Trump, Junk Democracy and the Disneyfication of Politics.

How do I explain the election of a misogynist to my seven year old daughter?

You will change their lifestyle for the sake of your health. You'll get a good night's sleep. You'll eat more fruit. You'll take exercise.

So why, when it comes to your democracy, are you content with junk food? Why are you happy with opinion instead of fact, with conspiracy theory instead of evidence and understanding, with easy answers rather than the difficult questions we need to ask to achieve real change?

We want change but we're not prepared to read a book? We want a brighter future so tell us a fairy tale? Sell us a fairy tale? Don't ask me to participate in anything that requires any acual thought or effort to solve my problems. Take away that copy of Das Capital and pass me the Brothers Grimm instead.

But where's the choice, we say? Clinton or Trump. Coke or Pepsi. McDonald's or Burger King. They're all the same. Everything is equivalent. We are all victims and everything is a lie. Our world is fake so to live in it we have to be fake as well. We have no responsibilities. Being fake is easy. Take away the real democracy and pass me the junk.

Don't wait to be offered a choice. You make your own choice! Change is not on the menu. There is no option to supersize your revolution. There is no Democracy flavoured McFlurry. Read. Think. Talk. Help each other. Do not be afraid of difference. You will never be offered the change you need. You must make it yourselves. Make the effort to be real. The revolution will not be televised.  

There used to be a reality to which we were aware of being connected. We perhaps represented this in highly stylised works of fiction, in movies and TV series. But we always used to know the difference. We always had a point of reference to preserve our perspective.

But at some point this fiction became our only vocabulary for conceptualising and describing and discussing reality. We lost sight of our reference points. We lost touch with the basis our fictions had in reality. The fictions themselves then became our reality.

Our horizons shrank and reality dissappeared beyond the world's edge. We were left with a movie adaptation of a novelisation of a mini-series of a novel loosely inspired by someone's real life experience, and at some point that concatenation of culture became so long it was truncated, it snapped under the sheer weight of its references, and we were left adrift with only a shimmering mirage of modern fairy tales, memes, tropes, a bizarre creepypasta counterfeit of reality in which all references are circular and meaningless.

Reality is still there though, sanctioning our benefits, starving our children, closing our workplaces and laying us off, bombing the people that have been selected by corporate interests to be our enemies for today, shaking the hands of the criminals chosen to be our allies, siphoning the world's wealth and concocting schemes to make us pay for it.

But we are now completely disconnected from this reality which is the source of our pain and frustration. We are insulated within coccoons of distraction while reality inexplicably torments us with its spikes and barbs from the outside. Our only remaining connection to each other is mediated by the fictions we now accept as reality, and our starved intellects become thin clients for the rumour of wars.    

I was reading about the Mirai and Bashlight botnet DDoS attacks that took down whole networks and caused massive disruption recently. They do this by infecting the Internet of Things (IoT), turning toasters and refrigerators into armies of zombies pinging servers until they crash. It wasn't that widely reported, but you might have noticed some of the services you enjoy slowed down or were offline for a while. You don't need to hack anything to find the source code for Mirai. It was openly released on a forum by an individual calling herself anna-senpai. Google it.

Trump is a botnet that has taken down democracy. His fascist glamour has infected you with a false prospectus, with insinuations and grievances and rumours and gossip, pointed you in the wrong direction and got you vulnerable to every shred of clickbait, set you chasing every squirrel, got you pinging the ballot with a cross in his box, and this has taken down the Internet of People. He as described your pain and frustration in lurid, fictional terms to compensate you for the impoverishment of your own vocabulary. He does the waving, with his tiny hands, while you do the drowning.

No matter what your pains and frustrations are, Trump is not the answer. Trump is a weapon of mass distraction who now has access to weapons of mass destruction. And his second in line, Pence, is a religious fundamentalist, a creationist, waiting for the Rapture, who is now one heart beat away from holding his finger over the nuclear button. Florida's electoral college votes will become irrelevant when Florida itself is under water as a result of Trump's climate change denial and withdrawal from international agreements to prevent catastrophic climate change. Don't let Trump diagnose your problems. He's a snake oil salesman.

And don't think you can justify the prejudice, misogyny and ignorance you have just endorsed with increasingly pathetic sounds of "but Hillary!" Hillary is in the past now. You have bigger problems.

We are insects in the wreckage of Jericho.