More than ever now, when I watch Trump, he looks completely clueless. I watch him stand next to people at the microphone, eyes shifting back and forth, empty of empathy, bereft of any visible emotion, other than “what do I look like”? When he talks, he says nothing. Gibberish. No encouragement, no consolation, no trace of any plan, no utterance of compassion. He now counts the dead.
It’s a celebration of ignorance.
In 1995, Carl Sagan published The Demon-Haunted World. What a visionary he was. Here is an excerpt:
I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time – when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the key manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agenda or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness. The dumbing down of America is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30-second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance.
— Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World