Me, Me, Me

I don’t know how, why or when the “Me, Me, Me” movement began to flourish in our nation. The 1980’s revealed such an ethos, thanks to TV shows like Dallas, but the surge seems to have reached some sort of peak during the past four years. The adrenalin rush of superiority it gave Americans led to a new level of pseudo-superiority and isolation upon the world stage for our country, and not because of the Pandemic alone. The monstrous ego of our president during that time dazzled many Americans into believing that we owned the planet and that no other countries mattered except those with heartless, conniving dictatorial leaders like Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong-Un and anyone who was White. Demeaning others through snide insults through innuendo and braggadocio became the stuff of America’s new personality, accepted and even adored by his gullible worshipers. The president even bamboozled people into believing he was a religious zealot. They fell for the whole package of rubbish, as long as he swung a Bible in the air or hugged an American flag. That’s really all it took.
There was the constant flood of “Tweets” that his followers drank up like cheap wine in a ghetto, his face and bitter swagger consuming television news every few minutes. He made Don Rickles look like Mother Teresa to the point where at times it seemed to diminish the oxygen supply of political discourse. The resident leader became a cult figure to his blithe and unquestioning followers. He was a Svengali who knew all the right buttons to press at just the right times, exploiting fears, real or imagined. His greatest asset was paranoia itself, wielded like a sword. His speeches were always filled with catch phrases like, “many people are saying,” or “everyone says.” But HIS opinion was the only one that mattered. He had the apparent swagger and unswerving confidence of Benito Mussolini or monstrously conceited Adolf Hitler from the 1920’s and 1930’s.
Some still cling to his model for what they feel is the essence of actual leadership, which really funnels down to unswerving egomania that is mostly carny show stuff with little or no substance than fake bravado, more entertaining through its making fun of any skeptics. He made Roman emperors Nero and Caligula look like rank amateurs when it came to colossal vanity.
Now that the show is pretty much over and we’re facing national issues under a new leader who is finding his way without the shield of a grotesquely oversized ego, or a nation that is not anywhere together on anything anymore, or the stage farce that merely tried to distract attention away from shared national problems, through tantrums and insults, reality is finally setting in.
I hope that the old issue of background checks for lethal weapons can come about through a wider understanding that legal, safe gun owners will remain perfectly fine keeping their weapons. No one is trying to dissolve the Second Amendment. The moronic myth that all weapons will be retrieved by the government is pure rubbish, and the rumor mongers know it. Such nonsense and unreasonable fear is what continues to make Republican senators huddle in terror against telling anything resembling the truth. Their muteness will mean only more unnecessary slaughter, while they sit quietly twiddling their thumbs in silence even during the next pointless gun massacre of the innocent. JB