Editor’s Note: The remnants of the disaster in Texas will be with us for a while, and another storm that could threaten Cat 5 consequences on the East Coast is rising west of Africa. It is the first day of September, the start of a holiday weekend, and if you have not contributed to the Red Cross or another reputable aid agency for those who are homeless, please consider it before the grilling starts. We are going to get rain here in DC, and it is chill, and the last few precious days of the pool are looming. I will do a “Pool People” article presently to show the very special people who made this a magical summer, but first things first. This is Marlow’s take on it all.

– Vic

The Unsuspected and Triumphant Rise of the Alt Radical Bleak’s Hero

When those ARB blog and social media site editors who supported the unelectable one met their candidate in his NYC tower in late November 2016, they were thrilled to understand that their supportive words had daily been on the smart phone of the soon to be President of the United States for many, many months.

This meeting was a first for them. These were just average men with well above average luck to have supported the most surprising and surprised president ever.

These scribes and podcast yappers were a rumpled lot with unpressed pants, most with open collared shirts, a few with askew ties, tousled if not downright unkempt hair, pale skin, and poorly clipped fingernails. Their breath often smelled of what snack foods they had last consumed while binge surfing and writing their multiple daily digital online pieces.

Their appearances like their words were the epitome of anti-fashionable because as one of them wrote long ago when he had only several dozen regular readers “the manicured sophistication of the mainstream media” appalled them and their readers with its self serving hypocrisy.

None of them considered that the object of their love should have caused them to rethink their attitudes. Lord knew that he spent at least forty minutes each morning in front of a mirror with multiple stylists shoring up his eye holes, facial irregularities, wrinkles and the amazingly confected baklava of glowing tri-leveled hair.

None thought to see and realize they were floating amongst a bounty of artisanal scones, crystal bowls and sterling silver trays full of elegantly made simple foods the elected candidate always had available within arms reach, and an invisible army of servants offering drinks and delicious morsels.

The colorful one had been for a brief moment long ago on the cutting edge of the Radical Bleak. He had sensed early on that this electorally crucial portion of the country had fallen into a steep decline and that no one was speaking on its behalf. These downtrodden didn’t yet know, however, that they needed a champion who would stop at nothing in speaking out on their behalf.

He had thought it all out. His goal was getting the support of the Alt Radical Bleakers. These ultra-insulting, direct action, insurrectionists had a devoted following, an enhanced megaphone based on their willingness to flaunt media convention and a track record of getting their anti-mainstream narratives inserted into conventional news platform coverage.

He carefully staged all of his pre-campaign public encounters with his potential voters to reflect their values and appetites. Only he could briefly close his eyes and quickly picture the way it had to be. There was not and would not be any other way. He was always right. The correct atmospherics were not mere conveniences, they were absolute necessities.

Counter-guilt was important sub rosa influencer during these encounters in his staged surroundings to make folks realize that they were in the presence of someone who was about to redefine what patriotic, successful, cultured, deal making, tuned in and hip were.

Pre-election Alt Radical Bleaker

What his new insider acolytes and chroniclers had to learn quickly was how to dress for these meetings and their public appearances henceforth. Obviously they would not want to wear something unserious nor ridiculously expensive. On the other hand one could no longer be seen in their former, bargain-basement-sales, slob duds. They had to now wear simple black outfits that underlined their seriousness along with absolutely no ornamentation save for a plain gold ring. It would portray simple dignity without any overt class symbolism and more importantly underscore their subservience to the man with the colorful hair and face.

The p-elect was always wearing a black or navy blue suit with modest blue or red ties. His tailors from Hong Kong and London were flown to his tower penthouse apartment to take the measurements and do the fittings.

He was a tall, modestly trim-appearing man. Some rumored he had been repeatedly cool sculpted in South America but it was equally likely that he wore custom, hand made, male girdles or mirdles.

Despite his colorful mien and hair, he had a blockish head and face that could be equally sensitive, attentive, pixieish and rugged. He always was careful to set off his appearance with the room colors and furniture choices. Success radiated from his eyes. Success was obviously good for his soul.

He eschewed the theatrics of the billionaire’s tchotchke look in his apartments. A few family photos in simple frames, no high end art on the walls. It was the antithesis of rich NYC types. It was very instinctive and to the carefully observant quite instructive. Zero outward pretentiousness was his ticket and trade.

He carefully arranged things so that he was always stood out in looks and words from the big city effete cliques of old money, snobs and intellectuals he so despised. At first during his pre-campaign announcement period, he cleverly arranged for a few of these unknowing targets to be present during an event. These set ups were his message’s alpha tests. He was ever pleased for his future adherents’ grins and chuckles after each of his zingers found their targets.

The celebrities and culturati were reflexively ashen and nonplussed by this treatment from someone that they had considered a friend and fellow yet parvenu member of the NYC elite. To him, this was just business. At first they ignored him or stomped out before openly defying and decrying him.

Whenever he fell into a hole rhetorically, he would be slow to recognize it before beginning his long painful climb back out. He would regain his footing by telling about the oppression of the working man by bad trade treaties and illegal immigration or how unsafe the hinest poor’s neighborhoods had become. He could count on a number of folks in the audience to chime in “Damn straight.”

“Some people think that we are racist, because the news media finds it useful to create that impression in order to support the entrenched elite power structure. We – you and I – have nothing to do with that . . . see . . . They’d like for our party and values to be made to look racist. That’s just lame camouflage of the true nature of your struggles.

“All people want is the good life, to live in peace and have a good job . . . that’s all we want . . . see . . . But right now there’s no way the other side will allow that.”

Everyone drank in his performances like mother’s milk for the soul.

On the campaign trail, he often would relate vignettes about audience members who had bootstrapped themselves into a better life. But sooner or later he would begin talking about pet grievances that deeply emotionally resonated with his supporters. For example, his speeches at times were about children’s liberation from poor public schools and how unions and Democratic Party attacks on the charter school movement were evidence of their true character, exploitation and racism.

His jive was realer than real, righter than right and sweepingly exhilarating. It was punctuated and punched up by his jerky hand thrusts into the air that he alone had the solutions to the radically bleak world his listeners inhabited.

In some ways he was establishing a totally new trend, a fashion, in these moments of nakedly raw and powerful triumph over their ills. How extraordinary that just a 15 minute stump speech could sweep away their Radical Bleak.

The mainstream press ignored, as best it could, the birth of the original Radical Bleak. It had become an underground wave in fly over country a while ago. It had been building, however, for decades. Several years before 2016 it had reached the fringe blog sites and social media pages on the internet, where it had morphed into the Alt Radical Bleak. Fashionable website pages sold a form of advanced political action and self-awareness and, to a lesser degree, of sympathy for these newly poor’s desire to reclaim their lost self-reliance.

This champion positioned himself to those who ate beans and wieners out of necessity as if they were being brought into communion with one who, not having to eat those foods voluntarily, did so as a sacrament. The ensuing struggle he would lead them on was thereby consecrated into the act of breaking sacred bread with a savior.

It was all so very nice. In fact, his romanticizing of the primitive in their souls was one of the things that brought the alt’ed Radical Bleak to the fore in the American electorate. Nostalgia for a lost golden age is an excellent motif whenever new faces and radically new-old ideas enter the national discussion.

As a “new” arrival he used several ways to establish his superiority over the benignly neglectful, entrenched elites. While he was a member of, possessed the trappings of and freely admitted to being part of the old aristocracy, he indulged his listeners in the thrills of taking on the always effective styles of nationalism and populism.

He recklessly waltzed his voters. He conveyed a beguilingly modest yet aristrocratic self-confidence while thumbing his nose at the mainstream’s obsession with propriety and appearances. His was an unspoken promise that the old guard of Democratic and Republican Party privilege and regulation would be upstaged by socially aware fair trade for America bankers, real estate developers and the leaders of large corporations lining up behind him to Make America Great Again and hore these long term un-and-underemployed

His was a rock solid invitation to another guilded age of middle class prosperity and upward mobility. All were invited to an unending Big Dinner, not just VIPs, financiers, and businessmen but those at home tending the children, those toiling in the fields of our farms, and those laboring in our factories and offices.

By the mid 2010s, the world’s internetted social media was beginning to dominate American life. It was totally horizantally unintegrated. The old ways of communications – namely the print, broadcast and cable media – were totally outmoded.

This empowered the digitally enabled fringe dwellers and other “minority” viewpointers. Yet, America still had two cultures, a waning “old centralized, coastal dwelling communications dependent” one and a waxing “new, decentralized, fly over country, social media, smart phone dependent” one. In every way possible, the “old” showed a non stop horrified disdain towards the “new,” expressing the devout conviction that their established good programs, their long in the tooth past good works, and their undenaible personal goodnesses were far preferable to this rank newbie climber.

The Alt Radical Bleakers played upon this pretentiousness relentlessly via Twitter, Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram, and old school web blogger sites. The Alt Radical Bleak became in ten short months in 2016 America’s new wave supreme.

On the face of it, Make America Great Again was a standard political slogan. But MAGA quickly came with the aid of the Alt Radical Bleak-o-sphere to symbolize the visceral aspirations and ambitions of lower-class Americans – the deplorables according to the other candidate – and, then by extension, of those who felt discarded, obsolete and forgotten, including, surprisingly, people of color.

Unseen by all old school media observers and pollsters, these new politics and communcations were seemlessly integrated under the proven social motif of nostalgia. Ba da bing, ba da boo, thus began late on that November night of 2016 the season of the Alt Radical Bleak and the current hot war front over language as an instrument of control of the unwanted, unuseable and insecure.

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