AND THE CLOCKS WERE STRIKING THIRTEEN

Donald Trump launched his presidency by pouting because he lost the popular vote to Hillary Clinton, and because the crowd for his inaugural was smaller than both of Barack Obama’s crowds.  But he has shown strength in at least one unexpected area.  He has the power to turn books into Amazon best sellers.

He lashed out at Congressman John Lewis right before the Martin Luther King holiday, and voila, Lewis’ three graphic novels quickly became Amazon’s top three sellers.  But he was just getting warmed up. 

When the press finally began using words like “false” and “lies” to describe Trump’s falsehoods and lies, Trump went ballistic.  Sean Spicer and Kellyanne Conway rallied to his defense with even more lies.  Conway even contributed a new euphemism for lies: “alternative facts.”  That’s classic Orwellian language, and guess what?  Voila again.  Suddenly George Orwell’s 1984 became Amazon’s number one best seller. 

I read 1984 in high school, back in the 1960s.  We smugly believed that the totalitarian society it described was the Soviet Union, or maybe Nazi Germany.  Certainly not the USA.  We were the good guys.  But now some of the novel’s memorable quotes strike uncomfortably close to home. 

Apart from plain old “lies,” is there a better definition of Kellyanne Conway’s “alternative facts” than this?  “Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.”

And if you sat Steve Bannon down and gave him a dose of truth serum, would you be surprised if what came out of his mouth was something like this?  “The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power, pure power…. We are different from the oligarchies of the past in that we know what we are doing…. The German Nazis and the Russian Communists came very close to us in their methods, but they never had the courage to recognize their own motives. They pretended, perhaps they even believed, that they had seized power unwillingly and for a limited time, and that just around the corner there lay a paradise where human beings would be free and equal. We are not like that. We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power. Now you begin to understand me.”

And if we let this go on?  “If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—forever.”

Respect to the protestors at JFK, LAX, and other flashpoints.  Respect to the politicians who have denounced Trump's executive order.  Respect to the American Civil Liberties Union, which won a temporary stay of the executive order.  In other news, I've just joined the American Civil Liberties Union.