American Pie in the face by @BloggersRUs

American Pie in the face

by Tom Sullivan

Image by @Carl_Price Chris Barker #sgtpepper2016 .

British graphic artist Chris Barker's montage began on election night in the U.S. Pondering the losses this year of David Bowie and so many other celebrities, Barker eventually created an homage to the cover of the Beatles’ 1967 “Sgt. Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band." The image posted on November 9 went viral:

“Then Leonard Cohen died and he was so almost Beatles-y that adding him was a no-brainer and it went even more viral,” Barker noted in his blog. “Then Robert Vaughan, another great sixties icon also passed away and it went viral again. Then suddenly I was that dead celebrity photoshopper guy.”

This is too much now. #ripgeorgemicheal #LastChristmas #sgtpepper2016 #sgtpepper2016 Massive thanks to @Carl_Price pic.twitter.com/70TEnC6qIu

— christhebarker (@christhebarker) December 26, 2016

The image may mimic "Sgt. Pepper's" but the feeling this morning is more the melancholy "American Pie." A bit of irony about what else died in 2016 appears in the center foreground:

Barker’s image includes Bowie, Prince, Muhammad Ali, Alan Rickman, Gene Wilder and more. Also represented is “America” via a Donald Trump “Make America Great Again” hat.

But what’s fascinating is how few of them, had anything positive to say about Trump and his coming presidency, despite their apparent love of the Great Orange Grimace. On the contrary, the contributions of Trump supporters on the thread were almost exclusively negative: They are gleefully certain that he will rain destruction on the heads of the hated liberals.

Trump’s fans on Twitter don’t seem to think that he’ll improve the economy or foreign relations or anything at all, really. In fact, they seem wholly opposed to the concept of improvement. Their worship of the man lies with their belief that he’s an agent of destruction, who will hurt people they have been trained by the likes of Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity to believe are evil.

The machine has been operating in this way for many years, as Alterman and others have detailed. But since the election, the delegitimization of real news has taken a new, dangerous twist. It has now become clear that faithful followers of Limbaugh, or Fox News, will not only immediately discount any mainstream-media story that reflects badly on politicians or policies they like, no matter how well sourced and substantiate; they will consider the story itself yet another reason to support those politicians and policies, and will quite possibly believe the opposite, simply as a matter of principle. Polling data suggests that even during the election, the revelations about Trump’s failure to pay federal income taxes, and then the Access Hollywood tape, failed to significantly affect his support within the Republican base. The stories were unquestionably true, but that was less important than the fact that they were reported in the mainstream media (broken, in fact, by The New York Times and The Washington Post, respectively). By definition the stories demonstrated the power and extent of the dark liberal conspiracy against America, making Trump’s victory even more important for the Republican base.