Illusion: an instance of a wrong or misinterpreted perception (of a sensory experience).

Delusion: an idiosyncratic belief or impression that is firmly maintained despite being contradicted by what is generally accepted as reality or rational argument; typically a symptom of mental disorder.

There’s a point when a strongly held conviction, a belief system, or a defining personal style morphs into something else. When an ‘I know this much is true. . .’ moment crosses the watershed into Neverland. When one’s credo becomes abruptly more sinister, more dangerous.

What makes this ‘crossing of the Rubicon’, this passing over the threshold from ‘generally accepted reality’ to a state less firmly tethered to the real world particularly worrisome is just that — that we’ve floated away from the mothership. That we’re no longer able to conduct meaningful ‘reality checks’. The feedback loop that keeps us grounded has breeched . . . and we’re adrift. Worse, we become increasingly attached to a self-referential, alternate universe, a ‘do-loop’ with no hope of fact-based correction.

The two versions of this New Yorker cover remind us that, with ‘selective pruning’, we ‘see’ what we want or are intended to see: the elegant, cocktail-sipping gal that has become the image of a Covid-times poster child. Pull back for for full frame and the rest of the story, the ‘truth’ reveals. Illusion of grace and style is supplanted by unshaven legs, days or weeks of detritus, device distractions, sweats over suits, the cavalier dereliction that displaces discipline. Illusion.

As state after state has certified and re-certified vote counts, suit upon suit has been tossed aside by the judiciary, ‘witnesses’ undone not by crafty examination but by their own ‘weirdness’, and November 3 recedes into the mists with January 20 looming on the horizon, the ‘version of reality’ that has held sway for a truly disturbing number of folks for the last four years has shifted from illusion to delusion.

An election has been won. . . and an election has been lost. I’m reminded of Arthur’s duel with ‘the Black Knight’ in Monty Python’s Holy Grail. As Arthur progressively dismembers his ‘worthy adversary’, BK sinks deeper and deeper into denial. Losing an arm (’Tis but a scratch’), a second arm (BK crows ‘Oh, had enough, eh?’) and confronted with the reality of his armless state (‘just a flesh wound’). Legless (BK’s defiant retort ‘I’ll do you for that’). Progressively, ‘I’m invincible’, ‘the BK always Trumps hurt’ — and ultimately ‘we’ll call it a draw’.

Funny in film, sympathetic in an individual’s psychotic process, tragic and terrifying in a nation’s morality play where near half of the population and an equal proportion of elected officials continue to support and endorse the deluded claim that ‘I won’ — and ‘none shall pass’.

Where does one begin? So many layers, so much irony, such glorious timing. DJT’s mentor and role model has been identified: Saparmurat Atayevich Niyazov or, if you’re a purist, Сапармырат Атаевич Ныязов. Sap, as his close friends and family affectionately tag him (I’m almost totally, certainly sure of this!), is the President for Life of Turkmenistan and a dog lover! His official moniker — hang on a minute while I make word pro space — ‘His Excellency Saparmurat Türkmenbaşy, President of Turkmenistan and Chairman of the Cabinet of Ministers’.

Nov. 10th saw Sap unveil a solid gold statue of a much cherished companion, an Alabai shepherd dog — and a bookend to the statue (also gold) of himself which, rotates throughout the day to face the sun. And to put this in context, the average annual earnings is about 25K (CD$) — with the last attempted assassination being 2002.

As the certainty of a ‘post-Trump’ era inches toward the start line, it’s rumoured (‘we have very good proof of this happening from many people’) that, DJT has been facing the East. The window is closing. Time to plan a management strategy for the road forward is ticking down.

Putting (or ‘Putin-ing’) another autocrat in one’s ‘starred’ (☪’d) list of contacts is a great first step. Much of the ground work has been laid already. Sap and Vlad are established good buddies, lifelong appointments to political autocracy is the norm . . . and gold is a favoured colour (skin, dogs, hair. . .). An unconfirmed bit of gossip is that Sap cruised to his 1999 ‘coronation’ on the slogan: MTGA (Make Turkmenistan Great Again). There is the dog, no-dog issue — but that can be spun. And, of course, not having to worry about illegal voting practices, the fickleness of the electorate, 2024, media that are fake or disloyal or both, and the wasted time attached to firing one’s inner circle — when a bullet (or a bit of poison) would suffice — are all so appealing.

A meme (/miːm/ MEEM) is an idea, behaviour, or style that becomes a fad and spreads by means of imitation from person to person within a culture and often carries symbolic meaning representing a particular phenomenon or theme.

Psychology is, in large part, about prediction. And with prediction, comes some measure of increased understanding. To reliably ‘know’ what is about to happen (within the usual disclaimer of ‘margin of error’), one must have identified a sufficient number of variables impacting a given person or event in a significant way to, in the lingo, ‘account for the variance’ in a particular outcome. One reduces the ‘wiggle room’ (in beautifully complex equations — algorithms, if you will) to be able to say, with some certainty that such and such will happen or so and so will behave in a ‘predictable’ way.

Among the legion shared obsessions of early November, two have surfaced in spades — well, one really: the pollsters (or if you’re DJT, the polesters) blew it again and, the . . . we interrupt this editorial moment to share the AP’s announcement at 11:47 a.m., four days post-election:

Back to the blog at hand.

. . . and ‘What the _______ were they thinking?’

That small segment of us who is both numbers-obsessed and enamoured of predicting human behaviour, needed to grasp how, not once (2016) but twice, the crunchers got it wrong — again! The Blue Wave not only didn’t happen, it took four days for said wave to even begin to break — and sweep away the sand castles that have populated the world’s beaches these past four years.

A New Yorker piece published in this very odd interlude since November 3 — when uncertainty was the rule — considered an ‘aftermath’, optimistically (now a reality), a pathway to transition. The article focussed in part on a distinction between Trump (the man) and Trumpism (the ‘movement’, if it’s even appropriate to dignify the ‘red mirage’ as such). And herein lies a clue to how a slam dunk of what was to be a ’10 point victory’ could fail to so palpably materialize and very nearly half of a voting public could entrench — again.

Consider the man. ‘Trump has famously survived one impeachment, two divorces, six bankruptcies, twenty-six accusations of sexual misconduct, and an estimated four thousand lawsuits’ — as catalogued in Jane Mayer’s NY’er article this week. Jimmy Kimmel did his own diarizing: ‘Cozying up to many of the world’s autocrats (Putin, Kim jong-un to name but two of the low lights), put children in cages, villainized the press, ducked paying income taxes (sorry, paid $750), tear-gassed peaceful protestors, pardoned criminal ‘buddies’, mismanaged and minimized a lethal pandemic, dismantled health care, incited white supremacists to violence, and lied, and lied, and lied. . .’ Hmm. Not exactly the resumé that would get you the job — but it very nearly did. . . again. Who could reasonably walk into a polling station, review in mind the four-year performance — with all the foregoing ‘highlights’ — and check the DJT box? Evidently nearly 71,000,000 voters of the recorded 145,000,000 total votes cast!

Sarah Cooper, the now widely viewed comedian best known for her ‘lip synching’ of DJT, offers some insight. Asked why her routines are so compelling, she noted that when we watch Trump in full flight we are so distracted by the caricature that is the man himself, that we fail to fully absorb the ignominy of his blither. We hear it . . . sort of. Her TicTok moments separate the man from the message. Failing to do so leaves us only slightly more aghast, disbelieving, numbed than we were before than last barrage.

As I watched election night and it became increasingly clear that there would be no resolution on that evening or for several to follow, like so many others, I began to reflect on a similar scenario four years earlier. A definitive Clinton victory had been predicted, then morphed into a toss-up, then simply disappeared. And this was before a term of chaos, prevarication, bullying, criminal behaviour, denial, and delusion. The ‘base’ had remained the ‘base’; and for a time appeared to have come through — again!

As tempting as it is to characterize the base as a collection of disenfranchised, disgruntled, gun-totin’, poorly educated rednecks incapable of critical thought, this is simply untrue (our Beer, BBQ, and Freedom demonstrator aside). ‘Election tailoring’ courtesy of Cambridge Analytica and the infamous social media targeting of messages to vast numbers of intellectually vulnerable droids is improbable — particularly for a second time around.

More likely some 48% of the US voting public cast their ballot, not for Donald J. Trump — but for a meme. A meme that has successfully polarized a nation — and capitalized on that divided number. A meme that did not require authentication, was completely lacking in accountability, empathy, compassion, planning. How else to make sense of an electorate’s decision, in the face of such cognitively dissonant truths, to express itself this way. Happily the ‘fad’ has run its course. The slogans have been found wanting, empty. Despite a very signifiant minority’s failure to separate the ‘myth from the man’, reality from the cartoon, we can now exhale. . . and heal. Having pulled the curtain away and, to paraphrase Rachel Maddow, revealed the small, pitiful, and irrelevant being behind — still in denial, still ranting. The work ahead will be to address the meme: Trumpism. Trump is out but the residual, the resonance his meme fostered remains.