From Salon:
Chauncey DeVega: If Donald Trump somehow returns to office, either by election or through a successful coup, what will happen?
Psychologist John D. Gartner:
I believe it will make "The Handmaid's Tale" look like a vacation.
Above is the last sentence in what was the lead story on Salon this morning:
The first part of Chauncey DeVega’s article summarizes the news coming from the revelations in the books just now being published which could be on the shelf in the bookstore labeled “If you thought Trump was dangerous, here’s proof.”
This will be familiar to most of you. The meat of the article is the interview with the first mental health health professional to try to break the glass on the fire alarm and sound the alarm in the non-partisan and widely read popular press about the danger of Donald Trump in this USA Today article. USA Today is the most widely read daily newspaper in the country.
The USA Today article was published in May of 2017 but about a year earlier Gartner wrote “What is Trump’s Psychological Problem” in Huffington Post. I found it interesting that he ended that article using the phrase “dystopian science fiction” which is the same term in the title of the Salon article (emphasis added):
In April, The Economist Magazine put a Trump presidency in it’s top ten list of global risks to the economy and world peace—the first time it has ever included a candidate for any political office on its list. Now that he has wrapped up the Republican nomination, he has arguably graduated to the number one slot. The idea that the American nuclear codes could be in the hands of a grandiose, thin skinned paranoid, with little in the way of conscience or impulse control, is the stuff of dystopian science fiction.
Only this doomsday tale is no paranoid fantasy.
Monday, Jul 19, 2021 · 3:36:15 PM +00:00 · HalBrown
From Oct. 2020, more recommended reading. This article also references Handmaid’s Tale.
Many artistic works have been brought to bear to comment on current events, such as Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. I suggest that The Picture of Dorian Gray should remind us, especially those of us gearing up for an important election, that the picture itself was never the problem.
Instead, the picture only revealed the darkness of Gray’s own soul, just as Trump lays bare the darkness in America’s soul (and the soul of many other nations besides).
