Monsters, Inc.

Will They Be Circling the Drain by Halloween?

Kristi “Roz” Noem, at her Homeland Security Office, preparing for another day of fear and loathing in America (from “Monsters, Inc. © Disney-Pixar Animation Studios, 2001).

War is being waged against us. It has gone beyond the simple stage of we are being prepared for war — for we are no longer being prepared, since what we want no longer even matters. The front lines off Venezuela’s coast, off Colombia’s, against the Federal Reserve (how dare it behave as its 1910 legislation intended — as an independent monetary body?), against the Kingdom of Denmark (how dare it continue to deny us Greenland?), against Chicago, Jimmy Kimmel and Stephen Colbert, against New York, Memphis, Canada (how dare they remind us what a tariff really does?), against the Voting Rights Act of 1965, James Comey, Boston, our health insurance, with China (on-again/off-again/on-again/off-again/on-again), against our history and culture, the federal government itself (as we undergo the 2nd longest shutdown in our history, and the 2nd one President Excreta has dumped all over us) — never has there been a war with this many simultaneous, unrelated front lines.

Sandwiched between dousing frogs with tear gas in Portland and arresting large penises in Alabama, ICE is still raiding immigrants (72% of whom have been taken into custody without any criminal record whatever) — tamale vendors, food handlers, day laborers, abuelas and their grandchildren — restrained in zipties, sometimes kicked, degraded, beaten, always humiliated, spirited off to God-knows-where. Not a speck of it has made America one iota safer, better, happier, more prosperous, more respected, more stable, more honored at home and abroad. Prices continue to rise — the Administration no longer bothers reporting on the data showing by how much. The rich continue to do well — yet the 40% of households who do not invest in the stock market have rarely felt as vulnerable as they do right now.

Masked ICE Agents from the Child Detection Agency Prepare for Another Day of School-Crossings (something their creators at Pixar Studios never intended, “Monsters, Inc.” 2001).

Fear rules our land now. Fear of neighbors. Fear of “them.” Fear mostly of ourselves, stoked by a *parasite with a podium* who stokes a seemingly inexhaustible sense of dread lurking within America’s id — inside the rotten, MAGAfied base that rewards his ego, even as he appeals to the very worst in them. Fear lurks deep within our Repulsican Congress and state legislatures —- hundreds of terrified louses constantly wetting their diapers, quaking with fear —- fear of being primaried, of being doxed, of being found out, of surviving without their Shadow. Fear has become the fertilizer of shit that makes all these needless wars of aggression, arrogance and stupidity possible. Fear has always served this purpose for tyrants — not just for this one, but for those the world over.

And all of them fancy themselves architects of glory as they push their wretchedly bad taste in buildings and entertainment forward. This one yanks his straight out of The Beverly Hillbillies — boorish, crude, resplendent, tacky, megalomaniacal as befitting the sensibilities of a 2-year-old psychopath dazzled by shiny things. One look at the plans for his giant Bread and Circuses ballroom on the White House grounds now set to be built over the rubble of the East Wing tells you that.

Once before, in 1981, convinced of similar greatness and glory, the Bulgarian Communist Party erected a monument to itself, high on a hill, overlooking nothing whatever — Buzludzha. Standing less than 7 years, it soon became a moment to nothing whatever — a crumbling, hollowed-out, useless, graffiti-stained absurdity and tourist sideshow. It is a reminder of the emptiness of buffoonish dictators and regimes which puzzlingly believe that they — and their architecture — will somehow live forever.

Bulgaria’s Abandoned Spaceship, Smeared in Graffiti and Giggles, © Paliparan, 2008.

Trump’s trashy taste for faux gold, his dumb brutishness and fondness for violence also mimic others before him, driven by even more unbridled brutality and absence of restraint. Nicolae Ceaușescu, the former despot of Communist Romania — a delusional thug with as much mastery of spoken Romanian as Trump has of English, and with the same bizarre arm gestures — comes to mind. He also shared Trump’s wretchedly foul taste in buildings, razing the entire historic section of Bucharest to make way for his gaudy Imperial Palace, built with chandeliers larger than those at Versailles, finally consuming 10% of the country’s gross national product to build. On tours today in Bucharest, you can see the empty electrical plug sockets with wires dangling out of them, never used.

In late November 1989, after tens of thousands refused to let his brutal regime remove a dissident Hungarian priest from his pulpit, Ceauşescu attacked demonstrators on the street, killing scores. He then held an improbable open-air rally in Bucharest on December 21, complete with over 100,000 forced attendees, who stood for hours in freezing cold, as he started to lecture them, terrorize them, dispensing a few trinkets to quell their displeasure. Standing on a the giant parapet of the Central Committee building, flanked by his lovely wife, his arm pumped up and down, defending a political order that at that moment is crumbling all over Central Europe.

And then it happened. Everything turned — on a dime. It all happened within seconds, covered by a stunned State TV that was operating without instructions on how to censor what was about to happen. The first line of forced, paid demonstrators clapped at those tiresome, slurred lines extolling the virtues of socialism, yet the remaining 99,500 stood silent as mice. A pre-recorded tape broadcast some other crowd roaring its approval on some other day. All at once, a deadly silence was broken by jeers and screams erupting from the crowds below. A clearly stunned, confused dictator stopped orating for a moment, his gaze fixated on something he had never seen before. Shouting “KEEP QUIET! KEEP QUIET!” over and over again — in an instant arrogance metamorphosed into sheer terror. Mrs. Macbeth then tried to silence the crowds as the cameras suddenly tilt skyward. When the cameras return, a secret police official could be heard whispering: “they’ve entered the building.” Unshown by State TV, hundreds of people suddenly stormed the Central Committee searching for the tyrant.

Spirited away by helicopter to a nearby town, but soon turned in by their own pilot, abandoned by the army, with the Secret Police in disarray, Mr. and Mrs. Eva Braun were forcibly returned to Bucharest that same afternoon. The next morning, his Minister of Defense committed suicide. They themselves were put on immediate trial for genocide and embezzlement, found summarily guilty by a swiftly convened tribunal, then dragged off — bound and tied — to a dirty, snowy alley on Christmas Day, where a firing squad emptied round after round at them both. Romanian State TV broadcast the stills showing their crumpled bodies. The message — without any subtlety to everyone everywhere leaving tyranny’s dark shadow: there’s no going back.

Ceauşescu’s Final Speech, December 21, 1989, Bucharest, Romania (the unraveling of everything starts at about 1:25).

No sane person willingly prays for such violence. Its advent is terrifying; its outcome is never known. But evil spells held together by fear and terror can and do turn on a dime. It has happened countless times in history — in many places, and always at the most unexpected of moments. For uncurbed violence, unrestrained cruelty and wanton desecration of law and order by untethered tyrants always beget further violence, cruelty and desecration. We now stand — however unbelievingly for most of us — at the brink of another spell about to break — in our own country. The Rube Goldberg contraption Trump and his Wormtongues have built and held together with scotch tape and lies is beginning to creak in gale-force winds. Judges are ruling against them. A few officials are beginning to stand up to them. Some have quit rather than carry out their illegal orders. We now enter the period when — in the words of a famous character from children’s literature, Professor Albus Dumbledore of Hogwarts School of Magic — “we must all choose between what is right and what is easy.”

When will Republicans start making right choices? When will they realize there can be no way out of the nightmare they themselves created — except to bring about its end? When will they choose to put country over themselves? What price will they demand we pay while they continue to fail to do the right thing?

[*With thanks and appreciation to Closer to the Edge for choosing the right words…https://substack.com/@closertotheedge.]