This Nunes memo set me thinking.
I saw three possibilities. 1.) The F.B.I., an independent agency, in its impartial pursuit of truth and justice, just happened to throw the 2016 presidential election to Donald Trump and now just happens to be trying to overthrow his presidency. Having ceased viewing the F.B.I. as a neutral agency sometime between the time its public face shifted from Jimmy Stewart (The F.B.I. Story) to Efrem Zimbalist, Jr. (The F.B.I.), I put this possibility aside.
2.) Under its previous director, the F.B.I. had been supportive of Donald Trump and undermined the candidacy of Hillary Clinton, but Trump had fired this director because, Trump claimed, of this unfairness and replaced him with someone who now sought to undermine Trump. (This would be the so-called “Deep State” theory, but it seemed to imply two distinct and separate Deep States warring with one another.)
Though this seemed to be the theory — at least the second half of it — that Trump was pushing — it seemed to me credible only to someone whose brain was more worm-hole-ridden than I had believed even Trump’s to be, so I moved on.
3.) The F.B.I. is in league with a third, yet unidentified force. This force, by getting rid of the steady, stable and competent — if unexciting and semi-compromised — Clinton, and installing the erratic, pathological, and scurrilous shitbag Trump, seeks to destroy the unifying fabrics of our society and level our system of government, enabling this force to seize control of us all.
That seems more like it. What I haven’t worked out is whether this “force” has actual flesh-and-blood representatives here on earth or if it is more like a Lovecraftian monster (to which I hesitantly allude, having read little, if any, Lovecroft), emanating from, communicating through, and linked together by the darkest and most evil impulses within all human beings — think Bizzaro-world Jungian collective unconscious — driving us toward self-inflicted doom.
Oh, hooey, Bob, you may very well say.
Well, fuck you, I say to that.
Look what has got us where we are. Greed. Racism. Xenophobia. Fear. Frustration. Jealousy. Hatred of the other — pick your “other.” That is what tickled us when we pulled the lever. That is what kicked us in our own nuts. Either that got within us — a lot of us — in toxic doses — by chance and happened, again by chance, to work in consort toward a single end, or a formed and calculating malevolency ruled the day.
You think November 2016 can be explained by policy differences or one candidate’s campaign performance not living up to another’s? Can I offer you my bridge between Dumbo and Manhattan?