Overcast with some occasional faded-yellow sunshine this Thursday afternoon on California’s north coast — we’re awaiting a week’s cycle of storms to roll-out across the region later today.
According to the NWS, the first round starts tonight and ‘will linger‘ through Saturday; the second on Sunday, and the last in this latest series arrives supposedly on Tuesday.
Unsettled weather all over, especially in the era of the T-Rump nonsense, where sense isn’t required, or even offered — in just less than two weeks and ranting-reality has consumed the planet.
This was directly concerned with T-Rump’s nasty call to the the Australian PM, but it could actually explain his whole shit-show:
‘In short, I consider it not only possible but likely that the President of the United States does not know and is not given basic facts about the world, and is making snap, angry judgments based not only on absence of knowledge but wild overconfidence despite lack of it.’
(Illustration found here).
In the 2002 movie, “28 Days Later,” this guy wakes up from a coma in a London hospital and discovers a virus has made the UK a haven for zombies — talk about a shock to the system. One of the few zombie movies I really liked (of course, “Shaun of the Dead“), and did make some sense.
Similar, we’ve been sleeping-awake, and watched in horror as cruel, ignorant zombie-like forms ravish our country with an odorous unhinged arrogance unmatched even by GW Bush standards, or anyone else in recorded US history.
Beyond national shame and embarrassment, there’s the possibility of death, such as in that botched raid in Yemen, which cost the life of a US SEAL — T-Rump okayed the mission ‘“without sufficient intelligence, ground support or adequate backup preparations.”‘
Just the beginning…
In placing T-Rump in history, a good view would be from the way-past, not just back a few years to Hitler and Mussolini, but back to the halcyon days of ancient Rome.
Last week, art critic Jonathan Jones had a most-interesting feature at the Guardian about how to classify T-Rump, as we would the tyrants of Rome.
Especially, the emperor Commodus, also the featured villain of the movie, “Gladiator,” and his likeness in a marble portrait bust fund in Rome’s Capitoline Museum. Commodus is posing as the mythic hero Hercules. Read the whole piece, makes great, but scary sense — key points:
This is an idea Donald Trump might like.
He surrounds himself with gold as lavishly as any tyrant.
Why not commission a portrait of himself as Hercules for the Oval Office instead of just moving around busts of Winston Churchill and Martin Luther King?
The way the worst Roman emperors are portrayed in art can help us to see Trump more clearly.
When we look at the face of Commodus in this eerie portrait, we are staring into the eyes of unhinged, utterly perverse tyranny.
When this son of the respected emperor Marcus Aurelius took control of the vast Roman empire in AD161 he embarked on a career of bizarre folly and monstrous cruelty.
As well as executing his enemies and perceived enemies, he liked to fight in the arena, killing gladiators with his own hands in a spectacle that educated Romans found shameful and disturbing.
…
You get the picture, or pictures.
The Romans did not see tyranny as a single fixed set of symptoms.
Tiberiua, Caligula, Nero, Commodus and the many freakish rulers thrown up by later Roman history are all different, all singular.
When we look at Trump, when we try to get the measure of the world’s most powerful man, we could compare him with these odd and extremely dangerous characters.
You don’t have to be a Hitler to threaten democracy and peace, a look at Roman art and history reveals: a Caligula or Commodus is equally scary.
All tyrants are different — mad, bad, stupid or sick, they tend to be wild and uninhibited characters who are highly original in their excesses.
So is the 45th president of the United States.
Maybe a coma is preferable..?