Sometimes when you're watching history happen it goes by really fast. Like the last couple of weeks or so. If political years are like dog years, we all just aged rapidly.

I wont try to add anything new to the Trump Assassination^© story lines, just about all has already been said, but I do want to point out how the incident has proven to be a masterclass in marketing, symbolism and narrative creation and control, both before and after the event.

In a timeline of an event there is a past, a present, and a future. The past and the future are predicated on the present. The present being that fleeting fragment of a millisecond in time that we recognize as the here and now, that swiftly renders the future into the past. It's that fleeting moment of the present that the story tellers use to define the past and the future to fit within a narrative. Never mind that you witnessed the event in real time, that's not what you saw, here's what you saw, laid out in a neat package of cognitive bias.

Package it in patriotism, repeat the media message ad nauseam, add in some slick AI imaging and babbling talking heads, and you've got a story line worthy of a TMZ gossip column.

That's how modern histories are written, and truth is dispatched right before our eyes.

18 July Open Thread - 'Eh'

I didn't and don't have much reaction to the attempted assassination of Trump. Mostly my reaction is, 'eh'. I'm upset about the man who died protecting his family. And the possible screwups, that's bothersome too. What really upsets me is what the shooting revealed, once again, about America. Our country is founded, and built, by violence and the guns that reflect that. RJ Eskow expressed exactly what I've been feeling, but couldn't describe very well, is his article 'One Nation Under Fire: Trump Resurgent'.

Eskow talks about how most Americans are 'under the gun', 'under the gun' of economic hardship as well as random shootings and so on, and about how America was founded in violence and how the wars America has fought in the last 75 years have all been driven by political violence, one way or another. I can't disagree; he's right.

From 2012, but it fits. An editorial cartoon from Cleveland.com.

....that Has Taken Place Right Under Our Noses.

.

There's a very good chance you might suddenly 'know' and understand that you are living in a world where you have no input at all. The coup government exists, with or without your consent or participation.

~

On my way home from the farm. Everything growing just fine. The 4 or 5 inches of hay mulch is holding in the moisture nicely.
Getting up there to water once a week is working out.
I have an automatic watering system going at my home garden, so no worries there.

A wounded Donald Trump and protecting Secret Service officers caught by photographers in an "Iwo Jima" like posture with the American flag.