Detoxing from Donald

Opting out of Donald Trump's 'Attention Economy'

Friends of mine are having nightmares about the United States. One told me that they dreamt they were at a rally with hundreds of MAGA people aggressively shouting “USA! USA!” People close at the rally were saying things to them like, “Europe is weak and dumb” and “we’re going to get you guys”. One friend said there were two massive bald eagles in her dream, eating raw meat that they had trapped in their claws. And in the dream of the MAGA rally, piles of abandoned plastic cups and refuse were left by the crowd in a stinking mess once they were done.

Now, I’m no psychologist, but I think I understand the cause of these dreams. They have the same cause as the Greenlander recently interviewed on the Irish TV news, who said that since Trump said he wants to take over her country, her sleep has been filled with threatening nightmares.

The problem is, our imaginary and interior life has been totally colonized by Donald Trump. We spend our waking hours seeing a young mother being shot dead by ICE in Trump’s America. We see him bullying heads of state and giving the finger to opponents on TV. We scroll through our phones and there he is again: abducting the President of Venezuela; threatening Canada; telling us he’s not ruling out force to take over sovereign countries that really aren’t that far away from us. It’s all taking a toll on our mental health: and showing up at 4am in the form of awful nightmares.

What’s happening is that the US President has secured a near monopoly on ‘the attention economy’, as it’s so crassly called. Every time there’s a news report, there he is. Every dinner party conversation, there he is. When the kids come home from school, what are they talking about? There he is.

It’s like we’re living in a sinister and autocratic system where every burp and scratch of the autocrat is reported. It’s not enough that the US has extraordinary control over our economies, our technology, our entertainment media, our online research tools, our credit and debit card infrastructure, our military security. Now our dream-life is being taken over as well.

In many respects, it’s been like this for a long time. Anyone that grew up in the ‘western world’ since World War II has had their imagination Americanized for a very long time. I was born in 1969 and wanted to be an American astronaut as a child. The Six Million Dollar Man socialized me into the super-human potential of US technology. The GIs were the good guys and America went around saving other weak and pathetic nations out of the goodness of their heart. Later, Apple, Google and Microsoft made me live in a virtual America through social media. Footpaths started to become ‘sidewalks’ to the younger generation. ‘Labour’ started to be spelled ‘Labor’ by the US spell-checker available on our university computers. Soon ‘u’ were taken out of it—in more ways than one.

Now the vulnerability we have allowed ourselves to fall into has become apparent. It’s like we have allowed Austria to be annexed and Czechoslovakia to be taken, and have only woken up that Poland could be next. Like the appeasement of times past, it has only allowed the problem to become greater and much more threatening.

The place to start the pushback, the place to begin to win back our agency and sovereignty, is in the realm of our minds and of our imagination. This battle starts on the frontier of attention. Now we have to do something, now that we have woken up to the fact that what we thought was ‘globalism’ was, in fact, US creeping control and dominance. What we have to do first is to take back our attention.

What this means, in Buddhist practice, is allowing the infant to have his tantrum and only engage when it’s over. Until then, dwell with equanimity in spaciousness. Instead of following every twist and turn of the raving fantasy, look to the facts on the ground that are still standing when the rant is over. That way we save our mental health from the rollercoaster ride of insanity that we’ve all been careering on. By taking back our attention and finding repose in stillness, we create a foundation for action in the wider world.

Foregrounding sane and alternative voices is also a way to exercise attention hygiene when it comes to Donald Trump. What are the informed, expert, and moderate voices saying? Insist that the US President’s ranting does not suffocate the oxygen that these voices get in the battle for your mental attention. The media, in particular, need to put this into practice. Resist the sensationalist bait of frontloading the story with his latest rant. Look beyond that to something that is wise and sane.

And when it comes to our dreamlife, it would be good for all our mental health to have a De-Donald-Tox. That doesn’t mean sticking your head in the sand while Trump plans to invade countries close to Europe. Rather, it means resisting his attempt to take over your mind. Read other parts of the newspaper. Listen to other voices. Spring is just around the corner: look and you’ll see daffodils are about to burst out and now you can feel the days lengthening and brightness coming into the evening sky. There is calmness and sanity in the natural world. There is refuge in our Zen practice, where we encounter the unchanging ground of being, no matter how upsetting the external conditions might be.

Martin Luther King’s birthday happened recently. Remember that he ‘had a dream’, an American Dream that is worth having. It’s time to push back against Donald Trump’s nightmares. It’s time to practice hygiene with our minds and with our interior life. Allow the peaceful depth of your Buddhist practice to nourish you now. All of this will pass, from one breath to the next.

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