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The Game is On

3 0
12.06.2025

“We’re flooded in shit, and we’re still searching for a way to shovel it out,”

– James Carville

While we are angst full over whether or not we’re in a Constitutional Crisis or not, President Donald J. Trump is just about to declare, unlawfully, a state of Insurrection in Los Angeles, is a stone’s throw from then declaring Martial Law and following that with an Executive Order postponing the Congressional Elections, the game, as Sherlock Holmes would say, is afoot. And then he charges after the Evil Moriarity armed with the certain and infallible methods of deduction.

We’re not so armed, nor does our President have Moriarity’s genius. He’s not on a 4D chessboard of moves so brilliant we can’t keep up. It’s not genius but clinical mania, a callous insouciance. I suggest that where he’s at is where the country is, though we’re shaken by what is in play, traumatized by losing our capacity to refute and shut down, shovel out, our President’s manic destruction of democracy certainly. Deeper though we are desperately angered and unhinged by the destruction of what reality is and the passing of our common grasp of truth.

About 35 years ago I began to teach a course in postmodern thought, not the various movements in the fine arts but its way of knowing, not Enlightenment or 20th Century Modernism but a swerve away from both. I was particularly interested in its impact on politics and so taught a course on radical political thought, focus on the U.S.

In short, I taught courses which the Trump gang is now rabid to excise. If indeed, they exist anywhere.

I want now to write about the intersection of these two courses and the way in which President Trump does politics. I want to once again talk about the game we’re in and the chessboard it’s being played on. Spoiler: it’s bottomless.

I find that the President practices a key tenet of the postmodern and that is the absence of an external point of reference that disputants could be directed to, see and accept as an adjudicating arbiter. It’s that point outside our own arguments that serves as a perfect template compelling acquiesce and so leading to common understanding.

In the absence of that something transcending our words, we have words that are in an interminable crushing battle as to see which hold The Truth. A whirlwind of spin and spectacle. See YouTube.

If the happy Enlightenment view was that Reason would make Truth transparent, and the scary 20thCentury modernist view was that........

© CounterPunch