MADE IN AMERICA: PYRITE PREXY

JANUARY 19, 2025 – As the world prepares for the improbable second inauguration of a flam-flam artist[1] gone so apparently legit, he garnered a majority of the popular vote for president of—get this—the United States of America, land of the free, home of the brave, domain of the eagle, and once a beacon for “[the] tired, [the] poor, [the] huddled masses yearning to breathe free” (and a good number of folks hellbent on cutting down all the trees and making a lot of quick bucks).

This second time around, the opposition is far less feisty than it was four eight years ago. The cold snap that has pushed down from our neighbor to the north resembles the lack of animation among those of us who are now far more resigned than we are defiant. A headline in today’s edition of the radical, extremist, communist, left-wing vox populi (yet once considered America’s newspaper of record), The New York Times, sums up the mood succinctly:

DEFIANCE IS OUT, DEFERENCE IS IN:

TRUMP RETURNS TO A DIFFERENT WASHINGTON.

Ever since last November 5, “blue” in “blue states” has taken on a meaning associated with a genre of secular folk music. Along with a rapid decline in defiance among us “Dems” is a subito reduction in self-flagellation over “what we did wrong.” We’ve even quit analyzing the MAGA phenomenon and laid aside the 1,001 reasons for Trump’s appeal—make that whatever reasons 77,303,753 people chose for voting his way.

As I discussed in my 11/26/25 post, Trump’s victory was a living example of the “bed of nails” phenomenon: you can actually lie down on a million densely arranged sharp points, but God forbid if you were asked to lie on a Sleep Number mattress that had a single sharp spike poking up through the sheets. You can easily handle the bed of nails if among all those nails is the “answer” to . . . your opposition to wokeness; your displeasure over the cost of a dozen eggs; your outrage over the price of gas the day before Election Day being higher than a year before (Oops! Had to strike that, because it was the other way around); your fear over all the knife-wielding criminal types pouring over our southern border; your fear of a teenager wielding an AR-15 inside an elementary school (Oops again, since that’s a Dem fear, not a Republican one); you don’t believe in climate change; or you don’t believe in gov’mnt (except to throw people in jail over abortion rights or simply in retribution—to hell with procedural due process); or whatever other hot button issue boils in your pot of political reasoning.

Our general acceptance of Trump 2.0 reminds me of a remark I heard from an acquaintance a few months after the 9-11 attacks. “After seeing airplanes being flown intentionally into tall buildings and the Pentagon,” he said, “We’ll never again be surprised—by anything—no matter how insane or horrible.” He was right: After umpteen subsequent acts of domestic terrorism (think Sandy Hook; Uvalde; Las Vegas; Madison—just for starters), we are no longer surprised by yet another deeply troubled American firing an AR-15 indiscriminately at a group of innocents—often children). The “nothing surprises after 9-11” phenomenon is a variation of the bed of nails principle.

After Trump’s crass TV show, The Apprentice, his “birther” campaign against Obama didn’t seem out of character for the carnival barker. After the “birther” nonsense, Trump’s boorish put-downs during the Republican presidential primaries weren’t surprising, though the lack of an effective backlash certainly was. Following the scandal-ridden 2016 campaign, Trump’s audacious “rallies,” and the crudeness of his Twitter comments, his obsession with exaggerating the size of his inauguration crowd was barely noteworthy.

After four years of habitual distortion of reality, another one, 10, 100, 1,000 lies no longer seemed to matter. Nor did two impeachments. Nor did it matter that a mob of Trumpers goaded by his rhetoric and groundless claim that the election had been “stole” viciously attacked the Capitol and call for the hanging of Vice President Pence—a Republican, no less.

And all the litigation that finally would derail Trump’s careening engine of narcissism and sociopathy? All went poof!  Oops (yet again)! I forgot about the hush-money case in which Trump was convicted—by a jury of his peers—then sentenced not with incarceration, a fine, or probation, but an “air slap” on the wrist (Yawn.).

Which brings us to the present: Appointing an anti-vaxxer as head of HHS? Choosing for Secretary of Defense, not a guy who’s knowledgeable enough of global affairs he can identify the members of ASEAN—the guy can’t—but because he looks good on TV? Threatening to plunge the world into recession by spelling trade policy, T-A-R-I-F-F-S?  Taking over Greenland—by force—if necessary? Rounding up 11 million people (at what cost, with what available recourses?) and deporting them? Say what? (And how?) Directing federal agencies to conduct actual witch-hunts against his high profile critics? Huh?!

It’s all just more of the same ol’ bed of nails.

But how did we let this happen? How did we wind up sleeping—and I do mean sleeping—on a bed of nails?

From an historical perspective, I think there’s a certain inevitability about the rise of a guy like Trump; not Trump specifically, perhaps, but of the movement that he created around an empty, meaningless slogan that runs no deeper than the man’s shallow understanding of the world beyond bright, shiny objects and people “who look good on TV.”

The inevitability I reference here correlates to my “river” theory of history. That view sees the evolution-devolution cycle of civilization as an Amazonian waterway with multiple traceable sources, many more tributaries—each contributing its own composition, all of which eventually coalesce to form a mighty river flowing inexorably toward the endless seas. They’re endless, because they flow around a sphere, the globe, our planet earth.

Each of us who lives for a minute, a day, a decade, a century—lives in this river. Some of us spend most of our lives in a physical or figurative backwater, but eventually a rise or fall in the water level draws us out into the mainstream. Others of our species are pulled against their will or intentionally swim out to the river’s center, where the water moves fastest—often dangerously, so much so, it pours over a grand cataract and crashes onto the rocks far below.

No matter who we are or when we live, three immutable phenomena govern our time in the river: First, we can never swim upstream. Second, the farther downstream we find ourselves, the more numerous and varied are all the chemicals, sediments, organic matter, flotsam—and people!—in the water. Third, the banks along the river form a continuum, defined as, “a continuous sequence in which adjacent elements are not perceptibly different from each other, although the extremes are quite distinct.”

To connect this river imagery to a better understanding of the rise of Trump—mainly the “Why?”—you must look for how the river shapes the banks, as well as how the banks conduct the river. If you think of the water as the flow of humanity and view all that lines the riverbanks—the trees, the grasses, the fields, the mountains, the bucolic, the industrial, the urban, the rural, the sun, the shade, the rain, ice and snow—as the forces and influences on humanity’s flow, you begin to appreciate that while no two parts of the river bank are exactly the same, just as no two parts of the river itself are exactly the same, patterns appear and correlations develop.

As with all nations, powers, and empires, America was formed by the confluence of influences. As time passed, the distinctions between one and another blended to the point where the individual sources became less identifiable; or at least we who are downstream from the tributaries of influence aren’t conscious of what they’ve contributed to the water that now carries us onward.

If I’m not exactly a teacher of American history, I’ve been a life-long student of it and have learned enough to see strains, episodes, movements that very much influenced “downstream” America. Once you survey our “tributaries” and “riverbanks” from 1492 forward, you begin to see how we became who we are—for better or worse. The influences that drove the earliest colonists to our shores are much the same that drew subsequent generations of immigrants to what is now the U.S.: the chance to “bust loose,” access seemingly unlimited natural resources, push out one’s elbows, be “different” (innovative, as well as whacky), and go for broke (or just “going broke”) trying to get rich.

It was inevitable that the most laissez-faire form of capitalism would thrive in America, just as “rugged individualism”—a term coined by Herbert Hoover in a 1928 campaign speech—would come to describe what was and is a quintessentially American trait. By way of just a few examples . . . Libertarian skepticism of gov’mnt; ascendancy of Christian nationalism; isolationism; xenophobia—often among people who are themselves, first or second generation immigrants; an obsession with owning, carrying, using firearms; impatience with the slow-turning wheels of the “rule of law” (except when playing defense, in which case legions of litigators schooled in procedure slow the wheels further or, as demonstrated in the Art of the Appeal, stop them altogether) . . . all the traits that we see in Trump and among his diverse supporters are characteristics that are well ingrained in our past.

Perhaps we’ve never before seen a bend in the river such as what we’re witnessing now—just as we’d never seen a president like Trump talking trash or selling Bibles and bacon (or is it Bibles wrapped in bacon?) or crypto-coins bearing the slogan, “Heads, I Win; Tails You Lose” on one side, and “God or Bust, but Never Bust a Trust” on the other. But all the ingredients for the comic book series (Pyrite Prexy) that now documents what we have become, have been long-baked into our culture.

We shouldn’t be surprised by any of this—especially well into the Post-Shock Age since 9-11.

Subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

 

 

© 2025 by Eric Nilsson

[1] “[A]rtist”? What am I thinking! Okay, okay . . . oh yeah . . . a guy (Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan) duct-taped a banana to a white wall at an exhibition and prestissimo: The “creation” was beheld as presented—a work of “art.”