New American Journal graphic by Walter Simon. Art Market Place

The Big Picture – 
By Glynn Wilson – 

While we wait for the delayed results of the Iowa Caucuses, what the National Affairs Desk of Rolling Stone magazine is calling Dempocalypse Now — and the election reporting glitch caused the New York Times to shut down it’s election results system on the web — the narcissist-in-chief prepares to deliver the 2020 State of the Union address before a House that impeached him and members of the Senate who are apparently preparing to acquit him on Wednesday.

If there was a Jesus, he would be coming back about now.

So U.S. politics 2020 starts with a bang and a whimper, feeding the chaos and mental illness running rampant across the land, all on top of the growing global pandemic of the spreading coronavirus from China.

Meanwhile, probably unnoticed by most still glued to Donald Trump’s Twitter feed, the Drive-By Truckers from Muscle Shoals, Alabama, just released their new album “The Unraveling,” complete with songs rife with political commentary such as “The Perilous Night” and “Armageddon’s Back In Town,” as well as commentary on the social reaction to gun violence in “Thoughts and Prayers.” Let’s just say Patterson Hood is not impressed with Facebook and Twitter comments from people sending thoughts and prayers. You’ve got to hear it to believe it.

I find myself listening to these songs on YouTube — up loud — because they capture my sentiments almost exactly, with themes I have been writing about for years — especially the last three, since Trump got elected in 2016.

When I commissioned the art to go with this column, I wanted to illustrate a theory about where we are as a country and a species. I’ve been studying the effects of social media apps with an eye toward fixing the problems, just as I have been studying how to fix American journalism and our public dialogue for the past 25 years.

For background, let me remind you of the troubled mission statement for Facebook, founded in 2004: “Facebook’s mission is to give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together.”

Research shows, however, that the mixed up Facebook home page, timeline, news feed (they can’t even seem to decide what to call it) is actually bad for people, causing more depression and making people feel even more disconnected than they did before they signed up for Facebook.

That’s probably because it was designed by computer programmers with little knowledge of history, political science, sociology, communications research, journalism or anything else, other than a little human psychology.

CAN MARK ZUCKERBERG FIX FACEBOOK BEFORE IT BREAKS DEMOCRACY?

The answer appears to be no, and we know why.

The entire culture of Facebook, making everybody their own news reporter and the concept of the “selfie” itself, just makes people see themselves as the center of the universe even more than before, feeding the rampant trend of a new mental defect, narcissistic personality disorder.

Psychologists define this as one of several types of personality disorders, “a mental condition in which people have an inflated sense of their own importance, a deep need for excessive attention and admiration, troubled relationships, and a lack of empathy for others.”

Expectations are elevated even more than ever before about the power of the individual, inflating the power of the selfish gene, and downgrading the power of working together in groups, deflating the power of the altruistic gene. This technology in the wrong hands is literally speeding up human evolution in exactly the wrong direction, the opposite of Facebook’s mission statement.

While the human species evolved using both self-interest and working in groups, surviving requires a balance. We are clearly teetering out of balance.

Trump is depicted here as the narcissist-in-chief, the Sol Invictus (“Unconquered Sun”) like the official sun god of the later Roman Empire and a patron of soldiers. All the other narcissists rotate around him, like the planets rotating around the sun.

As this trend continues, Trump’s selfish power only grows, while the social power of those who oppose him is forever made weaker. In the throes of impeachment, Trump’s approval rating just went up to 49 percent as announced by Gallup Tuesday morning. This is pretty insane, but perhaps predictable. When in a state of confusion and chaos, humans tend to seek out a leader or messiah who professes to have all the answers. They will bow down to a king who promises to feed them, even if it is water polluted with sewage and cake full of sugar.

The fascist dictator knows this instinctively, with a little help from his brain trust Steve Bannon, who knows just enough of history to make a human mess. He used the tea party in the early days of Facebook with Sarah Palin as the first test star like an anarchist to create chaos, just like Vladimir Putin of Russia, who knows that to seize power, you need the mass population divided and confused.

There is a way to fix this, but no one will listen. Everybody now thinks they are the sun, and everybody else are lowly outer planets and moons.

I’m quite happy to be the third planet from the Sun, not a god or a king. I am willing to work with others to save the Earth and democracy. But until enough people get the message and put their own over-sized egos aside long enough to help, we will continue to fall down the rabbit hole. As long as that is the case, I will keep hiding out in national forests away from this craziness.

If “the people” simply want this world to end, I will be sitting by the campfire in a comfortable camp chair sipping an IPA and toking on a doobie. When y’all get ready to fix this shit, give me a shout. I can’t do it all alone on this budget.