The dialectic that struggles in my brain pits two terrible things against one another – I sometimes think that Trump’s fascist coup has been an example of the chickens coming home to roost. The US – the fount that always destroys, plunders, extracts, exploits and tosses bombs (nuclear and “conventional”) on civilians across the face of the planet – has come to its predetermined fate. Trump is America, and America is Trump – “he alone” has not perfected cold hearted, transactional violence, he has merely become the face of the monster that has been there all along. Caitlin Johnstone argues that Trump is a mere distraction – the evil resides in the capitalist, colonial soul of historical America. We subtract Trump, in Johnstone’s view, and nothing changes. Johnstone – the Australian Journalist – offers US citizens a darkly rational view of ourselves.

On the other hand, I often feel that analytical, objective reasoning cannot capture the essential absurdity that has often evaded our pureed, confounded and injured minds. To engage in rational observations about American neofascism seems to be an act of self -deception. Trump comes from The Twilight Zone, or, he is a bad mushroom trip twisting the frayed neurons of hundreds of millions of us – we have been reduced to laboratory rats in a study of neurotoxicity.

I tend to gently list toward the mushroom/Twilight Zone theory of Trumpian fascism. The human brain has limits – if shit gets too weird we waste our time on reason. Perhaps the great Irish writer, Samuel Beckett, can explain human folly better than I can – in his novel Molloy, his narrator details a preposterously involved mathematical system designed to assure that his “sucking stones” (gathered pebbles that he holds in his mouth) be arranged in such a way that his collection of sixteen pebbles be sucked in an exact sequential order:

“There was something more than a principle I abandoned, when I abandoned the equal distribution, it was a bodily need. But to suck the stones in the way I have described, not haphazard, but with method, was also I think a bodily need. Here then were two incompatible bodily needs, at loggerheads. Such things happen. But deep down I didn’t give a tinker’s curse about being off my balance, dragged to the right hand and the left, backwards and forewards. And deep down it was all the same to me whether I sucked a different stone each time or always the same stone, until the end of time. For they all tasted exactly the same. And if I had collected sixteen, it was not in order to ballast myself in such and such a way, or to suck them turn about, but simply to have a little store, so as never to be without. But deep down I didn’t give a fiddler’s curse about being without, when they were all gone they would be all gone, I wouldn’t be any the worse off, or hardly any. And the solution to which I rallied in the end was to throw away all the stones but one, which I kept now in one pocket, now in another, and which of course I soon lost, or threw away, or gave away, or swallowed …”

In Beckett’s world, rational, analytic thinking does not obscure the deeper truth of existential absurdity, it is the absurdity. In our black hole of chaos, we cannot understand Trump with “sucking stone” reasoning. The pundits and political scientists can’t go below the surface – we can only look at Trump in the spirit of jaw dropped astonishment.

We have been dragged along to a point in time in which physical reality may no longer be relevant. Consider the Trump Gaza AI video. This will ultimately be viewed more times than the population of the planet. If you can find a piece of video somewhere, more ridiculous, ominously sinister, bat-shit warped, and beyond the pale, please send it along.

If even one person hasn’t seen it, I link it here. On the literal surface of things, it shows bombed out Gaza morphing into an ostentatious resort with Trump and Elon Musk gyrating to a catchy beat under showers of floating dollar bills. We see gold statues of Trump, a close up of Musk eating, Trump and Netanyahu reclining on beach chairs, belly dancers with beards and a panorama of sparkling ocean and yachts. But we have a still weirder subtext – evil has become entwined with comic nonsense, we have crossed the threshold into something morally unrecognizable. This isn’t just bad taste, but the alternative, parallel reality of some lost corner of the multiverse. Nazism never evolved to a point of moral refinement in which piles of corpses inspired choruses of Beer Barrel Polka.

The Nazis saw genocide as shameful, and once all hope of a military victory had vanished, they busily destroyed the evidence – burnt the corpses, the mass graves, and plowed the land over. Death camps became fields of grain. No Nazi ever imagined that Treblinka would be a nice spot for golf courses, restaurants and hotels. Trump Gaza transforms genocide into glitzy shlock. We have been inducted into a new reality that lays waste to our ability to comprehend.

My vain hope is that Trump Gaza will illuminate the moment in a way that our rational minds never dreamt possible. The public comments on YouTube videos are relentlessly hostile.

My favorite says quite simply: “What a terrible time to have eyes.”

Phil Wilson writes the blog Nobody’s Voice.

---