Showing posts with label Mao Zedong. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Mao Zedong. Show all posts

Friday, September 4, 2026

The myth after the man: a cult shall outlive its king

A densely detailed Gothic illustration depicts an extravagant moonlit cult of personality centred upon monumental statues and portraits of Donald Trump. An immense stone figure dominates the composition, surrounded by busts, fountains and colossal carved likenesses integrated into a fantastical palace garden. Numerous scantily clad women in black, crimson and ivory garments kneel, embrace, kiss and caress the monuments in gestures of fervent adoration, while roses, candles, gargoyles and gilded ornament heighten the atmosphere of decadent ritual. Repeated representations of the same leader extend into the distance, transforming political hero-worship into an eerie spectacle of idolatry, excess and manufactured immortality.
image generated via ChatGPT

Trump, on the raising of monuments unto himself: ‘Nobody will do it once I’m gone’. {CNN 4 September}

https://www.kten.com/news/politics/trump-doesn-t-dispute-he-s-building-monuments-to-himself-nobody-will-do-it-once/article_c5df451c-87aa-5e20-94a4-af52c1035877.html

I would say the president doth exhibit a measure of genuine perceptiveness, for once, as most of us are not going to lament his eventual departure from the stage of life — though decrepit as he is now, it is going to be many years still as I am convinced God is employing this man as an instrument of chastisement against the United States of America for its manifold transgressions, and shall preserve him unto an absurd age purely to prolong our torment. Yet in truth, Trump may be mistaken (imagine that), for millions of #Muricans remain so far gone into this cult of personality that even after he be dead, they shall endeavour to deify him regardless — a diminished number, seeing as many others shall themselves have departed this earth within some twenty to twenty-five years, and supposing the planet hath not by then been reduced to ruin (looking like a big ‘if’).

Even should this constitute but a modest fraction of the population, they shall nonetheless venerate Donald Trump in death. Decades after his denunciation by Khrushchev, and long past even the collapse of the Soviet Union itself, no small number of souls within his native country of Georgia, and throughout Russia and other lands once Soviet, did continue to lionise Joseph Stalin. Maoist guerrilla movements remain active in parts of South Asia. And, naturally, there have always existed those neo-Nazis harbouring an affection for Hitler, together with a full disregard for the reasons that rendered Nazism so catastrophic a failure on every conceivable level — and their numbers, indeed, are expanding, as neo-fascist doctrine continueth to poison the minds of millions, whilst living memory of the Third Reich’s horrors fades away with the passage of time.

Whether Trump doth genuinely belong in the same company as brutal tyrants and suchlike, I shall not here address — nor do I believe, even now, that most of us wish in earnest to entertain whether any elected American president might be justly likened unto some of history’s worst monsters, howsoever we may hold a given president in contempt. At the very least, however, he is as reviled across the globe as almost any political leader within living memory. Perchance Vladimir Putin is held in worse regard, and that would be deserved. No matter: the world at large shall not mourn Donald Trump upon his day of reckoning, yet his hold upon the most fervent of his acolytes shall, if anything, only grow stronger. It mattereth not how corrupt and inept the man doth prove to be in our own time, for in fifty to seventy-five years hence, there shall doubtless remain those who account Trump a folk hero and cultural icon — assuming, once again, that the planet itself remains standing to bear witness. Nothing is guaranteed... save for more misery, so long as this whoreson knave and his cult maintain their stranglehold upon the rest of us.

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🪐💔 #QueSeraSera 𓅨 🕈

Copyright 2026, Arthur Newhook.