Professional Left Podcast Episode 1029: Elois And Morlocks and MAGAs, Oh My!

"What really matters is what you do with what you have."  --  H. G. Wells

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It's Not Science Fiction, It Just Seems Like It

It's not from an adjacent dimension or an alternate timeline.  

There was a time within living memory, kids, when intelligent people sat around tables having civilized conversations about interesting subjects.  And you could watch it on the teevee!

From 1982, this is Isaac Asimov, Harlan Ellison, and Gene Wolfe discuss science-fiction writing with Studs Terkel and Calvin Trillin on the Alpha Repertory Television Service (ARTS), the predecessor of today's A&E (Arts and Entertainment Network). 

The program was called "Nightcap: Conversations on the Arts and Letters."

Enjoy.

Professional Left Podcast Episode 1003: Science Fiction University - Trust

“History does not always repeat itself. Sometimes it just yells, 'Can't you remember anything I told you?' and lets fly with a club.”  -- John W. Campbell Jr. 

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Professional Left Podcast Episode 986: AmeriKKKan Gothic

"Like they should have stopped Hitler at Munich, they should never let him get away with that, they was just asking for trouble."  --  Peter Clemenza, The Godfather

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Professional Left Podcast Episode 985: 'The Cheaper The Crook...'

"I don't mind a reasonable amount of trouble." -- Sam Spade, The Maltese Falcon

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Professional Left Podcast Episode 984: War On Hiatus Due To Bad Ratings

"War Is a Racket." -- retired United States Marine Corps Major General, Smedley D. Butler

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Professional Left Podcast Episode 983: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb

"I'm not saying we wouldn't get our hair mussed. But I do say no more than ten to twenty million killed, tops." -- General "Buck" Turgidson, Dr. Strangelove

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Professional Left Podcast Episode 982: Failure To Launch

"I'm sure we would not have had men on the Moon if it had not been for Wells and Verne and the people who write about this and made people think about it" -- Arthur C. Clarke

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The Strait of Arrakis

"The power to destroy a thing is the absolute control over it." -- Paul Muad'Dib, Dune, 1965

You Dune fans out there have probably noticed that the "power to destroy a thing" threat which Iran -- a nation governed by religious fanatics -- has now credibly leveled against the United States and Israel over the Strait of Hormuz is exactly the same threat that Paul Muad'Dib leveled at the rest of the Empire in Dune.  If you fuck with us, we will destroy this thing.   We will strangle it and then your empire will fall because your whole empire -- all trade, all medicine, all mobility -- depends on the product of this ancient place that you've been exploiting and abusing and messing with for generations.  

So welcome to the early premiere of Dune, III, but not in theaters in December.  This version of Dune is coming to our homes, our highway, our grocery stores, our schools, and our medical facilities right now courtesy of  Donald Trump, who, on a whim, decided to fuck with one of the places on this Earth that he should have left the fuck alone.

So, how did we get here?

Well, there are really two and only two theories of the case about the rise of Donald Trump.

First is that Trump swept in overnight as if by magic.  He just showed up, did some hoodoo and bamboozled 70 million United States citizens into voting for him.  Boom! Just like *that* he hoodwinked everybody.  First, handily sweeping aside all 723 of his Republican opponents in 2016  primaries, locking up the nomination early, and then proceeding on to win the general election due to the electoral college being massively tilted in favor of small states full of enough bigots and imbeciles to do the job.  

That's theory #1.

Theory #2 goes like this.

The rise of a monster like Trump was a long time coming down a long, and terrible road along which the Republican party has been marching for a generation.  Maybe two generations.  Either way, a very long time.   And eventually all the kindling, and all the oily rags, and all the barrels of toxic hate and bigotry and arrogant ignorance --  all the highly volatile poisons the GOP had been tinkering and toying with for decades -- finally came back to bite 'em.  

They had been using that poisonous alloy of focused hatred and stupidity and derangement to smite Democrats and win elections, and using the same logic that tobacco companies had used for decades: of course, we know the product we're selling is dangerous, highly addictive, and often lethal, but it's also incredibly profitable.   So we're going to go right on selling it because there is no way in this Land of the Free, that we're ever going to have to pay a price for how we make our money.      

And right down the line, the craftiest minds at every high-brow Conservative media platform and the savviest political operatives in the GOP -- even with examples like Golem, and Frankenstein, and The Sorcerers Apprentice, and all of human history right at their fingertips -- showed themselves to be utterly incapable of imagining that the doomsday machine they had built out of rage, racism and belligerent ignorance might one day be turned against them.  

For the record, this is what I wrote 36 hours after Donald Trump oozed down the Golden Escalator back in June of 2015:

In case you missed it, Squint and the Meat Puppet handed the MSNBC camera over to Donald Trump this morning for a relaxing, 30-minute handjob. While Trump rambled lazily from one pinnacle of bullshit and narcissism to the next, Morning Joe crack-house regulars Mark Halperin (Glenn Beck's favorite mainstream media enabler) and the pickled remains of Mike Barnacle looked on, smirking and giggling. All that it lacked to complete the creepy, peep-show effect were trench-coats and bad lighting.

But of course, the story of the Trump candidacy has very little to do with Donald Trump. 

As I wrote a few years ago, the brain-caste of the GOP spent a 40 years and billions of dollars carefully breeding an army of reliably angry, paranoid, racists chumps. And they have been so successful at completely re-engineering the Right's ideological digestive system that they can no longer process any information which does not come to them in the form of Fox-approved Benghaaaazi goo.  

In other words, in order to win elections and rake in vast fortunes, the Conservative brain caste has painstakingly created the perfect feeding-ground for con men and demagogues like Trump, the louder and more bombastic the better. And from David Brooks and the Wall Street Journal and "Meet the Press", to Ann Coulter and the Washington Free Beacon and the Breitbart Collective, in one way or another, virtually everyone in the media makes bank by flattering Conservative meatheads and pandering to their delusions.

They are the GOP's premium leads, but however abundant and renewable a resource the Conservative meatheads may be, come Presidential election time, there is never enough room at the trough for every rapacious Republican hog.  This is why every few years we have these Little Red State Fundy moments; that delicate time when the knives come out and the various species of Conservative con men start cutting each other's balls over who gets to pluck the wingnut pigeons...

...while trying desperately not to call attention to the fact that their entire political system depends on pandering to the army of reliably angry, paranoid, racists chumps which the GOP has worked so long and hard to cultivate.

Fortunately for the Right, now that the "respectable" media has as much to lose by cracking out of turn as Hate Radio and Fox News, we can all look forward to another campaign season of the American mainstream media looking stoically the other way.

Seems like theory #2 actually fits the facts like a bespoke Savile Row suit, while theory #1 looks more and more like a tiny, tattered fig leaf trying to cover a mountain of shame, complicity and bad faith.  

So a sensible person might well ask themselves, "Why the hell do the Never Trumpers and the legacy media still cling to theory #1 like a drunk clinging to an empty jug?"

And I might well answer that person, "You know, that's a helluva good question.  The next time you're within shouting distance, why don't you ask them, because they ain't taking my calls."

I Am The Liberal Media.

Professional Left Podcast Episode 980: Zombie Apocalypse

"My zombie films were all sort of satirical, with political messages. So I was doing them inexpensively and quietly off in left field somewhere." --   George A. Romero

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MAGA is a Genre

You want to know why all the savvy people -- every one of them -- were baffled and confused by the rise of Trump and MAGA, and still are?

Well, because I like you, I'll tell you.  And I do this in the full knowledge that none of this secret intel will leak to the savvy people because the savvy people do not read Liberal blogs.

Ready?

Ok...but first we have do a thing.  What the kids call a side-quest.  

You love Westerns, right?  Anyway, I do, so there we are. 

So, Westerns.  What defines a Western?  Well, even if you're not a professional deconstructor of films, if you watch enough Westerns from every era, you can see clear themes and commonalities, some of which remain fairly constant across time, and others which change and morph into something else entirely.  

For example, in early Westerns, the heroes and villains were mostly two-dimensional.  Often literally White Hats versus Black Hats.  Or White Hats versus The Savages.  But over time this changes.  For example, John Ford's landmark 1939 Western Stagecoach (The Canterbury Tales with Stetsons) is all about inverting social hierarchies, with John Wayne's Ringo Kid and Claire Trevor's Dallas characters -- the Outlaw and the Prostitute -- emerging as the heroes of the tale.

30 years later, in Sergio Leone's Once Upon a Time in the West, the recognizable tropes of the Western were mostly still there -- heroes, villains, hats, horses, guns, saloons, etc. -- but their meanings had all been scrambled.    The villain was no longer the Savages or the Black Hats, it was the crippled railroad baron.  The Black Hat gunslinger was now reduced to the status of a hireling: the henchman of capitalism.  

To make the point absolutely clear -- that this was about the closing of the frontier and the end of the traditional Western -- Leone hired iconic American good guy actor Henry Fonda to play Frank, the murderous, amoral tool of capitalism.   

And sticking with Once Upon a Time in the West for just one more minute, the opening scene does what all great opening scenes do: it sets the tone for the rest of the tale.   In Fred Zinnemann's High Noon, the entire story is about a train that's due to arrive at...when?  When?  Don't go simple on me now, it's the title of the movie.  Four bad men -- Frank Miller and his backup singers -- are due to arrive in town at noon and they are out for revenge.  Everyone in town knows it,  and as the fateful hour approaches (the director keeps the audience apprised of the time by placing clocks in nearly every scene) the townspeople slowly desert their sheriff, leaving him to face the four bad men all alone.

Then, at last, the clocks strike twelve.

Once Upon a Time in the West completely inverts this.  Instead of an arrival by train being the event towards which all plot lines are moving, Once Upon a Time in the West starts with an arrival by train.

Instead of four bad men getting off the train and marching into town to hunt down the hero, three bad men are waiting at the train for the hero to arrive.  

To drive home the point that this movie was to be the end of the Western, Leone originally wanted the stars of his Dollars Trilogy --  Clint Eastwood, Lee Van Cleef, and Eli Wallach -- to play the three gunmen.  But they declined, so Leone cast Woody Strode, Jack Elam, and Al Mulock instead.

At this point I was going to go on a long thing about how awesome The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance is, but this isn't a movie review post, and if you didn't already know how awesome The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance is, well, I just feel sorry for you is all.

Obviously Once Upon a Time in the West wasn't the end of the Western genre, because the archetypes the genre developed are too sturdy and too firmly rooted in human nature to disappear.  And so, every year or two, someone comes along to mix and match the same elements in different way.  In Silverado you find a classic Western done very well, even ending in a gunfight in the street with the church behind our hero.  In Lonesome Dove, a sweeping epic.   In Quigley Down Under you get the Western in Australia.  In No Country For Old Men, you get the Western in the West Texas of 1980 because the Coen brothers love Westerns.

Is Unforgiven a Western?  Obviously.  But is Firefly a Western?  You bet.  It's whatchacall a "neo-Western", but c'mon.  

Is Justified?  Damn right it is.  

So what is all of this to do with Republicans and their MAGA headgear?

Well, since you asked, getting back to explaining why all the savvy people -- every one of them -- were baffled and confused by the rise of Trump and MAGA, and still are... don't go simple on me now, because it's the title of this post.   

MAGA is not a set of policy beliefs or checked set of ideological boxes.  

MAGA is a genre.  MAGA is a vibe.  

Which is why, when the savvy crowd sees Republican voters appear to casually and completely reverse what they swore were their bedrock beliefs (and then do it again... and again) the savvy crowd are flummoxed.   They have no theory to fit the facts, because they had always taken as gospel that what Republican mopes say they believe on any given day was something akin the hammer throw at a track and field event: momentum is built up, then released, and the hammer follows a straight tangent line from the point of that release.

But Republican voters do not behave that way.  At all.  Because the policies they'll swear by on a Monday because Sean Hannity said so... and then drop like first period French on Wednesday because Sean Hannity said so...are just props.   Just plot devices.  

This is why MAGA mopes not only don't give a shit that Trump lies constantly, they're thrilled by it.  Since, in the MAGA genre, everything is treated as a plot device that either advances the MAGA narrative, or threatens it, who cares whether an individual story element is true or not?

Now for a quick bit of genre hopping.  

You love Film Noir, right?  Well anyway, I do, so here we are again. When Howard Hawks was filming The Big Sleep, his writing team couldn't figure out who killed the chauffeur, Owen Taylor.  So Hawks fired off a telegram to the author of the original novel, Raymond Chandler, asking him to clarify.  Here was their exchange.

Hawks:  "Who killed the chauffeur?" 

Chandler: "Dammit, I don't know either."

Even though the murder of Owen Taylor is central to the plot, Chandler didn't know or care who killed him because that wasn't the point of the novel. The Big Sleep is about atmosphere and characterization, not nailing down every detail, and since it didn't really matter who offed the chauffeur, Chandler didn't bother with it.  

From the MAGA perspective, asking whether or not this is true...

... or this is true ...

Trump repeats false claims that children are undergoing transgender surgery during the school day

Trump’s remarks escalated conservatives’ claims that educators are “grooming” or “indoctrinating” children to become gay or transgender.

...or this is true ...

Trump:  “It’s a tremendous difference... We’re going to get the drug prices down… Not 30 or 40 percent… No, we’re going to get them down 1,000 percent, 600 percent, 500 percent, 1,500 percent — numbers that are not even thought to be achievable… and it will be, you know, serious. It will be numbers that nobody can even imagine.”

... or the 10,000 other lies Trump has spewed are true is irrelevant.

As irrelevant as who killed Owen Taylor.   

Because all those lies are just plot devices designed to advance the MAGA narrative.  

Ergo understanding which way the MAGA mob will jump next is not (and never had been) a matter of sifting through the mountain of self-contradicting bullshit that constitutes MAGA dogma.   This is what the savvy crowd always gets wrong.  

Understanding the wild oscillations of MAGA dogma only makes sense when you understand the Republicans mythos being served by those lies: a mythos that long pre-dates the rise of Trump. 

And it's really pretty simple.  As simple as the earliest Westerns.  Their world is a world of Black Hats and White Hats.  They -- white Conservative Christian nationalists and their fellow travelers-- are the White Hats and pretty much everyone else are the Black Hats.  

They're the real Americas.  They are "righteous" in the original meaning of that word: just, upright, and in accord with divine law.  And since, to MAGA, this is all self-evident -- that they and only they are properly aligned with God's moral order -- then it follows that whatever they feel to be true and good must be true and good.

Instead of "Cogito ergo sum" -- "I think therefore I am" -- the MAGA way is (pardon the rough Latin translation) "Sentio ergo est" -- "I feel therefore it is".  

It's a pre-Enlightenment way of thinking, where faith doesn't merely beat facts all day long, but facts that conflict with the One True Faith are the darkest heresy.  Something to be rooted out and destroyed. 

For decades Conservative media and Republican politicians have been making fortunes and winning elections reinforcing this mythos by feeding the base an endless supply of Black Hats to hate and vote against.  Liberals.  Mouthy women.  Brown people who don't know their place.  Urbanites.  The gays.  Immigrants.  Unions.  Trans people.  Pointy-headed intellectuals.  Government employees.  Hollywood.  "Rootless cosmopolitans".  Socialists.  You know the drill.  

And once the base came to accept as axiomatic that is was perpetually under siege by the Black Hats, everything became existential crisis.  Deficits were an existential crisis...then they weren't...then they were again...then they weren't again.  Every Democratic president was somehow illegitimate and also  simultaneously a feckless weakling, a jackbooted tyrant and the Worst President in History.  

Everything was a battle in a forever war for the survival of real America where the salvation of the nation was always hanging by a thread.   And gradually, the fascist "blood and soil" language that has been thrown around on Hate Radio since the 1980s -- constantly framing the press as the "enemy of the people", slandering any opposition as deranged parasites, speaking of the nation as something that needed cleansing and purification -- filtered up from the base, where it was the common tongue, and into Conservative teevee, Republican political ads, Conservative think tanks and publications and Republican politicians.  

And in that environment, what does it matter if what the Dear Leader says is true or not?  What does it matter if what fascist state media says is true or not?  Who cares if slander about eating the pets is racist bullshit?  Who cares if trans people are no threat to anyone?  The only thing that matters is the utility of the words coming out of the Dear Leader's mouth. And since us Black Hats are so dangerous -- "the face of pure evil" (Liz Cheney, 2019) -- any and all weapons and tactics are permitted.  

Which is why we can carefully pack up all our facts -- our mountains of irrefutable facts stretching back decades --  and lay them aside for another day, or for when we talk among ourselves.  Conservative media and Republican politicians worked very hard for many decades engineering a voting base for whom facts are irrelevant and anyone who tells them anything they don't want to hear is dismissed as treason and Fake News.  This how Conservative media and Republican politicians paved a road for Donald Trump to win the White House.

Did lies about Obama's birth certificate feel true to the racist Republican base?  Did lies about Somalis eating people's pets feel true to those same bigots 15 years later?  Did lies about cafeteria castrations feed the MAGA moron's hysteria about trans people?  Does the torrent of lies that Trump vomits out on a daily basis tickle MAGA's ganglia and reinforce their myths about apocalyptic struggle, heroism and destiny?  

Yes.  And in the end, to them, that's all that matters.  

Because MAGA is not a set of policy beliefs or checked set of ideological boxes.  

MAGA is a vibe.  MAGA is a genre in which it's just Black Hats versus White Hats, all day long.

And all those lies are the necessary story elements that move the plot along.  

I Am The Liberal Media

Professional Left Podcast Episode 923: Fantastic 4, Dems Fight Back, AI Convos.

"This is the voice of world control. I bring you peace. It may be the peace of plenty and content or the peace of unburied death." -- Colossus: The Forbin Project

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The Professional Left is brought to you by our wholly imaginary "sponsors" and real listeners like you!

Professional Left Podcast Episode 920: President Queeg

“Madness in great ones must not unwatched go.” -- Hamlet, Bill Shakespeare.

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The Professional Left is brought to you by our wholly imaginary "sponsors" and real listeners like you!

Professional Left Podcast Episode 919: Superman and Hamlet, Plus The News Of The Week

"Words, words. words." -- Hamlet, Bill Shakespeare.

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The Professional Left is brought to you by our wholly imaginary "sponsors" and real listeners like you!

Professional Left Podcast Episode 916: Hot Take Time Machine

"It is the folly of too many to mistake the echo of a London coffee-house for the voice of the kingdom." -- Jonathan Swift

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The Professional Left is brought to you by our wholly imaginary "sponsors" and real listeners like you!

Professional Left Podcast Episode 901: They're All Jeff Gannon Now (Plus Love to St. Louis)

"Why now, blow wind, swell billow, and swim bark!
The storm is up, and all is on the hazard." -- William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar, 5.1.72

Links:  

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The Professional Left is brought to you by our wholly imaginary "sponsors" and real listeners like you!

The Real Guns of the South

Harry Turtledove's excellent, award-winning alternate history science fiction novel, "The Guns of the South", is set during the American Civil War. 

The story deals with a group of time traveling members of the Afrikaner AWB -- a South African nationalist, white supremacist, and neo-Nazi political party -- from 21st-century (Hey, that's us!)  In their timeline, the South African system of apartheid has been overthrown, but these fuckers have access to a time machine.  So, in the hopes of saving and spreading their depraved ideology, they travel back in time to the American Civil War and supply Robert E. Lee's Army of Northern Virginia with AK-47s and other advanced technology, medicine and intelligence. 

Their intervention results in a Confederate victory in the war.

33 years ago, in 1992 when the novel was published, who could have guessed that time travel shenanigans wouldn't be necessary for Afrikaner AWB scum to find safe harbor and political power in the United States?   All it took was 40 years of relentless propagandizing from Hate Radio and 30 years of relentless propagandizing from Fox News, and the relentless propagandizing from the rest of Conservative media to sculpt the Republican base into reprogrammable meatbags who adored the idea of a white Christian nationalist authoritarianism, and a few South African billionaires willing to put up millions of dollars to buy the White House for a corrupt degenerate felon who is 100% on-board with the white supremacist agenda.

From The New York Times:

The Road to Trump’s Embrace of White South Africans

The Trump administration’s hostile approach to South Africa was shaped by a convergence of factors.

It was May 2019 and national security officials were in the Situation Room discussing Iran when President Trump abruptly changed the subject. He wanted to talk about granting asylum and citizenship to white South African farmers.

Mr. Trump had floated the idea before, claiming that the farmers were a persecuted minority group being displaced from their land, according to John R. Bolton, his national security adviser at the time, who was at the meeting.

Mr. Bolton said he thought little of Mr. Trump’s wish. The president had embraced fringe ideas and false narratives pushed by white Afrikaner activists, Mr. Bolton said.

“It never amounted to anything, so I just put it as typical Trump,” Mr. Bolton recalled in a recent interview. “Some random person tells him something and he’s obsessed with it.”

Years later, Mr. Trump’s views on white farmers in South Africa are shaping U.S. foreign policy in his second term. On Monday, the first group of Afrikaners, a white ethnic minority that ruled during apartheid in South Africa, landed in Washington, as the Trump administration upended a refugee system that had provided sanctuary for those fleeing war, famine and natural disasters.

The administration is welcoming white South Africans after suspending the program for everyone else, including other Africans who have waited in refugee camps for years and were vetted and cleared, and Afghans who supported the U.S. war in their country...

From The Guardian:

‘Trump and Musk are gaslighting’: anti-apartheid artist on how US president and his billionaire ally are attacking South Africa

From MoneyWeb:

The deep South African ties in the Trump administration

Apart from Elon Musk it’s clear the US president has the ear of South Africans, or those who have lived here.

Everyone by now is aware that Elon Musk has the ear of US President Donald Trump, and is to a large extent shaping US attitudes to SA.

Apart from Musk, there are several others with strong South African ties in Trump’s inner circle, including David Sacks, the US’s new AI and crypto czar; billionaire investor Peter Thiel, a key backer of Trump for many years; and Joel Pollak, who has been tipped as the next US ambassador to SA...

I Am The Liberal Media

Ethical Movie Titles

Call Things By Their Right Names

Professional Left Podcast Episode 870: Propaganda! (Science Fiction University)

All episodes available at our Science Fiction University website here.

Mysterious Flying Machines + New Jersey = ...Yoyodyne Propulsion Systems?

C'mon!  Wake up sheeple!  Do I need to draw you a picture?

No Matter Where You Go, There You Are