The United States is no longer inspirational. Our people have surrendered aspiration. This Republic has assumed the vilest qualities of Donald Trump, a pig who has been awarded our presidency.
Gone are the verve, curiosity, and intellect which propelled our formerly great nation. Removed is the fresh-faced visage and vigor which once made us indispensable among all countries inhabiting the earth.
Under Der Trump the United States is sliding from vital into nonessential.
Today, in the first quarter of the 21st century, Americans have willingly forfeited our essential nature. Instead our least admirable aspects have risen to the fore.
Previously muscular, nimble, and clever, we’ve become muscle-bound and dull upon Der Trump’s ascension. Of greater national lament, a good percentage of us have made his pinch-faced, slitty-eyed, pursed-lip, selfish manner ours.
Our national disposition no longer promotes the sunny outlooks of optimists but his scowling pessimism.
The one beneficial result of Der Trump’s ascendency? Those occupying America’s center and left aren’t obliged to treat the right and reactionaries and evangelicals with any measure of respect. That troika has unshackled reasonable citizens from much political correctness.
We should be glad. We may now treat the contemptible contemptuously.
Since the late 70s when Holy Rollers gained a foothold in the Republican Party and started co-opting it with the lure of a dependable voting bloc, our nation has been retarded by the patently and purposely unsophisticated.
What societal advance haven’t those lowbrows attempted thwarting or subverting?
Considerate, far-sighted Americans tried being polite. Didn’t matter. Rather than understanding ours is a multicultural society, that it never consisted of a single-minded monolith like their own narrow-minded slice of the populace, they yearned for a return to an imaginary bygone Americana; one where simple people, jus’ folks, whatever appellation comforted and reassured Anglos the most, occupied the top layer and could look down upon those below.
Plainly their superiority never existed. More like those truly at the top fed them this ruse just to keep them docile. But as perception can create mountains it may also move them. And if one wishes to be willingly fooled, then one will be.
Thankfully for the nation, the formerly excluded shook their chains of conformity – but only after jumping through hoops and over hurdles unimaginable to the majority. Women seeking independence, discontented minorities, people whose sexual proclivities didn’t match expected gender roles, rudely disrupted the accepted order. The artist Francis Picabia once stated “our heads are round so our thoughts can change direction.” During the 2016 election, whole segments of Americans struggled mightily to make sure their outlooks remained cornered.
Many of them espoused positions that plainly offended. These impressions hardened as citizens seen inferior gradually asserted themselves and continually claimed their rightful places under the American sun. That rise fomented resentment. Der Trump spewed what the enlightened swallowed as manna. Sour manna, but manna nonetheless. It further stoked white supremacists, who in Der Trump saw their savior.
Often his pleas demanded our society backtrack on progress. Progressives and others who’d finally begin advancing in our less restrictive America hoped the less obstinate and less-blinkered among us might see the advantages of inclusion for everyone. Maybe they’d loosen up and come along. Or, at least, realize while they mustn’t go forward with the rest of us no American should be compelled to remain stuck behind with them.
No soap. No radio either.
The most hardcore among that bunch always intended the broadest two-way streets to become single-way lanes. Theirs. Never open-minded, incapable of compromise or accommodation, they yearn for a simpler America – a country of hierarchal, no, paternal structure, where everyone knew his or her place and stayed squeezed in those slots.
As plenty of clear-eyed observers have noted the mentally immobilized form Der Trump’s intractable implacable base. They believed themselves “owed.” Der Trump, the sock puppet for false grievance, baldly appealed to what the ambitious, intelligent, and worldly recognize as suckers’ susceptibilities.
This is how gullible the dopes were – as big as cosmopolitan as Der Trump really is, the pig didn’t bother convincing any he was one of them. Talk about taking a lie too far. Instead he succeeded with limited rhetorical ability and dim star power. Given this era where reality TV can make the most inept and least talented glimmer, numerous retakes and copious editing let Der Trump come across as decisive, calm, and in command.
Attributes the flaccid and bloated one-time reality pitchman lacks in real life.
Nonetheless the pig was sufficiently persuasive enough to convince those who believed themselves forsaken. People who believed themselves overtaken by the less worthy, the duplicitous, and foreign intriguers.
What those voters lamented, and what Der Trump adroitly (or accidentally) tapped into were regrets of having become inferiors in a nation they or those akin to them once ruled. Must be horrible having an imagined rug pulled out from beneath one’s feet.
So not only did it infuriate them that the industries which sustained their families for generations have become obsolete or trend towards greater automation, but that those segments which had been reliably considered below them had through sheer dint of familiar American attributes – determination, hard work, perseverance – adjusted better to the new impositions. Recognizing the old order disappeared, they migrated. They smartened up. They wised up. They evolved.
There’s precedence of this in American history. Post-bellum, Reconstruction blacks understood their era’s New South offered nothing. Maybe the defeated region would become more oppressive than under slavery. Ripping a page from the Israelites who escaped Egyptian bondage, blacks gradually left then streamed from Dixie and all they’d ever known, bravely seeking opportunities elsewhere because surely where else could be worse than the hell they already knew?
Certainly today’s disenchanted Anglos who’d bought Der Trump’s condescending lies might’ve benefited from imitating the efforts of those believed to have lapped them in the economic stakes. But rather than wrench themselves from the familiar, from “home,” a place hard to leave even during our most secure times, and venture into the new, the unknown, to seek and likely gain improved fortunes, they preferred remaining mired.
Strangely they’ve taken succor in accustomed misery.
Also, who doubts that the hillbilly heroin flooding Dawgpatch and similar swaths of woe-is-me, less dynamic America eases their deepening transition into voluntary lassitude? The short-fingered vulgarian beaming into their homes promising to restore the vanished, impossible to revive pasts, all that minus even the barest specifics of how, must’ve answered misdirected prayers, these being “victims” who place overwhelming stock in beseeching the Almighty to deliver rescue rather than ask Him for strength to manufacture their own.
So it becomes easy to see how they might regard Der Trump as a “Godsend” rather than the goddamn he is. Thus through their votes they’ve consigned us all not to heaven on earth, but Baboon America.