Sauce for the Goose

One of the Las Vegas newspapers has an editorial page which lurches right. So far right readers should ask why columns and letters to the editor aren’t printed in Fraktur.

Given the harmful effect of Twitter on political debate, the city’s broadsheet, an at times schizophrenic news source – news remains objectively presented while opinions often harken back to those of Der Stürmer and Völkischer Beobachter – offers American reactionaries a forum through which they can mock tweets veering from their less enlightened view of our society. Thanks to Donald Trump’s current soiling the Oval Office, malcontents once rightly embarrassed to publicly demonstrate their various intellectual deficiencies may now further poison open discourse with them.

Say this about the short-fingered vulgarian he sure has tipped over a lot of rocks.

Although not a faithful reader of such tripe, I do review now and then how the myopic and frightened respond to tweets nowhere near their worldview. Naturally most of these are ill-informed and proudly display ignorance. Indeed, the binary crayon scribbles of Trump supporters.

Sometimes when I’m feeling quite vindictive – as opposed to my normal state of being particularly vindictive – at the vile pig driving our once great nation into decline, and a certain tweet exceeds the common depths of thoughtlessness, I’ll track down the Tweeter and properly illuminate the correspondent with a well-meant corrective figurative backhand upside the head. Oh, if only these swine could be dusted literally. If just to hear the peas rattle around inside their heads.

Ours are not debates. I save those for Facebook threads.

Tweeted remarks simply serve as broadsides, as attention-grabbers, as pointed, no, piercing reminders true Americans haven’t disappeared.

Throughout the presidency of Barack Obama, right-wingers and their increasingly lunatic fringe launched ceaseless invective against him. As the joke went, Obama could’ve walked on water and those monkeys would’ve claimed he couldn’t swim. The president’s critics never saw or, likelier, refused seeing how the Obama Administration rescued the nation’s prestige his predecessor squandered or righted the economic calamity bequeathed him. While Obama didn’t completely restore the Republic’s lost stature, he sure regained much of it.

The magician-politician following the real estate fraud may need to be the Fantasia sorcerer who fixed the badly cast spells of his Mickey Mouse apprentice. That’s how dire the nation’s situation is in 2018. There is excellent reason to believe that the United States may be immeasurably worse off in 2020 than this moment.

If there’s one thing Der Trump knows, it’s how to degrade and demean.

While he presided, Obama’s adherents followed the chief’s lead in how to respond against his detractors. Rather than give such two-legged vermin as good as they gave – or better – we hewed the president’s elevated disdain of them. Tough as it was, those in Obama’s corner didn’t disparage the deplorables savaging him.

I suppose the president must’ve hoped that by bringing honor and respect to the executive branch, behaving with the utmost dignity, not belittling this group of Americans in favor of another, and soberly steering the ship of state, these attributes would eventually defang all but his most unhinged opposition. Unfortunately, Obama never realized their depth of derangement. And frankly until Cadet Bone Spurs’ White House residency required the mansion be fumigated, his low-slouching entry sanctioning the vent of unfettered Obama hate, rational Americans, Americans pleased by our once great nation, true Americans, could never have suspected it.

We sure know now. We now may react with the appropriate venom.

When Obama presided he caught all sorts of harangues. Most of them beyond baseless, exceeding unbalanced. Few were genuine in that they touched upon his policies. It was personal.

Americans, true Americans, should be proud our last chief executive had enough confidence in himself and backbone to resist harshly rebuffing the affronts hurled his and his family’s direction. But looking back the more salacious assaults were foretastes of the spew we endure today.

In this perilous era with our country now being led astray by pure incompetence, immaturity, and ignorance, by Der Trump, a man whose shamelessness seemingly tramples itself daily, there is no longer any need to correspond with the former decorum. No need to play nice now. To hell with the white gloves – break out the weighted ones.

Trump adherents are undeserving of any respect. Why exhibit any deference to savages so obviously aligned against our nation?

None at all. They have become domestic enemies of America. They’re as traitorous as the vile pig currently soiling the Oval Office.

Strangely when I make that clear to those more unhinged Trump supporters who can somehow stand on their hind legs they’re offended. It still amazes me how the same mongrels who hatefully dismissed Barack Obama’s clear humanity and talent are now hurt when the same hose is properly turned against his successor, a pure cur possessing scant charity and zero capacity.

Of course their “hero” has addressed their worries. Having been a real estate fraud, the short-fingered vulgarian is quite adept in cynicism.

Apparently there are swaths of Anglo-Americans suddenly discovering themselves left behind. Naturally Der Trump appealed to them. He promised them what they wanted to hear. Adult listeners would’ve demanded he tell them what they needed to know.

In these less dynamic portions of the country, Dawgpatch and Texas, old industries have been rendered obsolete by technological innovation or the financial siren of coolie foreign labor. What remains in these abandoned regions is old thinking.

For the longest the residents in them prospered. Few should doubt there were many thoughts about the future. Why even ask “What if?” After all, weren’t quality and abundance American hallmarks? The gravy bowl would never empty, would it? Why go through any effort of improving the self in order to possibly advance when industries and locales situating them had sustained generations would continue serving as workers’ sinecures and havens?

Such as it was, such is it ever shall be, right?

Anglos in less dynamic America are in a bind. The old plums are being uprooted and rolling elsewhere. The residents find the solutions unpalatable. Either migrate where the jobs are or ratchet abilities into locally marketable skills. Unfortunately these dummies have become so accustomed to this task that plot, they’ve lost the ability to evolve. Told so long they’d been kings of the hill, they’ve taken root. So much so these delicate flowers can’t be transplanted without risking withering.

Naturally they’re resentful – of a global economy that’s determined them useless, of corporate overlords and shareholders who scorn them, of the black and brown and yellow people they once could look down upon with impunity now not only racing ahead by leaps and bounds but almost close to lapping them. By the way, any advances non-Anglos have achieved issue from establishing a goal and pursuing it with all deliberation. Good old American virtues the civil rights movement coopted as well as properly applied affirmative action finally permitted qualified, though neglected and denied the longest, segments of our populace to pursue and achieve.

Horatio Alger mightn’t recognize the faces, but he’d applaud their drive. Once, long ago before becoming fat and happy and expendable, the jolly faces crowding that particular frame were those of today’s bleating and mewling down-and-out Anglo-America.

That bunch has even lost its old fortitude. A dilemma such as theirs would’ve roused their forbearers into resolution then action. Recall hard, focused people clawed the United States back from the Depression’s abyss; those same people defeated fascism and held global communism at bay. Now, their successors seek weak man’s solace in opioids. They seek to become comfortably numb.

As someone who observed the War on Drugs from the cushy aerie of suburban splendor, and noticed severe incarceration landed heavily against distinct hues of dealers and users, seeing what’s befallen Anglo-America is a delayed, though welcome, turnabout.

In the past, those whom justice crushed were among that era’s most purposely marginalized citizens. Mercy and second chances had seldom visited them throughout their lives. Why should the criminal justice system have been different and cut them breaks?

Our more voluble law and order rabble-rousers loudly and stridently demanded longer sentences and bigger jails to warehouse these menaces to decent society. Of course the breakdowns of prison populations never matched those of general society. Somehow minorities overwhelmingly crowded the big houses even in states having miniscule non-Anglo residents.

Like Vermont.

Yet here we are. Opioids have discriminated. They are the mental mush of salt-of-the-earth America. Like Willie Nelson softly derides the parasites, “they’re good people.” And “good people” as they are, “good people” as their family, friends, associates, majority society claims them, these “good people” aren’t addicts, they aren’t deviants. No. They’re sick, victims of an epidemic.

Treatment, not prison, is their answer for such “good people.”

Strange isn’t it? Rather than provide cures to the victims of a previous plague, Americans insisted those wretches be locked away, be thrown in holes, and the keys lost.

Seems to me just out of plain fairness the same remedy should be applied to this bunch rendered infirm by willful pharmaceutical excess. Yes, industrial scale jailing failed the prior group of junkies. But maybe it’ll succeed with this new wave. Especially if we throw as many as possible under the jails.

After all it isn’t Baboon America if we coddle criminals, is it?