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Donald Trump: Fake News!

JFK, Trump, and Camelot

Gary North – September 23, 2017

If Trump was ever sincere, his election has proven that one person simply cannot fight this corrupt system, this horrid swamp. Trump the reformer, the unlikeliest of knights in shining armor, is gone. The renegade billionaire striking fear into the heart of the establishment lasted a brief shining moment, like Camelot. — Donald Jeffries

These are the concluding words of an article listing Donald Trump’s sellouts since January 20, 2017. There have been a lot of them.

I think he is correct about his association of Trump with Camelot. Trump is a lot more like Camelot then Jeffries imagines.

JFK AS KING ARTHUR

We associate Jack Kennedy’s presidency with the 1960 musical that was totally mythical: Camelot.

Why do we do this? What possible connection does the presidency of John F. Kennedy have to King Arthur?

We do it because Jackie Kennedy was one of the great PR masters of the 20th century. Shortly after the assassination, she saw an advantage like only one other in American political history: the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. Lincoln became mythic in retrospect. It was fake news at its most implausible, but it worked.

She literally designed the whole campaign to connect her husband’s presidency with a mythical King Arthur, taking advantage of the enormous popularity of the musical.

It took 50 years for this story to become public. It still is not well known, but here are some mainstream media articles that tell the story:

http://www.thedailybeast.com/how-jackie-kennedy-invented-the-camelot-legend-after-jfks-deathhttp://people.com/politics/jackie-kennedy-invented-camelot-jfk-assassination

http://nypost.com/2013/11/10/inventing-camelot-how-jackie-kennedy-shaped-her-husbands-legacy

The posthumous legend of JFK was entirely mythical. It was tacked on top of a musical that was entirely mythical. The musical was tacked on top of a book that was entirely mythical. The book that was entirely mythical was based on one of the most popular literary myths in English literature. Virtually nothing is known of Arthur.

It was myth layered upon myth that would lead anybody to believe that JFK was anything more than a superficial, verbally gifted, speed reading, James Bond loving, serial adulterer. He got us into Vietnam, and he is to blame for having done so. He led Lyndon Johnson into the big muddy, from which Johnson never emerged. Neither did Nixon.

DONALD TRUMP AS KING ARTHUR

Trump gave a good inaugural address, a lot better than most. But he began to retreat from that address within days of having delivered it.

Trump’s candidacy was fake news. He coined the phrase, and it truly applied to everything he promised. It was all fake from day one. The man is a deal-doer. Deal-doers have no principles. They just do deals. They compromise. They lie. They over-promise. They deceive. They profit by putting lipstick on pigs. They do whatever it takes to get the deal done. He campaigned as a deal-doer. I believed him. That’s why I did not vote for him. I voted for Gary Johnson. I did not want to be sullied retroactively in my own mind by the sellouts that were inevitable.

The problem we are facing is this: Trump always got out of bad deals by declaring bankruptcy of the corporation in which he was the driving force. He raised money by means of his name, but when the deal went south, he bailed out. Here is the problem: you can’t declare bankruptcy on a presidency easily. Richard Nixon did, but Trump does not want to be remembered the way Nixon is remembered.

He is not going to declare bankruptcy on his presidency. I realize there are people who predict this, but I think it’s ridiculous. His presidency is not a corporation. He is, in the language of business, the sole proprietor. He is going to attempt to cobble together his presidential legacy by a series of deals. That’s why he keeps talking about renegotiating all the things that, during the campaign, he promised were nonnegotiable. For a deal-doer, nothing is nonnegotiable.

I really do think that there has been a Camelot element to Trump’s presidency. This element, like the original, was entirely mythical. His campaign was a series of deceptions in order to seal the deal. His inaugural address was his parting shot, not his opening salvo. His inaugural address was indeed a Camelot moment. It was his version of a Broadway play. He was the star of the play. He understood this.

CONCLUSION

The play has closed. It did not have a long run. He is now starring in its sequel: Merlin. King Arthur has died. Merlin has been declared king. It is a show about hope. It is about faith in magic. The star himself is a magician. He has always been a lot more like Merlin than King Arthur. He is a master of illusion.

The play is still sold out. It will be sold out for another 3 1/2 years. It may be sold out for another 7 1/2 years. That is because Donald Trump is not simply the star of the show, he is in charge of marketing. There has not been a marketer as successful at this level since Franklin Roosevelt.

From Gary North, here.

Everyone’s Crazy Except You and Me…

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Atheism of the Gaps – Part Two

Friendly reminder: There are men and moments for which reading almost anything with the word “atheism” is detrimental.

(This essay is clearly imperfect and is not intended to be final.)

Atheism of the Gaps – Part One is here.

Here’s just one example of how to escape religious argument: even the popular, teleological “Argument from Design” is invalid.

What is the Argument from Design (AFD)?

It is commonly introduced thus:

In crossing a heath, suppose I pitched my foot against a stone, and were asked how the stone came to be there; I might possibly answer, that, for anything I knew to the contrary, it had lain there forever: nor would it perhaps be very easy to show the absurdity of this answer. But suppose I had found a watch upon the ground, and it should be inquired how the watch happened to be in that place; I should hardly think of the answer I had before given, that for anything I knew, the watch might have always been there. … There must have existed, at some time, and at some place or other, an artificer or artificers, who formed [the watch] for the purpose which we find it actually to answer; who comprehended its construction, and designed its use. … Every indication of contrivance, every manifestation of design, which existed in the watch, exists in the works of nature; with the difference, on the side of nature, of being greater or more, and that in a degree which exceeds all computation.

— William Paley, Natural Theology (1802)

Why isn’t it valid in your opinion?

Let’s keep this interesting. Meanwhile, I’ll try to argue in favor. Firstly, the word “design” is too laden. Let’s call it Argument from Order, instead, and restate the argument my own way:

Assuming we both accept order is both (1) possible and (2) recognizable as such, you must concede order was “ordered” by the “Great Orderer”: God.

Perhaps man myopically finds order where there is none? You beg the question, assuming order in order to prove an Orderer.

See Part One regarding shifting standards of proof. Your own life reflects many “basic beliefs“.

But man can only discern something by distinguishing it from its reverse? What point of reference can there be for the claim the universe is ordered, if the universe is all we have to observe? Moreso, in the original example, a man finds a watch enfolded by a forest, that is, he recognizes order in the midst of disorder. Yet you try and prove the forest itself is ordered!

Again, although “the universe is all we have to observe”, man acts as though it isn’t (and there is adequate reason for this feature of man’s nature, but that doesn’t concern us here). So what’s it going to be?

In the original parable, man differentiates between varying degrees of order (relative order in the pocket watch and relative disorder in the rock, above). Indeed, the original version is a form of “Argument from Assertion”, but this is not always invalid. “Give me a break!”, for instance, is often an appeal to the knowledge we both share, which you purportedly forgot or stifled.

Wait. Maybe specific phenomena are orderly because of natural laws, as we see occurring in the wild; mechanistic “order out of chaos” (sorry, I mean “anarchy”!)?

You will notice I didn’t reference rocks and flowers in the rephrased argument… Are those “natural laws” you appealed to “orderly” or not? Yes? Again, Order is there – with a vengeance. There is no non-purposeful ordering.

For the sake of argument, maybe the universe’s order comes from polytheism or aliens?

Polytheism is mutually contradictory. If there are two forces, they necessarily infringe upon each other’s sovereignty, so neither is “God”. And who ordered such well-ordered aliens?

What of natural disasters and dastardly disease?

This is not about theodicy. Good or bad, the universe shows great order.

What of apparent exceptions to order?

The argument stands on the great majority. “Ordering” is man’s job, too, as much as possible (Tanchuma Tazri’a 5).

Evolution…

Some Kosher Jews accept [some of] it; other Kosher Jews don’t. Objection: Irrelevant.

I give up. How do atheists get out of this one?

Hume’s first objection here is correct: We might know that which is in the universe, but we cannot know anything at all of the universe itself.

Then how can we know anything at all?

We supposedly cannot, but see this here.