Despite an admitted lack of education or training in the discipline of our present theme, our empirical experience, nevertheless, has indicated that to the extent an individual is removed from the state of reality orientation, can he, permissibly, be considered societally aberrant or insane. We find ourselves reluctantly and alarmingly obliged, in candor, to observe the remarkable profusion of such derangement in our contemporary American society. We would further hazard the opinion that the malady can attribute its appearance and corruptive metastasis to a combination of natural inclination and an experienced incentive to reject reality in favor of facts, deemed consistent with disparate, but felt “preferable” ideation.
We would not grant the exclusivity of a proprietary patent for such subjective or tactical rejection of empirical reality to the meretricious ingenuity of Donald J. Trump; but would award him the gold medal for its efficient, evangelical proselytization. Trump’s bizarrely successful, autocratic promotion of “alternate facts” appears to have attained the status of a virulent toxic pandemic, and still serves as a universal credo for his multitudinous, cultish following. From the advent of his public appearance on the political stage, Trump tactically, and in some quarters, successfully devalued factual reality and denigrated the validity of the responsible media and the findings of the academic World; in preference to subjectively acceptable falsity, consistent with his egoistic self-interest. Such would-be autocrat, by unfortunate chance, having somehow been gifted with skill in snake oil merchandising, tactically utilized said demagogic skills in the achievement of adulation from the Nation’s eternally discontented and unenlightened populist bloc of citizens; and, of most impact, the perceived potential of their votes.
It was but a small step from “alternative facts” and “alternate reality” to the emergence of paranoid conspiratorial ideations of the sycophantic Trump supporters. Thus the Nation experienced irrational proclamations ranging from, a “rigged election,” tiny tracking micro-computers in vaccines, rockets sent down from the atmosphere by Israel, the Trade Center attack being seen as a government-friendly flag operation, bamboo implants in ballots altering votes, Jews (only 2% of the population) replacing white Christian citizens, George Soros being part of a worldwide, Jewish banking conspiracy to control the Planet, the relegation of “Climate Warming” to “a conceived meme of the “coastal elite,” to the insanity of “Pizzagate.” The range of paranoid conspiratorial ideations has proven to be limitless.
It is the identical, elected irrationality, as observed, that predictably denies established historical reality in favor of a preferred version or perhaps, a complete erasure, more comfortable or commensurate with the intransigent tropes of the fact-denier (predictably, right-wing). A glaring example of such a lack of reality orientation or, denial of reality, may be observed in the instances of demands for the deletion from education of America’s “Original Sin,” the evil and inhuman practice of black chattel slavery.
A substantial portion of our Nation’s bigoted citizens adamantly oppose the teaching of the Nation’s shameful history of black chattel slavery. Such aberration includes the elimination of “CRT” (Critical Race Teaching) from the universal school curricula and the banning of books and educational sources relevant to the period. This education-disabling impediment is an especially notable extension of reality denial and, effectively constitutes a roadblock to the acquisition of an honest and objective education. The utilitarian study of historical National mistakes is empirically useful in avoiding them in the future. Equally, or perhaps more important, is the preservation of the assumption of the accuracy of the content and consequent trust and enlightenment derived from a society’s truthful and beneficial education. Abridged history is deceitful, useless, and not, candidly, “History.” The latter truism has far less significance to our thematic fact denier than his unsupported, intransigent beliefs and attempts at the perpetuation of his subjectively preferred false historical and political dogma.
Such factually deranged dynamic attained the level of “Beyond the Pale,” [please excuse the eventually realized pun] status through a certain recently expressed and bewildering ideation, relative to race relations. Considering the historical context of the Nation’s continuing and necessary attempts to attain appropriate equality for its black citizens (including, the elimination of voter interference and statutorily and judicially, proscribing prejudice in employment, housing, criminal justice, finance, housing, education, and elsewhere), the bizarre statements of the perverse, “Adolph Eichmann-like reincarnation, Steven Miller and others of his perverse ilk, attained record depths of reality disorientation (whether tactical or believed) by the bizarre declaration that the present state of American law is “prejudicial to white citizens.” Any sentient Homo sapiens within arm’s reach of the plethora of sources of National media would afford that statement the same degree of reality orientation and verisimilitude, as a declaration that television’s Mr. Rogers was an “Isis Terrorist,” or that Broadway’s “Zabars” is a launching platform for military intercontinental missiles.
A reality-oriented and well-deliberated Presidential vote, next November, will assure existential importance to the endurance of our unique Republican Democracy and, additionally, beneficially serve as an empirically, necessary, boon to citizen sanity.
-p.
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