Return To Whenever...

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I came across a word new to me, today, in the FT Weekend Magazine's 'Departments' sidebar: ' RETCON/ rɛtkɒn / (verb or noun), a contraction of 'retroactive continuity', for when an existing narrative and the established facts within that narrative are overwritten, as in the [cited] Patrick Duffy shower resurrection in the TV show 'Dallas'. Having been killed off in the previous season of the show, it was decided that Duffy that should stay with the show, and returned, as if from the dead, with the entire previous season being written off as a dream.

How so 'now' this seems, with The Trump Show performing this feat of narrative gymnastics on an almost daily basis, now that the scene has expanded into the catastrophic war we are witnessing in the Middle East. A man not overly familiar with or given to the telling of the truth, Trump not only mangles the English language on a sentence by sentence basis, but flips narratives to suit the expediency of any given moment in whose headlights he currently finds himself transfixed by. The war [which?] will be over in a matter of hours - is pretty much complete/finished - we will bomb them back into the Stone Age - we have a firm deal - they have refused to negotiate - and so on, ad absurdum...

It's no great accident that the two 'pillars' of Trump's business 'success' are both founded on fictional constructs as flimsy as Bobby Ewing's return to the Dallas fold, having previously been very fictionally dead for several months. Trump's book "The Art of the Deal" was ghostwritten and loosely based on his very sketchy career in real estate, which consisted mostly of failure and bankrupt schemes; with the remainder of his infamy grounded in the wholly fictive narrative construct of a stupid reality TV show. Is it any wonder that the man's grasp on the actual world of real things and events is so flaky? I'd like to imagine a world where the retcon rewrites The Trump out of existence altogether, but I suspect that we're just going to have to wait for him to expire and do it for us himself...

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