A Tale of Two Tale Spins: Managing America Through Its PTSD Collapse

The teeth-rattling cognitive dissonance that awaits half the nation (and it’s still fair to ask which half) is going to send some folks into therapy for years. This essay, as you will see, is predisposed to one narrative. The human mind cannot entertain both.

In fact, the reset for many will arrive in begrudging half-measures. They will grumble that the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy finally prevailed on poor Hillary. Psychologically, that will be about the best they can do. Patience, not partisan recriminations, will be the most suitable response.

I have an 80-something year old mother who will not walk on grass if the authorities have placed a sign on the approach to City Hall. She’s far from stupid and yet she has been socialized into an unquestioning belief that what appears on the TV news is an accurate rendition of what transpired in the world that day. Why would it be otherwise?

Morbid as it may sound, I would like her Christian naiveté to depart the planet unmarred before her go-to source, CNN, has little choice but to report on the most depraved aspects of what so many of us have already come to accept.

There may not be blood, but there will be psychological carnage which can create equally grievous wounds. Then there may be blood.

Already, microcosmic civil wars are being waged across America’s dining tables. It seems a new nation is being conceptually birthed one car pool and barbershop at a time. For better or worse, the alt-narrative is going mid-speed viral, which may be just fast enough. Perhaps the nation is better left ingesting seedy revelations in increments at a cellular level — friend helping friend — until a New Consensus can construct itself from the bottom-up, couched as a People’s directive for a new paradigm of leadership.

For the moment I’m having limited success reaching consensus with many in my social and family circles on even the most rudimentary fact patterns, as I’m sure many others are too. I think most Trump supporters have endured some level of social ostracism, even if it amounts to little more than de-friending on social networks. I know I have.

Red Pill/Blue Pill? I prefer Red Capstone/Blue Abyss. But there I go giving away my bias again.

If you believe the darkest tributaries of the Clinton/Globalist machinations, it takes on a Goebbels-esque Bigness that, by its very ambition, resists ready comprehension. Mass incredulity is a tactic. These people have (allegedly) drifted so far from the norms of human behavior that their aberrance serves as its own sinister camouflage. Our humanity implores us to deny the worst of what we hear, especially as it relates to children. I, for one, will be ecstatic if, in a surfeit of investigatory zeal, we’ve inferred an inky blackness where there is mere darkness. But like many of you, I’ve read too many bone-chilling accounts for too long.

I particularly want to acknowledge the Conservative Treehouse site. The analytical homework that has gone on there over the last few months is breathtaking. Kudos to the folks behind all that.

Due to the mass cognitive dislocation that may loom just around the corner, I believe people will benefit from graspable handles into this story, a conducted bread-crumb trail through the Dark Forest. Reminiscent of Sheldon Wolin’s inverted totalitarianism, the apparent totalism (Wolin’s term) of the corruption lends it a disembodied, ubiquitous colorless and odorless quality. Like Rosemary’s Baby, it can feel like everyone, every institution, is in the coven. We desperately need a redemptive figure.

Enter NSA Director, Admiral Mike Rogers.

The Conservative Treehouse largely fashioned the Rogers narrative, or at least I encountered it there first in its most comprehensive form. I simply attempted to propagate it and other relevant insights in the video (below) to spread the gospel within my own circle. Rogers presents a White Hat which decent people can sink their teeth into (not to mention that he seems to me a very credible Q Anon candidate; I follow Jerome Corsi’s lead on the latter’s veracity). The Admiral may be just the narrative float we need. I know I’m glad I found him.

The other advantage of the Rogers Handle is that, depicted correctly, it can neatly sidestep the elephant in the psych ward, Trump Derangement Syndrome (TDS). TDS is a real pathology.  No doubt you’ve encountered it in the more afflicted Trump-haters. Some examples of TDS in walk-around life:

It’s raining today. Damn that Trump!

California is engulfed in flames — Ooh I could strangle Trump!

My cat got hit by a car –Where’s that scoundrel Trump?!

In fact, The Chicago Manual of Style recently deemed our Rorschach President a new hybridized form of punctuation — something between a period and an exclamation mark. This means all petulant American bitches and moans (of which there are many) can now end in Trump without running afoul of grammatical syntax.

Years ago, my son asked me for an example of an ad hominem fallacy. Sure, I said. Charles Manson looks out the window and says “It’s raining.” A guy on the other side of the room says, “It can’t possibly be raining. You’re mass murderer Charles Manson.” Trump has become the universal butt of all ad hominem attacks. You encounter this ‘mode of argument’ a dozen times every day in the mainstream press.

But seriously, the egregious and fascistic Constitutional abuses routinely practiced by the prior regime — both to preserve Clinton’s candidacy and then later, in phase two, to attempt a palace coup on the fledgling Trump administration — need not belabor the Trump name.

Call Trump simply Victim One if you like. Would you interrogate or blame a victim for being a compulsory party to a crime? Of course not! Then leave Trump out of it. Do your best Tom Jefferson and keep to the rarefied heights of Constitutional rectitude. (Please watch the video to get a keener sense of the frightening FISA 702 abuses and the Deep State/Obama Administration collusion that sought to usurp the People’s Choice. Trump is blessedly incidental to the core abuses.)

Finally (just because it pays to be paranoid and cynical all at the same time) there have been rumblings of a conciliatory ‘hand-across-the-aisle’ State of the Union address. I note too a rather buoyant Hillary at the recent Grammy’s. She doesn’t give off the vibe of someone expecting a swarm of US Marshals at any moment. Are we being punked again? I think Trump the Master Negotiator is too politically smart –and too covetous of his populist street cred– to stop short of shackles for these treasonous miscreants, but you never know. And who put the cement in Sessions’ shoes? Will the System, even with a comparatively exogenous Trump at the helm, rush in to save itself? It’s possible.

What I’m suggesting, with some trepidation, is that a Grand Bargain may yet emerge from the backrooms of power. Boy, it would have to be a kick-ass quid pro quo. The populist in me could never swallow such a betrayal –and make no mistake, it would be a betrayal. Only time will tell.

Norman Ball can be reached at gspressnow@gmail.com. Visit his blog Full-Spectum Domino to keep abreast. An excerpt of his latest book Between River and Rock: How I Resolved Television in Six Easy Payments is available at the Museum of American Poetics (MAP). He also has an eBook out on the impending currency reset Eye Am Eye Press, 2015. He can be reached at: gspressnow@gmail.com. Read other articles by Norman.