https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AQL9hRRYDIw
Blade Runner, 1982. The original version with Harrison Ford was set in 2019, just next year! At the time, it seemed visionary, edgy, and the theme, of course, was and is still current: the domination of corporations over every facet of our lives. Thank you, Philip K. Dick, who wrote the book on which the movie was based: Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
Blade Runner 2049, the sequel, was too long and meandering. The optics were vastly improved, the idea was still intact, but the message, I think, was lost.
So let’s take USA, summer 2018, and call it Blade Runner: Now. Even though we aren’t chasing replicants, we’re pursuing answers about whether the trump campaign was colluding with foreign governments to win the 2016 election and obstructing justice. If Philip K. Dick were still alive, he probably would be writing for The Atlantic or The New York Times and trump would take to Twitter to try to discredit and humiliate him. But his attempts would backfire, this reporting would win Pulitzers, the movie would be watched by hundreds of millions. Philip would keep writing and exploring the secrets of the most corrupt administration in history.
From Salon: “Donald Trump’s White House is on pace to becoming the most corrupt and scandal-ridden administration since at least Richard Nixon’s — and perhaps in the entire history of the country. Rather than “draining the swamp,” Trump has ushered in a new age of corruption in Washington that reminds one of the brazen and widespread corruption of the gilded age.”
At some point about a year into trump’s presidency, the press attitude toward him shifted from Oh, what a silly buffoon to He’s a threat to democracy. He’s the guy whose morning tweets set the scandal and big distraction for the day – how it’s all a witch hunt, fake news, a disgrace, there was an FBI spy in the campaign…and on and on. And it’s not just the press who are finally calling out trump for the despot he is. James Comey does it in his book A Higher Loyalty. James Clapper, former Director of National Intelligence and of the Defense Intelligence Agency, a career intelligence officer, also defines trump in the same way in his book, Facts and Fears: Hard Truths from a Life in Intelligence.
When Clapper was on Rachel Maddow’s show, he talked openly about how the Russians influenced the election for a trump win and wrote about it in his book. “Surprising even themselves, they (the Russians) swung the election to a Trump win. To conclude otherwise stretches logic, common sense, and credulity to the breaking point. Less than eighty thousand votes in three key states swung the election. I have no doubt that more votes than that were influenced by this massive effort by the Russians.”
As a country, we’re headed into perilous territory, where this experiment called democracy is being tested at every twist and turn. Every day, someone on trump’s team is spinning, redefining laws and protcols. Rudy Gulliani, the newest addition to trump’s legal team, claims a sitting president can’t be indicted. Really? That would mean that if a sitting president committed murder, he would get a pass? That’s not democracy; it’s the world of dictators and authoritarian governments.
Every day, trump’s press secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, daughter of self-righteous religious nut Mike Huckabee, stands before the White House press corp and TV cameras and lies through her pretty white teeth. Every day, the republican congress sits on their collective hands and turns their collective head away from facts and truth and do nothing to stop this slow erosion of the very institutions that exposed Richard Nixon and Watergate. Pundits talk about the infamous Saturday Night Massacre during the Nixon administration and how we’re approaching a constitutional crisis now.
But the truth is uglier: I think we’re already at that crisis point. As the protagonist of the Handmaid’s Tale remarks, “How did we get here?”
We got here because most of us have never lived under an authoritarian government. We’ve enjoyed the 1st amendment, the freedom to speak our minds. We’ve lived freely with the bill of rights. The 4 in 10 Americans who still support trump don’t care about shady and possibly illegal payoffs to porn stars or how he and his admin may have colluded with a foreign government or obstructed justice. They don’t understand how his policies hurt them in terms of health care, tax cuts, trade, wages, employee rights. They don’t understand because they don’t pay attention.
Instead, they blame Obama, Clinton, the “liberal agenda.”
But trump is the ultimate trickster and unless something shifts dramatically – and soon – then the joke is on us. We become a third world, autocratic country ruled by a cruel clown who bows to dictators like Putin and empowers corporations just as Philip K. Dick envisioned in the original Blade Runner.
But now I wonder if even Dick could have imagined Blade Runner: Now, starring the likes of trump and his gang.
My example and synchronism:Venezuela’s autocratic regime. The young ones think this is ir al. They don’t know any any better. trump has to go. I agree with VOTE. VOTE. VOTE it’s our only hope
I’ve been preaching this for some time now. The militarization of the police was my first scary red flag. We have gone from interesting times to terrifying times. Trump is one evil despot.
trump is the equivalent in my book of every dictator before him and of the ones still alive. An authoritarian gov’t is gradually being phased in. Now we camps for immigrant children. What’s the next step? Camps for journalists?
Vote Vote Vote and then get everyone who hasn’t voted before to vote with you. That is what we can do. When enough like minded people run this country the buffoons will be history…bad history.
Unless they’ve rigged the voting, like the bushies did in 2004 with the diebold machines. My sense is this admin is so corrupt they’ll stop at nothing.
I have lived in so called “third world” countries, resigned to corrupt governments and authoritarian rule. I think, for example, of the many Mexicans I have met, who just shrug about their government, recognizing that the vast majority of their resources go to a small minority of the population, while everyone else is mostly impoverished. Yet they carry on, and love their families and enjoy their lives, resigned to a government corruption that they know will never change. “It’s just the way it is”. We are heading right down this same road, and Trump must be reading the textbook on fascism, along with the regime he has put in place.
You are correct……….this is nothing to laugh at. It’s happening right now, in plain sight, and the propaganda machine is, apparently, effective. Millions and millions marched………..it’s changed nothing. Nothing. Our “leader” alienates our neighbors, our Allies, and praises Putin and North Korea and the American Nazi movement. Along with evangelicals who might as well be considered Nazis. The regime spends and spends and takes all limits off of corporate entities, and we move right into a certain economic depression. Children are separated from their parents and in extreme cruelty held in dog kennels at the border, and “christians” talk about it being, somehow, in the bible. And christianity, in my book, is rapidly, in the hands of this corrupt regime, becoming a really dirty word. Sorry. I am beyond sad and angry at the loss of what was a great experiment in democracy.
I’m feeling just like you[‘re describing. I can’t even listen to any more news reports about these kids. They’re now going to be put in tent cities.
As individuals, we each have individual Consciousness. As Americans, we have a Collective Consciousness. The Collective Consciousness, by whatever means, (and there were plenty), put Donald J. Trump in the Oval Office. There are reasons for this, but we don’t know the reasons.The majority of folks who regularly visit this blog are spiritual entities on varying spiritual paths, and understand that EVERYTHING happens for a reason. I have made a decision, just for myself and for no one else, to cease negative thoughts about this president and all the negatives involving him and replace them with a mind that is open to learning whatever it is we need to know; whatever it is that brought us into this cesspool, and focus on those. It’s my personal conviction that the continuing hatred aimed a him and his administration is only hurting US, not him. And worse, it is carrying us into a very low and dark energy space, far away from the spiritual Light-bearing Beings we attempt to be. As of today, I will no longer allow myself to participate in the Trump bashing. Please note this comment is not aimed at anyone in particular except myself, and I don’t like the way I feel when I indulge in the bashing, however deserved it may be. For me. it stops here and now.
We live in incredibly scary times. I have never been as afraid as I am now of what is coming. Every morning when I open my laptop to see what might have happened since I last looked, I’m afraid of an event that will change everything I’ve ever known. I have never watched Blade Runner. Maybe it’s time. 🙁