The Sunday Review
Figuring out what did and did not happen
by Mike Meyer ~ Honolulu ~ November 8, 2020
We have learned a lot, but is it enough? Certainty is not a useable word in our world, and that is a painful loss. Truth, very much like quantum mechanics, is not a point to grasp but a wave acting as an array.
The propaganda claim that truth does not exist is wrong, and lies are actually lies. Reality is a continuously shifting array of positions based on perception and potentialities linking to universal laws. We do not directly connect to the things that embody the universal laws even though we can shape them.
But that’s the realm of the new materialism and object-oriented ontology within speculative realism as the larger term. The second link is a lecture by Graham Harmon that explains both and shows how they are linked. But that is for those intrigued by the shift in thinking about people and objects and who is on first, as Abbott and Costello once explained in an ancient comedy routine.
For people more concerned with understanding what is going on, the problem is simple. We have way too many variables than we are comfortable juggling concurrently, and the truth is a wave rather than a point.
The results and implications of Biden and Harris's election to replace the disastrous Trump regime illustrate this explicitly. Biden and Harris's success took some time due to the delays imposed in places on mail-in vote processing, but the results are clear and numbers irrefutable. That doesn’t stop those out on the edges of the array field claiming anything they can think of to claim and thus proposing an alternate reality for themselves and anyone interested.
An interesting result, something that seems to have been learned through Trump’s disastrous reign, is that truth masses more than lies. Lies float around but have no weight or no proof. While we have dealt continuously with the horror of Big Lies, even with millions of people believing them, they are tenuous, and the majority see through them.
Like clouds, they can quickly dissipate. You can’t simply lie to people endlessly and have people keep paying attention. Somehow this seems relevant to Trump’s announced presser by Rudy Giuliani on Saturday at the Four Seasons Landscape company parking lot. The entanglement of truth and lies in that were not at all what they first appeared.
The Four Seasons Landscape Company parking lot was authentic, and Rudy Giuliani appeared there. Everything after that slid off the scale into riotous laughter. Trump’s denial of defeat floated off with Rudy Giuliani waving his arms in a fog of frivolous claims with matching lawsuits in suburban landscape company’s parking lot next to a sex toy store.
While several million dangerous people are seriously infected with Trumpian narcissistic psychosis who need to be watched, the center seems to have dissipated. Something significant has been learned about lies, propaganda, and serious personality disorders.
In the larger picture, Biden and Harris gave good acceptance speeches and said all the right things for the great majority of people exhausted by the disaster in all of its forms. Almost none of it means much until the Georgia Senate seat's final run-off election on January 5, and the odds are the Trump disease will linger, blocking essential changes.
But the great majority of the planet’s population has decided that this is good enough to warrant relief and hope. Happiness has been sparse for the last five years as the pseudo fascist infection with rampant racism, corruption, and criminality set in. A tentative projection is that this can be beaten back with work and numbers.
My sense is now that people are willing to let Trump and his remaining stooges sulk and throw tantrums, but there is little that they can do that Biden's immediate executive actions cannot reverse. The masslessness of pseudo fascist movements is a reality. They can damage and kill people, but they cannot gain a majority following in even moderately educated countries. They rule is as an authoritarian minority and a not very bright minority at that.
Trump’s intent on revenge and scorched earth threat has already been badly damaged by his weak tantrums and Rudy Giuliani’s Mary Poppins imitation in the landscape company parking lot. As several people have noted, Trump cannot handle being laughed at and ignored and often revert to sulking in front of his TV set. His consistent laziness may be our protection for the next eleven weeks. We can hope.
Hope has been so long lost; we need to take a little time to get familiar with it again. A strange condition that we don’t know how far to trust but are fairly sure that it isn’t too far. I think people are now much more careful and observant, and that is a real win.
