A Poem For Donald Trump and His Fascist Amerika

And, as a special bonus prize, a provocative footnote on the media that made Hitler and Trump

By

David Gottfried

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I am too tired to write an essay, but I am offering this poem prompted by more revelations of Trump’s worship of Adolf Hitler.   I scribbled it in the past 15 minutes, and it unfortunately might seem like a 15 minute production, but its assets outweigh its deficits and, as Trump might say, its in the black – while he’s as red as the Masque of the Red Death. 

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All is always for Naught

Love flounders and fails

The moon balloons like a sun

And all light is undone

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All is astral and stark

The cosmos deep and dark

There are no promises to keep
Only vengeance to reap

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America once loved Robert Kennedy

America now loves Donald Trump

A nation that defeated Hitler

Bows and scrapes like a butler

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The lonely and bitter voters

Poison the polls with their spleen

Their bodies sag and falter

And rage screams evergreen

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Radio was the medium of Hitler ¹

Social media, catnip  for Trump

Frenzied, febrile and furious

Lady Liberty, just a frump

1. In the late Sixties, the media theorist Marshall McLuhan said that Hitler was spawned by radio, something he called a hot medium.  It was a hot or emotional medium because it gave you sound without pictures.   The individual, while receiving the audio, was free to imagine the video. And so when Hitler said the Jews were vermin, the paranoid Germans could use their minds to imagine torrents of rats sweeping across the bedroom floor.   McLuhan said that TV was a cool, soporific medium because it gave you both sound and pictures, leaving the viewer with nothing to do but vegetate, and because of its mind-numbing properties, it limited and finally killed the protest movements of the Sixties.   Social Media seems to be  a menace of an entirely different type, and it may have spawned Hitler’s successor.