Thread by @jeffblack945

#RevThread 02/19/22
The Age of Transactional Man

1/ Trump in the West, Putin in the East. This is the age of Transactional Man. Our heroes compulsively deal. The more amoral the deal maker, the stronger they appear. They advertise themselves as “strong men.”

2/ The Russian tanks entering Ukraine are an object lesson in toxic masculinity. Freud would have some choice words about those cannons. Some combination of greed and unregistered self-loathing has pushed Putin to Hitlerian depths.

3/ Putin's analysis of his situation is apparently that Russia can’t be secure because it just doesn’t yet have enough land. So now millions of people will lose their freedom and hundreds of thousands may well get killed. Then Vlad will get his mojo back for a little while.

4/Meanwhile, back home, Trump keeps on strutting. His hapless children keep on grifting. The illusion of all that wealth is evaporating. Trump and Putin are apostles of greed. Our desire to appear and to be rich is how the men of our time obey the malicious promptings of Satan.

5/The victims of all this greed include the children of all the monstrously greedy. They don’t know how to do anything, so they can’t get a -- gasp! --- job. They’re just in the family business.

6/Meanwhile, dumb white guys from Dixie to Maine keep hoping Trump will do another rally so they can feel something happening inside their flogged psyches.

7/ All through the GOP -- through Fox and the even scuzzier “conservative media”-- the rantings about socialism continue, barely disguising the obdurate racism of the terminally aggrieved.

8/How about this, Messrs Bannon, Guiliani, Carlson, Hawley, etc, ad nauseum: how about trying an inward journey to discover what has happened to make you relish cruelty?

9/ Recently I’ve been re-reading Richard Wurmbrand’s "Midnight Bride". In it, he recounts his experiences and those of other believers who were imprisoned and tortured by totalitarian communist regimes in the mid 20th century. The accounts are gruesome, the resisters heroic.

10/Reading the words of the torturers, I was forcibly reminded of the rhetoric of the current right wing of American political and media figures -- the same disdain, the same “Oh Yeah?!” the same inner emptiness, the same self-righteousness.

11/ What defeats such committed, blind wickedness? A steadfast refusal to join them or to imitate them. An insistence, not just on law but on justice. The faith that all men and all women are equally entitled to dignity, to life, and to liberty.

12/ Watching those tanks headed into Ukraine, I am reminded of Gogol’s description of the Russian leaders of the 19th century: “Dead Souls”