The blog begins

                                      Jack Doppelt

Dec. 15, 2020

I'm starting today to archive my writings, commentaries, and musings going back to college during the 1970s. I'll upload as I go, so for awhile, it will be randomly fed. You can watch it go up, as you might with a high rise in downtown Evanston or a Jeanne Gang building in Chicago.

Jeanne Gang's Aqua Tower

Fountain of Yahoo

                                                                                                             Jack Doppelt

Dec. 3, 2020

The Fountain of Youth may be a mythical spring that restores the youth of anyone who drinks or bathes in it.

“Drinking the kool-aid” may be a grotesque reference that reminds us of the 900 people who died in Jonestown, Guyana in 1978 when Jim Jones, the cult leader of the Peoples Temple movement turned on his followers and on a congressman who visited to investigate the settlement that was preying on Americans.

We are now in the throes of the unseemly phenomenon of millions of Americans drinking with blind faith from the Fountain of Yahoo. They are the sympathizers of Donald Trump who in the month since the Nov. 3 election has stepped up his fundraising campaign that is driven by the need for him to play into the stoked beliefs that he was elected President and has been defrauded of his rightful place as the incumbent winner. To bilk as much as he can out of these believers, one surefire way is to prolong his unremitting conga line of lawsuits.

Within two weeks of the election, Trump and his henchmen hatched the coordinated plan that seamlessly converted his official campaign site into the Official Election Defense Fund. Go to the campaign site, click to donate and it takes you and others thirsting to support to the defense fund site, which in only a couple of weeks has raised more than $170 million, far more than his campaign did over any similar period before the election. Now he’s being victimized. As his claims of election fraud become more insistent, they are debunked by anyone with a shred of dignity or a grip on reality.

It only matters that the blindly faithful cling to his visions of grandeur. In one interview after another, the small-dollar donors are fine with the idea that their contributions don’t go toward recounts or legal expenses to challenge the election results. They’re fine in being told not one of the lawsuits has succeeded. Their blind faith is reinforced by Republican officials at the highest levels and by Fox News and other conservative outlets. They assert his victory being snatched from him with the same apparent certainty and indignation as Trump. If 75% of each contribution goes to Trump’s future or into his pockets, no matter what he chooses to do with it, so be it. They trust him to do what’s best.

The “drinking the kool-aid” reference is a harsh reminder, often used lightly. When Trump was interviewed by Bob Woodward for his book Rage, Trump's reaction to his question about the responsibility of white, privileged people to help understand the motivations of Black Lives Matter protesters, Trump said: "You really drank the Kool-Aid, didn't you?”

I hope fervently that Donald Trump’s careless use of his presidential and charismatic powers of persuasion will not result in anything unthinkable from some of his sympathizers acting in his name. Many well-meaning people dread the possibility.

I prefer at this juncture to caution people to not drink from the Fountain of Yahoo he’s offering.

Yahoo, aside from being a social media provider, is a word that conjures the image of a rude person, or as used originally in Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver's Travels, a book many of us read in school, a Yahoo is a primitive creature obsessed with digging in the mud whom Swift invoked to represent distasteful materialism and ignorant elitism.

Stay clear of the fountain.

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