Zerothink

I Rest His Case

August 2, 2018

On the first episode of the Colbert Report back in 2005, Stephen Colbert coined the term “truthiness.”  Two days after the very, very poorly attended inauguration of the 45^th president, Kellyanne Conjob brought us the unmitigated joy and loathing of “alternative facts.”  Ari Melber recently talked about “Chrumpwellian language”.  None of these people was the first to broach the subject of contorting the common tongue into near paralysis, verging on uselessness.

We are assaulted every single day by a tsunami of lies.  Mostly from one single, sociopathic, stunningly stupid schmuck.  Lies I tell you.  But, you knew that.  Everybody knows it.  Some ignore it, but it does not stop. And it hurts.  It hurts us all.  It is a lit match held to the fabric of our nation. 

In 1949, George Orwell wrote 1984.  Orwell wrote it to warn people about the dangers of totalitarianism.  Donald Chrump is using it as an instruction manual.  Orwell coined the term doublethink: the ability to hold two completely contradictory thoughts simultaneously while believing both of them to be true.  Chrump seems to have made Orwell’s doublethink America’s official mindset.  His followers applaud wildly when he claims to have invented daylight two weeks ago, and applaud just as mightily when he says day is night and blames in on Hillary Clinton.  The media mostly plays along, afraid of angering Velveeta Vladimir.  After Kellyanne let the rat out of the bag with her claim that the Chrump administration had every right to present “alternative facts” when the factual facts proved inconvenient, 1984 shot up to #5 on Amazon’s best-seller list in 2017.

Der Furor heads his own real life Ministry of Truth, another Orwellian invention.  Chrump and his spokesliars will say anything that suits his demented ego, and are all too content tampering with our reality in favor of their alternative one.  An absolute master of doublethink, phrases like war is peace, freedom is slavery, Chrump is presidential, and “I have a very good brain” are now commonplace.

Chrump, immediately after telling reporters he did not want to talk about lying about writing the totally dishonest statement “explaining” Don Jr.’s treasonous meeting with Russian operatives in Chrump Tower, had this exchange with reporter Kristen Welker:

Welker: “Mr. president, about Don Jr., did you dictate the statement about Don Jr?”

Trump: “Let's not talk about it.”

Welker: “But can you tell us?”

Trump: “You know what that is? It's irrelevant. It's a statement to the New York Times, the phony, failing New York Times.” He shushed Welker's follow-up. “Just wait a minute, wait a minute.”

Welker: “To clear it up.”

Trump: “That's not a statement to a high tribunal of judges, understand? That's a statement to the phony New York Times. In fact, frankly, he shouldn't even speak to the New York Times because they only write phony stories anyway, although yesterday they wrote a nice story.”

Chrump thinks lying to the “phony, failing New York Times” is suitable, though he seems to acknowledge that it might be bad form to lie to “a high tribunal of judges.”  Presumably, he will decide that lying to Robert Mueller is acceptable, since Mueller is not a judge.  Not many people* know this, but if someone lies to Robert Mueller these days, they could conceivably end up spending a little quality time – and I do not mean front row seats to Hamilton – with a judge, maybe even a tribunal.  Chrump has truly earned the right to lie to Mueller as much as he wants.  About whatever he wants.  I look forward to watching him give this a try.

Zerothink

Chrump is maintaining a precarious balancing act between doublethink and Zerothink – a term coined just now by yours truly.  Zerothink is the power of spitting out lies with no beliefs of any kind, with wanton disregard for, well, for everything.  Zerothink requires an empty mind, but not the empty mind of Zen meditation.  It is the empty mind of thoughtlessness, vapidity, ignorance, hatred and pure, unadulterated idiocy.  It is the mind of Donald Chrump and his many empty-minded minions.  It is possible that Chrumpwellian language is a quantum stumble beyond Orwellian language.  Orwell thought it would take until 2050 for doublethink to become the status quo.  He seriously misunderestimated the human race, or at least Americans.

George Orwell’s famous 1940 – first-ever – mic drop

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* Actually, only one person seems to not know this.

I. Mangrey reporting.  There’s no place like home, there’s no place like home.