What makes you most anxious?
Right-wing politicians at the federal, state, and local levels, MAGA supporters, QAnon followers, book banners, radical pro-lifers, white supremacists, racists, Christian nationalist, antisemites, and those who would allow democracy in America to fail in order to make way for an autocratic, fascist, Christian fundamentalist theocracy, the Supreme Court, right-wing judges, Fox News, white-washers of history, the Proud Boys, the Oath Keepers, gun nuts, Bible thumpers, far-right and well-armed militia groups, and the beat goes on.
I’m not going to name names, but you know who I’m talking about.
This, That, and the Other 
Revolutions of Marquis De Lafayette |author Mike Duncan on tmr
Mike Duncan situates how his study of the Democratic revolutions of the 18th and 19th Centuries brought to the fore the role of THEE Marquis de Lafayette in these wars, traveling from revolution to revolution to deploy his expertise against the British and French ruling class. Duncan explores the patterns the revolutions of this era saw, the importance of a divided working class, and how Lafayette fits into these system, before a smaller conversation on what the revolutions of these eras actually entailed. Wrapping up with a broader discussion of revolutions, including those Duncan has written about in the past, and the systems and structures [leading to/that led to] them, situating … the current US.
LikeLiked by 1 person
What makes you most anxious?
Dumpf becoming President. There’s no judge with the balls to put him away permanently.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Isn’t that a pity. 😠
LikeLiked by 1 person
Bragg’s good
LikeLiked by 1 person
Totally agree!
LikeLiked by 1 person
I try to keep the world out of my big bag of anxieties, but they creep in anyway. There’s a horrible lurking about climate change in the mix where I figure EVEN if we fix all the political stuff, our world is going to spit us out and we deserve it.
Meanwhile, we all wait to see if we’ve got COVID. There’s a general belief that we are all going to get it sooner or later. You cant hide forever.
LikeLiked by 1 person
So far my wife and I have escaped, but except for us, nobody’s wearing masks anymore. They think it’s over. But it’s here to stay and is gonna get each of us at some point.
LikeLike
That’s probably why all the people who never got it are finally getting it. A few people wear masks and they are required in most medical facilities — but not all. So now we are waiting to see if WE have it. What will be, will be. I think there is an inevitability about it at this point. It’s going around. You can run but you can’t (effectively) hide.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Remember Trump answering that P.T. Barnum is a comparison that he likes for himself? I haven’t seen the movie, but I just now looked up what The Greatest Showman was based on (intuiting it was about Barnum when I saw a graphic). Released in 2017, many people find it inspiring. Sadly.
P.T. Barnum and Abraham Lincoln are both credited with having said some form of “You can fool all the people some of the time and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time.” To say that either is credited with saying it would be technically correct.
Aug 31, 2016
https://www.nwaonline%5Bdot%5Dcom › aug
Actually, I will share (in an upcoming comment) that there is no record of him saying THAT.
https://quotefancy.com/quote/1083005/P-T-Barnum-You-can-fool-most-of-the-people-most-of-the-time
LikeLiked by 1 person
I put “[dot]” in the first of the above apparent links, to make it not a link. Fail; this hack has apparently been overridden by software (not making it an actually functioning link nevertheless). Also, I said there’s “no record of him saying THAT” (by which I meant Barnum).
https://www.news-leader.com/story/opinion/readers/2015/08/20/letter-trump-candidate-pt-barnum/32063031/
Letter: Is Trump a candidate or P.T. Barnum?
Janice Bond, Springfield
Not since “The Music Man” Professor Harold Hill marched into “River City” with “76 Trombones” blaring has Iowa welcomed a flim-flam artist with such abandon.
Donald Trump is the P.T. Barnum of politics, banking on his mentor’s truism that “a sucker is born every minute!”
His gigantic ego is not as disturbing as his childish behavior, or his vindictive personality.
~
He promises that his “Art of the Deal” leverage will be his most effective weapon to mislead, find loopholes and outmaneuver his way to “make America great again.” Then, he boasts about all the people he took advantage of while working his magic.
I can only imagine what his insulting logic, applied to his deep religious faith would be: “I like Gods who don’t get crucified!”
LikeLiked by 1 person
Amongst the text of the article below, at the website itself,
there is this information for a photograph:
President Trump during a press conference with Polish President Andrzej Duda at the Three Seas Initiative Summit in Warsaw, Poland on July 6, 2017. (Photo by Karol Serewis/Gallo Images Poland/Getty Images)
President Trump, This Way to the Egress
BY MICHAEL WINSHIP | JULY 6, 2017
https://billmoyers.com/story/donald-trump-learned-pt-barnum/
Trump Bet Americans Would Like His Un-Presidential Antics.
He May Be Right. …
BY NEAL GABLER | JULY 13, 2017
~
In short, Republicanism lite [is where Democrats landed].
And then there is the analysis of [a] Times columnist … inaptly titled “What’s the Matter With Republicans?” because it really was aimed at what’s wrong with Democrats, since in his view nothing really seems to be wrong with the GOP. Republicans subscribe to traditional American values forged on the frontier, things like self-reliance and self-sufficiency, independence, loyalty, toughness and virtue; Democrats seemingly do not.
None of these criticisms is new. In fact, they are pretty hoary. But they actually seem a lot less persuasive now that Donald Trump is in the White House. There has never been a president whose values are so antithetical to traditional American ones — never one less self-reliant, loyal, tough, disciplined, religious or virtuous — so the argument doesn’t hold much water to me.
I want to suggest something else entirely that helps explain the love for Republicans and Trump in the supposedly old-fashioned precincts of the South, Midwest and West. I want to suggest that beneath or beside these so-called “traditional” frontier values — which we ourselves promote so self-aggrandizingly — there’s another set of values, no less American, and probably much more so. According to some historians, they, too, were forged on the frontier as a form of survival.
They have nothing to do with the Protestant ethic — quite the contrary. They are not values of virtue but of success, promoting deception and the fast con, easy cash, hustling and the love of money. If the first set of values might be called “Algeresque,” after Horatio Alger, the popular 19th-century American author who wrote stories about poor ragamuffins rising to great wealth through hard work, this second set might be called “Barnumesque,” after P. T. Barnum, the 19th-century promoter, hoaxster and circus impresario, who played on his countrymen’s gullibility.
As Michael Winship wrote on this site recently in astutely pointing to Trump’s hucksterism, Trump is a chip off of P.T. Barnum’s block. I’d like to focus here on something else: Unfortunately, he isn’t the only one.
Of course, no one wants to come right out and say that America is a land of hustlers, least of all politicians and pundits. It is a kind of sacrilege. Everyone prefers the Alger scenario of social mobility, which historian Henry Steele Commager described as one in which “opportunities lie all about you; success is material and is the reward of virtue and work.” This is one of the bulwarks of America. To say otherwise is to engage in class warfare, and class warfare, we are often told by conservatives, is a betrayal of American exceptionalism.
But as much a bulwark as this is, just about everyone also knows it isn’t exactly true — even, it turns out, Horatio Alger himself. “He constantly preached that success was to be won through virtue and hard work,” writes his most perspicacious biographer, John Tebbel, “but his stories tell us just as constantly that success is actually the result of fortuitous circumstance.” Or luck, so long as you aren’t lucky enough to be born rich. Those idlers — the Trumps of the world — are Alger’s villains.
Perhaps it was because the American dream was so riddled with inconsistencies, contradictions and outright lies that Americans constructed (and lived) an alternative in which success goes not to the industrious but to the insolent. This is the thesis of historian Walter McDougall’s provocative story of the early republic, Freedom Just Around the Corner. As he writes, it is the unexceptionalism of so many Americans that really makes America exceptional.
“To suggest that Americans are, among other things, prone to be hustlers,” McDougall notes, “is simply to acknowledge Americans have enjoyed more opportunity to pursue their ambitions by foul means or fair, than any other people in history.” And: “Americans take it for granted that ‘everyone’s got an angle,’ except maybe themselves.” This idea, that you succeed through grift and guile, has …
{… dawned on me (Marleen) rather late, but before Drumpf. I found it’s oppressive presence in my individual life experiences at approximately exactly the same time as the 2000 political scene was playing out, then both parallel onward as we headed into Iraq based on lies.}
~
Trump has gambled that many Americans would enjoy his unpresidential, con-man antics. He hasn’t entirely won that gamble. Most Americans don’t. But there are enough who do, especially among Republicans, to let him wreak havoc. After all those years of our hearing Algeresque bromides, President Barnum is now in charge, and he is working hard to reveal America as one great big con game.
LikeLiked by 1 person
https://billmoyers.com/story/president-trump-impeachment/
Back when P.T Barnum displayed his many wonders to the millions who visited his American Museum in New York City — everything and everyone from tiny General Tom Thumb to the bogus Fiji Mermaid (a monkey’s head and torso stitched to the tail of a fish) — he noticed that many ticket holders, each of whom had paid a quarter apiece, were spending far too much time loitering and gawking at the exhibits. So he had signs posted that read, “This way to the egress.” Thinking they were going to see yet another of Barnum’s curiosities, sightseers followed the signs and were startled to find themselves out on the street.
LikeLiked by 1 person
My own application of this song:
Riverside (of Poland): “I’m done with you”
So you’ve always been on my side
You’ve always been my “friend”
…….
You have to make me aware
Tell me I lost my way
You are not my judge
You are not my God
You are not my own CEO
Why don’t you simply shut your mouth
And take your poison from my soul
Far away
Why do you want to tell me what to do?
Who do you think you are?
Do you not realise it’s my choice, it’s my life
Yeah, draw me a chart, make an action plan, outline a strategy
Educate me, cause I clearly
Don’t undеrstand
And you’re so clever
You arе not my judge
You are not my God
You are not my own CEO
Why don’t you simply shut your mouth
And take your poison from my soul
Far away
Far away
LikeLiked by 1 person
20 years on, should George W.
Bush be on trial for Iraq | MSNBC
LikeLiked by 1 person
WATCH HEROS Stand Up to Iraq War Machine
LikeLiked by 1 person
‘I don’t know how to explain the war to myself.’
LikeLiked by 1 person
How Neil Young Came to
Write OHIO After Kent State
LikeLiked by 1 person
🤯 He’s coming forth, here, as more positive (in 2004) or less challenging (or more hopeful or naive) than the way the introduction (almost thirteen years later) I quoted comes off (in my opinion). Yet, it might be more challenging in a way to me, personally; and it’s my habit to entertain such. Actually… by the end, he gets more real. Much of what was already quoted is in the first 24 minutes.
https://www.c-span.org/video/?181954-1/freedom-corner
LikeLiked by 1 person
https://www.fpri.org/article/2004/04/freedom-just-around-the-corner-an-excerpt/
LikeLiked by 1 person
Don’t forget Ron Desantis. Be very afraid America if you have not yet realized how dangerous he is. One of his latest stunts was a mandatory order that all female student/athletes in Florida High Schools & Colleges to start recoding their menstrual cycles in order to compete in sports. I kid you not. Fortunately it was voted down but it shows you the lengths he is going to just to see what he can get voted in. Take a look at what he has got passed right here: – https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a42888929/ron-desantis-banned-list/
LikeLiked by 2 people
Yes, he is very dangerous and I’m pretty sure he’s going to win the GOP nomination for a run in 2024 and may even win the general election and be our next president (or our first dictator).
LikeLiked by 1 person
😡
LikeLiked by 1 person
I’m not even American, and all those names have given me PTSD. I swear! Being off Twitter I haven’t heard much about them. I had forgotten about them for a bit =/ Oh well, life goes on, lol
LikeLiked by 1 person
I could agree with that list.
LikeLiked by 1 person