Darkness and Rage in the Days of Trump

The 1461 days of Trump. They’re pervasive, loathsome and relentless.  They disturb what would otherwise be our quiet times.  They inflame us with a heretofore unknown rage. They spawn the worst in us and they bleed us dry of hope, aspiration and our expectations of prosperity and basic comforts. They rob us of security and leech our souls of optimism. They’re deathless zombies that foment our rage, haunt our nights and pillage our dreams.  As Americans they leave us fearful about rights and justice and mortified as citizens of the world. These are the days of Trump.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

Words penned some 240 years ago.  Dreams and aspirations of men, immigrants all, who collaborated, worked, fought and risked everything for a better life; a just nation; one, that  for all its faults, was the shining beacon that the world’s marginalized, poor, hungry and oppressed all turned to. In these days of Trump we find ourselves looking around and wondering where it all went.  A world looking for the lighthouse of freedom and justice looks towards America now and sees a darkened, crumbling watchtower. These are the days of Trump.

I start most workday mornings by firing up the computer and getting coffee as the daily drudge loads on the dual screens at my desk. While the 50 or so emails populate the ironically named Outlook I sip my coffee and look at the news.  A morning doesn’t pass without a head shaking string of events perpetrated by the 45th President or one of his stooges. And so every day begins with a breakfast of coffee, toast and a cheerless triple side order of rage, disbelief and melancholy.

There’s a helplessness you know. It’s kind of like those scenes in the movies where the hero is bound to a chair and forced to watch his kids tortured and his wife ravaged. He wants to will the ropes apart, punish the villains and save all that’s dear to him but all that he’s left with is desperate hopelessness and fruitless rage. These are the days of Trump.

I’ve been told, more times than I’ve wanted to hear, that I should give Trump a chance. He’ll turn America around, just watch. Those of us in despair have been chided by the Trumpers that we’re rooting for Trump to fail. Yeah you’re fuckin’ A right that we want him to fail.  Who on the ill fated Titanic was encouraging the captain to steer towards the iceberg?  And so why on Earth would rational people root for the 45th President to drive the American bus off a cliff?

Who among America’s middle class and poor parents want to see the public school system gutted for the benefit of the monied?  Who among the sick want to see the dismantling of healthcare for all?  Who among the educated and the literate want to see the diminishing of the arts to further enrich the wealthy and the denial of science to satisfy that strangely odd couple; American industry and the religious right ?  Who among the compassionate want to see meals denied needy children and the elderly?

If there was any inkling that Trump and the stooges were working towards the betterment of America and the principles that America has espoused then I’d be all in. But that gang of cutthroats has shown us nothing.  Nothing to hang the hat of hope on. It’s Steve Bannon’s wrecking crew, hell bent on the destruction of all that’s decent in America and the world.  So yeah, I want them to fail. It’s my fervent prayer that they fall on their faces. Hell yeah I rejoice when an ill conceived and patently unjust Trumpian executive order gets set aside by the courts. I find it hard to stifle a derisive laugh when the President of the United States conjures up another one of his asinine tweets. I’m willing to suffer the present embarrassment by executive folly if it will commensurately shortens the pillaging of America.

I find myself harboring this perverse ironic hope that Trump and Bannon and Ryan and the rest of the stooges will so absolutely fail and in the process so fuck America up that they’ll create, out of their own self-made rubble, their own very extinction. I find myself ridiculously rooting for so much more of the raping of American ideals that an enraged electorate will transform the Republican Party into becoming as extinct as the dinosaurs. I don’t want to see OMB Fuehrer Mulvaney and Minister of Propaganda Spicer taking half measures. Go ahead and piss off the AARP and keep spewing the alternative facts.  Let Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke allow the wolf population to dwindle while he sinks oil derricks in Yellowstone.  Go ahead EPA director Pruitt, foul the air and set the Ohio River on fire again (hell, we put it out once, we can extinguish it again). Sure Bannon, tear the whole thing down.  Carry on despots, nationalists, racists and stooges; fuck it all up so horribly that you’ll all be banished to forever live on in the ignominious disgrace of history.

So yeah Trumpers, I’m guilty as charged of wanting Donald Trump to fail. . I’m as guilty as you were when you hung effigies of our first and only black President and tarred him with slanders and wished every ill on him; from failure to death. The difference is that I have truth, science, reason, empathy and world opinion on my side. You never had any of that. You possessed hatred before Obama and honed it during Obama.  And now with your xenophobic champion and his stooges in power you’ve gone beyond simply harboring hatred.  The disease that plagues our government has emboldened you to openly act out what you hid in your soulless guts for decades. Your bigotry, hatred, and twisted version of Christianity have all been laid bare.  What you profess to be American values are the antithesis of what this nation is supposed to stand for and you’re all as un-American as Vladimir Putin.

When Obama was President, those of us who supported him darkly joked that if Obama cured cancer he'd still be reviled. I suppose that the Trumpers share the same joke. The difference is that Obama would donate the cure while Trump would sell it for all the market would bear.

My fantasies of Trump’s doom are born of rage, spawned of hopelessness and sired by helplessness. I look forward to the day when America is made right so that I can shed this dark burden. But for now anger, despair and gloom are the raw materials from which are forged the weapons that fight the tyranny, injustice and evil that have contaminated America’s halls of government.. And so we can’t allow ourselves to wallow. There can be no rest; not for a moment. We have to keep our eyes on the horizon and focus on that faint glow of hope hidden behind the dark, malevolent, corrupt and evil clouds that loom over our nation. And we must know that once again we can take America back for ourselves and a watching world. These are the days of Trump.

But when a long train of abuses and usurpations pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government. ~ Declaration of Independence.

~ Posted by Paulie, San Francisco CA