— by Polydamas
We here at The Cassandra Times have long admired the writings of Robert A. Heinlein, who was one of the pillars of the nascent science fiction literary genre. His writing career generally spanned from the 1940s through the 1980s. He could always be counted upon to expound upon deep ideas and make profound observations, often employing droll language.
Heinlein once observed that “A dying culture invariably exhibits personal rudeness. Bad manners. Lack of consideration for others in minor matters. A loss of politeness, of gentle manners, is more significant than is a riot”. To Heinlein, a society’s loss of manners and politeness was the canary in the coal mine. A riot is a symptom, a consequence which naturally results from internal rot, when a critical mass of people dispenses with polite manners as an unnecessary social lubricant, inevitably causing society’s engine to overheat and seize up.
In 1939, movie audiences were scandalized when Rhett Butler told Scarlett O’Hara in the movie Gone With the Wind, “Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn”. Certainly, curses and profanities were not unknown to previous generations. However, polite society shunned their widespread use, and they were confined to a very small and disreputable minority of gutter criminals. Contemptuous of social taboos, the ensuing rebellious counterculture generation of the 1960s then proceeded to revel in shocking its elders with a downward spiral of curses and profanities. Later, vulgar curses and profanities became an adolescent boy or girl’s rite of passage into adulthood. Now, coarse sexual language and vulgar profanities have trickled down into the elementary schools and kindergartens, casually uttered by children today with the same regard for propriety as yesteryear’s hoodlums.
The coarsening of society and the extinction of good manners are now epidemic. Profanity is everywhere, in movies, television, books, and especially in the public square, with the only notable exception perhaps being religious services in houses of worship. People from all walks of life, the highly-educated and the less so, spice up their oral and written communication with profanities. No less a luminary like Democratic New York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand was quoted in the April 4, 2017 edition of New York Magazine (http://nym.ag/2o5SxmQ) for her casual use of profanities that used to belong in men’s locker rooms.
Curse words of sexual and scatological origins used to be irritants that prompted violent confrontations, the so-called “fighting words”. Now, Americans as well as people in other western countries have become completely desensitized to curses and all other forms of opprobrium. Like people who have long lived among houseflies and mosquitoes become so habituated to these annoying pests that they no longer notice any tickling skin contact with them, curse words are now the “new normal”.
In the post 2016 presidential election period, Comedienne Kathy Griffin wanted to be considered even more edgy and avant garde by her fellow leftists. They had all publicly yearned for President Donald Trump’s untimely demise by assassination. She proceeded top their vitriol by participating in “performance art”, a photo shoot in which she grimly displayed, in the style of Islamic State’s bloodthirsty executioners, the decapitated latex head of Donald Trump. Her symbolic decapitation of Trump’s latex head was widely lauded by the coastal left as “authentic”, “artistic”, “pure political speech”, and proper “resistance to tyranny” while repulsing America’s heartland.
The backlash against Griffin for her offense was relatively modest. CNN promptly dismissed her from its New Year’s Eve lineup. Several politicians and media personalities distanced themselves from her. A few advertisers abandoned her as their media spokesperson. However, she was not arrested or suffered any severe legal repercussions. Griffin had simply provided a visual representation of every leftist’s fondest post-November 2016 wish, and the dominant mass culture remained firmly on her side.
Imagine, in contrast, the firestorm of outrage that would be unleashed if a conservative comedian were to hold up the severed latex head of Trump’s predecessor, President Barack Hussein Obama. The same leftists who now wholeheartedly support Kathy Griffin’s “performance art” as constitutionally-protected “pure political speech” would have called for the harshest penalties available under the law for threatening a president. The howls condemning “racism”, “lynching African Americans”, “Ku Klux Klan,” and the like would not have ceased for years.
Under the Obama administration, this comedian would have merited a pair of handcuffs, a Secret Service visit, a visit from the Federal Bureau of Investigations’ G-Men, a National Security Agency examination of every one of his e-mails for the past two decades, a tax audit from the Internal Revenue Service, a Department of Justice investigation, and an indictment for a hate crime. He would have been legally prosecuted like Nakoula Basseley Nakoula, who wrote and produced the short Youtube movie “Innocence of Muslims” that the Obama administration sought to blame for the 2012 attack in Benghazi.
Hollywood’s leftists and leftists everywhere would have demanded the most severe societal punishments for the conservative comedian many times worse than for Mel Gibson, and he would have been boycotted socially and professionally for the rest of his life. His life would be threatened, and he would have had no choice except to undergo plastic surgery and placed in the witness protection program. He would have been forced to go into exile, not unlike Salman Rushdie against whom a death sentence fatwa was issued for penning a novel “The Satanic Verses” considered to be critical of Islam’s prophet Mohammad.
Almost equally repulsive to America’s flyover country was New York Public Theater’s Shakespeare at the Park’s most recent production of “Julius Caesar”. This play features an actor resembling Donald Trump, complete with a shock of hair, a business suit with a red tie, and a Slovenian wife, playing the role of Julius Caesar. He is then bloodily assassinated to the great satisfaction of the audience, which yearns for the real assassination of Donald Trump or, at the very least, a voodoo curse to the same effect.
It is our contention here at The Cassandra Times that the public discourse about the assassination and demise of Donald Trump are not merely the paroxysms of intense rage by unhinged leftists. They are not only the “mother of temper tantrums” by spoiled toddlers who were denied the prize of the presidency and the ability to irretrievably shape America in their own image. Instead, we believe that they are a part of a sophisticated Deep State media campaign to desensitize Americans to the upcoming assassination of their sitting president.
Like the proliferation of profanity to the point that it desensitizes the public, becomes the “new normal”, and is scarcely noticed any longer, Americans are being gradually prepared by the Deep State to accept the inevitable resolution of the existential threat against the Beltway swamp — the assassination of Donald Trump. An unprepared American public would normally revolt against the Deep State for countermanding the results of a popular democratic election and may even resort to violent insurrection. The Deep State wishes to rid itself of its mortal enemy while pacifying the public and avoiding a civil war.
Americans simply cannot hope to sustain on a daily basis the adrenaline-fueled outrage at the various mainstream media’s chattering heads eagerly discussing with a gleam in their eyes various assassination and continuity of government scenarios. They cannot feel for a prolonged period the height of outraged emotions at the “performance art” of Kathy Griffin or the Public Theater’s Shakespeare at the Park production. At some point, they will no longer be moved by television shows and popular music calling out for Donald Trump’s head and lifeblood. The public’s emotional strength is limited and exhaustion is bound to set in.
Once emotional exhaustion sets in, President Trump will, indeed, be assassinated by the Deep State, an act which will be pinned on a lone wolf, a disgruntled former veteran, the 21st century’s version of Lee Harvey Oswald, who assassinated President John Fitzgerald Kennedy. An added benefit to our ruling elite will be to capitalize on the event with a drastic rollback of the Second Amendment. Like Vice-President Lyndon Johnson before him, Vice-President Mike Pence is a government insider who is much more acceptable to the Deep State than the revolutionary men that they replaced. New President Pence will publicly vow to faithfully continue his predecessor’s groundbreaking policies, but he will quietly abandon Trump’s campaign to drain the Beltway swamp in which the Deep State lives and thrives. The lion’s share of Pence’s decision will be based upon his own self-preservation.
In the 1960s, Bobby Fuller sang and recorded the immortal rock anthem “I Fought the Law (and the Law Won)”. Shortly thereafter, the 23-year-old Fuller was found dead, the victim of an ostensible suicide by asphyxiation in his car, which some people believe was murder. The Deep State may not succeed in getting Donald Trump to sing “I Fought the Deep State (and the Deep State Won)”, but his end may very well be quite the same. And the non-elite American people will have lost their populist champion and a truly transformative president.