How to keep your Trump Anxiety Disorder from becoming Trump Derangement Syndrome

Not only is Trump Anxiety Disorder (TAD) an actual diagnosis from actual therapists, but it's hard to trust anyone who isn't suffering from it; if you don't have at least a touch of TAD, you're not paying attention. Trump Derangement Syndrome (TDS) may be more of a pejorative diagnosis from Donald Trump's supporters at Fox News and Donald Trump himself, but it's also a real danger. While recognizing the real danger of Trump and Trumpism to the nation and the world, we shouldn't let it dominate our lives. A serious case of TDS would make it hard to appreciate all the non-Trump areas of our world; I can imagine a TDS sufferer getting so bad that doctors would prescribe a radical treatment of pulling all the electronic links and asking him or her to take a retreat to a world of nature hikes and vinyl records and books that were printed before 2016. During Vietnam and Watergate, I was very politically active, going to marches and writing letters to the editor -- maybe a little obsessed at times -- but there was no 24-hour news on television (there was no 24-hour television, period), so I got a natural break from Nixon to read books or listen to records or play guitar. There was literally no news available between the time the TV networks played the national anthem and signed off at midnight until the local newspaper arrived on your doorstep the next morning.

I was recently laid off. For the first time in forty years, I don't have a workplace to go to every day. I was worried about the temptation of daytime cable news and its ability to turn my TAD into a case of incurable TDS (I've seen those people on Twitter who tweet fanatically about every "Morning Joe" guest), so I've taken a few steps. I've lived completely without television for years before, but I didn't take that drastic step this time. I was able (after too much time on the phone with Time Warner Spectrum) to reduce the number of available channels to the lowest number, basically the New York over-the-air channels (if I lived in a place where I could get TV over the air) and C-Span and some shopping channels. No Netflix. No Amazon. No Hulu. No HBO. No ESPN(s). No Fox News (not that I watched anyway). No MSNBC (sorry, Rachel). No CNN. No panels of  "experts" trying to attract eyeballs 24/7/365 with manufactured political conflict. No Corey Lewandowski or Alan Dershowitz or Rudy Giuliani or Kellyanne Conway popping up unexpectedly on my television to cause an outbreak of TDS inflammation. It's not as good as the days when there were only three stations, but I have it close to the point where there's never anything on worth watching. Like Ruth Bader Ginsburg, I want to get to the point where I'm only tempted to watch PBS NewsHour and nothing else.

In addition to the steps I've taken with my TV, I'm also trying to cut down my time on Twitter, where  reactions to insane @realDonaldTrump tweets seem to hijack all conversations. I don't follow his account, but somehow I never miss a tweet of his as everyone on the left spreads his words. If you are following him on any social media platform, please stop; he assumes all followers (even the obviously fake accounts from Saint Petersburg troll farms) are supporters. You'll hear what he has to say anyway; you can't avoid it.

All that being said about steps to avoid TDS, let's not forget who made up the term. In an article in Salon by Chauncey DeVega two weeks before the inauguration, "You have been warned: 'Trump Derangement Syndrome' will be a cudgel used to silence his critics," the danger was explained succinctly:

The right-wing propagandists who will deploy "Trump Derangement Syndrome" against their enemies have one ultimate goal: to normalize the danger to American democracy represented by Trump and his supporters.

But still, I worry:

Is it an early warning sign of Trump Derangement Syndrome if you see the hashtag "#PumpkinSpice" trending and immediately get an image of the pumpkin-headed @realDonaldTrump as the sixth Spice Girl?

— True Blue Liberal (@TrueBlueLiberal) August 28, 2018

POLL: Which "Witch Hunt" Will Ultimately Nab the Witch?

While Robert Mueller continues to compile Trump-Russia evidence in secret, there were public advances this week in both the Trump sex-scandal coverup and emoluments cases. In addition to proving that Donald Trump was lying (which is never news), the Michael Cohen tape aired on CNN on Tuesday night could be important evidence in proving campaign finance violations in the Playboy Model / National Enquirer case (and today we find out the feds have more than a hundred other tapes related to Trump and Cohen). In emoluments and corruption news, there was an important advance yesterday when a federal judge interpreted the anticorruption clauses of the Constitution in a way that will allow the case against Trump's conflicts of interest to proceed.

Which leads to the True Blue Liberal Poll of the Week asking the infallible collective intelligence of Twitter which "Witch Hunt" will be the one most likely to snare the leader of the coven?

POLL:
Which "Witch Hunt" is most likely to catch the lead witch @realDonaldTrump? The #TrumpRussia witch hunt, the sex scandal witch hunt(s), the #Emoluments witch hunt, or some other #WitchHunt?

— True Blue Liberal (@TrueBlueLiberal) July 26, 2018

Happy 75th to Mick Jagger

Happy Birthday to Amelia Earhart...

...born on this date in 1897 (disappeared in July 1937).




A ghost of aviation
She was swallowed by the sky
Or by the sea like me she had a dream to fly
Like Icarus ascending
On beautiful foolish arms
Amelia it was just a false alarm
--Joni Mitchell, 1976

Happy Birthday to Philip Seymour Hoffman

Brandt left us much too soon.

Why type "Donald Trump" when you can simply type "Idiot"?

With shades of "Santorum," savvy internet users now know that if they are looking for images of or webpages about President Donald J. Trump on Google, they can save carpal-tunnel-inducing keystrokes by simply typing i-d-i-o-t. You would think another idiot or two would show up; they do, but you have to scroll down past images of Donald Trump to find them.

Two Active TrueBlueLiberal Twitter Polls need your input.

One:
Who is the better liar, Putin or Trump...

POLL:
They both lie, but who lies better, i.e., more, more effectively, and more easily?

Duplicitous Validmir Putin, the KGB-trained leader of Russia,
or
#LyingDonaldTrump, the KFC-fueled leader of the USA?

— True Blue Liberal (@TrueBlueLiberal) July 17, 2018

and Two:
Can one maintain civility when addressing Trump about his Washington, D.C., military parade with its authoritarian and un-American (i.e., Trumpian) overtones...

POLL:
Is it possible to tell @realDonaldTrump what you think of his fucking pyongyangish #MilitaryParade while maintaining civility? https://t.co/l9PcTu9DNs

— True Blue Liberal (@TrueBlueLiberal) July 19, 2018

Yellowbird: Did Joseph Heller Predict President Trump in his Final Novel?

I just started reading Joseph Heller's final novel, Portrait of an Artist, as an Old Man, in which Eugene Pota, an older novelist, is looking for an appropriate subject and plot for his next book. I was surprised to see that one of Pota's early attempts is a story prompted by a memory of the song Yellow Bird. In this novel sketch a young boy lets his mother's new canary out of its cage, a mistake that leads to the yellow bird's death and also leads to his first experience with successful lying when he gets his mother's money back at the pet store.

"Years later, he remembered the yellow bird and labeled the experience his first brush with death. Also his first advantageous negotiation. His first constructive deception. It was all so easily fruitful he resolved to try dishonesty again whenever a situation counseled chicanery. Like Tom Sawyer, he was fond of mischievous deceit, and his antics had never, until the present, tumbled him into trouble. Foppishly, he'd felt himself invulnerable. Absurdly, when elected to the presidency of the country, he'd chosen for himself the code name Yellowbird."

I don't know what this fictional lying president looked like, but wouldn't "Yellowbird" be a great code name for a septugenarian president who insists on wearing a baby-chick yellow wing on the top of his head.

"Forty-five years  later, when holed up quaking in the White House as though in an imperiled stronghold, and confronted by the impending ignominious dishonor of impeachment, he recalled this childhood exploit with the canary, and in his next lamebrained and squirming, sorrowful, insincere, apologetic speech he impetuously injected a line of poetry he'd come upon far back in a place he no longer remembered by a poet no longer of importance to him, interpolating, 'I would rather learn from one bird how to sing than teach ten thousand stars how not to shine...or dance.' That sounded great, he thought, and infused with an ardent surge of confidence, he hastened to venture further into the domain of arts and letters and raced on extemporaneously with a line he associated with Eleanor Roosevelt, that, to wit, it was better to light a candle than curse the darkness. He was pleased with himself after that one too and was basking in his own scholarly sense of himself even before he finished.
"His speechwriters and closest advisors, on the other hand, were aghast. In shocked states of agonized helplessness, they glared at each other with outrage. 'That putz!' grumbled the one from New York City. 'That very dumb putz!' Another, with a polite growl of apology, stepped outside to vomit."  

If Twitter had existed in 1999 when Heller's novel was written, I'm sure President Yellowbird would have used it rather than a speaker's podium to embarrass himself. But despite its prophetic qualities, this fictional sketch doesn't become Pota's next novel.

"Who cared? What could it lead to that was worthwhile? Another political farce, another dysfunctional family yarn? Any serious literary work treating those contaminated buffoons in Washington as a herd of contaminated buffoons could no longer be fresh or striking. It would have to be ludicrous and thin, anything but serious, and there had already been too many of those."

Isn't that exactly how a lot of writers are feeling about the "real world" of 2018, with our current president that no serious novelist would ever be able to (or want to) invent?

70 Years Ago Today, UK citizens got something that US citizens are told is impossible, a National Health Service

How is it possible that a modern National Health Service was achievable 70 years ago in a Great Britain still clearing rubble from World War II and still experiencing food rationing, but is considered impossibly expensive in the world's wealthiest economy, one that hasn't experienced war on its soil since 1865?

The National Health Service began on July 5, 1948.

I'm simply retyping the historic text of the page above in order to make it searchable and readable on all devices:

THE NEW

NATIONAL

HEALTH 

SERVICE

*

Your new National Health Service begins on 5th July. What is it? How do you get it?

    It will provide you with all medical, dental, and nursing care. Everyone--rich or poor, man, woman or child--can use it or any part of it. There are no charges, except for a few special items. There are no insurance qualifications. But it is not a " charity ". You are all paying for it, mainly as taxpayers, and it will relieve your money worries in time of illness.

The Soundtrack for the Trump Era?

In case you had any doubt about Rage Against the Machine being in the running for the most appropriate soundtrack of the Trump era, look at Giuliani's appearance at the beginning of this 1999 Michael Moore-directed video for "Sleep Now in the Fire," and the bizarre campaign poster that makes a prophetic appearance at the 1'04" mark.


Rage may not be touring or recording now, but we have their songs being given new life by Brass Against the Machine. This version of "Wake Up" was just posted ten days ago.