TO constantly have to see Donald Trump ply the hustings with dinosauric dominance is both exciting and reassuring for those of us who loathe demagogues. Trump is consummate demagogue…as quintessential as they come. The prototype demagogue sees the fault line inside his target crowd, sets his chisels into the cracks till the plates become irreversibly unstuck.
He is often wily enough to know there are two routes to winning an argument: The wrong but easier…appealing to the emotions of the crowd and by practiced skills, work those emotions to such frenzy, none in the room can afford the distraction of analysis. Or the correct but arduous…appealing to sense of logic and though prone to the risks of exasperative and analytic scrutiny can in the end result in enduring dividends. The demagogue knows only too well the risk of situating a debate in the brain, seeking with dogged commitment, to wag the polemics into the belly.
Steered in the direction of the guts, facts and data no longer matter, only feelings and hot winds do. And from inside the messy mix of the gut, the demagogue pops out the champion of the carnival, his more cerebral spars left to wonder what the hell has just befallen them.
But those who know demagogues as much as they do dinosaurs also know only too well the tragic transience that is the fate of dinosauric myopia .
Long after the vegetation had changed, dinosaurs refused to evolve their dentition and the resulting mismatch between a nascent diet and an archaic tooth dealt the extinction blow to a once indomitable genius. Donald Trump is plagued with a dinosaur sensorium of events in his country and the world…his eventual demise sired inside the seeds of a totemic ignorance. But unlike his ‘predecessor’ dinosaurs whose disappearance dragged over a period, his will be sudden, marked by apocalyptic death at the general elections when he would come to shockingly realise how electorally unforgiving the new demographic fauna in today’s America has become; particularly to those who refuse to venture outside the bubble into which decades of monochromatic hegemony has them trapped. Donald Trump lumbers around with the imperial but suicidal machismo of times gone by when it was sufficient to simply cry tally-ho to rally loyal troops whose combat colors were primevally tribal or racial.
Today’s America may still be racial, but within the new electoral dynamics, so much progress has been made it is almost impossible to win a white house riding either a single color or single world view. Monochromatic tyranny has been softened if not vanquished into a polychromatic eclecticism that plants very firmly non-negotiable obstacles in the electoral paths of demagogues and demagoguery. To win the lot, you must first woo the lot. Dinosauric Trump seems blind to this evolution, luxuriously littering his own path with an outlandish litany of insults to any and everyone calculated merely to entertain and retain his choir brigade, oblivious that none in today’s America can mount the throne with a cavalry only the size of a brigade. It may yet turn out that Trump is what Salman Rushdie (the famed author of “Satanic verses”) aptly described in a recent piece as the “Manchurian candidate” ‘planted’ for no other reason than make Hillary Clinton the next president.
Whatever the case, I see a Donald Trump firmly routed in the legacy of the dinosaurs with the only difference that his own extinction will be sudden not gradual. For far much less, Mitt Romney sank into quicksand. A bellicose Trump promising nothing but shock and awe to the world, ruder by several degrees than Mitt deserves either same or better yet a sink hole. What a pleasurable prospect for peaceniks like me.
GUARDIAN
END
Be the first to comment