Hamilton Nolan's juxtapositional metaphor — perfectly describes the United States

© 2020 Peter Free

 

18 November 2020

 

 

I often address how US propaganda motivates us to miss the main point

 

Hamilton Nolan apparently does also. And he writes with juxtapositional, metaphor-oriented genius.

 

Here in extracts — taken from a misleadingly entitled piece:

 

 

The Million MAGA March in Washington, DC on Saturday did not have a million people, but it had a million flags. You couldn’t take two steps without one of them smacking you in the face.

 

Perhaps it has been too long since we had a big war that required a draft, and all of that bloodlust is pouring into America itself, like an infection.

 

[N]ow, lacking a distinct boogieman to soak up our aggression, we have thousands and thousands of people who dress up as soldiers and roam the streets of American cities, waiting to attack… whoever.

 

Trump’s achieve­ment has been to remove any real polit­i­cal pre­text from our nation­al polit­i­cal feud, leav­ing only a pile of hate that can be direct­ed at any ene­my that’s con­ve­nient.

 

That so many of these people would feel it necessary to travel across the country to march up Constitution Avenue and inform the world that ​“I’d Rather Get Covid-19 Than Biden 20” is disturbing on a human level, but not cause for undue alarm.

 

The real shitkickers were a minority.

 

On the side of a street in downtown DC on Saturday morning sat a tiny woman wrapped in a TRUMP 2020 flag that was bigger than she was. She had stuck up hand-lettered cardboard signs on the bus shelter where she was laying.

 

One of them read, ​“How in the Hell do undocumented people get Housing in the USA and Americans are homeless.”

 

None of the MAGA people paid her any attention, and neither did anyone else.

 

© 2020 Hamilton Nolan, The MAGA Army Tries to Drag America to Hell, In These Times (16 November 2020)

 

 

Notice the concluding existential message . . .

 

. . . and the "bag lady" who makes it, even while wrapped in her "Trump 2020" flag.

 

There is soul-slaying irony in that double metaphor.

 

 

The moral? — The act of continuous propaganda-slurping kills our brains . . .

 

. . . always other people and (sometimes) even us.