State of Deception

Yesterday was Election Day and so I voted. I almost always vote and I even got the “I Voted” sticker this time. There wasn’t much on the ballot, just two city tax propositions. I was lucky voter number thirteen. When I voted, I was the only voter there, even though one of the election officials joked, “Look, we’ve got a line!” She was counting one of the other election officials, who was standing beside me, which I don’t think should really count. Interestingly, the election official who setup the touch screen machine for me was named Mohammed. I noticed his name and thought that it was a nice touch for democracy. I just learned that Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders is Jewish. I did not know that. He had relatives that were murdered in the Holocaust, which is a source for his motivation to pursue a career in politics. Adolf Hitler was democratically elected chancellor of Germany and through this unguarded moment the Nazis came to power and the Second World War and the Holocaust resulted. Because of this history, Sanders believes that politics really matters and I do too.

Last July, I attended an exhibit at the Missouri History Museum entitled, “State of Deception – The Power of Nazi Propaganda”. It was a traveling exhibit created by the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, a part of the Smithsonian. This show contained many artifacts indicative of everything that the Nazis stood for. They are all bold, powerful graphics, the type of imagery that I usually like to post, but their hateful symbolism is something that I have no wish to propagate. Instead, what I have chosen as the graphic for this post is the exhibit’s own ad, which still contains some of the same hated imagery, but in a more muted form.

This morning I awoke to the latest act of utter stupidity by Donald Trump. Last night he first tweeted and then retracted an image of Jeb Bush along with a Nazi swastika. I can only assume that alcohol was involved, but only to the extent that it freed Trump of any inhibitions and left #TheRealDonaldTrump exposed, but his racist demagoguery is only the tip of the GOP iceberg. The Donald may be out there, but he is not that far out there from many in his party. I have to believe that Abraham Lincoln must be turning in his grave.