Tag Archives: bigotry

Political Rants

Walls and bridges.

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Another new year, but still the same bullshit: Trump wants to make one of his rhetorical flourishes a reality because he’s afraid of losing his base, and he wants us to pay for it. Welcome to sunny Mexico, my friends. The various pundits and politicians go back and forth on whether Trump’s wall is actually a wall (as the president has said many times) or a metaphor for something called “border security”, which everyone seems to agree with but no one can define. I think they’re missing the obvious answer – Trump is talking about a real “wall”, but the fact that he talks about it is itself a metaphor. He wants to build a big wall that will represent the separation barrier between white and brown people.

On the white side of historyThis is the program Trump inherited from other Republicans like Tom Tancredo, Mitt Romney, and many more.  Obama’s first term, in particular, was an extreme accommodation to it as well. That’s likely because the big lie about invading armies of dark people is an effective distraction for disaffected workers. The bipartisan neoliberal economic experiment that’s been underway for the last forty years is a total failure for working people in this country; Trump is working to deepen that failure, and the only way a politician can maintain some measure of popularity while conducting these deeply unpopular policies is by encouraging working-class white people to blame brown people for all their troubles.

Of course, the lie needs to grow more elaborate with every passing year, reaching remarkable levels of implausibility and ridiculousness and yet they still draw on the old, familiar themes: criminality, disease, uncleanliness. Trump doesn’t dog whistle this stuff – he just says it right out loud. Dog whistles are too subtle to work these days, I suspect. You need a bull horn to drown out the din of an economy that enriches only the rich, despite their claims of full employment. Many millions are out of the workforce and no longer counted; millions more have taken poorly paid jobs or are driving Uber. Wages are stagnant. Trump needs his wall to keep you from noticing how badly this system sucks. If you’re suffering, it’s because of those bad hombres.

We need bridges, not walls. We need to make common cause with workers and families on both sides of our borders. And we need to hold our politicians (of either party) to account when they try to drive us apart.

luv u,

jp

Political Rants

The “T” word.

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Just when you think it can’t happen in YOUR town, well … it happens. Our odiferous president came to Utica, NY this past week, barking his acrid endorsement of our congressional representative, Claudia Tenney (a.k.a she who claims the $1.5 trillion in rich people tax cuts have “already paid for themselves”) at the old Hotel Utica. He was greeted by what was, by most estimations, the largest public demonstration in recent memory – somewhere between 1,700 and 2,000 people holding signs, raising their voices, pulling a large duck-like inflatable man-baby Trump replica. Back in 2003, just before the start of the Iraq war, we had what was for Utica a large demonstration downtown that was probably 200 or 250 people – nothing like this.

Trump / Tenney: a match made in heaven.Trump attended a fundraiser for Tenney that was supposed to be a closed-door, no-press event, but at some point they allowed pool reporters in to record his remarks, which were about typical. It amounts to the Democrats wanting to raise your taxes, open the borders wide, and take away your guns. Of course, the president was talking to a crowd of heavy-wallet donors: the cheap seats were $1,000 and sponsors paid $15,000. So, for once, he may be right about Democrats wanting to raise the taxes of the people in that room – they richly deserve it.

No comments from the president on the recent media tour of his former advisor and reality television co-star, Omarosa (whose name sounds like Elvis spoke it). The celebrity has released some recordings of conversations in the White House and on the phone with Trump, Kelly, and others. She has also claimed that Trump has used the N-word a number of times on his dumb-ass NBC show and as president. This is more reality-show fodder, of course, and particularly meaningless, as evidence of this kind would prove nothing that we don’t already know. Donald Trump is a racist and a bigot; we don’t need to hear him using that special word to know that much. He has been spouting bigoted rhetoric since day one of his campaign and long before. He has engaged in the equivalent of blood libel against muslims and refugees from the global south. He has elevated notorious racists to key posts in his administration and apologized for white supremacists.

People can get used to just about anything. But with an administration like this, normalization amounts to complicity. Glad to see so many of my neighbors making their voices heard.

luv u,

jp

Political Rants

Stirring the pot.

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Republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump recalls seeing footage of “thousands” of Muslims in New Jersey cheering as the Twin Towers fell on September 11, 2001. Fellow candidate Ben Carson briefly claimed to have seen the same inspiring vision in his mind’s eye, too, then backed off. (He seems to be recalling the clip of five Palestinians jumping up and down that was most likely a hatchet job.) Trump’s claim is the ideal bookend to his recent suggestion of maintaining a federal database of Muslims in America, a component in his new post-Paris attack national security platform. It’s a simple, time tested formula: call out a domestic population that you can term a fifth column and associate with a foreign enemy, then repeat your rhetoric and watch your polling numbers rise. Oldest trick in the book.

Look in the mirror, America.The thing is, Trump is a mirror to the Republican base, as Sam Seder and others have pointed out. This is a mostly white minority of virulently anti-immigration, nativist, evangelical Christian Americans who are attracted to Trump for the time being because he arrogantly articulates their hatred of the “other” and gives voice to their sense of outrage over being relegated, however temporarily, to opposition party status. I have heard commentators blame this constituency on Obama – the nauseating former Bush adviser Nicole Wallace, for instance – but it’s useful to remember that even in the depths of his second-term unpopularity, Wallace’s former boss retained a solid core of conservative support, including the same crackpots that showed up at McCain/Palin campaign rallies in 2008. That was the nascent “tea party”, the constituency that has kept Trump in the high twenties for months now.

Stirring up racist or bigoted sentiments is always a dangerous game, but it’s one that remains popular with politicians who have no real value to offer the constituencies they seek to serve. We white people tend to think of non-white, non-European, non-Christian people as different. We see this in the response (or lack of same) to the Beirut bombing, compared to the near media obsession over Paris. Even the President does this. When he talks about Paris, he refers to the fact that we see ourselves in the sidewalk cafes; that Parisians are like us. There is a deep reservoir of anti-foreign, anti-other sentiment in our society. It is hard to avoid this mentality when you become an imperial power. You can mask it, conceal it, but it tends to bob to the surface.

We’ve all seen this movie before. I like to think that there are enough decent people in this country to overcome this type of ugliness, but if there is some kind of attack in the United States over the next year, all bets are off.

luv u,

jp