Rereading some old books.

[TownsendPLocke]

This sums it up very well 
"Such imbeciles do not want ideas—that is, new ideas, ideas that are unfamiliar, ideas that challenge their attention. What they want is simply a gaudy series of platitudes, of sonorous nonsense driven home with gestures. As I say, they can’t understand many words of more than two syllables, but that is not saying that they do not esteem such words. On the contrary, they like them and demand them. The roll of incomprehensible polysyllables enchants them. They like phrases which thunder like salvos of artillery. Let
that thunder sound, and they take all the rest on trust. If a sentence begins furiously and then peters out into fatuity, they are still satisfied. If a phrase has a punch in it, they do not ask that it also have a meaning. If a word slips off the tongue like a ship going down the ways, they are content and applaud it and wait for the next"
The thing is-it was written by H.L Menken in March of 1921 upon the inauguration of Warren Harding

I am re-reading Gore Vidal's Hollywood. Which is about this period of time in the US and it is pretty amazing how history is repeating itself. The repub's foist off a candidate that no one seriously considered-with the full intent by party bosses that he will simply be a front-man while they control things in the back ground.
Harding obliges them in a way which Modern day bosses only dream of-he dies! Calvin Coolidge is then ushered in (VP assumes duties) and then Herbert Hoover. And in August 1929,eight months after Hoover takes office, after nearly a decade of Republican shenanigans (lots of free market BS etc) The Markets crashed and the world was plunged into The Great Depression.

I sincerely hope that Orange and his cronies fuck it up so badly in the first few years that we do not have to stretch this out for 9 years and 8 months only to be faced with another global Depression.

And then Mencken wrote  "“The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed, and hence clamorous to be led to safety, by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary…As democracy is perfected, the office of President represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.”

[Thumper1]

If you like GV Read United States, his collection of Essays.   Once finished keep it within easy reach, because you'll return to it often. 

 

https://www.amazon.com/United-States-1952-1992-Gore-Vidal/dp/0679414894