The Dern Truth!

Watching The Late Show With Stephen Colbert this morning via my DVR as I tend to do every morning, I enjoyed the interview with the superb actress Laura Dern.
She started out with a compliment of Stephen saying that he makes her more able to relax and deal with the situation we’re all in with Trump.
This suddenly felt like an aha moment for me. Living through this time, to me it’s creating huge levels of anxiety. And I know I’m not alone in this.
I see many of my friends both IRW (in the real world) and online whose stress levels get so high they keep posting things like “Hey everyone I gotta take a break from Twitter or Facebook this is all too much”.
Again for me, from my perspective I’m seeing everything I love (including Mother Earth) and much of what I believe in being threatened and attacked in a massively accelerated pace by this degenerate ignoramus bullying lying conman, a cadre of the Goldman Sachs billionaires he railed against in his campaign, some generals and a complicit spineless Republican party.
And every night there’s new outrageous events in what I and friends come to call the Trump Show to keep our blood pressure up, fears elevated and sense of walking on stable ground uncertain.
I mean it was already extremely difficult for many of us who never saw the benefits of the so-called economic recovery reach our lives!
We who struggle in shitty paying jobs to pay ever rising rents, and deal with credit card and school loan debts & other rising costs of living, had hoped help was possible. Some help if not all the help we need or want, we thought some help was possible and near.
Living in Trump-America is especially heartbreaking for those of us who fought to get Bernie Sanders elected, and then facing the soul crushing loss in the primary to get much of our platform into the Democratic Party platform in the hopes of again getting some help.
Even though we openly worried and expected the help would be slow to come and insufficient given the massive disconnect of the Dem Party establishment folks, caused by big money corporate funded consultants, their pollsters and think tanks. (Hint; It’s STILL about the economy stupid! as James Carville told us 20 years ago!)
But now? Now we see, basically okay I’ll speak for myself, I see the polar opposite of everything I wanted and thought was necessary to bring relief to myself, my friends and all in the bottom 80% of this 1% controlled ponzi scheme of an economy.
So back to Colbert. I love his show and look forward to his reporting on the news by comically sticking a proverbial sharp stick in the bloated belly of the beast whose name is not to be spoken Donald Trump. It’s a good release!
That’s the aha moment I had this morning watching Laura Dern speak about what Stephen and his show means to her. This comedy satire we all enjoy or all but the Trump cult members enjoy, is an escape valve for massive amounts of anxiety as we see all we love, need, and want in mortal danger.
Is that good? Is that good for us who want to survive and see real economic justice finally happen in our lives? Or maybe if we were less able to deal with the stress by laughing at it might we be more apt to get off our phones and computers and into our communities doing stuff to help each other, to educate our neighbors, to support candidates who put people and planet before corporate profits?
President Roosevelt is said to have has a proverbial come to Jesus meeting with the Robber Baron/plutocrats of his era ie the tip of the one percent and told them if they didn’t pony up serious cash to fund unemployment insurance, retirement insurance (Social Security) and a huge public works program they might see the same uprising Russia and China did in the turn of that century and possibly lose all they had maybe even their lives.
You see he knew that when people had no security in their lives, no hope things would get any better they had nothing to lose by rising up and completely removing the establishment power structures that they saw to be oppressing them. So we got the New Deal as a kind of safety net, not just for the working class but safety for the super rich. Because again if they let things get too bad with income inequality it historically never ends well for them.
So maybe if we are able to laugh every night at our deepest and more serious fears regarding our very survival it stifles the engine of revolution and change. Maybe that’s not such a good thing if we normalize this monstrous Trump situation with nightly humor.
Some say the satire of shows like The Daily Show and others helped educate people about the news by calling out the establishment in both parties for their bullshit using humor and killer editing skills. And I watched Jon Stewart for what seems like decades! I’m sure it did educate lots of people. But did we do anything with that education?

