'Top of the world, Ma!' Or . . . spare us your white bleat

Steve King, the Nazi-lovin’ Iowa congressman. Again.

Donald Trump’s Amerika. Still.

Identity politics, culture warriors and vilification of those unlike ourselves. Always.
 
Much has been said over the last year and a half about the need to understand the beleaguered, alienated Americans demeaned by arrogant progressives, poor souls who have lashed out electorally, using the only weapon available to them. Thus, President Donald Trump.

Blow up a skyscraper with a jetliner, you’re the most notorious terrorist in history. Blow up a country with a fascistic orange imbecile, and we’re supposed to understand your goddamned pain. Gotcha.
 
Listen. I have pain. Oftentimes, I feel beleaguered, alienated and demeaned by arrogant virtue signalers who think I’m a “hater” by mere virtue of my religion. Identity politics is not just a knuckle-dragging, right-wing phenomenon mostly experienced in trailer parks, King's congressional district in Iowa and at Nuremberg for Dummies events featuring the president of the United States of Amerika . . . er, America.

Despite my beleaguered, alienated distress, I made the conscious choice not to take it out on the rest of the country. Neither did I take it out on minorities, refugees, gays, the poor or undocumented immigrants. That would have been profoundly wrong.

By November 2016, anyone with eyes to see and ears to hear knew exactly who and what Donald Trump was. He wasn’t shy about letting us know, and the press wasn’t exactly, shall we say . . . reticent.

We knew. We knew.

We knew that Trump acted like a nut and talked like a fascist. We knew he was reckless in word and in deed. We knew he was a liar. We knew he was a cheat. We knew he was a cad, a philanderer, a vulgarian and a misogynist. We knew he was a raging narcissist.



We knew he didn’t know his ass from a hole in the ground.

We also knew that, for all her myriad faults as a public servant and a politician, Hillary Clinton wasn’t an idiot, wasn’t a racist, wasn’t a fascist, wasn’t certifiable — and wasn’t in Vladimir Putin’s hip pocket.



A majority of voters held their noses and voted for Not the Fascist Buffoon, a.k.a., Hillary Clinton. They voted for not blowing up the United States, despite everything. They voted for not making things worse. They eschewed the hissy fit.



I was among that popular-vote majority. I don’t know a lot of things, but I knew President Donald John Trump would be an existential threat. Events thus far are proving me right.

Others, however, wanted to “shake things up.” Consider them shook.

Trump gets owned by Little Rocket Man

THOSE ENABLERS of that unfortunate electoral-vote majority shook up the lives of people who could just use a little affordable health care right now.

They shook up the lives of desperate migrants fleeing to a Trump-addled Amerika . . . er, America . . . because almost anything was better than being killed by Salvadoran or Honduran gangs, or being staggeringly poor for one day more, or looking at the future of one’s children and seeing nothing.

Now many get to look on as la Migra tear the little ones out of their arms at a detention center, and they get a glimpse of hell.

The Trumpkins shook up their own manufacturing jobs, too. Full-scale trade war with the entire world ought to work wonders for their economic prospects.



And, hey! Amazing how a just 80,000 or so proud “deplorables” in just the right spots on the electoral map could — Dare we dream? — shake up the entire global order. Well, it’s all shook up.

The Iranians perhaps are going to build the Bomb now, Little Rocket Man in North Korea is our best buddy (Yeah, right) just a few months after Trump was threatening to nuke him and his . . . and, oh, by the way, the Western alliance is in tatters, Canada is our enemy, and pretty much the whole rest of the world hates our guts. This all happened in the past month or so.

Cue Jerry Lee Lewis. There’s a whole lot of shakin’ goin’ on.

Yeah, you have a shitty job, the pencil-neck geeks are makin’ fun of you, and Barack Hussein Obama and the liberal establishment have capped your ass a couple of times with a long gun.



What to do . . . what to do?



“Made it, Ma! Top of the world!”


 
FASCIST AUTHORITARIANISM and racist identity politics: They’re the gifts that keep on taking. Taking your freedom, taking your dignity, taking a country’s prosperity, taking your idealism, taking your hope . . . taking your soul. And all you got was that stupid Make America Great Again trucker cap.



Well, Trump voter, if you had any sense right now, you’d be feeling like a Trump Organization contractor after the bankruptcy hearing.

So, let’s talk about “identity politics” for a second.

What’s your “identity”? White? Christian? Conservative? ‘Merkun?
 
Not “one of them”?

None of us, you know, are just any one thing. For me, being American is somewhere down the line of my identities -- somewhere behind human, child of God, husband, Catholic and smartass. "My country, right or wrong" doesn't cut it with me.

Just like "Mein reich, richtig oder falsch" was less than persuasive among the Allies when Germans used it as a justification for doing Adolf Hitler's bidding. There are consequences when your country is wrong, and you are not immune when you acquiesce to evil — because "my country.”

Do not, Brother Trumpkin, ask me to understand you or sympathize with your plight as you stand proudly with your evil boy in the White House, telling me it’s all good and justified just because you were pissed off at the world. America’s prisons are filled with misunderstood, pissed-off souls who got psychic relief by robbing a Quickie Mart or blowing somebody’s brains out.

I’m with Esquire’s Charles P. Pierce — I don’t effing want to hear it. Because two wrongs, etc., and so on.

It might be important to understand why half of Americans initially supported Donald Trump, but we have no need to understand why people support this administration now, as it inflicts evil upon evil both here and abroad, upon both nations and vulnerable individuals.

We didn't need, in the heat of battle, to understand the Nazis' desire to be Nazi. We needed to understand how best to stop the damned Nazis.

We didn't need to understand the complex dynamics of racism and white supremacy to unleash all legal and societal hell against Jim Crow.

In the 1940s, denazification could begin only after we kicked the Nazis' asses and turned Germany into ruins.

The only thing Trumpkins need to hear from the world now, as the horrors of their boy Trump mount, is "You must have had your reasons for voting abject evil into the White House, and we can talk about that. Later. But there is no justification in heaven or on earth for supporting what Trump is turning America into. None. And you will be stopped."

Some 'very fine people' in Charlottesville, Va.

 
LIKE I SAID, I’m a Catholic. Not a liberal Catholic, not a conservative Catholic . . . a Catholic. Period. Paragraph.

As a Catholic, I believe in the concept of divine judgment. For that matter, so did non-Catholic Abraham Lincoln, who thought the Civil War was God’s divine judgment against slavery and the country that tolerated it for so long.



Me, I think we have it coming today for any number of reasons. The continuing scourge of racial injustice would be just one. My particular concept of divine judgment, however, is that God gives sinful people, countries and societies just enough rope to hang themselves.

I figure about now, America is swinging like the pendulum on a cuckoo clock. It won’t get better from here. Not for a good while.

We, in our blind arrogance, just can’t see that yet. But we will soon enough, and “the least of these” whom we abuse — in the name of Trump and “Well, we were pissed off” — will be avenged. Alas, Trump will not save our sorry selves.

Place not your faith in golden calves . . . or orange asses. For "the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether."