In a turnaround so preposterous it could hardly have been imagined, yesterday the former President took a phrase with an established definition, culture-wide, and simply told his loyalists that it didn't mean that at all, that it was going to mean what he claimed it meant. "The Big Lie" had, by frequent usage, been given to mean his big lie, specifically that the election, now seven months behind us, was a fraud, that, in fact, he was the winner in a landslide because the Democrats and their stooges, had somehow altered or harvested fraudulent ballots in sufficient quantity, a national movement, to make sure Joe Biden won, when clearly, if hadn't been for the criminal voting fraud, Donald Trump should have been king.
"The Big Lie" belonged to him, a man who amassed thousands of lies throughout his Presidency, standard operating procedure. It's hard to say this latest one is his grandest, but few really rattle the Richter Scale at this level.
"The Fraudulent Presidential Election of 2020 will be, from this day forth, known as THE BIG LIE!" Trump ruled on Monday, transforming the words that cursed him into a his own personal blessing. His cultic power is so great that he can--and did--alter the meaning of our words: the real Big Lie, he determined just yesterday, is what his enemies did to him.
And some people like him. Millions do. They love him. Worse, they believe him.
It's absolutely Orwellian. What he said and what he's done for as long as he has is right out of Animal Farm, the Orwell novel in which the animals eventually by fiat redo barnyard moral principals by altering accepted meanings.
Animal Farm is just a book, a fable that Orwell intended to use to comment on the evils of the Russian Revolution a century ago. I can't help but believe that we're starting to look more and more like the farm.
We've been watching a French drama about the German occupation during World War II, titled, simply A French Village. Twenty years ago now, a my cup ran considerably over with a weekly diet of Holocaust literature when I taught a course on the subject. Ever since, I have had a low tolerance for stories which dramatize the brutality of Nazi thugs occupying a land not their own, horrifying forces whose ruthlessness in a movie or book or story leaves me fearful.
A French Village is not a chronicle about heroes like Things We Couldn't Say or The Hiding Place. It is more than occasionally about heroic acts, thank goodness, but it's also about falsehood amid evil when men and women do absolutely deplorable things rather than do even worse deplorably things. A French Village is about what happens to a community overtaken by a ruthless power who exercises mind control over the electorate.
When ex-President Donald J. Trump can, by whatever form of media, tell his cultic masses that he has determined "the Big Lie" is not what people it is, but what he says it is--and they believe him--then it's difficult not to suggest that what he's doing is undercutting our--and his--own democratic system.
In Maricopa County, AZ, right now, vote counters, most of whom are Trump followers, appear to be counting ballots once more, even though the election results were audited twice previously by counters from both sides of the political aisle. Soon enough, I'd guess, we'll see how much closer we are to Animal Farm.
It's scary. It really is. Eighty percent of the people around me voted for him. It's very scary.
1 comment:
soon we'll know what the vote was or wasn't in Arizona
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