My wife and I blame the above remonstrance on Midsomer Murders.
We’ve watched every episode, all the seasons, but the most memorable was the one with a modern-day coven of Druids. “Where did they come from?,” both of us wondered aloud. Since then,tv mystery series with modern-day witches and priest magicians have been met with, “It’s the Druids again!”
I’m now trying to train myself to remonstrate just this way every time I hear or read about Trump.
The problem is that I’ve spent the last part of my professional career arguing and demonstrating that “complex is as simple as it gets.” But here is Trump who is quite simply a massive travesty.
What to do?
One answer is to defamiliarize the public man into an institutional brand. As the brand for a particular kind of politics, Trump™ highlights “the inherent contradictions between individual and institution underlying their brand identities” (https://yorkspace.library.yorku.ca/server/api/core/bitstreams/0f6826d5-4858-4ccb-936d-cce1c98faf01/content).
And these institutions have been with us for a long time. “Yup. It’s the Druids again.”
WHEN COMPLEX IS AS SIMPLE AS IT GETS 