If you scroll down, just a little bit further, you will find pictures of John Wilguess as an 18 year-old, future President of the United States and world-expert of . . . everything. That photo was VERY in style in 1983 with my polyester blend blue suit AND vest. Oh yes, can't forget the overwhelming head of hair that went with it!
My wife and kids recently saw it and . . . suggested many uses for it . . . not all of them as favorable as I would have hoped since, as an 18 year-old-expert-at-everything, I thought that this represented me and my future life very well. I remember searching through the backdrops available for Senior Class pictures and thinking, very clearly, "this is me."
And now its not. They have not aged as well as I have 😄. You be the judge when you scroll down.
I would argue that it is human nature that, throughout our lives, we try to minimize those things that we did/thought/said which might not age well, either. In fact, I would ask you to consider that everywhere around us are efforts to forget that something happened because now it is:
Uncomfortable
Embarrassing
Sad
Funny to everyone but me
Out-of-date
Out-of-style
If we can pretend it didn't happen AND then erase any evidence that it actually did occur, even better! We are off the hook and never have to explain.
Which brings me to the picture above. There is quite the story going on now about the desire of many - including the director as well as the (no-longer) child star Macauley Culkin to digitally eliminate the short cameo appearance of Donald Trump in the old movie "Home Alone 2." Please stick with me a minute. This is most certainly not a "defend Donald Trump" post.
This is a terrible, terrible idea.
While today's dominant culture (DC) labels Trump as many things, eliminating the collective memory of our society is a very dangerous act to undertake, even if it attempts to serve some self-righteous purpose. Yes, the Hollywood/media-types/liberals who despise Donald Trump, once he became a political figure - before that - LOVED him.
While it fails to conform to the "new" truth of the DC it was THE truth, at one time. That reality must not be hidden or digitally altered to remove the truth. The natural next steps, if the "owners" of the movie insist on cutting him out now, is finding all of the existing copies/downloads and eliminating them so that nothing goes against the new reality. The echoes of past history should be setting off warning signs at the logical outcome of this purification.
The very idea should raise revulsion and fear in every one of us. The suggested actions are not funny, sarcastic or helpful. Mass media has, for good or ill, created a collective memory and that memory now includes, if you made it that far in the movie, Donald Trump, as himself, talking to Macaulay Culkin, playing a character named Kevin, in the Home Alone movie. By eliminating that scene, pretending it was not a part of the original creative process AND included in the final cut because there was a benefit of including Trump, the DC would force all of us to pretend we didn’t know it was there. In order to accept the new reality we would have to lie to ourselves about what we know occurred.
On a separate note, one of the most troubling aspects for free speech and intellectual integrity should be the almost total reliance on digital memory. When a book, movie, song has been created and committed to paper, film, record or disc, something permanent, we are able to check the original versus future versions. When all is digital and left to the whims of Dominant Culture and people like these who would so readily change the truth to hide reality, how much reality are we losing without any knowledge of it whatsoever? Now, back to our story.
This should be a red flag for everyone who believes free speech, freedom of expression and intellectual integrity are synonymous with our US values. But with Dominant Culture guardians, many of whom used to proclaim themselves strong free speech proponents, those values are being jettisoned in favor of political acceptance.
Want to know how I can make such a statement? This chart:
Contained in it are the political donations Trump made prior to becoming a candidate for President. Before 2011 or so, when he decided he was a Republican, Donald Trump made huge donations to Democrats. Especially to:
Andrew Cuomo for NY Attorney General and NY Governor
Hillary Clinton for US Senate and the Clinton Foundation
He gave thousands and thousands more in support of Democrats than the GOP. That changed as he decided to run for President but it is true.
But once he moved into their line of work, he became the political equivalent of Satan to all those who adored, catered to, swooned after him for his money. The list, from Ballotpedia, notes that only a tiny fraction of donations were returned. How much power, money, influence came to those people who, less than a decade ago, thought of Donald Trump as “one of them” enough, so that they had no heartburn taking money from him to gain that power? Had their conscience been so pierced by his political positions of the day, why haven't they, even now, given back the money or resigned the position his influence gained them? Certainly in the Home Alone 2 movie, he was included for a certain effect that the director/producer wanted to achieve because of who he was. Now they would erase him for the tiny bit of notoriety it gains them.
Worse however, Dominant Culture insists that those who supported him most recently are in need of “reprogramming” according to multiple sources within the Democrat Party - even the just fired Chief Legal Counsel for PBS was recorded saying this. When Trump was seen as a liberal he was part of the culture enough to put him in movies as himself, fete him at Democrat events, adore him on Oprah and hide his “dirty secret videos” with Billy Bush.
But when he went to the other side, all that changed. In fairness, his positions may have changed dramatically during this transformation from one party to the other - but IF you eliminate the history, no one will ever know how that came to be.
Now he, and those who supported him on policy issues (more than 70 million Americans) must be eliminated. First, for fun by digitally altering Trump from a movie and then by marginalizing and blacklisting anyone who has been associated with the GOP. Just do a quick search of calls to never hire anyone who had anything to do with Trump. It makes the McCarthy-era hunt for Communists look positively quaint.
That’s not funny. It’s not cute. It’s not American. Yet, that is where some in the DC (and I worry it’s a growing number) who feel free, after assuring they are in the electoral majority, would steer us.
Leave history alone. Explain it, put it in context, reinterpret - but don’t alter reality. That’s a line we should never cross.
BTW -
I promised - here’s the infamous, now unwanted reality from my Senior Class pictures. Stillwater High School, 1983. Priceless.
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