now one American perishes from the novel coronavirus every 80 seconds.
To “Punk the People”, first you strive for casualties on both sides to bludgeon your campaign themes into memes and quickly turn contrived street warfare into political theater. Then, you posture and demand “law and order” but under your direct order and without any objective, ubiquitous rule of law except your version of the Sun King’s golden rule, “he who tweetstorms, rules”. Like an alley cat Wizard of Oz manipulating ethno-populist catnip.
You make common cause with Murdochian news cacophony and its institutionalized prevarication to channel street fear gilding your brand. During your coronation convention, your chief propagandist proudly admits that, “the more chaos and anarchy and vandalism and violence reigns, the better it is for the very clear choice on who’s best on public safety and law and order.”
You feed the beast. You cut down the roses and century-old cherry trees to convert the People’s House & Garden into your appropriated campaign background prop with your name emblazoned in state-funded fireworks above the nation’s most sacred monuments to those who faithfully delivered on the ultimate sacrifice for a cause greater than themselves. You admit out loud and signal in public that there is no ethical bridge you will not cross and then destroy in retreat to win again and at any cost to a nation already fraudulently and treasonously placed in your care.
Like everything else you inherited and inappropriately grabbed during your entire distorted privileged life; you make the twenty-first century caudillo playbook your own. You both give and take syndicated lessons on subversion defined by divide & conquer politics of mutual assured domestic destruction (MAD2), making nice with the likes of Putin+Erdoğan+Orban+Xi+Duarte+Jong-un+Lashenko+Modi+Maduro+Al-Assad+Netanyahu and MBS, such “very fine people”.
Hands-up or hands-down, will get shot either way. Your traveling, trolling “hit parade” hits polling charts with real bullets to commoditize the deaths of public school children, frontline workers, pandemic victims, nursing home residents, embedded racist policing BIPOC victims, America’s military serving overseas as bounty-booty for Russian sharpshooters, and any other Blue State voter at large and at risk from exposure to you.
You invade Portland, Washington Park, and Kenosha with other vulnerable invasion locales trembling in the queue. Your minions and enablers strip search the Hatch Act removing every legal article of moral clothing to guarantee that “mirror, mirror on the wall”, you are the most nakedly depraved emperor of them all. Going back to Kenosha in person, a jackal circling its kill, you direct and incite more action figure sequences, pour salt in those wounds.
In your “Qmerica”, “Whataboutism” replaces the National Anthem your militarized, Putinized electorate sings to laud and honor you, the QAnon Messiah, while trolling the rest of us. In your “Qmerica”, a colonizing universe opens up for the U.S. Department of Defense’s Space Force to navigate the heavens deploying Ptolemy instead of Copernicus as its guiding north star.
Back on Planet Earth, nothing left but virus-vandalized, smoldering partisan wastelands to chronicle your four-year, non-stop dystopic legacy. In our civic society breakdown, you shift-shape from the hypothetical, “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose any voters, okay(?)”, to a definitive game over, country of coffins. “We have pioneered fatality rates”.
In your “Qmerica”, vigilante justice is the only justice. In Kenosha, your killing fields vigilantes invaded from over forty cities away to show the waiting world what “Second Amendment” solutions look like. A reactive, advertising revenue compliant mainstream media of purported fourth estate investigative fame voraciously chronicles “democracy dying in darkness” without admitting guilt or even any self-awareness in pulling the plug on itself through false equivalencies.
Your pandemic epicenter-fatality-rated, deplorable economy showcases why and how a divided house cannot stand. It reveals Mar a Lago fellow travelers and architects of your seventh bankruptcy seeding our impending second Great Depression apocalypse. The U.S. Senate millionaires club going on summer recess before refusing to solve rising pandemic-induced food poverty and home evictions. Stock market denizens rooting for COVID-19 economic dismantling to cut costs, downsize, outsource, off-shore and further commoditize workers, then culling and reaping collective misery profits.
On your watch, you design and produce electorally targeted, local racial civil wars and count coup on fallen victims, redefining them as without recourse, without names, cannibalized to serve your spiraling vainglory. Your conspiracy theory tweets, interviews, press conferences, and contagious constitutional corruption syndicates spin-off criminal enterprises. Unable to breathe, shot in the back, your nation dies alone, decomposing into a suffocating, alternative fact whipped effigy of itself.
Since 2016, you’ve gaslighted the domestic tweet-sphere over ending the homegrown white grievance terrorism you promote, produce, legitimize and even un-presidentially pardon to the point of getting yourself impeached. Your latest democratic revelation is you informing your voter base to vote twice intentionally because the only way you know how to win, the only way you’ve ever won, is through the art of dealing the scam, rigging the game, lying, cheating, stealing, and breaking the law. Two-way “mirror, mirror on the border wall” – it is what “you” is.
Wag the Dog. Punk the People. Deja-vu all over again.
Michael Alden Peck
Terms of Bereavement:
- Wagging the Dog: “Distract attention away from political scandals, often through military action”.
- Complicit Punking: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/08/24/michael-steele-trump-cult-youre-complicit-your-own-punking/
- DJT 2016 RNC Convention : “Nobody knows the system better than me, which is why I alone can fix it”.
- DJT 2020 RNC Convention: “Always remember: They are coming after me, because I am fighting for you”.