ISIS and Trumpism: Mirror images of Each other?

Bismillah er-Rahmen er-Raheem

I’ve been noting that just as ISIL or ISIS is the natural extension of Saudi Wahabbism, and even little varied from its perverted ideology by acting out unthinkable atrocities based on its complete disregard for true Islamic principles, so the present hour’s Fascist American madness in the persons of Donald Trump and the Republican candidates for President are a natural extension of the still loose neo-con Republican and occasional Democrat masterminds who more recently triggered the whole debacle now playing out in the Middle East from their rashly sociopathic invasion and deranged mismanagement of the war and “peace” in Iraq. They are both chillingly mirror images of each other. Crude braggadocio in the worst comic-book fashion (nightmare editions), gross intolerance of any deviations from the professed ideology, obviously untutored but passionate hate mongering logorrhea, public running-off-at-the-mouth, which, if it doesn’t solidify official policy after all, will no doubt inspire equally unhinged but less restrained members of our oft-touted democratic society to take vigilante matters into their own hands, with dire results, and tragedies. (It’s already beginning.)

We have our own ISIS to contend with on our home turf, and their recruitment is growing apace the more hallucinatory the oratory of its principle voices becomes. Just like (but so far less fervently acted out, thank God) the bombast, recruitment and actions of ISIS far away. It’s not enough to say Trump must be stopped, maybe even arrested and charged with treason, under the tattered Constitution (but his masses of new acolytes would certainly make a martyr out of him, resulting in horrific retaliation), but something like a hypnotic gas is spreading over much of this country and drawing out the worst kind of bigotry and xenophobia. The Klu Klux Klan is “demonstrating” tomorrow at a Dallas Texas mosque. Southern Baptist Preachers are saying Islam is from Satan, and a false religion. Trump lightly regards violence done at his instigation to those who represent opposition to his pronouncements. Cheney is given a bust of himself in the Capitol Rotunda, honored as an American statesman. Bush was there at its unveiling, and made some jokes.

Does this miasma stem from the trauma still of the Civil War? The South, it has often seemed to me, and from direct experience of living in Atlanta, Georgia, and San Antonio and Austin, Texas, has not gotten over its “loss” to the North and to central civil government. And the “negro,” traumatized from slavery, and after its abolition, is still in a steady state of daily trauma, from finding out the emancipation has only led to further forms of enslavement. Like prisoners who tunnel out from their cells to escape and pop up somewhere in the middle of the Yard instead. Have all our national wounds so little healed that one scratch and out comes the most vicious venom, and racist hysteria? The public ugliness of hatred as soon as Obama won the presidency against the mere fact of his being African American, by those who vowed to thwart everything he would propose, across the board, regardless of its rationale!

Who’s to win “hearts and minds” across the waters amongst foreign and other-systems (of politics, religion, etc.) populations, when a miasma of madness is spreading in our own country, and dangerously close to poisoning the atmosphere and conversation of our way of life for some time to come, with worsening rather than lessening, of the deathly atmosphere and its consequences? Who?

Where must the transformation to beneficent consciousness take place?

Right here, at home. In our own hearts and minds. And a strong stand against further insanity. If Trump and his ISIS cohorts prevail, it’s all over now, baby blue — we’re doomed.

Categories: Blog, Essays