Mary Shelley metaphorically offered her fearful criticism of the burgeoning scientific age in the early 19th Century in her classic novel, Frankenstein. In the end, the monster, created by the scientific genius of Victor Frankenstein, returns to his birthplace and tells Victor, “You are my creator, but I am your master; Obey!” Though science fiction and the cautious warnings from the field of medical ethics have treated dangers akin to Shelley’s imagined monster, the real threat of modernity has come to us through the technology of the machinery of warfare and now through the mass media’s ability to manipulate the psyche of the general population.
The pampleting of earlier centuries have given way to the much more passive communication of TV “news” and it’s nearly indistinguishable kin in paid advertisements. How does an absurd conspiracy theory such as “Obama is coming for our guns,” get sustained in the absence of any evidence of any abatement of the inexplicable growth of privately own lethal weapons? The simple explanation is the nearly fact free drum beat of corporate news stations that have found punching the buttons of paranoia to be easier and more profitable than basic journalism have elevated lies to the status of reality.
An excellent case is point is the current trend among southern politicians to use the dis-ease felt among many by the prospect of encountering a transgender person in the close quarters of a public restroom. The anxiety is often articulated as a fear of sexual assault though there have been, in the history of our nation, exactly ZERO cases of a transgender woman or man sexually assaulting anyone in a restroom. The obvious truth is that there is no one more uncomfortable in a public restroom than is a transgendering woman or man. And so far as crime statistics go, the real prospect of assault is against the transgendering person. Currently, about half of all fatal hate crimes are against transgendering women, a fact that renders all of the hysteria about who uses which public restroom to be obvious hypocrisy.
Conservatives have used dog-whistle topics to manipulate a fearful population to vote for the candidates that would protect them from the imagined ravages of gay marriage, the prospects of Muslim immigrants imposing Sharia Law in their American cities, the outlawing of guns, and the undocumented immigrants who harvest our crops, lay our bricks, and shingle our roofs. For more than thirty years, from the days of the Moral Majority, the uninformed have been played by the Republican party in every election cycle, continually feeding their fears of non-existent threats while actually rigging the economic system to transfer the wealth of the poor and middle class into the hands of those at the top of the economic ladder.
We now stand on the cusp of the first brokered presidential election conventions since 1952. Ironically, in that year, both Republican and Democratic conventions opened without a certain candidate. Bernie Sanders’ challenge to the once evident coronation of Hillary Clinton may yet make the Democratic convention a battle ground but more certainly, the once absurdly crowded field of Republican candidates will have spread the delegates out enough to make the Republican convention must-see-TV.
The voices of party sages such as Jeb Bush and Mitt Romney decrying the popularity of Donald Trump gives evidence to the anxiety felt by traditional Republicans but their warnings have only fueled the fire that their predecessors started. Richard Nixon blew the dog whistle of fear of Communism, Reagan picked up the refrain with renewed fear of Communists, flavored with substantive fear of the poor. Thirty years of constantly motivating their voting base by fear and prejudice has come home to roost. Though party elders want to declare that Donald Trump is not a true conservative and even try to libel him by calling him a Democrat, the truth is that he is their propaganda inspired creation and now, a la Mary Shelley, the monster has become the master, and, as the novel unfolded two centuries ago, this is bound to end tragically for the Republican Party. We can only hope that they do not take our nation and the rest of the world into the flames of the monsters funeral pyre with them.