Crazy white people
America’s racist fanatics return, again, to restore the atrocities.
I’d prefer cicadas. But our nation’s savage cultists of whiteness are just as reliable.
They never go away, of course. Sometimes they just skulk. But now they are fully out, once more, perhaps once and for all, at their bestial best.
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White people who are insane with racism are America’s guarantee of never becoming an egalitarian, sustainable democracy. Crazy white people, to the delight of plutocrats, make an America of widely-distributed wealth and broad citizen satisfaction impossible. Whenever the criminality of the rich reaches the point where non-rich people of differing skin hues are widely pissed off for shared reasons, here come the crazy white people with their pitchforks and nooses to safely return the narrative back to their hatred and resentment of we brown people. My grandfather, a lifelong postal carrier in Toledo, Ohio who came into young adulthood during the racist bloodbath of lynchings and massacres that avenged the cross-racial solidarities among working people after Reconstruction, could have set his Illinois pocket watch by it.
I, like others, saw President Donald Trump coming. While his campaign was still being treated as a joke, I saw him cashing in on a fount of embittered white wage-earner rage, further fed by Hillary Clinton’s tepid corporate jingle of a campaign. I emailed in to a Baltimore NPR talk show to suggest that this default appeal could lead to a Trump win, which was roundly dismissed by a panel of confident mainstream journalists. Two years into his presidency I wondered if Trump’s seemingly random wrecking ball persona might be just the right tool to galvanize desperate nostalgia among those who fear that everything good for them is gone, in the familiar vein of successful dictators before him. Trump gave us plenty of clues. His playbook was defiantly open, and that, in hindsight, has been his lethal genius.
I fear it is now too late for even an emergency reversal of the haplessly arrogant Biden/Pelosi “America Isn’t Broken, It Can’t Be” approach to this catastrophe. I, like many of we Black Americans, have known pretty much all my life what a fascistic regime looks like. Decades ago during the W administration, a Jewish Holocaust survivor friend of mine told me, with a deadpan expression one night at a Baltimore bar, that he was seeing the everyday warning signs of fascism in the USA.
The Biden administration’s crazily naive corporate-manners-as-usual etiquette has now lethally armed the GOP’s soulless top operatives and has slowly sucked the breath out of ordinary Americans who’ve waited patiently through a pandemic for top Democrats to square off already and rumble against Mitch McConnell, Kevin McCarthy, Ted Cruz, Ron DeSantis, and other Nazi-beneficiaries-in-training whose moral abyss has no bottom so long as there is power in it for them. They are worse than evil; evil involves an ethical choice. Evil requires you to be ethically conscious enough to choose badness. But these dead souls simply do not care. They know full well that they are lying daily, killing adults and children with Coronavirus, sacrificing the entire planet. All for a few moments of seemingly absolute power. And they, unlike the cult that they lead to slaughter, are fine with this.
Steve Schmidt, a white Republican who resigned from the anti-Trump Lincoln Project he co-founded amid controversy over its handling of sexual harassment charges against another co-founder, provides his own analysis of top GOPers’ careerist deal with Satan’s orange-haired rep in this scorchingly frank interview. Give a listen, but be prepared; it may permanently jar your physical sense of place. You may not want to believe that you live in this country.
The Democratic Party will not solve this. Not today or next month or next year. If anyone does, it will be us: people with less and less to lose and more and more to gain. Where our fatally-trained official political concierges fail, a few million ordinary citizens sitting down, say, in the middle of their towns’ main streets — and refusing to budge for weeks until America looks more like democracy — might succeed. Or begin a path toward it.
