And melting down too William Irwin Thompson once critiqued the emptiness of a modern culture in which we’ve learned to crave (and pay for) the synthetic as a substitute for the real. Cheez Whiz and Cool Whip. Fake wrestling substituting for real wrestling, etc. “If Americans would rather tour a fake Europe at EPCOT Center in Disney World,” Thompson wrote, “they can go to ‘foreign’ restaurants, but still speak English.” Thompson described the Disneyfication of everything long before we elected Donald Trump, a ratings-obsessed, reality-TV president in place of a real one. “Harris’ large crowds are a pivotal part of her strategy to defeat Trump,” reads CNN’s landing page just now. Hers are bigger. Trump’s manhood as well as his freedom is threatened. Marcy Wheeler this morning speaks of how central spectacle is to Donald Trump’s sense of himself, and how threatened he is by the spectacle of a Harris-Walz rally: The rest is largely a critique of the news coverage’s misread (or ignore) of the timelines involved. More a measure of his insecurity and need to pleasure himself, Trump’s boasts about crowd size are an essential feature of sustaining the Big Lie from 2020 (he believes crowd size equates to vote counts) and the one he’s updating for 2024 to explain his loss and to foment another coup attempt. Team Harris knows this and goads him at every opportunity with how her crowds translate into volunteers. This is actually the purpose rallies are supposed to serve at this point…