Any reasonable effort to briefly describe the encyclopedic extent of the human practice of wearing facemasks would be extensive and challenging. Nevertheless, our search for a possible contextual significance and intrinsic meaning of the Trump administration’s dissonant and visually dystopian use of a masked, private army provided the irresistible catalyst that prompted this writing.
The ubiquitous array of contexts for the wearing of face masks encompasses a multitude of disparate purposes, including cultural, theatrical, criminal, recreational, and prophylactic. Ancient cultures used religiously oriented masks in their tribal observances to the gods, and were used in Japanese and Greek theater to depict the character of the protagonist; they were also employed at” stylish European “masked balls as epitomized in the German opera, “Die Fledermaus” and prophylactically used by operating surgeons, the public during pandemics, and recreationally, on Halloween and in children’s comic books (i,e., “The Lone Ranger” and “Batman”). Masks are, as well, ubiquitously employed in nefarious enterprises, such as the Spanish Inquisition, the Ku Klux Klan, criminality, and, notably, Trump’s thematic, un-American, and visually dystopian masked militia, known as. “ICE.”
The media has reported daily, Gestapo-style arrests, torture, incarceration, and banishment to foreign torture prisons of peaceable, productive, tax-paying, and military-serving Hispanic residents of the Nation, perversely based upon the tan color of their skin, their language and cultural observances, notably, without due process. We, in accord with the multitude of mainstream American citizens, are shocked and greatly disturbed by this daily, fascistic and constitutionally, and cognitively dissonant, xenophobic program.
The same is shamefully and dangerously consistent with the Administration’s repugnant, principled rejection of the Nation’s Constitution, and its precedential rule of law, and traditional history. The autocratic-leaning, reductively ignorant, and prejudicial Trump Administration has faint recognotion of the “Bill of Rights,” legal precedent, the “Separation of Powers,” or fundamental moral decency, but singularly recognizes and worships Trump’s psychoneurotic, reductive thirst for perceived power; viz., to be universally perceived as a “winner” at the cost of American democratic principle, historic ethos fundamental conception of humanistic decency,
There is little factual or principled distinction between the historic American blemish on America’s history of the masked, infamous groups that egregiously constituted the nefarious hate groups of the Ku Klux Klan (the”KKK’,) and the extant, presidentially authorized and amply financed, masked militia of ICE agents. This new and frightening blemish on our Nation is a bitter, but cogent reminder of the vulnerability of our unique democratic republic to with, neglectful populist decline,
Trump’s egregiously unprincipled catering to the Nation’s substantial horde of populist bigots is principally inconsistent and inarguably denigrating of the basic and fundamental precepts of democratic governance, underlying the moral context and history of our Republican Democracy. Trump’s most despicable and outrageous policy, among his plethora of undemocratic and inhumane travesties of rectitude, is this heartless display of xenophobic fascism.
Donald J. Trump and his circus menagerie of Cabinet advisors, appropriately, should be the parties’ dystopically masked to hide from the American public their shameful, undemocratically cruel policies, most notable among which is their fascistic program of intimidation and abject misery tragically and unjustly meted out to America’s Hispanic population.
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