Congenial-speak #5

History's second dark ages

Couching the soap opera, looking in Trumpland's windows, I wait to exit. I wait to vote again and see if it's only time for America's 200 year check-up. I look to discern whether dark ages come in phases, if democracy's been coasting for 41 years, wearing its axle to a hub, smoothing un-GPSed asphalt, shrinking and ballooning toward its Greek roots.

Never did I expect to watch the news for a light comedy, a darkness that, so far, has had little real success. The executive orders are usually baseless, lacking any credibility, would fail any constitutional test, and are often nullified before their ink is dry. The instance, the illogical, the counter-productive order of success: put guns in the hands of the mentally unbalanced, the decks of 48, the ausgespielt. Does Trump see the irony here? This includes him. He wrote an order to give himself easier access to guns.. Yes, let's go with that. That, at least, would make sense. Otherwise it totally contradicts his “law and order” premise. Let's see. . .he wants to arm the insane, yet he wants law and order, yet he is emptying out the state department which would eventually mean fewer check-points, government security, and cops on the street. And let's not even go into the hypocrisy of toting a pro-life banner.

Money speaks the loudest from the overstuffed pockets of Republicans. Democrat's pockets may leave green vapor trails, although the difference is worth noting. Nine times out of ten the Dems will throw that surplus at things that, barring Reps cyclical attacks in the House and Oval Office, will benefit humankind, American people, actual constituents. (Actually, if any good is to come from the nightmare, it is showing Democrats the worst mutation of political fodder, the most dangerous laughing-stock the Electoral College could cough up. It shows how deeply necessary measured philosophy, checks and balance and judicial review are needed). Zero, nada, bupkis are the times in ten that Republicans—certainly this tea-party hybrid web-toed cousin—will throw the chump-change at anything whose end result will help humanity in any definable, enduring way.

Trump is poison. It's Bushy nucle-ar toxic waste from Three-mile Island that's marinated in bryl-cream for 38 years. Look at him, his face is glowing, his hair piece is glowing and everyone who comes near him loses their spine. Don't look him in the eye. He is Medusa gentrified, sitting on a golden pot with snakes that are petrified. He tweets out his half-wits, his digited twits and uses a spicer to translate them to double-speak. He is a character from 1984 in some long lost Orwellian draft. (or the dumber pig in Animal Farm). Okay, he had his fun, appointed his compasssionless billionaire's boys club with the two tokens. He got one EO past the goalie, found out how America looks on methamphetamine. Get him out of there! Trump, Pence, Ryan, anyone who has had any complicity with this administration's constitution distorting, oath-choking, unethical (no accident their first move was a shot at ethics) policies. This does not include the people who stayed on from the good days, if only to lend credence to an administration that literally needed help finding the light switch, most of whom have parted ways long ago, to leave the emperor to contemplate his naval futilely. Caligula lies smothering himself with grapes, aged and bereft of dexterity, when Kelley-Ann will no longer feed him.

Maybe I am the only one who saw it, who engraved his smarmy, pigeon-hole Catholic, “thank you, may I have another,” mayoral head-tripped, face in my mind. Rudy “may I be damned if I'll go gently into any night” Giuliani sat with the better part of the country thinking Hillary had the election sewn up. Trump's paths to 270 were nearly non-existent and, moreover, to many tested any existential conception of government. The former NYC mayor chattered away with a reporter in a diner, sure anything he said would be misrepresented by the media. On November 6 he said the Trump campaign had “a few more tricks” up its sleeve. It was looking bleak, but ol' altar boy Rudy never lost faith, even if it meant reaching out to Russia and being accomplice to a dossier that included golden showers of flagellation. Trump beat the bushes, the hidden constituents, the under-privileged, under-educated, uninformed who roamed the fields of Lancaster county out-pacing complacent Amish who probably thought they were the ones laughing. His sleeve tricks were the white mid to lower-class remnants of the tea-party movement, the under class for whom money spoke and reality TV celebrity status out ranked a much less affluent senator from Vermont with only a salient, direct message and no celebrity. They were too blinded by his “billions,” his celebrity and his promises to hone the word back to a homogeneity that placated simple minds. But Trump tried to appeal to blacks, stoking the fires with “what have you got to lose?” Some did fall for his Tom-foolery, his African-American friend.

Some did not vote at all, not even for the two other parties on the ballot. I don't think it was a “lesser of two evils” contest. Clinton's record of service since 1973, her executive and legislative tenure sat there, under-appreciated, if anyone even bothered to have the audacity to set it on the same scale with Trump's doodle of a signature as a real estate mogul. Clinton's balance would plummet to the floor. It would precede gravity in its chained drop, turning Newton's apple to mash. I feel sorry for Hillary, I really do. The world, not just our government, has treated her horribly, knocking down an indefatigable woman with their tenacity and suspicions emblematic of an Egyptian cat. Her questioned mistakes were admitted, endured before tribunals, decimated to extraneous minutia and never forgiven, much less forgotten. In my written- about (story in my collection Finding me—and Them: Stories of Assimilation out later this spring) dalliance with the bible and Christianity the passage in Mathew about forgiveness stuck with me. Is that not “The Book?” Is that not the phraseology they so dutifully, mnemonically phonetic, so pathetic and glibly tainted when they oddly appear in church to utter the Lord's prayer.

But it is a dark age. The span of the 6^th to 14^th centuries, the Inquisition, the Third Reich, all in Europe, all with little regard for humanity, thinly veiled hope (only showers), all designed to push one—or more—races deemed undesirable away from the fugue, the kiln solidified to make sure we grow stronger together, that we will be stronger together. Now, at a brief gaff in the beginning of the 21^st century, perhaps it is America's turn. We enslaved a race for upwards of two centuries, we've lynched its people, we've blocked their right to vote with whips and barb-wired club. They've been segregated, belligerently integrated, systematically debilitated and left with the odds of the law killing them not in their favor. Andrew Jackson drove Native Americans away. The government broke enough treaties to wall the library of congress. The ungrateful dust of European “visitors” have run over the Native to end at Standing Rock.

This however, this trampling out the vintages, is no Salem witch trial. It is no gallows pole farce with teenage girls pinning tricks on their mothers. As those judges had no history, no science from which to learn, Trump has no compassion. That is a human deficit, it is not inherent. But he also refuses to even know history, much less learn from it. He refutes science for ignorance's sake or because during so would veer off the path that ends in a field of green $$$$$$$.