Trump has taken the sad remains of the United States of America so far down the rabbit hole of corruption, domestic violence, treason, and incompetence that it should be amazing that he has any supporters left in this country. But he does. And that remaining 26-38% who still approve of Donny and his sad sack band of third tier elites are, and should be, amazing. “Loyal” doesn’t begin to describe their addiction and attraction to Little Benito. “Perverse” is the first description that comes to my mind.
Trump’s falling approval numbers are based on Trump’s incompetent “handling” of the economy, mostly the rising cost of consumables, and the suspicions (if you are totally gullible) that Donny is a pedophile and is hiding his relationship to his pedo-bestie Epstein. Weirdly, corruption, grotesque levels of abuse of Executive power, threatening violence against his opposition, his disdain for the US Constitution, and generally childish, petulant behavior isn’t even a thing for the shambles of the Republican Party and its minions. So, while I’m disgusted and discouraged by the goobers who voted for Trump and have, recently, soured on him, the ones who are left are something even more despicable. They are, in fact, economically and ethically, poor examples of exactly who Donald Trump is: narcissistic, amoral, greedy, childish, and stupid.
Ms Day and I often participate in a local protest event. We stand along Highway 61, downtown at rush hour on Friday with 100-200 other locals waving signs and talking to people about the decline of the American Empire. [I know. It’s probably a pointless exercise, like piling sandbags against a beach house when a tsunami is on the way. I’m almost 80-years-old. Thanks to worn out hinges and struts and biomechanical supports, I can barely lift my arms over my head some mornings. There isn’t much that I can do to change the direction of our destruction, but I’m going to do what I can, while I still can.] At that protest, we get a close look at who the Trump culters are and we hear a lot from them, too. This is rural Minnesota, which is no smarter than rural anywhere else on the planet. At least half of the citizens in our county are on some kind of government assistance for food, shelter, healthcare, and employment. The region’s education level is below the state’s average, the average age in our county is 42.3 years and a substantial portion of the population is over 65. Of the remaining population, maybe a quarter are actually fairly self-supporting and the rest are living on socialism and/or Mommy and Daddy’s money (most “farmers” inherited their occupation, real estate, and a lot more). As a group, we’re nothing to brag about, but that doesn’t stop the strutting, preening, and chanting. Rural Americans are nothing if not full of false pride.
Last week we had the usual bunch of loud pipes bozos, spewing noise and wasted fuel as they left the stoplight where we congregate. It’s hard to beat that for an expression of disrespect for law and order and the public peace and it’s a pretty clear statement from local “law enforcement’ that the only laws enforced are the convenient ones. We’re drawing near the end of the 3-month biker season (it’s much longer for motorcyclists) in Minnesota, but that crowd is consistently pro-Trump and anti-civility. Since early March of this year, I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of Hardly riders who expressed anything but disdain for our protest. A safe rule is “the louder the exhaust system, the more pro-fascist the rider/driver.” This, by the way, appears to be true across the globe. Dictators from Putin to Venezuela’s Maduro to Israel’s branch of the Infidels Motorcycle Gang are used as enforcers without any sort of interference from police and government restrictions. You have to be a special kind of stupid to imagine that the Hell’s Angels, the Outlaws, or even the many biker gangs comprised of felon-loving US cops care about the US Constitution.
One of the weirdest protest-protestors was a young person of unidentifiable gender, in the front passenger seat of a car, somewhere between 18 and 30, who screamed “I hate you, I hate you . . .” as he/she/it slowly passed our group in the moderately heavy afternoon traffic. I’m not exaggerating the description. If you asked me to identify this person, I could describe a lot about clothing, hair color and length, but I couldn’t even make a guess about the gender. The voice was high and shrill, but not necessarily feminine. The person’s face was as gender-neutral as a baby. The person’s light brown hair was cut at about 2-4” and scraggly. Even the voice, screaming at the top of his/her lungs, was gender-neutral. None of us knew what to make of that display of weirdness.
We get a surprising number of weird looking old men who stop in the intersection to shriek indecipherable pro-Trump polemics at us. It’s hard to rank them for weirdness, because they are all peculiar, lonely, old Minnesota bachelors with varying levels of either credit or resources. That last assumption is based on the vehicle they are driving and the amount and content of the crap piled in the seats around them. I have never understood a whole sentence from any of them because they are incoherent and rabid in their love for Donny the Pedo. Hands-down, the weirdest of this old white men bunch is a ZZ Top looking gnome, about 5’5’ and with a white beard and long hair, who spoke with such a strong eastern European accent that I could only understand a few words out of the hundreds he shrieked at us. One of the people I was standing near decided to engage this doofus and was drenched in spittle as a result. I was impressed at that person’s ability to translate enough of the “conversation” to try and interact. Between the volume, the flying saliva, and the cartoonish Russian accent, all I could do was look away and try not to laugh.
At least once every Friday, there are the scraggly barfly groupies who scream “I love Trump” as they wobble through our intersection. Like women who vote Republican, these characters are seriously deluded. There is, literally, nothing the Mango Mussolini or the Republican Party could or would ever do for these people. Even if they weren’t poor, uneducated, and beaten half-to-death by a gnarly ugly stick, our Founding Farter is clearly fond of per-pubescent little girls who can be threatened by a micro-penis. Of course, Cheeto Benito has nothing but disgust for anyone who isn’t a billionaire or a Fox News supplicant, but he is particularly put off by “those dirty people” who were foolish enough to vote for him. Of all the filthy hands he doesn’t want to be touched by or seen near, “ugly women” are at the top of the list. But they still “love” him and that is, at the least, confusing.
This week, one of the most baffling counter-protestors I’ve encountered rolled down her window and very pleasantly said, “I Love Trump.” There was nothing classically Trump-cult about her: she wasn’t scared with the usual permanent anger lines, she made her announcement with a shy smile on her face, the driver of her vehicle remained as uninvolved as possible while waiting for the light to change as if he were somewhat embarrassed, and they both looked reasonably middle-class. The best response I could manage was, “That is sad to hear.” Of course, I thought of a dozen better comebacks after she was gone, but my first response was as honest as anything I thought of later. It is overwhelmingly sad to realize that some of the people ensnared in the Trump cult are not obviously awful people.
There have been a few political figures in my life who I have admired, but none that I would say I “love.” I don’t know any of them well enough to make that kind of emotional commitment. There is nothing about Trump to love, so what is going on there is beyond my comprehension. It is clearly and obviously a cult. In a Guardian article. titled “Watch Out for the Tell-Tale Signs,” a cult is defined as “‘formal religious veneration,’ ‘a system of religious beliefs and its body of adherents,’ ‘a religion regarded as ‘unorthodox or spurious,’ ‘great devotion to a person or idea’ as well as ‘persons united by devotion or allegiance to an artistic or intellectual movement or figure.’” That appears to be the mental state of at least 79 million American voters and, to me, it is incomprehensible.
When 79M citizens are this easily conned and take their selfish, racist, uneducated, paranoid conspiracy-insanity this far down the rabbit hole, the rest of us are condemned to suffer some of the consequences. On average, Trumpers are less educated, older, more rural, more superstitious, and, obviously, more gullible than the average casino sucker. Know-Nothing Donald ought to, at least, give them all Trump University diplomas, then they’d have something to show for all that they have lost. As for the rest of us, the United States of America will never be the place it was before the Trump fascist movement changed everything. The rest of the world has moved on without us and it’s hard to imagine that our former allies will ever consider us to be sane, intelligent, reliable, trustworthy, or even useful. There will be repercussions for all of that and none of it will make any part of America great and we will, likely, never be anything near great again.
No comments:
Post a Comment