Who Comes After Whom?

The division between reality and Trump is not some distant geographic line but a close personal distinction which in most cases divides us from family and people we have long regarded as friends.

It is founded on two things: ignorance and arrogance, both of which are too expensive to maintain.

Although our experience of Trump breaks down strictly along partisan lines laid down by the right in the days of Jerry Falwell and adhered to since then out of habit, understanding Donald Trump is a non-partisan issue: since he first emerged as a celebrity in the Reagan era he has stood for empty boasting, gold plating, and substandard housing. He boasted about using debt and bankruptcy to milk the system like a dedicated Socialist, while leaving contractors unpaid like a true Capitalist. In short, he had no moral orientation more profound than what it apparently took to run his reality show, and everyone always knew it. Nothing in his campaign did anything to improve his image, in fact he did all he could in that short time to make it worse.

Nevertheless our friends and relatives were being advised on their social media and on whatever TV and radio they follow that Hillary was a criminal--in a campaign of smearing and innuendo that has gone on nearly thirty years without ever succeeding in getting her locked up. At the same time a vast popular movement, built around the idea that economic justice begins with consumer protection and a social safety net built around education, health care, and dignified retirement—an organic movement that sprang out of plain speaking by an old man making sensible observations rather than outlandish claims--was absorbed and smothered by the Democratic Party in a rather ugly and public massacre, so that Hillary could be duly inaugurated as planned.

Now, according to my brother, believing that Bernie Sanders has a more workable and practical understanding of and vision for America than Trump makes me insane.

Which brings us back to the division between reality and Trump.

It is only in a distorted world that more and more guns in more and more hands could possibly increase public safety. The Second Amendment was drafted and ratified in a day when even the most bellicose could do nothing more than amass a large supply of muskets.

How are things getting so distorted?

I spent some time this Spring as a member of some Facebook clubs that most of us probably wish didn’t exist.

Members of those clubs share information with each other proving that the Muslim takeover of America is well under way and being contained only by the combined ferocity of several thousand rural gun clubs whose members subvert regulations to possess and deal in weapons and ammunition. They post videos provided by Milo the Molester and Alex Jones and other sources they really dig for, proving whatever is most outrageous and justifying greater and greater fear.

The dismantling and destruction of monuments to rebel soldiers has led to a sense of outraged honor, exactly as if, instead of watching NASCAR and drinking beer on the weekends since 1992, every obese redneck in America has been on regular Home Guard patrol, tough and cynical, but doing it all for his Ma and her Apple Pie.

Now they are boiling out of hiding, willing to fight for the local statue of a conscripted frontiersman caught between Southern Tradition and Yankee Ingenuity in the form of Minnie balls and rail fences. They have of course constructed a myth around the War of Northern Aggression in which slavery was not a factor, whereas one’s favorite brand of beer, pickup, and jeans were. Their ancestors fought proudly for State’s Rights, a term which is undefinable in context except as a justification for perpetuating a class-based social system than kept poor rural whites at a disadvantage which they became adept at blaming the enslaved Africans down the road for. Since Reconstruction the South has learned to remember a different antebellum America, even if they agree on the indisputable events of the war. Though they use different names for the war itself as well as many battles, they all agree that Robert E. Lee surrendered in his best uniform.

They are upfront, however, with the racism which is the chief legacy not of the war but of the social traditions that made it necessary. Proud of it, as if they are in possession of a scientific fact which has escaped the softer, less-disciplined intellectuals of academia and the professions—exactly as the phrenologists and eugenicists, especially in South Carolina, saw the world, in defiance of modern science.

They use racist terms proudly and make threats that range from simple dares to “come after” them to alerting the world to be ready when they “come after” us.

I antagonized the members of these clubs by pointing out some of the most glaring inconsistencies in their rhetoric.

They called me all kinds of vile names and several promised to come after me.

They are united in the profound belief that there is a vast leftist organization in America, full of Muslims, gays, LGBT youth, Wiccans and organic gardeners, and that these disparate threads of the rainbow are a dangerous foe. They hint darkly of jackboots, wire fences, authoritarianism….

Again: Reality vs. Trump.

The number one threat to our nation is the fact that this entire clown circus got its start with the lie that Obama was from Kenya. Trump spoke on that theme to a willing nation who had imbibed the rightist radio Kool Aid deep and long with no outlet other than the odd lynching of Obama in effigy, or shooting up a church.

Russians may have helped tip the balance in favor of Trump with a little clever propaganda and some dastardly hacking, but the brainwashing of America was well under way before Trump took advantage of it.

I saw an article that said Interstate 5 is the border between Blue and Red America. East of this line, which is drawn about a mile west of my front door, is the world of Trump, where lies come from the Left and the press is a liberal conspiracy they call “MSM”—which they ignore in favor of Fox News and selected others.

To the West, the libertines and social welfare specialists plot to admit even more terrorists illegally while indoctrinating youth in Marxism and Secularism.

(note to Kellyanne Conway: the preceding sentences contain elements of both satire and irony)

Full Disclosure:

I have read Marx but am not a Marxist.

Although my sanity has never been professionally evaluated there have been few calls for it, and those mostly from people with either an axe or a drag saw to grind.

I have never encouraged armed revolt or even armed resistance. There is always another, better, way.

I am not a Democrat.

If there was a Left, I would not know where to find it.

I believe that people are smarter, rather than stupider, than it seems sometimes.

Those of us who grew up in rural America surrounded by the silhouettes and shibboleths of conservatism have seen this debate up close all our lives. We argued over the draft, over Martin Luther King, over El Salvador, Iran-Contra, and Desert Storm. It was always something. It always is—but to have convictions means to defend them when it might be easier to silently allow them to be assaulted.

So far the worst I’ve suffered in the form of retaliation has been an upraised finger and a few threatening remarks.

Furthermore: I am not the enemy, I am not anti-American, a snowflake, a libtard or a LIBTARD.

Death threats from strangers is not what social media was invented for, I’m sure, but it is the Right, not the Left, that is using it to spread fear and intimidation. The groups I visit otherwise take pictures of flowers and birds, which seems more wholesome overall.

People like Alex Jones and others not worth naming are helping the most ignorant but passionate Americans construct the myth that there is a violent threat on the left, which they alone can arm and prepare for.

When they speak of the Left they imagine an organization bigger and more subversive than the wildest dream of a socialist idealist. They are being told, continually and in ways that continue to escalate the threat. This is why people believe building a higher, more beautiful wall would make them safer. They fail to consider the reality, the many instances of failed walls in history, for instance, from Northern China to Northern France, where walls may at times have done more harm than good.

All the proof needed is to compare right wing media to left wing media. Keep looking—left wing media has not existed as a social force since the heyday of the Berkeley Barb, when it was more important as a symbol than as a reality, since it was of limited distribution and may have been imitated in short-lived campus radical papers more than it was seen in its’ own right. Where is the Left-Wing radio presence to counter Rush and the shouting pedants of doom? Air America? NPR? If those are even questions to you, rather than obvious rhetorical devices, you are hopelessly naïve, and fair game for the first demagogue or snake oil salesman to come along.

The danger we face is the reckless fanning of fear into rage, exactly the response that Trump used to get himself elected.

The counter to that is to take educating yourself seriously. Never trust anything you read, hear or see on a screen. Subject all claims to logical scrutiny. Don’t subscribe.

#idealist #LIBTARD #snowflake #NPR #satire #irony #KellyanneConway