Because I can’t bear to say it in English. But thanks to current events, I can’t be comfortable of being safe saying anything in this post in English. Some guys in this administration actually speak it. Badly.
Let me first get the cliches out of the way if only because they are so pleasing:
You broke it, you bought it.
I told you so.
He told you who he said he was. Why didn’t you believe him?
This is what you wanted, what you voted for, so don’t blame me.
And one more time, YOU broke it, YOU bought it.
I confess that there is a lot of anger and bitterness in this post. But that’s to be expected when you are rejecting your homeland. I promise that this will be the end of it till that son of a German refugee is lying in his grave. Promise.
I was really surprised when on election night he won the popular vote. A surprisingly enormous number of white women voted for him. This tells us a lot of things about the American people, which is why Nancy, Kate and I have pursued our residency in Portugal, which we are finally close to receiving.
We have had it with the American people and are leaving them behind.
What the fuck is with American women? It apparently has never been enough that he said that he could grab women by the pussy because he was a star and he could do anything.
Shouldn’t that have disqualified him?
And he hasn’t done anything whatsoever to redeem himself. He brags about having appointed the spineless judges who reversed Roe v. Wade, and you’re OK with that? While your sisters are suffering horribly in maternity wards or dying? When are you going to wake up to the horrible reality?
White American men, I’m just over you. You’ve had it your own way on these shores since about 1610. Isn’t it fair that someone else, including people on whose necks you have had your feet on from the beginning, meaning anyone who is not a white American male, finally have their day? Quit watching video games and working on dead cars and learn some useful skills. Then come talk to us.
Hey Randy, I had nothing to do with your disenfranchisement, OK? And be sure to solidify your downfall by voting for someone who assuredly has nothing for you but contempt. Read J.D. Vance’s book about you if you have any doubt. He is a Yalie, the worst kind of eastern elite, yet you stupidly voted for him for vice president. If you noticed.
Black men, it’s amazing that any one of you voted for him: he who urged the police not to be so nice to people whom they arrested and then killed, black men disproportionately? Black women, who die disproportionately due to Republicans’ harsh anti-abortion laws, how can you stand him?
Hispanic men and women, you voted in higher proportions for Trump than before. What are you thinking? Haven’t you read that when he takes office he’s going to close the border and begin deporting millions of your brothers and sisters? Your neighbors? Your RELATIVES??
I just don’t get it. I understand the dopey explanations for Hispanics and blacks.
But women, I absolutely don’t get it. What are you thinking? Don’t you see the stories from states like Texas? Women having a miscarriage have to go wait in the hospital parking lot till they are dying before they can seek medical help, and then they die, or come out of a procedure being infertile, because their doctors fear criminal liability?
What Nancy and I took away from this is that the American people have made their choice. They voted in the majority for a man who may be stupid, but if he’s not, he’s so uneducated, so incurious about the history and culture of a people he wants to govern, that he makes George W. Bush look civilized.
He wants to abandon Ukraine to appease his teenage crush, Putin. He also wants to abandon NATO. These actions would bring down the western alliance and put the US in a confrontational mode with Russia; supporting Ukraine would instead continue to degrade Russia’s military and thus provide a defense against Russian aggression. The brave Ukrainians have already turned Russia’s military force into a significantly insignificant one. Why allow them to reload?
Also, letting Russia off the hook would encourage other autocrats, like China, which given our timidity might effect a military takeover of Taiwan. Opposing Russia against Ukraine would set an example.
I don’t like talking so geopolitically, which is not an area I know much about, but clearly the Americans who voted for Trump don’t get it at all.
So what does this tell us about the American people?
For one thing, to be charitable, they have too much on their plates. Health care is completely broken. I have no idea how the average American manages it. My family spent over $33,000 last year on insurance premiums and out of pocket costs, but I still can’t walk without pain. There’s less and less of a safety net, and Trump’s minion Russell Vought wants to cut Head Start significantly. No one is ever going to be able to afford to buy a house again, and, if they do, no insurance will be available. I get it, they feel abandoned and betrayed. But guess who did that?
I can’t wait for some group to realize how Trump has fucked them (sorry but I wanted to emphasize the fuckedness of it) and complain. I told you so! You broke it, you bought it.
Resist? Sure. After a mysterious silence—what was everybody doing?—we’ve seen protests and lawsuits aplenty in early February. Courts have given injunctive relief, freezing Trump’s initiatives in their place. A district court judge sitting in Seattle wondered in a scathing benchslap of an opinion striking Trump’s EO on birthright citizenship if there’d been a lawyer in the room when the order was written. Trump doesn’t like lawyers; they take notes memorializing his many crimes against the American people.
And the tone of the American citizenry has changed. It’s Archie Bunker’s world now. He’s not giving up and he’s not going back. When I was teaching at Auburn, ironically the students showed a real anti-intellectual bent (re: a Dylan Thomas poem: “This is just stupid!”) but generally kept it hidden. Now that bent is standing up for itself and sticking its jaw out.
Meathead can complain all he want, but it’s going to take the moral and intellectual equivalent of an asteroid to strike the country before sanity will be restored. I’ll be dead by then.
I’m going to protest, call congresspeople, give money to the Good Guys till it hurts, but I’m also not going to let Trump destroy the rest of my life. I’m going to fun until I’m done. I’ve allowed myself for too long to be taken over by the sadness of seeing my country destroyed.
Come over sometime and I’ll give you whiskey, pate, and we can watch a baseball game. Contra the tone of this post, I’m not going to waste what’s left of my life being angry. I’m not going to read any news about them unless it’s to laugh about how they’ve inevitably fucked up. Already it’s happening.
That’s it. Unless he’s gunned down, this blog will never mention Donald Trump again. I’m not going to rehearse all of his faults here because it would take too long and anyone with a quarter of a brain knows them anyway.
Great friend Michael Barnes suggested I write a blog because I was so funny (like he isn’t funnier than I by multiples). But then, thanks to the Trump zeitgeist, I quit being funny and just went dark. Then I quit writing altogether. I may be whistling past the graveyard—where my own stone awaits—but now, for what’s left of the time this blog has to exist, let’s have fun!
Knock knock, who’s there?
Trump!
Trump who?
…….
Ah, blessed silence!
Kate enjoying another experience her father could never have imagined: cheering with a college mascot, here the Oregon State University beaver.
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