The striking eye of sculptor Korczak Ziolkowski’s Crazy Horse: Walter Simon

“Anything that gets the adrenalin moving like a 440 volt blast in a copper bathtub is good for the reflexes and keeps the veins free of cholesterol… but too many adrenaline rushes in any given time span has the same effect on the nervous system as too many electro-shock treatments are said to have on the brain: after a while you start burning out the circuits.

“When a jackrabbit gets addicted to road-running, its only a matter of time before he gets smashed — and when a journalist turns into a politics junkie he will sooner or later start raving and babbling in print about things that only a person who has Been There can possibly understand.”
– Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail ’72

Sunday Reader – 
By Glynn Wilson – 

When the news is breaking fast and horror is happening right before your eyes — a natural disaster or a man-made threat like war or insurrection — the stress gets the adrenal glands pumping.

Your breathing rate increases along with your blood circulation. You may feel it pumping in your temples.

Your carbohydrate metabolism also goes up, preparing your muscles for exertion. The fight-or-flight response is triggered by both real or imaginary threats.

In the heat of the moment, there’s little time for reflection or planning. How you deal with the stress and react will depend on your preparation and training. Well trained police and military commanders know this all too well.

After the threat dissipates, it takes about 20 to 60 minutes for your body to return to its pre-arousal levels. Then and only then can we slow down and assess the situation and maybe learn from it.

Let’s face it, we have all been through a lot of stress over the past four years — and especially the past year — some of it real because of the coronavirus pandemic.

But much of it was artificially generated in a very real effort to exploit our existential anxiety as human beings.

Whether the messages arrived on social media such as Facebook or Twitter, or in video form on YouTube or TV, much of what Trump said was designed to trigger the stress response, to heighten existential anxiety, and prime the pump among his followers for what happened in Washington, D.C. on Jan. 6 — a violent overthrow of American Democracy.

We should have seen it coming, and some did. We did, and wrote about it. But the talking heads on broadcast and cable just kept treating the lies as normal, and here we are.

Writing back during the Bush years in the aftermath of the terrorist attack on September 11, 2001 and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, Canadian author Naomi Klein wrote about The Shock Doctrine and “the rise of disaster capitalism.”

In this groundbreaking alternative history of the most dominant economic ideology of our time — Milton Friedman’s free-market economic system and Ronald Reagan’s so-called conservative revolution in politics — Klein challenged the popular myth of this movement’s ultimate goal of peaceful global victory. From Chile in 1973 to Iraq, Klein showed how Friedman and his followers repeatedly harnessed terrible shocks and violence to implement their radical capitalist agenda.

Her work and time out on the lecture circuit was designed to warn the American people. But I don’t think even she could have foreseen the success of the selfish-gene revolution coming with the rise of Facebook and Trump.

Even before the coronavirus pandemic hit in the United States, I was writing about how Donald Trump and his team of disrupters like Steve Bannon were perfecting tactics used by authoritarian dictators from George Wallace to Adolph Hitter and Vladimir Putin.

How Existential Anxiety Leads to Authoritarianism

After three and a half years to reflect on what was happening in America with the press and media focusing so much attention on the agenda of the 45th president and commander-in-chief, I also wrote about a potential solution.

Can Altruism Trump Selfishness to Save Democracy and Planet Earth?

How to Create a Functioning Communications System to Save Democracy and the Planet

Then the coronavirus hit, and all hell broke loose.

Novel Coronavirus Pandemic Hits Hard, Threatens Global Recession

After about five solid months of dealing with the pandemic and a criminal justice crisis to boot, Democrats and many Republicans and independents did come together and worked together altruistically to trump the selfishness of Trump.

It’s Official: Trump is A Loser – Biden is President-Elect

Unfortunately, Trump was not done screwing with the heads of Americans who had come to follow him like a divine emperor or messiah.

The End of the World As We Know It: Is Donald Trump the Antichrist?

Trump Promotes Messiah Complex With Low IQ, Religious Voters

Dumb is the New Smart, and Smart is the New Dumb

Claiming falsely that the election was stolen from him, he continued to fire up his base to revolt, including many Republicans, racist police officers and military personnel and vets.

Larceny: The True Story of How the Deep State Stole the Election from Trump

Inside Job: Were the U.S. Military and Capitol Police Ordered to ‘Stand Down’ to Allow Trump’s Mob to Storm the Capitol?

So for the past three and a half weeks, instead of celebrating the amazing victory of democracy in the 2020 election, we have suffered even more shocks. And the reality is setting in that it’s not over yet.

National Terrorism Bulletin Issued Warning of an Ongoing Threat from Right-Wing, Racist Domestic Extremists

Meanwhile, while there is hope on the horizon that the vaccine will eventually be distributed widely and we will get a handle on the COVID crisis, the news on Sunday was not so encouraging.

“The road to herd immunity from the coronavirus suddenly looks longer. The emergence of more transmissible, potentially vaccine-evading variants threatens to extend the global health disaster and make 2021 feel too much like 2020. A complicated mix of good news and bad news makes any forecast for the coming months fuzzy,” according to The Washington Post. “But scientists have one clear and sobering message: The pandemic is a long way from over.”

Coronavirus mutations add urgency to vaccination effort as experts warn of long battle ahead

The good news is that a clear majority of the American people have gotten the message that Trump was an evil son-of-a-bitch and are ready to move on under Democratic leadership in the White House and Congress. So we have a chance here to turn things around in the months ahead and move on in a more positive direction.

Unfortunately, a third or more of the people are still clinging to Tump’s bullshit. But we hold a majority.

Public Opinion: Biden’s Presidency Greeted With Optimism, Trump Called the ‘Worst President Ever’

Biden’s Initial Job Approval Rating Is Higher Than Trump’s Ever Was

Where Do We Go From Here?

The Biden administration is putting together a plan, and it would help if the press and media in this country would give them the time and a honeymoon and the attention they need to recapture the news agenda and take it away from Trump’s destructive propaganda.

But if the past few days are any indication, Trump is going to continue to find a way to dominate the news cycle, even as he is banned from Twitter and Facebook and even with Parler shut down.

I know all too well what the problem is. But so far, we have not gotten enough attention to change the game.

So we too have a plan. It can be boiled down to this.

“What we’ve got here is a failure to communicate.”

Maybe the news has slowed down enough now for me to be able to put all these thoughts down into one coherent series. So that’s what I’m planning to work on this week, depending on what happens in the breaking news world.

Here’s a hint and a bit of an outline.

The problem and solutions on how the American press is funded.

The problem and a solution on how journalism objectivity is defined.

The problem of government regulation of the internet.

There’s more, but I will save that for the series.

Stay tuned.

Take a break. Have a strong drink or two. Listen to some music up very loud. We might make it through this together yet.