The Mirror Stage of US Politics

The US has been transformed into a mirror world, the mirror world of a pathological narcissist, a world of reverse images where victims are flipped into perpetrators, the poor portrayed as exploiters of the super-rich, the weak as persecutors of the strong and where the law is used to perpetuate lawlessness. The police conceal their faces behind the masks of thieves, while thieves loot the public estate unmolested. Public corruption has been legalized and exposing graft made a crime. 

The right of free speech has been rendered into an obligation to be obsequious in the face of power. The history of the country is being erased and rewritten to honor some of its most infamous villains and traitors and airbrush out defenders of liberty, diversity and equality. The sins of the past are promoted as virtues.  People are judged based on the color of their skin and the size of their portfolios. Domestic tranquillity has been supplanted by an atmosphere of fear and manufactured dread, where everything and everyone is suspect and no one is even sure what a citizen is or whether they are one. Not even the weather is to be believed. 

This mirror world’s aesthetic is the grotesque, the bloated, the cannabilistic and the country feeding upon itself is presented as a kind of cage match for the entertainment of the elite. Even the people’s house, built, maintained and served by the enslaved, has been  retrofitted into a gilt-fringed Versailles on the Potomac. 

This is, of course, the mirror world’s fatal weakness: a hollow hubris. Deep down a secret voice whispers to the narcissist that he’s not worthy of the power he holds. His crippling anxiety is that the people he despises the most will see through him to the fraud within, that his grip on power is maintained by an illusion of force–not real authority–and that once exposed, the mirror will crack and he will crumble by his own accord at the feet of those he tormented.

A shorter version of this piece was written for the fall issue of Ishmael Reed’s new magazine, Tar Baby, published by the Toni Morrison Foundation.

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