Lewis Carroll’s novel Alice in Wonderland (1865) sadly resonates so well today. This writer in November of 2016 emphasized with Alice as she fell down that rabbit hole. The unlikely co-conspirators in this 21st Century Amerikan novel were, as usual, the Democrats. All they had to do was nominate Donald Duck and they would have defeated Donald Trump… anyone but the wicked witch. Trump did not win that election… Hillary lost it! She lost it because the Democrats, historically since FDR, join with the other party and side with the super rich who run this empire. The only difference between them and the Republicans is that each side of that same dirty empire coin have their own group of super rich handlers. Yes, without a doubt the Republicans are the wolves who will eat us working stiffs alive if given the opportunity. Their ‘across the aisle’ adversaries (social friends in many instances) the Democrats, well they are the foxes. They ‘feel your pain’ and then allow the Man to stick the dagger in deeper. OK, they support abortion, gay rights and some (not many) calls for justice for the indigent, but not much more. When it comes to foreign policy and the War Economy they also ‘suck up’ to the Beast.
My concern, for this very urgent election cycle, is that many decent and rational citizens have truly fallen down that rabbit hole into Trumpland. Just look at the latest news of Trump paying either NO federal income taxes or, in some years, paying LESS than what 95% of his working stiff supporters paid. Many will still continue to drink his phony populist Kool- Aid. In August of 2017, Trump laid his cards on the table, put his late father’s white sheets aside and emboldened the far right white supremacist movement. Not so soon after the violent confrontation (and murder of an Antifa demonstrator) he carefully announced that there were “Good folks on both sides” of the Antifa/white supremacist divide in Charlottesville, Virginia. What this did was reject any semblance of condemnation that was urgently needed from the most powerful man in not only our nation but the entire world! Imagine the chagrin of all who saw vile Anti Semitic rhetoric and violence when viewing those white supremacists on Friday night and Saturday afternoon in August of ’17. What should any decent human being feel when seeing and hearing this: Marchers carrying torches as they filed around repeating over and over “Jews will not replace us” and “Blood and Soil”… all right out of 1920s-1930s Germany? When the president of the United States fails to condemn such behavior the door is opened for all the loonies and real ‘Domestic Terrorists’ to come out of the woodwork. A little more than a year later, in October of 2018, 46 year old Robert Bowers walked into the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh, PA and blew away eleven worshippers, injuring nine others. Who is to say that he was NOT emboldened by his president’s failure to speak out after Charlottesville? As the Tom Cruise character in the fine film ‘A Few Good Men’ put it so succinctly when seeing his court case go down the tubes: “And the hits just keep on coming!” To add insult to injury (with two murders) Trump actually made reference to the 17-year-old kid, Kyle Rittenhouse, who shot and killed two protestors in Kenosha Wisconsin. He said that Rittenhouse, illegally carrying a powerful rife across state lines as a vigilante, was ‘defending his life’ from protestors who were chasing after him. Alice, did you hear that one? The armed man murdering the unarmed… and ‘Up is down and black is white’!
There are so many recent instances of this president, and his lackey administration and partisans in Congress, allowing this white supremacist backlash to flourish. It is NOT just those far right wing police officers who should have been vetted better before being hired. It is this phony so called ‘Law and Order’ BS that has infected the minds of so many of my friends and neighbors. They see the ‘Boogie Man’ in every black and brown face they do not know… Just like the Christian Germans and Poles who bought into the garbage about Jews being subhuman etc. That infection, like the pandemic we now experience, was transmitted throughout the entire western world. In this new century we see the Middle Eastern refugees of the phony CIA wars, along with the brown faces fleeing from Latin American dead end economies, labeled as shall we say ‘Less than human’. Trump has the ear of the ‘White makes right’ Amerikans who still support him.
The other group who will never leave his side are the hard line evangelicals who ONLY care about abortion and gay marriage etc and really little else. My dear late friend and fellow Anti War activist Ed Dunphy put it to a group of bible class teachers and students while jogging on the campus at North Carolina University a few years ago. He asked to speak to them for a few minutes, and they agreed to hear him, not knowing of course what in the hell he was about to lay on them. “I too am Pro Life and against abortion, other than in life threatening emergencies to the mother. Yet, to me, the life of a fetus is as important as the life of a newborn babe, or one inside the mother, when they are destroyed by the Collateral Damage of illegal and immoral bomb and missile attacks by our drones. Why won’t you all speak out about that? ” They asked him to please leave… NOW!
I guess Ralph Kramden in the Honeymooners comedy show was correct: “If you want loyalty… get a dog!” Preferably a right wing one, hey Donald!
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